When I want to move extremely heavy objects from hither to thither I tend to use Egyptian slaves. On days when my slaves are on holiday or undertaking The Trial Of A Thousand Crocodiles, I turn to cranes. Tall, steely, and often teeming with snipers, these monumental machines have just been immortalised in sim form. Naturally, it’s a German studio that’s done the immortalising. Unnaturally (considering dross like Müllabfuhr-Simulator 2008 and Bagger-Simulator 2008) the result is really rather pleasing.(...)
Read the rest of Kran-Simulator 2009 (172 words)

Posted by tstone. | 7 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: German sims, Kran-Simulator 2009
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Happy Thanksgiving everyone! As we spend time with our families — stuffing our bellies with turkey and watching the Lions get trounced by the TItans, we’d like to give thanks to all of you for supporting us. THANK YOU!

Below are some additional reasons we’re thankful this holiday season.

Todd Howard: Big thanks to everyone out there who supports our games. And to all my teammates, thanks for making work a joy. We’re so lucky to be able to make games we love to play.

Pete Hines: This year I am giving thanks for the great people I get to work with,
 Chick-fil-A, the start of college basketball season, Firefly vodka, Five
 Guys’ cheeseburgers, The Foo Fighters, finally having time to actually 
play games, and for having survived the last year and getting Fallout 3
 out the door.

Matt Killmon, Video Producer: Thanks to my family, friends, and loving girlfriend for bringing me back to this coast. Thanks to Bethsoft for giving me this job (and my friends in QA who suggested I apply). Thanks to my co-workers for being severely awesome and making my first six months here an absolute blast. And of course thanks to all our fans on YouTube, GameTrailers, and around the gaming web for all the positive comments on the trailers, gameplay demos, and other videos I worked on — the encouragement is appreciated. Happy Thanksgiving!

Ryan Salvatore, Associate Artist: Big thanks to my family and all my friends (this includes you, coworkers). I must also thank the Bethesda fans for enjoying our games and always demanding more from us. And finally, a huge thanks to my girlfriend for putting up with my occasionally ridiculous hours at work so that I can pursue my dream.

Orin Tresnjak, Graphics Programmer: I’m thankful to have had the opportunity to work with such a brilliant and colorful cast of coworkers on games that I actually want to play. Three and a half years in, and it just gets more and more fun. I’m also thankful for my friends, family, and my lovely Bobbie for putting up with me talking about work all the time!

Jay Woodward, AI Programmer: To my parents: thank you always for all your love and wisdom, and for teaching me the virtues of curiosity, kindness, and apple pie. ;). To old friends: thank you for keeping in touch! I’ll be thinking of you over the holidays. To new friends: thank you for being so much fun! I’ll be thinking of you over the holidays too -– especially when I’m not playing board games. To co-workers, old and new: thank you for being the best and brightest people I’ve ever met. The opportunity to collaborate with such awesomely talented people is a privilege for which I’m thankful year-round. To the players of Fallout 3: thank you for your praise, your enjoyment, and yes, even your criticism. Finally being able to share this experience with you makes all the effort so enormously worthwhile. And most of all, to all the citizens of this great nation: thank you for turning your eyes to the future.

Sam Bernstein, Quality Assurance: I’m thankful for my family, my friends, and to everyone who has helped me get to where I am today; I don’t think I could have done it with out you all, and I can’t thank you enough. Oh, I’m also thankful for canned cranberry sauce, that stuff is the gelatinous substance (food?) of kings! Happy Thanksgiving!

Larry Waldman, QA: I am thankful for my coworkers who produced an awesome game. I’d also like to thank my friends, my family and my Grandmother, who just turned 98 years young. Happy Birthday Grandma! Happy Thanksgiving All!

Ricardo Gonzalez, Stuffing Enthusiast: I’m thankful for how awesome Fallout 3 turned out, a great life, a lovely wife, and to all the fans, trolls, lurkers, and just random gamers that have bought, played, gushed about, hated on, modded beyond all recognition, and generally made Fallout the phenomenon that it is. Thanks, guys!

Fred Zeleny, Quest Designer: It’s been a hugely stressful year, but I’m thankful that the hard work of a lot of people has paid off well, from big things like the game and government, to personal situations with family and friends. I could fill pages with a thousand thanks great and small, but to save us all time, I’ll just thank the Vault-Boy bobblehead on my desk, for always believing in me and giving a cheerful thumbs-up when I needed it.

