A job advertisement for Microsoft Game Studios is looking for somebody to work "with an experienced team at MGS and the world-class developers at Epic to drive the success of Gears of War and Shadow Complex in the highly competitive and fascinating world of interactive entertainment".

Exciting. We'd have pointed out the Gears part too, but news of more Gears of War games is like news of the sun's rising.

Microsoft hunts producer for new Epic games [Develop]

The site is running a post-mortem about the game all week, which would be interesting enough based on Shadow Complex's roots as a dream project of the brothers running Epic-owned Chair Entertainment.

The look back at the game is all the more interesting due to the fact that people who make Super Metroid-style adventures seldom talk publicly about the process of designing the games and the maps that serve as their core feature.

Here's a bit from Chair's chief designer, Donald Mustard:

"We created these little grid blocks and lines. We did a lot of it by hand at first, but then we went and transcribed it all into [Adobe] Illustrator…you could literally see a side view of the map, it was all just gray, with lines and stuff. And we had a stick figure that represented the player, and we'd say, 'Ok, the player can jump this many units high.' And we had a little graph that showed how high you could jump and how long it would take to build up to a speed run and stuff like that. So we'd 'play through' the entire game with this little stick figure guy."

Check out the MTV post for a bigger look at this prototype map and for more on how the game came together.

Exclusive: 'Shadow Complex' Prototype Map Revealed [MTV Multiplayer]

An official statement from Chair and the Xbox Live team sternly warns verified Shadow Complex cheaters that punishment is incoming. Beyond leaderboard deletion, that means a Gamerscore reset across all games and a public outing as a cheater on Xbox.com and the Xbox 360 dashboard.

The statement laments that cheaters "have not only violated the spirit of the game, but they have also violated the Xbox LIVE Terms of Use." Which could mean a virtual slap on the wrist. Might be a good time to brush up on exactly what those terms are, kids.

A message to the Shadow Complex community [Major Nelson]

Here's some of my monthly instant analysis for all those NPD August hardware and software sales figures McWhertor just posted. Study them and then consider the following as viable talking points when you're flirting with someone in a bar this weekend or thinking of a topic for your first term paper or just making small talk with your dog...

Shadow Complex Would Have Been #6... Or So: Microsoft announced last month that the downloadable game Shadow Complex sold more than 200,000 copies in its first week of sales, starting August 19. That's more copies than all but five games on the NPD list sold in the month. We don't know how many copies the $15 downloadable sold by month's end, but Dissidia: Final Fantasy, which was released a week later, managed 130,000 during its month. Shadow Complex handily beat it as well as the PS2 version of Madden. Those were more expensive games, but NPD does rank by units. When it comes to tallying which games sold to the most gamers in the month, remember the downloadables. (Note: Gamasutra shows that Trials HD may have ranked even higher, though this also raises the question of whether it's fair to compare what appears to be worldwide sales of XBLA games to U.S.-only NPDs)

Madden Ennui: EA's annual hit football series posted big numbers on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 2, but there's no sign of the Wii edition, despite the series being re-retooled. How many more times does EA have to re-invent the series before it clicks with the Wii audience, who, this top 10 list indicates, have nothing against certain types of sports games?

The Gap Closed: A $100 price drop didn't enable the PlayStation 3 to out-sell the Xbox 360, but it's possible that people were waiting to buy a Slim. The redesigned system wasn't available in many regions until after the 8/29 conclusion of the August sales month. Regardless, the Wii didn't even beat the Xbox 360 by that much, bunching the Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo systems at 210,000, 215,400 and 277,400. It's getting cozy there.

Handheld Stereotypes Persevere: A game with Final Fantasy in the title can get a PSP game finally back in the top 10. And a kid-friendly new intellectual property called Fossil Fighters can score a bigger first-month number on the Nintendo DS than a new Grand Theft Auto. Each was on sale for the same amount of days: 19. That success of Fossil Fighters is a possible good sign for another kid-friendly DS game... Scribblenauts.

Activision Shut Out: There aren't many times Activision's many detractors can be gleeful, so they might want to stare at these NPDs and smile just this once. Activision is absent from the list of top 10 games, as are all other publishers in the industry except Nintendo, EA and Square Enix (the last of which recently bought Batman publisher Eidos).

Notable new releases that failed to make the overall software top 10 (With no console or handheld version selling more than 92,000 units in the U.S. by August 29) : G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (August 4), Wolfenstein (August 18), Metroid Prime Trilogy (August 24), Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box (August 24)

NPD-PDs will return next month... if you demand them!

We loved Shadow Complex, and so did you folks apparently, with stellar review scores and one-week sales so spectacular that Microsoft had to issue a celebratory press release. Multiplayer titles dominate Xbox Live Arcade, and single-player games generally don't perform nearly as well, but Chair seems to have knocked this one out of the park.

"Congratulations to Chair Entertainment and Epic Games for creating an outstanding game," said Scott Austin, director of digitally distributed games at Microsoft. "As the capstone title of the second annual Summer of Arcade program, "Shadow Complex" has raised the bar for downloadable games. We're proud to offer such high-quality content on Xbox LIVE Arcade."

I found the game to be one of the most complete game offerings ever made available on Xbox Live Arcade. I would have easily paid full price for it, which makes the 1200 Microsoft point ($15) so much sweeter. If you've not yet played it, it comes highly recommended.

