Here's Sony's first video advertisement for the powerful PlayStation Vita, an ad that the publisher says will be plastered on Fox, Comedy Central, and ESPN (among other networks) in the near future.
The tagline? "Never Stop Playing." You probably should stop playing at some point, though. To eat. And sleep. And read Kotaku.
We all know that the "social" space has changed the dating scene. Facebook has thrown all sorts of new tools and little wrinkles our way.
Now that the virtual hangouts have caught up with crowded bars as a place to meet a mate, social games are finding a new way to shine. Zynga ran a poll this week in Words With Friends, its super-popular Scrabble-like tile word game for phones and Facebook. Over 118,000 players responded, and of them, 10% claimed that Words With Friends had led directly to a hookup.
Break down that number, and there are over 11,000 folks whose tile draws were apparently very, very lucky indeed.
Words With Friends Players Get Flirty and Wordy With Valentine's Day Poll [Zynga company blog]
We all know that the "social" space has changed the dating scene. Facebook has thrown all sorts of new tools and little wrinkles our way.
Now that the virtual hangouts have caught up with crowded bars as a place to meet a mate, social games are finding a new way to shine. Zynga ran a poll this week in Words With Friends, its super-popular Scrabble-like tile word game for phones and Facebook. Over 118,000 players responded, and of them, 10% claimed that Words With Friends had led directly to a hookup.
Break down that number, and there are over 11,000 folks whose tile draws were apparently very, very lucky indeed.
Words With Friends Players Get Flirty and Wordy With Valentine's Day Poll [Zynga company blog]
Commenter Kinecticdamage tries to shock massively multiplayer online game developers out of their World of Warcraft-fueled haze and on track to create something truly unique and beautiful in today's Speak Up on Kotaku.
"In case of Doubt, copy WoW", a message to MMO devs.
I don't know if there are any MMO analysts, business angels, or game director browsing these forums. But in case of, I want to sum up the overall message a large portion of the MMO gaming community has addressed to them lately with sub drops in most popular MMOs.
It will be short, and will revolve around Bioware's co-founder quote:
"It [World of Warcraft] is a touchstone. It has established standards, it's established how you play an MMO. Every MMO that comes out, I play and look at it. And if they break any of the WoW rules, in my book that's pretty dumb."
- Greg Zeshuk
For the last time, NO.
Stop believing that because a product has 10 millions of subscribers, it means that you have to "steal" its user base.
Who the hell was paid to convince you about that ? Just use common sense: WoW is around for 7 years now, and you just can't match such a lifecycle at retail. All what you will succeed in with copying/being inspired by WoW, is not to make a new game, but popping a WoW Add-on. An expansion pack, but in a different universe. A "reskinning".
Game devs, MMO studios, contractors, investors, indies whatever ... Just please, please stop thinking to "secure an existing user base by design". Stop ignoring the market saturation. Plus, if you're really trying to copy a game's mechanics, all you will receive is this very game's fan base asking you to copy it even more. Especially with a massively popular title!
And what's next : you will be trapped into having to follow your "inspiration"'s footsteps forever, directly or indirectly.
I'm glad the overall player base is starting to voice its boredom of a 7 years old formula with mainstream articles, forum activity, and unsubbing. Because it seems game designers were so much convinced of the WoW formula that it seems like only thousands and thousands of people would have been enough to make them understand.
It's not even that hard to see the old formula boredom pattern: you just have to read MMO forums a bit, whatever they are.
In short : Devs ... Stop stealing, start creating.
Grow some balls, stop limiting your trust into financial reports and market share numbers. Just play all those games for at least 3 months, and judge by yourself.
Spread your f**king wings, I'm sure they are beautiful.
Double Fine's record-breaking Kickstarter adventure has, over the past few days, rekindled the perennial discussion about the entire genre of adventure games. The classic adventure has had its death announced dozens, if not hundreds, of times over the past decade or so, with at least an equal number of rebuttals.
When adventure game god Tim Schafer courted his fans directly last week, over 50,000 individuals (so far) put their money where their mouths are to the tune of $1.7 million and counting. And yet, video games are an industry in which the biggest titles routinely cost between $20 and $100 million to create, and where the biggest action hits can generate $1 billion in sales from millions of copies in a handful of days. Adventure games might be alive and well, but a billion-dollar genre they certainly are not.
