The last time Namco Bandai released a Museum collection on Wii with updated versions of its classics ... it didn't really work out. Namco is trying again with Namco Museum Megamix -- sort of. In fact, many of the remixed games in this collection are the same as in the previous collection, judging from the materials released. The Galaga Remix seen in the screenshots is the same "defend Pac-Man" rail shooter seen in the 2007 game, and Pac-Motos and Pac-n-Roll Remix, described in the press release, was also present. That's right, Namco has now taken to re-releasing its remakes.

The Megamix adds at least one new rearrangement: Grobda Remix, based on a shmup you're forgiven for now knowing about. It'll also feature original (read: good) versions of Pac-Man, Mappy, Rally-X, Galaga, and more. Megamix will be out in November.

Continue reading Namco remakes arcade classics again in Wii's Namco Museum Megamix

Namco remakes arcade classics again in Wii's Namco Museum Megamix originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Ballistic Publishing, the folks behind The Art of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, have announced its next PlayStation partnership, The Art of God of War III.

Set for release this October, the 272-page book will feature a "visual history tour" of the game, including 100 pieces of art that didn't appear in the game. The book will feature concept art, character studios, character modeling, and more, giving you a behind-the-scenes look at Sony Santa Monica's production process.

Ballistic is also offering exclusive character modeling walkthrough videos to anyone who purchases the book through its website. The videos will feature Santa Monica character artist Katon Callaway detailing how the Cerberus and Hephaestus characters were designed.

The Art of God of War III comes in two flavors -- paperback for $65, leather-bound for $129.99, and a "Limited Folio Edition" for $300. What does three bills get you? A leather-bound presentation case, a hand-signed an number Certificate of Authenticity, and a hand-carved cover ornament designed to look like the "Blade of Exile."

Despite popping up on GameStop and having been rated by Australia's OFLC, the so-called "Dragon Age Origins - Ultimate Edition" still hasn't been officially announced by EA. Now the British Board of Film Classification has gone ahead and listed the supposed contents of the re-release, which is "made up of a number of separate components," including:

• Dragon Age: Origins (original game)
• Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening (standalone expansion)
• "The Darkspawn Chronicles" (DLC)
• "Feastday Combo Pack" (DLC)
• "The Golems of Amgarrak" (DLC)
• "Leliana's Song" (DLC)
• "Return to Ostagar" (DLC)
• "The Stone Prisoner" (lDLC)
• "Warden's Keep" (DLC)
• "Witch Hunt" (DLC)

While the GameStop listing has since been removed, the retailer had posted a $60 price and an October 12 release date for the Ultimate Edition. We'll be sure to note the official details when EA officially announces them.

BBFC: Dragon Age Ultimate Edition to include Awakening and all DLC originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

The IndieCade 2010 festival, an annual event held in Culver City, California which celebrates independently-created games, is doing a couple things differently for this year's awards presentation. The first is that all 32 of the finalists are nominated for every award category, such as "Technical Innovation," "World/Story," and the slightly more obscure "Sublime Experience." Check out the full list of categories and their lengthy list of contenders just past the jump.

Oh, the second difference for this year's show? It's going to be hosted by LeVar Burton. In short, it's shaping up to be the best awards show ever.

Continue reading IndieCade 2010 finalists announced, everyone's nominated for everything

IndieCade 2010 finalists announced, everyone's nominated for everything originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Who needs to be at PAX? We're bringing it to you! Disney is letting PAX Prime goers go hands on with its upcoming title TRON: Evolution, allowing them to get a taste of the game's free-running, combat, and the light cycle in action.

While this doesn't quite match playing it, we've got a video of the game in action for you to watch in the comfort of your chair. If you're standing, sit down. I can't imagine why you'd be standing up and reading this though, unless it's on your phone, and chances are you can't watch this video anyhow.

