Eon's ICube uses a combination of stereo projectors, stereoscopic glasses, motion tracking position trackers, and 3-6 walls that wrap scenes around their corners to give users the illusion of a "complete sense of presence" in a displayed virtual world.

The system also supports peripherals like force feedback devices, a gesture dataglove, and a wireless wand that looks like a power drill or a Romulan disruptor. Multiple users can walk around the setup at the same time, provided they all have their own pair of glasses. Here's a recent video of IDEO Labs taking the ICube for a spin (and almost falling over while trying it out):

Continue reading "One Step Closer To A Holodeck: Eon's ICube" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

While Nintendo's user-generated content (UGC) features in its games haven't yet matched the scope of titles like LittleBigPlanet or Spore, the company has shown effort to include engaging UGC elements in its marquee releases such as Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Animal Crossing.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata recognizes the UGC's importance in its future game, and explained at an investor meeting earlier this year, "The reason why we feel the potential of [UGC] through the Internet is because the fun that is generated by UGC can be appreciated by a higher percentage of our consumers as a fresh experience."

"There are some people, although they may be a minority, who love to create something creative, share that with others, and enjoy seeing other people being entertained or responding positively to their creation," he continued. "At the same time, [a] great majority of people are rather passive and love to applaud the creative efforts by others and enjoy playing with them. In other words, UGC has the unique characteristic that, regardless of their game skills, people on both sides can enjoy."

To really see how Nintendo's first-party UGC offerings have evolved in the past three years, one should look to the comapany's DS releases. In 2006, Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis allowed players to create and swap levels with friends. 2008's Daigasso! Band Brothers DX, a Japan-only game for composing music, enabled users to upload, download, and rate songs.

Late last year, the publisher released animation software Ugoku Memo Chou (coming stateside as Moving Notepad) for free through its DSiWare digital download platform. Partnering with Kyoto-based internet services company Hatena, Nintendo put up Ugomemo Hatena, a YouTube-like site where users can upload, download, rate, and comment on different animations. The animations can even be embedded on other sites, or, if the original creator permits it, remixed to make a slightly different or completely new cartoon.

The next release to flex Nintendo's UGC muscles? Made in Ore, an upcoming WarioWare game that enables players to create their own microgames, along with comics, sounds, and Famicom cart designs. Users can trade their microgames, comics, and records with up to 50 of their friends locally or online.

Continue reading "Nintendo's Made in Ore, User-Generated Content" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Our yearly GDC Austin conference is all about online games, and here's its latest call for papers, with community and social networking - plus audio and writing summits, and more (EXCITING!) summits to be announced - to the fore! More info follows...]

The organizers of Game Developers Conference Austin have started accepting submissions for the upcoming four-day trade show, to be held this September.

Proposals to present lectures, roundtables and full-day tutorials will be accepted for review by the GDC Austin advisory boards through Friday, May 8th.

Presented by Think Services, organizers of the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, GDC Austin is a four-day event taking place at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas from September 15 to 18, 2009.

GDC Austin focuses on connected games including online games, virtual worlds, and social networking. Submissions should address the most pressing development challenges for connected games related to business and marketing, design, social networking and community, services, production, and programming.

Continue reading "GDC Austin 2009 Calls For Session Submissions" »

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bent Festival, the "annual art and music festival celebrating DIY electronics, hardware hacking, and circuit bending" is already underway in New York City, and will run until April 18th at The Tank. It's designed to entertain and educate both children and adults with installations, concerts, and workshops relevant to the DIY electronics and circuit bending scene. For the uninitiated, circuit bending refers to the act of "modifying the circuitry of battery-powered children's toys to create strange, new, and unintended sounds for creative purposes."

Chiptune group Burnkit2600 (music video below) will perform at one of Bent Festival's three nightly concerts, as will Tristan Perich, who was behind the intriguing 1-Bit Music project and will also have an installation at the festival. Jeff "noteNdo" Donaldson is slated to have his own installation, too.

Don "No Carrier" Miller, whose coding work can be seen in Pulsewave's fabulous ROM invites, will hold a workshop on "Soft Circuit-Bending on the NES," in which he'll show off open source software project glitchNES and explain how the NES Picture Processing Unit can be "abused and exploited to create stunning patterns and effects."

Continue reading "2009 Bent Festival Featuring Chiptune Performances, Installations" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Since our sister Game Developer magazine already has popular features like Top 20 Publishers, we expanded to also include Top 50 Developers last year, with some interesting results - here's a reputation survey you can fill out to help with this year's countdown.]

Sister magazine Game Developer has opened a public survey for the second Top 50 Developers countdown, used to inform upcoming research on the top developers in the industry.

