LooseCannon

5 Adventure Games That Need Sequals

wyattferguson123 — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 06:21:00 +0000

The first adventure game I recall ever seeing was Myst, I had never seen anything like it. I was playing Prince of Persia on my Tandy 1000 and Myst blew my doors off. Looking back on Myst as a ‘game’ it wasnt exactly stellar after the first play through you could beat it again in under 2 minutes or so. Adventure games are like movies to me, I know Indiana Jones doesn’t get crushed by the boulder but I can keep watching that movie over and over, the characters and the story are what make it great. Even though adventure games kinda shot themselves in the foot by having balls out crazy puzzles that only some savant and the game designer ever thought were totally logical. The iPhone and DS couldn’t be better for reliving some of that brain melting glory that was the adventure gaming. I decided to compile a list of games I would like to see sequels for the hand held.

5.The Secret of Monkey Island

The Secret of Monkey Island was the game that introduced Guybrush Threepwood to the world. Released in 1990, The Secret of Monkey Island is the fifth game to use the SCUMM engine. Monkey Island was designed by Tim Schafer, Dave Grossman, Ron Gilbert who all went on to design other prolific games including another one on our list. Guybrush desires to become a pirate, at the beginning of the game he washes up on the Caribbean island of Mêlée. This game has probably the best fighting mechanic ever devised for those of you not familiar with Monkey Island to win sword duals you must shout ryming insults at your opponent until you defeat him. That alone is reason enough to have a sequal on a hand held.

4.Sam & Max: Hit the Road

Sam and Max, the Freelance Police, are two comic book characters created by Steve Purcell, who act as private detectives and vigilantes. The game was originally released for DOS in 1993 and for Mac OS in 1995. The pair first debuted in 1987 with the this game being base on the 1989 Sam & Max comic “On The Road”. The duo take the case of a missing bigfoot from a nearby carnival, traveling to many Americana tourist sites to solve the mystery.

Sam & Max Hit the Road is the ninth game to use the SCUMM adventure game engine, and also integrated the iMUSE audio system developed by Michael Land and Peter McConnell. The game is witty with suprisingly good voice acting, and great music. Several attempts to produce sequels were cancelled, ultimately resulting in the franchise moving from LucasArts to Telltale Games. Some of the canceled titles in this hard up series were, Sam & Max Plunge Through Space, Sam & Max 2,and Sam & Max: Freelance Police. Even though they have revived the series in an episodic form, it would be amazing to get a full fledged sequal onto a portable.

3.Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is one of the dirtyest / fantastic games ever devised.
First released in 1987 it follows Larry Laffer, a 40-year old virgin who leaves behind his geeky life and decides to visit the city of Lost Wages and and find the woman of his dreams. Because of the adult nature of the game, it featured an age verification system, which consisted of a series of questions to which the authors reasoned only adults would know the answer. As the questions were U.S.-centric, they frustrated some non-American gamers. In the 1987 AGI version, the verification system could be skipped by pressing Alt-X, or in the 1991 SCI remake, by pressing Ctrl-Alt-X.

Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards is believed to be one of the most widely pirated PC games of the late 1980s. Sierra sold many more hint books than it did actual copies of the retail game. Today, the game is regarded as the first adult graphic adventure. The game has a little known imposed time limit. If Larry makes it through the night without having sex, the player is shown a close-up of Larry holding a gun to his temple. The screen cuts to black and Larry then commits suicide. The limit, however, is set to several hours, and most players will have already gotten Larry in bed with the prostitute before the time runs out, thus remaining unaware of the deadline. I say if you cant bang virtual hookers on your iPhone, why even have one?

2.Day of the Tentacle

Day of the Tentacle was originally released in 1993, and published by LucasArts. It is the eighth game to use the SCUMM engine. It was released simultaneously on floppy disk and CD-ROM and was designed by Tim Schafter and David Grossman of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango fame. The game, a sequel to Maniac Mansion, is focused on Bernard Bernoulli and his friends Laverne and Hoagie, as they help Dr. Fred Edison using a time machine to prevent Purple Tentacle from taking over the world. You use time travel to change history to solve most of the puzzles. In Maniac Mansion, the playable characters can be killed by various sequences of events. LucasArts adopted a different philosophy towards that for Day of the Tentacle saying that the game should not punish the player for exploring the game world. In every LucasArts adventure game after Loom the player cannot die.

