BRINGING GAMMA HOME TO YOU
As you can see from Infinite Ammo’s video above, Kokoromi’s Gamma3D looks to have gone off without a hitch, with a reported 400 some odd people in attendence, and, as promised, the collective have posted all of the games to their website for your approval — including Offworld’s previously mentioned super HYPERCUBE, and Paper Moon, the excellent planar-platformer from Infinite Ammo themselves (whose lead designer previously worked with Bit Blot on the recently noted Aquaria).
Gamma3D Game Downloads [Kokoromi Collective]
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WIGI SHOWS OFF CELEBRITY AUCTION WARES
Via some fortuitous Facebook linking we note that tomorrow marks the kick off Women In Games International’s celebrity auction, which will run through Sunday the 29th. The list of items up for bid, which you can preview on Bonnie Ruberg’s Flickr set, includes items like two legitimately wicked Shepard Fairey designed Civilization Revolution posters signed by Sid Meier, a Bioshock guide signed by Ken Levine, more Witcher, Mass Effect, Gears of War and Halo merch than you’ve ever seen in one place, and, our favorite: an Electronic Arts watch and keyring so vintage they still use its old ‘EOA’ square-circle-triangle logo.
The Writers Cabal Blog has more info on finding the appropriate eBay link.
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THE CASE FOR USED GAMES
This one passed us by earlier in the week but is still worthy of note: as a number of publishers trend toward curbing used game sales by offering one-time-use download codes for certain value adds (see: the extra 20 songs included in Rock Band 2 for new purchases), Civilization and Spore designer Soren Johnson makes an equally strong case for used sales. Some salient points:
Used game sales are the primary method by which the retail games market is segmented. For quite a few gamers, especially younger ones, used games are their only option for buying games instead of renting them. Keeping these price-sensitive consumers – who will often be tomorrow’s full-price customers – in the retail system and away from piracy is a good thing all around.
[…]
Many factors come into play when a consumer decides if a specific game purchase is worth the money, and one of those factors is the perceived value from selling it back as a used game. In other words, people will pay more for a new game because they know they can get some of that money back when they trade it in at the local Gamestop. Importantly, this perceived value exists whether the consumer actually sells the game or keeps it. Wizards of the Coast has long admitted that the existence of the secondary market for Magic cards has long helped buoy the primary market because buyers perceive that the cards have monetary value.
His caveat, though, is that in order to maintain that perceived value of traditional retail games, digital download services (which it would seem we’re all growing much more comfortable with) have to lower their own prices in turn. Hit the link below for the full argument and following lengthy conversation in the comments.
DESIGNER NOTES » Blog Archive » The Case for Used Games
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THE ORIGIN OF BIOFORGE PLUS
Feeling a certain affinity having just relocated to Austin, and because I’ve gone a week without going too terribly retro, I feel inclined to note that former Origin Systems director Jeff Morris has captured and uploaded the original intro cinema (featuring what sounds to be a fantastic Mike ‘MST3K’ Nelson impersonator) for the long-since-canceled Bioforge Plus add-on.
Morris’ YouTube channel is actually a treasure trove of Origin material, with various Wing Commander, Bioforge, and Ultima series ephemera, including an in-costume interview with Lord British himself in full regalia.
As friends-of-Offworld RockPaperShotgun previously mentioned, a terabyte of Origin material landed in the offices of EA Mythic this past summer and was quickly cataloged by ardent fans, quite possibly including the Bioforge Plus source itself. The Artful Gamer blog has more on what’s been unearthed so far.
Games That Weren’t » Bioforge Plus intro on YouTube [via GameSetWatch]
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BY PRESSING DOWN A SPECIAL KEY IT PLAYS A LITTLE MELODY
There’s a fantastic meta-game the Nintendo elite like to play with every game scored by long-time company composer Kazumi Totaka, who is oft-noted as the not entirely coincidental spitting image of Animal Crossing‘s K.K. Slider (the dog’s Japanese name, Totakeke, being a bastardization of Totaka’s name).
Totaka has notoriously been hiding a vaguely arabesque 19-note melody in each game he’s worked on, from import-only original Game Boy game X (notably created by now-PixelJunk Monsters/Eden studio head Dylan Cuthbert) through more recent DS and GameCube games.
And so, after only days of searching, the song — known simply as Totaka’s Song — has been discovered in the Wii’s new Animal Crossing title, City Folk. Sitting idle in Kapp’n’s opening-scene bus for enough time will net you the whistled reward.
More on the phenomenon can be found via YouTube user ‘PhilBond’s three part series exhaustively cataloging the appearances.
