To: Crecente
From: Bashcraft
Today isn't Sunday, but yesterday was. So let's a music video together!
What you missed last night
Nintendo And McDonalds: A Short History
Brazilian Kratos Has Magnificently Painted Man Boobs
Get Inside The Real-Life Yakuza
Mario Creator Has Never Called Video Games "Art"
Swiss Government Cracking Down On Violent Game Sales
The characters from the movie based off of Mark Millar's comic book Kick-Ass completely kick ass in this trailer for WHA Entertainment's video game adaptation for the iPhone and PlayStation Network, and somehow that doesn't seem right.
Then again I've read the comic book series several times over, and I haven't seen the film yet, so I don't know what changes have been made bringing the work to the big screen. The comic book version of Kick-Ass wouldn't be found dead in an isometric beat-em up game. Or hell, he might be found dead in one.
The opening cinematic in the trailer gets it right, I suppose. Kick-Ass spends most of the initial comic book run getting himself kicked, punched, stabbed, and run over by cars, so seeing him in an alley getting the crap kicked out of him works just fine. Breezing through hordes of enemies with Hit Girl at his side? Not so much.
"We are excited to show off some of the gameplay that players will find in Kick-Ass through these new assets," said Howard Horowitz, Founder and CEO of WHA Entertainment, Inc. "Kick-Ass promises to deliver non-stop superhero action to gamers, and we can't wait for players to be able to get their hands on the game next month!"
The full release will coincide with the April 16 release of the feature film, and will see one to three players taking on the roles of Kick-Ass, Big Daddy, and Hit Girl. Why no Red Mist? Go read the comics.
Electronic Arts plans to grow its digital game business to become one-third of their total revenue over the next few years and that includes starting to charge for what one analyst described as very long game demos.
The comments came during an analyst visit to Electronic Arts' Redwood City headquarters and meetings with the company's executives.
One of Electronic Arts strategies will be to release what they call "premium downloadable content" on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live for $10 to $15 and then later release the full game for a full price, EA Group General Manager Nick Earl told Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter during the recent meeting.
Pachter writes in his report of the meeting that this premium downloadable content would "essentially be a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009's Battlefield 1943." The "full-blown packaged game" would released shortly after the download version, he writes.
Earl told Pachter that the strategy would allow the company to limit the risk of marketing the full game and would "serve as a low-cost marketing tool."
A marketing tool that it sounds like you'll be paying $10 to $15 for. We've contacted Electronic Arts for comment and clarification, but have not yet heard back. We'll update this story when and if we do.
During the same meeting at EA, John Riccitiello, the company's CEO, told Pachter that the "company had performed poorly over the first years of his tenure, and admitted that the turnaround of the company was taking longer than he originally expected."
Riccitiello estimated that Electronic Arts was about two-thirds of the way through its turnaround, and one-third of the way through its "transformation to the distribution of intellectual property through multiple channels."
He added that he expects the company to grow its digital business to one-third of EA's revenues within the next few years.
Another major way that EA plans to achieve that goal, Riccitiello told Pachter, is for EA to "exploit all of its packaged games with ancillary digital revenue streams."
The TAY guys are getting ready to go to Boston for PAX East. Maybe you'll be there too? For now, please stay where you are and talk about video games.
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Two weeks ago the inseparable duo behind popular game-themed web comic Penny Arcade received an award for their work as "video game ambassadors", this weekend they'll be earning it... again.
Friday marks the kick off of the team's East Coast expo in Boston, an extension of the popular, often overflowing Penny Arcade Expo held each year in Seattle.
Penny Arcade creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik liken this latest endeavor, a second convention, to having a second child.
"We're still not 100 percent sure we can do both," illustrator Krahulik tells me, half kidding, I think.
"A third one would be reaching too far," writer Holkins says.
"A third one would be dangerous," Krahulik adds.
"A third one would ruin us," Holkins says.
"We say that now," Krahulik says.
They tend to conduct interviews that way: Finishing each other's thoughts, turning a question into a discussion between the two, often laced with humor and self-deprecation.
