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Journal Land Pick of the Week Gaiiden's Scroll - Yes, I am tooting my own horn. Toot! Toot! This past Tues and Wed I was in Montreal attending the Int'l Game Summit there, and I have summaries and pictures from the event - full coverage coming next week. It seems the holidays are kicking in - journal posts are way down lately. Still some good stuff in what is up though!

Building upon the sold-out 2008 event, the third-annual Game Design Expo, hosted by Vancouver Film School (VFS), Canada's premier post-secondary entertainment arts institution, is shaping up to be even bigger and better. Set for February 7 and 8, 2009 at the Vancity Theater at the Vancouver International Film Centre, the weekend will be headlined by Clint Hocking, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal (Splinter Cell, Far Cry 2), a popular speaker at industry events, and will feature an exciting lineup of talks and panels with the leading minds in game design.

World-renowned indie game developers Paul Preece and David Scott -- the creators of blockbuster Web game hits Desktop Tower Defense and Flash Element TD -- today announced the launch of Casual Collective, a free-to-play social gaming site featuring a range of new Web games created exclusively by Preece and Scott. In the coming months, Casual Collective will introduce an ongoing stream of new titles on its site, with features and content exclusive to Casual Collective, as well as distribute titles to a host of other top game destination sites across the Web.

Audio middleware company Firelight Technologies today released its popular FMOD Music and Sound Effects System for the iPhone platform. FMOD Ex is a library and toolset that enables developers to take advantage of the latest audio technologies in their software titles. With this release, iPhone developers can now use the same high quality FMOD audio engine that is widely used throughout the games industry.

I'm writing to you from a fresh install of Vista x64 after a few too many blue screens every day or so coerced me from my ever-comfortable prior install into a the nerd equivalent of a brand new desk chair. Now, maybe I'm just OCD (little bit), but does anyone else have a very meticulous set of settings/programs that absolutely must be installed within mere minutes of the first boot-up of any new OS install? I do. It took me a few hours. At least. A mere handful of months after it's initial launch, Google kills Google Lively citing that the company needs to "prioritize [their] resources and focus more on [their] core search, ads and apps business." Lively.com will be shut down at the end of December and "everyone who has worked on the project will then move on to other teams." All respect to the Lively team but I hope I'm not the target for Lively because, quite honestly, I wasn't aware it existed. Did I write about it here back in July? The 1Up Network division of Ziff Davis, which shut down the PC gaming-focused superb Games for Windows Magazine back in April and shut down their PC platform-focused PC Magazine yesterday is now contemplating shutting down Electronic Gaming Monthly as well. The New York Times report on the topic, despite offering any direct quotes from Ziff Davis CEO Jason Young, says that "Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year." I've been reading EGM since I was seven-years-old and the magazine, in its current incarnations, is the best American gaming magazines I am aware of and the transformation of that into an online-only form would be sad. In more positive news, Rockstar is giving a late Valentine's Day present to gamers in the downloadable form of Grand Theft Auto 4: The Lost and the Damned. The estimated $15-20 USD DLC will place wanton criminals into the shoes of Johnny Klebitz, a member of The Lost (a biker gang from the original game). I can't wait to shoot run people over with the power of Euphoria again. I like zombies and the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising and I was glad to learn that Capcom won the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Dawn of the Dead producer MKR Productions. Some of the similarities between Dead Rising and Dawn of the Dead, as listed by MKR Productions, included: "The mall has a gun shop, in which action takes place" (!), "Both works use music in the mall for comedic effect" (like every movie with an elevator!), and, undoubtedly the worst offense, "Many of the zombies wear plaid shirts" (oh, the horror). I love the world sometimes. As a final, incredibly important, reminder: Canadians are working on Dead Rising 2 -- a game I'd like injected straight into my cerebral cortex. Finally, Sony has realized that if their system of gamer achievements is to take off then, like Microsoft, developers/publishers must support Playstation 3 Trophies in all games. I prefer the simplicity of the Xbox 360's achievement system (pseudo-tiers of achievements determined by a common "gamer points" currency) over the three-tiered trophy system of the Playstation 3 but, really, I just like the idea of achievements so anything is good. You should be playing games this weekend. It's a good weekend for it. We've got Left 4 Dead a zombie game (!) which GameDev.net'ers like myself, Ravuya, and Run_The_Shadows have been playing all week. Alongside that I will also be acting all tactical-like in Valkyria Chronicles. Also zombies.

