Gamertell

Industry-friendly candidates will be getting financial support this election year from a political action committee established last fall by the Electronic Software Association (ESA). The New York Times spoke to ESA chief executive Michael D. Gallagher on Tuesday (January 15, 2008) regarding the status of the new committee and how it could affect politicians this year:

We will be writing checks to campaigns by the end of this quarter. This is an important step in the political maturation process of the industry that we are ready to take now. This is about identifying and supporting champions for the game industry on Capitol Hill so that they support us.

With the presidential candidates having already surpassed the twenty million dollar mark a full year before the election, $5,000 hardly seems like big money. But Gallagher’s action committee intends to write about $50,000 to $100,000 worth of donations, which is…

MORE »

A US Army press release sent out earlier this week (January 17, 2008)  is crediting Paxton Galvanek, twenty-eight, with saving a life last year because of skills he received while playing America’s Army, a first-person shooter based on and funded by the US military.

On November 23, 2007, Galvanek witnessed a sports utility vehicle loose control while driving west on I-40 in North Carolina with his family. Galvanek was able to remove two men from the wreckage and administer first aid to one of the passengers who had lost two fingers. America’s Army project director Colonel Casey Wardynski had this to say ((IN THE PRESS RELEASE?)) regarding Galvanek’s actions that day:

Because of the training he received in [the] America’s Amry virtual classroom, Mr. Galvanek had mastered the basics of first aid and had the confidence to take appropriate action when others might do nothing. He took the initiative to assess the situation, prioritize actions and apply the correct procedures…Paxton is a true hero. We are pleased to have played a role in providing the lifesaving training that he employed so successfully at the scene.

This causes a few interesting conjectures to drift through the brain, should the parties in thought be willing…

MORE »

Stubb’s Bar-B-Q in Austin Texas is set to host the second annual Expo for Interactive Entertainment, Independent and Original on March 6, 2008. The event, announced this Tuesday (January 15, 2008) and cleverly abbreviated E.I.E.I.O., will be an instantly memorable acronym for fans of the children’s song classic regarding Mr. McDonald’s ownership of a farm.

Gamecock Media Group has teamed up with South by Southwest for this year’s events. The less cleverly dubbed “SXSWeek” (missing a ‘W’ there guys, you have to follow the rules) will run March 7-16 with the Interactive portion running March 7-11. Among the development companies already slated for E.I.E.I.O are Wideload, Red Fly Studio, Spark Unlimited, Replay Studios, Firefly Studios, and Timegate Studios. The show will include demos of Hail to the Chimp, Section 8, Mushroom Men, Legendary, Sabotage, Dungeon Hero, and Insecticide. More developers and games will be announced later.

Plans for the evening concert included this interesting plea built right into the press release:

E.I.E.I.O. 2008 will be an all day event at Stubb?s and will lead into a concert that evening. The evening shenanigans will be open to the local gaming public (via tickets issued prior to the event). Gamecock is hoping to feature bands with members of the gaming press in them for the concert, so if you write about games and play in a band, please contact .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) about bookings.

I’m going to be honest with you. I was once in a little band by the name of “Cock of the Rock.” People didn’t like the name. And why not? It’s obviously phallic, and thusly…

MORE »

The Hollywood Reporter confirmed yesterday (January 17, 2008) that Jerry “Blockbuster” Bruckheimer has teamed up with Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner to launch yet another attempt at bringing video game movies into the realm of respectable cinema. So far the feat has been unattainable in spite of a glut of entrees, the most recent being the spectacularly horrible Hitman. 

Reporter Paul Hyman quotes Bruckheimer’s interest in the series and his ambivalence toward the dismal track record for game-to-movie crossovers:

I like to look at arenas that haven’t been exposed to audiences for quite a while and then surprise moviegoers with the way we’re doing it. The ‘Prince of Persia’ characters are wonderful and they exist in a period of time and a venue that’s interesting.

When something hits you and excites you, that’s what you do. I’ve played the game ... it’s a great game ... and I believe the movie is one people will want to go see.

