Thursday Regulars:
No RetroforceGO! this week: We all have SARS
The Memory Card .46: Insult swordfighting!

Review:
Tomb Raider Underworld

Contest:
Get your running shoes on: we have 80 copies of Mirror's Edge to give away!

News:
Gran Turismo 5 release date still in the air, fast car devs build slow
Virtual Peace 'better than shooting 'em up'
Ken Levine likes PC gaming, would like to have it back
Square Enix expected to bid for Eidos
Character in Animal Crossing tosses out the N-word, Nintendo rescues our eyes
Harrison: Kids will soon refuse to buy discs
Research group says that consoles are the new hotness for on-demand video
Could Brutal Legend news be coming? We all hope so
Qore episode 7 is free this week at the PlayStation Store
How Sirlin struggled with Street Fighter 2 HD
Dress up your Xbox 360 avatar in new duds -- for free, no less!
Animal Crossing Wii character imports region locked: Because that's not dumb
Real bands vs fake ones: the argument goes on
WiiWare manga starts this January with Princess Ai Monogatari
Penn describes motivation behind Desert Bus minigame
Buy this PS3 for the every day low price of $736.99 [Update]
List of streamable videogame movies on Netflix

Rumortoid:
SCEE reminds staff of their NDA after PS3 price drop talk

Offbeat:
The Daily Mail: Win a Sega Megadrive! Or ... not

Galleries:
Screenshots for Suikoden Tierkreis: Because the DS needs more RPGs
Go to Burger King for a heart attack/Nintendo toy combo

Videos:
Mirror's Edge DLC announced, looks bloody weird [update]
Banjo goes to Paris in this absurd Nuts & Bolts promo video
New 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand video displays the art of Counter-Kills

Community:
C Blogs of 12/04/08

• A Kingdom for Keflings
• Aegis Wing
• Bomberman Live
• Hardwood Hearts
• Hardwood Spaces
• UNO
• Small Amrs
• Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

Unfortunately, you’re going to have to, unless  “The Legend of Zelda: The Complete Series” is something you’re dying to see.

We sorted through Netflix’s list of video game (or video game-related) movies currently available to stream, and here’s what we found.

* BloodRayne
* BloodRayne 2
* National Geographic’s …Video Games: Behind The Fun
* Gamers [comedy]
* Super Mario Bros. Super Show: Mario of the Deep
* Pokemon: The First Movie
* Street Fighter Alpha [anime]
* Street Fighter Generations [anime]
* The Legend of Zelda: The Complete Series

It’s admittedly a pretty small list, but streaming — especially high-definition streaming — only recently became part of Netflix’s suite of services. In the coming months, expect Netflix to add more and more value to streaming. Hopefully, that means more video game movies. “Mortal Kombat” was good, you know.

Plus, it’s been too long time since I’ve watched “Double Dragon.”

Related Posts
Netflix Speaks Out On Sony Movies Disappearing From Xbox 360 Service — It’s Not A Glitch
Sony Pictures Says Netflix Streaming Issue ‘Not Specific To Xbox’

How is that new-ish NXE and Netflix thing working out for you? Find any dirty movies yet? I haven't found much. Most of the things I find that sound pretty horny actually aren't at all. Yesterday, I watched Happy Gilmore again for the millionth time, and then I followed it up with some anime that had more panty shots than a Victoria's Secret catalog. In one scene, a girl falls off a ladder face first into another's crotch, while the victim finds her nose buried in ladder-girl's ass. High-brow stuff, folks.

Oh, and here's my favorite Happy Gilmore scene:

Grandma: Sir, can I trouble you for a warm glass of milk? It helps me go to sleep.

Nursing Home Orderly: You can trouble me for a warm glass of shut-the-hell-up. Now, you will go to sleep or I will put you to sleep. Check out the name tag. You're in my world now, grandma. 