This was the last SCUMM game to use the original interface of having the bottom of the screen being taken up by a verb selection and inventory. The whole original Maniac Mansion game can be played on a computer inside the Day of the Tentacle game, a practice that other game developers have repeated, but at the time of Day of the Tentacle’s release this was unprecedented. The game was originally intended to resemble Maniac Mansion more closely, with the player allowed to choose from among six characters which would have included a male poet named Chester, a female hippie named Moonglow, and Razor from the original game. This idea was dropped in preproduction to simplify the project. The art created for the character of Chester was eventually adapted for the characters of the sculptor twins in the final game. Anyone who has played Day of the Tentacle knows why it needs a update, and everyone else can take my word for it.

1.Grim Fandango

At least once a year I pull out my copy of Grim Fandango and with some open source magic I get it up and running again. Everything about this game is so orginal and stylish, the story is told in year long chapters that follows a grim reaper named Manny Calavera across the land of the dead to save his love Mercedes Colomar. Released by LucasArts in 1998 and primarily written by Tim Schafer, it is the first adventure game by LucasArts to use 3D graphics overlaid on pre-rendered 2D computer backgrounds. Every once in a while you hear rumblings of a possible sequal but nothing has ever come to light. The game still has an amazing online community, I actually suprised the community hasnt gotten togther to make a fan sequal. The game creates a very unique film noir style with Aztec and Mexican styling to create a vibrant intruiging world. Although the game was a comercial failure, if one game needs to live on it has to be this one.

A Programmers Overview of the PS3

wyattferguson123 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 06:00:00 +0000

The PS3 is a daunting piece of hardware, you have 8 cores at your disposal which hurts my head thinking about developing anything that would ever need to be that threaded. I recently came across an article on the Guardian where they did an interview with the lead programmer from Volatile Studios. Out of that I wanted to create a document covering some of the deeper tech behind PS3 and explain what it takes to code the next Kill Zone.

Lets first start off with a overview of whats under the PS3′s hood.

CPU: Cell Processor

PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS

GPU: RSX @550MHz

1.8 TFLOPS floating point performance
Full HD (up to 1080p) x 2 channels
Multi-way programmable parallel floating point shader pipelines

Sound: Dolby 5.1ch, DTS, LPCM, etc. (Cell-base processing)

Memory:

256MB XDR Main RAM @3.2GHz
256MB GDDR3 VRAM @700MHz

The difficulty of development for PS3 has been greatly exagerated it has a few quarks in its architecture but it is actually far easier to developer for then the PS2. The PS3 graphics API is Open GL ES ,which is a simplified version of Open GL which any PC games developer should be all to familiar with. Open GL ES was orginally created to be a bare bones version of Open GL for hand held devices, that gave the developer your basic graphics tool set and removed alot of the more ‘fringe’ features.

Graphics coding for the PS3 is done in a language called Cg, which is a version of C created by NVIDIA and Microsoft to work with advanced graphics processors. Cg was created as a result of technical advancements in graphics cards and the increasing complexity to program for them. To simplify the process, new features were added to graphics cards, including the ability to modify their rendering pipelines using vertex and pixel shaders. In the beginning, vertex and pixel shaders were programmed at a very low level with only the assembly language of the graphics processing unit. Although using the assembly language gave the programmer complete control over code and flexibility, it was fairly hard to use. A portable, higher level language for programming the GPU was needed, so Cg was created to overcome these problems and make shader development easier.

Where the complexity comes into the PS3 is when you start dealing with the multiple-cores. Any program that runs on 8 cores on a PC could run on a PS3, but theres a little catch. The main processor can access all the machine’s video memory, but each of the seven SPE chips has access only to its own 256k of onboard memory. The secondary CPU’s has a very limited amount of memory to work with so you can only do chunks of a calculation at once, making jumping around memory a pain. Managing these processors is the biggest consideration you have to make when programming. It would be simple enough to just have each SPE handle a specific task ie. AI, Physics,etc.. The problem with this model is that if something happens in the game say alot of gernades get tossed at once, or in the case of crysis someone stacks a 1000 exploding barrels ontop of one another, that 1 SPE wont be able to handle all the calculations that need to be done. This results in your games frame rate shitting the bed.

According to Lyndon Homewood the lead PS3 programmer from Volatile, “The way we’re thinking of doing it ourselves is via a job queue. We’ll stick the jobs we want to do into a queue on the main processor and then we’ll get the SPEs to pull off a queue entry and process it whenever they’re free. You want to make sure all of your processors are always running. If you give the chips specific jobs, you’ll end up with a lot of them being idle – you won’t get the maximum out of PS3.”

To begin dipping your toes in the Cell programming world, I recommend you first drop a copy of Linux onto your PS3. IBM has an easy to follow tutorial on how to get Yellow Dog Linux onto your system. Once you have Yellow Dog up and running lets create the staple of every programming tutorial the ‘Hello World’ program. The only difference is that ours will use multiple cores, and advance programming methods…but what ever.