Mechner, who wrote the screenplay, chronicles the creative process:

If I’d tried to adapt the game’s storyline beat for beat into a screenplay, we would have wound up with a ‘B’-level survival-horror movie about a warrior prince who spends most of his time fighting off ravaging, zombie-like sand creatures—basically, ‘Resident Evil’ in the desert,” Mechner explains. “You might make a good movie from that, but it definitely wouldn’t be a Disney-Bruckheimer ‘A’-level summer blockbuster.

Which all sounds fantastic on paper, but can it fly? I’ll tell you the God’s honest right now, I kind of doubt it. The video game movie is like the sword in the stone of cinema, so who can blame Bruckheimer for wanting to have a try where everyone else has failed? But moviegoers have been burned time and time again here, and it’s going to be a tough sell.

Still, it’s good to hear the top guys making this kind of noise — naïve perhaps, but they’ve got their hearts in the right place. If it were a bunch of studio execs sitting around a table spouting this kind of nonsense, then I’d be worried. Here’s hoping that they get it right this time.

Read [Hollywood Reporter]  Also Read [Penny Arcade]

• Ubisoft announces Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands
• Uwe Boll confirms he is working on Bloodrayne 3
• “Welcome to Macintosh” and “MacHEADS” to be shown on CNBC January 4th-5th

It was the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even the three friends who’d been waiting for Halo 3’s matchmaker to find a game for like, two %#$ing hours.

Were you one of the thousands, possibly millions of gamers who had their precious holiday break defecated upon by what is widely regarded as one of the most heinous holiday !&*@ ups in the entire history of human endeavor? Me too. (Caveat: by ‘widely’ I mean myself, my brother and his buddy Dylan, but we are unanimous in our agreement, which counts for something, I think).

And we were not alone in our frustrations during our most recent happy-Jesus-birthday-time. Oh no, not alone at all. The Texans! Keith Kay, Orlando Perez and Shannon Smith were with us on that cold winter night. They were with us in spirit as they cursed Bill Gates and swore at the television and threw controllers at their pets as matchmaking failed time and time again. The three Texans, as a matter of fact, swore so many times that they accidentally summoned a lawyer from the depths of the underworld and he agreed to file a class action lawsuit on their behalf.

News of the lawsuit tore through the blogosphere with a speed paralleling that of light. MTV got a chance to speak with the lawyer because they’ve pretty much given up on music and…

MORE »

Product: Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation
Price: $59.99
System(s): Xbox 360
Rating: 7.1/10
Publisher (Developer): Namco Bandai Games
ESRB Rating: “Teen”
Pros: Solid gameplay, great graphics, continuation of great franchise
Cons: Not much replay value or variety of gameplay
Overall: A good flight simulator that you’ll think is 68-73% awesome

Like many young children, I dreamt of becoming a fighter pilot. To be able to transcend the limits of gravity and soar amongst the clouds, surely there could be no greater experience than this. LEGO kits would constantly be assembled into futuristic fighter jets, and grandparents were always telling my cousins and I to slow down as we tore around the house, propelling our imaginative planes with less-than-aerodynamic sprinting.

The dream lasted until I realized what a god-awful amount of work it would take, and that the end result would likely involve a lot of killing. Not my bag. Luckily, the poor bastards who did end up becoming pilots had to train on flight simulators first, and so now we have them. Regardless of how you feel about the military, they do come up with some pretty cool ####.

The evolution of commercial flight simulators ranges from the utilitarian training genre to this year’s super slick 360 release, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation. There are many interesting stops along the way, including a healthy dose of Star Wars related material, but Bandai Namco’s latest chapter in the Ace Combat franchise is a fair indicator of where the genre sits today. Interestingly, it’s actually the ninth installment; the first eight were published on other consoles (PS1, PS2, GBA, and PSP.) They’ve dressed it up a bit for Gates and his cronies but it’s essentially the same gaming experience, only with more drool.

