The Giant Bomb guys put one of their engineers on the case, having him trawl through data collected by their website. The site tracks Achievements, Trophies and similar accolades that are available through the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and the PC's Steam service. The team announced the most common names during a recent podcast, acknowledging a caveat: They would be double or triple-counting for some games that have the same Achievements in different editions or are on multiple platforms.

Here's the list:

1) Untouchable — used in 55 games, according to the Giant Bomb guys. Including in: Aegis Wing, Altered Beast, Beijing 2008, Buzz Jr: Robo Jam, Call of Juarez, Conan, Contra, Defense Grid, Double Dragon, Dreamkiller, Facebreaker, F.E.A.R. 2, Hail To The Chimp and more...

2) Hero — used in 30 games

3) Veteran - used in 28 games

4) Survivor - used in 27 games

5) Treasure Hunter - used in 19 games

Other common ones include: Collector, Legend, Winning Streak, Sniper, Champion, Team Player, Death From Above, Sharpshooter, Collateral Damage, Pack Rat, Completionist, Exterminator, and Perfectionist

Note to developers: If you're really having trouble figuring out unique names for Achievements, try reading more Kotaku for inspiration.

Giant Bombcast: 12/08/09

[PIC]

Here's Giant Bomb's Jeff Gerstmann, one of the most respected and tenured reviewers in the gaming press, explaining what he believed he had to do to have a day one review ready for Tony Hawk Ride.

He mentioned this during the most recent Giant Bombcast podcast, at the one hour and six minute mark:

Jeff Gerstmann, Giant Bomb: We've gotten e-mails saying, hey, we're doing an event on Saturday, with Tony Hawk Ride. Tony Hawk will be there talking about the game. This would be your opportunity to come and play it for day one reviews.

Brad Shoemaker, Giant Bomb: Really?

Gerstmann: Twelve to three on a Saturday. Do you really want to read the Day One review I would write after fighting the public and maybe playing the game for 20 minutes? "The 20 minutes I played was awesome!" or "The worst thing ever! I couldn't learn how to play because this game has a learning curve because it's got an actual skateboard. [whispers] They're sending that game off to die."

Gerstmann didn't attend the event. He bought the game instead.

For the record Activision didn't offer early review access of the game to Kotaku nor supply a review copy in advance of release. As of this evening, the day of Ride's release, Metacritic listed only one review for the game.

Kotaku checked in with a representative for the Activision regarding the details of that Saturday event. I'll update this post if I hear back.

Giant Bombcast: 11/10/09

In the middle of last month, ex-Midway producer John Vignocchi was a guest on the Giant Bomb podcast, managing to share some wild tales about his adventures at Midway. I just caught up to listening to it today.

Past stories of sending porn to NBA stars and before a story of people hitting on the sister of a famous music producer, comes this bit from Vignocchi about the value of multiplayer modes in games that might otherwise be single-player games.

You can find this at about the 1 hour, 22 minute, 51 second mark of the October 13 Giant Bombcast:

We were having this battle all the time, talking about, "OK, is a totally amazing single-player experience, the most important thing? Or should it be an 80% single-player experience and then a pretty cool multiplayer. Stranglehold when through that exact same problem. I think if you ask every single person that worked on Stranglehold whether or not multiplayer was a necessity for that product, they would all say, 'I wish we never did it.' It was the worst part of the game, and it was something that executive management had said, 'This has to be in the game.' And no one wanted it, and it turned out the way it turned out. That's something every game developer goes through.

Vignocchi segued his story into some talk about our own Michael McWhertor's story about the diminishing presence of single-player-only games. And there's more. Check out a particularly juicy episode of the ever-entertaining Giant Bombcast.

Giant Bombcast: 10/13/09

I've been behind on listening to what used to be called 1Up Yours and, more recently, Listen Up, ever since, trying to keep pace with a weekly release of audio talk about games that usually exceeded two hours.

I will be caught up soon, for an unfortunate reason: The podcast, as it has been structured for three years, is ending.

Today's Listen Up, recorded Thursday night, is the farewell episode for host, Garnett Lee, and regular guest, John Davison. Lee and Davison have started new jobs at outlets competitive with 1Up.