First start by creating a file called spu_hello.c this is what will run on each SPU to print “Hello World!”. In spu_hello.c place this block of code:

#include
int main(unsigned long long spuid){
printf(“Hello World! From SPU:%llx\n”,spuid);
return (0);
}

The printf line for anyone not familiar with C, simply will print “Hello World!” and then prints spuid which is the address of the SPU used to print the message. To compile this code use:

spu-gcc spu_hello.c -o spu_hello

Now we need to create a host file to execute spu_hello on each SPU. So we create a file called ppu_hello.c and we put this in the file:

#include
#include
#define SPU_NUM 6
extern spe_program_handle_t hello_spu;
int main(void){
int status,i;
int* speid[SPU_NUM];
for(i=0;i<SPU_NUM;i++)
speid[i] = spe_create_thread (0, &hello_spu, NULL, NULL, -1, 0);

for(i=0;i<SPU_NUM;i++)
spe_wait(speid[i], &status, 1);

return 0;
}

Now we need to embed the spe program with the command:

embedspu hello_spu spu_hello spu_hello_embedded.o

And now we compile it all together with this command

gcc ppu_hello.c spu_hello_embedded.o -lspe -o hello

When you run hello you should get this output:

Hello World! From SPU:1001a038
Hello World! From SPU:1001a3d8
Hello World! From SPU:1001a208
Hello World! From SPU:1001a5a8
Hello World! From SPU:1001a778
Hello World! From SPU:1001a948

So that ladies and gentlemen is a quick run down on how begin developing for the PS3 and a good overview of some of the more technical details of this beast of a console.

PSP 2 Coming Soon?

wyattferguson123 — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 07:36:00 +0000

The rumors of a PSP2 have been circling every since…well the release of the first PSP. Sony has been avidly denying any plans of a PSP2, but at some point they are bound to release a new handheld. So lets speculate the hell out of this.

According to a article posted on IGN a reliable source inside Sony said

the PSP 2 will feature a widescreen multi-touch interface comparable to that of the iPhone for both in-game control and menu navigation.

Hopefully Sony has learned that a touch interface is not the most elegant way to play games. My biggest hopes for the PSP2 are a fully functional PSN style store, NO UMD’s, and 2 joysticks. But most importantly lets hope that Sony dosnt try to make it a ‘iPhone Killer’. If they could create a all in one gaming system with no external media required, and have all games delivered through an online store, that would make it a very appealing device. Heres some of the concept art that has been floating around the internet that would actually seem kinda feasable.

Would a PSP2 get Sony back into the hand held game? Something they will need to put far more effort into is getting more and better games onto their platform. But imagine if they integrated alot of the PSN games for the PS3 and made them playable on the PSP, right out of the gate that would give the PSP2 a deep catalog of good games. This is all just wishful thinking though, if Sonys standing design philosphy applies, it will probably have UMD2.0 that will chew through your battery in 20 minutes ,only have memory stick storage, and 0 joysticks cause rubbing your fingers all over the screen will totaly work fine.

Analysis of Console Numbers For 2008

wyattferguson123 — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:24:00 +0000

We are in a very crazy time for video games, production budgets through the roof, companies loosing billions of dollars, some of the best games ever being released. I was curious to see how everything managed to shake out after this epic year of gaming. All the data I used is from the monthly NDP’s, which I accept as a reliable source. Please note they do not count game purchases done through DLC, but these numbers are still a very good overview of industry trends.Click here to download a PDF of the data used for my analysis.

Console Sales Per Month

As everyone Im sure already knows Nintendo dominated sales in 2008. Every month in 2008 either the DS or Wii was the top selling console, with the Wii taking 7 months and the DS leading the remaining 5. The PS3 actually was leading sales over the Xbox 360 for the first half of 2008 but from August on the Xbox was in the lead. For November and December the Xbox 360 sold over double the number of PS3′s. This is a major blow to the PS3 not even breaking the 1 million sales mark during the crutial holiday sales season.

Max / Min Console Sales

This max/min graph shows of all the monthly sales what the maximum number of consoles were sold and what the least number was for all of 2008. The large spike from the DS occured during December selling a 3.04 million units, that is three times more then its competitor the PSP that sold just over 1 million units.

Total Average Console Sales

This graph is of the average sales for each console over the 12 months. The Wii and DS averaged nearly the same amount but the Wii’s sales were a bit higher at 845,000 and the DS at 830,000. Most interesting though is the PSP averaging better sales then its sister console the PS3. The PSP averaged 20,000 more units then the PS3 which only sold an average of 295,000 consoles.