For the past week or so, some gamers and game reporters online have begun discussing the newly-released Xbox Live Arcade side-scrolling adventure game Shadow Complex in ways not intended by its creators. Stepping away from a discussion about how the game is one of the biggest downloadable titles ever made, a collaboration between a leading studio and some bright young talents, a love letter to the classic, but neglected, designs of Nintendo's early Metroid adventures, some gamers have instead debated whether buying Shadow Complex is an intolerable act of support for someone they view as an opponent of gay rights, novelist Orson Scott Card.

The debate around the game has provoked a rare discussion about whether the political, moral or religious views of people involved with making or promoting a video game — views so rarely discussed publicly by video game creators — should or would affect whether a person buys a particular title. Fun factor's got nothing to do with it. Or does it?

Kim Wong has discovered that moral views of creators do matter to him. He cannot countenance the involvement with Shadow Complex of Card. The acclaimed science fiction author has written that practicing homosexuals should not be treated as equal citizens and has described gay rights as a "collective delusion." He has supported legal movements to block laws that would allow gay people to marry.

In a phone interview this week, Wong told me: "I decided I could not in good conscience support a product of a person whose views I find abhorrent and knowingly give him money. In my everyday life I probably give enough money unknowingly to bigots or at least to people whose personal and political views I find distasteful."

Card was not the main creator of Shadow Complex. He did not conceive it nor code it. His name has been used in the game's promotion by its developers and publisher, Microsoft, to trade both on the renown for his classic novel, Ender's Game, as well his 2006 book, Empire, which was based on the same fiction as Shadow Complex: a Right-Wing-vs.-Left-Wing future American civil war crafted by members of the new game's development studio, Chair Entertainment.

Card, who has expressed his views about homosexuality in more detail than can be summarized in a sound bite, has, for years, bristled at accusations that he is a homophobe, establishing his views about homosexuality in the context of his faith as member of the Church of Jesus Crhist of Latter-day Saints, a faith, like those of Catholics, that deems the practice of homosexuality as a sin. (Card did not return Kotaku's requests to comment for this article.)

While Card's writings and efforts to ban gay marriage have sparked outcry from Wong and other gamers who say they won't buy Shadow Complex, those involved in the creation of the game had not commented publicly about this debate until now.

The Creators Speak

"Card's political beliefs sure didn't come up during the game's development," Mark Rein, vice president of Gears of War development studio Epic Games, which owns Chair Entertainment, told Kotaku. He was speaking on behalf of Epic and Chair. "Even if they had, we don't discriminate when hiring or choosing partners based on people's personal beliefs. Heck, Gears of War was made by Democrats, Republicans, Libertarians, and even a few Canadians like me. It takes all kinds to make great creative games."

Game developers don't often flash their party affiliation or state their positions on ethical debates. Reporters like me rarely ask. We wind up knowing more about the moral beliefs of Hollywood stars and politicians than we do whether the person who created the year's biggest game thinks abortion should be illegal or that the Israelis or Palestinians are right or wrong. Will Wright's contributions to the Republican Party and Alex Rigopulos' to the Democrats become public in legally required campaign filings but neither the promotion of Spore nor Rock Band involves the discussion of America's Right and Left. If there is a block of Conservatives who are planning on not buying Beatles: Rock Band, I am unaware of them.

Even marginally more public statements about social issues don't seem to stir much gamer reaction. Two weeks ago at QuakeCon, programming legend John Carmack mocked the green movement and described the eco-friendly selling point of the Tesla electric car as a "sham," to little reaction and certainly no major debate about whether the next Doom he creates should be bought by those who consider themselves eco-conscious.

Yet the opinions of Card, expressed so vividly and available so readily online have generated the kind of debate that appears to be costing the developers of Shadow Complex at least a few consumers.

Card has likened homosexuality to other predispositions to sin, like those of a hormonally active teenage boy. He told Salon.com in 2000 that he found charges that he was homophobic to be "ugly." But his critics have had an easy time making that charge, given the frankness of Card's writings.

"The Church has plenty of room for individuals who are struggling to overcome their temptation toward homosexual behavior," he wrote in a 1990 essay called The Hypocrites of Homosexuality that argued that practicing gay people should not have equal rights. "But for the protection of the Saints and the good of the persons themselves, the Church has no room for those who, instead of repenting of homosexuality, wish it to become an acceptable behavior in the society of the Saints. They are wolves in sheep's clothing, preaching meekness while attempting to devour the flock."

No one from the Shadow Complex development team has said whether they agree with Card. A few years ago, the author was referred to me by Chair's co-founder Donald Mustard as a friend. But there is an argument to be made that it is irrelevant whether Chair's team agrees or disagrees with Card or is friends with him or not. That argument was made by Peter David, the comic book writer and novelist hired by Chair to script Shadow Complex, and a man who may not have much more patience for Orson Scott Card than Kim Wong.

"My disagreements with Orson's politics are hardly limited to his views on gay marriage," David told Kotaku in an e-mailed statement. "We are at opposite ends of the political spectrum on pretty much everything. Why, then, did I agree to work on the game? Because among my most cherished beliefs is that, while I disagree with everything you have to say, I will defend to the death your right to say it. [Comic book creator] John Byrne has said no end of vicious things directed at me personally; I still buy his comic books because I like his work. I never, EVER, allow someone's stated opinions to impact on whether I support his work so long as those opinions don't transform the work itself into something that I have no desire to support.