Women in Games International (WIGI) today announced their WIGI Celebrity Ebay Auction, a collection of over a hundred video games and game-related merchandise items -- much of it signed by industry leaders -- being auctioned to raise funds for Women in Games International

A new StemCell Game Engine-powered demo is available for download. It emphasizes on soft shadows and good illumination, physically driven player control, in-game extensible and configurable GUI, real-time physics and controllable physical machineries, in-game scene loading, multiple rendering viewports, immersive 3d sounds and a lot more.

Xoreax Software announced today the release of IncrediBuild 3.32RC. IncrediBuild is an easy-to-use platform for accelerating Windows-based processes such as code/data builds, scripts and tools through advanced Grid Computing technology. IncrediBuild 3.32 features enhanced performance and networking, new monitoring options and additional new features.

Quotix Software is released the fourth collection of high quality textures for game development. In this collection there are 110 textures in 512x512 resolution. Normal, specular and bump maps are included. For more details visit www.quotixsoftware.com

Although I'm trying hard to change the perception that Thursday Dailies are late in coming, today I didn't get back into the country from my jaunt out to Canada until early this afternoon. So - reasonable excuse? You decide!Speaking of Canada, apparently the Quebec game industry has shaped up to be the sixth largest in the world, according to a recent study reported on by Gamasutra. The top 5 spots (starting from the top) go to Japan, California, South Korea, the UK and then Washington. However, if you replace total number of industry employees with total number of industry employees per thousand people, then Quebec comes in third as the densest concentration of industry members, beaten only by Washington and British Columbia. The province is looking to continue building out its development community. [Full Story]Still on the subject of Canada, and specifically Quebec, I just flew back in from attending the Montreal International Game Summit over the last two days. While full coverage is coming next week of all the sessions and events that I attended, you can catch summaries of MIGS sessions/events in my journal, and of course Gamasutra has their own coverage - although I wish it were easier to list all together rather than searching out MIGS in the headline.MIGS's counter-part conference, the Vancouver International Game Summit, is being expanded next year by Think Services and has been re-branded GDC Canada. A call for submissions for GDC Canada has just been sent out, and while I could link to the Gamasutra report, I find it far more interesting that it's being broadcast as well by IGN Games. [Full Story]Okay, slowly working away from MIGS, Autodesk completes their acquisition of Softimage. This is slightly MIGS-relevant because I happened to be introduced to Autodesk's Public Relations Manager for Worldwide Marketing and she was very excited about the closing of the deal. She'll also be sure to keep us here at GDNet informed of the new developments stemming from the acquisition. The deal closed at $35M, and Autodesk is now in control of Maya as well as all the various Softimage products. [Full Story]So it should be no surprise to anyone that of course Nintendo is running short on stock for their Wii Fit product. The company is hoping to have enough Wii console units this year, however - but Wiitailers aren't so sure. That was a while ago though, so hopefully Nintendo's recent reports hold true for those seeking Wii's this holiday season. Oh, I also find this part confusing: "According to Fils-Aime, Wii owners want to see more games that perform well on rival systems, like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, brought to the Wii." Define "perform well", please. I'm guessing sales, not graphics. [Full Story]Annnd for our final story we have the sad case of a 15yr-old boy going into convulsions after a WoW:Lich King marathon. Sad of course because he couldn't tear himself away from the game before doing himself harm (from which he will thankfully(?) recover). Too bad he's in Sweden and not Vietnam or he could seek help. His binging may have been an attempt to level his character to the new cap of 80, however he should have strategized a bit better like these guys, who did it in only 27 hours and survived to talk about it. [Full Story]Your cool link of the day is - What Photoshop Would Look Like in Real Life

Game Design Expo Unveils 2009 Lineup Vancouver Film School to Host Weekend with Game Industry Luminaries; Ubisoft's Clint Hocking Announced as Keynote November 18, 2008 Vancouver, BC Building upon the sold-out 2008 event, the third-annual Game Design Expo, hosted by Vancouver Film School (VFS), Canada's premier post-secondary entertainment arts institution, is shaping up to be even bigger and better. Set for February 7 and 8, 2009 at the Vancity Theater at the Vancouver International Film Centre, the weekend will be headlined by Clint Hocking, Creative Director at Ubisoft Montreal (Splinter Cell, Far Cry 2), a popular speaker at industry events, and will feature an exciting lineup of talks and panels with the leading minds in game design.