Design: 8.0/10 If you’ve ever played any other game by either Namco or Bandai you will recognize the straight-to-the-point game design. It is definitely the “only do one thing but do it well” approach, and they succeed here wonderfully. All of the previous Ace Combat games feature planes and conflicts loosely rooted in history, and Fires of Liberation follows that path doggedly. Aircraft buffs will recognize the real life counterparts of the F-16C, A-10A, F117A and F-14D planes. And yes, the variable geometry wings on the F-14 sweep back at higher speeds. Tom Cruise wig not included.

The planes are all wonderfully modeled, and the designers really opened up the graphics for the game’s first appearance on the 360. Lens flares skip off cockpit windows and condensation forms in the slipstream for high-G turns. They pulled out all the stops for this one, including satellite imaging for the terrain. Imagine flying over a section of Google-Earth but with clouds and surface-to-air-missile sites too.

Control of the aircraft is necessarily dumbed down for console flight sims. There’s just no way you could accurately transfer the complex control system for a real fighter jet to the 360 controller. There are no flares or chaff for example, key defensive tools for real jet pilots. The left and right bumpers control yaw but there’s a setting which will let you bypass that as well if you’ve absolutely no idea how an aircraft stays in the air. (Read a book, for ####’s goodness’ sake.)

Every plane gets three weapons systems, a default missile and gun emplacement and a special ordinance that varies by aircraft. Missile guidance systems are mysteriously crappy for enemy planes but almost always work for you if you’re on the right attack vector. The special weapons generally possess longer ranges and more badass-ery but lack universal targeting, meaning you can target either ground or air units but not both. The exception to this rule is the ADMM system for the CFA-44 Nosferatu, the game’s centerpiece plane. Its missile system could target Christ’s left testicle if asked. More on the vampire later.

Features: 6.5/10 Versatility is the most challenging obstacle to overcome for any game company, and Ace Combat 6 runs aground here. There exists an almost unquenchable thirst for innovative game experience in today’s market, and this is where many of the hot titles are coming up short. Some do better than others, but overall there seems to be a limited number of ways that you can play a next-generation game.

Ace Combat Six has one universal rule: fly fast. It’s great heaping bunches of fun, but the right-hand seizes up every now and then because it’s always pulling down the right trigger, which is the afterburn. The cruising spees of each aircraft varies, but each is universally prone to missile attacks which are fatal at any of the harder difficulty levels. And there are six of them. Why are there six difficulty levels? Because the only way you’d replay the game was if it was just a bit harder. That, plus you can only unlock the Nosferatu by beating the game on the harder difficulty levels.

There are a few nice little bells on this game that keep it interesting, mind you. Mid-air refueling and carrier landings are pretty neat. There’s a playback feature, but the camera angles are all preset. There’s a music player that lets you play the tracks from the game, but it’s pretty standard fare. The exceptions are the tracks from the very last level—they’re actually pretty good, if you’re willing to sit down and listen to them. Which most people aren’t.

The most interesting feature is the free flight option, which allows you to play any of the fifteen missions without having to worry about getting shot at. Some of the landscapes are truly breathtaking and are worth a look just by themselves. The canyon levels are especially well done, and this mode of gameplay is certainly a nod to the young aspiring pilot.

Performance: 7.5/10 Again, the game only does one thing, but it does it well. No bugs or slow frame rates, just solid flight simulation from start to finish. Each plane has a rating pentagon (very similar to Chromehounds) that gauges stability, defense, mobility, speed, air-to-air and air-to-ground capabilities. Planes with low stability are easy to stall and planes with high mobility turn on a dime. The offensive ratings of each plane are naturally relative to the skill of the pilot, but everything else is spot on.

Performance wise, the CFA-44 Nosferatu is by far the best plane. It’s the aircraft that Ace Combat 6 is meant to be played with, and the only one that will pass muster at the hardest difficulty settings. Lacking only in defense and stability, the Nosferatu sports a sleek profile with a set of ailerons by the cockpit that look like the collar on Count Dracula’s infamous cape. The plane is huge, fast, and the aforementioned special weapon fires twelve warheads that track 360 degrees. It’s literally a winged demon.