"Shadow Complex wasn't a huge paying gig for me but I took it because I thought the developers were a nice couple of kids, and I found the story of a reluctant warrior being forced to find something worth fighting for to be a compelling narrative. By the same token, all the money in the world could not have gotten me to be involved if the story was something I personally found repellent."

To Boycott Or Not?

There is no sign that the debate about Card is significantly hurting Shadow Complex's sales even if the game and its developers' reputation are taking some abuse on gaming Internet forums. Shadow Complex has scored high marks from reviewers.

"It's up to the individual to make their own purchasing decisions," Wong told me, saying he does not advocate a boycott of the game. He said it's been easy to resist buying Shadow Complex, both because of the many other games available for purchase and because of how provocative he finds Card's views. "With good conscience I can't support that, and I would like other gamers to think about this issue as well."

I asked Wong if he had ever taken a similar stance. He said he has urged friends to avoid supporting advertisers who buy time on the shows of other public figures he disagrees with, like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. But he admits that it would be impossible to avoid supporting every product that was partially made by or connected to people whose views he dislikes. That's no reason to not take a stand here, he said: "With the limited voice that I have in the public discourse, I am choosing to voice my disapproval by not purchasing the game, as are the other friends of mine who have made the same decision."

The debate here echoes so many debates about supporting the work of socially controversial filmmakers and authors. It's doubtful whether there will be agreement about whether such debates are a sign of the gaming industry maturing or taking a sour turn. Will an expression of political views become a prerequisite for game developers in the future? Will gamers desire an explanation as to where the creators stand? Developers, writers and anyone else associated with a game might find themselves losing a possible fan — and maybe gaining another — based on the social views they express. It happens in most other forms of entertainment, whether relevant or not.

Aside from all of those options, there is another way this could be handled. Shadow Complex writer Peter David offered it: "If anyone wants to boycott the game and thus damage me or Chair while doing nothing to change Orson's opinions, that's naturally their right. Or...They can display the sort of tolerance for someone who is different from them that they feel is lacking in Orson and thus prove they're better. Your choice."

[Orscon Scott Card photo via Wired.com]

In Shadow Complex, our hero is Jason Fleming, a hiker who starts ill-equipped on his girlfriend-saving quest with little more than a flashlight and a fancy belt buckle. After stumbling upon a massive underground facility housing a rogue military force, it's clear that Fleming is in way over his head. But like Metroids past, Fleming gains new abilities and new weapons through equipment upgrades, granting him access to areas of the base where he'll find new abilities and even more powerful weapons.

Shadow Complex could quite possibly be the perfect balance of 2D gameplay and 3D presentation in high-definition that Metroid and Castlevania fans have demanded, but not yet received. Actually, you know what? It is.

Loved
The Sincerest Form Of Flattery: Shadow Complex borrows from the best, but stands capably on its own in the "Metroidvania" school. There are direct relationships between some of Shadow Complex's and Metroid's upgrades—Fleming's foam gun and Samus Aran's ice beam, for example—but Chair has brilliantly reinvented some, helping to differentiate the weapons in its Xbox Live Arcade title from the games that influenced it. Shadow Complex actually trumps some of Metroid's power-up staples, offering a triple-jump(!) and eliminating the need for a morph ball to enter confined space. Yes, Fleming can crouch and walk at the same time.

Turn On Your Flashlight: Shadow Complex is charitable enough to make scanning for secrets painless. Fleming's flashlight illuminates in an instant just what you'll need to bypass certain doors and air ducts. If they glow red, they'll require missiles. Purple doors require a foam shot. Green doors can only be destroyed with grenades. The flashlight makes scanning your surroundings effortless, something Shadow Complex completionists will likely applaud Chair for, if they've ever grown weary of switching on Samus' visor or slicing every brick in sight as Alucard.

100% Pure Love: There are over a hundred items—from gold bars to armor upgrades to health expansions—to discover and collect in Shadow Complex. The design behind keeping these items well hidden is brilliant, as some are genuinely tricky to find, even when you have a clear marker on the map showing you where a power up is squirreled away. This kind of exploration and studying one's surroundings is the kind of thing that keeps me up until 3 AM, going for "just one more save point." In my first play through, I only managed to find 99% of the items. Three still elude me, something I'll remedy in my second play through.

2D, Meet 3D: Shadow Complex looks gorgeous, particularly when the player ventures into the less industrialized areas or spends any time underwater. The environmental design manages to be varied enough so that even room after room of barracks and factory floors are recognizable. The addition of a Z-axis, letting players fire into the screen and beyond the 2D plane is a neat trick, but it's the twin-stick evolution of the Metroidvania formula that's far more enjoyable.

Power Levels On The 10s: What Shadow Complex borrows from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the Koji Igarashi-directed games that followed it is the experience leveling system. You'll earn XP from killing enemies and uncovering new areas of the map, eventually boosting your stats, like stamina and accuracy. Chair makes this system interesting in two ways. First, if you chain together a series of non-standardized attacks—melee attacks, headshots, etc.—you'll receive an experience bonus multiplier for each kill, encouraging the player to be creative, while also making the action more frenetic. Second, at levels on the multiple of ten, Jason will get specialized bonuses, including a health boost and... somethings we won't spoil for you.