Total Console Sales for 2008

As the average sales duplicated the Wii and DS have a staggering lead in the console race, with the Xbox 360 a distant third. The PSP out sold the PS3 by 285,000 units, but even more of a shocker is how close PS2 sales are to the PS3. The PS2 still is selling an average of 200,000 units per month and sold over 400,000 in December, showing that maybe Sony was right about their products having a 10 year life cycle.

Below is a listing of the best selling and highest growsing games. Nintendo first party titles ruled the roost claiming the top 4 sales spots and the top 2 revenue postitions. Besides RockBand and Guitar Hero third party titles did only a fraction of the sales, and none managed to stay more then one month on the charts.

Top 10 Games by Total Sales
1. Wii Play w/ remote – Wii – Nintendo – 5.28 million
2. Mario Kart Wii w/ wheel – Wii – Nintendo – 5.00 million
3. Wii Fit w/ balance board – Wii – Nintendo – 4.53 million
4. Super Smash Bros. Brawl – Wii – Nintendo – 4.17 million
5. Grand Theft Auto IV – Xbox 360 – Take-Two – 3.29 million*
6. Call of Duty: World at War – Xbox 360 – Activision – 2.75 million*
7. Gears of War 2 – Xbox 360 – Microsoft – 2.31 million*
8. Grand Theft Auto IV – PS3 – Take-Two – 1.89 million*
9. Madden NFL 09 – Xbox 360 – Electronic Arts – 1.87 million*
10. Mario Kart – DS – Nintendo – 1.65 million

Top 10 Games by Revenue
1. Rock Band – Multiple Platforms
2. Wii Fit – Wii
3. Guitar Hero World Tour – Multiple Platforms
4. Grand Theft Auto IV – Multiple Platforms
5. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock – Multiple Platforms
6. Mario Kart – Wii
7. Madden NFL 09 – Multiple Platforms
8. Wii Play w/ Remote – Wii
9. Call of Duty: World at War – Multiple Platforms
10. Super Smash Brothers: Brawl – Wii

Something to note how well Madden NFL 09 did, claiming 7 in revenue and 9 in total sales and also being the only sports title to be on either list, Wii Fit not counting.

Average Number of Games in Top Ten Sales

Number of Games in Top Ten Sales Per Month

Total Number of Games in Top Ten Sales Per Month

This is where Im sure much contestion will take place from fan boys. No surprise that the Wii dominated this category again. But surprisingly the Xbox 360 had an incredible amount of games in the top 10 over the year. Another dishearting fact for Sony is that the PSP averaged less than half the number of PS2 titles to chart and the PS3 had less then half of the number the Xbox 360 had. This DOES NOT speak to the quality of the games however but to far fewer consoles in wild, meaning far fewer potential customers, which also in turn means far fewer game releases.

With PS3 planning a price cut for early this year and a very strong line up of games on the horizon. Microsoft now having the cheapest console with a nice catalog of games, and the Wii’s line up for 2009 being best described as “shovelware”. Im guessing this years sales will be speratic, but some major issues may aries like, the Wii and DS eventually reaching a saturation point and with so very few promising titles amoung a mound of garbage what will the Wii’s longevity be. Sony will continue to poor money into the PS3 regardless of its performance that goes without question. With so little support and marketing of the PSP at least in North America, and its low amount of third party support, when will Sony pull the plug and do a major PSP reboot and fix its biggest design flaw(besides UMD) but adding a second joystick. The big questions for Microsoft being is it finally over its red ring trouble, and when will it announce the sequal to the 360. From a hardware standpoint the PS3 dwarfs the 360 and as publishers have begun to hit the roof of what it is caipable of and PS3 developers just becoming comfortable with its crazy architecture the graphics gap will begin to widen much more noticably as 2009 progresses.

Regardless of the what system you play on, we should still revil in what a seminal year 2008 was for gaming. That we are finally at the point were gaming is beging to go main stream(for better or worse) and more people then ever are enjoying gaming in their homes. Im just happy to be along for the ride.

The Top Ten Games of 1989

wyattferguson123 — Sun, 18 Jan 2009 03:44:00 +0000

1989 was a flagship year for gaming, the NES was coming into full stride, the gameboy was released, and some of the most prolific series’s in gaming were just being released. Titles like Prince of Persia, Sim City, Ninja Gaiden, and the number 1 block stacking game of all time Tetris were about to hit gaming like a sledge hammer.

Prince of Persia(PC)

Prince of Persia was originally developed for the Apple II by Jordan Mechner. Mechner used a process called rotoscoping, to create such fluid animation. This is the same technology used to create the characters in Mortal Kombat. Prince of Persia has had a very long life, with the recent remake for XBLA and PSN, not to mention being ported to over 13 platforms through out the years. Prince of Persia is the definition of a classic game.

