Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an action adventure game based on the movie of the same name, telling the story of the return of Megatron and the rise of an even more diabolical enemy from the dawn of time. After a sub-par product from Traveller's Tales for the first film, Activision handed over development duties for the sequel to California-based Luxoflux, the team behind the video game adaptation of Kung Fu Panda. While the new developer brings much to the table, including robust multiplayer on top of the required single player mode, certain aspects of the game are a real pain in the ass.

Let's tense up and roll out!

Loved
Big, Beautiful Bots: No matter what my opinion might be on the Michael Bay-bots versus the more traditional designs, I have to admit that Luxoflux has done an admirable job of recreating the movie machines for the video game adaptation. The developer knows this, kicking off every mission with a crane shot of your character so you can appreciate all the work that went into creating him before the firefight begins.

Heavy Metal Combat: Revenge of the Fallen does an admirable job of depicting giant-robot-on-giant-robot combat. Bullets, missiles, and fists all pack a seriously satisfying punch, and each robot has a different set of ranged weapons and special abilities than makes going back through missions with different characters to try and top your score a worthwhile endeavor. The combat may not be perfect, but it works for me.

Pimping Your Rides: An upgrade system allows you to convert Energon based on how well you complete your mission objectives into power enhancements for your entire team. The selection of upgrade choices is a bit strange – you can power up your melee damage but not your ranged, for instance – but the system does allow for the player to tweak their abilities based on how they prefer to play.

Massive and Multiplayer: Many licensed games are developed with single player in mind, tacking on a multiplayer component at the last minute to add to the feature listing on the back of the box. It feels as if Luxoflux reversed that trend, creating an enjoyable multiplayer experience and then adding the story mode as an afterthought. The multiplayer mode contains more characters (with more on the way in the form of DLC) and quite frankly more excitement than the single player experience. Sure, you'll have to deal with listening to a bunch of early teen boys cussing up a storm…I guess that really isn't that much different than any other online console game.

Unlockables: Despite the fact that I already own all of them on DVD, the unlockable episodes of the original television series may have contributed somewhat to the relative lateness of this review. Just saying.

Hated
Triggered Transformation: Luxoflux has managed to take the one aspect of the Transformers that every other Transformers game has gotten right, and do it wrong. Press a button, and you're a car. Easy, right? Instead, the developers map transforming to the right trigger. Squeeze the trigger and you are a vehicle, with the amount of pressure you apply affecting your speed. Release the trigger and you are a robot. It's the mechanical equivalent of clenching your ass cheeks, and while the special moves you can perform when popping out of vehicle mode can make the release somewhat enjoyable, all in all it's just embarrassing.

We'll Call Them Vehicle Physics: Revenge of the Fallen plays fast and loose with its vehicle physics. Ground-based vehicles aren't so bad, with physics akin to your more arcadey racing games. Flying vehicles, on the other hand, are simply sad. Planes bounce off buildings in comical fashion, and maneuverability is quite limited, with even the simplest of aerial maneuvers out of reach thanks to the simplistic controls. Perhaps it is a matter of game play balance, but car should never be able to keep pace with a jet. An airplane moving at 60 miles per hour is an airplane on the ground.

Welcome To Dullsville: I suppose if I our planet actually did have giant robots doing battle in the streets on a regular basis, we'd probably pack up all of our interesting scenery and leave town as well. While the robots in Revenge of the Fallen look spectacular, the environments simply feel like a collection of random structures with different skins on them, which I suppose is what they are. There's just no real character to the setting.

The Story Unfolding: I somehow managed to avoid seeing the film before playing the game, which might be why the story feels like a disjointed series of occurrences rather than a full, compelling narrative. Balancing telling the tale of the game while trying not to delve to deeply into the plot of a film is a tricky maneuver, and one Luxoflux didn't manage to pull off gracefully.

Required Missions: Sam has been whisked away to a far off land where he could be in great danger! We should rescue him, but first, we need to clear the Decepticons out of one particular area, because we haven't unlocked the rescuing Sam mission yet. Unlocking missions in Revenge of the Fallen requires that you complete a certain number of missions previously, which leads to telling your best human buddy to cool his jets while you rescue generic power plant A and B from the enemy.

Of all of the failings of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, the transformation feature is the most damning. It's the main focus of the property, and it deserves to be done correctly. Perhaps my main issue is that you can't simply transform and then pan around the vehicle, admiring the details. Instead, triggering a transformation also triggers movement, so you never get the chance. Instead of alternate modes, they are simply travel forms that disappear when they come to a stop. Call me crazy, but I'd just prefer a Transformers game where I can press a button once and BAM - I'm a Camaro.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is an odd title that manages to succeed in categories that licensed games generally fail, while floundering in areas that should have been easy to get right. It's a movie tie-in that excels at multiplayer yet flails where the actual story is concerned. I'd use the term ass-backwards, but those muscles need a little rest.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was developed by Luxoflux and published by Activision for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 23rd. Different versions from different developers exist for the Nintendo DS, PSP, PS2, Wii, and PC. Retails for $59.99 USD. Reviewed the Xbox 360 version. Played through Autobot and Decepticon story modes to completion, and played multiple multiplayer matches across all game types.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Names carry weight. They give a group of people and the products they create an identity. For companies like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and others, those names are associated with memories, even if those words have little meaning.

Sega, for example, is simply a portmanteau of the words "service" and "games." Nintendo, officially, a direct translation from the Japanese to mean "leave luck to heaven." And Sony, well, that's a fabricated word, a twist on the Latin word "sonus" and the familiar "sonny."

But how did video game developers decide upon the likes of Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Harmonix, and the recently re-christened Visceral Games? And what the heck is a Capybara, anyway? We asked game development studio founders to explain themselves.

The studio that started us wondering just how one settles on an identity was the young Capybara Games, a Toronto-based independent group of initially a dozen game developers. The team most recently had a double showing at E3 2009, with Critter Crunch for the PlayStation Network and Might & Magic Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DS.

The studio is named for the world's largest rodent, the capybara, a relative of the guinea pig that can weigh more than 200 pounds. How exactly does one decide to identify oneself with a giant South American mammal?

"Unfortunately, with 12 very different opinions on what makes a cool name, coming to a unanimous decision was impossible," Nathan Vella, Capybara co-founder and Art Director said. "We bitched at each other for far too long before deciding on a fair and democratic process. Names of varying quality, from ‘surprisingly awesome' to ‘literally the worst name ever' were tossed out by members of the group, and each person chose their Top 3 from the pool."

No one, however, decided the name "Capybara" was "surprisingly awesome."

"In the end, Capybara was unanimously everyone's second or third choice… and so it won the name election," Vella said. "It was the name everyone thought was 'ok' but didn't really want to win. That's democracy for you... you're not picking the best, you're picking the least-worst."

There was an unintended metaphor in Capybara's "least-worst" choice, Vella says.

"At this point we had not yet realized the irony or accuracy that we were naming our 'guinea pig' of a company after the world's largest guinea pig. In hindsight we totally should have caught on to that earlier."

The developer informally calls itself Capy, as seen in its logo. But it employs a "modern day mustache hero" known as Hank Hudson as its official mascot, not a capybara—though Vella jokes it has flirted with taking an Argentinean agency up on its offer to open a capybara farm.

Another developer that didn't go with its first choice for a studio name was Resistance and Ratchet & Clank developers Insomniac Games.

Before the Burbank, California area developer shipped its first game—the first-person shooter Disruptor for the original PlayStation—it went by a trio of other names: Planet X Software, Outzone Software and Xtreme Software. That last name almost stuck, as the company had already incorporated itself as Xtreme prior to announcing Disruptor. Then it found out someone else, a database company, was already using it.

"We only had a few weeks to come up with something new," says Ted Price, president of what we now call Insomniac Games. "So we hung a whiteboard in the office and began writing down everything we could think of. There must have been 200 names on the list."

Some of the rejects? Ragnarok, Black Sun, Ice-9 Games and Blue Moon Turtle.

"Seriously, Blue Moon Turtle," Price admitted. "However, every name we liked was already being used by someone else. We actually got permission from Kurt Vonnegut's estate to use Ice-9 but someone else was already using it without permission."

Faced with the prospect of launching Disruptor anonymously, a last minute suggestion arrived—Insomniac.

"It was one of those rare moments when everyone looked at each other and said 'Yeah, that works,'" according to Price. "It definitely described us at the time. We sure weren't sleeping much."

From our discussions with game development studio founders, it seems like the best piece of advice they can impart about naming one's studio is to check early (and often) to see if someone else is using your descriptor of choice.

Such is the case with Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and, when it first formed, "music software technology."

Eran Egozy, Harmonix co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, says that he and general manager Alex Rigopulos debated over a key aspect of the developer's name, whether to spell it Harmonics or Harmonix.

"The 'ix' ending won," Egozy says. "Hey, it was the mid-90s." To be clear, the company's full name is, in Egozy's words, the "somewhat awkward" Harmonix Music Systems.

"Unfortunately, we did not check to see that harmonix.com was already taken when we named the company," Egozy says. "So our domain name is harmonixmusic.com. If we had checked, maybe the company would be called something else now."

One video game maker that did get an opportunity to change its identity was Dead Space and Dante's Inferno developer Visceral Games, once known by the more sterile EA Redwood Shores or, unfortunately and informally, EARS.

Glen Schofield, general manager of the newly re-branded Visceral Games explains.

"There were a bunch of names we threw away," he says, culling hundreds of ideas and concepts solicited from Redwood Shores team members. "I got tons of great ones but I really wanted a name that had a real meaning for our studio. Visceral just worked perfect as it is a term we use all the time to describe the feeling we want in our combat. It captured our more mature or action type games we make."

The developer's very web site is behind an age-gate, highlighting its mature focus.

The name change had support from the top, with president of EA Games label Frank Gibeau and CEO John Riccitiello supporting a more autonomous model, already seen at individually named EA developers like Criterion, BioWare and Pandemic.

"They welcomed the idea of studios having a distinct identity," Schofield says. "Once I mentioned it to Frank he kept asking me when we were announcing the name. He wanted it changed right away, it was pretty funny. But obviously once you have a name you then have months of creative and legal wrangling before you can go live with it."

Visceral's coming out party, as it were, was a little different from start up studios who sometimes choose their names under the gun. It had time to plan, hire an outside brand agency, and build a style guide for the new identity. Then it went public with a studio-wide meeting, press release, site launch and a tasty visceral treat.

"We painted the walls and hung up mounted artwork from our games," Schofield says. "We had posters, decals and a shirt for everyone. There was even a huge Visceral skull cake waiting. It's the only time we've ever had to have a cake maker sign an NDA!"

And that was that. "When the meeting was over the entire place was now changed and we were ready to move on as Visceral Games."

That sense of identity is something that Uncharted developers Naughty Dog share, with employees (positively) referred to as "the Dogs." The explanation for that choice is much simpler than some of the other stories we'd heard.

The company, formerly known as JAM—hey, it was the mid-80s—when it shipped its first game Ski Crazed for the Apple II, was changed to Naughty Dog the next decade. Founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin were "dog lovers," with Rubin often taking his puppy to work.

That continues today, with current co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra giving their dogs a second home at the Naughty Dog offices.

And the names of their dogs? Pogo and Trumpet. How those names came to be, we'll just have to wonder.

[Photo Credit]

The premise is simple: take Battlefield, then make it absolutely free to play, by stripping some elements out and reserving them for paying customers, while supporting the whole thing via front-end advertising.

Such a move is like walking a knife's edge. Make too much free and there's no point running it as a product. Make too much paid content and you'll piss people off who want to play for free.

Question is, then, can Battlefield Heroes manage to walk that line?

LOVED
War Is Not Hell, It Is Gorgeous: Battlefield Heroes' design initially drew "TF2 clone" accusations, but those are unfounded. This game has a look all of its own, part Max Headroom, part, well, Wind Waker. It's charming, it's attractive. Even the theme song is catchy, and we haven't stopped whistling it all week long.

Learner's Permit: Being a Battlefield title, vehicular control is a big part of whether the game succeeds or fails, and Battlefield Heroes manages just fine. Land vehicles are quick and responsive (the tank's power has been reduced in exchange for added speed), while planes can even be controlled semi-successfully with a mouse.

Money Can't Buy You…Poisoned Knives: Had EA restricted certain special powers and weapons to paying customers, this game would be an instant failure. Thankfully, that's not the case. Money can only buy you a few things; mostly avatar clothing, along with a few upgrades that do things like level you up faster. Everything else is paid for via XP, gained only through playtime and accomplishing missions, and while paying customers can get access to higher level weapons faster, they're not locked out for those playing for free. If you think that's slightly unfair, remember, you're playing for free.

Walk Right In, Sit Right Down: Battlefield Heroes is all about jumping right into the action, and once in, staying there. To play, you just visit the site, login, then hit a giant yellow button that says "PLAY NOW". You'll be automatically whisked away to a server. Then, while in the game, respawn times are kept to an absolute minimum, at most 6-8 seconds, but sometimes only 3-4.

Smooth As Ice: We played Battlefield Heroes for a week, and in that whole time, only once encountered connection or server issues. Considering the game is still technically in beta, that's not too shabby.

Spongeheads: There's only a single one-shot kill in this game, and that's if you're run over by a land vehicle. Everything else, from sniper headshots to grenades to dynamite, only takes off part of a player's health. It means that you're never blindsided, and never killed off instantly because of something you never saw coming.

HATED
Spongeheads: Yet this is a double-edged sword. It's great that you can't instantly be killed by a camping sniper from across the map. But if you're the camping sniper – or anyone else tricky enough to lay something like an ambush – it's frustrating as hell. Vehicle damage could also do with a tune-up, as it shouldn't take 3-4 shots from a tank to kill infantry. 2-3 would do just fine.

Matchmaker: Like we said, Battlefield Heroes is all about jumping into the action. Which in some ways is great, but in others, quite frustrating. We only want to play vehicle maps, for example. Just vehicle maps. But there's no way of selecting this. You can prefer to play vehicle maps, but when you hit PLAY NOW, you're automatically taken to a server, and half the time, it's for an infantry map. Nothankyou. Favourite servers can be bookmarked, but we'd love a server list option where we can filter for specific maps, or map types.

