Child’s Play and gamerDNA are teaming up to raise money for charity this holiday season. Beginning December 2nd, leading game community websites will be prompting members to complete the gamerDNA Decades of Influence Quiz throughout December. The multiple choice quiz helps gamers discover which gaming trends over the last 4 decades have the most influence on their personal gaming style.

Here’s how it works according to the press release.

After completing the quiz, participants will receive a unique virtual badge featuring their quiz results and the name of the community they represent. Using the embeddable codes provided, participants will race to share their badge in as many online locations as possible. The community that shares the most badges will select which Children’s Hospital is to receive a donation of 6 bundles of Nintendo DS systems and games from gamerDNA.”

Child’s Play is a charity begun in 2003 by Penny Arcade creators, Mike “Gabe” Krahulik and Jerry “Tycho” Holkins. All donations go to Children’s Hospitals across the country. Thanks to gamers, Child’s Play has been very successful endeavor.

“Child’s Play has done so much for kids in need, helping to make their lives a little easier and more fun,” said Gene Mauro, VP of Marketing and Business Development at gamerDNA. “We commend all that the organization has accomplished and are happy to contribute to their charity this holiday season with this new contest.”

“Last year was a successful one for Child’s Play, with over 1.3 million dollars in donations from gamers around the globe,” said Kristin Lindsay, Project Coordinator for Child’s Play. “We are excited to have gamerDNA help us raise donations and provide a fun contest and quiz for gamers to participate in along the way.”

For more information on the contest visit the gamerDNA Non-Profit Child’s Play Charity Event website.

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Square Enix announced this morning that their newest RPG, The Last Remnant has shipped for the Xbox 360. Developed by tri Ace, long ago, the world was filled with Remnants - mysterious artifacts from an ancient civilization. But as time passed, the powers of the Remnants began to shift the world’s balance. As the rift widened between those who ruled and those who were ruled over, a new era dawned: one of countless frays brought upon the world by those enslaved by their own lust for power.

Storyline: Rush lives with his sister Irina on secluded Eulam Island, far from the power struggles for Remnants that are occurring back on the mainland. However, this peaceful life is shattered when his sister is suddenly kidnapped by a mysterious group of soldiers right before his eyes. He immediately sets off after them, unaware of the evils of the outside world but determined to find his sister at any cost.

In celebration of the release, Square Enix has sent us two new trailers.  Above, you will notice a trailer showing off a battle sequence in the game, and the posted after the break is called Crookfen which gives you an idea of just how lush the gaming world is in The Last Remnant.

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• Last Remnant Site Now Live
• Square Enix Unveils The Last Remnant
• Square Enix Did Not Promise Final Fantasy XIII in 2008
• Square Enix's The Last Remnant 'Debut' Trailer
• Square Enix Plans on Warming Up Your Xbox 360 this Winter with: The Last Remnant

The XNA Creators' Club is being touted as a way for semi-pro and amateur developers to bring their designs to the masses via XNA Community Games, which launch alongside the New Xbox Experience today.

At its recent San Francisco XNA Community Games event, however, it became clear that a lot of the developers who have created the most polished and ready-for-market games on the service actually do have professional backgrounds.

At the event, we had a chance to speak with Nathan Fouts, founder and president of Mommy's Best Games (as well as its only full-time employee.) His game, Weapon of Choice, is a neo-retro throwback that brings to mind classics like Contra while embracing contemporary design choices.

Despite its hardest-of-hardcore looks and (nearly) one-man creation, it sprang not from the mind of an enthusiastic amateur, but a seasoned professional.

Though Fouts left Insomniac Games to found his own company, Insomniac CEO Ted Price, when recently asked, called him "an instrumental part of Resistance: Fall of Man... one of the most creative programmers I've ever met."

What is it that drove Fouts to leave his job at one of the most successful independent developers in the country and strike out on his own, and why through XNA Community Games? The answers may surprise you.

Did you have any sort of professional background in development before you started this project?

Nathan Fouts: I've been in the industry for over a decade now -- I guess I'm getting old! I've worked at Running with Scissors, I've worked at N-Space, I've worked at Insomniac Games.

I actually designed and programmed the weapons on Resistance: Fall of Man, the launch title. And I did the bosses on Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

So you actually have extensive experience on high-budget, next-gen projects. You decided to give that up and make your own project?