We're a games site, so I suppose we should be talking about videogame movies, right? While I was watching stupid movies and horny animation, the Multiplayer Blog was digging through the service to find the games movies. Here they are:

•  BloodRayne
•  BloodRayne 2
•  National Geographic’s …Video Games: Behind The Fun
•  Gamers [comedy]
•  Super Mario Bros. Super Show: Mario of the Deep
•  Pokemon: The First Movie
•  Street Fighter Alpha [anime]
•  Street Fighter Generations [anime]
•  The Legend of Zelda: The Complete Series 

How is that new-ish NXE and Netflix thing working out for you? Find any dirty movies yet? I haven't found much. Most of the things I find that sound pretty horny actually aren't at all. Yesterday, I watched Happy Gilmore again for the millionth time, and then I followed it up with some anime that had more panty shots than a Victoria's Secret catalog. In one scene, a girl falls off a ladder face first into another's crotch, while the victim finds her nose buried in ladder-girl's ass. High-brow stuff, folks.

Oh, and here's my favorite Happy Gilmore scene:

Grandma: Sir, can I trouble you for a warm glass of milk? It helps me go to sleep.

Nursing Home Orderly: You can trouble me for a warm glass of shut-the-hell-up. Now, you will go to sleep or I will put you to sleep. Check out the name tag. You're in my world now, grandma. 

We're a games site, so I suppose we should be talking about videogame movies, right? While I was watching stupid movies and horny animation, the Multiplayer Blog was digging through the service to find the games movies. Here they are:

•  BloodRayne
•  BloodRayne 2
•  National Geographic’s …Video Games: Behind The Fun
•  Gamers [comedy]
•  Super Mario Bros. Super Show: Mario of the Deep
•  Pokemon: The First Movie
•  Street Fighter Alpha [anime]
•  Street Fighter Generations [anime]
•  The Legend of Zelda: The Complete Series 

“It’s been a great high for the last couple of weeks,” Daniel Suarez, Activision’s executive producer for “Call of Duty: World At War” told me in an interview last week. Happy is any man whose game has launched so well that it topped — his words — the “bajillion pound gorilla” that is “World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King” in sales in the U.K in its launch week.

Suarez and I talked about a number of things during out interview, some of which I’ve covered here on Multiplayer this week — plans for upcoming DLC for the game and where the game’s surprising Nazi Zombie mode came from.

The first topic of my interview, however, was how the development team at Treyarch dealt with making a game in the shadow of “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.” That was the bajillion-pound gorilla as far as I was concerned.

It’s not every year that a development team puts out a game that so many critics don’t expect to be better than last year’s installment. How do you deal with that pressure?

“If you look at what was done for ‘Call of Duty 3,’ everybody goes, ‘Treyarch’s not very good’…Well they only had a year to do it.”

Suarez said his team was “100% aware” of the main knock on “World At War” going in, the reason some gaming critics were expecting a stinker. The “Call of Duty” franchise had been threatening to veer into “Star Trek” movie or “Splinter Cell” gaming territory, flip-flopping in quality with each installment.

Last year’s “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” as well as “Call of Duty 2” two years before that were seen as good “Call of Duty” games. The one in between, “CoD 3,” was a critical disappointment. The even number ones were made by Infinity Ward. But installment #3 and this new one, “World at War,” were developed by Treyarch. “If you look at what was done for ‘Call of Duty 3,’ everybody goes, ‘Treyarch’s not very good. “Call of Duty 3″ wasn’t as good as the other ones.’” You have to look at the detail of it. Why was “Call of Duty 3″ rated only a mid-80 game? Well they only had a year to do it in a year that they were also doing PS3 for the first time on a launch year and also the Wii on a launch year.” The new game, “World At War,” he said, benefited from a two-year development cycle and an embrace of some new priorities like improving the voice-acting and pushing an M rating.

“Everybody wants to say it’s a competition,” Suarez said when I pressed him about “World At War”’s airplane level, which seemed to me to be an attempt to one-up “Modern Warfare”’s airplane level. I wasn’t buying his explanation that there wasn’t competition. Didn’t these teams have heat? I persisted that there had to be some sort of competitive urge there to prove that “World at War” could top its predecessor. “It’s not like that,” Suarez said. As Suarez tells it, Treyarch started with historical inspiration and then amped up the drama for reasons other than competing with Infinity Ward. “From our perspective it’s never about how we can one-up the previous game. It’s: ‘What do we think is going to make a great game? What do we think is fun? What do we think is going to make people’s jaws drop when they play it?’”