Proving Grounds: When you've burned through the main campaign enough times to do everything—finish it with 100% of the items, then with 13% of the items, then in under three hours on the hardest difficulty—you can enjoy the Proving Grounds. This is where Chair seems to have borrowed a bit from Portal, offering up a few dozen time-attack style challenges, putting your equipment skills to the test. Most are fun, some are sadistic.

Boost: By the end of Shadow Complex, you're a total bad-ass, raining infinite missile hellfire down upon whatever mech or armored soldier stands between you and the next door. And it feels good. Triple-jumping and hookshotting your way to almost anywhere is a pleasure. But honestly, it's the fact that we can slide down and up ladders that may be most satisfying. Thanks for that, Chair.

Hated
The Technicalities: For as good as Shadow Complex is from a gameplay standpoint, it suffers slightly—ever so slightly—from the occasional frustrating technical snafu. I've faced clearly demolished doors that wouldn't let me walk or swim through them. I've had the camera lock onto a spot during a scripted moment and get permanently stuck there. Beyond those bugs, the game's frame rate and dynamic lighting can take a little too long to catch up sometimes. And only one save slot? We're supposed to get three!

Shadow Complex has reset the bar for what we can expect from an Xbox Live Arcade title. It also happens to ranks among the best 2D Metroids and Castlevanias, thanks to its strong map and upgrade design. While outstanding graphically, it lacks in some of the visual and character charm offered by its forebears, partly because of its photorealistic near-future setting. There's also not much meat to the story—not like there ever really is in these games, but when yours is based on a series of books, it's worth flagging—or much all that appealing about Fleming himself.

But these negatives are the most minor of concerns. Shadow Complex is easily one of the best games I've played all year, appealing perfectly to my own Metroidvania collection addiction and priced well below the amount of carefully crafted content it offers. I can't emphasize just how much of a pleasure it was to play through this game and how earnestly I'm looking forward to returning to it.

Shadow Complex was developed by Chair Entertainment and Epic Games, published by Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox Live Arcade on August 19. Retails for 1200 Microsoft Points ($15 USD). Played single player campaign to completion on Normal difficulty, completed half of Proving Grounds challenges.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

I must have missed McWhertor's story on Peter David taking up writing duties for Shadow Complex, which is strange, considering David is one of my all-time favorite comic book writers, and not too shabby as a novelist as well. His stint on X-Factor still stands as my favorite comic book run, developing Guido "Strong Guy" Carosella into the role model for guys with torsos way out of proportion to their legs. Yes, guys like me.

U.S. Xbox 360 owners who shell out the 5600 Microsoft Points necessary to net them Splosion Man, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, Turtles in Time Re-shelled, Trials HD, and Shadow Complex between now and August 31st will get an extra 800 Microsoft points added to their account, basically cancelling out the price of Splosion Man. From a monetary standpoint, it amounts to getting $80 worth of Microsoft points for $70, which is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it. Of course, if you don't buy all five games you get nothing, but that's the price you pay for not paying the price for everything.

So why did Chair opt to pursue a Metroid-style adventure for its second Live Arcade title? We sat down with Chair Entertainment creative director and co-founder Donald Mustard to find out. And to thank him.

"It seems like there was this huge void," Mustard said, saying that Shadow Complex explores a largely unexplored genre. "No one's making these kinds of games. So we decided, well, we're gonna try it. My biggest secret hope is that some awesome game designer will look at what we did and think 'I could do that even better,' and make a game that I can play."

"I already know where everything is in Shadow Complex, which ruins it for me," Mustard joked.

One thing, though. Someone is making these games, as Koji Igarashi and the Castlevania team regularly pumps out "Metroidvania" games on Nintendo's portable platforms. But Chair didn't look to Igarashi's creations, instead going to the source.

"We really looked at Metroid more than Castlevania," he said. "We made everyone replay Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission. Everyone on the team played that for a week or two, but I played them constantly... to the point where I had felt like I had cleansed my system of anything other than Metroid."

Mustard said he was cognizant of looking too closely at the inspiration behind Shadow Complex's game design, saying that there's "a fine line between doing a genre entry and doing a genre rip-off." After immersing themselves in Metroid, they avoided the title during Shadow Complex's two year development cycle.

"We sat down, talked about what we wanted the game to be and we started designing what we thought it would be — then we never looked at Metroid again," Mustard said. "Because we then wanted to make our own game. And I think it was pretty effective, capturing that vibe of Metroid. We didn't want to be seen as derivative."

What games like Super Metroid—and most Metroid games—didn't offer was much of a narrative, at least not on par with what we're expecting to see in Shadow Complex. That's a potential pitfall, considering how much time is spent backtracking and exploring, things that may interfere with a game-long story line.

"I think you have to tell the right story," Mustard says. "Because so much of that kind of game is exploratory, and if you're doing it correctly, has a strong non-linear element to it."

Of course, there is a Metroid exception.

"Metroid Fusion had a really strong story to it," he notes "That's one of the ones I looked at the closest. I thought, 'What are the pitfalls that they fell into while doing this?'"

"I think we tried very hard to structure the narrative more about a loose plot, but then kept it very character-centric. We were always trying to keep the narrative flowing."