NF: Yeah. It's kind of crazy. We were making good coin at Insomniac Games.

They still are, without you. (laughs)

NF: Oh, yeah. Everybody there. That place... it's a great place to work. Basically, though, we had a child -- I don't know if you guys are interested in this from a developer standpoint, but because we're getting older, a lot of people, a lot of the professionals I'm friends with have had kids.

We had a baby and we decided to move back to the Midwest to be closer to my parents, so they could be with their grandson. This wasn't going to work, working at a big place. So a couple of years ago I started to think about forming my own place. And we didn't know how, and we knew that we couldn't pull it off until the whole downloadable thing started, with the new systems, basically.

Once Live Arcade started moving, I thought, "Wow, if we can get our money together, this might be possible." When XNA came through, and when Community Games announced that you could make money through it, that's when I knew we could do it.

How many people did you have working on the title?

NF: Me.

Really?

NF: Okay, that's extreme. But basically, I did original concept, design, art, programming, animation, sound effects, and then I had a really talented musician out of Tucson who did the music. I wrote the skeleton for the story, and then I had a science fiction writer friend write the story and the dialogue. So, basically, 95% of the game.

Wow. How long have you been in development?

NF: Like I said, we saved our money for a couple of years, and then I quit my job at Insomniac, and then I started full time in November last year. So it's almost been a year now.

I can imagine that's been like perpetual crunch.

NF: You know what's funny? Just, again, for the other developers' standpoint, working at home, it's been perpetual crunch that has been doable because I get these, like, mini-breaks.

You have dinner, there's your wife, your kid, and then you keep working. It's not as bad as a real place. I've done plenty of crunch before, and it drains your soul. But this hasn't been as bad. Anyway -- it's just different, working at home.

It's something, as you said, that people are facing. People want to start families. Everyone comes coastal to work in development. You don't really have a lot of choice in the matter.

NF: We didn't love Los Angeles, honestly. We lived there a couple of years. The only reason we were there was to work on games. There are a ton of places there. It's easy to move around. It isn't nice, but...

The interesting thing is, with the internet, it was possible to do our game in the boonies. We live out in the country, in Indiana, actually. And so it was actually possible to keep in touch with people, share files, and actually share the game itself, so that actually made it possible.

And your wife worked on it, too, right?

NF: Well, I did the development side, and she's like business, and producer -- well, quasi-producer. She does marketing, and helps with the press and that kind of stuff.

She's actually a fundraiser grant writer by trade, so she's really good at talking with people and working with them and everything. It's kind of like the Frank Zappa scenario. His wife managed him and did the marketing, and he did the music.

We actually have a couple of guys, very freelance, who helped me with the art, off and on. So I wouldn't mind expanding, but it's a really touchy kind of thing -- you have to be really careful about it.

I heard this story from Kathleen from Microsoft -- she said it's based on a concept that you had when you were 17, and then your wife found the designs, and it kind of grew from there. Can you tell me about that?

NF: Sure. I don't want this to turn into a... what's that Silicon Knights game?

Too Human.

NF: It's not a Too Human.

(laughter)

NF: I've always been playing games, and as a kid, as a middle-schooler, I'd do game design. And then I would send in game designs to, like, Electronic Arts, and get refused. And then I'd send them to Tecmo, and Sega, and places like that.

Now, with my wife, we're actually living with my parents, and she was digging through these old boxes, and found my old drawings.

And the funny thing is, they look similar to the new stuff that I've been working on -- but the game design is totally different in this. It's just the fact that I was doing this old style...

Well, the game is very reminiscent of a 16-bit aesthetic. It was a semi-credible story.

NF: No, it's true. It's fine that they say that, but it's a conscious thing -- I wanted to make a new 16-bit kind of game, that looks better, that plays better, that's more fluid, but it plays like that.

In the game there are a lot of elements that make it more playable, nowadays. It's an instant-kill game, but there's an element called "death brushing." Everything slows down, and you have this brush with death. It can happen as often as it needs to, and it's infinite, and it makes it a lot more possible to not die. It's an old-style game with new influences.

It's such a small thing, but the title screen really looks like a TurboGrafx or Genesis game to me, aesthetically.

NF: Exactly! That was a conscious decision. Another comparison that Steve Wik, of Postal, the game designer there -- he said, "I'd expect it to be on a marquee for an arcade machine from, like, '87." Yes!

