In a rare moment of scheduling success, my co-hosts and I at the Played Podcast have lived up to our ostensible weekly format, releasing our latest episode in the week following the previous episode.  Anyone who follows the show will recognize this as something of an achievement for us.

This week’s episode is number 43, and includes Comic-Con talk as well as residual E3 affairs (The Conduit, Fallout 3, Fable 2), and discussion of currently-played games including Siren: Blood Curse, Space Invaders Extreme, Civilization Revolution, Ticket to Ride, Catan, and Everyday Shooter.  Go check it out.

Alternatively, the text to all reviews could read, “The framerate is unbearable.”

Anagramarama (word puzzle)
This game does not recognize the words “coy,” “soy,” “duo,” “dim,” “vise,” “diva,” “dais,” “ides,” or “is.” It does, however, recognize “admixed” and “via.”

Doom (first-person shooter)
Boy, I wish I could plug a Goddamn mouse into this.

Primate Plunge (platformer)
This vertically-oriented platformer is surprisingly playable until it becomes all too apparent that, like its name suggests, its unendingly tedious levels consist entirely of a monkey falling.

Gem Drop X (color matching puzzle)
If Bejeweled and Bust a Move had sexual relations, this would be the resultant miscarriage. (more…)

[Update: For the full scoop on this story, including final price and specs, check out this update.]

At Electronic Arts’ Comic-Con booth today, an EA rep mentioned that the company plans to market pre-built PCs in conjunction with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead.  The idea seems to be to try and circumvent some of the intimidation that exists for gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and reassure them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

Apparently, the rigs will come in various configurations, which will correspond to Crysis Warhead’s levels of graphical detail, with a likely price range being $600-$800 (I doubt EA will want to market a machine that meets only the game’s minimum spec), and they will probably be named accordingly–the Crysis Warhead Performance PC, and so on.

I like the idea of Electronic Arts looking for ways to make the PC platform more approachable, and this idea is sound–buy this PC that says Crysis on it; it’s designed to run Crysis, and you know that if it plays Crysis it’ll play anything else on the market.  I was also impressed that EA had no less than three PC exclusives–Crysis Warhead, BattleForge, and Warhammer Online, and other games on display like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space are in development for PC as well–in its booth at Comic-Con, a mainstream show if there ever was one.

As the rep also mentioned to me, EA’s own internal analysis indicates the PC market is growing–publishers just have to learn how to capitalize on it.

On the train to downtown San Diego for Comic-Con, I snapped this portent of sights to come.

In the middle of writing this post, the guy picked up his cell phone (which rang with some crazy adventure music) and answered with “moshi moshi.”

There is much confusion over what exactly Portal: Still Alive, an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release of Valve’s excellent platformer-thing, is. After all, it was announced amazingly vaguely during Microsoft’s E3 press conference, and there was little followup. So I asked Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and he explained it to me.

Portal: Still Alive is a standalone version of the original Portal that can be purchased through Xbox Live Marketplace.  In addition to Portal itself, it will include a number of levels that are not part of the game’s story, and do not feature story-related elements such as GLaDOS voiceover.

The game is exclusive to Live Arcade, at least for a while, but PC players can get basically the same experience right now anyway. Here’s why.

You may have seen Portal: The Flash Version, a clever Flash-based tribute to Valve’s game. You are slightly less likely to have seen the Portal: The Flash Version MapPack, which recursively ports the Flash game’s levels to Portal itself.

Still Alive’s bonus content consists of 360-certified versions of the levels from that pack. So if you’re a PC Portal owner who, like me, was feeling excluded by Still Alive’s bonus content, fear not: you get to play that content first, and for free.

He said, “We’re making Pikmin.”

Then I walked to the Orpheum Theatre, and saw The Motherfucking Who.

Pretty Goddamn rad, as far as evenings go.

Last month, I wrote up my initial reactions to Spore, based on some hands-on at Will Wright’s Emeryville studio and following a long interview with Soren Johnson, Spore designer and former Firaxis designer on Civilization III and IV.  That full interview has finally been posted.  It was conducted with my coworker Brandon Sheffield in hot tag-team style.