1Up editorial director Sam Kennedy, who described today's episode as "an end of an era," told me that, in some form, the podcast will go on, under the direction of show veteran David Ellis. "He has some fantastic ideas about the direction in which it should go next," Kennedy wrote in an e-mail to Kotaku. "We've also just upgraded 1Up's podcast studio with brand new equipment (ironically, which Garnett helped spec — he was only able to use it this once before leaving). So I'd say there are definitely some good things to look forward on the 1Up podcast front — in terms of a show to replace Listen Up but also some other things we have planned.

The podcast, which I will refer to as Listen Up for simplicity's sake, has been a fine experiment for a different way to cover video games. Critics might say it was nothing more than a two-hour open mic for rambling about new games and news. But even at its most lengthy, the show was great for unraveling secrets and good for rants.

While the published words of 1Up's writers may have been monitored by the gaming industry's press relations apparatus, the podcast was a good source to hear gaming reporters and reviewers talk recklessly unrestrained about what they were playing and hearing. They talked about new games that showed up in the office with the rhythm of friends at a bar — an effect aided by the constant presence of alcohol around the table where they recorded.

Their most notorious guests were the talkers, developer Denis Dyack on a warpath about the irresponsibility and potential libelous nature of gaming forums... developer Bill Roper requiring more than an hour to explain his then-unreleased game, Hellgate: London. I was a guest a couple of times, though for better or worse, I don't think my stints earned me any infamy.

The show regulars were the main attractions, a cast of characters who consistently had to say goodbye to their "fourth chair," the equivalent of the podcast drummer who never lasted long in the band. Today the first chair is gone as well.

This latest and possibly last episode is billed as an emotional farewell. I hear there are tears in it. As a podcast listener — one who has often turned them into posts here — I'll miss Garnett's version of the show. He's off to Shacknews. Davison is taking over GamePro.

For the faithful who want 1Up's flagship podcast to continue, Kennedy notes: "A podcast in the spirit of 1UP Yours and Listen Up will be coming shortly. And while it surely won't be the same without Garnett, it's an opportunity to bring in some new talent and change up the formula a bit. I always point to Saturday Night Live as an example: while in many peoples' minds no cast could ever quite compare to the original, it's a show that's reinvented itself so many times over the years. If it weren't for certain people moving on we would have never been introduced to others."

This last episode is over three hours. Of course. Find the 10/09/09 Listen Up on the site's official show page.

Giant Bomb editorial institutions Ryan Davis and Vinny Caravella had made a bet — for pride and maybe a nominal amount of money — about whether Sam Fisher would have his trademark three-lensed night vision goggles in next year's Splinter Cell Conviction. There was room for doubt, as Fisher appears to have gone rogue in his new game, using none of his standard gadgets in the Conviction demos presented since E3.

Ryan had bet that Fisher wouldn't have the goggles in the game, a sign of just how fully re-invented the franchise would be.

Vinny said there would be goggles.

On Friday night, just a couple of hours before I had the opportunity to join the men on a special edition of their Giant Bombcast podcast here in Seattle, one of the game's developers speaking at a Penny Arcade Expo live stage demo revealed the answer. That sealed it. I had to attend. I had to go on the show and settle the bet.

I had been in that stage demo audience. A developer played through the same chunk of the game that I'd sampled and covered at E3, receiving raucous applause and cheers throughout as Fisher shot guys from shadows and threw some of them out of windows. The Ubisoft developer followed his demo by showing a brief clip that he said would settle a question he knew people were asking. The short in-engine snippet that may have lasted 10 seconds merely panned up Fisher's body to reveal the famous goggles on his head.

I Tweeted this fact. Then I notified Giant Bomb's Brad Shoemaker that I would be en route.

A couple of hours later, I was one of nine people in a Wu-Tang-sized special Giant Bombcast. I settled that bet on the air. Well, I thought I did. Ryan is holding out. After all, he said, the goggles could still be cut from the game. Or the game could never come out.

Hear it all for yourself, plus plenty of other chatter among me and what amounted to a Gamespot reunion. Bonus content includes lots of MAG and Eyepet talk as well as discussions of a Val Kilmer video game and how I would improve Steven Seagal's reality TV show.

Giant Bombcast: PAX Edition

(The image in this post is from an earlier Splinter Cell game.)