Overall:  7.1/10 Ace Combat Six: Fires of Liberation loses points for not having a whole lot of “there” there, if you know what I mean, but it’s still a solid little game. Fans of the genre will enjoy sinking their teeth into one of the few console games that offers up a decent flight simulation. First timers will enjoy the gentle learning curve and helpful tutorials. Hardcore flight enthusiasts will lament the absence of flap controls but will eventually have a good time after overcoming their central issue, which is washing out of flight school.

Part of the reason this game is getting panned is because the story isn’t what you would call deathless prose. The gorgeous detailing that went into the planes was conspicuously absent from both the voice acting and the plot. The enemy pilots are cooler than the good guys, but still not nearly as cool as the pilots in Top Gun, which should give you a pretty good idea. All in all, these are some of the most effeminate and whiny fighter pilots ever imagined.

The best part of this game (besides a mid-to-highly awesome unlockable gamer pic) is that it’s the one that comes the closest to those childhood playtimes where we dreamed of taking to the skies. Nothing can compare with the power of the imagination, but I found myself running free flights over and over again, seeing if I could fly underneath the bridge that spans the first level bay. It’s fun to blow things up, but there’s nothing like tearing a fighter jet through a 200-meter gap at supersonic speeds. And that’s precisely why they won’t let me fly a real one.

Read [Xbox 360]

• Gamertell Review:  Wallace and Gromit’s The Last Resort for PC
• Opinion: Klonoa for Wii is awesome, we need more games like this on Wii
• Gamertell Review: Wallace and Gromit: The Bogey Man for PC

Product: Bazooka Café
Price: $34.95
System Requirements: Pentium II 300 mhz, 96 MB RAM, Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista
Rating: 6.6/10
Pros: Good erotic art, low system requirements, funny and fairly well written
Cons: Low gaming value, culture shocks, grandma will think you’re a pervert
Overall: Selective adult fans will enjoy, not a good gift idea for Nana

You have to love the Japanese. Why? Because we dropped nuclear bombs on them, and that was rude. This is why we have to react with polite interest when they come up with #### that we think is weird culturally, like sushi or cartoon porn. In our culture, cartoons are for bright Saturday mornings and breakfast cereals. In Japan, cartoons are more likely to eviscerate each other with samurai swords or engage in lewd sexual acts. Which is probably a better way to sell cereal.

Which brings us to our game. Bazooka Café is a mixture of all of these things, except for evisceration and the breakfast cereal, because in Japan they call it “porridge.” I am a certified Japan expert.

Bazooka Café is what is called a bishoujo game, which translates literally as “pretty young girl.” This makes you think that Bungie might have done better to call it “bad-ass cyborg” instead of Halo, and you’d be right. According to Wikipedia a certain online source that my editor has expressly forbidden me to cite, and which I personally believe to be more accurate than the bible, these games will routinely sell a million copies in Japan. They don’t sell in western markets because we don’t do as well with freaky sex ####. There’s an entry for this phenomenon too, under the term “conservative Christian.”

You play Bazooka café by reading the story and then selecting different actions at certain points in the game, kind of like those choose-your-own-adventure novels you used to read as a kid. Each time you play through the game, you can choose a different action and unlock a different ending (read: sleep with a different women).

Seriously, this game has samurai swords. Well, actually they’re called Kendo swords and they’re made out of bamboo, but I hear they hurt like hell. Narumi is a waitress who works at Ariel café, and she also happens to be a Kendo instructor. She used to date Hideyuki, the game’s protagonist, who inherited from his father both the café and its corresponding propensity to attract women with Olympian proportions. Hideyuki soon finds that running the café will mostly involve tenderly contemplating the emotional problems of his staff while occasionally making comments like, “As a bonus, she has a huge rack as well.”