Class Warfare: Maybe we've played too much Team Fortress 2 of late, but if a map is stacked with heavies, and we join as a heavy, we'd love to be able to respawn as a commando. Mix things up. But you can't. Because when you create a character, you're bound to that character, as is all the XP you accrue while playing as it. You can create additional characters, sure, but you can only play as one at a time.

There's just something about the mix of clean, cartoon visuals and refined multiplayer mechanics that make Battlefield Heroes an absolute blast. The fact you can play it effectively without paying a cent probably helps. Series purists may turn their noses up at the new visual style and slightly more "arcade" feel of the game, but that's fine. For those people, there's alway other Battlefield games. That they have to pay for.

For everyone else, though, Battlefield Heroes is a fun, accessible shooter that retains the best strategic elements of the series while making the game appealing to a broader range of people. If EA can add a few more matchmaking/server options to the game, Battlefield Heroes could be one of the sleeper hits of the year on PC.

Battlefield Heroes was developed by DICE, and published by EA for the PC. Launched on June 25, and is free to play, worldwide. Created two characters, a level 7 Gunner and a level 10 Commando, in the Royal Army.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The Conduit has everything going for it. It's an exclusive first-person shooter for a console that generally only sees second-rate ports. It features a compelling story of conspiracy, betrayal, and alien invasion on the streets of Washington D.C. And it also delivers a robust multiplayer experience on a platform that isn't exactly known for its only capabilities. What could possibly go wrong?

Let us channel the assembled game critics through The Conduit and see what comes out the other end.

Giant Bomb The game's story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn't really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to a conduit, and then shutting it with a grenade. You'll also have to pull out the all-seeing eye, a glowing orb that acts as your primary way to interact with computers and as a beam that reveals hidden objects in the world. Sometimes you'll use this to unlock doors that block your forward progress. Other times, you'll use it to open up secret pathways to additional weaponry, disarm normally invisible mines, and so on.

GameSpot The real draw in The Conduit is the outstanding control scheme. Conceptually, it's nothing special. You aim your gun with the remote, walk around with the analog stick, and perform various moves by hitting buttons or performing specific motions. However, the execution is nearly flawless. You can aim with pinpoint precision, easily lining up headshots from across the screen or spinning around to cut down a critter creeping up behind you. With more than 10 different actions to keep track of, it can be difficult to find the ideal controller setup, but you can customize the controls to suit your play style.

Game Informer Online play works better than I expected on the Wii, which is to say that it's slightly better than what PC gamers had circa 1998. Matchmaking works well enough, and latency issues are present but not catastrophic. An interesting take on free-for-all deathmatching, dubbed Bounty Hunter mode, subtly changes the game by only scoring points for players who have wronged you in the past, giving you an onscreen objective arrow to the current location of your most bitter foe. Beyond that, the old standbys like capture-the-flag and team deathmatch round out a capable online experience.

Gamervision High Voltage has done a fantastic job showing what is possible with the Wii when a developer actually commits itself to the console. Sadly, the answer isn't as much as you'd hope. Claims that the graphics would reach that of early Xbox 360 titles was a bit of an overstatement, and the game is likely outperformed in some areas by a number of last-generation titles. Some enemy character models look fantastic, and nearly reach Xbox 360 levels, but others look downright muddy. It has that same "next-gen shine" that Perfect Dark: Zero took advantage of, but environments can often look rough. For a Wii game, it's likely one of the best looking, but saying much more is really stretching the truth.

Nintendo World Report This is the paradox of The Conduit. Its disappointing single-player component seems hastily-designed with its cookie-cutter plot, limited range of enemies, and myriad elements copied wholesale from popular recent first-person shooters. On the other hand, its multiplayer component is great, matching online shooters on other platforms feature-for-feature and providing a no-hassle experience that's among the best on Wii. Hopefully High Voltage will learn from The Conduit's shortcomings for their next game, but for now, Wii owners will have to settle for something very good instead of truly great.

Nice to see everyone agrees.

But loaded down with absurd design decisions that have you playing as a commander of the Wingians taking on an army of the Landians, can Mecho Wars solid design make up for its silly aesthetic?

Loved
Advance Wars On iTunes:The iPhone and iPod Touch need more strategy games. Of all the genres available for a developer to tap into, you'd think it would be obvious what a perfect fit this one is for the touchy portable. Mecho Wars is one of the few out there and its heavy use of the design and mechanics of popular Nintendo franchise Advance Wars makes it the best.

Environmental Effects: I would have been happy with a straight-up Advance Wars clone on the iPhone, but the developers added one little twist: A changing environment. Every turn is measured in hours, not days, and when you slip past midnight the plentiful water of most levels freezes over allowing you to march troops across it. Better still, come morning the ice melts and all of the units still out on the ice fall into the water and are immediately destroyed. It's a minor change that can have a major impact on strategy.

Hated
Art Style: I just can't stand the art style of the game. The unit types are so whimsical that it's impossible to tell at a glance what exactly they are supposed to be, and more important what sorts of attacks they have. That's a major issue with strategy games of this type. Better to be bland than indiscernible in a strategy title.

Mecho Wars, despite its over-the-top art style, is a great little game for the iPhone. It is slightly too short, and without the inclusion of multiplayer, that could be a deal breaker. Fortunately, I'm told that the developers plan to add multiplayer to the game as a free update in the near future.

If you're into strategy titles and need a fix of Advance Wars, Mecho Wars is the best thing currently out for the Touch and iPhone.

Mecho Wars was developed and published by Oyaji for the iPhone and iPod Touch on June 13. Retails for $4.99. Played through the campaign and all challenges.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Tsui was at this week's IGDA demo night in Chicago, Tsui showed off the board controller to the crowd, explaining how the original prototype design set the company back abot $3,000 to make. After getting Activision on board (harhar), Tony Hawk started helping out with product testing, eventually cracking an early prototype trying to perform an ollie.

The most interesting thing to come out of the presentation, it seems was not that Tsui envisions the skateboard being used for other games, we reported that a month or so back, but which types of games it might be used for.

Tsui mentioned that there are plenty of no-brainers, like surfing and snowboarding, but that there are also opportunities for Silver Surfer and Hobgoblin games in the future.

[Thanks news ninja AJ]

The customized console is wrapped in a first generation casing. The innards seem new, but the shell is not. Below is a picture of the A/V slot for a first generation Xbox 360.
Compare this with the HDMI-equipped A/V slot of the Xbox 360 Elite.
Now look at this Frankenconsole mess.
The A/V and HDMI slots are shoehorned into a casing designed for only an A/V Slot. Meaning? It's not possible to plug the A/V cable in and difficult to even get the HDMI cable in there. Last we checked, being able to plug your console in is kind of important.

Thanks Toast for the tip!

Now, five years later, the case is finally starting to heat up.

See, unlike many other cases of this ilk - which are often harmless - this one may have some teeth.

Why? Because in 2004, the two men not only sued Microsoft over Xbox Live, but Sony as well, claiming the PS2's online network infringed on the same patent. And in April of this year, Sony settled with them for an undisclosed sum.

What's more, Microsoft, rather than shrugging the case off with a team of mighty lawyers, have resorted to juvenile tricks, holding the case up for weeks in February 2009 over a single, innocent typo, and dumping 140,000 documents on Hochstein and Tenenbaum without an index.

Something tells me this may end up costing Microsoft a dollar or two, if only in the form of another "undisclosed sum".

If long-winded legal documents are your thing, you can read up on the various stages of the case here, here and here. [via PA]

Make way for Rune Factory Frontier and Rock Band 2 in our (theoretically) monthly study of which Nintendo Wii games are getting played the most, per user.

We're not tracking sales here. Any game can get bought. We're tracking how much time these games get used by the people who own and rent them as tabulated by the Nintendo Channel's indexing of play time by two million Wii owners. The results should tell us how much people who wind up with these games like them. That's more interesting, no?

Rune Factory: Frontier, a March-released RPG with a deep farming and dating system, was no big seller. But the lengthy FAQs for it are proof that there's more than enough content in the game to justify the playing times reported here by the '09 release. Wii gamers love their virtual farming and dating.

Rock Band 2's appearance is no surprise, as it surges toward Guitar Hero III. Notably, Rock Band 2 has passed the average playing time of its predecessor, while Guitar Hero World Tour has not passed its predecessor, Guitar Hero III.

What's the lesson from July? Hardcore RPGs get a lot of playing time. So do games that are fun at parties. And so do games with strong online multiplayer. Hear that, Wii developers? Strong. Online. Multiplayer.

We'll have a closer look at the playing times of some other Wii games in the next couple of days.

I tracked these numbers for the first of the month since September of 2008 and will continue to here for Kotaku. These stats are through July 1. We skipped the June report due to E3, but Kotaku's newest intern, Andrew Freedman did a great job catching those numbers for our records early last month.

Where's all this from? (AKA an explanation of the above chart for stat junkies only): In a move somewhat surprising for the generally secretive company, Nintendo makes all of this data public. Any Wii owner can download the Nintendo Channel to their Wii and begin browsing for games. Any game that has been played enough times has usage stats listed for it, contributed by anyone who chose to share their data with the channel. The sample size that the channel tracks is pretty good. We calculate it by looking at Wii Sports usage numbers, which show that almost 69 million sessions of that game have been played by Nintendo Channel users (up seven million in two months), for an average of 28.52 sessions per player. That divides to more than 2.4 million Wii Sports users whose gaming has been tracked by the channel. Since almost all Wii Sports owners would be Wii users, we will venture that as many as 2.4 million people are contributing stats. That is up from 2.2 million people when these numbers were ran for May 1.

Growing up in..., well growing up just about everywhere, my summers usually meant staying outside until it was dark out and my parents were serving dinner. But nowadays I think a lot of folks spend their summers inside playing video games and watching TV.

I have nothing against electronics and gaming, but why not blend the best of both worlds? During the month of July that's exactly what Kotaku will be trying to do: Tapping into the greater world of video game culture to talk about some of the more physical, more cerebral, more out-of-doors ways to have fun in the sun without abandoning your favorite pastime.

We're kicking off Kotaku's Summer of Gaming a bit later today with a great summer reading list of video game books meant to be a handy guide to the novels you should take along while traveling, sunning and kicking back.

Stay tuned throughout the rest of the month for plenty more fun features that tackle everything from game design and summer blockbusters to arcade guides and outdoor games.

Who says you can't get a tan while playing video games?

[Pic]

At least that's the way the game's name translates according to our own Brian Ashcraft, who pored over the scans to glean what information her could. The Four Warriors of light, the name of which was uncovered in a trademark filing earlier this month, is a traditional turn-based roleplaying game for the Nintendo DS that tells the story of a boy trying to save a princess. The scans contain scant details other than when you change equipment, your character's appearance changes, which is a feature that many RPG fans salivate over. This supplemental Final Fantasy adventure is on its way to Japan this fall.

Now that we know what the countdown image will eventually look like, we can go back to doing more productive things in the middle of the night, like sleeping.

They allege that there were a raft of lawsuits behind the sackings, which stem from Blue Omega being "taken off" their own game by Codemasters, as well as a dipsute between Blue Omega and two subcontracting studios, one of which stands accused of having continued work on Blue Omega's title even after Blue Omega had been stood down, and the other of having performed shoddy work.

In addition to those messy behind-the-scenes affairs, the former employees also stated that poor sales of Damnation were a contributing factor.

Today marks the halfway point of 2009, a year that brought Grand Theft Auto to the DS, our eyes to the bottom of an Avatar's shoe and some other guy to my old MTV desk.

We and the rest of the gaming press are at risk of forgetting everything that happened in the past six months when 2009 ends and we have to decide which games were best in the last 365 days. So let this post be a monument to the greats of Jan-June '09.

I'll start. But you help out, please. Any categories you want.

(Warning: These selections do not represent the collective wisdom of Kotaku, just one guy.)

Possibly The 10 Best Games Of 2009 So Far (according to the deputy editor): Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, Flower, Pictobits, infamous, Red Faction Guerilla, House of the Dead Overkill, Art Style: Boxlife, uh... what else?

Games With Some Good Stuff In Them That People Will Probably Forget: Deadly Creatures, 50 Cent Blood on the Sand

Games with The Best Graphics: Killzone 2, Street Fighter IV, Fight Night Round 4, Resident Evil 5

Games with The Best Graphics and Best Credit Sequences: MadWorld

Best Cut Scenes So Far: Halo Wars

Soundtracks We Shouldn't Forget: Henry Hatsworth In The Puzzling Adventure

Best Peripheral Game Expected To Be Outshone By Wii Sports Resort: Personal Trainer Walking

Best Downloadable Content That's Not A Full Game But Could Be: GTA IV: The Lost and Damned, some of that Fallout 3 DLC.

Games I Didn't Play Much Of But Maybe Were Really Good: Plants Vs. Zombies, Patapon 2, The Sims 3, stuff on the iPhone

Games You Commenters Have Shamed Me Into Admitting I Forgot: Punch-Out!, Prototype, MLB 09: The Show (best baseball game ever, I've heard?), Bonsai Barber

[PIC]

MMA is hot and WWE never quite fades away. Boxing eternally hangs from a cliff.

Since the 1970s, each decade of boxing disappointment has been followed by a decade when those of us who can still name a single active heavyweight realize that the previous decade wasn't so bad. The 90s of boxing? I miss them. Boxing never seems to improve, except in my memories.

Those of us who enjoy the sport can at least celebrate this spring of 2009 and its video game boxing renaissance, which has brought us back Punch-Out on the Wii and Fight Night on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Punch-Out's a fun puzzle game — identify and memorize the pattern to knock Bald Bull out. Fight Night aspires to be what boxing should be these days. It gets close when its controls don't deeply bend one of gaming's cardinal rules.