Golden Axe(Genesis)

Golden Axe is a side-scrolling arcade hack and slash game released by Sega for the System 16-B arcade hardware and the Genesis. It was the first one of the first arcade ports to the Genesis. Makoto Uchida was the primary developer of the game and also was responsible for the creation of Altered Beast. Fun fact, the kanji that appear in the title screen read as “Senpu” 戦斧 meaning “Battle Axe”, however both the game and series are known as “Golden Axe”, even in Japan. Golden Axe takes place in the fictional land of Yuria where an evil entity known as Death Adder has captured the King and his daughter, and holds them captive in their castle. I have many fond memories of Golden Axe as Im sure many other 80′s kids do to.

Populous(PC)

Populous was developed by Bullfrog and is regarded by many as the seminal go game. The lead developer of on the project was Peter Molyneux of Fable Fame. In an interview with Peter he said the reason the player could manipulate the terrain was that he couldnt figure out a routine to flatten all the land. Populous won the Origins Award for Best Military or Strategy Computer Game. Peter Molyneux actually got motion sickness from the isometric view. At the time, he decided the isometric was necessary, but he could not play his own game. Bullfrog created a special cartridge for him to play top down only.

SimCity(PC)

SimCity was Maxis’ first product and designed by one of the smartest men in gaming Will Wright. On January 10, 2008 the SimCity source code was released under the free software GPL 3 license under the name Micropolis. A copy of SimCity was shipped on the OLPC’s under the name SimCity and not Micropolis. The inspiration for SimCity came from a feature of the game Raid on Bungeling Bay that allowed Wright to create his own maps during development. Wright soon found he enjoyed creating maps more than playing the actual game, and SimCity was born.

Tetris(Gameboy)

Tetris was the bundle in game for the Game Boy, making it a gigantic success. Alexey Pajitnov’s smash hit was the first game to use the Game Boy Link Cable. The name Tetris comes from “tetrads” the word for shapes composed of four blocks. Addicting is the only way to describe Tetris and anyone who owned a Game Boy can back me up on that.

Mega Man 2(NES)

Mega Man 2, or Rockman 2: The Mystery of Dr. Wily(hahaha) as its known in Japan was a labour of love for Keiji Inafune the brain child of Mega Man. Mega Man 2 added several new gameplay elements. The E-Tank allows a player to refill Mega Man?s health at any time, and also introduced was a password system. After defeating each Robot Master a password is displayed, allowing the player to return to that particular point in the game after restarting the system.The password stores the particular list of completed Robot Masters, as well as the number of E-Tanks that the player has accumulated. Unlike the original Mega Man, the game does not keep a running score for the player and the player was unable to replay levels once they have been completed. Many of the addition to Mega Man 2 were orginally planned for the original Mega Man but were removed because of size limitations on the cartridge. Mega Man 2 was named by GameSpot as one of “The Greatest Games of All Time” and it ranked at number 33 in Nintendo Power’s “Top 200 Nintendo Games Ever” list.

Adventure Island(NES)

Adventure Island also known as Hudson’s Adventure Island, was developed for the NES by Hudson Soft, the game was an adaptation of the arcade game Wonder Boy. Adventure Island was first released in Japan for the Famicom on September 12, 1986 and MSX in 1986. Adventure Island is a side-scrolling platform game that follows Master Higgins as he attempts to rescue his mate by traversing the tropical island.

Ninja Gaiden(NES)

Ninja Gaiden was developed by Tecmo and made initially for the NES. It was developed and directed by Shuichi Sakurazaki, who would go on to also develop and direct the game’s sequel.Ninja Gaiden was released in Japan on December 9, 1988 as Ninja Ryukenden( “Legend of the Ninja Dragon Sword”). It was released in North America as Ninja Gaiden in March 1989.Ninja Gaiden was the second title to bear its name, the first being the arcade version also released by Tecmo earlier in 1988. Whereas the arcade version was a two-player cooperative beat ‘em up game like Double Dragon, the NES version featured platforming gameplay, different graphics and storylines, and featured cinematic cutscenes.

Adventures of Lolo 2(NES)

Adventures of Lolo 2 is a puzzle game released by HAL Corporation for the NES. It is based on the Japanese Eggerland video game series and was the second game released in the U.S. series. Adventures of Lolo 2 was released on the Wii Virtual Console on January 21, 2008. In Japan, the game was released as Adventures of Lolo because the “first game” was not released in Japan because it was viewed merely as a compilation of previous Eggerland games. The Japanese version contained different stages and a different level of difficulty.