Suarez said there were three levels in Treyarch that is most proud of. Judge Treyarch by them: 1) The flight level Black Cats, for its sheer Michael Bay bombastic spectacle. 2) The street scene in Eviction, a level in Berlin that culminates in a fight in the metro. 3) The Hard Landing level that ends with a massive Pacific island firefight.

At the time of our interview I believed that one of the best measures of “World At War”’s appeal — and one of the best ways to see if Activision had been overzealous in releasing a sequel in the franchise this year — was Xbox Live activity. A year after its release, “Modern Warfare” consistently ranks at or near the top of the chart for most online activity on Microsoft’s console. I suggested to Suarez that some people, maybe many people, just wouldn’t migrate away from the “Modern Warfare” experience they love so much.

“Other iterations to ‘Counter-Strike’ occurred after that first one came out, but a lot of people still liked the core of what [the original] ‘Counter-Strike’ was. I think it’s the same with ‘Call of Duty’ multiplayer.”

“I think there’s going to be a longstanding group of people that play “Modern Warfare.” I think “Modern Warfare,” to me, at least when I play it today, it’s very much how ‘Counter-Strike‘ was. Other iterations to ‘Counter-Strike’ occurred after that first one came out, but a lot of people still liked the core of what [the original] ‘Counter-Strike’ was. I think it’s the same with ‘Call of Duty’ multiplayer. A lot of people come over to play ‘World At War” that kind of like the setting. They like that it’s a little different. It’s got new maps. They like the vehicles and different perks. They may go back. They may come back to “World At War.” From our perspective, all we want to deliver is a great game. It’s not a competition, like ‘Who’s got more volume online today vs. [Modern Warfare]?’”

Typically a game developer can assume that their online-enabled sequel will eventually have more players competing in it than the previous iteration. See “Halo 3“’s online activity currently surpassing “Halo 2“’s. The prospect of the same thing happening with the “Call of Duty” franchise isn’t guaranteed. I asked Suarez if he thought that online usage of “World at War” would eventually exceed that of “Modern Warfare.” Shouldn’t that just be a matter of time? “We’ll see how the sales go,” he said. “There’s 10 million copies sold of ‘Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare’. The hope is that if we can get close to that number… again it’s not “Do we hope it exceeds the number of users online?’ Look, I’d love to be number one on Xbox Live and hold that crown for a while.”

Well, today Suarez may be an even happier man. The latest popularity ranking for Xbox Live usage shows that last week, “Call of Duty: World At War” was played more online than “Modern Warfare.”

Victory? It’s not a competition.

• A Kingdom for Keflings
• Aegis Wing
• Bomberman Live
• Hardwood Hearts
• Hardwood Spades
• UNO
• Small Arms
• Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

Free online multiplayer for SFII HD, UNO and others for the holidays originally appeared on Xbox 360 Fanboy on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Free SFII HD Remix soundtrack get! originally appeared on Xbox 360 Fanboy on Thu, 04 Dec 2008 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix released last week on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network to great acclaim, but according to lead designer David Sirlin, the game was a momentous struggle with which he received very little help.

"I struggled almost every day with that whole project trying to get something done. A real critical hurdle for me was having the rebalanced mode at all. Backbone, they just didn't want to do it at all because it sounded like too much work," explains Sirlin. "Who's going to pay for all this, it's hard enough to ship this game in the first place and, were they going to assign programmers to help me? They didn't want to do that. So they said, 'no, we're not going to do it'. Just flat out no.

"I pretty much ignored that. I started reading the source code myself, and I'm not a programmer, and I'm certainly not an assembly programmer, so it's complete gibberish to me."

Undeterred, the designer used the Yoga Hyper Book, which contains Street Fighter hit box data and frame statistics, to basically teach himself the code. He received very little help from either Capcom or Backbone, who didn't want the rebalanced mode to happen. 

I can believe this of Backbone, who has made a career of doing straight ports so faithful, they even leave in all the glitches. Massive kudos to Sirlin, then, who went above and beyond the call of duty and delivered a game that was more than the simply standard port everyone else wanted it to be. Lazy developers be damned!