Loved
The Sport In Full: Ring walks. Round card girls. Choices of trunks. Previous Fight Nights had those too. Lots of fighters, including Ali, Tyson, Robinson (no de la Hoya and Holyfield), can get in the ring. Added to that — and new to Fight Night Round 4 — is a Legacy Mode that lets the player bring an amateur fighter to pro superstardom, one match at a time. The difficulty ramps up uncomfortably early, and the training mini-games between fights are too hard for a novice fighter whose foot speed and power-punching stats are not yet leveled up. But the climb is exciting and just vague enough in detail to let the gamer's imagination build a narrative better than Stallone's first Rocky. There are unexpected challengers, rematches, far-flung venues, annual achievement awards and a novel's worth of a fighting career determined one punch and one drop of blood at a time. (UPDATE: Judging by feedback in the comments I did not sufficiently distinguish how Round 4's career mode differs from that of Round 3. The new one includes multiple championships, the ability to unify belts, defend the title, move weight classes, all to increase one's reputation in order to be named The Greatest of All Time. Different tiers, from Club Fighter to Contender to Greatest have different criteria for players to achieve, including measures of fame and winning percentage. It's modeled off of a realistic career, compared to Round 3's series of challenges.)

Brutal Beauty: No greater compliment may be offered a game's graphics than to say that this game would be playable without its heads-up display (HUD). I tried one fight that way and I could see enough of the expressions of pain and fatigue on my fighter's and his opponent's faces to know how the match was going. Round 4's new physics-based damage system, which makes flush punches more hurtful than glancing blows, can be read by one's eyes without needing to see a health meter. It's all there in virtual-physical form.

Subtlety: A ha! This is what I like about boxing. Fights are seldom determined by one punch. They are determined by the accretion of jabs and hooks painted on an opponent round after round. Head movement and footwork are keys to victory. The game is a little too in love with making the player look for counter-punching opportunities, but even just a steady jab investment pays dividends, as it should. Leveling up offense and defensive stats like body-resilience or punch-accuracy shows small but significant results each time. Boxing's loudest moments follow many quieter accomplishments that the casual observer may not appreciate. They're in here.

Swift Online: I played the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions and went online with the latter. Matchmaking was swift and the fights were fun. I was disappointed that player's boxer attribute stats are leveled, as it doesn't seem to enable me to bring a fighter who is, say, biased toward power and not speed to match up against a fighter aligned the other way. Nevertheless, integrating fights into an online quest to be the champion of the game's three online weight divisions is a smart move. I'll never be champ, but it's fun to know I have a shot.

Hated
Interference: The core of Fight Night Round 4, the boxing, is a smoothly-played delight. But this game's Legacy mode is larded with extra menus and simulation options that slow one's advance from fight to training and back to fight. Then, during the fights, commentators Teddy Atlas and Joe Tessitore devolve into the worst of boxing announcers by repeatedly calling every round they see the best round of their life. What salvages the commentary is the interesting decision to have the two men criticize the state of real boxing. They discuss the proliferation of world titles and weight classes. They lament the shallow talent pool of new fighters. They even lobby for basketball players to become boxers. But all of that and even Atlas' goofy asides — like his comparison of my great fight to the first time he hard Ray Charles sing God Bless America — couldn't keep me from shutting these guys off.

Strict Controls: EA is so fervently behind Fight Night's right-stick punch system that it didn't deliver an option to map punches to controller face buttons this time. The right-stick technique is conceptually sound. Tilt in the direction of a left or right jab. Hook in the direction of a left or right hook. Pull back and arc in the direction of a left or right uppercut. What could be better? The problem is that many of us can't execute those controls reliably, myself included. My view is that game controls should be invisible and intangible. We should forget them and achieve a oneness with what's on the screen: I think an action; I believe I've done it; It happens. With Fight Night Round 4, sadly, what I think will be an uppercut winds up being a hook half the time. Perhaps I will continue to improve, but it's disappointing that EA did not offer a control scheme that lets me do what I want to do. Why not let the game learn what I think is a hook and map that move to my fighter's hook? Why force me to only use EA's pre-defined arcs? It's a narrow option that has led me to question whether I'm failing at the game or whether the game is failing at me. I'd rather focus on boxing than the controls, but players be warned: if you stink at these controls, you're in big trouble.

Fight Night Round 4 presents boxing at its most beautiful, a sport that looks great, is exciting, is full of talent and devoid of corruption.

The game falters in narrowing its audience to only those who can handle its tricky controls. But those who can manage are in for an experience about which there is little else to complain.

Fight Night Round 4 was developed and published by Electronic Arts for the PS3 and Xbox 360 on June 25. Retails for $59.99 USD. Played two brief, faltering careers on the PS3, switched to the tighter analog stick of the Xbox 360 and have had a rocky 13-6-0 middleweight career with 12 KOs on the Xbox 360. Played several matches online. Used to work for Bert Sugar (in real life). Was once prank phone-called by Michael Moorer (also in real life).

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The acquisition appears to be the first step into turning The Pirate Bay into a legal site. The Stockholm-based piracy site is a peer-to-peer server which made video games, movies and music available for "sharing" among users. Swedish police previously raided the The Pirate Bay and those connected to the site, and the ensuing trial against the BitTorrent site's founder resulted in a guilty verdict.

According to Hans Pandeya, CEO of Sweden's Global Gaming Factory, "We would like to introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site."

Pandeya adds that while The Pirate Bay is one of the top 100 most visited sites on the entire internet, it needs to change. "In order to live on, The Pirate Bay requires a new business model, which satisfies the requirements and needs of all parties, content providers, broadband operators, end users, and the judiciary," says the GGF exec. "Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it." What's more, Pandeya adds, file sharers need "faster downloads and better quality".

According to a statement from The Pirate Bay, "If the new owners will screw around with the site, nobody will keep using it. That's the biggest insurance one can have that the site will be run in the way that we all want to."

Global Gaming Factory X AB will acquire The Pirate Bay this August.

Thanks to all who sent this in!

Some background: when the PS3 first launched, it was backwards-compatible, meaning you could play PlayStation 2 games on your new PlayStation 3. The 20GB and 60GB units released in North America and Japan featured hardware emulation (they literally had a PS2 chip inside), while those released in PAL territories featured software emulation (similar to how the 360 handles original Xbox games).

Later, though, this feature was removed. Anyone buying a 40GB, a later model of the 80GB or the 120GB PS3 can't play a single PS2 game on them. It was a stupid, stupid move on the part of Sony.

A patent discovered by Siliconera, however, suggests that Sony might be re-thinking this stance. Filed in December 2008, it's basically a patent for a method that would allow the PS3's Cell chip to translate code from the PS2's Emotion Engine. Not half-assed software emulation (which in previous PS3 models couldn't run some games), full, total replication of the functionality of the Emotion Engine.

Which means, theoretically at least, you could play any PS2 game on any PS3, regardless of the model or year of release.

Whether this would allow you to play actual PS2 discs, or would just be the advance party for the sale of PS2 downloads on the PlayStation Store is unclear. We'd like the former, but with Sony being a business and all, would expect the latter.

Sony Patents Emotion Engine Emulation Technology For Cell Processors [Siliconera]

But the Wii-exclusive first-person shooter hopes to win gamers over not with its plot and known voice talent, but its nuanced controls and solid multiplayer gaming. With the ability to tweak every control in the game, from HUD layout to motion controls, High Voltage Software seems to be going out of its way to try and appease an audience sometimes hard to please on the Nintendo console.

But can even the voice talent, sci-fi plot and solid controls help turn a core game into a mainstream success on the Wii?

Loved
Tight Controls: Even without messing around with the settings, The Conduit has responsive, tight controls for a point-and-aim shooter. Players use the nunchuk to move around the game while aiming and firing off shots with the Wii Remote. The buttons on the two controllers let you jump, duck, spin around, swap weapons and grenade types on the fly and reload. Stabbing toward the screen with the remote lets you pull off a melee attack and swinging the nunchuk lets you toss a grenade.

Control Customization: While the presets for The Conduits controls are fairly good, the ability to change just about everything in the game's controls means you can make the game play like you want to. After beating the campaign, for instance, I went in and shrunk the Wii Remote's dead zone down to the size of a largish postage stamp. Moving outside of the dead zone moves the camera. Making the dead zone that small meant that the game felt and played like I was using a mouse to aim and shoot and gave me a sizable advantage over gamers who hadn't tweaked in multiplayer matches. You can also change sensitivity, the location of everything on the HUD, what the game does when the remote stops pointing off the screen and the button mapping.

Weapons: The Conduit has more than a dozen weapons and three types of grenades. The weapons are broken down into three categories: conventional human guns, high-tech Trust guns and alien guns. The weapons all act differently enough to give the game, and better still the multiplayer matches, a lot of variety. Some guns even detect when you twist the remote, allowing you to tweak the spread of multishot weapons.

The ASE: One of the only interesting twists that The Conduit brings to the first-person shooter genre is the inclusion of the alien All Seeing Eye. The floating ball can detect items in a hidden phase state and pull them into the physical world. Unfortunately, that means putting your gun away for a few minutes as you sweep an area and then use the ASE to pull it into the world. It's a nice twist that breaks the monotony of running and gunning.

Interesting Level Design: While much of The Conduit's single player campaign is a bit monotonous, the levels you have to fight your way through offer up a pretty broad spectrum of settings and maps. The game has you working your way through the White House, the Pentagon, down city streets and inside bunkers. It's a nice reminder that not all shooters have to take place on a battlefield.

Multiplayer Matches: The Conduit's multiplayer matches are surprisingly fun to play. While the game only includes three modes of play, each mode can be tweaked with a variety of rule sets that change the maps, the weapons and basic rules of the game. Add to that the inclusion of voice chat support through the Wii Speak peripheral and the variety of weapons and you've got yourself a fairly robust Wii shooter.

Hated
Background Graphics: While The Conduit's front-and-center graphics are fairly impressive, the little stuff, the backdrops, the decals, have some major issues and go a long way to undermine the game's overall visuals. Looking through windows in buildings net you flat backdrops that look like cardboard cut-outs. Blaster burns from weapons sometimes float in midair. The horizon for some settings is often blurry, and uninspired.

Blundering Enemies: The enemy artificial intelligence, the heart of any single-player experience in a shooter, is tragically flawed. Enemy aliens and humans occasionally get stuck behind things, continue to fire despite having no clear line of fire, and respond to obvious triggers in the game, allowing you to systematically clear a room with careful footwork.

Voice Acting: With the likes of Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda), William Morgan Sheppard and Mark Sheppard doing voice work for the game, you'd think it would be, at least, a fun listen. You'd be wrong. The trite dialog is made worse, not better, when this trio get their voices on it.

Plot: Conspiracy theories are often not the best fodder for video games. Generic conspiracy theories are even worse. While the plot is pretty straightforward, it would be easy to get confused searching for some substance in the dialog.

Despite its shortcomings, I was pleasantly surprised to find The Conduit to be a solid shooter that offers just enough in its single-player campaign to keep me playing to the end and enough multiplayer support to make me want to stick around after I'm done.

The key moment for me was when I went in and played around with the control settings. Once fine-tuned to my tastes, The Conduit felt nearly as intuitive and precise as a shooter played on a PC.

The Conduit was developed by High Voltage Software and published by Sega for the Wii on June 23. The Teen-rated game retails for $49.99. Played through the entire single-player campaign and a dozen or so matches of online multiplayer matches.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The Blizzard employee library is home to the informational—programming language texts, maps, historical reference—but it's also filled with fun, as decades' worth of PC and console games take up almost half of the room's space. Let's take a look.

Nerd alert! Classic Dungeons & Dragons manuals and campaigns join copies of the original Warcraft: Orcs Vs. Humans and... a copy of the Sega Genesis version of Populous.
Given display priority are the works of Yoshitaka Amano, famous for his Final Fantasy work, in Amano: The Complete Prints of Yoshitaka Amano, one of three books so prominently displayed.
Battles of the Ancient World 1285 BC - AD 451: From Kadesh to Catalaunian Field and Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar. If you want to work at Blizzard, it might not be a bad idea to read these books.
There are... a lot of PC games, still in the box, at the Blizzard library. From classics like System Shock to competition like EverQuest, you'd be hard pressed to find many marquee titles missing from these shelves.
More pen and paper role-playing game manuals up top, every nerd reference—comic books, Star Wars, Star Trek, Tolkein, et al.—on the bottom.
What Blizzard's library is a little shorter on are console games. There are some last-generation must-haves out of frame, but the Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 aren't as well represented.
Yep, more PC games. Can you name them all?

When we were first invited to Blizzard's headquarters, we were going to get our first hands-on experience with StarCraft II's single-player game. We were also supposed to get a look at new Battle.net features. Unfortunately for those of us looking forward to seeing how both of those projects were progressing, those presentations had to be pushed back. Such is the Blizzard way, as clearly no product will go public—or ship—until it's ready.

Disappointing? Maybe a little bit, as I'm looking forward to the campaign more than anything. But this is StarCraft II, people. And we just got another dose.

Last week's multiplayer event was the third time I've gone hands-on with StarCraft II, having played the game's multiplayer at Games Convention in 2008 and at BlizzCon in 2007. This time, however, there were almost no time constraints. I had time to play through to the construction of advance buildings. I played long enough to be crushed by a Zerg swarm of Brood Lords, the flying units that rained down broodlings upon my hapless, under-developed Terran forces. I played on every available map, Blistering Sands, Steppes of War, Kulas Ravine, a re-made Lost Temple, New Antioch and Toxic Wastes.

And while we didn't actually get a chance to go hands-on with some of the new Battle.net features—all still a work in progress, Blizzard cautioned—we got to see some fascinating changes.

Most of those changes to the Battle.net interface will appeal to StarCraft professionals and wanna-be professionals. During the three "shoutcasted" pro-level matches we watched—essentially live Battle Reports with color commentary—it was clear that Blizzard is adding features that will appeal to serious fans. There are a ton of stats to eat up during matches, showing each player's army details, technological progress, buildings constructed, economic growth, and average "actions per minute" or APM. All are good indicators of how a StarCraft II player is doing, but it's the post-game stats that will probably appeal to less hardcore fans looking to improve their game.

Not only can observers watch a full replay of a match, they can fast forward and reverse, letting them review snippets of a battle and rewatch game changing moments. Observers can also review match data in fun graph form or study a player's build order, complete with timestamps that will show the precise second when a winning player built his second Barracks or went all-in with Dark Templars.