I know Promit covered NXE yesterday, but I think it deserves another day of coverage, since the official release is today. As previously stated, Microsoft have launched their latest update to the Xbox Live. The New Xbox Experience, NXE, gives users a few new features, such as the ability to choose their own customized animated avatar, a new interface and play from hard drive. You can also access your Xbox live market place on the web, the Xbox LIVE Party which allows users to talk to friends from the dashboard rather than just in game. In related news, Gamesindustry.biz are reporting that hundreds of titles from Sony Pictures Entertainment made previously available to stream via Netflix on Xbox Live have been withdrawn. The movie titles have only been restricted on the Xbox 360, apparently since the announcement of Microsoft's NXE. Netflix's VP of corporate communications Steve Swasey says they hope the Sony Pictures Entertainment titles will be licensed for Xbox 360 shortly. Need for Speed: Undercover was released yesterday and its looking pretty hot!

I'm at the Montreal International Games Summit, which runs through today (it started yesterday), and providing summaries of the sessions that I attend in my journal. They're just highlights to give you an idea of what each session covered so you can see if you'd be interested in checking out the full coverage coming next week, where each of the summaries in my journal will be expanded to cover all the features of each talk.

Oh have I got good news for all of you. Since you've been such loyal readers, I am presenting to you today the New GameDev.Net Daily Experience! By providing a shiny new Experience for Daily reading, I am confident that I can distract you from basic failings in my Daily posts, such as the lack of content that isn't already highly visible elsewhere. Welcome to the New GameDev.Net Experience. Read in. Of course I'm just following the lead of Microsoft, because word is out that everybody who signed up for the preview of the New Xbox Experience now has access. That's an entire day early! I of course did not sign up because I figured I wouldn't end up getting a preview so screw the whole thing. Oops. Anyway, lots of people are going to get their New Experiences tonight, and I suppose the rest of us will have to wait until tomorrow. The biggest news of course is the Xiivatars, customizable characters that can even be used in games (though sadly they're not supported in XNA right now). I'm very impressed with Microsoft's creativity and originality on this one, which should come as no surprise to anyone who reads my Tuesday Dailies. I just wish they'd creatively add a web browser to the thing. A Blu-Ray addon would be good too. Maybe I'm being unfair to the NXE, though -- it does add streaming from Netflix (including HD), hard drive installation of games, and XNA Community Games. In the world of computer hardware, Intel just launched their Core i7 processors. If you haven't been following the development and previews of this chip line, I will go ahead and summize: they're goddamn processing monsters. They're even unlocked for overclocking, so you can pull out that unused can of liquid nitrogen and go wild if you want. AMD meanwhile is counting on earlier availability of multisocket configurations for their new chips to give them an advantage. This is of course because their processors are simply no match for the Intel offerings one on one. I'm kind of disappointed, personally, because in the Athlon64's heyday, the competition between Intel and AMD was really impressive and interesting. Now it seems to be mostly about Intel pummeling AMD in new and more creative ways while AMD reconfigures itself. Remember that lawsuit against Microsoft about "Vista Capable" branding? Basically it's a class action claiming that the branding of computers as Vista capable was deceptive advertising by Microsoft because those computers could only run the Home Basic edition (which sucks). Anyway, although the details of the actual lawsuit are kind of tedious, it has resulted in a lot of emails within Microsoft being made public by the court system, and there's interesting stuff in there. In particular, it's interesting to see how pressure from Intel on Microsoft caused the rules of the branding to be changed. It's best to read the article (and follow some links) for the full story, but suffice it to say there's a lot of angry hardware vendors, a lot of angry and confused consumers, and one operating system standing very awkwardly in the corner as a storm continues around it and its successor looms on the horizon. This is what makes technology fun. Lastly, we can get back to game development news with a Q&A with the Ensemble Director of Technology, discussing Microsoft's decision to shut the studio down. (Also linked yesterday.) He also talks about the Halo MMO a bit, and openly admits that World of Warcraft was being used as the model. (Personally I subscribe to Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw's theory that all MMOs want to be World of Warcraft.) It's a fairly short interview, but there's also an interview with Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. As usual, Wardell is a pretty cocky and self-confident sort of guy, but it's interesting to see what the smaller independent studios are interested in doing. I have a question. Can you have too much LittleBigPlanet? I'm thinking no. Yes, even despite cheesy Steve Irwin imitators.