The interview starts out very much about Spore (obviously), but towards the end it actually starts to angle more towards a discussion about strategy games in general—why they’ve become successful, why they’ve faced challenges, and what their future may hold.  Johnson obviously has a lot of perspective on the matter, and it’s particularly interesting since he was the designer on Spore charged with ensuring the game will be of interest to hardcore gamers, not just the more casual crowd that has typified Wright’s audience with The Sims.

He also speaks a lot about the Civilization series, and the pressures to satisfy an increasingly hardcore and competent audience by the fourth game in the series, at the potential expense of the broader audience that made the series big in the first place.

And did you know the original Civ was conceived as an RTS?  Sid Meier changed his mind.  I didn’t know that!  Maybe you did.

I have nothing against Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, Microsoft’s Xbox Live programming director–he’s a really nice guy as far as I can tell from our limited interaction–but this kind of shit just makes me cringe.

Microsoft is apparently sending its own press corps to E3 this year, which in itself isn’t hugely notable–across the board publishers are more and more attempting to sidestep the gaming press and present their own unfiltered PR, and Microsoft has long been on the cutting edge of that with Live and its general community attitude. But the way this is presented seems more than a little disingenuous to me.

“Major Nelson is already lining up exclusive interviews with bigwig industry insiders,” the site boasts. “TriXie will undoubtedly try to crash a few VIP parties,” it continues, in a conspiratorial, guerrilla sort of tone. “Video Monkey is ready to bring you the sights and sounds of the show, and our intrepid Inside Xbox game gurus (Ryan and Denny of This Week In Xbox) will be grabbing as many controllers as they can for hands-on impressions of all the hot games,” it promises.

Is Mr. Hryb, an executive at the world’s most prominent software developer and a first-party hardware manufacturer that other publishers must pay in order to publish their software, going to have much trouble scoring these hot scoops? (more…)

[Update: This piece was published on Gamasutra on July 9.]

A number of observers have hypothesized that the recent, vaguely-announced contract renegotiation between increasingly huge publisher Activision and star developer Infinity Ward may have been catalyzed by last year’s surprise regained independence on the part of Bungie Studios.

The move was revealed by Infinity Ward community manager Robert Bowling, who stated that the studio has renegotiated its deal with owner Activision, and will have “complete control” over its next project, a new intellectual property. (In an email, Bowling told me the company isn’t ready to go into any further detail just yet.)

The Bungie connection

The Bungie-related speculation is sensible, and almost certainly at least partially accurate, particularly from Infinity Ward’s perspective. Like Bungie, Infinity Ward was founded as an independent studio, and was acquired by its publishing partner; both studios retain key leadership; and both reached their incredible retail success after they were acquired.

Both also left their major properties–Halo and Call of Duty–in the hands of their publishers after years of unbroken franchise development, freeing up the studios to get back to what put them on the map in the first place: developing new titles.

Seeing the kind of leverage Bungie leadership was able to wield when negotiating its amiable departure from Microsoft ownership surely inspired Infinity Ward’s Grant Collier et al to knock on the doors of Activision brass, revenue sheets in hand.

Breaking the never-ending dev cycle

But inspiration may also have come from somewhere a little closer to home: Blizzard Entertainment, the fully-owned-but-nigh-untouchable rockstar developer of WarCraft, StarCraft, and Diablo, a subsidiary of soon-to-be Activision partner Vivendi. (more…)

A couple of months ago, I conducted a pretty lengthy interview with adventure gaming legend Ron Gilbert (The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge, Maniac Mansion, etc.), and for various complicated reasons it was only just published yesterday on Gamasutra. We discuss Gilbert’s recent projects, including his own title DeathSpank and its Diablo influence (yes), how he feels about the game industry these days, and the merits of the Hollywood production system.

It was nice to see Gilbert a whole lot more cheerful about the industry than he was the last time I interviewed him, then alongside my colleague Jake Rodkin–although something that didn’t change was my vaguely embarrassing tendency to start asking four-paragraph questions toward the end.

As before, he was a good sport about it.