The new Battle.net interface—again, not final—looked sharp and polished, something we're unfortunately not allowed to show you.

During our eyes-on and hands-on experiences, we got to see some of the more recent changes to the StarCraft II suite of strategies. New, to me anyway, were destructible rocks. Those rocks can open up new chokepoints. They can also block players from building expansions, so you may need to send in a demolition squad if you want to build a second or third base. Who knows what they might do in the hands of map makers?

And speaking of bases, we got a look at the high-yield mineral fields for the first time. A gold cluster of crystals instead of the standard blue, they'll help players earn more raw materials—but also provide a more obvious location at which to expand.

While much of the early StarCraft II game feels familiar, Blizzard has added another layer of strategy to something as simple as resource gathering. Each faction, Terran, Zerg and Protoss, have ways of boosting their resourcing means.

For the Terrans, it's the experimental Mule, a super-powered SCV that harvests more rapidly than the standard drone, but eventually shuts down. The Zerg have the ability now to spawn additional larvae, thanks to the Queen. Helpful for a quick build when the Hatchery is all tapped out. The Protoss have an ability called the Proton Charge, which simply lets Probes collect materials faster. Protoss players will need to build an Obelisk, a special Pylon, to initiate that boost.

Also new to our StarCraft II experience were units we hadn't had a chance to play with before, like the flame-throwing Hellion—a Vulture replacement, of sorts—and the heavily armored Marauder, two Terran units that complement the standard Marine during the early game. And while we did get a chance to delve slightly into StarCraft II's later game, getting far enough to grow Mutalisks during on Zerg playthrough and sprinting to a Protoss Mothership build, most of what we played was early game stuff.

But that will have to come with time and a little bit of single-player experience. Jumping into the deep end of StarCraft II isn't easy for this rusty StarCraft fan, so it will take some time to get used to the new tech trees and the fleet of new units.

Hopefully, the StarCraft II multiplayer beta is just around the corner, as what we played at Blizzard felt incredibly polished, with fantastic new music adding to the atmosphere and improved visuals that threatened to put a hurt on my old graphics card. Granted, there were still some placeholder buttons in the pre-beta version we played, but if Blizzard can get the public multiplayer test out there, we'll overlook that kind of thing. Gladly.

• Here's a Story: The Great Chain Interview
  The Great Chain Interview, Part 1: Miyamoto Questions Metroid Director
  The Great Chain Interview, Part 2: Metroid Guy To Xbox Guy To PS3 Guy
  The Great Chain Interview, Part 3: Sony Questions Sony, Who Questions Shane Kim
  The Great Chain Interview, Part 4: Xbox Guy To Ex-Xbox Guy To That Guy's Boss
  The Great Chain Interview, Part 5: Riccitiello To Reggie To You
  by Stephen Totilo
• 
  
• Game Robo-cock
  When Robot Chicken Meets Video Games
  by Luke Plunkett
• 
  
• Playing The Numbers
  Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures Studies Fallout, Physics, Also Beer
  by Owen Good
• 
  
• Father Knows Best
  The Best and Worst Fathers in Video Games
  by AJ Glasser
• 
  
• Going Against The flOw
  ThatGameCompany And The Beauty Of Taking Risks
  by Brian Ashcraft
• 
  

REVIEWS

• Eduardo The Samurai Toaster Micro-Review
• Let's Tap Review: Rhythm Limbo
• Fallout 3 Point Lookout Micro-Review: Axe Murder
• Art Style Boxlife Micro-Review: Smart Misery
• The Sims 3 Review: Delayed Gratification
• Star Defense Micro-Review: Tower Defense in Spaaaace
• Zenonia Micro-Review: Unexpectedly Epic
• Mario Vs. Donkey Kong: Minis March Again Micro-Review: App Alternative
• Red Faction: Guerrilla Review: Bustin Makes Me Feel Good
• Prototype Review: Alex Mercer SMASH!
• Swords & Soldiers Micro-Review: Violence Included
• Ghostbusters: The Video Game Review: Survival Comedy

PREVIEWS

• Batman: Arkham Asylum Preview: A Thinker's Brawling Game
• Madballs in Babo Invasion Preview: A Game With Balls
• Wii Sports Resort Preview: Motion Game Of The Year?
• The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks Preview: Pigs Might Fly
• Wolfenstein Re-Preview: Sans Mecha-Hitler
• Shadow Complex Preview: Where's The Morph Ball?
• Tony Hawk Ride Preview: Feet On, Most of The Time
• Lost Planet 2 Preview: I Want To Be Inside You
• WireWay Preview: Drawn to Flight
• Marvel Super-Hero Squad Preview: Lego Without Lego
• Drawn To Life: The Next Chapter Preview: Wii-Drawn
• Darksiders Preview: Blasts From Pasts
• MX Vs. ATV Reflex Preview: Right Stick Re-Imagined
• Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack In Time Preview: Time For Change
• PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe Preview: Marital Bliss
• Halo 3: ODST Firefight Preview: OUHave12
• Dexter iPhone Preview: Bits And Pieces
• Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment Preview: Disturbing Yet Familiar
• Muramasa The Demon Blade Preview: So, So Pretty
• Saw Preview: Should I Be Enjoying This?
• MAG Preview: Generic Action Game
• Jumpgate Multiplayer Preview: Shades Of Descent
• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories Preview: There's A Light
• Afrika Preview: And It Hurts That My Friends Never Stood Downwind
• G.I. Joe Preview: The Rise Of Contra
• PixelJunk Shooter Preview: Hot And Cold-Running Co-Op
• Split/Second Preview: Race Track Go Boom
• Fat Princess: A Fistful of Cake Preview: Fatter
• Splinter Cell Conviction Preview: A Smoother Operator
• New Super Mario Bros. Wii Preview: Classic Mario, Endless Play
• Alan Wake Preview: Shoot Twice
• LEGO Rock Band Preview: Building Family Fun-Time
• Batman Preview: Not A Bat-Toosie In Sight
• Gravity Crash Preview: Retro Evolved

WELL PLAYED

• The Great Experiment
• Kotaku's Best of E3 Awards: Hair Dragons, CatBats and Light Graffiti
• iPhone: The Great White Hype?
• Bethesda's Big Move

COVER

• by Michael McWhertor

Apparently a "project team" will be set up next month to build an all-new device that combines the functionality of a Sony Ericsson mobile phone with a handheld gaming device.

In other words, a PlayStation Phone, in spirit if not in name.

Not the first time we've seen one of the these rumours, we know, but the specifics and the source make it by far the most plausible of the lot.

UPDATE - Contacted for comment, Sony said...they do not comment on rumour and speculation.

Sony eyes cellphone/game gear hybrid - Nikkei [Reuters]

"I like an open world where it feels like stuff is going on around you," James Hague, Red Faction Guerilla's lead designer at development studio Volition told me in a phone interview earlier this week.

Red Faction Guerilla is a sprawling open-world action-adventure for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 set on a Mars ruled under the tight grip of the heartless Earth Defense Force. The player is a miner-turned-revolutionary who shoots and batters enemies and buildings to help the just overthrow the bad.

What Hague was discussing a game that is loaded with opportunity and charged with the energy of an insurgent's rebellion against a military authority – the kind that, not intentionally, has parallels to those seen fighting on the news these days.

Let's start with the game design rebellion. The game Hague and his team made, the game that technical designer Luke Schneider maintains was not intended to be a "GTA on Mars," was made to feel like a more open open-world game than the average one. It was a game designed to enable rampant destruction and handle all of the gameplay consequences. Volition built their game, Hague and Schneider told Kotaku, on the premise that giving the player an axe and guns that can destroy every structure on the map is also a game that should open the player's options to do as much as they can imagine.

"We wanted people to play pretty much however they wanted to," Hague said.

There are signs of success. For example, the developers has learned that players are doing things the creators didn't expect. Take the destruction of a canyon-spanning bridge in the game's Badlands district. Some might take it down with explosives. Others might use the game's disintegration gun to zap one strut away at a time. Volition discovered that one player decided to attract military attention and then shot helicopters so they crashed into – and tore down – the bridge. Another player filled the bridge's lanes with cars then made them detonate in a chain. "When that was put in there, the goal was to put in something very large and allow the player a lot of choices in how to take it down. We're not looking to dictate how you do it."

What they pushed was emergence, a value celebrated by players and makers of open-world games at least as far back as the launch of GTA III.

"We were trying to go a little further out there in terms of emergent gameplay on the high level," Schneider said. During development, they went too far: "Players would just be completely lost." The developers said they wanted to make an open-world game that felt more open than gamers have been playing. Things in the world were just supposed to… happen. Convoys would drive through the game world at set times each game-day. Players could attack them or not. But some players of pre-release versions of the game panicked and felt that they'd be letting their guerilla movement down if they saw a convoy and didn't attack. Missions like hostage rescues that are now triggered only when a player goes to an icon on the game world's map – the classic way of starting missions in open-world games – used to instead be sprung upon the player as alerts they could choose to respond to. "We were trying to get a balance between letting you choose what you want to do and making the world seem alive," Hague said. "We tried at both extremes and I think the balance is pretty good."

They found the right amount of insurgency to make their game work. And if it resembles any current real-life insurgency, that's not intended, the developers say. "We weren't looking at the modern day situation," Hague said. "We were looking at stuff like the past wars in Afghanistan and so on. How do react when you have a superior force against you and you can't attack them head on? We weren't trying to make an Iraq simulator."

Yes, this is a game about being part of an insurgent fighting force, a game that rewards players who can sneak up and undermine a more powerful military maybe with a disintegration ray or maybe by blowing up a car in front of a building. But civilians are never targets. The enemy is only military and always armed. Early in the game, the hero of Red Faction tells his brother, "I'm not a terrorist," only to see his brother gunned down by the evil military rulers, the Earth Defense Force. "We didn't want people to feel like they were on the wrong side of this war," said Schneider, who said that wars as far back as the American Revolutionary War were studied for tactics. "We just wanted people to have fun blowing stuff up."

With both the politics of the game as well as in the gameplay design, the developers don't think they took their rebellion too far. Almost.

One mission, which puts the player in the turret position of a vehicle while a fellow freedom fighter sharpens knives and begins to viciously interrogate a captured military man, did make Hague briefly uneasy. "The first time I actually played that mission once we got it in place I felt kind of bad," he said. He remembered thinking: "The Red Faction really crossed the line here. I don't know if I believe in the same stuff they believe in anymore, but I've got to keep continuing because it's a good cause overall… I remember we were going to go with an interrogation fairly early on. It just wasn't until we did the final writing pass and recording pass that we could really hear it in context. Honestly, it came out a little more over-the-top and intense than I expected to be."

A scene like that wouldn't have been unusual in 24 or out of context in an action movie. It's an ethical boundary, pushed.

The rebellions of Red Faction Guerilla are set to continue. Development of downloadable content is underway. The two developers would not share specifics.

Is this as open as it gets? Of course not. But as far as they've gone, the makers of Red Faction Guerilla are happy with the result.

What makes you laugh as a gamer? A joke? A line of dialogue or a sight gag? And what's the target of the humor? Who gets skewered? You?

Some might describe the new DSi downloadable, Art Style: Boxlife, simply as a new puzzle game and leave it at that. But it is also a sharp satire of tedium, both of the dreary labor some of us go through to make money and the bland motions we willfully prosecute in video games.

Oh, and it's a game about folding paper into boxes.

Loved
Brain-Hurting: Yes, this is a good thing. The core gameplay of Boxlife requires the player to use swipes of the DS stylus to scissor and fold sheets of grid-lined paper. Form six connected squares into a box and that box is lifted from the playing field, either to help clear a level in the game's puzzle-based R&D mode or to win points in Factory mode (better if you build that box around a dropped bomb before the bomb detonates). This is a task you will pray you are never forced to do repeatedly for real work and once you've probably seldom had to do under the pressure of a video game timer. It's not easy. And, early on, you won't see any of the patterns you need to spot to play well. Later, you'll be folding like an Origami master. Then, the game gets way harder.

The Office, The Video Game: This game is a joke. On purpose. Difficulty levels are named after levels of employment, like part-timer, craftsman and specialist. Scores are all delivered in dollar amounts and displayed in charts styled off of the bland profit-driven line-graphs you could imagine being shown in a corporate boardroom. And what's the drive? The money earned unlocks lifestyle improvements that gradually improve the quality of our employee hero's shoe-box diorama of a life. That quaint, pathetic diorama always appears on the games's title screen. Congratulations! You just earned enough money to swap that guy's bike with a moped. Happy? This game knows that its gameplay feels like work and that work's a chore. It knows that, in real life, the rewards and the cheerleading of a company toward those rewards is shallow. Somehow I still had fun. And laughed. This is sharp stuff.

Hated
Twitchy Control: The game requires precise cutting and folding. But sometimes the stylus felt too fat in my hands, like a pencil from kindergarten. The game occasionally didn't register the folds I was trying to make or missed my attempt to glue to squares back together. It's not a common problem, but it's persistent enough to deserve a mention.

If you only need to know if there's enough entertainment in a game to justify its price tag, then, yes, there's $5 of fun in Boxlife. But the game will get harder than mere mortals can handle. Don't be mad.

Boxlife is a game that uses some of the less fun aspects of life to create an addictive and distinct puzzle game. I took it as satire and applaud the game for respecting my intelligence while doing something new.

Art Style: Box Life was developed by Skip Ltd. and distributed by Nintendo for the DSis downloadable DSiWare service on June 22. Retails for 500 Nintendo points ($5 USD). Played 13 of 14 R&D 10-level stages. Unlocked six of eight Factory modes, up to Genius level. Earned $34,685.60 of fake money. Just enough to buy a new bench for outside and a dog to fetch the paper.)

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In addition to starring in a few video games, Michael Jackson appeared at the first E3 more than a decade ago. GTTV's Geoff Keighley recalled the event to Kotaku:

"Michael showed up at the first PlayStation E3 party in 1995 as a surprise guest of Mickey Schulhof, the then-CEO of Sony. There were rumors he was going to perform, but as far as I recall he never actually took the stage. Instead, he walked around the party and spent most of his time holed up inside the ice cream parlor on the backlot. I seem to recall he was also caught sitting down and playing the arcade version of the original Ridge Racer that was set up at the party."