Emily Sears, Watcher of the Front Desk: I am thankful for my wonderful husband and that we both survived the year in good health; my cute cat and my family and friends who are always there for me; my great job where I never again have to feel like an outsider; and last but not least Christopher Nolan, Christian Bale, and Heath Ledger for creating the best Batman movie I’ve ever seen!  Happy Thanksgiving!

Tony “Golden” Greco: Thank you for being a friend. Traveled down the road and back again. Your heart is true. You’re a pal and a confidant. And if you threw a party…

Matt Grandstaff, Community Manager: Here’s a shout out to my family, friends, coworkers, forum moderators, forum members, Bethblog readers…it’s been a fun year. I’d also like to thank Chauncey Billups for being a great Piston, Allen Iverson for becoming a Piston, and Rich Rodriguez for, uh…nevermind. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Downloading the update and installing it only takes 5 or 6 minutes. This is one advantage that Microsoft has over Sony, faster downloads and updates. It took 3 or 4 times as long to update LBP (which I also got yesterday, but that is for another post) to version 1.03 than it took to completely change my Xbox dashboard. Sony, you really need to fix that. Anyway, after the download and install is complete I was then required to select a virtual me. Yes, avatars are mandatory now. Is that a bad thing? No, I actually had a bit of fun selecting my avatar from the 8 standard choices, then customizing it to my liking. The change features tab has 9 choices in customizing your virtual dude (or dudette). You have the option to adjust your hair, eyes, eyebrows, ears, nose, face (facial features such as moles and freckles and facial hair are selected here), chin, mouth, and skin color and body (height and weight are adjusted here). Plenty of options for everyone.

Is that all you can do to your avatar? Nope, you can also select what clothes you want him or her to wear. There are 8 options for adjusting your avatars appearance here. You can choose what top, headwear, makeup (eye shadow and lip color), bottoms, head accessories (glasses and earrings), dress up (a white morning suit and a tan formal suit are here), shoes, and body accessories (wristwear, rings, gloves). The last option is the ability to save and name that special outfit that you just made. From here you get to take your gamer picture. You can zoom in or out, turn your avatar to the left or right, move his or her head around, and take whatever picture that you like. You want to take a picture of the top of your head? Feel free. How about the back? That’s OK, too. You can preview the picture and then save if you like it. If you are done messing around with the digital you, you can either start over (if you are break mirrors ugly, you may want to take this option) or save and exit. After saving your avatar he does a little fist pump and a little jig. Now, onto the meat of the update, the dashboard itself.

My first impression of the NXE? I like it. The old dashboard just didn’t do it for me. It felt like a step backward on a machine trying to be a step ahead. I never had an original Xbox, but the blades felt like they would have been more appropriate on that machine, not a next gen console. This update changes that for me, it looks cleaner, is easier to navigate, and seems to be organized a lot better then it was. I know some people will disagree with me for saying this, but the NXE has a similar setup to the XMB. Turn the XMB 90 degrees clockwise, use phrases instead of icons on the up/down portion of the bar and use tiles with descriptions and picures on them instead of the option choices for the left/right bar and you have the NXE. Look, I will be honest here, I think the XMB succeeded where the blades failed because of simplicity. The XMB was uncluttered with too much unneeded information and advertisements that the blades were littered with. Having an NXE that takes a few cues from the XMB is not a bad thing, and I applaud Microsoft for realizing it.

Starting out on the new dashboard you have several choices that are called channels. It starts with the Spotlight channel and goes to the My Xbox channel, Game Marketplace channel, Video Marketplace channel, Friends channel, Inside Xbox channel, the Events channel, and finally, the Welcome channel (this channel can be set to hide if you don’t want it). I can’t stress enough how clean and uncluttered the new system is. Finding the channel I want is as easy as pushing the left stick up or down. When you hit the channel that you want, say the My Xbox channel, you will see additional tiles appear to the right of the main one. Again, using the left stick, you can move left or right to select which subchannel that you want. If you want to see your achievements for example (and who wouldn’t?) select the My Xbox channel. From there you will see (if your profile is signed in) your avatar standing there in front of the second tile. Select that subchannel, then move to the right. From there you will see that each game you have played will have it’s very own tile, and on these tiles, you will see all the acheivements for that game.