Mustard is obviously concerned about being compared unfairly to the decades old Metroid series, lamenting that "we can't compete with nostalgia"—words borrowed from our own Stephen Totilo.

We'll have more from our interview with Chair at Comic-Con later this week.

I've spent two hours and twenty minutes this morning with the game, a game made with great love for its predecessors. And no, of course it's not as brilliant as Super Metroid — what has the cleverness, the pacing, the geographic diversity, the unusual mix of power-ups? But it's clearly a game built on the same values. It's a game made to be played like it's a map being traced with a finger, followed closely, fueled by the excitement of where to explore next and where to come back to later.

Here's how it is shaping up so far…

What Is It?
Shadow Complex is an Xbox Live Arcade game set for release when it's steamy outside, an August alternative to the heat. It is a side-scrolling adventure game in the style of 2D Metroids and Castlevanias, but rendered with a 3D engine. As with its inspirations, it is a game about exploring, finding power-ups and using newly enhanced abilities to reach previously inaccessible areas of the map. This one's all about a guy fighting his way through an enormous underground sci-fi military base and, so far, trying to keep his girlfriend alive. It comes from Chair Entertainment and parent company Epic Games, chiefly designed by Donald Mustard with oversight from Gears of War alpha-developer Cliff Bleszinski. It's a 1200-point game, costing $15 and the build I downloaded, which appears to be final, is close to 900 MB.

What We Saw
I was supplied with code of the game that appears complete. I played the first two hours and twenty minutes, discovering 32% of the game's expansive 2D-map and finding 20% of its mostly-hidden power-ups.

How Far Along Is It?
The game appears to be done, but because it's a downloadable, it's probably eligible for more last-minute tweaking than most.

What Needs Improvement?
Too Much Nostalgia: One of the themes of Kotaku's coverage this week has been developers' love of past influences and the extent to which that love can be applied too thickly. Shadow Complex's first hour is almost a sequence of homages to sequences from Super Metroid, Empire Strikes Back and other boys-will-be-boys action-packed inspirations. Evoking the past so much is risky, especially given that this game's chief interactive predecessor is considered one of the greatest games of all time. That the early action in the game is more conventional and its environmental puzzles less interesting than Super Metroid's initially sets Shadow Complex needlessly back. It's only when Shadow Complex starts getting past the early homages and starts showing off its own ideas that it demonstrates its worth. (That first hour isn't helped with its Uncharted homage. Yes, you have the voice-actor, but did you also need to dress your guy in the half-tucked shirt?)

Ledge-Grabbing: The controls are mostly good but compromised in one common way: it's hard to sometimes know whether you're going to drop from a ledge or just hang from it, whether you're able to pull yourself up from a ledge or whether you're going to be stuck. A smoother scheme there would be nice. Otherwise, exploration is a breeze. Finding the hidden nooks and crannies is, as always, great fun.

Blind Enemies: It was good for Metroids to be set on worlds full of dumb monsters and Castlevanias to have dullards as foes. It's less convincing to see Shadow Complex's military-base guards and super-soldiers not recognize our hero when he's standing in the same room, just because he's a little too far away but standing in plain view.

What Should Stay The Same?
An Identity Of Its Own: A couple of moments in the first two hours show what Shadow Complex can do that its predecessors never did. I won't spoil them, but just know that they take advantage of the modern technology being used in the game. And that tech helps this game a lot. This is a Metroid/Castlevania-style game with audio cues, lots of smart use of vocals, and great graphical depth. It's one in which 3D lighting and the hero's flashlight can make hunting for weakened hatches and ducts a more visually interesting endeavor. I did not get far enough into the game to find Shadow Complex's more unconventional gadgets, which will surely distinguish the game even more from others in its genre. Where I'm at, it's a game of machine guns and grenades — a different set of armament than you'd see in a Castlevania, to be sure — but not yet one that allows the action to be consistently clever. The good news is: the game appears to be getting there the further I play.

Pacing: One of Bleszinski's favorite hallmarks of good game design is good pacing. That's evident early as Shadow Complex moves smoothly from one exciting firefight to the discovery of an interesting new environment and then back to an interesting combat scene, punctuated with the discovery of a new gun or the hints of a new hidden power-up to crawl around and find, maybe hidden under an elevator or above the cafeteria full of guards.

Depth-Perception: The game's made in 3D but played in 2D. And that's used to great effect almost every minute of the first two hours. You'll think you've shot the last guard in the room when a door in what should have just been the boring background graphics of the level opens and a phalanx of troops rush in for the kill. It looks great and is fun, particularly because you can shoot into the background. You may only be able to move in 2D, but your gun does 3D. It's Shadow Complex's strongest quality and one that will make it tough to ever return to flatter games in this genre.

Final Thoughts
As I said up top, Shadow Complex could never hope to be as good as the best Metroid and Castlevania games, and I don't think its developers expected it to be. What I've played so far — past an opening a little too in love with the past — shows signs of how this genre can move forward. I haven't even mentioned the XP system which adds a little RPG character growth for every discovered room, every kill — and a multiplier for more if the kills are done creatively.

Shadow Complex is looking like a strong new entry in a style of game that too few developers seem interested in trying to make. Maybe other developers are intimidated. The bravado evident in the well-paced action so far shows that these guys most certainly were not.