Electric Playground host Victor Lucas was also at that E3 and shared his memory with Kotaku:

"He was at the first ever E3 Sony party in 1995 and it was at one of their studio backlots so it was set against a fake small town street with fake little shops. There were games in some of the fake shops, some PlayStation standees and some arcade machines. [Former Sony Computer Entertainment president] Steve Race had given a short speech thanking everyone for coming and how exciting it was for Sony to be entering this new era for their business.

"A band started playing on a stage after that, and I remember rumors being whispered that Michael Jackson was going to perform. He didn't, but I remember a small crowd had gathered around one of the fake shops, peering into the windows. I took a look inside and there he was sitting down and it looked like he was being catered to by at least a half dozen people in his entourage. Eventually he stood up and started playing a game machine in that room. I remember people saying he wasn't going to come out of there, so I moved on and walked around the rest of the party.

"The Sony party that year was big but much smaller than they grew to be over subsequent years at E3, so it didn't take long to circle the party and eventually get back to where Jackson was. Only, when I got back, he wasn't in the fake shop anymore, so I turned the fake street corner and almost walked into him and his entourage as they walked down the street. It was weird. It was like a force field had been built around them and a circle of people had given Michael Jackson 20 feet of space as they followed him. He walked down the fake street, stopping now and then to play a game or two. He didn't perform. All he did was walk around and check out games and wave, smile and say hello to people.

"We were all pretty blown away—a bunch of developers and brand new game journalists were in the presence of pop culture royalty. And as I left the party, collecting my PlayStation Polygon-Man t-shirt and still buzzing about being mere feet away from Michael Jackson, one of the most famous people the world has ever known, I remember thinking how big the videogame industry was already and wondering how big it was going to grow..."

Game designer Dave Perry had a more personal memory, one he shared on his blog today. Perry recounts a story of visits to the star's home at Neverland Ranch, Jackson's playful behavior around his kids and... an egg fight.

Michael Jackson was a gamer, he wanted me to come up to Neverland and talk to him about games. The first time I went up and after walking in the door he handed me a black plastic trash bag and told me to put it on. I was like, "HUH?" He started putting his trash bag on. Then one of his staff walked in with a giant PILE of eggs. A bunch of his friends came in (wearing the requisite black trash bags) and we all went into the garden area and started a giant egg fight. I threw my first egg FULL FORCE (I have long arms), then the world went into bullet-time, I thought, "Oh No!", as I saw the egg flying full speed towards his son's face, and I noticed they were filming everything for Michael's home video collection (so they'd know who did it!) What a great start to make his son cry. Luckily, it whizzed right by his ear missing him by millimeters. I then went into "Here, take this" as I performed the lamest egg throws you've ever seen. So everyone survived, and I was invited to stay.

There's much more from Perry about his view of a Michael Jackson he very much respected over at Perry's blog.

Jackson was a historic and controversial figure, sure to be missed by many. While his connections to the gaming industry were few compared to his influences on music and television, his influence has registered throughout entertainment.

Despite his moniker as the World's Greatest Detective, the Dark Knight's video game appearances rarely tap into his vast skills as a sleuth.

While Batman: Arkham Asylum is certainly no comic book CSI, and who would want it to be, it certainly remembers that Batman is a detective first and a slugger second. Asylum asks gamers to think their way through the game not only when trying to solve puzzles, but when quietly taking out a room full guards and even busting heads.

What Is It?
Batman: Arkham Asylum is a third-person action game with a heavy emphasis on fighting, stealth and good old-fashioned detective work. The game isn't based on any particular existing story in the world of Batman, but rather taps into the vast history of comic books, movies and TV shows to create its own storyline set in the infamous asylum.

What We Saw
While I played through the first two chapters of the game, there are some strict rules about certain chunks of the game's story that I cannot talk about.

How Far Along Is It?
Due out in August, the build I played was set to me in May to help me judge the game for an E3 Game Critics award. Eidos later said judges could write previews based on the build.

What Needs Improvement?
Polish: The game is shaping up nicely, but it still needs a bit of polish to smooth out the rough edges. Specifically, I'd like to see a bit more done on character models to deal with things like the occasional flesh-colored mohawks on bad guys, lip-syncing and general lighting issues.

Bats: As much as I've been enjoying the character design and aesthetic of this latest Batman, there is one thing that really bugs me. Every time you take out a bad guy a camp of bats appear and swirl around him for a second Initially it looks kind of neat, but the effect quickly loses its charm.

What Should Stay The Same?
Vicious Fights: The fighting system used in the game is pretty straight forward. One button delivers an attack, another delivers a stunning attack. A third button is used for counter-attacks. You can also double tap a button to dodge. These simple single-button attacks are all weaved together with a heavy reliance on timing and the ability to shift between targets by moving the thumbstick in different directions. The results can be stunning when dealing with a room full of enemies, which is typically the case. This whole fluid combat system is back-up with stunning slow-mo finishing moves delivered to the final bad guy in a room, which gives the game a cinematic flare.

Fun Stealth: I'm not a huge fan of stealth, it's not my style and I don't like have it forced upon me. Batman's take on stealth, though, is a whole other story. Instead of slinking around trying to avoid the bad guys, Batman uses his arsenal of gadgets and the shadows to stalk and take down enemies one at a time, leaving those still standing quaking in their bad guy shoes. Take downs including gliding from the shadows to deliver a face full of Bat boot, sleeper holds, and hanging upside down to knock an enemy into unconsciousness.

Light Detective Work: One of Batman's cooler gadgets is his cowl vision, which allows him to scan an area for enemies, trails, scents and clues. You can activate the cowl at anytime in the game. While active, it shows an X-ray version of everyone on screen. If you look directly at a person it will also tell you their current heart rate and even state of mind. This is great when you're trying to sneak up on people, letting you know if they're relaxed or scared out of their minds. You can also use it to follow trails. At one point in the game, for instance, you have to follow a bad guy by searching for the smell of the alcohol on his breath. The detective work in the game is delivered in such a simple, straightforward way that it manages to add a little nuance to what would otherwise be a straight-up action game without distracting from the central theme of the game.

Voice Acting: Batman: Arkham Asylum is a joy to listen to both for fans of Batman and those new to the hero. The game features voice work by Kevin Conroy, Arleen Sorkin, Tom Kane, and even Mark Hamil;l as The Joker. Everyone involved delivers in the game.

Story: Instead of latching on to the latest movie, a TV show or plucking a story from the vast library of Batman comics, the developers decided to create something wholly new and it's the right call. Arkham Asylum opens with Batman escorting The Joker back to his favorite high-security mental ward. Shortly after his arrival though, things go sideways and Batman finds himself trapped in an asylum run by the inmates. The game takes place not just in the asylum but in the wider world of Arkham island, a perfect setting for this open-ended adventure game.

Challenge Modes: These modes are outside the single-player campaign, adding a bit of replayability to the single-player game. There are two types of challenge modes. In one you fight a stream of bad guys, taking on as many as you can until you finally succumb. In the other you use the stealth mode to try to quietly clear a room as quickly as possible.

Final Thoughts
Batman: Arkham Asylum's individual elements of fighting, stealth and detective work can all stand on their own as fun elements of gameplay, but put together they provide an experience much better than the sum of its parts.

It goes so far over the cliff that it bounces right back into awesometown. Lighting's Odin summons? Less so. The Japanese internet has been critical of it — calling the summons beast things like "rat face".

Final Fantasy XIII director Motomu Toriyama has issued a statement regarding the summons:

At E3, we thought let's show off the cool summons, and with overwhelming nervousness, we kind of blundered with both Odin and Shiva... Because of that, we're not showing the whole thing! Until we have another chance, we hope to keep perfecting them, so please wait only a little bit more.

More awesometown please, less rat face!

Final Fantasy XIII [Official Site via はちま起稿]

The basic facts haven't changed even if the business circumstances have quaked. Wolfenstein returns to consoles on August 4, developed primarily by Raven Software, with supervision by id. That's id, the company that just sold to Bethesda parent ZeniMax and told Kotaku that letting outside developers work on its intellectual property has resulted in a "step down in quality."

That's right. On Thursday morning, id's own CEO gave us reason to doubt Wolfenstein would be that good. And then, in the afternoon, id and Activision reps in New York City showed of the game. Kinda awkward.

What Is It?
Wolfenstein is a one-man first-person war (no vehicles!) against Nazis set in World War II and amplified by the supernatural powers of something called The Veil. It's a follow-up to the shooters that, along with Doom and Quake, defined id.

What We Saw
I played the game's hospital mission in the Xbox 360 build of the game. It occurs about a third of the way into the game. I had undying mode on, which allowed me to see the effects of taking damage without dying.

How Far Along Is It?
Wolfenstein is out on August 4. The build I played was a beta.

What Needs Improvement?
Clarity of Veil: So our hero, B.J. Blazkowicz, has more than machine guns and disintegration guns that spit out energy like fire hoses. He can find and activate four Veil powers. Until a meter depletes, these allow for the ability to slow time, see hidden passages and obscured enemies, don a shield or shoot bullets through walls. Nothing wrong with that. But activating and stacking the powers via the d-pad becomes confusing. The problem was that the visual cues distinguishing one power from the next were not as pronounced as a first-time player like me would have liked. Perhaps this is remedied in the main game, which doles the powers out individually. But I got confused as to which powers I had on or off.

Lack of Mecha-Hitler: Yes, Hitler will be in paintings hung on walls in the game. But he's not in the game. Not being a player of past Wolfensteins, I don't mind. But I suspect others will.

What Should Stay The Same?
The Powers: Blowing up barrels of Veil energy make enemies float, flailing in the air. Using Veil powers makes B.J. sort of a super-hero and sort of the classic FPS griefer/cheater. Seeing through walls to shoot enemies with fully-powered Veil Sight and Veil Empower? Why not? Upgrades to the Shield power, I'm told, will cause bullets to bounce off B.J. and back at his enemies. Sounds good to me, especially if the Veil powers work as well in multiplayer.

Hub City: Conceptually the design of Wolfenstein seems smart. Here's hoping it is, even though I wasn't shown it. The game is partially set in the fictional German hub city of Eisenstadt. Resistance fighters, merchants (who sell items and power-ups for collected gold) and Nazis populate the city. So do non-player characters who will lead you to mission-activation points. It's a different way to organize an FPS rather than a linear progression of missions. You can explore the city, find treasure, and interact with all these people. Or go to missions. But the developers not showing any of this yesterday was a little worrisome. Let's hope it's shaped up well.

Final Thoughts
Despite some sudden concerns I have about non-id id games, Wolfenstein appears to have some solid, core ideas. It is fighting for attention amid a crowd of FPSes this year, but it has a fighting chance by getting an August release. If those Veil powers hold up, then this could be a fine summer vacation from all that going outside stuff people recommend.

Wolfenstein is set for release on the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. Players of the recently-released PSN and XBLA versions of Wolfenstein 3D can earn gold for the Wolfenstein by completing simply playing the download game.

And, for the record, id community manager Pete Sokal, who oversaw my session with the game, told me that "We feel confident with the product Raven has made. It feels like Wolfenstein."

The demo being shown in New York was the same displayed behind closed doors at E3. We've previewed the game's multiplayer mode, Firefight. This is our first eyewitness report of the campaign.

The player's main character is an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) known as Rookie. He drops to New Mombasa, Africa, during the battle that leads into the beginning of Halo 3. But his drop goes awry and he's knocked out for six hours. Once he's conscious, his journey through the Covenant-besieged New Mombasa traces the trunk of the branched ODST story.

I was shown Rookie using his series-new silenced machine gun and non-regenerative shielding to fight through part of the city. After a skirmish, he found a computer terminal and helpful AI that uploaded a map of the metropolis into his visor. Once the map was added, several waypoints were selectable. We selected the one that marked the Office of Naval Intelligence on the map. (The Microsoft rep showing me the game said that Rookie needed to go to the "ONI" building — nice Bungie pun, man!).

The E3 demo skipped ahead to place Rookie at the edge of what was an obliterated bridge. That bridge would have led to Rookie's destination. Walking near a piece of metal on the ground prompted a button press, and that led to a flashback set two hours after the game's opening ODST drop. And that's how ODST differs from other Halo games. The various waypoints on Rookie's map lead to different trigger-able, playable flashbacks. These sequences, set at different times, put the player in control of different members of the ODST squad and ultimately piece together the story of the game. We didn't have to go to ONI first, and when you play, you won't either.

Going to the ONI location and activating the flashback puts the player in control of Dutch, a munitions specialist. In Dutch's portion of the game, the bridge is intact. The player, as Dutch, is the one who has to do something about that by placing charges along the bridge and blowing it up. The Convenant resist every footstep of that mission.

The Microsoft rep showing me the game said the ODSTs all have the same abilities. Visions of the player controlling different styles of characters would be wrong. This isn't Eternal Darkness or other character-hopping games that provide different move-sets. But each ODST has the new ability to activate a low-light vision mode (VISR - Visual Intelligence System Reconnaissance-class) that outlines enemies and other items of interest with a thin colored line for better targeting.

I was told that ODST campaign will not be as long as Halo 3, which no one who've been following news about the game would be expecting, but it is shaping up to be "much longer" than the original handful of hours estimated by Bungie.

One note about the graphics: the game's orange-tinted palette didn't impress me when it was debuted on stage during Microsoft's E3 briefing. Seeing the game a few feet from a TV was a better showcase. New Mombasa's skies are a firestorm of billowing black clouds and illuminations of blazing orange. Its streets are dark and doomed. There's a grim mood to the scene that Bungie is building, which looks oppressive and impressive up close.

Halo 3: ODST's will come bundled with Firefight mode (even more info on that here), new and old multiplayer maps and free access to the forthcoming multiplayer beta of the 2010 Bungie game Halo: Reach.

In case you've never seen the show, Robot Chicken is an animated series that runs on Cartoon Network (and other channels across the world). It's a sketch comedy show, which uses stop-motion animation to portray parodies of characters and settings from recent popular culture.