So in the years since the first PlayStation and XBox arrived, where have the adventure games been hiding? The genre never did exactly die, but it did evolve. And indeed, one could argue, lost its way. Hit up the "Adventure" category on the Steam store, and rather than just finding the old, new, and updated titles you might expect, like Loom, Gemini Rue, and The Secret of Monkey Island (special edition), you find the full gamut of games, including Portal 2, Trine 2, and Grand Theft Auto IV. Anything that might have intimations of a puzzle or even of a story existing at some point in the game is somehow folded in.
A main theme of the history of games seems to be that as visual action got easier to put in, we the audience collectively ran to it. Reading text that says, "You swing your sword and damage the ogre by 50%" does even now appeal to a certain audience, but a 3D sword rendered to mimic the gleam of steel and dripping after contact with the fallen enemy's viscera appeals to a wider one. Our stories and their telling have become ever more kinetic while the graphical tools we can use to tell these stories have gotten more powerful. Our consoles and computers can display incredibly realized worlds, both stylized and plausible, for us to explore and sometimes destroy. Collectively, we seem not to want to "waste" their power on anything less.
Perhaps, then, it is unsurprising that where we find games borrowing most heavily from the traditions handed down to us 20 years ago by LucasArts and Sierra is on our less powerful hardware. Monkey Island games old and new have found a home on iPhone and iPad, a platform naturally suited to point-and-click. The Nintendo DS has its Hotel Dusk and Phoenix Wright, while the Wii has its Zak and Wiki and Telltale titles. We have GOG and Steam bringing us retro favorites on PC, and online gaming sites like Kongregate giving us Flash-based new games that can often be surprisingly good. Indie bundles bring us new classics like Machinarium. The games are everywhere. We're playing at home and on-the-go, but we're playing them without much fanfare, in the grand scheme of things, because a game with a $5000, $50,000 or $500,000 budget is never going to have $5 million worth of marketing.
But what we also have are some of the hallmark elements of adventure games bleeding out into all our other, more mainstream, genres. Ezio Auditore's story may be primarily told through stealth platforming and combat, but the interstitial "Subject 16 " puzzles in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood have a straight line back to Missing: Since January (a.k.a. In Memoriam). Nathan Drake's adventures in the Uncharted mostly involve shooting and jumping, but his journals of clues always bring us to some kind of environmental logic puzzle to solve. Even God of War's distinctly homicidal Kratos occasionally has to stop killing everything in sight and think of ways to use available tools to solve a complex location.
It's now easier than ever for almost anyone to sit down to play a game, on almost any device. The era of digital distribution has opened up new avenues for developers large and small to get almost anything to this wide new pool of players, and we're still learning the full range these games and their revenue models can take. We have perhaps never been better poised for the up-again, down-again adventure game to find its star on the rise once more.
But as our divisive arguments shift away from pure genre and toward audience type — social, casual, core, and so on — variations on the classic point-and-click adventure may easily find themselves overwhelmed in the melee. Games that don't rely on combat as their central mechanic, or that aren't released on the big consoles, have a way of getting shunted off to the side in the wider conversations, as not for "real" gamers.
And yet the fact remains that twenty years after first sitting down to help Guybrush Threepwood become a Mighty Pirate, we're still arguing over where the increasingly dotted line truly is that clearly separates him from Gordon Freeman, Nathan Drake, and Commander Shepard. Like so many other controversies, it seems for now that we know an adventure game when we see it. I just want to keep seeing more of them.
Welcome to Kotaku's official forum, Talk Amongst Yourselves, where we gather on a daily basis to discuss the joys and wonders of gaming all rolled up into one.
It's Valentine's Day, the day on which we remember that falling in love can be like falling into a hole. That must be what user CG420, creator of this TAYpic must want us to think. The mannequin from Echochrome must tell himself that he falls in love a whole hell of a lot. Will his hapless wooden self ever know true affection? You can discuss this and other matters of the heart—video game or otherwise—in the thread below.
Want to see your own TAYpic atop a future forum post? Monkey around with the base image to create your own TAYpic and share your own riffs on our February image in our #TAYpics thread. Don't forget to keep your image in a 16x9 ratio if you want a slice of Talk Amongst Yourselves glory. Grab the base image here. The best ones will be featured in future installments of Talk Amongst Yourselves. Make us proud!