I love that kind of art. I just love that you can see the pencil drawing in it, and you can just imagine the guy laboring over it, and I wanted to bring that through -- and I labored over it.

And the other thing is, and this isn't a negative on Resistance: Fall of Man, but when you go from one thing to another, that game is, the color palette is really kind of... low-key.

Brown.

NF: Okay, it's brown. It's Brown World. It just gets to you. Ratchet was very full and colorful, but that did not cure me. From working on Resistance, I was like, "Man, I want insane aliens, and I want crazy colors!" I've been seeing forum posts that have been saying it looks like an acid trip, and I've been like, "Thanks!" You know? Cool!

It reminds me a lot of 16-bit games, but more so. Based on what I've just seen.

NF: That's the idea. A lot of the weapons -- the other design idea behind the weapons is that each character has a weapon. It's his weapon of choice. But each character has a weapon, but when you play him, he's a life.

So when you play him, you're stuck with that guy. And even though you think you may not enjoy that weapon, you get to explore it more, and every weapon has a lot of depth to it. So it's easy to use at first, but then there's a lot more things you can do with it, and hopefully you'll grow to like all of the different weapons.

So it sounds like you've definitely put a lot of thought into how to evolve the design of a 16-bit game and make it compelling for a contemporary audience. I mean, we all have a lot of nostalgia for old games, but Mega Man 9 notwithstanding, it's a bit hard to approach them.

NF: And I'm playing Mega Man 9! And it kicks my butt. And it's a wake up, man. When you start those old games -- I still play a lot of those old games -- but when you start them, they smack you in the face! And in this one I wanted it to be a little bit more of an ease-in.

Again, I studied all of those old games really carefully. This is a game where you restart from the beginning -- which not everybody's psyched about -- but you do restart it from the beginning, I wanted to make it interesting every time you play.

So say you only play 10 minutes, and you fail. Then, you restart from the beginning. But when you restart, there's a lot of different paths to take. And within the levels themselves, you can actually branch and go a whole different way, and the story changes.

So if you keep trying this one path, and it starts to get boring, you can say, "I'm going to try this other path," but as you go, you're also picking up new operatives, so you're picking up new people with new weapons.

So say that one path you didn't get too far in -- it was too tough for you. You manage to save a new guy, you restart the game, and you have four guys -- four extra lives -- and now you are able to get further down the path. And that's how we make it playable for everybody. We've focused a lot on that.

To talk about something a bit different -- you said that your original inspiration was that you thought you could go on a traditional download service -- you made it sound like you were going for Xbox Live Arcade, when you initially had this idea to do it yourself as an independent developer.

NF: Absolutely.

But you ended up moving into the Community Games space. That has the benefit that you don't have to wend your way through getting picked, and everything, but obviously you don't have the same level of support.

NF: Right.

Can you talk about that decision-making process, and your expectations?

NF: It's a hard thing to talk about, but I'll just tell you, we got refused from Live Arcade. The initial game didn't look as good as this one.

Basically what happened -- and this is for everybody else who's thinking about it -- we went in, we pushed the game through to them, and they thought it was really interesting and fun.

But they thought the art style just wasn't enough, so we actually took that and spent a month and a half redoing just about every single thing in the game, and it was just horrible.

What I did, initially, was really static, and since then I've re-animated everything -- all the trees, all the grass, everything moves. I've had Xbox people say it's even stronger now, and because they want to bump up Community Games, they want to keep it on Community Games!

I'm cool with that, because I like Community Games. But it's been tough. I wanted it on Live Arcade -- or I thought I wanted it on there. But this whole thing's been a blessing too, so it's really come out great. And the [Dream Build Play] contest was pretty amazing, so I'm really excited about the whole thing.

I really wish I could have been present to hear Mr. Smith’s speech in full. It sounds like this guy really cares about the industry, and knows what games can be. Click here to read the entire piece.

The Path is an independently created horror game inspired by the ancient folk tales of Little Red Ridinghood, but set in the present day.  Six sisters live with their mother in an urban apartment at the edge of a gloomy forest and each of them is sent on an errand to their grandmother on the other side of the woods. A straight path connects the city with grandmother’s house. It’s a safe journey. But will the girls be able to resist the temptation of leaving the path?