To find out how strongly gaming runs through the heart of the show - and the show's creators - we spoke with Tom Root, producer and occasional voice actor on the hit Cartoon Network series.

"I think most of the Robot Chicken writers have multiple consoles, and we're just as likely to be playing some sunshine-spewing Wii game as we are some grim, apocalyptic first-person shooter" he says. "Personally, I like to mix it up. I finished Fallout 3 and then moved on to Lego Batman, then the latest Tomb Raider, then Tiger Woods golf. I'm pretty scattered."

While everyone involved in making the show may be a big gamer, do they ever worry that not everyone watching the show might be? "I think we rarely worry about whether viewers recognize the references we're making, as long as WE recognize the references we're making", he explains. "Our philosophy has always been, 'If we find it funny, other people will find it funny', so that's all we worry about. Making it funny. To US. Heh heh heh."

Which leads us to wonder; as games grow increasingly popular, does he think in the future, they could take pride of place in the next generation's version of a show like Robot Chicken? "Our popular culture is getting so fragmented and niche-y, I really wonder what "pop culture" is even going to mean in 20 years", he says. "There are so many entertainment options that our shared experience as a culture is getting pretty tenuous."

"For example, can you imagine Johnny Carson's ''Tonight Show' audience understanding a Pac-Man joke?" Root continues. "Sure. Can you imagine Jay Leno's 'Tonight Show' audience understanding a Niko Bellic joke back when GTA IV was the biggest thing in video games? I can't. So it's hard to say whether video games will dominate entertainment culture in 20 years. I think nothing will dominate because there will be too many entertainment options to have a clear winner."

It's no surprise that alongside skits based on movies, comics, TV shows and action figures, video games have featured repeatedly on Robot Chicken. The highlight? In our opinion, the Final Fantasy burger joint sketch. Root agrees.

"Our Final Fantasy VII sketch from season two is one of my favorites", he enthuses. "We were all such big fans of that game when it came out. I think when I pitched that sketch, I was playing clips from the soundtrack CD to help sell the moments I was making fun of, and the other writers were like, 'YES!' And then the animation and the graphics were so spot-on. I'm really proud of that one".

And his second-favourite? "Another one of my favorite concepts — which got cut prior to animation, sadly — involved the Needler weapon from Halo. Because everyone knows the Needler sucks. I'd rather fight the enemy with a pair of nail clippers than a Needler". This scene, while cut from the show, will be included in a rough form on the release of season four on DVD.

Aware of the writing team's openness towards video games, and of the similarities between the premise of Robot Chicken and what they were working on with Spore, Maxis and Electronic Arts recently teamed up with Root and some of the show's other creators and writers to create a series of missions for the upcoming Spore expansion pack, Galactic Adventures.

"The folks at Maxis are fans of our show and asked us to help them demonstrate the game", Root explains. "It was a good fit. Our show is nothing but short-form madness, and Galactic Adventures lets players create their own short-form missions that can get as bizarre and as crazy as you want to make them."

While none of the Robot Chicken writers helped with the design of the expansion itself, they did play a role in the development of its missions. "After a day at EA learning the game, each of the writers came up with 10 one-paragraph pitches for possible adventures," Root says.

"Each list of pitches got winnowed down to one or two missions to be fully scripted. One writer, Hugh Sterbakov, had the poor foresight to write an entire trilogy, so he ended up writing twice as much as the rest of us. I think we ended up with about 10 total missions, but they might still be slogging away on Hugh's trilogy."

The experience wasn't as easy as the video here would have you believe. While good comedy is good comedy, regardless of the medium, the Robot Chicken writers ran into some unexpected obstacles (unless you're in the games business) when trying to write for a video game.

"I think I bent my brain in half trying to figure out ways to keep the player on track and experiencing the story the way I envisioned it", he says. "Plus, I also wanted my missions to be fun and have some repeat playability. In my mind that meant loading the levels with characters to murder. The problem was, the more murder-able characters I added, the more dialogue I had to write."

"When I look back at some of the games I've played in the last few years, like Grand Theft Auto IV and Fallout 3, I have a newfound appreciation for how impossibly freaking hard it must be to write games that epic and make them not only actually work but also make them kick ass."

So having tried their hand at games writing, could there be a future in the business for Tom or any of the other Robot Chicken writers? "I personally think helping out with in-game dialogue or gags in a game or two could be fun, but I don't have the attention span to spend years and years developing a single game from the ground up", Root says.

"I have no doubt that our other writers could do it, though. Some of the sketches Mike Fasolo writes have the kind of epic scope that could only be captured in video game form. He's always writing things like the Earth splitting in half, then an asteroid splitting in half and the asteroid halves blowing up the Earth halves. Come to think of it, that sounds like a pretty good game."

A lot better than this one: "I wish we could take the Left 4 Dead framework and replace the heroes with Seth Green, Breckin Meyer, Doug Goldstein and Hugh Sterbakov [Robot Chicken producers/writers]. How hard could that be? The engine already exists! Doug and Breckin would end up ignoring the zombies, arguing about which one of them wrote our 'Emperor's Phone Call' sketch and shooting each other. Hugh would keep threatening to use his shotgun on himself. The possibilities, people..."

So Robot Chicken features video games. The writing team love video games. They now have video game design experience. So I ask, what are the chances of us ever seeing a Robot Chicken game? Surely the show's sketch comedy format is ideally suited for, say, a collection of mini-games spoofing popular gaming series or characters?

"Funny you mention that!", he says. "One company came close to pulling the trigger on just such a game, but as of yet, no luck. We're definitely open to the idea, though. And by 'open to the idea' I mean 'dying for it to happen'."

Where does a sprawling game that's already sprawled across three downloadable expansions set partially in Alaska, Pittsburgh and an Air Force base go in a fourth? To the rocky beaches, creepy swamps and faded boardwalk of a new island called Point Lookout.

With so much content already released that makes the massive Bethesda game more massive, the offering of another $10 expansion is either a tough sell or a necessary fix for those who've been buying everything. Following the bombastic, level-cap-raising, end-revising Broken Steel, however, the next piece of content just can't seem like that big a deal. Good thing it's interesting.

Loved
Creepy Creeps:Point Lookout is no Resident Evil. It's not as scary as the first of those games. But it's got a double-barreled shotgun and plenty of shambling enemies to be shot with it. It's got a boarded up mansion, a propensity to exhaust its visitors' ammo supply, and some great psychological tricks similar to what Bethesda's designers dabbled with in one of the Vaults in the core game. It also has a bunch of new inbred enemies and a lot of people swinging axes in close quarters where your rifle is poor defense. If you like to panic while playing your games, this is the Fallout 3 DLC for you.

Beauty And The Beach:Games grounded on real world terrain such as Grand Theft Auto and Fallout benefit from art designers who draw from interesting elements of real geography. Forget lava bridges and rainbow roads. There's beauty in bringing a strong art style and the player witnessing it to craggy cliffs that overlooking a shipwreck and the shoals of sand exposed by low tide. A smoky sky, a looming Ferris wheel, a lone lighthouse in the distance, a cave littered with coffins… this is the scenery to make you feel uneasy.

Hated
Strange Pace: It starts hard. It ends easy. There are lots of optional side mission, at least one that was surprisingly simple for a Level 26 hero. An expansion's degree of challenge certainly doesn't need to be set to a steady incline, but when you feel like it's getting good is when it's ending.

This one's the haunted side-trip of the Fallout 3 downloadable expansions. It offers players a more significant change of scenery than any of the DLCs since Operation Anchorage. It breaks no new ground for gameplay, but advances Fallout 3's aesthetics.

Recommended for those seeking uneasy and weird. And, hey, if you play Fallout 3 and already have your hero eating the flesh of the ghouls he kills, then uneasy and weird is just right.

Oh, and it features Mother Brain. See? Weird.

Fallout 3: Point Lookout was developed by Bethesda Softworks and distributed to the Xbox 360 and Windows for download on June. It's also announced as coming to the PS3 later. Retails for 800 Microsoft Points ($10 USD). Played the five core quests, one extra, sampled the new weapons, raised my hero from Level 24 to Level 26 over the course of about five hours.

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Mini-games? Original?! Yes, because Sega's Let's Tap plays unlike anything else on the Wii, as gamers will almost never touch the controller while playing. Instead, Let's Tap requires simple tapping near the Wii Remote, using the built-in accelerometer and the vibrations sent through a flat surface—box, coffee table, floor—to control on-screen characters. Let's Tap is comprised of five parts, Tap Runner, Rhythm Tap, Silent Blocks, Bubble Voyager and Visualizer, some of which feature gameplay sub-variations, some of which are arguably not even "games" at all.

But each aspect of Let's Tap is unique, utilizing the tapping mechanic in different ways, offering an original experience on the Wii that doesn't feel at all like it belongs in the already flooded mini-game market. Does Let's Tap offer enough to wrangle in gamers looking for software to party with?

Loved
Wonderfully Clever: Let's Tap's gimmick is what makes it great. A total lack of waggle and wild Wii Remote swinging is a refreshing change and, despite a few control quirks and a bit of a learning curve involved in understanding tap strength levels, the mechanic works quite well. While Prope doesn't mine the simplicity of its tap mechanic as smartly as a game like Nintendo's similarly tappy Rhythm Heaven, Let's Tap's individual parts show real creativity.

Tap Runner: The game's most straightforward experience is also its best, offering fun, frantic multiplayer and satisfying singleplayer experiences. Four-players race across glowing orange platforms, jumping over hurdles, traversing tightropes, avoiding electric spheres and teleporting through warp holes in a classic track and field-style competition sent into outer space. Great track design and variety across 16 levels make Tap Runner the game's most replayable draw.

United Game Artistry: Let's Tap looks sharp. Anyone with a visual preference for Sega games like the brightly dynamic Rez and Cosmic Smash will enjoy Let's Tap's array of visual styles. Whether the game is striving for something brilliantly sci-fi in Tap Runner or more realistic in Visualizer mode, it offers something easy on the senses.

Party Time Excellent: For better or worse, but in this case better, Let's Tap shines brightest when played with friends. The tension of Silent Blocks, a Jenga-like puzzle game that requires sharp, but delicate tapping is as enjoyable as the more dramatically competitive Tap Runner. The downside of this is that lonely Wii owners will have few reasons to come back to Let's Tap after they've collected each of Tap Runner's gold medals and become bored with Bubble Voyager.

Hated
Rhythm Tap: Let's Tap's rhythm game, an imitation of Namco Bandai's Taiko Drum Master, is just plain dull, too simplistic to offer much fun beyond the initial playthrough. Only a handful of the mode's musical tracks are memorable, most seemingly gushing forth from some automatic J-pop generating machine.

Shallow: As previously mentioned, Wii owners with an aversion to local multiplayer throwdowns won't find much to keep them occupied in Let's Tap. The game's five modes eventually feel scant, particularly when one brushes off Rhythm Tap and experiments fully with the semi-playable Visualizer mode. A trio of unlockables that you likely won't care about require excessive play to acquire.

Let's Tap, with its unique visual style and brilliant hands-off approach to the Wii Remote's capabilities is a great entry in the Wii library that feels bound to be under-appreciated. Prope's first stab at the Wii would have likely been lauded as a genius addition to the Dreamcast library because of its bizarre play style, but may simply be written off as just another Wii mini-game collection. Granted, Let's Tap has its shortcomings, its share of filler—and it's cheaply lacking dedicated, packed-in cardboard boxes on which to lay the Wii Remote—but it's also ultimately a fun little package, priced right for the amount of content it offers.

Had Let's Tap been released as a Wii launch title, it may have gotten a little more attention for its abilities to showcase what Nintendo's motion controller is capable of. Don't let Let's Tap get lost in the mini-game crowd if you're looking for something unique, something clearly not phoned-in on the Wii. Just don't expect a well of depth.

Let's Tap was developed by Prope and published by Sega for the Wii on June 16. Retails for $29.99 USD. Played all game types in both single and multiplayer modes.

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Announced at the Game Developers Conference in March, The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks was first playable for us at E3 earlier this month. Crecente put stylus to DS and reported back. But the man was pressed for time.

Thankfully, a build of the new Zelda was carried to New York by some Nintendo reps, so I could play more of that E3 demo and discover just how bossy Spirit Tracks' Link can be.

What Is It?
Nintendo-made action-RPG. Stars a kid dressed in green. Something about a sword, a shield. This one's on a DS, set 100 years after the last one on the platform, The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass.

What We Saw
The E3 demo that was brought to NYC this week was divided into Dungeon, Boss and Train sections. I got timed-out by the demo in the Dungeon, skipped the Boss, rode the Train to pig-enraging victory – only to be beaten by the train's boss enemy. That's a lot of failure on my part, if you parse that out. So please don't.

How Far Along Is It?
Spirit Tracks is set for a fall release. It's clearly working with the art style – and maybe the engine – of Phantom Hourglass, so it looks solid already.

What Needs Improvement?
Train Schedule: Yes, controlling Link on his train is fun. The player can control both the speed of the train and the switches the determine how the tracks will guide the train at intersections. Link's got a cannon he can fire at threatening enemies who ride on boarback up to his train (tap anywhere to fire that cannon, as seen in Phantom Hourglass). The player can tug a rope icon to blow a whistle. But… there's something strange about how the train missions are designed. That's just it: if the demo is an accurate representation of the structure of the final game, then note that these are missions, not moments encountered seamlessly while traveling from one dungeon to the next. The one in the demo is confined to a single-screen's worth of map, a loose spaghetti-tangle of train tracks that leads past some enemy trains and into a cave where a boss dwells. In other words, it's like a side mission. It's not an emergent part of open-world exploration, which is what Link's adventures on horseback in Ocarina of Time or on the deck of a boat in Wind Waker were. I'm the first to cheer Zelda innovating, but there's a hint here of a choppier flow for this next Zelda. I need to see more to be convinced this won't detract from the joy of open exploration found in most Zeldas.

The New Item Blows: In the dungeon, Link's got some sort of wind-blown propeller thing that shoots a breeze wherever Link is pointing. This is useful for getting keys past walls of flame. You make the item emit its rush of air by… blowing into the DS mic. Those of us who like to play their DS on major metropolitan subways with dignity intact are officially dismayed.

