A mysterious countdown timer has appeared on BioWare's home page, as well as the pages for Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect 2. What is BioWare revealing on Monday?
Kotakuite Alexander pointed us to the countdown clock that's now ticking down the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until Monday morning at noon Eastern time, 9AM Pacific across most of BioWare's current web presence. I say most, because while the timer is indeed on BioWare's main, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age pages, it does not appear on the page for Star Wars: The Old Republic, which leads me to believe the reveal has nothing to do with that game in particular.
With the Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening expansion pack was recently released, and Mass Effect 2's Kasumi downloadable content coming in April, what could the developer possibly have up its sleeve for Monday, March 29? A new game? More downloadable content? A version of Mass Effect 2 that isn't for the Xbox 360 or PC?
It's time for rampant speculation. You folks know what to do.
The billion dollar business of selling virtual goods in free-to-play games is more than just a financial windfall for companies like Playfish. A controlled economy with millions of active participants gives economists an entirely new way to model consumer behavior.
In Newsweek article titled "Money for Nothing," Playfish founder Kristian Segerstrale explains how a virtual economy like the one generated in that company's flagship title, Pet Society, can give economists access to more pure consumer behavior data than was previously available through traditional studies.
"The data is always limited, and once you get hold of it there are tons of reasons to mistrust it," Segerstrale says. In virtual worlds, on the other hand, "the data set is perfect. You know every data point with absolute certainty. In social networks you even know who the people are. You can slice and dice by gender, by age, by anything."
Segerstrale uses the example of taxes. In a traditional economy you can generally determine how consumers react to a tax increase, but knowing exactly who is reacting is tricky. The data is far too generalized.
In a virtual world, however, all of the data you need is at your fingertips, and the population is entirely manageable. You can increase taxes for a specific demographic to gauge their reaction.
"You can conduct any experiment you want," he says. "You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20-stuff that's just not possible to discover in the real world."
I liken it to an ant farm, the toys that kids once used to study how a colony of ants works together to build and maintain their habitat. It's essentially the same sort of thing, only with much more control in the hands of the farm creators.
This is yet another example of how gaming has changed the way we look at the world in a positive way. By generating compelling virtual worlds and selling virtual goods, a company like Playfish isn't just generating revenue, but data that could have a lasting effect on how we study the interaction between people and their money.
As Newseek's Daniel Lyons points out, the subset of people who play such games might not accurately represent the rest of the population, but when you've got 20 million people logging into Pet Society every day, I'd say you're getting pretty damn close.
Money for Nothing [Newsweek]
I think we should be prepared for all sorts of evil, player-created games when WarioWare D.I.Y. hits North America this weekend.
The DS game allows you to create the sort of mini-games found in classic WarioWare titles using your own graphics, sounds and imagination. Unfortunately, that means at least some wannabe game designers are going to abuse the technology.
Imagine the sort of tasteless games one can create given the nature of the DS title's pick-up-and-design technology which makes mini-game development a breeze?
Actually, don't imagine it, just check out this video featuring a collection of gory, bloody, violent mini-games created over the past year or so since the game's release in Japan.
Of course, this is just a small percent of all of the wonderful games that have come out of the DS title as well. I mean, check out these Mario themed ones!
WarioWare: D.I.Y. - a collection of extremely violent fan-made microgames [Go Nintendo]
Crecente detailed several fine reasons to purchase Super Street Fighter IV. Capcom's GameStop-exclusive preorder bonus is not one of those, unless you have really cold thumbs.
Yes, it's Super Thumb Fighters, eight thumb socks emblazoned with the faces of your favorite Super Street Fighter IV characters. I suppose these underachieving sock puppets will give players something to do in case the power goes out and they can't play the game proper, but other than that I cannot think of a single good reason to have Chun-Li's face on the tip of your thumb.
I said good reason. That is not a good reason. Stop that.
While Microsoft's 250GB Xbox 360 hard disk is currently only available in North America as part of a console bundle, according to a new ad popping up on the 360 dashboard, that's about to change.
This "Make More Room for Entertainment" advertisement popped up on the Xbox 360 dashboard today, urging console owners to head to a participating retailer and pick up a brand new standalone 250GB hard drive, complete with transfer cable for securing your data during the upgrade.