It's not surprising given everything they have accomplished together. Popular webcomic Penny Arcade debuted in 1998, written by Holkins and illustrated by Krahulik. What started as a online comic strip updated three times a week on their website eventually lead to an industry under the guiding hand of business manager Robert Khoo. Penny Arcade now runs an international charity that has raised more than $6 million for sick children, an annual expo that last year filled Washington State's Seattle convention center with more than 60,000 people, their own video game and a series of popular books.
Last March, Holkins and Krahulik were honored by the Washington State Senate for their work with fundraiser Child's Play. I caught up with the two earlier this month, just moments before they were ushered into the bowels of San Francisco's Moscone Convention center to receive their latest honorific: A Game Developer Choice Ambassador Award for their help in making the game industry "a better place."
The first thing the two did when they found out they were receiving the awards, Krahulik tells me, was look it up on the Internet. They wanted to make sure, they say, that it wasn't an elaborate trap for the industry to deliver a beat down on the two who have so often held game developers and publishers to higher standards through sharp wit and sometimes cutting comics.
Krahulik is quick to point out that they're only mean to the industry because they love video games so much.
The way Holkins figures it, they were selected because so many of their comics point out the good in gamers and games.
"It's not hard to promote a true thing," he said.
About an hour after our interview, the two took to the stage of the Game Developers Choice Awards, delivering a humorous off-the-cuff acceptance speech of sorts before heading out to the airport to go their separate ways: Krahulik back home to celebrate his anniversary with his wife and Holkins to get to work on Penny Arcade Expo East, due to kick off this Friday.
The inaugural East Coast event, which sold out last Friday, features three days of talks (including one by Kotaku), panels, concerts, movies and gaming. It also has a show floor packed with the latest offerings from the likes of Microsoft, Nintendo and oodles of other game developers.
And Holkins and Krahulik won't be heading home when the show wraps up. Instead the two will be kicking off the East Coast leg of their latest book tour, this one promoting The Splendid Magic of Penny Arcade: The 11 1/2 Anniversary Edition.
Book tours, web comics, charities, video games, expos, the two have a grueling schedule that seems to get more packed with each year, not less.
They both also have children. I asked them if they think the comic has changed now that they have children.
"The comic is about our lives," Krahulik says without hesitation, "as our lives change the comics will. Our readership has been growing with us."
Are either of them concerned, I ask, that they could become less relevant to gamers as they grow older. Could they become the stereotypical parents, people easily confused by new and previously unimagined technology? Essentially, could they become like their own parents?
"I don't think there is enough demographic data on aging geeks," Holkins says first joking, and then turning serious. "Growing up our dads didn't play, they went to work. But now as dad's we do play.
"The reality is, I think you're describing a person who no longer exists."
Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.
[Pic]
Girls in stockings. Girls in wigs. Girls in frilly dresses. Over the weekend, the cosplaying hoard took to the streets of Osaka's Den-Den Town in the annual Nipponbashi Street Festival.
The main drag, Sakai-suji, was closed to traffic so cosplayers and people with cameras could mill about, pose and snap photos. It was, for a brief instance, reminiscent of Tokyo's geek mecca Akihabara before the tragedy that struck in June 2008.
A 25-year-old man named Tomohiro Kato drove a rented truck into a crowd of pedestrians. He then got out of the truck and began wildly stabbing bystanders.
Seven ended up dead and ten were injured.
At that time, the main drag in Akihabara was closed to vehicles, and the street had been dubbed "Pedestrian Paradise". After the massacre, the streets were no longer blocked to automobiles during the weekends. The mood in Akihabara changed forever. Security cameras were installed in Akihabara earlier this year.
The weekend's festivities in Osaka seemed to be careful and fun. Like the good old days, no?
日本橋ストリートフェスタのコスプレ 「格段に可愛くなってね？」 [せなか：オタロードBlog]
Peter Molyneux, the game designer behind the Fable franchise, was invited on the set of Hollywood motion picture Avatar. He didn't quite "get it".
"I went on the set of Avatar three times and thought, 'Good grief, he's got the same problem I have,'" Molyneux told the Times. "All I saw the first time was storyboards full of six-legged animals and I thought, 'I don't get this.' People were telling me it was going to be this great big 3D experience, and I was thinking, 'That's what they all say.'"