What Should Stay The Same?
Gold-Standard Controls: The Phantom Hourglass had one of the best control schemes on the DS. It's almost all stylus, with touches on open areas moving Link to those points, swipes at nearby enemies making him melee-attack and distant taps firing projectiles. Simple, smart, adaptable to many items and weapons, including that train cannon.

The Phantom: Crecente already wrote about how the demo introduces a Phantom partner character who patrols the demo's dungeon with Link. He can carry Link over lava and be commanded to stand on switches. Better than that, the player defines the Phantom's walking path by drawing a route for him on the screen, just as they drew the path of Link's boomerang in Phantom Hourglass. (If any close readers are noticing a number of echoes of Star Fox Command's winning RTS-lite design, I'm with you). Here's what we didn't report last time: drawing the Phantom's path into that of an enemy sets the Phantom on the attack. Let him fight Link's battles. The Phantom seemed like a more satisfyingly powerful, and more easily controllable partner, than those allies who showed up in some Wind Waker dungeons.

The Harassment of Pigs: I was tired of hacking at chickens with Link's sword in other Zelda games, anyway. Peaceful pigs wandering near the train tracks Link is chugging over are perfect targets for cannonballs. Warning: they turn red and attack the train.

Final Thoughts
Nintendo often demos its Zelda games with discrete, themed sections, as it did for the E3 presentation of Spirit Tracks. It makes it hard to determine if some of the confines apparent in what we're playing are only in the demo or representative of the structure of the full game. Either way, there was plenty that was fun in this build, even if some of it felt confining.

Those who have become fatigued of the Zelda series are weary of repetition of certain items and types of quests. Those are not elements that could be judged in the E3 Spirit Tracks demo. People who are still delighted by Zelda enjoy discovering new ways for Link to get around his world and new puzzle mechanics in his dungeons. In the E3 demo, both of those showed well.

id Software is still a development studio that commands respect, but it's one that had found itself not quite fitting in of late, its principals told us during a phone interview tied to the announcement of the company's sale to ZeniMax.

One of the problems lately, Carmack told Kotaku, is that id just wasn't a good fit with big publishers these days. "As we were shopping Rage and Doom and upcoming stuff, talking about all of that, we were getting a pretty consistent line from all the publishers," he said. "They were willing to continue to fund our working with partner companies for all of these but pretty much ever publisher said, ‘Well, it would be worth much more to us if you would grow your studio and do more of your own work internally. That's why we already started to staff up to do Doom 4 internally. So things were already moving in that direction."

Carmack spoke specifically of Activision, where id's games such as the upcoming Wolfenstein (developed in partnership with Raven), would be published under the same label as works from Activision's internal studios, like Call of Duty and Modern Warfare studios Treyarch and Infinity Ward. "Going back to a much earlier time," Carmack said, "We were just Activision's shooter shop. We did the FPSes there. There was no conflict, and that was great. But they brought on their own internal studios and there's a very real conflict there between whether they want to put resources behind something they own the IP for and derive all the profit for versus something where they don't own the IP and they might feel like any effort they're putting into it isn't going into their value but somebody else's. That problem has grown over the years as budgets have increased."

Hollenshead told Kotaku that he found ZeniMax to have the closest match with id in terms of a philosophy on how to best make and sell games. It was a better fit, he said, than the studio's recent publishing partners Activision and EA.

What comes out of the deal is a stronger id, the men say. "Things aren't really going to be different in terms of what's going on at id," Hollenshead said. "We're not going to change the kinds of games we make…. It allows us to accelerate the growth of our internal studios, so we can focus on making all of our internal games as opposed to working with external partners where there has been a step down in quality… There will be more, better games from id. So if you're a fan of the company, then it is all upside and all things to look forward to."

Carmack's high on id even now, of course. He said the company just did a "first-look" event for upcoming EA-published, id-developed racing-FPS Rage last week and that it "went spectacularly."

Doom 4 will be published by ZeniMax/Bethesda. The Wolfenstein and Rage games being made under Activision and EA's publishing labels, respectively, will continue as such. But any sequels will be ZeniMax games.

And will there be any Bethesda-id crossover coming out of this? "The teams are very much separate," Carmack said. "There is a lot of mutual respect there. There's going to be a lot of communication and cross-pollination. I doubt there's going to be any technology shifts between the two companies, but there's certainly going to be cooperation. And I wouldn't be shocked to see some hints of different things crossing over in different ways. That's just the kind of stuff when you have lots of people who think everybody is working on cool stuff together."

Terms of today's deal were not disclosed. ZeniMax and id are private companies.

The Bureau's mission: To needlessly expose the wide gulf between video game physics and the laws of the real world; to pursue, to a pointless degree if necessary possible, the logical extremes of any mathematical given; to ask the questions that do not really deserve to be answered; and as an ultimate, Quixotic pursuit, to finally define the real world value of one hit point. We do this in the name of science for all mankind.

Our first journal of study is hereby submitted, dealing with three metrics - weight, speed and momentum.

Dr. Owen S. Good
Director, Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures

WEIGHT
Game: Fallout 3
Test Subject: Vault Dweller

In an RPG, you'd expect to have some distorted encumbrance measurements. Players have been hauling around a full cabinet of arms, plus full plate armor, plus a spare set of armor, plus dual-wield crossbows, plus 500 bolts, plus turkey dinner, since this kind of game was played on paper. It's why D&D invented the Portable Hole.

Fallout 3 measures weight in vague units of "WG." Of any RPG that caps carrying weight, it seems to let you carry a lot. Like a U-Haul's worth. In my latest game I deliberately created a guy with 4 strength because I wanted him to travel light and carry only that which was useful. But as you can see in this recent loadout below, I'm still stowing a spare set of recon armor in case a Glowing One makes me dump in my Brotherhood suit.

Weapons: A3-21's Plasma Rifle, Combat Shotgun, 28 Frag Grenades, 15 Frag Mines, Mesmetron, 3 Plasma Grenades, 4 Plasma Mines, Plasma Pistol, 9 Pulse Grenades, Scoped .44 Magnum (56 WG)
Apparel: Enclave Officer Hat, Power Armor, Power Helmet, Recon Armor. (71)
Aid: Blood Pack, 9 Buffout, 3 Dirty Water, 14 Med-X, 15 Mentats, 2 Nuka-Cola Quantum, 4 Psycho, 17 Purified Water
9 Rad-X, 25 RadAway, 6 Stealth Boy, 79 Stimpak, (sue me, I'm a HP whore), Sugar Bombs. (28)
Miscellaneous: 16 Bobby Pins, Carton of Cigarettes, Cherry Bomb, Conductor, Fire hose Nozzle, Ink Container
Leaf Blower, Pack of Cigarettes, 5 Pre-War Money, 12 Scrap Metal, Key ring with 14 keys on it (29)
Ammo: 202 rounds .44 magnum, 20 darts, 285 Energy Cells, 50 Mesmetron Power Cells, 493 Microfusion Cells, 280 Shotgun Shells. (0 WG)
Total WG: 184

What bothered me about Fallout was not so much that the heavy weapons, like a Flamer, weighed only "15." Maybe they're made from futuristic lightweight metal. No, it's more that a pair of freaking TWEEZERS was equivalent in weight to a motorcycle helmet. It's not even that the WG figure represents a total encumbrance factor – that either the item's size or fragility makes it difficult to carry - because a pool cue has the same WG figure: 1.

So I chatted up Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3's game director, about this. First off, is "WG" equivalent to anything?

"Not really," Todd said. "It's sort of close to pounds, but we intentionally don't really say what it is. It actually started based on the weights we used for The Elder Scrolls, which most people don't know are the also-amorphous ‘stones.'"

OK, fine. If they didn't peg WG to something, I will. And I'm going to base it on the weight of beer. A bottle in Fallout is 1 WG. In real life, a bottle of beer, depending on how stout it is, will weigh roughly three-quarters of a pound when you figure in the glass. By figuring my total burden as it relates to at least one item in my possession, I could start imagining how large a load I was carrying around.

But what I couldn't measure is ammo, meds and chems, which have no weight value - and I wasn't going down to the local needle exchange to weigh whatever approximates a Jet syringe. Why didn't Bethesda give them a weight? Because in the game, these are very valuable items. Why wouldn't an RPG, which is more based in realism and more dependent on choice-making than other genres, also require players to be more conscientious about what they're carrying?

"In regards to ammo and money, it's just too granular a decision for the player, if they had weight," Todd said. "You don't want to make that a choice for the player; he already has to manage so much in his inventory and you need things he can find that are an instant win - ammo, money, drugs, etc, things that help keep him alive and playing. It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."

Yes, but when a Gatling Laser weighs the same as a frosty 18-can fridge pack of Miller, your decision to carry two is not because of their combat utility but the resale value in Rivet City. Todd said that's entirely valid reasoning, and strength is meant to enable it.

"Much of your character's power comes from his stuff. The more he has, the better he is. Even if he's not using it, it becomes money," Todd said. "Players get pretty good at the value versus weight game quickly."

You might figure that, in the long run, it all balances out. Tweezers are overweighted, bazookas are underweighted, and everyone gets along. But my previous loadout would weigh 138 pounds (1 WG = 0.75 pounds) and still fill up a Public Storage room. Todd insisted that developers discussed the question of how much a player should be able to carry, "right until the end. … We kept narrowing and narrowing what a low-strength versus high-strength gave you, because it was too powerful."

Was too powerful? In the finished game, a Fallout 3 character with the bare minimum strength of 1 can carry 160 WG. I searched for a real world comparison, and this is the best I could do: The Improved Load Bearing Equipment in use by the U.S. Marine Corps since 2005 can carry - ready for this? - 120 pounds. If beer is our unit of measure (and why shouldn't it be?) that converts to 160 bottles of beer (or WG). In other words, any vault reject a notch above total weakling - a 2 strength or better - will out-lug any Marine, even the one assigned to carry the mortar and shells.

Partly to spite Bethesda, I created a character with 1 Strength and assigned the rest of the points to more useful attributes. I never use melee weapons, anyway. I also manually assigned weight to my ammunition and chems (1 for units of 10). I quickly saw how right Todd was.

In Fallout, your ability to meet more difficult challenges depends a lot on the equipment you have, and it's usually items you build or buy that prove the difference. Financing that comes from the resale of surplus items, not the discovery of treasure. Realistic strength would leave you endlessly grinding before starting the next job.

As for ammo, I gave up on that shortly after a raid at the Super-Duper Mart. I was robbing Raider corpses for spare rounds to fight off the survivors and writing down the totals. It was indeed too granular a decision, and got in the way of more pressing challenges.

So, even though with a 5 strength, you can run from Megaton to the Arlington Public Library loaded down like a Peruvian donkey, let's just say the future is made of super-light plastics. And the radiation turned everyone into Lou Ferrigno.

[Images from the Fallout Wiki]

SPEED
Game:Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Test Subject: Carl "C.J." Johnson

Originally, I wanted to test the scale speeds of the Team Fortress 2 characters, especially Scout, who could probably outrun Carl Lewis like a Porsche outruns Stephen Hawking. The problem with this, as with other games, is measuring the distance those guys cover in real world units. I'd have to know, say, Heavy's IRL height (6'5?") and be able to lay him end to end over a straightaway to get its real distance. I'm not a modder, and I wouldn't have that kind of time anyway.

So I then looked to the Grand Theft Auto series. From Claude to Niko, you've always had the ability to overtake a moving car on foot and jack it. I really wanted to know these guys' running speeds, and they live in cities with structures based on real world ones. Unfortunately, everything in Liberty City is a compressed distance, so running Niko across the Broker Bridge still wouldn't tell us much.

But in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there's this Easter egg, which identifies the specific dimensions of the Gant Bridge, including a length of 159.7 meters. During the first few tests, something seemed way off. First, 159.7 meters isn't even a 10th of a mile, and C.J.'s runs - at a sprint - were keeping up with traffic and returning mile times of 17:41. So I had to measure this bridge for myself. If I knew the actual scale speed of a vehicle in the game, I could derive its length. This database lists all such attributes.

Thus aboard an NRG-500 motorcycle running at its top speed of 118 mph, I made five maximum-speed trips across the bridge, at a flying start, with a median time of 18.15 seconds. If the Gant Bridge really was 159.7 meters, the bike would have been doing 20 mph, not 120 mph. It's possible they're talking about a distance shorter than the one I was using - toll booth in San Fierro to concrete strip at Tierra Robada - but at top speed, the bike should be able to cross 159.7 meters in just under 3 seconds. Either way, 160 meters is a fraction of the bridge's length as it relates to C.J.

So, at top speed, the bike is traveling at 173.16 feet per second. Multiplied by 18.15, we discover the length of the Gant Bridge is 3,142.85 feet, which is nearly 1 kilometer. As another control, I went back and rode with traffic, matching its speed. We crossed the bridge in 1:09.16, which is 30.98 miles per hour. I damn for sure could see a developer setting standard traffic speed to something round, and 31 mph is almost 50 kph. So, I'm pretty confident the sign is incorrect, and I got this measured as close as possible.

Now, back to running it. C.J. has five paces on foot: a walk, a "brisk walk," a "jog," and then two sprints, one with the A button held down, and another that provides a burst of speed by rapidly tapping it. The C.J. I was playing had maxed all of his physical stats, so he could achieve top running speed and not tire out, at any distance. Back at the bridge on foot, I took him through the five paces.
Walking
At his slowest C.J. covered the distance in 8:22, which equates to 4.2 miles per hour. Frame of reference: 4.0 is the fastest most walk on a gym treadmill. At the "brisk walk" pace, C.J. covers the distance in 4:44.03. Remember our treadmill? This "walk" is more than a jog, it's 7.54 miles per hour. It's equivalent to a 7:57 mile time. My best time in the mile - running - is 8:21, five years ago.

Running
Now it gets good. At the third pace, "jogging," C.J. crossed the span in 2:43.16. If he held that pace he would run a marathon in under two hours, which is unprecedented. Holding down the A button, C.J. crossed the bridge in 1:38.11, or 21 miles per hour. That's a mile in 2:44.84, which is inhuman. Remember Roger Bannister? The first mile under 4 minutes? C.J. would run the first one under three. He would beat the world record holder by a larger margin (in seconds) than he would have lost this year's Kentucky Derby.