Game description: There’s something wrong with the forest. No matter how bright the sun shines, it remains dark and foggy. It smells like something died. Strange noises fill the rusty air. Squeaks and screeches. The dull thump of someone chopping trees. The wind playing eerie melodies on ghostlike flutes. She just left the city. Cars can’t drive here anymore. Mother told her to go visit grandmother. The old lady lives all alone at the other side of the forest. Quite a walk from here. It’s probably best if she stays on the path…

In The Path, you play Little Red Ridinghood. Not the cute blond toddler that we’re used to, but a young woman in the throws of teenage angst. When her mother sends her on this errand, she has no intention to stay on the path–and the forest is a dangerous place, especially for lonely girl with an interest in wolves.

According to the developers, The Path is a game of exploration, discovery and introspection with atmosphere and immersion being as important as any other element on the game. You control the avatar, but she also has a life of her own  which is directed by an alternative AI system. The foliage on the trees turns out to be careful arrangements of gothic ornaments. What first seemed like sound effects, is in fact a continuously changing musical soundtrack, and random signs of decay on the screen become helpful hints for navigation. The entire forest feels natural but closer inspection reveals its artificiality. This is not the real world. You have entered a fabrication, a story, a memory, a dream.

This extends to the three dimensional environments as well. The main area of the game, the forest, is never the same. It is re-arranged every time you play. Things are in different places, objects appear and disappear, giving the feeling of exploring a dream more than any factual reality. The same applies to the final destination of the protagonists. Grandmother’s house changes according to what you have done in the forest, furniture appears or moves, new rooms are added and put together in impossible ways. What seems like a cozy cottage on the outside, can suddenly turn into a nightmarish labyrinth upon entry.

Painting with the aesthetic palette of real-time 3D rather than using the medium for the simulation of reality, to some extent, the players themselves can decide what things look like. Walking down the path, for instance, changes the time of day. Depending on where you enter the forest, you will be wandering through a bright and misty environment or a dark and spooky one.

An early demo of The Path was nominated for “Excellence in Visual Art” in the Independent Games Festival of 2008. Other games by Tale of Tales include The Endless Forest and The Graveyard, both of which are available for free download here and here.

The Path is scheduled for release on PC in Spring 2009. Be sure to check out the official website by clikcing here and be sure and check out the developers journal here.

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• The Path: Red Riding Hood's Gone Goth
• Namco Bandai Reveals Tales of Vesperia Special Edition
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• Shows an error message instead of silently crashing in the case of a broken installation.
• The current score was added to the list of high-scores twice if you used restart or quit after losing all your lives.
• Pausing the game stopped the music, it now only stops sound effects.
• After completing all stages, the game sometimes crashed.
• Script errors in stages other than the first weren't shown to the user.
• After a boss' spellcard finishes, -all- enemy projectiles are now destroyed, not just those of the ENEMY_SHOT type.
• Instead of overwriting the default textures, user-specified textures were added -after- the existing textures. This limited the max. texture memory to 32KB.

• Internal script compiler now does basic type-checking.
• Meaningful error messages in the script compiler.
• Added (beta) support for downloading additional characters from within the game using wifi.
• Rewrote a large portion of the scripting manual.
• Support for multiple routes per game. Routes are commonly used to create a selectable difficulty setting.
• The score overview shown at the end of every stage works now.
• Both stages and routes can now be locked/unlocked. Read the manual for more info.
• Added a third stage.

Continue reading Meet the Team: Krystalle Voecks

Meet the Team: Krystalle Voecks originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Know Your LotRO Lore: The Watcher in the Water originally appeared on Massively on Tue, 18 Nov 2008 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It's an odd quirk of massively multiplayer online gaming that World of Warcrafthas completely trumped its competition not purely on the creativity of its gameplay, but by delivering a game that isn't broken.

The MMO's latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, provides further proof of developer Blizzard Entertainment's commitment to both quality and quantity. Lich Kingadds vast new swaths of content to suck away hours of gamers' lives. The add-on succeeds because of the unparalleled level of polish Blizzard gives all its games, and at $40, Lich Kingis also the best dollar-per-hour deal you're likely to find in any new videogame.

Blizzard's famous attention to detail has helped draw 11 million players to Warcraftsince the MMO's 2004 launch. They've spent countless hours questing, socializing and slaying monsters and wildlife in the expansive fantasy world.

