The wonderful Rez is back on XBox Live, and it looks and sounds absolutely glorious. Even though the game has an hypnotic and relaxing quality, my right thumb hurts, and with Devil May Cry 4 next week that’s just the beginning. 🙂

A few monhts ago in Gamasutra, Harvey Smith described the intriguing elements of social and political subversion in his shooter Blacksite: Area 51. The game apparently turned out to be crap, but I never got to try it. Now Gamasutra again introduces us to another contender for "politically conscious FPS games" in the form of Turning Point: Fall of Liberty. From the horrible demo just released, this game is even worse. I’m all for making games more interesting with complex themes and narratives, but the game doesn’t have to suck in order to deliver them!

Ah well, the demo for Devil May Cry 4 more than made up for the bad taste. It plays essentially like the other DMC games (1 and 3; 2 was an aberration), and looks beautiful, crisp and smooth. It may not be innovative, but I won’t say no to more of a good thing.

Edit: Check this amazing DMC4 demo run. I don’t know how he does half the things he does.

JJ Abram’s latest baby is here, after months of speculation generated by last summer’s trailer and an Internet viral campaign. It’s basically a Godzilla-like monster movie shown through the eyes of a guy’s camcorder. There are many reports of people feeling sick and even throwing up thanks to the savage shaky-cam work. I certainly saw way more people getting up and out of the theater than in any other movie I remember (except for Vatel, but that’s a different story).

I liked the movie and had a great time. I don’t consider it a great movie by any standards: the plot and writing was crap, the acting was basic at best, and a good quarter of the movie (the beginning) was uninteresting and downright boring. However, the action was intense, the visual style (once you accept the shakycam) worked very well, and the ending was satisfying.

That said, I can’t wait for the shakycam fad to pass. It can add to the atmosphere of a movie (see also United 93), but I’d like it to be the exception rather than the norm. Most of the time, when I watch a movie, I want to see what’s actually going on.

Ok, this is funny, or sad, probably both. John Romero attacks and Mike Wilson responds. I never had much respect for either guy’s public antics, and this doesn’t help, but who cares.

And a happy New Year to everyone!

It´s good to be in Spain for a couple of weeks, see the family, friends, and of course have plenty of tapas and fun.

Yesterday I went to watch Michael Clayton, an excellent directorial debut by writer Tony Gilroy. He was clearly influenced by producer Steven Soderbergh’s style: slow pace, complex storytelling and heavy emphasis on character development. One of the best movies this year.

Another film I watched today was 1955’s The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell, a dramatized documentary about one of the visionaries in the early days of US Air Forces, who in the 1920’s predicted things like Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, aircraft carriers or airplanes breaking the sound barrier. Funny bit from the credits: actor Will Wright plays the role of Admiral Sims.

A few days ago Dr Petter released a little tool to generate simple sound effects for hobby game developers. "An MS Paint for sound effects…" as he puts it himself. It’s certainly no SoundForge, but lots of fun to play with, and more than capable for many quick projects.

Ok, this is really cool. Passage is a sort of artsy-fartsy game that’s supposed to make you think and all that, rather than entertain.

Jokes aside, it is a really interesting experiment. It’s not pretty, it’s not even fun, but it certainly touches some of the ways in which a game can speak about us, both the author and the players. You should play it without reading any instructions, just… well, like creator Jason Roher says, fire it up and play it. And then, if you are like me, be completely unable to get it, read the Creator’s Statement, and think about it.

Fun with boxes in Crysis. If you are not a demoscener then you may not already know that cubes can be beautiful.

Independent Games Festival finalists. Some great-looking stuff there (with interesting emphasis on rhythm games), and some are freely available. Best of lucks to all of them!

It’s been a snowy weekend here in Vancouver, with little expectations in the way of fun or surprises. However, Vivendi Games (who owns my current employer Radical Entertainment) and Activision decided to stir things up a bit by announcing a merger of both companies and naming / branding the result "Activision Blizzard." I’ll spare you the "better name suggestion" comment and jokes.

Maybe they cooked it all up in 2 days just to piss off John Riccitello? Nah, he actually said "I think there will be more consolidation to come" so he still ok. Although he will surely make downplay the "we’re bigger than EA" message that surrounds the merger press release.

I guess tomorrow will be an interesting Monday at work, with lots of chatter and a few corporate emails about this. Kelly Zmak has so far been very communicative and open (within reason) about the business aspects of Radical. Other than a certain sense of being downplayed (along with other wholly-owned development studios) in the press releases in favor of the 80000-lb gorilla that is Blizzard, I don’t expect the new situation to affect our day-to-day life for quite a long time. A bigger muscle behind Prototype, but more games to compete with for marketing attention.

Meanwhile, Activision have put up a specific website to describe the merger; that’s pretty neat, even though it’s full of predictably corporate language. Both that site and Vivendi’s should be hosting a webcast tomorrow morning.

Some good stuff coming from there, but from all the coverage I have had access to, this talk by Jonathan Blow is the most interesting (and complete – audio and slides included). A bit incomplete in the sense that it doesn’t address the need for commercial games to work as commercial products, but commercial viability is not his point anyway.

For some time I have held the belief that games have a hard time as meaningful forms of expression, because the kind of activity and instant-to-instant attention they require tends to overwhelm the mind and distract from what could be meaningful in them. Cutscenes and narrative are hailed by some as the answer, since they are aspects of the game experience where the player is not (necessarily) bombarded with that level of activity, and is more receptive to messages and ideas. However, these tend to be times where the game stops being a game and becomes something else, a purely narrative experience where the player is turned into a spectator, one anxiously deprived of interactive capabilities.

Portal, Bioshock or Half Life (and other games before them) break the mold a bit by rarely coming to a full stop. You can listen to the audio recordings, computer speech or feel the chaos around you while you are moving, exploring or figuring out what’s coming next. In Shadow of the Colossus, you have long periods of riding where your mind is free to think about the land and what happened to leave it so barren. But these moments are still not using the power of interaction and player agency.

I think he does a great disservice to World of Warcraft by focusing on a limited set of aspects of that game, and completely ignoring the amount of player-to-player interaction, player-created goals, and encouragement of exploration. If you play WoW as a single-player game and see other people simply as means to achieve your own goals, then yeah, all you have is a very addictive but unfulfilling experience. But if you don’t restrict yourself like that, you have access many aspects of human nature: greed, friendship, despair, organization, envy, curiosity, and even conscious self-expression through role-playing. You could say that those are the same experiences you can get with real-life social activities. But, as he says of poetry vs movies vs music, they are all capable of providing interestingly different flavours of the same thing.

I loved his description of games development being poorer as a result of being done as series of problems to solve or squash. It’s all too true, especially for a problem-solver kind of developer like myself. 🙂