The Final Fantasy Legend(GameBoy)

The Final Fantasy Legend, known as Makai Toushi Sa·Ga in Japan(“Warrior in the Tower of the Spirit World”) was released for the Game Boy by Square and is the first of game in the SaGa series. The Final Fantasy Legend has actually nothing to do with the Final Fantasy series but was named that for marketing purposes. Final Fantasy Legend operates on a turn based RPG system, in which the game’s characters battle monsters using a variety of weapons. The game follows the story of four heroes that attempt to scale a tower at the center of the world, which supposedly leads to paradise. The four heroes controlled by the player may be one of three character classes, two of which may have different genders and one of which contains many subsets. The game was conceived by Nobuyuki Hoshino, and developed under director Akitoshi Kawazu, two years after Final Fantasy was released.

10 Most Stylized Games of 2008

wyattferguson123 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 04:48:00 +0000

2008 was a amazing year to be a gamer, with a incredible amount of standout games, and the revitilization of idie games, DLC, and online play being pushed hard, what more could we ask for. I wanted to look back on some games that tryed to stear away from your stock next gen greys and browns and push the visuals of gaming in a new direction. I should preface this, that these games are in no particular order, they are all pretty in their own right.

10. Professor Layton and the Curious Village

The Curious Village is a puzzle game, with the player controlling the movements of Professor Layton and his young assistant Luke around the village of St. Mystere to locate the “Golden Apple” and solving other mysteries that arise during their searching. The games has a dark anime styling, with colorful, intriguing character designs and impressive full motion video for the little ds.

9.Echochrome

Echochrome takes you into a topsy-turvy world of 3D mid-air mazes, where your aim is to guide a wandering mannequin along a series of pathways. Echochrome is an M. C. Escher fans wet dream, the very minimalist art style suits the mind numbingly hard puzzles.

8. Prince of Persia

This most recent reboot of the Prince of Persia series was a truck load of eye candy goodness. The cell shaded, moving artwork style of the game makes it very distinctive against the overwhelming number of games that stick to the ‘next gen brown’ color pallet.

7. Rez HD

Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s HD remake of his Dreamcast rail shooter Rez is a fever dream of techno glory. The world you are flying through gradually evolves as the player moves through sections of the each level and the music playsout. Elements such as the polygons that make up the player’s avatar, as well as background elements, also “beat” in time with the music.

6.No More Heroes

The Wii is not known for being a graphical zeitgeist, being essentially a repackaged Gamecube. Suda51 stylized cartoonish graphics, I dare say are probably one of the most adventurous games that we are probably going to see in the Wii, which is a very sad realization. The bloodgushing Quentin Tarantino-esc strategic dismemberment is a nice touch also. No More Heroes also gets nerd points for its reimagnined hyper stylized light saber.

5. Little Big Planet

This PS3 darling, has a look and feel all its own. Even the menus have been styled in this ‘cut & paste’ manner to make it seem like a childs playground. Every object in the game has a grit and roughness to it, that makes the art pop off the screen. Little Big Planet quirky art style is like nothing else out there.

4.Mirrors Edge

This futuristic parkcore romp, regardless of your opinion of the gameplay has a sterile look all its own. The motion blur and lighting effects give the world a nice glow and add a level of realism to your character Faith. The ultra clean look of the city is a nice juxtaposition to all the curroption we are lead to believe is going on around this world. The sparing use of color is a unique touch also.

3.Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved

With warping background grid reacting to player shots and the behavior of enemies, and rave style everything else Geometry Wars: Retor Evolved eye bleedingly fantastic.

2.Okami

Okami’s re-release onto the Wii was a very welcomed site ,after most gamers missed it first time around on the PS2. The japanese influence mixed with colourful cell shaded graphics make Okami a visual master peice. The watercolor-like world is beautiful, the only thing that could make it better is getting an HD version, and that probably isnt going to happen any time soon.

1. Valkyria Chronicles

One of the newest editions to the PS3 line up, Valkyria Chronicles has a soft pastel comic book feel from start to finish. From Segas site they say “The “CANVAS” graphics engine, created exclusively for the PLAYSTATION®3, brings a never-before-seen style to life. Breath life into stunningly unique visuals similar to hand-drawn illustrations, and immerse yourself in real-time battles in environments resembling a watercolor painting in motion.” That pretty much sums it up.

Rejected GDC Session Proposal: Unions

wyattferguson123 — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 02:58:00 +0000

Unions are a topic that are rarely ever discussed in video gaming. In my digging around the internet, I came across an article from fustianfuture.com, the blog is the a documentation of an indie developers life. He recently published his rejected proposal for a GDC session about unions in gaming. From his proposal:

“Union” is one of those words that have a strong polarizing effect on people in the industry. Game developers are either strongly for it, or against it. Some think it will solve all of the industry’s woes, others believe it won’t help in any way, and others yet think that unions would stifle creativity and impede the industry’s continued growth.