The successful first chart, saw Nintendo Kyoto and Infinity Ward in the top two spots. Now, this new survey will help the authors determine the worldwide "top 50" developers, based also on statistics like sales charts, number of games released, and average game rating.

The magazine's survey, which can be found online here, allows all game professional readers to first score developers based on perceived reputation, on a scale of 1-10, providing comments along the way.

Second, the survey asks that persons who have worked with developers in a publishing, contract, or full-time basis rank those developers in terms of their overall value, including pay and perks, professionalism and competency, and how likely the respondent would be to work with the company again.

The survey is completely anonymous, and can be completed in full beginning today. It will close at the end of Friday, April 24, 2009.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just as Earthbound (Mother 2 in Japan) for the SNES included an official player's guide, Fangamer accompanied the recent release of Mother 3's fan-translation English patch with a Mother 3 Handbook, a 240-page guide brimming with game facts, secrets, and art.

Inspired by the clay models featured in the original Earthbound Nintendo Player's Guide, Camille Young, wife of Starmen.net (Mother online community) and Fangamer head Reid Young, created a series of impressive figurines for the new handbook, using "10-year-old scraps of Sculpey III polymer clay" and adding color to them with acrylics paint. Though the figures are small, ranging from 1.5cm to 4.5in tall, Camille spent around 12.7 hours on each piece.

I've gathered my favorites below, but you can see more of them and some in-progress shots on Camille's blog:

Continue reading "Camille Young's Marvelous Mother 3 Sculptures" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[In this new editorial, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander looks at that ever-ready comparison, Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane, looking at how relevant it is to any argument of games and legitimacy.]

The knell for deeper art, broader sophistication and greater maturity in games just keeps getting louder, but do we really know what we're asking for?

The question of "gaming's Citizen Kane," for example, has become so widely-echoed that it's begun to frustrate fans and industry-watchers alike. Maybe history will show us we've already got our Citizen Kane. Or hey, wait, aren't the cultural and practical differences between film and games so broad that it's useless to analogize?

There's nothing wrong with craving watershed moments for video games, of course. But problem with the Citizen Kane question, as with other similar demands, is that it's begun to reverberate wildly without any practical follow-through on what the answer might look like.

Being dissatisfied with the status quo is easy -- proposing practical alternatives or concrete answers isn't. It's easy to complain about the creative constraints of a hit-driven industry. And it's easy to take issue with the fact that a "recession-resistant", $21 billion industry still serves such a small segment of the market.

Because really, for the purposes of this discussion, it does. It may be fun to point to vague concepts like "casual gaming", "the success of the Wii," or any one of the thousand regular studies that purport that "the average gamer is a 35-year-old woman."

Continue reading "Opinion: Why Raising 'Kane' Won't Help Games' Legitimacy" »

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a recent Gamasutra blog post professing his adoration and fright of Sinistar, Michael Molinari brought up an interview with the arcade game's creator Noah Falstein, in which he revealed, "There's an easter egg hidden in the attract mode, triggered by an odd combination of button presses that we've all forgotten, but soon I may have the chance to rediscover it."

Though Molinari was unable to find further details on the attract mode feature, commentor Ross Patrol located Jeff Vavasour's instructions on bringing up the easter egg, and created a video demonstrating the odd combination of button presses and its effects:

It's a complicated series of steps, but now you can look up the game's developers on Sinistar's screen whenever you want!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Showcasing highlights from big sister site Gamasutra's Expert Blogssection, which we continue to be really delighted with, industry veterans discuss design collaboration, Resistance 2 frustration, and controversy over 'playing to win'. Go join up as a Gama blogger if you want to be part of the conversation, too.]

In our weekly Best of Expert Blogs column, we showcase notable pieces of writing from members of the game development community who maintain Expert Blogs on Gamasutra.

Member Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while the invitation-only Expert Blogs are written by development professionals with a wealth of experience to share.

We hope that both sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information about the blogs, check out the official posting guidelines.

This Week's Standout Expert Blogs

Ideas From Your Team: The Pooling Ideas Philosophy
(Bruno Urbain)

A designer's role is not simply to generate ideas, but also to collect ideas from the team and incorporate them into a coherent design.

Springing off a piece written by Game Developer magazine design columnist Damion Schubert, designers Bruno Urbain and Benjamin Dumaz describe the pros and cons of a number of strategies for collecting, communicating, and making use of ideas in development.

Continue reading "Gamasutra Expert Blogs: Pooling Ideas & Adding Rules" »

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The child of an interracial coupling, this simple but effective Sega Saturn modification combines the shells of a White Japanese system and a Black North American console. Rising Stuff forumer Yoshimitsu points out that he added a blue LED, a switchless region mod, and a matching controller, too.

