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You Could Have Won $2,500 If You Were Better Than These Guys
The good thing about the second annual Bay Area Game Jam‘s make-a-game-in-4824-hours contest is you get free games the day after the contest ends. The grand prize of $2,500 went to Daniel Bryner, Bradley Johnson and Chris Webb who managed to create Lava Ball on Wild Pocket’s new 3D engine. How they did this with…
By AJ Glasser -
Bay Area Game Jam Rocks My Weekend
This weekend, Wild Pockets, Crispy Gamer and Microsoft are teaming up to host Bay Area Game Jam – a 24-hour game development competition at the Microsoft Silicon Valley Campus in Mountain View, California. Contestants have to use Wild Pockets’ 3D web-based game engine and the fine print on the contest rules specifies that this is…
By AJ Glasser -
Not As Shocking New G.I. Joe Screens
After the last batch of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra screens, I was seriously hoping to see more of Cobra — specifically Destro and Baroness — doing their thing. But instead, we’ve got more “Yo, Joe!” shots of Snake Eyes, Duke and some random dudes blowing stuff up. Mind you, blowing stuff up is…
By AJ Glasser -
What Happened At The Mass Effect 2 Panel
I’d been dreading writing up what happened at the last GDC panel I attended, and not because it was boring to sit through. Far from it – BioWare showed off a couple Mass Effect 2 videos with combat and cut scenes; two journalists I admire almost got in a fight about the illicit recording of…
By AJ Glasser -
All That Jazz: Video Game Musicals
Last month, Phoenix Wright came to life on stage in Japan courtesy of the all-female musical theater group, Takarazuka Revue. It was bright, it was catchy, it sold like hotcakes — and it was downright uncanny. Takarazuka is no stranger to adaptations; their five troupes have each put on works based on Western literature and…
By AJ Glasser -
High or Low? Fantasy in Dragon Age
Dragon Age: Origins Lead Writer David Gaider and BioWare heads Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk have different ideas about what high and low fantasy is; which may foretell a genre crisis for the game. Ideally, Origins is supposed to be a “new” kind of fantasy that does away with Zeschuk’s dreaded “elves sashaying through the…
By AJ Glasser -
Dexter iPhone Preview: Dexter Does Interesting Things
Dexter is a Showtime series about a forensics expert that secretly murders guilty suspects and collects samples of their blood. This is the game of that show made by a clothing designer. Yes, Marc Ecko – that Marc Ecko – has expanded his efforts from rhinoceros-branded jackets and hats into iPhone games. Dexter for the…
By AJ Glasser -
Mafia II Swag Speaks Volumes
I can’t say anything about the game, yet. But this swag should tell you all you need to know for now about 2K’s second mobster game coming out this fall. Note the Italian restaurant-style takeout container. That ain’t pasta sauce splattered on the edge, there… Open it up and you’ll find — not a severed…
By AJ Glasser -
The Simpsons Almost Killed Dead Space
If you wonder why Dead Space cribs from other material, consider the fact that they were the sole new IP developed in competition with The Godfather, Lord of the Rings and The Simpsons. There is no way EA would let a licensed game near the chopping block — not if a little-known new IP like…
By AJ Glasser -
Missed Opportunities: Lionhead Could Have Made LittleBigPlanet
Peter Molyneux still wouldn’t give up the goods on his new game at the “Lionhead Experiment Revealed” panel, but he did give us a glimpse into how Lionhead let LittleBigPlanet slip through their fingers. The studio that brought us Black & White and the Fable games has a creative process called “experiments” where anybody in…
By AJ Glasser -
Dragon Age: Origins – A Tragedy in the Making
As “spiritual successor” to the Baldur’s Gate series, BioWare’s upcoming fantasy RPG has lot to live up to. Not to mention a console port expectation that no PC RPG has ever fulfilled. It doesn’t help that the game is being touted as a “new” take on the fantasy genre, or that the PC ship date…
By AJ Glasser -
The World of Fable II Wastes Less Than The World of Fable I
I wasn’t sure what to think of “The World of Fable II” when they played a blues song with the chorus “gonna give you a whippin'” before the panel started. What game had I been playing? I thought maybe I was in the wrong room, but then Fable II’s Technical Art Director, Ian Lovett, started…
By AJ Glasser -
BioWare Tackles Elf Racism In Dragon Age: Origins
You can’t have an ginormous fantasy epic without at least three different races — elf, human, dwarf, etc. — and you can’t have elves and dwarfs without racism according to fantasy standard-setter J.R.R. Tolkien. In typical BioWare fashion of reinventing the plot wheel, Dragon Age: Origins aims to redefine the fantasy genre; and it’ll start…
By AJ Glasser -
Brutal Legend Art: Everything Is Metal — Even The Sky
Here are the ingredients to a successful GDC panel: visually entertaining slides, more than one trailer, halfway-decent public speaker, a game that’s actually coming out in the near future. And Tim Schafer. “The Brutal Art of Brutal Legend” nailed all five – or at least four if for some reason the game gets pushed back…
By AJ Glasser -
The Art of LittleBigPlanet: Never Compromise
Media Molecule‘s Creative Director, Mark Healey, and Art Director, Kareem Ettouney, had an hour to try and explain the look and feel of LittleBigPlanet — it took them about two seconds and one trailer. But the talk went on for well over an hour as the two creative types gushed about their award-winning innovation. LittleBigPlanet…
By AJ Glasser -
How Sackboy Learned to Love Physics
Last night, Media Molecule’s David Smith accepted four awards for LittleBigPlanet at the Game Developers Choice Awards. I’m amazed he’s awake enough to lecture on the game’s physics this morning. Here are some key insights Smith had into the challenges of making a game where physics is everything and logic is next to nothing: “I…
By AJ Glasser -
A Clue: Level 5 Lets Layton Sequel Hints Drop
So caught up in Ninokuni was I that I missed out on some important Layton news that came out in the Level 5 panel Q&A: Akihiro Hino says Diabolical Box is on its way to the US. This is the logical conclusion for the second game in the Professor Layton series — it sold like…
By AJ Glasser -
Check Out This Bloodspattered iPhone Case
I’ve never seen Dexter and I don’t own an iPhone — but these iPhone cases almost make me want to play the new game Marc Ecko is putting out on Apple’s de facto console. Dexter for the iPhone features Showtime’s psychopathic killer character of the same name. Your job as the gamer is to help…
By AJ Glasser -
Level 5 Studio Ghibli Game Maybe 20% Done
The secret to Level 5‘s success, says CEO/President Akihiro Hino, is having a really awesome trailer with lots of visual images that target the game’s core audience. Said trailer’s gameplay footage is “not final.” In a Q&A session following his “Level-5’s Techniques to Producing a Hit Game,” Hino said that the in-game footage that appears…
By AJ Glasser -
God of War III Frame Rate Revealed
God of War III has a max sustained frame rate of 60 frames per second – but some scenes in the game might have to run at as low as 30 per second. This and many more inside baseball-y factoids were kicked around at the “Practical SPU Usage in God of War 3” panel. Programmer…
By AJ Glasser
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