"Next time I saw five minutes of footage, and I got it," Molyneux continued." I finally saw what the storyboards were about. And I am probably one of the most receptive people there are to new things like this."
Molyneux was attempting to explain what Microsoft's upcoming Natal motion control peripheral will be like and relating how one must see the final product to finally "get it".
The game designer also mentioned that this Thanksgiving is the "shut off" date for Fable III when asked about the game's release date.
Peter Molyneux interview [Times Online]
The king of fast-food. The biggest Japanese video game company. Nintendo and McDonald's have been in cahoots for years.
The recent news that McDonald's is using the Nintendo DS to quickly train new part-time employees is just the latest in a long, long line of Nintendo-McDonald's tie-ups. This collaboration helps McDonald's cuts training time in half. McDonald's will procure 2 Nintendo DS units for each of its 3,700 restaurants in Japan.
Nintendo and McDonald's have been working together since the days of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Take McKids or the Super Mario Bros. III ad campaigns, for instance. These two are thick as thieves.
Both of them had something that the other wanted and needed: the attention of kids. From the start, it was a win-win relationship. Kids like McDonald's. Kids like Nintendo.
The early efforts, though, got more complex when Nintendo consoles like the Nintendo 64 (later, the GameCube) started appearing in Nintendo playlands. If the playland slide was not enticing enough, the chain could offer video games!
Just as McDonald's got hammered in documentaries like Super Size Me, video games were in flux. Titles like Dance Dance Revolution had been giving gamers workouts for years. McDonald's has made an effort to change its menu by offering healthier meals. But it's still...McDonald's.
The collaboration between Nintendo and McDonald's continued to get increasingly sophisticated. No longer were both content to only offer, say, cheap plastic toys. Instead, Nintendo began offering WiFi so that customers could bring their Nintendo DS consoles to McDonald's and sit there and play Mario Kart. (Hopefully consume more food, too!) As of 2007, twenty-five percent of that WiFi was being sucked up by Nintendo DS handhelds. At the time, McDonald's said the impetus for installing the WiFi was so their employees could use wireless handheld devices for taking orders and tracking inventory.
And while Nintendo was promoting health and fitness with its WiiFit, it continued its relationship with McDonald's. You want to get healthy? Don't eat McDonald's. Ever. Eat vegetables. And fruit. Ironically, in 2008 the UK McDonald's boss blamed video games for obesity!
As a company, McDonald's does a tremendous amount of good via its charity work and whatnot. It also makes deliciously fatty food that, in large amounts, could kill you! Apparently, there are some "healthy" choices at McDonald's — but it's probably not what you'd like you or your kids eating everyday.
Yet, don't expect Nintendo to bail on its relationship with the golden arches anytime soon. Not with all those potential customers at stake. Potential Wii Fit customers, that is.
Alex Kobbs, creator of LEGO "film" Battle of the Brick, is a busy man, for not only is he making a stop-motion movie based on Halo, he's just made one based on XBLA shooter Geometry Wars as well.
Called Geometry - Everything you need to know!, it's the tale of what happens when you sit down to do some serious learning, but find yourself dreaming of an Xbox Live Arcade game instead.
If you think that, having to build every enemy and bullet then animate them individually he'd skimp on the quantity of on-screen action, then you are mistaken.
Ready to slice you up! After being erected this past summer in Tokyo's Odaiba, the life-sized Gundam statue is returning. With an beam saber.
The huge 18-meter statue will be once again erected in the city of Shizuoka this July - specifically, the east exit of Japan Rail Higashi-Shizuoka Station. The beam saber even lights up at night.
The city of Shizuoka guestimates that the statue is able to draw 900,000 visitors and 40 billion yen over the course of 300 days. The statue will also create 9,600 jobs for things like security, maintenance and the like.
Why Shizuoka? The Production Factory for Bandai's Gundam plastic models are located in Shizuoka. This is a homecoming of sorts. A really, really big homecoming.
Originally, the statue went up in Tokyo's Odaiba last July for the 35th Anniversary of Gundam and was taken done in September. The statue was visited by over 4 million.