Note that the custom black and white console is sitting in between the rare Japan-only Hello Kitty Dreamcast and Skeleton Sega Saturn, both of which sell for crazy bucks. The Skeleton edition, the last produced Saturn model with a 50,000 run, is so great, Sega actually wrote "This is Cool" over its CD drive lid and controller.

In other Saturn news, fansite Segatastic noticed that Enterbrain's Sega Store has brought back its Saturn-shaped backpacks, over ten years after the company stopped production for the actual console. The nylon bag sells for a ridiculous $72 (¥7,140), and is only available in the less exciting and not-at-all rare color of gray

Continue reading "Sega Saturn Modded, Bagged" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At a glance, Miami Law looks like the dozens of other DS adventure games that Japan seems flooded with. When it was announced for North America two months ago, I was convinced that it was a localization from D3 Publisher's budget Simple series, a suspicion supported by the game's middling 3D portions.

Miami Law has touches of Phoenix Wright, with segments devoted to examining crime scenes and interviewing suspects, but there are also action and puzzle elements. You can choose to play as two characters with different perspectives on the cases, police detective Martin Law or FBI Agent Sara Starling.

While Law's minigames put more emphasis on action, with car chases and touchscreen-based on-rails shootouts, Starling's segments are puzzle-focused, as she analyzes evidence and plays sudoku (I assume there's some loose connection between 9x9 grids and the case they're investigating). Another example of their unique perspectives -- during one of the game's car chases, you can either command the car as Law, or shoot at the escaping perpetrators as Starling.

It's a completely new title developed by Hudson in Japan, I later learned, and it's being brought to the States with the help of Gaijinworks, a relatively new (established in 2006) localization company founded by Victor Ireland. Those of you who played Lunar, Arc the Lad, or various other Japanese RPGs on the original PlayStation might remember Ireland as the former president of now defunct publisher Working Designs.

Continue reading "Victor Ireland and the Miami Game Machine" »

Posted by Eric Caoili at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Semi-pseudonymous Game Developer magazine humor columnist -- and developer -- Matthew Wasteland discovers a hidden cache of news, from producer bug-tracking to Yuji Naka stalking and beyond, and is kindly presenting it to GameSetWatch readers.]

Game Journalist Totally Hung Out with Yuji Naka

San Francisco, CA — Area game journalist Benjamin Day recently hung out with Yuji Naka, one of Japan's top game designers, known for his involvement in seminal Sega titles such as Sonic the Hedgehog.

“Naka-san is totally awesome,” Day enthused. “He's super cool and I'm really glad I got the chance to meet him.”

At the most recent Tokyo Game Show, Day was lucky enough to be in a small group with some of the other guys from his work and some real-life Japanese people he knows, who said, “Hey, do you want to meet Yuji Naka?” And Day was like, “Of course I do!”

Day and his friends were led to an amazing shabu-shabu place nearby, which is not on any tour books or anything, you pretty much have to be Japanese and know the area to be aware it even exists.

Continue reading "Arrested Development: 'Hard News'" »

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As more and more players pick up Keita Takahashi's supremely odd Noby Noby Boy for PlayStation 3, stretching the worm-like Boy as much as possible to earn points, and then submitting those points online, they contribute to the PSN title's meta-game. That stream of accumulating points helps stretch Girl to different outer space milestones.

When Girl reached the Moon several weeks ago, a Moon stage was unlocked for all players. Girl's next goal is to stretch to Mars, which is considerably farther away than Earth's natural satellite.

To help estimate and track how long it will take before players stretch Boy enough to help Girl reach Mars, Evil Robot Stuff has put up Noby Noby Stats, a site collecting data from the official Noby Noby Boy site and presenting the information with graphs covering Girl's daily growth, the number of active Boys per day, and more.

According to current figures, Girl will reach Mars in an estimated 2700 days. So, quit wasting your time on the internet and get back to stretching!

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With only a limited selection of paint colors, Jesse Balmer decorated this arcade cabinet, trading services with his "girlfriend's sister's boyfriend" in exchange for computer maintenance. Even with just the five or six colors, though, the cabinet looks fantastic!

One side shows Blanka breaking through a gray wall along with a Chinese dragon, Mario holding a grumpy purple goomba, a skull spider, and another character I'm unable to identify. The other side depicts a deteriorating zombie, Wolverine with his claws bared, Iron Man appearing very serious, an undead Thor, Doctor Doom shaking his fist, and Batman with what looks like a Charlie Brown shirt pattern patched to his chest. Wicked.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)