Unfortunately none of the retailers I've checked - GameStop, Amazon, or Best Buy - are currently participating, and the Xbox.com accessories page doesn't have a listing for the drive by itself. Still, that's definitely an advertisement for the drive, so I'd expect the lack of availability to be rectified shortly.
Since there are no retail listings for the drive, we still don't know how much it will cost. The Japanese version is currently available for import at Play-Asia for $160, and the 120GB hard drive Microsoft sells in the states sells for $129.99, so one might expect a reasonable price somewhere in that range. We'll let you know once we know for certain.
Thanks to Taylor for pointing out the ad!
Update: And we have a price! $129.99 for 250GB, the same price the 120GB was going for previously. Not a bad deal, all things considered.
I've been playing an early build of Super Street Fighter IV for a week or so now, and it's convinced me of one thing: Picking up this latest Capcom fighter is a must for any fan of the genre.
Why?
There are the two new fighters: Korea's first fighter Juri and Turkish oil wrestler Hakan. There is also the addition of a slew of fighters from classic Street Fighter games like DeeJay, T. Hawk, Guy, Cody, Adon, Ibuki, Makoto and Dudley. And all of these characters are fully unlocked the moment you start the game.
But the biggest reason you're going to want to pick up the $40 Super Street Fighter IV is because of the way is strives to recreate the arcade feel of playing against your friends without having to get them all to come over to your house for a mini-tournament.
Super Street Fighter IV includes three new modes of online play.
Team Battles allow up to eight players to participate in their own team elimination tournament. You can set your mini tournament up anyway you want and almost instantly launch into the beat downs. This mode lets you set up whether the tourney will be 2 on 2, 3 on 3 or 4 on 4. You can also set the number of rounds, time limit, what region you want to pull players from and whether you have private slots.
Players can also choose to set up an Endless Battle. In Endless Battles up to eight players can be invited into an never-ending online match where the winner takes on the next gamer in the room. Everyone in the room can talk with each other and the two currently playing. Most importantly, the gamers not currently in the match can watch the fight unfold.
That's right, Super Street Fighter IV fixes the biggest issue I had with Street Fighter IV, it allows you to watch your opponents take each other on over Xbox Live or the Playstation Network.
Another really cool addition is the Replay Channel. Gamers can hop into this channel on their console to view "recorded" matches from around the world. Capcom folks tell me that the game doesn't even start considering whether you're bouts are good enough to make the channel until you've won three matches in a row. Once you've hit that level of success the game compares your abilities to others and pulls the best one to share with the world.
The Replay Channel sorts videos into several categories.
Originals allows you to check out the best matches between the game's classic characters. Alpha shows off replays of matches between characters from the Street Fighter Alpha Series. Turbo & III shows off matches with characters from Super Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 3. New Comers lets you check out fights between the characters introduced in Street Fighter IV and Boss is replays of boss character battles.
The Replay Channel also automatically saves your online matches for local viewing and allows you to save your favorite replays to create your own channel.
How will the newly-announced Nintendo 3DS show 3D graphics without requiring 3D glasses? One solid theory involves cameras (but wouldn't require a new machine). Another, here, involves a motion sensor in a portable, a trick the iPhone already does.
As you can see in the video, iPhone game WordFu, which we wrote about a year ago, simulates 3D with the help of the iPhone/iPod Touch's motion sensor. 3D graphics. No glasses. Exactly the effect Nintendo is now promising with the 3DS. Could a motion sensor be Nintendo's means to pull this off?
Since 2004 at least, Nintendo has been on-record about wanting a motion sensor in its portable game systems. In the past few months it's been trying to explain how its CEO was quoted in a leading Japanese newspaper about a new handheld needing to have a way to detect motion. And now, even though there is already a method — using the DSi's cameras — to show 3D graphics to players without requiring the use of glasses, it is announcing that a new DS successor, new hardware, will be the thing to bring us no-glasses 3D to portable gaming.
The motion-sensor approach would also answer many of the good questions people are now bringing up about how to do touch-screen DS gaming with graphics that appear to have 3D depth.