Our panel will convene to discuss the pros and cons of a union specific to the games industry and the various issues surrounding it. In this discussion, the taboo label on unions will be ripped off. The panelists will engage in a frank, honest, and fruitful discussion amongst themselves and with the audience.

The aim of the session is not to advocate for or against unions in particular, but to provide one of the first public forums on unions for the games industry.

He doesn’t state why the GDC rejected the topic, but one word comes to mind CONTROVERSIAL. The idea of unions in gaming has never really been addressed on a large scale and its an issue that keeps popping up in gaming throughout the years. One of the most important examples being Atari not crediting developers with the creation of games for the 2600 and them subsiquently leaving to found activision. I can only imagaine how many times the word ‘union’ must have been thrown around that office. Click here to read the full post.

Guy & Girl Gamercast Episode 1

wyattferguson123 — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 23:26:00 +0000

The very first episode of the Guy & Girl Gamercast has launched! Hosted by Wyatt Ferguson(me) and Shauna Morrison, we are trying to bring an average person opinion to video games. In the first episode we are working out the kinks, but in the first section what we’ve been playing and in the second section what games we want to get our grubby mitts on in 2009. You can leave all your feedback in the comments section or email us at GirlandGuyGamercast@Gmail.com.

Ray Tracing: 101

wyattferguson123 — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:14:00 +0000

Ray tracing has been making quite the stir in computing of late, and with Intel researchers making claims like, “Real Time Ray-Tracing: The End of Rasterization” it is hard to ignore. In this piece I am going to explore what ray tracing is, the technology behind it, what it means for gaming, and if all the hype around it is to be deserved. This is your crash course of ray tracing.

First off, what is ray tracing? ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. More simply put ray tracing follows the path of light from your eyes to an object. Using this method you can create incredibly life photorealistic objects and pictures on a computer. To do this however it takes a much greater amount of processing power, compared to standard scanline rendering which is has far more modest computing requirements. Ray tracing has been confined to images and special effects things that you can render slowly and not ‘live’ the way you would in say a video game.

The image above demonstrates how ray tracing would work, with you ray tracing from the perspective of the camera. Ray tracing is so named because it tries to simulate the path that light rays take as they bounce around within the world. The name “ray tracing” is a bit misleading because the natural assumption would be that rays are traced starting at their point of origin, the light source, and towards their destination,in this case the camera. That method would also work, but is computationally even more costly then ray tracing. How can tracing from the source to the destination be any different then going from the destination to the source you may ask? well let me explain. Lets trace one ray in a scene with a light bulb,a ball,and a table. We begin at the light bulb, but first need to decide how many rays to shoot out from the bulb. Then for each ray we have to decide in what direction it is going. There is really an infinity of directions in which it can travel – how do we know which to choose? Let’s say now were tracing a number of photons. Some will reach the eye directly, others will bounce around some and then reach the eye, and many, many more will probably never hit the eye at all. For all the rays that never reach the eye, the effort tracing them was wasted. In order to save ourselves this wasted effort, we trace only those rays that are guaranteed to hit your eye. How do we do that? start at the eye of course!.

Researchers at Intel helped port Quake 4 into a ray tracing engine they have been developing and showed it off on June 12, 2008 for Research@Intel Day. They ran Quake 4 without any special graphics cards, actual the only time the GPU was ever used was to send the video signal to the monitor. All the computation is done on the CPU. They did this with a system that had eight x86 cores running at 2.93 GHz, a system Intel predicts will be fairly common in a short number of years. The game ran at just under 100 frames per second at 1024×1024 resolution. As the resolution increases, the CPU will spend more time tracing light rays for those additional pixels being display on your monitor. This was an amazing acomplishement, showing that this technology is nearly ready to be brought to the consumer space and out of research labs. The image below and the header image for this article were both created using ray tracing, to give you an idea of what ray tracing is capable of.

A major ray tracing research breakthrough came in 1979 from a man named Turner Whitted. Previous algorithms cast rays from the eye into the scene and then stopped, Whitted continued the process. A ray can generate one of three possible outcomes when its projected it can reflect, refract, or shadow. A reflected ray continues on in the direction it is reflected off the mirror and intersects with the closest object in its path and thats what you see inthe reflection. Refraction bends the ray as it passes into or out of an object. To further avoid tracing all rays in a scene, a shadow ray is used to test if a surface is visible to a light. When a ray hits a surface at some point, if the surface at this point faces a light, a ray is traced between this intersection point and the light. If the ray hits a dark spot the ray ‘dies’ and stops tracing. This hole new layer of ray tracing added incedible amounts of realism to ray traced images. Below is the pseudo code for a classical ray tracing algorithm:

For each pixel in image{Create ray from eye passing through this pxlInitialize NrstT = INFINITY and NrstObjt = NULL