That story is based on the works of Orson Scott Card, whose novel Empire the Xbox Live Arcade game is based upon. But David's yarn runs parallel to the events of that novel.

Comic book geeks and lapsed comic book geeks like myself will likely recognize Mr. David's name from his work on titles like The Incredible Hulk. If you do, and that's the sort of contributor who excites you, you're probably going to Comic-Con next week.

And if you are, you may want to find yourself at the Xbox 360 booth at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, July 25 at the the show. Joining Peter David will be Shadow Complex creators Donald Mustard and Cliff "Don't Call Me Dude Huge Anymore" Bleszinski from Epic Games.

If you don't know much about this whole Shadow Complex thing, you should really read our previous coverage of the game and anticipate some future coverage, I don't know, maybe tomorrow?

Shadow Complex's Apple Debut: On Tuesday, I met Donald and Laura Mustard, the developer and public relations rep couple who showed me the August-scheduled Xbox Live Arcade game Shadow Complex. A detail they told me that didn't make it into my coverage was that, before Epic purchased their home studio, Chair Entertainment, before Microsoft signed on to publish their game, they were meeting with people at Game Developers Conference 2008... showing a video of Shadow Complex running on one of their iPhones. That iPhone video was a hit, they remembered. Laura mentioned that Epic vice president Mark Rein proudly showed off the phone. He gets excited about what developers do with Unreal tech. But, no, the game never was programmed to actually be played on the iPhone.

Modern Warfare 2 Wii MIA: Call of Duty: World at War was a hit on the Wii last year, selling more than a million copies. At E3 last month I asked Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime whether the series was returning this year to the Wii, or if the then non-COD-named Modern Warfare 2 was going to have a Wii version. He said that that was a question for series publisher Activision. So this week, right as the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 naming news was breaking (not the best timing), I shot Kotaku's rep for all things Activision a note inquiring about whether COD or MW was going to have a Wii presence. The response was that Activision had no information to share. So... we wait.

Xcalibur Is Sleeping: At last night's XSeed event, where I played Half-Minute Hero, Sky Crawlers and demo versions of some other upcoming games, I noticed a guy sitting in a chair inputting a character name into part of the character customization screen of Wii role-playing game Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga. I found this odd, because there doesn't seem to be a good reason to spend time inputting a name for your character in a copy of a game you can't take home. The name he was typing in was "Xcalibur." While he was doing this, Destructoid's Samit Sarkar was interviewing an XSeed official about the game. They were being serious, so I turned to Joystiq's Andrew Yoon to remark about the guy typing in the name. OK. Funny enough. We started to leave. Then I looked at the guy again. He was passed out. Wii in hand. Asleep. Samit's interview continued. I didn't play the game, but even the most amazing games don't exactly have the most rousing name-input screens. So don't blame Valhalla Knights for this one.

Horror Needs Quiet: Also at the XSeed event, I tried the Ju-On: The Grudge sort-of-game, which is labeled by its publisher as a "haunted house simulator." I used the Wii like a flashlight to slowly walk through a dark hospital corridor. I barely got a sense of how this game is supposed to feel, which is a problem for horror titles that might be better demoed in quiet places, not noisy second floors of Japanese restaurants. (Not that horror games are ever demoed in quiet places.) Excellent detail from the official fact sheet: "Unlike any other product on the Wii, this game forgoes slow-paced story elements to offer immediate gratification with scare after scare."

No Help To Nokia: I got a call from a guy from Nokia at some point this week to speak my mind about mobile games. Um, I'm no expert. People like iPhone games, I hear? Our readers are a little interested in mobile games but not hugely interested? I said that I needed to be convinced that there are games worth playing on today's phones in order to think people will be eager for more coverage. Maybe that's happening on the iPhone, but if it's happening on other phones, I'm unaware. It's a blind spot.

I think that's all that I didn't get to this week... other than the stuff I'm saving for next week. Have a good weekend, folks. Don't yell at Owen too much.

One would think that with all the ambitions that Donald Mustard and his team at Epic-owned Chair Entertainment are trying to accomplish with their XBLA love letter to Super Metroid — 3D graphics, a huge world, giant bosses, etc — that they might even have been thinking of multiplayer.

Multiplayer hasn't been done much in Metroid/Castelvania-style games. None of the side-scrolling Metroids have it. Castlevania games on the DS have dabbled with putting co-op in boss rush modes and time attacks.

Mustard loves the idea of trying co-op as a main mechanic in a Metroidvania kind of game. But he said it was an idea that just didn't make sense to prioritize for Shadow Complex. He imagines that, if he could do it, he'd want players to be able to solve complex puzzles, in concert even if they were located on opposite ends of the game's map. In fact, he said that that would be cool if a Metroidvania-style puzzle required players to be spread that far apart.

I suggested that the Shadow Complex developers could prototype the idea and offer it as a downloadable expansion to their game.

Mustard switched into "If we're fortunate to do more games like this"-mode.

If anyone out there wants another experiment in co-op Metroidvania, you better hope he's fortunate.

NOTE: Reader Blue Toast Likes Parenthises notes that this "sounds like Contra" more than it does a Metroidvania. Mustard talked to me about that being a key challenge. Contra can do co-op because it is linear. Making a Metroidvania co-op would have to allow two players to explore and backtrack, requiring much more complex game design. Good luck to anyone who tries it!