These players will thoroughly enjoy Lich King. The content additions are far too numerous to list here, but every segment of the WoWfan base will find something to enjoyin the expansion pack.

Those who like player-versus-player combat will adore the new battlegrounds and the addition of vehicular combat. Those who spend their days in Azeroth as pacifist crafters will be pleased to hear that every single profession has been granted a wealth of new recipes and abilities.

More broadly, all the gamers who've been stuck at level 70 since The Burning Crusadeexpansion will be happy to have an additional 10 levels of experience to work through and a huge new landmass to explore, complete with hundreds of entertaining quests and lore. The Blizzard writing team has truly outdone itself with the new quest lines: Almost every goal in Wrathis entertaining and often quite novel.

I could go on for hours about each of the individual additions to the game -- I haven't even mentioned the surprisingly unique Death Knight character class -- but it's more important to specify why this expansion is Blizzard's finest MMO release to date.

To understand why Blizzard is so successful and so adamantly beloved by fans, one needs only look at the company's competition.

Age of Conan , for instance, was widely hailed as the first real competitor for Blizzard's game since 2004, and gamers had extremely high hopes that the game could deliver something innovative and new. Though the title promised many novel ideas, when it finally hit shelves, gamers were disappointed by the overall level of the quality-assurance work that went into the game.

In the early days after release, you literally couldn't walk more than a few feet without seeing someone's character vanishing into the side of a building or losing track of a quest goal due to your target disappearing at random. Even now, six months after release, Age of Conanremains a disappointing mess of half-fulfilled promises and bugs that may never be fixed.

By comparison, Wrath of the Lich Kingis practically flawless. No large MMO release will ever be completely bug-free, thanks to the sheer amount of content contained in these games, but Blizzard's quality control is miles ahead of its competition. In the nearly 100 quests I've run since Wrath'sNov. 13 launch, I've only encountered one bug that prevented me from finishing a task.

It's certainly impressive that Blizzard has released an expansion with thousands of hours of additional content, but even more impressive is that all the content is present and functional on launch day. That should be the standard by which we judge all MMOs.

Even though the release of Wrathcontinues World of Warcraft's reign as the best MMO available, the game is not without flaws. Wrathadds minor graphical updates (real-time shadows and slightly more complex character models, specifically in the new areas), but the game's underlying technology hasn't changed in nearly half a decade -- and it shows.

I'm a big fan of WoW'sunrealistic art style, so the relatively simple character models and colorful locales in Wrathstill work for me, but there are many people who would prefer a more realistic design aesthetic. It's a matter of personal preference, but by maintaining a simpler style, Blizzard has produced a world that runs very nicely even on older computers.

Wrathprobably won't convert any of WoW's vocal detractors (see the inevitable comments below for examples). Though the expansion adds a vast new section of landmass to Azeroth and gives players many more activities to fill their time, the gameplay is essentially unchanged from its debut.

Endless fetch quests are still pretty prevalent, the road to the level cap still seems like an endless leveling treadmill and the strength of the title still relies on a very carefully balanced system of rewarding monotonous drudgery. Blizzard has always hidden these tenets behind a glossy coat of entertaining gameplay, but nothing in Wrathis a drastic departure from what has come before.

Still, hewing so closely to the traditional formula is a smart move for Blizzard. After all, it's convinced 11 million people to fork over $15 a month, and Wrathshould certainly keep that massive player base content, for a while at least.

For those 11 million gamers, the $40 entry fee for Wrathis simply the most reliable gaming purchase you can make this holiday season. No other title will offer more content for the price. And even though it's basically more of the same, Blizzard has once again crafted an entertaining expansion for its virtual world.

Images courtesy Blizzard

WIRED Thousands of hours of new content, vast new landscape to explore, content simply works

TIRED No vast graphical upgrades, doesn't alter classic WoWformula

$40, Activision Blizzard

Rating:

Read Game|Life's game ratings guide.

See also:

• Lich KingLevel Cap Reached
• Impressions: Wrath of the Lich KingBeta
• Q&A: Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on DRM, WoWand the Next MMO
• Q&A: Blizzard's Executive Vice President of Game Design Rob Pardo
• Q&A: World of WarcraftLead Producer J. Allen Brack
• Q&A: StarCraft IILead Designer Dustin Browder