For every object in scene{If ray intersects this object{If t of intersection is less than NrstT{   Set NrstT to t of the intersection   Set NrstObjt to this object}}}

If NrstObjt is NULL{Fill this pixel with background color}Else{Shoot a ray to each light source check if shadowIf surface is reflective{generate reflection rayrecurse}If surface is transparent}generate refraction rayrecurse}Use NrstObjt and NrstT to compute shading functionFill this pxl with color result of shading function}}

The first ever “real-time” ray tracying was done in 2005 at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. Using tools that were developed nearly two decades ealier in 1986 by Mike Muuss for BRL-CAS solid modeling system. This software is now availible and being developed on in the open source community. One of the spinoffs of this is the OpenRT project that has highly-optimized ray tracing code to offer programmers a OpenGL style development for ray tracing. Ray tracing hardware, such as the experimental Ray Processing Unit developed at the Saarland University, has been designed to accelerate some of the computationally intensive operations of ray tracing. On March 16, 2007, the University of Saarland revealed an implementation of a high-performance ray tracing engine that allowed computer games to be rendered via ray tracing without intensive resource usage.

The increased focus on ray tracing as technology is catching up to the theory, in the next two years should start seeing ray tracing used in real-time in video games. The PS3 could be the first console to ever render games using ray tracing. With its beefy hardware specs and as programmers come to grips on how to develop efficiently for the system it is a real possibility.

Apples First Gaming Console: The Pippin

wyattferguson123 — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 17:49:00 +0000

Few people know that Apple developed a game console in the mid-nineties and even fewer have ever touched or played one. They marketed it as a ‘cheap’ home computer and tried to trojan horse it into homes the same way the Commodore 64 had years earlier. Their are actually two ‘versions’ of the Pippin, the black model is referred to as the @World, which was sold in the United States and the white model is referred to as the ATMARK which was sold only in Japan. Black ATMARK’s are extremely rare because of there extremely limited sales and distrobution.

Apple never intended to release Pippin on its own. Instead it intended to license the technology to third parties; Bandai was looking at entering the console video game market, and chose the Pippin as its platform. Much later Katz Media also entered production, planning to use the platform as a low cost PC with web ability. By the time the Apple Bandai Pippin was released in 1996 in the United States, the market was dominated by the Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation. In addition there was little launch software for Pippin, the only major publisher being Bandai itself. It cost US$599 on launch, its price was considered too expensive in comparison to its contemporaries and only ended up selling just over 42,000 units before discontinuing the system. Production was so limited that there were more keyboard and modem accessories produced than actual systems.

The Pippin used a stripped down version of Apples 7.5.2 operating system with each software release having a hidden Pippin Authentication File. Without this file present the Pippin would simply spit out the disc, this ‘feature’ prevented the use of any Apple computer designed games or programs from being play.The homebrew community found ways to bypass this and even install later versions of the Mac OS on the Pippin. Only eighteen titles were ever availible in the US and about eighty in Japan. Even though the Pippin had online capabilities, software updates were released on CD-ROM rather than downloadable patches, which made sense considering the speed limitations of the average users Internet connection at the time.

The boomerang shaped Pippin controller was used to both play games and navigate though the systems operating system. A centre mounted trackball and two front mounted orange select buttons were designed to replicate the features of a computer mouse. The boomerange was very similar to the Super Nintendo layout with a D-pad on the left and four action buttons laid out in the diamond design,it even had matching button colours as the SNES controller. The packaged controllers were all wired units but wireless versions were available but good luck finding them.

In every way the Pippin is a Macintosh. A third party created a Pippin bootable CD with Netscape that had the Macintosh interface, but was stripped of many of the extensions and control panels found on regular Macs. Only one titled existed that could run on the Pippin, Mac, and Windows it was a Japanese title called Ultraman.

Pippin CDs were created on a Macintosh or a Pippin with a SCSI connected external CD drive. Once the final version of the software was ready, a checksum of the CD was sent to Apple and signed with Apple’s private key. The signed checksum was applied to the gold master CD that was to be pressed and released to the public. The Pippin, during its boot process, would generate a checksum of the CD and compare it to the one signed with Apple’s private key. Only if the checksums compared successfully would the boot process continue.

Only 18 titles were released for the Pippin in the United States, although Bandai released as many as 80 in Japan. All Pippin titles could be used on Macintosh computers of the time, although you could not use any Macintosh software on the Pippin without certain modifications. Through heavy modification, some DOS and Windows based programs could also be used on the Pippin.

For all the Pippin’s flaws it was a very forward thinking console by marrying the best parts of a PC with a game console. This vision is something that current generations keep leaning closer towards, but continue to resist.