And just as the sensation of chewing and swallowing raw fish wrapped in rice and seaweed is fairly disconcerting at first, the notion of sitting down at a computer to seduce fake women is disorienting, and feels somehow to flout Darwin’s theory of evolution. Shouldn’t I be trying to talk to real women, you ask? But hey, let’s face it, usually that never works out so you might as well play this game where the women are impossible to not sleep with. We’ll learn a few interesting things about Japanese culinary culture as well, such as the fact that a lot of people have their drinks after they eat lunch instead of before. Also, there’s apparently much more restaurant sex than in America.

Design—6/10
Expect the traditional Japanese aesthetic on this one. Big eyes, small nose, ri-god-damn-diculous huge breasts in every god-damn scene. Truthfully, this ended up being kind of a turn off. They looked painful. In almost every instance where they were not barely sheathed beneath some strained fabric, I was thinking to myself that these girls are going to have serious back problems in the future.

There’s a preset number of stills for each scene that let you know how the girls are feeling based on the discussion. The ones for angry and sad are particularly well done, and fans of Manga will recognize these right away. A variety of backdrop scenes expand the location of the game so you don’t feel like you’re always in the restaurant, which can get to be tedious.

The voice acting is haunting. Passion may be the universal language, but dirty talk in Japanese waxes traumatic. A few times I thought I was being yelled at.

Features—6.5/10
This game features a truly exceptional save/load interface with over five pages/screens of save game slots. That’s a lot. There’s a gallery where you can view all of the “artistic cut-scenes” lets call them, for each of the game’s endings that you’ve unlocked.Included on the install disc is the bonus Valentines Day Special, which asks the tantalizing question “What if you didn’t have to choose?” This means threesomes. Lot’s of ‘em. The game also comes with a locker-sized poster that would be a fantastic way to get kicked out of Catholic school if you were looking for one.

Performance—7.5/10
The game runs well, even on my trusty old Dell Dimension, the first computer made in the early Paleolithic period. The game is only 546 MB, a little over 300 of which are the voice recordings. This is why G-Collections (the game’s distributor) makes a desperate plea not to pirate the game right in the instruction manual. They also ask you to call the authorities should you encounter one of the many roving groups of bishoujo game pirates that roam our city streets.

Overall—6.6/10
Here is the essential rub (no pun intended) for bishoujo — is it even a game at all? Some would contend that reading text and pressing the enter key does not a game constitute. After all, there are generally less than ten branch points in the game, and no matter which response you choose somebody is going to end up getting naked somewhere. The game even has an “Auto” feature, which is a polite way of saying hands free.

Barring masturbation, I was feeling fairly left out of the gaming experience until Narumi hit the protagonist with this line of dialouge: “If you’ve got enough free time to dance around like a little freak over there, then get your ass in the kitchen and help out! A bunch of customers just showed up.”

Which, of course, made me fall totally in love with her. And herein lies the real core of these kinds of games. We oftentimes judge games by their ability to establish an alternate reality, a complete and separate world. Admittedly, endowments often flout the laws of physics and physiology, and the protagonist is somewhat of a douche-bag (he would be sued and jailed in our country for sexual harassment, instantly) but there are still real characters there, each with their individual set of problems, desires, quirks, and ridiculously oversize braziers. Bazooka Café accomplishes this by forcing you to tap your way through literally hours of text before any of the clothes come off.

Which is probably why it confounds most Americans. They come to it looking for a game and find pornography or they come to it looking for pornography and find a game. Either way, they seem dissatisfied, generally give up and go get McDonalds. Little known fact: bishoujo is the real cause of the American obesity problem.

Read [J-List] Also Read [Play Asia] Also Read [G-Collections ] Read [Advance Anime Network]

EDITOR’S NOTE: J-List and Play Asia feature items not suitable for gamers under the age of 18. Please click with caution.