The Last Guardian is the the PlayStation 3 game that the people who most want PlayStation 3 games want.
It's also the biggest Sony title that appears to be in risk of vanishing before our very eyes.
First shown in a pair of trailers in mid-2009, it was a no-show at E3's 2010 and 2011. It's lead creator, the vaunted Fumito Ueda whose PlayStation 2 projects Ico and Shadow of the Colossus are modern classics, left Sony last fall. GameStop erroneously listed the game as cancelled.
It's still alive, Sony has said, but, I recently asked Sony head of worldwide game development, Shuhei Yoshida, what can you tell people who are terrified that this game will never come out?
"For any game, I say no one can guarantee all games will come out," Yoshida replied, diminishing my own skepticism not a tad. "Making games is hard. Teams try to come up with something totally unique and ty to prove that they are do-able. There is a lot of engineering involved."
But this game, this ambitious game about a boy and a monster he hangs out with, still exists?
"Absolutely."
Follow-up: Is it any good?
"Yeah," Yoshida laughed. "The team's always been making progress, but there are lots of difficulties, especially on the…" He paused. "It's a tough, tough proposition that Ueda-san has come up with, the emotion, the character and AI."
Ueda is still on the game, Yoshida stressed, just as a freelancer, Yoshida said. "Ueda-san has never left the team… he just has a different kind of set-up. We have discussed [things] with Ueda-san and made it a bit more defined in terms of his contribution and his creative input. He has been doing the same, great work. He never left the team. He's is on top of the team."
(I'll have more from my conversation with Yoshida, mostly about the PlayStation Vita, soon.)
Strategy buffs should get a kick out of this trailer for Fray, which French developer Brain Candy officially announced for pre-order today. I saw this simultaneous turn-based strategy game last year at an event in New York and thought it looked pretty damn neat, so it's good to see that things are progressing nicely.
Attention parents of the world: GameStop is not a babysitting service. That fact was made abundantly clear to 21-year-old Kethia Dagrin-Francois of Florida when police arrested her for child neglect after her five-year-old son was found wandering the parking lot of Boyton Mall.
According to authorities shoppers discovered the young boy wandering the parking lot of the Boyton Mall alone on Sunday afternoon. He was taken to the mall's guest services counter, who attempted to contact his mother via intercom for 20 minutes before contacting the local police. Once police arrived they walked the mall with the child, searching for his mother. Returning to guest services they came across the boy's aunt, who told police his mother had been searching for him for 15 minutes.
It had been 50 minutes since he was found in the parking lot.
Reports say the mother arrived shortly after the aunt was found, telling police she taken the boy to GameStop to play a video game while she went shopping. She told the five-year-old to not leave the store until she returned.
She told the five-year-old.
So Dagrin-Francois was arrested and charged with child neglect. She was released Monday on $3,000 bond.
You hear that sound? That's the sound of thousands of GameStop employees cheering. During my time as an employee for the retail chain there wasn't a day that went by when some parent didn't let their child run rampant in the store, knocking over display games, rearranging shelves, and basically acting like a child does when their parent isn't around.
Even worse, these parents are leaving their young children alone in a store full of strangers. Strangers that could do the child harm, sure, but also strangers that have no responsibility for their child's safety one way or the other, so when they go wandering out into a busy mall parking lot, no one is going to stop them.
So no, GameStop is not day care. It's not a babysitting service. It's where gamers go to buy overpriced used games, and that's no place for an impressionable young child to wander about on his own.
Child left alone in store while mom shops ends up wandering Boynton Mall parking lot, police say [Palm Beach Post]
Commander Shepard's battle against the malevolent Reapers may be coming to an explosive end this year, but the associated Mass Effect plastic goodies have only begun to fight. You can tell an intellectual property license is popular when it's got items coming out from different companies and Mass Effect's got stuff coming from Dark Horse—who publish tie-in ME comics—and Diamond Select, the giant comics distributor that also offers geek-friendly toys. You'll see a silver Normandy variant, a Legion figure butt side up and much more in the pictures above fro this year's Toy Fair.