Animal Crossing City Folk- Kapp’n Whistles Totaka’s Song [YouTube, via Tiny Cartridge]
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ONLINE MULTIPLAYER COMING TO NEW AURORA FEINT
Investor news site VentureBeat has a very lengthy preview on the online multiplayer online features coming to Aurora Feint II, the sequel to the Puzzle Quest meets Tetris Attack iPhone game, which sounds like it’s coming together nicely:
One person plays a level of the game (which is, at its heart, a puzzle game) and when he or she is done, sends that data to the game’s servers. As a competitor, you can then download this data (which includes not only scores but also a play-by-play of how the player made his or her moves), and put it into your game, creating a sort of “ghost” competitor…
But what’s cool is that you can actually manipulate the opposing player’s score by making certain moves at the right time. This may seem a bit odd since the other person has already played, but using weapons, you can alter their game and work toward a victory.
Where the first hit was free, Feint‘s developers are banking on the hope that fans of the original will return for this $10 update, which greatly extends its social networking features.
Aurora Feint II: The Arena brings asynchronous online multi-player gaming to the iPhone [VentureBeat]
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REZ, LUMINES DEV MAKING N-GAGE GAMES?
File this one under wait and see, but when Shuji Utsumi speaks, I listen. Formerly variously VP at Sony Computer Entertainment, Sega and Disney, Utsumi is now CEO of Q Entertainment, the developer behind Lumines, Every Extend Extra and Xbox Live Arcade’s Rez revival — in general, one of the top studios driving music and games closer together outside of Rock Band and Phase creator Harmonix.
So it was with some interest that I noted via his blog that he’d just returned from a quick ‘Roman Holiday’ to visit the Nokia Games Summit, where he appeared on stage (above) to tell the audience that mobile media would soon be the “center of the media, replacing TV,” and, more interestingly, how happy he was to see Nokia working closely with content creators in the area.
Sitting to Utsumi’s left is not, as it would appear on first glance, Mythbuster Adam Savage, but instead (you later can hear him referred to in the video) former Eurythmic Dave Stewart (!).
Utsumi notes in his post that Stewart was impressed when he showed off another of Q’s music properties, Genki Rockets, who are, in Q’s own words, “a music group which vocal is 17 years old girl, Lumi, a first baby born in outer space and has never been to the earth” (and is, in fact, beaming her pop videos to us from 30 years in the future).
So what brings Q and a Eurythmic together? After doing a little further digging, we can see that Stewart attended the games summit as part of the company’s “Artists’ Advisory Council,” where he is helping to introduce “up-and-coming singer Cindy Gomez through [Digital Legends’ already-announced N-Gage game Dance Fabulous] with brand new songs including the theme song, ‘Street Dancing.'”
But after more digging, we can see that while the studio isn’t currently listed, in July of this year Q Entertainment did indeed show up on Nokia’s ‘Our Developers’ list.
So, like I say, file this one under wait and see until we get solid word from an official source — it could be as simple as Q porting Lumines to the device, as they have to PSP, Xbox Live Arcade, and PC (via Steam) — but either way, along with the mind-boggling but excellent N-Gage/PC strategy game Reset Generation and the intriguing looking Yamake, Nokia appear to be gathering a solid team beneath their wing.
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PREVIEW THE NXE’S PREMIUM THEMES
Now that nearly everyone has signed on for Microsoft’s New Xbox Experience dashboard update, the community has been putting itself to good use. Above and beyond simple background pictures, the NXE allows developers to create their own premium themes that also decorate the spaces occupied by your now avatar-ized friends, the hitch being that you can’t preview a theme before you purchase.
The members of the otherwise raucous NeoGAF forum, though, have solved that with good (or, in some cases, you know, good enough) photos of each, letting me see that why, yes, I think I do want The Behemoth’s Castle Crashers theme.
The Official NXE PREMIUM THEME SHOWCASE [NeoGAF]
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2.8 MILLION SIGN ON FOR MORE WORLD OF WARCRAFT IN 24 HOURS
At a clip that the company says makes it “the fastest-selling PC game of all time,” and clearly showing no signs of slowing down in the nearly four years since its original release, publishing juggernaut Activision Blizzard says World of Warcraft‘s second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King has sold more than 2.8 million copies in its first 24 hours, eclipsing January 2007’s Burning Crusade expansion record of 2.4 million copies in the same time.
World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King [Blizzard]
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DIGITAL PICTURES AUGMENTING YOUR REALITY WITH PAPERVISION
Oh! What a time to have a busted web cam and a printer packed firmly away: while we wait patiently to see just how lovable Sony’s curiously Monchichi-esque EyePet will be, Digital Pictures Interactive have released the first stirrings of their own bespoke version which you can interact with now by printing a reference spot and training your webcam to your desk.
The studio is the same one behind their earlier Save Your Sensible campaign that also uses Papervision3D tech to do realtime 3D animation in Flash, utilizing, they say, “a file format originally created for first person shooter video games from 10 years ago (id Software’s Quake 2).”
The games potential for this type of augmented reality is obviously quite high, and while Sony is one of the few big players currently dabbling in it (also with their card RPG Eye of Judgment), we also have big hopes for Nintendo to do the same with the now camera-enabled DSi.
Let us know how you get on with your creature via the comments.
Papervision – Augmented Reality [Digital Pictures Interactive]
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