1up's David Ellis put in a heroic effort during last week's Listen Up podcast trying to describe the game Osmos. He was describing the game that I voted as best entry in this spring's Independent Games Festival (it didn't win.) And I pitied his attempts to describe it to his co-workers.

A little set-up, not that I think I can do much better than Ellis.

Osmos is a 2D PC puzzle game played from the overhead view that makes you think of flOw or the cell stage in Spore. You control one globule - or mote, in Ellis' descriptions — with the goal of moving that globule into contact with smaller globules, automatically absorbing them and eventually being the largest globule in the playing field. Two complications: 1) If you go near larger globules in the playing field, they will siphon off your size, making you shrink as they gain size... 2) You can only propel yourself by jetting some of your mass behind your globule, shrinking yourself in the process and injecting more globules into the playing field in the process (Imagine retreating from a larger globule but having to fire off some of your mass into that larger one to escape — thereby making it larger).

OK. If I haven't lost you yet, then here's Ellis trying to describe the game's wonderful Milky-Way-galaxy-style level at 9:34 of the podcast:

David Ellis: There are other levels where you start in orbit around this sun and all the globules are like asteroids and planets and meteorites, also orbiting around the sun, and you actually have to adjust your orbit on the fly to avoid larger motes but also...

Garnett Lee, Listen Up host: So you already have momentum.

Ellis: You already have momentum. So you're trying to actually adjust your orbital track while trying to catch up to other ones, but also not adjusting it in such a way that you lose your orbit, because then you'll have to use a lot of the make-up of your character to actually get back into orbit. So you'll actually be a lot smaller then. So you want to try to keep it pretty consistent all the way around. But you also want to adjust it so that you're not just following in the same track but you are changing it every time around so you're picking up more and more motes to make yourself much larger.

Don't blame the messenger. Blame the complexity of even the simplest games. I've told people that the breakthrough of Osmos is that it tweaks the design fundamentals of Katamari Damacy. That game is all about gaining mass in order to absorb whatever is, at the moment, smaller. That dynamic is here, but coupled with the stress that larger things in the level are always a threat to roll you up. It's like a Katamari MMO, except that it's single-player.

Does that make sense?

Maybe you should just watch the trailer and try the demo from Hemisphere Games.

08-28-2009 Listen Up Podcast

Osmos Trailer from hemisphere games on Vimeo.

As I was listening to the summer edition of the official Lost podcast and trying to not count the months until the show's final season, I caught this video-game-related snippet. It's at 17:24 of the August 6 installment, during a conversation with two of the show's executive producers.

The men are discussing the recreational distractions that occupy the Lost writing office and turn to Alec Baldwin's favorite pastime:

Adam Horowitz, Lost Executive Producer: All I know is that there was a lot of Galaga in season three.

Eddy Kitsis, Lost Executive Producer: In fact, the name of the sub originally was going to be — in fact, did we name it that? I can't remember. We wanted to name it the Galaga because we were playing so much Galaga.

Horowitz: [Lost co-creator] Damon [Lindelof] and I got into a vicious, friendly competition on Galaga.

Kitsis: Yeah, Adam and Damon would literally play for 20 hours a day.

Horowitz: The problem became that we both got so good at the game. And I will concede that Damon ultimately did come off with the high score — although there is an asterisk attached to that, which is that he passed a million and then it goes back to zero, so the high score of mine of 970,000 is the one that's up on the board but he actually did get the high score...

Host: Was this a bit like your own King of Kong-type competition?

Horowitz: Kind of...

Kitsis: But there's no kill screen.

Horowitz: There was no kill screen, but by the end of it, it got to the point where we had both gotten so good that when one of us would start the game our first man would take a half an hour and the other one would have to go off and do whatever. It just became too much of a time suck.

As with everything related to Lost, there's a plot twist. In this case, the twist is that the sub already was called Galaga and that some people knew this. Somehow, despite discussing this show obsessively with my wife and fellow devotee/reporter Patrick Klepek, I never picked up on it before.

08-06-2009 Lost Podcast

A listener of the Listen Up podcast recently asked the show's hosts to talk about the poor quality of game endings. The listener was blue over the arguably poor endings of Metal Gear Solid IV and BioShock.