We're getting one big release per week starting July 22nd and running through August 19th, when the Summer of Arcade promotion delivers its last quality title and we revert back to plain old, unexciting Xbox Live Arcade releases.

Festivities kick off on July 22nd, with the release of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time Re-shelled, the remake of what many consider to be the best TMNT title. (1200 Microsoft Points)

On July 29th we get another remake, though I'm not sure if Marvel VS Capcom 2 counts as a remake. The HD health bars are certainly nice, but I suppose re-release is more appropriate in this case. (1200 Microsoft Points)

August comes in with a bang with the release of Twisted Pixel Games' Splosion Man, revisiting old-school platforming goodness with an exploding hero for a new age. (800 Microsoft Points)

Trials HD races onto Live Arcade on August 12h, a physics-based motorcycle racer that lets players create and share tracks via the magic of Xbox Live. (1200 Microsoft Points)

Last, but not least, Chair Entertainment returns to Xbox Live Arcade with Shadow Complex, a 2D shooter created using the Unreal Engine 3, set in the world of Orson Scott Card's novel. Empire. (1200 Microsoft Points)

Definitely an impressive lineup this summer. I might end up collecting the whole set.

We're talking about a game developer who always dreamed of making a game like Super Metroid and is putting one out this summer.

He's a developer so relaxed about showing his game that he's doing it barefoot and so pumped that he keeps showing off — this thing, oh and this thing, and this too — more and more cool stuff.

Donald Mustard, visiting the Big Apple from the Chair Entertainment home office in Utah, has something special with Shadow Complex, a cornerstone release scheduled for Microsoft's 2009 Summer of Arcade offering of downloadable games for the Xbox 360. (Kotaku last previewed Shadow Complex at E3.)

It's a game that shows well, whether demoed with socks and shoes or without in Mustard's midtown Manhattan hotel room on a sunny summer day.

Mustard said he always wanted to make a so-called Metroidvania game, the kind of side-scrolling exploration-heavy, empowerment adventure rendered by Nintendo and Konami back during the NES to PlayStation eras.

Now he's got one close to completion, a spiritual successor to Super Metroid that runs on Unreal graphics technology. He describes it as a game of exploration punctuated by combat. It's a mostly side-scrolling game of military bases, robots, forests and caves, rich in earth tones and energized by explosions and energy blasts. , 120 power-ups — many of them hidden — and a bunch of core power upgrades. A flashlight reveals which boulders can be obliterated only once the hero has missiles, which hatches need a different gadget. A distant corner can only be grabbed once the player's earned a grappling hook.

The game has a "Jason Bailey" Achievement for speed-runners who clear the adventure in two hours — 10 hours fewer than Chair's testers are clearing it their first time through. And, get this Metroid sequence-breakers, it's got an Achievement called Insurgent that rewards players who can figure out how to clear the game while only obtaining 4% of Shadow Complex's items.

And the most Metoidvania thing of all... the map. It's drawn over grid squares. Seven-hundred eighty squares, not counting the skyline. Mustard's team of Metroid-lovers counted squares on the Super Metroid map. That total? Two-hundred fifty five.

Mustard was showing Kotaku some exciting stuff. This included stuff his publicist (who is also his wife and was seated nearby) hadn't seen yet. He couldn't resist. He wanted to show the dark caverns of the game to demonstrate what real 3D lighting effects can do for the dark exploration of a Metroid-style game. He wanted to show battles with medium-sized mechs and screen-tall mechs who are far taller than the height of his hero's generous jumping height. He wanted to show the hidden power-ups he knows how to find, the secret crannies where an extra grenade-capacity icon is sitting.

He showed that his game's got an ability for its hero to run, momentum-based at super-speed... dashing across water, up walls, on ceilings. His hero shoots a foam gun that generates cover, gums joints of enemy mechs or provides the materials that will make, on impact, a missile detonate in a bigger explosion.

The gameplay is a throwback. The graphics are a throw forward. This is modern material: Shadow Complex is one of the rare 2D side-scrollers that takes advantage of being rendered in a 3D graphics engine. It's a The 3D-ness is shown off when Mustard has the game's hero Jason Fleming, man a turret and the sideways perspective switches to what could be a behind-the-back turret-shooting view from a Gears of War game. There's no parallax faking depth effects in these graphics. They're real 3D.

When displayed in the manner of a 2D adventure, as they are in most of the game, the graphics have a depth not seen in this kind of game. The catwalks in the background. That guy shooting from back near the waterfall. They're back there and they can be shot, they can ragdoll over a balcony or fall into the front plane of action.

Players will earn experience points for their hero in this game, leveling up some of his core abilities and granting, every 10 levels, a special power-up. More XP is earned for defeating enemies in creative ways. But Mustard said that players won't earn all their levels the first time through. The game's designed for an increasingly empowered playthrough each time players re-visit it.

In addition, a Proving Grounds set of 21 unlocked challenges which present puzzles harder than many found in the main game are available from the start. Imagine having to grapple-hook and grenade-toss one's way around a hanging vertical wall suspended over a pit of fire. Or imagine a microcosm of a Metroidvania game with hidden power-ups that's just a few rooms large.