When I say every game I mean every game is shown. If you’ve played Spongebob just to pad your gamerscore, a tile will show up. Played a last gen Barbie game recently, yep, it’ll be there too. On each tile you will see the title of the game, a couple of bars on the right side (signifying the gamerscore and the number of achievements unlocked from that title), date last played and all the achievements available for that game shown below. I love gaming, but I’m obviously not a gamerscore whore as my tiles show. I don’t have any of the titles know for score padding and even have a pretty good amount of locked achievements from the games that I have played. Maybe I’ll get to those in the future. The bottom line is that with this new system all your information for a specific title is available with just one glance. Instead of having to drill down into a couple of menu options, it’s all in plain sight for everyone to see.

Now, the big question. How is the marketplace handled on the NXE? Is it still a pain to try and find that title that you want? Starting off, there are two ways to get to the Marketplace channel. The first is using the main channel options by scrolling up or down to get to the Game or Video Marketplace channels. The second way is to push the Y button while on the Spotlight channel to go directly to the Game Marketplace channel. From here you have the option of selecting All Games, Arcade, Game Add-ons, Community Games, Xbox Originals, Themes and Gamer Pictures, Game Demos, and Game Videos. All of the previous options have 3 main selection tiles asocciated with them. You can select from a New Arrivals, Most Popular, or Browse tiles. These options are pretty self explanatory and basic, no need to go into detail. Now, let me walk you through something that I found interesting. Say, you see that Xbox Originals has just added GTA: San Adreas. Hit the A button on that tile and it takes you to another section with 5 tiles in it. The first shows the price and purchase options, pretty much the same as the old dashboard did. The next title over is the featured downloads tile, not much interesting here. The next tile over is where the new stuff starts. Images and screenshots, about damn time. Now, you can finally see what you are getting before you buy it, granted, not such a big deal with the original titles, but very welcome with gamer pics and themes. The next tile shows some basic information and features that the game has. Finally, the last tile has a full description of the game. What I like about this tile that was fixed from the old dash is that you can scroll the description up and down instead of waiting for it to do it automatically. New features, I love it.

Here’s something else new, Community Games. As the description on the NXE says “user-created indie games that are not reviewed by ratings boards.” So, some fruit off of the XNA tree has arrived. These are independently developed games that are being sold for 200-400 Microsoft points. These games follow the same basic description format as all the other titles do on the Marketplace, to include a full description and screenshots. There is one difference though. Since these titles are not reviewed by the ESRB they do not have a rating attached to them, enter you and me. These titles are reviewed instead by the community. They are rated from a 0 to 3 scale (0 being none) on violence, sex and mature content. This way little Timmy’s mom knows what he should and should not play, just as she would with traditional games. There are only 16 Community Games right now, but expect that number to grow in the next few months.

I think that covers all the basics, oh wait. I forgot about the new harddrive install option. How could I let that slip my mind. This is one feature that I have been really interested in. My main question is not about load times (I really couldn’t care less about that) but whether or not the 360’s loud disc drive will be silenced by this addition. Let’s try it out, shall we? My choice of game to install first is Fallout 3. A decently sized game to start things out. After you insert the disc, go to the My Xbox channel and hit the Y button. This will bring you to a tile with a couple of options on it. One of these options is install to hard drive. After selecting that option the installation begins. Installing the game itself took about 10 minutes to do, not so bad, after all, it’ll be worth it if I could actually hear the game while playing it. Now the verdict. The 360 is indeed quiet while playing the game after the install. I started up Fallout 3 to hear…nothing at all.

OK, now I’m completely sold on this NXE thing. There are some great additions to the old formula that make the 360 easier to use and better looking too. I haven’t spent any real time with this yet, so I can’t say that everything is perfect. I just haven’t ran into any problems yet.

Change Is Nigh

If there is one word to describe the game, that would be ‘intense’. Your goal in the game is to simply destroy the waves after waves of enemies we throw at you and try to not get killed. If you’re not constantly on the edge of your seat when trying to blow up everything in sight with dozens of asteroids coming at you all the while screen is filled with explosions and fireworks, you should probably apply for a job as an astronaut or something.