• Important Importables: Vanillaware
• Marvelous bringing Harvest Moon to web browsers
• Capcom announces Monster Hunter Portable 3rd - monsters go into hiding

I found myself in line at my local supermarket the other day when I noticed a large munitions dump of annoyingly orange 2 liter bottles glaring at me from the end of the checkout line. The bottles contained Mountain Dew’s brand spanking new Halo 3 themed drink, innovatively titled Game Fuel. Now, I pride myself on being something of an intellectual. My friends call it arrogance mixed with a little antisocialism, but you and I know better—I’m a pretty smart guy, actually. So why was I thinking about buying two liters of Game Fuel? I didn’t even need one liter of Game Fuel, much less a conveniently packaged set of two.  Did I think it would taste good? No. Was I thirsty? Absolutely not, and I had just bought beer. Was it because there was a life-sized cardboard replica of the master chief positioned strategically next to the display, his helmeted visage gazing stoically into the distance? Maybe. Was it because each bottle featured a special Halo 3 design, 40% more caffeine, and a burst of citrus flavor? You bet ‘yer ass.

When I got home I set the bottle on the table. I looked at the Game fuel, and the Game Fuel looked at me. It must have been my imagination, but I fancied that the bottle fairly shook, vibrating ever so slightly as the pent up energies and anti-gravity physics that any Halo 3 product must surely contain railed to be free of the thin plastic prison binding it. I knew it was time to finish the fight, as they say. So I poured out a couple of fingers of the stuff and down the hatch it went.

As I’ve said, I consider myself something of an academic, but I’ve never felt as stupid or as disgusted by something at the same time as when I took that first, putrid slug of Game Fuel. My eyes watered, I briefly lost the capacity for speech.  I’m proud to say that I maintained bowl control, but it was a close call, let me tell you.
“How does it taste?” asked my girlfriend. “Good,” I spluttered, eager to avoid the I-told-you-so look for as long as possible. The finish was killing me, something in-between the way you’d think plastic fruit would taste and the smell of an overflowing port-a-potty on a hot and humid summer’s day. My girlfriend left the room and I took the opportunity to scour my tongue with paper towels to try and get the taste out. I turned away from the kitchen sink and there it was, still looking at me—a mostly full two liter bottle of Game Fuel. What the hell am I going to do with the rest of this? I thought.

Several ideas occurred to me, the most obvious of which was the radiator fluid substitute because I imagine that’s what radiator fluid would taste like if you carbonated it. Then I thought that the bottles could be used in some massive abstract art piece; the color of the liquid is quite extraordinary, it’s like getting punched in the retina just looking at it. Pouring it out over any sort of vegetation or where it might make it into the water table was out of the question for me, no way. I’m an environmentalist for your information, and Game Fuel can’t be good for plant life.

So it comes to this: Is anyone out there willing to offer Game Fuel disposal services? Millions of young gamers around the world will strip away the first few layers of stomach cells playing the most anticipated game of the season while drinking the least digestible beverage of all time. There’s going to be extra, and you know it. Perhaps Gamertell’s next contest will be to see who can come up with the most inventive way of getting rid of the stuff? Send suggestions, please. And for the love of God, be quick about it…it’s still watching me.

• Halo 3: ODST tourney this weekend in New York City
• Bungie asks fans to “Be a Hero” for Haiti
• Gamertell Review: Mountain Dew World of Warcraft Game Fuel

Xbox Live’s hippest girl gamer got a feature in the web edition of the Chicago Tribune yesterday (September 10, 2007) where she wasted no time in alerting the hordes of mostly male gamers that they’re still being rude pricks:

“For some women, the minute they open their mouths, they get trash-talked or hit on or both,” Phillips said.

Phillips went on to estimate that women comprise ten to twenty percent of Xbox’s online community, which means that (as of E3) there are up to 140,000 girl gamers out there. That’s a lot of people, and they’re not being treated with…

MORE »

Sierra announced a new Tomb Raider spin-off Wednesday (August 22nd, 2007) titled WET which is scheduled to be released sometime in 2008. The game will contain “seamless integration of intense gunplay, death-defying acrobatics and exciting swordplay, framed by breathtaking art direction and unparalleled animation quality.”

Andre Emerson, executive producer for the game, details the characteristics of Rubi (the stripper-esque name of the new heroine) in this interview…

MORE »