Chair Entertainment, parent company Epic Games and publisher Microsoft have not announced a price yet for all this content. An announcement about the full Summer of Arcade is expected soon.

And no, Mustard told Kotaku, he didn't show us everything. Like a good Metroidvania, there will hopefully be plenty more to Shadow Complex to make it worth our time to revisit later.

Shadow Complex is the third exclusive game from Epic for the Xbox 360, a dramatic stylistic shift from two Gears of Wars. This one's a just-about-modern-day side-scrolling adventure for Xbox Live Arcade primarily designed by Epic's newly-acquired Chair Entertainment, whose design lead, Donald Mustard has distinguished himself as a big ideas man.

The game comes together as the developers may finally be coming into its own. The Chair principals' first game, the ambitious, cosmic Advent Rising, disappointed many and is one of the first installments of a planned trilogy that stalled at one. But Chair's second effort, the underwater combat game Undertow set graphical benchmarks for an XBLA game, which Mustard believes this new game can now surpass.

He predicted to Kotaku during our hands-on session that this will be the biggest XBLA game yet — at least in terms of size.

What Is It?
Shadow Complex unabashedly plays like a 2D Metroid, with its hero traversing 2D levels and backtracking to previously inaccessible areas once he gains more power-ups. Instead of being a lady in a suit of armor who can roll into a ball and shoot monsters, he's a guy with in combat gear who can crouch low if need be and shoot mechs.

What We Saw
Pressed for time, I sat with Mustard as he talked me through an early level in the game. He had me button-mashing to skip his own cutscenes so I could find the hero's pistol, start crawling through ducts, backtrack through alternate routes accessible because I now had the gun that would open my way to them and appreciate that, yes, this game feels like a well-developed child of Mother Brain's favorite series.

How Far Along Is It?
Shadow Complex is set for a summer release, so the game must be close to completion.

What Needs Improvement?
Movement: Metroid games, at least as I remember them, empower the player to perform acrobatic movement fluidly. The hero in Shadow Complex could run well, but he didn't reliably grab ledges or duck when I needed him to. Nothing another fine-tuning of the controls can't fix so that I can focus on movement and exploration, not get frustrated that my guy's not operating as I commanded.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Metroid Stuff: The mini-map for this game is a direct "homage" of the Metroid map, as it creates a colored grid that charts the corridors you've discovered. An optional feature will show the player where to go next on the map, but thankfully that can be turned off for those of us who never needed help to find Kraid or the Screw Attack. The backtracking is looking good. One hopes it is more clever than it is tedious, the knife's edge on which all Metroid games teeter.

The Non-Metroid Stuff: No Metroid side-scroller had this much visual depth, which, thanks to the Unreal Engine or not, allows Shadow Complex's combat to have a faked third dimension. Imagine the hero running from left to right down a street and reaching an intersection. From the distance, over the intersecting road, comes a helicopter attacking our hero. Moving the hero's targeting cursor over that helicopter doesn't just cause our guy to shoot at it, but it turns him so that his gun points toward it and his bullets fire back toward the chopper, as if the battlefield was in 3D. It's a flashy visual trick that adds depth without keeping the game from being classified as a 2D adventure.

Final Thoughts
One hopes that Shadow Complex will eventually be able to boast an identity of its own, but for a first impression, it compares well to its Metroid inspiration. While the game is ultimately being creatively overseen by Epic's Cliff Bleszinski, the fact that Mustard is the driving force — and that the gap is narrowing between his hype for his games and what he and Chair have been delivering — there's reason to anticipate Shadow Complex as an important XBLA release.

Sources claiming to have already played that game told us about their experience with the title, a side-scrolling shooter likened to classics Super Metroid and Mega Man X, a mash up of genres that's a 2.5D platformer. Card has said in the past that the game will focus on the Battle Room simulations that test tactical aptitude and be high on replayability.

Shadow Complex is also said to feature a unique twist on the Metroid-formula. It will feature familiar weapon and ability upgrades, including a jet pack for double jumps, a climbing kit for wall slides and a Bionic Commando style hookshot, but it's also a little deeper than the games it's been compared to.

According to what we were told by folks who had played the game, Shadow Complex takes advantage of the third dimension by offering interactive backgrounds. Players are said to be able to shoot into those backgrounds with the aide of a laser sight—controlled with the right thumbstick—to fend off enemies in a fashion described to Kotaku as a blend of Contra's side-scrolling and hallway style levels.

That mechanic was touted as an interesting addition to stock 2D shooter gameplay, but also lamented for its occasional awkwardness.

Shadow Complex sounds like it will follow the Metroid formula in offering new weapons, new areas to unlock and a progression that takes the main player from lowly combatant to super soldier.

We were told to expect more storytelling than your average 2D side-scroller, with cut scenes explaining why Battle Room combatants enter the titular complex on a rescue mission. Expect a sci-fi twist that fans of Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game may already be familiar with to justify why you're there and what you're doing.

What we were told certainly jives with tidbits that Chair Entertainment and Orson Scott Card have dropped since the announcement that the two parties would be working together. We wouldn't be surprised to see Shadow Complex announced at E3 as an Xbox Live Arcade downloadable game, but we're still calling this all rumor for now.

Update: Looks like we got everything but the book the game is based on right. That has been corrected to Orson Scott Card's Empire, instead of his Ender's Game series.