It's a slow, cold Monday here, so here is an attempt to put out a GDNet Daily to stoke the flames of righteous outrage. I'm sure I've been blacklisted from 96% of game studios out there, and probably marked for death by Bill Roper's squad of elite assassins. Ensemble, makers of fine RTS titles and the unreleased Halo Wars, is finally speaking out about Microsoft's treatment of them. Insomniac also gave an interview. Am I the only one who constantly confuses them with Naughty Dog? Greatly despised antagonist Infogrames Atari is not dead, really! Games industry juggernaut Nintendo has announced that they won't make a Wii successor any time soon, most likely because the console is still selling like crack-infused hotcakes. If your grandmother is looking for more games to play in the nursing home, therefore, you might want to buy her Guitar Praise, a Christian rock Guitar Hero clone. No word yet on whether Judas Priest is on the tracklist. Capcom made me cry by refusing to put Street Fighter IV in arcades. This is despite the fact that I have no idea where a local arcade stocking fighting games is, other than at a movie theatre several dozen miles from my place of residence. In indie news (finally!) Ludum Dare 13 is the Dec 5 - 7 weekend, so mark off your calendar. I will try to keep notifying you of this advancing date, but the LD squad are nice chaps and you could do much worse than to spend 48 hours straight kept awake through drug abuse and pinching yourself as you wait for your code to compile. Finally, before we go today, I must remind U.S. Americans that Black Friday is coming soon, and many of your favourite game-stocking retail outlets have deals on videogames. You should consider holding purchases off until then, which adds the metagame, I am told, of being forced to brutalize housewives and fight for your life in the parking lot before you even get the game.

Richard Garriott’s last great effort to make the MMO of our dreams is to shut down in February 2009. It’s always particularly sad when an MMO shuts down - they don’t get to be saved from the bargain bin like other games. They’re just gone. Sniff.

The official message is here:

So it is with regret that we must announce that Tabula Rasa will end live service on February 28, 2009. Before we end the service, we’ll make Tabula Rasa servers free to play starting on January 10, 2009.

Free stuff! Hurray! I mean: Yes, what a shame.

Related stories:

• Tabula Rasa Dated
• Operation Immortality - DNA In Spaaaaaace
• NCSoft Austin In Trouble?

Posted by rossignol. | No comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: ncsoft, Tabula-Rasa
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

The latest in Tilted Mill’s attempt to release forty-two games this month continued with the release of Mosby’s Confederacy their skirmish-level Civil-War Guerrilla-’em-up. I didn’t post about it when it hit Steam, as there’s no demo so we’d have a content-light post for a game we hadn’t played. What if it was rubbish? What if it deleted your hard-drive when it looked at it? What if it featured too much non-period mauve uniforms? I had to play and find out. I’ve found out. The answers are “It’s not”, “It doesn’t” and “None seen in the hour or so I’ve played of it”. It’s $20 on steam if you fancy throwing down cash on a whim, and you can find some more initial impressions beneath the cut.
(...)
Read the rest of Mosby’s Confederacy: Release Impressions (607 words)

Posted by KieronGillen. | 2 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Mosby's Confederacy, Tilted Mill
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

A Friday evening to bring you some GameSetLinks highlights, and I've decided to switch to eight links per post with a little more detail for each - as opposed to ten with minimal description. Hey, it's subtle, but if it makes GSW HQ happy...

Anyhow, quite apart from the actual release of the (pictured) Night Of The Cephalopods, scattered in here are Esquire's full Jason Rohrer piece, an odd Japanese print ad for God Of War, James Mielke's finally fantastic marriage proposal, and more besides.

The Yukon river:

STANFORD Magazine: November/December 2008 > Farm Report > News > Virtual Worlds
On Henry Lowood and friends' virtual worlds and classic game preservation efforts, with an interesting quote from a Library Of Congress rep on the importance of video games: "Besides showing us how society has entertained itself, they also provide a graphic picture of how technology itself has evolved over the decades.”

press the ACTION BUTTON!!: Tim Rogers reviews Gears Of War 2
Filled with enjoyably inflammatory piquant rhetoric, as per normal: 'What we’re saying is, if you’re going to make a game that blatantly rips off another game, for god’s sake, rip off Gears of War 2, not BioShock.'

1UP EIC Proposes With The Help of Final Fantasy Creators
James Mielke "...called upon two of the creators of the Final Fantasy series -- composer Nobuo Uematsu and artist/designer Yoshitaka Amano -- to help him out. Amano designed the ring for him and Uematsu composed a melody that played as he proposed." I really like the ring design.

Future of Video Game Design - Jason Rohrer's Programming Online Games - Esquire
The companion article to Rohrer's new game on Esquire. It's a really interesting outsider view of the state of independent games, and some of the mixed emotions people have relating to them. The fact it can be written shows we've arrived.

xkcd - A Webcomic - Theft of the Magi
Uhoh, Left 4 Dead vs. Xbox 360 tragedy in the making from the perpetually wry webcomic.

Dusk and Dawn » Salaryman of War
An ad for God Of War PSP from earlier this year in Famitsu: 'I’m not sure what about this ad I like better: the flame-rimmed salaryman going batshit with the Blades of Chaos or the ad copy proclaiming this game a remedy for today’s stressful Japanese workplace.'