When we first got the idea from Sony about doing a PSP version of the game, we were thrilled. We think that Super Stardust is a perfect fit for a portable device, do a 10 minute session of Endless while riding on the bus into school. Pick up and play, it’s like it was designed to be portable from the start. Then it hit us, how are we going to get this thing running on the PSP. Even though the PSP is the most powerful for a hand-held console, it’s still a totally different animal from the processing power of the PS3. We’ve got more than ten thousand objects and hundreds of thousands particles flying around in the PS3 version and we probably use more than 10GHz of processing power from the machine.

What we learned from developing the PS3 version is that sphere level is actually quite a large playing space and requires thousands and thousands of objects rotating around before the game level doesn’t feel empty. It took a lot of trial and error to get that working on the PS3 version. The PSP version is played on a wrapping 2D field that is optimized for the PSP screen. There was a lot of tuning to make it not feel either crowded or too large so we could have the gameplay and levels stay as fast as before. After we found the optimum size, we felt that we had lost nothing of the old intensity in the conversion. In addition we actually do a few tricks to make it look like you’re still playing around a planet too. After a lot of work and because of the choices we made, we managed to get more than a thousand objects on the field with 60 frames per second. That’s a lot of things to shoot. We’ve also got the Super Stardust trademark particle effects working on the PSP, so the explosions look as pretty as ever.

Another change we faced was the controls. The PS3 version uses two analog sticks for control and shooting. How are we going to get that working on the PSP where there’s only one analog stick available? What we decided to go with is to map the shooting to the face buttons and let the game interpolate the shooting direction when needed. This took a lot of effort to get right, but the end result feels perfect. We were glad to find out that even for those that are completely new to PSP system, it didn’t take long to figure out the controls. We also made a new shooting mode to make full use of the buttons. If you tap a shooting direction, the shots will spray around. This also makes for another interesting gameplay choice. More weapon power on one focused point or less in a wide spray? The controls are also configurable, so if someone out there doesn’t like the choices we made, they can remap the controls for their own liking.

Some other new things we have for PSP version:

• A completely new mode: Impact. In impact mode you cannot shoot, just bomb and boost. The boost is a bit different in this mode in that when you boost through something, you receive more boost energy and your multiplier goes up at the same time (max 100x), so the key to high scores is to chain your boosts into as long as you can and to collect points with huge multipliers.
• A new final boss: One complaint on the PS3 version was that the final boss was way too easy. I should warn you that your first meeting with Professor Schaumunds’ new machine of destruction could leave a bit of something in you pants.
• Even more intense gameplay. We still have a casual mode that is suitable for everyone, but one thing we found out about the PS3 version is that for the best players it takes hours and hours to complete the arcade game. For this version we have upped the difficulty curve too after a few of the first difficulty levels. This is a portable game, you shouldn’t have to play a day to get challenged in the game even if you are that good.

Our main goals were to keep the same high intensity gameplay from the PS3 version and do it at a consistent 60 frames per second. We feel that both goals were successfully completed, but I’ll leave the final judgement to you.

See you on the high score lists! (Yes we have online high scores too!)

Thanksgiving is just about here, and with it comes another Retrofeast; a time to gather around the virtual dinnertable and give thanks for all the old-school blessings that have been bestowed upon us over the last year.

This will be a list-heavy episode, a fact that will likely have Chad squealing with the unhindered glee of a thousand schoolgirls throughout most of the show, so you've got that to look forward to. Certainly you must be thankful for something that's happened in gaming since last year. Hit the jump and tell us, and leave a question or two while you're at it.

In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, “The Guild” is a series of video shorts. It’s a spoof on a fictional raiding guild for an EverQuest or World of Warcraft type MMO. If a picture paints a thousand words, how many is a video worth?

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“Um, hi. Do you think you could tell me anything about this game? I, er, found it on the bottom shelf back there.”

“Gunstar Heroes? Hmm. I’ve not heard of that one. Let me take a look.”

This is Mad Andy. We’re not friends and that’s certainly not a nickname of my invention. Rather, it’s the name Andy’s given himself and, by extension, his shop, an independent, second-hand video game store based in South London.