Sprinting
Rapid-tapping the A-button gave C.J. just a 16- second advantage, which means this loses its effect pretty quickly. Still, at minimum one can assume some world-class sprint times. How world class? Try torching Usain Bolt's records in the 200 and 100 by two and one seconds, respectively - 17.1 and 8.58 seconds. Granted, that speed figure is derived from a running start. Real-life sprinters have to react to a gun and get up to speed. But, remember, C.J.'s sprint lost effect, I'm not sure exactly how far in, so most of this time was derived from a run at the standard "A" pace.

Incidentally, C.J.'s motion capture actor was Eddie Goines, a star wide receiver at North Carolina State University and a classmate of mine. I knew him pretty well, as well as a sports writer knows one of the team's stars, anyway. As a flanker, he set all the receiving records that Torry Holt and Koren Robinson would later break. As a freshman, Eddie was the fastest on the team, clocking a 40 yard dash in 4.35. A 4.09 is thought to be the NFL record. CJ's time is 3.15. I'm sure Eddie would be delighted to know that, at least in a video game, he's by far the fastest human alive.

MOMENTUM
Game: Assassin's Creed
Test Subject: Altair

No one would expect to fall 40 stories onto the top of a parked car and survive. However, at least it stops the body from crashing all the way through to the ground. Now imagine falling that height into a pile of hay that's roughly 2 meters wide by a meter and a half tall.

That's the first "leap of faith" in Assassin's Creed, from the tower at Masayaf. Holy catfish, that poor bastard who jumped with Altair at the beginning was lucky to get off with just a broken leg. And it is far from the steepest drop in the game. The infamous steeple on the cathedral at Acre is nearly twice as tall. Fresh off our victory in San Fierro, the Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures set out not only to fix its height, but also to calculate how much hay you'd need to land safely.

Ubisoft verified that Altair's height and weight, for purposes of the game's physics, was 6 feet and 190 pounds. This would be useful in calculating his stop. But that's all we got from them. However, one of the locations in the game is Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, whose dimensions are known. The structure's walls are 11 meters tall. Putting all this information in the hand of a trained scientist - devoted reader Matt M. - we were able to come up with some good estimates.

Matt worked up all three heights, but let's use Acre's as it is the most impressive. We were able to time the drop from the top of the steeple -4.1 seconds - using this video (which I downloaded and measured frame by frame). Working backward, we found that its real-world height would be 82.37 meters - about 270 feet. In the game, Altair is accelerating to 39.69 meters per second, acquiring a momentum of 3,420.48 kilogram-meters per second.

That's certainly a large number, but what does it mean? Matt breaks it down:

Basically, whatever catches him has to has to reduce that momentum to zero in under 0.05 seconds, which is the difference in time between Altair falling 82.05 meters and falling 80.05 meters at that speed. That means in the space of 2 meters - which is a little lenient since the floor of the cart is, what, half a meter off the ground? - the hay has to provide 68,298.25 Newtons of force. It's 136,596.5 Newton meters of work, which is a ridiculous thing to ask of hay.

Certainly, Kotaku Weights & Measures does not want to be unreasonable in its dealings with dead vegetable matter. And I'm not sure what could provide that kind of stopping power in that space, other than Kevlar. Or pavement. So I asked Matt if he could figure how large a haystack would be required to cushion a fall from such a height. We used the elasticity of military-grade bungee cords as a guide (using specs found here).

In the case of Acre, the haystack would be so big it would dwarf most other buildings in the game - 40 meters (131 feet) at its point, 67 meters (219 feet) wide at the bottom, if the dimensions conform to the original tiny pile. The freefall into such a mass of hay would last only 2.87 seconds. In terms of volume, it's more than 2.7 million cubic feet of hay - 2,695 times greater than what Altair is leaping into. I kept picturing Phil Hartman sitting atop the amazing mountain of Colon Blow cereal.

Alongside this you can see comparisons, to scale, of the heights Altair falls at the Dome of the Rock, Masayaf, and Acre, and of the size of hay he hits in the game relative to the size he would need to survive. "Leap of Faith" indeed. Sounds more like Altair's in a suicide cult.

The Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Matt M. to this post. Follow him on Twitter.

Two of the most acclaimed game development studios of all time are joining forces. ZeniMax Media, parent company of Fallout 3 and Elder Scrolls development studio Bethesda Softworks, announced today that it is purchasing legendary Doom and Wolfenstein studio id.

In an interview with Kotaku, id co-founder John Carmack, id CEO Todd Hollenshead and ZeniMax CEO Robert Altman said the purchase will change none of the principles or principals of id and Bethesda but will allow id to grow like it never has before. The purchase does not affect plans for previously announced games from id that are slated for release through other publishers, including the Activision-backed Wolfenstein and the EA Partners-planned Rage.

Why did id sell?

"We're really getting kind of tired competing with our own publishers in terms of how our titles will be featured," Carmack said. "And we've really gotten more IPs than we've been able to take advantage of. And working with other companies hasn't been working out as spectacularly as it could. So the idea of actually becoming a publisher and merging Bethesda and ZeniMax on there [is ideal.] It would be hard to imagine a more complementary relationship. They are triple A, top-of-the-line in what they do in the RPGs. And they have no overlap with all the things we do in the FPSes."

Hollenshead said ZeniMax's acquisition will allow id to grow its internal teams, staffing up the groups working on the next Doom — which will now be a ZeniMax game — and the Quake Live team, for starters.

The goal, explained Carmack, is for id to handle all of its own IPs. "We can build the pipeline and have a regular pipeline of releases."

Altman described the deal as a "win for fans of id." He said the deal came about when Hollenshead approached him. ZeniMax had been looking to acquire developers and wanted id, but didn't know it was available until approached. The merger had been in the works for months, according to the men on the call today.

In a press release for today's news, Altman laid out a vision for a robust id: "We, along with many others, consider id Software to be among the finest game studios in the world, with extraordinary design, artistic and technical capabilities. They have demonstrated, repeatedly, that rare ability to create franchise properties that are critical and commercial successes. Our intention is to make sure id Software will continue to do what they do best – make AAA games. Our role will be to provide publisher support through Bethesda Softworks and give id Software the resources it needs to grow and expand."

No co-developed games are planned at this time. But, they joked, getting those Fallout bobbleheads into Rage would be fun.

I figured that since I live in the middle of nowhere it would be fun to bring some schwag along.

Here's the deal, I've got a smallish stash of freebies that I'll be handing out of to anyone who spots me over the next couple of weeks. Just flag me down and say you're a Kotaku reader. It's not a ton of stuff and I have no idea if anyone will notice me during my travels, so I can't really say how long the freebies will last. In other words, if I don't have anything for you if you do spot me, don't be annoyed and sorry in advance.

I'll be traveling through Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and back to Colorado. We're mostly just passing through these states, with a few stops along the way in places like El Paso, Fort Worth, New Orleans and Moultrie, Georgia.

As is often the case, Trish will be driving and I'll be writing shotgun. (See what I did there?) But I hope to squeeze in a bit of road gaming along the way on the DSi, PSP or iPhone.

Do you have any summer trips planned?

Several sources have confirmed to Kotaku that the entire QA department was shuttered, along with artists and a few other assorted staffers in other departments as well. According to one insider, Rockstar is not enthusiastic about having internal QA departments, but rather, wants to keep all QA at a dedicated QA studio.

Estimates are that "at least 10 percent of the studio" was made redundant.

The upside is that Rockstar's severance package is being described as "fairly generous", and the company is even helping some former Rockstar New England employees find jobs.

Based in Andover, Massachusetts, Rockstar New England was originally Mad Doc Software, but acquired by Rockstar in April 2008 and re-branded as a subsidiary.

We are following up with Rockstar for a comment.

Small things I observed:

-MotionPlus Shouldn't Stay Attached: Like the Nunchuck, Nintendo's MotionPlus Wii Remote add-on can get in the way while playing some games. Take New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which is played by holding the Remote sideways as if it's an NES controller. MotionPlus isn't utilized, but if it's plugged in, it adds to the Remote's length, requiring one's right thumb to reach too far to press the 1 and 2 buttons. So be prepared to remove MotionPlus for games that don't need it, especially those played NES-style.

-New Stop-Playing Images: I've heard people complain that Wii games' graphics aren't good enough, but I've never heard anyone complain that the images that appear in Wii games to remind players to go outside and get fresh air aren't good enough. Well, Nintendo has improved them. While playing Wii Sports Resort I noticed that the reminder to get fresh air was new and improved, with an added dash of color and a more accurately rendered and jacketed Wii Remote sitting on a table while wind blew in from an open window.

-Re-Calibration Recommendations: MotionPlus undoubtedly improves the Wii Remote's motion-sensitivity, but there are signs that the device may have sensitivities of its own. While playing Wii Sports Resort I saw multiple recommendations to press the Remote's plus button in order to re-calibrate the MotionPlus add-on.

-Minimum Motion: For every Wii Sports or Wii Music that Nintendo makes with full motion-control support, there are at least as many games from the company that use motion sparingly. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is one of those. You shake the Remote to pick up a nearby player's character or, if you've fallen and return in a floating bubble, to drift your character toward an active one so you can re-join the action. For gamers skeptical about the applicability of motion control to all gaming mechanics, Nintendo's restraint from motion in key titles speaks volumes.

There's one other game I played with the folks from Nintendo yesterday, in addition to New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Style Savvy, Wii Fit Plus and Wii Sports Resort. More on that one tomorrow.

Away from the chaos of E3, we've gotten a chance to swing a MotionPlus-appended Wii Remote to control Wii Sports Resort, the showcase game for Nintendo's latest controller add-on. Yes, the chaos of the big show was absent, but present were guys from Nintendo.

And here's the thing: the more one spends time chatting with guys from Nintendo of America, the more one feels that parts of their headquarters must feel like a gamer variation of a varsity locker room, where the jocks walk around with swelled chests bragging not about how much they can bench press but how many more times they can return a serve in Wii Sports Resort table tennis.

With meager skills and a willing attitude, Kotaku took a swing.

What Is It?
Wii Sports Resort is the sequel to Wii Sports, which is, Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft notwithstanding, the most-discussed game of the last five years. The original Wii Sports was packed in with every Wii sold in North America. The new Wii Sports comes bundled with MotionPlus, the required add-on that enables a more direct relationship between a player's hand movements and those rendered on-screen. Wii Sports had four five sports. (Edit: sorry about that.) Wii Sports Resort has 12 — well, more than 12 given some of the unlockable variations of the core dozen.

What We Saw
We binged and played five sports: archery, basketball, table tennis, swordplay and skydiving.

How Far Along Is It?
Wii Sports Resort is out in mere weeks. It's done.

What Needs Improvement?
Uh, nothing? This game's quite good. Maybe we should complain about how simple these Miis look. Or about how there's no online play. Or how some of the sports, like bowling, are built upon (or recycled) from what was in Wii Sports. Or how the game would be cooler if it came bundled with two MotionPlusses instead of one to more easily enable multiplayer gaming. But such criticisms would be like yelling at a cute puppy to put on a hat: an ineffectual recommendation and one hardly guaranteed to improve something that's already plenty capable of providing delight.

What Should Stay The Same?

Archery: Seen at E3, previewed by many. Hold the Wii Remote vertical as one would hold a bow and yank back with the nunchuck to pull back the arrow. Hold steady. Account for wind and how gravity will tug on a long-flying arrow. Release. After the easy levels, a batch of new areas and harder difficulty options open up.

Basketball: Select three-point contest (other variations are offered). Hold the remote sideways. Tap the b-button to grab a ball from a rack. Make a flicking motion. Put some spring in your toes. Work through racks all around the half court, just like the pros. It feels perfect, though somewhere a Sony designer is growling that they already did this with Sixaxis for the first NBA game on PS3. Sorry, dude.

Table Tennis: It controls like Wii Sports tennis but plays faster. The variation on head-to-head is a challenge to return serves. Kotaku army, try to beat Nintendo man Melvin's 352 points. That's an order. And don't call the Achievement-like things in this game Achievements. They're Accomplishments. It's unclear, though, whether the times one hits the computer character on the other side of the table with a ball to the head is an Accomplishment or not.

Swordplay: One on one? Played it at E3 last year. Alternate mode involving chopping stalks of bamboo? It's probably dandy. But if there's a trophy for Mini-Game Of The Year, polish it for whatever Nintendo is calling Wii Sports Resort's light variation of Gears of War Horde. You are your Mii. You're holding a sword. And those waves of sword-wielding Miis coming down that rope bridge toward you need to be whacked. Batter them off the bridge and a balloon lifts them to some sort of Wii Sports Resort heaven. Boss Miis with extra health hearts and better blocking abilities await. By the way, imagine if those Miis rushing at you resemble your friends, family and favorite celebrity Miis.

Skydiving: Hold the Wii Remote like it's a small doll and tilt it to make him dive. Shades of the Pilotwings sequel we behaved so well to get but Nintendo never made. Points are taken for linking the diver to other divers, which sends a photographer down to snap a shot. Parachutes open automatically to prevent that Pilotwings pastime of planting skydiver into ground. The unlockable modes for this one include an airplane dogfighting mode, stretching the definition of sport in a manner few will protest.

Final Thoughts
What originally could have been accused as a cash-in or pointless sequel instead appears to boast more depth than any game Nintendo's internal teams have made in a couple of years. There's little to complain about from last night's preview session. In short bursts these games control splendidly.

This is one of those Nintendo games that, when you play early, feels like it's going to both intimidate and inspire game creators. For gamers it will need to prove its depth is equaled by longevity. A healthy sampling of what's on the game's menu suggests that it will. Things are looking up for this one.

On Monday, enthusiastic gamer Jimmy Fallon announced that Tiger Woods would be on his show this Thursday, saying he wanted to play him on the Wii because it was the only way he would have a chance.

Today, Electronic Arts confirmed to Kotaku that Woods has accepted the challenge and that the two would be playing rounds of golf on the Wii version of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10. I'd assume it will include MotionPlus, which means Fallon better start practicing.