Night of the Cephalopods - official site
Oo, Artsy Game Incubator plus Lovecraftian goodness equals an awesome-looking PC indie freeware game, downloadable now, good folks.

An American Game Journalist in Paris | GameCulture
John Gaudiosi: 'This was my fourth videogame trip to Paris this year.' Seriously? Not really sure what this has to do with the ECA or GameCulture.com, which is normally very smart, but all of Gaudiosi's posts for the site just seem to be playing up his oldschool publisher-funded worldwide jaunts.

I’m not entirely sure why last year’s Defender of the Crown: Heroes Live Forever is going around the demo-sites again when its been out for over a year. But in the early morning time, I found myself oddly drawn to play it. I had one eye on the reviews last year, where everyone tore it apart. First one to turn up is Gamespot UK’s, which is characteristic in its laceration and its criticism. Which is primarily that it’s some manner of desecration of the past when their actual problem is that the past wasn’t that good to start with. After all, if it were any good, they wouldn’t mind just a minor aesthetic scrub-up. Defender of the Crown, like the vast majority of Cinemaware’s games, were deeply strange products of their time, constructed around ideas which are pretty much discredited now. And playing it… well, I think maybe that’s a shame.
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Read the rest of Defender of Defender of the Crown? Well, A Bit… (606 words)

Posted by KieronGillen. | 15 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Cinemaware, Defender of the Crown, demo, free
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

Now, here's something interesting. In the raft of press releases we get sent here at GSW, we came across Heileen, created by the folks at Tycoon Games.

It's, intriguingly enough, a PC indie title that's a "historical-fiction visual novel game with multiple endings", and the release for it has Tycoon's Riva Celso insisting: “Visual novels are the next wave of interactive fiction games. They're like a hybrid of books and games - they're deeper than the average video game since they're narrative-based, and they're interactive; what the player does affects the story and ultimately the outcome.”

The game, for which there's PC, Mac and Linux demos available, and 4500 screens of dialog, 8 chapters and 3 different endings, "...tells the tale of a young girl from the 17th Century, Heileen. Her merchant uncle leaving her no choice, she undertakes a voyage to the New World. She'll meet old friends, like her childhood friend Marie, and get the chance to befriend other people, like John, the young, dashing sailor, Marco, the ship's cook, and Lora, the shameless mistress accompanying her uncle on the voyage."

Of course, those who know the visual novel genre will realize that they are pretty popular - in a niche way - in Japan, but have never really made a big impact in the West, primarily because they're not interactive enough for a lot of people who consider themselves gamers, one suspects.

In any case, I caught up with Italian native Celso, who has made a surprisingly eclectic set of homebrew-ish titles, including Universal Boxing Manager and the RPG/card-ish Magic Stones, and asked him a few questions exclusively for GameSetWatch via email about his new game and his thoughts on the genre:

What made you decide to try the visual novel, given it's popular in Japan but not so much in the West?

First of all because I like them. I remember playing those kinds of games already 10 years ago, like True Love, Paradise Heights 1 & 2, and so on. Second because I'm an indie, that means I can try making any game I want, and not always follow the "market rules".

Is romance as major part of your visual novels as it is in Japan, or even explicit content?

Romance is present, and sensuality as well (the character of Lora for example) but there's more than that. It's basically a story and there are choices like in real life, which influences your relationships with the other crew member. There's not only love in the game, but also friendship, hate, envy and more.

Who do you think the target market is for this kind of product?

I believe everyone who enjoy reading books or comics, and sometimes thinks "If I was the protagonist, I would have made this other choice".

This is quite different from your previous products, which include sports simulators - why the shift?

I love making simulation games, but they require lots of effort, research, and unfortunately, big name licenses to sell well. Playing a soccer game where all player names are false isn't as exciting as playing an "officially licensed game". Beside that, I am always experimenting with various games genres. I did a card/RPG (Magic Stones) and a space wargame (Supernova 2) too. However, I'm really enjoying making visual novels so probably will make more in the near future.

Do you think the relative non-interactivity of the genre presents a problem in the West?

It could be, I don't want to lie. Some players really don't get what's so exciting in those kind of games and I can understand them.

In Heileen I tried to break a bit from the classic visual novel scheme introducing a "Quest System" inside the game and a final rating similar to those you find in Sid Meier's games, to add more replay value.

What are your favorite examples of the visual novel genre?

Well I've mentioned some earlier, if I have to talk about more recent titles, I liked Hanako's game Fatal Hearts, but honestly apart for that there isn't anything else that caught my attention.