Nintendo has not said how the 3DS will provide glasses-free 3D. You see the theory above. It could be motion. According to Nintendo, we'll find out more by mid-June at E3.
The end time, a doomsday described in many different religions, isn't a subject typically explored by massively multiplayer online games, which is a bit surprising.
Depending on which religion you look to for inspiration, a game based on the end of the world could include zombies, demons, supernatural phenomenon and could even take place in the next couple of years.
So I suppose it isn't surprising that the still undated Funcom massively multiplayer online role-playing game The Secret World taps into the theoretical, theological end of everything we know.
And the best part: It has real, honest-to-god zombies. Not infected people.
While The Secret World kicks off with players starting in modern day versions of London, New York and Seoul, Korea, the bit I saw of the game earlier this month took place in the fictional New England town of Kingsmouth.
In The Secret World each location has what the game developers call its own "monster ecology" based on the mythology and lore of the area. It is a world, the developers tell me, heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King and H.P Lovecraft.
In the case of Kingsmouth, a sizable island town off the coast of Maine, evil seems very nautically themed. There are zombies coming up out of the ground and walking out of the ocean, hulking creatures that look a bit like something you'd see in Left 4 Dead, possessed machinery and nasty sea creatures.
While folk tales and mythology help to shape the enemies you will face in an area, the bigger point of The Secret World is to tell a story that players become engrossed in and try to figure out.
"Digging deeper is really what our story is about," said Martin Harsheim Bruusgaard, lead designer for the game." Stories and MMO RPGs traditionally don't play well together. There has always been a conflict between the game mechanics in a way and telling a story and the perception seems that it is not possible. I think what Bioware is doing with The Old Republic and what we're doing with this game could change that.
"Our game is a very fertile playground for telling a story. It's a vast open playground for going around and being able to pick up these little jigsaw pieces and put them together on this giant canvas and try to figure out what this story is really about."
Funcom's approach to the game allowed them to create hundreds of fully-voiced characters, Bruusgaard said. All of The Secret World's missions are introduced with full cinematics as well.
"Stories are the important part of the game for us," said Ragnar Tornquist, the game's creative director. "It feels really nice to have a purpose in the game world. In some MMOS you're running around meeting random NPC number 37 and have to bring them some fish. It's so much cooler to establish this relationship between the player character and the NPC and you're learning about the relationships between the other NPCs. You become part of this group and try to help them out."
Instead of worrying about leveling up your character in The Secret World, the big push is to unravel the game's greater mystery and try to find increasingly powerful weapons. You also have a number of occult-like powers you can use, all of which automatically scale with the items you find.
While the game has hundreds of powers that can be used, a player can only use 14 at a time - seven active and seven passive.
Those abilities can be switched out at certain special locations, the team told me, allowing you to constantly adjust and customize how the character you are playing fights.
In one battle I witnessed involving four players against a giant junkyard man, one of the players was using an assault weapon, another stayed in the back healing, a third shot fire from his hands and a fourth used a flaming sword.
Bruusgaard pointed out that powers can combine to create new effects, even powers from two different players. This is done by allowing some powers to put friendly or enemy characters in special "states." For instance, a player set an enemy on fire, putting it in the fire state, then another nearby character used a passive power which made the enemy explode as it died, showering nearby enemies with damage-inducing chunks of flaming enemy flesh.
Because the game has no levels, the game designers had to come up with other ways to keep players interested in playing the game.
That includes all of those powers, weapons and clothing and what they think is a much closer attention to detail in creating the world and the stories that drive it.
While the title as a whole isn't meant to be a psychologically frightening game, there are moments that are meant to scare.
"When you are out in the open world with hundreds of people it can't be psychologically scary," Bruusgaard said. "When you go into dungeons and four player instances we have a more scripted experience. We use sound and scripting to create a more frightening experience.
"I dont think you can have an MMO that is constantly psychologically scary, because that's emotionally draining and to do that for hours and hours would be terrifying."
While a release date for The Secret World hasn't yet been set, the team did drop this teaser trailer on me which seems to indicate we'll be learning even more about the game later this week.
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