The hosts debated whether they should lament the state of game endings or delve into the problematic staying power of end-boss-based design.

Neither.

They settled on a more interesting nuance: What about making the most exciting moment of a game not be the very last thing? Maybe that's a problem?

Here's Listen Up master of ceremonies Garnett Lee and Gamasutra's Christian Nutt on the last Listen Up at 1:49:40:

Garnett Lee: The exigency of making the game come together at the end and hitting the [development] milestones was what undermined building out the ultimate end of the game. They were working on the journey, they're building all this stuff. And then they get toward the end and they're like: "Oh shit, we've got to wrap this thing up. Let's wrap it up, get it done and get it out..."

...If you followed a classic story progression, the end of the game wouldn't be the climax. You'd have the climax prior to the end of the game and then you would have the rest of the run-out.

Christian Nutt: Ico had a denouement...

Indeed it did, Christian. And the denouement was playable, which is more than one can say about the long post-climactic-end-boss-battle of games like Ocarina of Time or BioShock or just about any Metal Gear.

Most games give the gamer little to experience after the final major battle other than a cut-scene or end credits. An exception — that doesn't satisfy what's being called for here — are open world games that continue after their story concludes do. They, in a sense, have denouements, just based on the fact that the player can roam a Fallout 3, Fable II or Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas world after the final narrative confrontation. But that's not quite the classic way it's done.

What about going back to visit the home town your game started in? Or chatting with the characters who helped you slay the final boss?

Why is the climax the last thing you play in most games? That's a good question from Listen Up.

07-17-2009 Listen Up Podcast

PSPgo, as we learned at E3, is a no-disc version of the PSP coming this October 1, one that will require gamers to download their games. Among the games people will be able to download will be full-sized games that would normally be released on disc for the system at standard PSP game prices: $20- $40.

But in the world of the iPhone, customers have become accustomed to buying games cheaply, and have seen game prices stay low, with few exceptions.

So what's going to happen if people bring iPhone App Store pricing expectations to the PSPgo?

The topic came up at one hour, four minutes and 17 seconds of the most recent installment of the always-epic Listen Up podcast. Show regulars David Ellis and Garnett Lee joined the pricing conversation with Davison as they discussed the irresistible nature of the 99-cent price for some iPhone games:

David Ellis: Ninety-nine cents is like popping two quarters into an arcade machine… I'll check this game out.

John Davison: Yeah, even if I'll only play a couple of times, whatever, it's only 99 cents. But once you get to $10 it's a noticeable hit on your credit card. But for me, Rolando 2 is sort of on the periphery of being worth it. And, put it into a broader context: If Rolando 2 was a DS game and it was 30 bucks, price wouldn't come into it. If it was a PSP game, it would be 30 bucks and price wouldn't come into it.

Garnett Lee: I think that's part of the argument that tech bloggers have been making is that the floor fell so fast in the App store to 99 cents …

Davison: But I think we're also going to see it with PSPgo. As we move toward digital on PSP, price sensitivity is going to come in fast.

Lee: That would be brutal on that platform.

Davison: Yeah, and a year from now? You're going to look at something like Loco Roco and go: 'I am not going to spend 20 bucks on this.'

Sony hasn't said much about software pricing on the PSPgo. On the DSi, where Nintendo has been releasing downloadable games weekly, prices have ranged from $2 to $5 for games, clocks and other digital shorts.

07-10-2009 Listen Up Podcast

EA's Glen Schofield, studio manager for the company's Dead Space team at Visceral Games, appeared on the second episode of EA's official podcast to talk games, mention that Dead Space had co-op during some of its development cycle and explain the company's take on Dead Space's sales.

And he dismissed the thought that what held Dead Space back was a lack of online play.

Here's their key exchange, at 22 minutes, 56 seconds of last week's episode:

We looked at how many we sold. We also looked at — we didn't have online which is one of the big features that you need to have to kind of keep it in the house a little bit longer these days. But then we also did studies on sort of how many unique users there were on the PSN network and Xbox Live. And realized, you know what, there's over three million people that have played Dead Space. Maybe we've only sold 1.5 million or whatever the number is. But there's something there because that means that, ok, there were a lot of used sales. So there's a lot of people when I go out and talk to [them]… it seems that everybody has played it or heard about it or whatever.