Mad Andy pulls a dog-eared phone directory from the shelf behind where he’s sitting, and plants it with a dull thud on the counter with that officious sense of purpose some men display when called upon to give advice.

Tongue peeking from the corner of his mouth, he flickbooks through its tatty pages, every now and again calling out the name of a game that catches his attention as it flits past his eyes alphabetically.

“Altered Beast, Another World, Bomberman, Contra, D,…”

The book’s a catalogue of every game ever, or so it seems to the thirteen-year-old me. More accurately, it’s a price guide compiled by goodness–knows-who, listing the buy and sell rates for games current and past. Armed with this tome, every independent videogame store knows how much to buy in a second-hand game for and how much to mark it up in order to secure fair but essential profit without undercutting market rates.

As well as prices, the book also boasts reviews, again, written by God-knows-which sorry freelancer. These pithy one-line assessments are accompanied by a score out of five, two pieces of information that gives the salesman everything he needs to issue customers with an authoritative recommendation.

“Elite, Frogger…Ga…Gi…Go. Ah! Here we go: Gunstar Heroes. Hmm. Well what do you know! It’s a good one. Look, right there: ‘Fast, frantic, frenetic scrolling shoot ‘em up. Five out of five.’”

Our sorry freelancer is a fan of alliteration.

“Whoa.” I look down at the back of the box in my hands. “Treasure? Never heard of them.”

Mad Andy and his shop are long gone but I still think about him and his staff from time to time. All gamers of my generation knew a video game store like that, a dealership they visited in youth with wide eyes and a fistful of pocket money. These were the places where dreams were met, the escapism dealers.

Everyone who has ever bought a video game at a shop knows how long the walk home can be. But that time between when a purchase has been made and before it’s played is never unpleasant.

Rather, it is in these delicious moments that you hold in your hands the perfect video game: one which has been invested in but which is yet to let you down. Unknown games are always the best ones because they are played in our imaginations, free of budgetary restraints, deadlines and the ten thousand other pressures that bear down upon the games of reality.

They are always stronger, funnier, cleverer and better-executed than their realities and so that walk home from the store, when the game is tangible in your hands but still imagined in your mind, is oftentimes the most potent moment in the videogame experience.

And yet it’s an experience whose days are numbered. If not by the next generation of hardware then certainly by the one after, all of our games will be supplied by digital distribution, the walk home from the shop with a new game box an anachronism, the weird necessity of supposedly poorer and simpler age.

This makes sense. While shopping for clothes on the high street will always be preferable to mail order – after all, clothes are tactile, need to be tried on and assessed in the atom dimension – video games have nothing to do with physicality. Discs are a means to an end, not an end in themselves unlike, say, an art book with thick pages that you’d want to leave open on a coffee table. Just as .mp3s make CDs obsolete so too will our broadband pipes and copious hard-drives dismiss hard media.

The long walk home will be replaced by a loading bar which fills as you browse the internet or make a cup of tea. And why not? Quaintness will always give way to convenience in technology’s inevitable advance and few things are so convenient as digital distribution.

The game manufacturers, ostensibly, win too. As their games exist only as digital copies, tied to gamertags and PSN accounts, so the second hand market console software will choke. No need to tie hardware to software codes, or to create long-view achievements to convince players to hang on to their games. There will be no other option.

But beyond the romance of reminiscing about the dingy independent game stores of our youth, there’s the very real disadvantage of not being able to trade old games in for new. How many game sales are made in part-exchange, trading spent old experiences for new ones, especially amongst younger gamers?

And what of those games that will be lost to time when they’re removed from the publisher’s servers? Bandwidth costs ensure that not every game released into the ether will be served indefinitely. When a game fails to make enough money month on moth to cover the cost of its hosting, what sensible business is going to hold onto it?

Will we need a videogame arts council, funded to make available those games that aren’t necessarily popular but are important and culturally improving, like those who work tirelessly to preserve the opera?

Video game retail is endangered, its removal from the industry supposedly a good thing, bringing publisher and consumer closer to one another and, perhaps, by removing the middlemen, helping to reduce the cost of games.

But the implications of the shift are far-reaching, will cost jobs, will bury games that have outlived their virtual shelf life and will make it much harder for 13-year-old newcomers to find buried Treasure, a sad thing indeed.