One of the podcast's hosts asked Schofield if adding online was key. Had there been pressure to have an online?

I think it's bang for the buck is really what we're looking at right now these days and going: 'OK, we came out at 60 bucks and so did some of these other games that had online that maybe people could play for 50 hours, right? Or they had tons and tons of PDLC [paid downloadable content] so they could play it for 40, 50 hours again. Or we were up against Fallout, which was a 50-hour game to begin with. So, we didn't look at it and say we have to have online. What we said we've got to be bang for the buck. Some people could get through our game in 10 hours or so, so we learned.

For the record, Dead Space did have PDLC, in the form of several optional downloadable suits. But it had no narrative expansions, purchasable multiplayer modes or other offerings issued for games such as Fallout 3, Resident Evil 5 and more.

06-30-2009 EA Podcast

Humor is hard in games. So, as excited as the Giant Bomb podcast hosts sound about the new Ghostbusters game — and they do spent several minutes talking about how much fun they're having with a build of it — they are resigned to it not being as funny as the movie that spawned it.

Here's their key exchange, at 51 minutes, 40 seconds of this week's episode:

Ryan Davis: I think the issue is… the thing about Ghostbusters is the source material is so funny. And doing humor in games is really hard, especially when you have something that people like me revere so much. Trying to make something that is going to hit those same levels in next to impossible, particularly in a video game. Particularly when it's like 25 years after the movie came out.

Jeff Gerstmann: Especially when it's something like an action game, not the most story-heavy genre in the world.

Davis: I think the voices are ok. It's just the things they're saying aren't as funny.

Vinny Caravella: The humor in Ghostbusters.. it's in the writing but it's also in the characters who are delivering it. It's pretty subtle. There's good facial expressions. And turns and winks and nods.

Davis: Yeah, and you don't get any of that with the CG model versions. Everyone has very cartoonish expressions. I'm playing the Xbox 360 version… The Wii version will be much more stylized… but the 360 version they look a lot more realistically proportioned but their animations are still over-the-top. That stuff just looks weird.

Ghostbusters is out this June on all major platforms.

05-19-2009 Giant Bombcast

During the latest installment of the Listen Up podcast, host Garnett Lee tore into a design decision made in the recent Wolverine game that strips the hero of some of his powers, forcing players to earn them back, Metroid-style.

This anger apparently fomented during a mid-podcast bathroom break during which Lee and show regular John Davison, founder of What They Play, discussed the problem with super-hero games that involve heroes more powerful than mortal men.

Back from the restroom, they shared the following with the masses, at 1 hour, 24 minutes into their show:

Garnett Lee: If you're playing a Hulk or a Wolverine or a Captain America, you know who those characters are.

John Davison: This is where video game conventions let down the super-hero genre.

Lee: Absolutely.

Davison: There are expectations of video games that super-heroes aren't compatible with.

Lee: Like building the character. And having rewards based on how you develop the character. Maybe there's another reward system somebody could come up with. I don't' know what it is.

Davison: In that situation you should be able to die. There are certain things in video games that you take for granted that a super-hero automatically table-swipes. That' why the city-health thing [in EA's Superman Returns] I don't think it worked but..

G4TV.com reporter Patrick Klepek: It's clever. It was an attempt to do something different.

05-15-2009 Listen Up

Dead Rising. Left4 Dead. Nazi zombie mode in Call of Duty: World at War.

More Nazi zombies in the first World at War map pack.

And next, in June, Imperial Japanese zombies in a swamp shamble through he second map pack for World at War.

Gamers love their zombies, but maybe they've been smothered by one too many? Enough with the zombies?

At 6:56 seconds of the 5/12 Giant Bombcast gaming podcast, Treyarch community lead Josh Olin, who is hyping the June map pack, says:

"Out of fear of showing my zombie nerd-ism I will contend that zombies aren't saturated at all. I could play zombies for the rest of time. But people thought that about the World War II genre, right — that that was saturated? And I think that with World at War at least our hope was that we would come out with something that was new and different that people haven't been used to playing before. Hopefully that's been proven by the success of these map packs."

Zombies are forever?

05-12-2009 Giant Bombcast