The demo at PAX is the same thing I played pre-E3, and while it showed promise (I had fun with the combat, based on Capoeira) , but need a bit of polishing. If you did attend PAX (or you're there now -- why are you reading this?), then let me know what you think of the game. It's out for PlayStation3 and Xbox 360 on December 7, a few weeks before the film, TRON: Legacy, hits theaters.

 

If a video game contains guns, does it also contain bullets? Not necessarily. Well, not necessarily — get this — depending on your philosophical take on what it means for a bullet to exist.

The case of the missing bullets in video games is more of a quirk than a dire tragedy. There is no scandal behind the fact that if you stare at your favorite shooter game, watch a video of it in slow-motion or scruitinize its screenshots you may not see a bullet.

Some games just don't show the bullets. You pull the trigger of your oh-so-visible virtual gun. You see the muzzle flash. You see the spent casings eject from side of your rifle. You see the impact of your shot. But in many games — not all — no visible bullet left your weapon and traveled to the place where the damage was dealt.

There's a good programming reason for leaving bullets out of the picture. And there's a wonderful philosophical justification for doing so .

For the programming reason, you have to accept the classic video game need for machine guns and for lots of shooting. If video games were stage plays in which there was one gun, maybe five shots fired, and that was that, then they probably could all show their bullets. Video games, however, are not stage plays. Games with guns have thousands of shots fired.

When a player fires a gun in a game, what usually happens is that an invisible line is immediately drawn — tested — in the video game world, connecting the player's aimed gun with whatever the fired shot is going to hit.

If the target is a wall, the wall will be changed to depict the result. Maybe it becomes chipped. Maybe it crumbles.

If the target is a red barrel, maybe a sequence is triggered that shows the barrel blowing up.

If the target is a body of an enemy, specific animations will ensue. Maybe the enemy falls. Parameters will change. Maybe the enemy now have less life energy and is closer to being killed.

None of that is all that different from what would happen in the real world. A shot is fired. There is a result. The big difference in how things work — aside from that pain, injury and possible mortal consequences thing — is that everything that happens in the video game world comes at a cost to the computer hardware. That computer hardware has to have the power and speed to determine what the results of a shot should be and then illustrate it. The engines of our computers and game consoles must render these results as a part of the scene we see, a scene that is shown, frame after frame, 30-60 frames in a second. If the computer has too much work to do, it will show fewer frames. The virtual world will become stacatto.

There are other optional differences between those shots fired in the real world and in a first-person shooter: in games, those shots may not involve the traveling of an object through the air and the shots may be — faster than a speeding bullet — infinitely fast.

Why Guns And Bullets Don't Always Mix

Jon Creighton, programmer on upcoming firsrt-person shooter Bodycount and veteran of the PlayStation 2 and Xbox gun-crazy shooter called Black, explained what programmers and game designers already know: how shooting in a game works and why bullets can ruin the action of any video game that has been built to run at a steady framerate. He did this for Kotaku over e-mail. He was invited to be as specific and technical as he desired.

"Because real bullets travel so fast," he wrote, "They move a fair distance each frame. To simulate that in games you have to use a single line which projects out into the scene, and for shotguns you create a spread of multiple lines.

"No matter what physics engine is used, testing a line against the game world is an expensive operation, since you have to search through a large model of the scene, which we call a collision mesh. With the current generation of consoles you can do a number of these tests at the same time. But, on the PlayStation 2, you were limited to doing one after another. That meant that you could only handle 10 or 20 of these line tests per frame.

"This small budget has to be spread between all the [non-player characters; i.e. the allies and enemies who are also shooting all around or at you] as well as the player, including those that are carrying shotguns. So that you don't overwhelm the game in any one frame — with all of the NPCs shooting at once — there is a round-robin system, which only allows two or three of them to shoot in any one frame,

"Because of this cost, most games treat the bullets as infinitely fast and run the line test through to the limit of the range of the bullet. If the bullets aren't represented like this, then you have to perform multiple line tests, one after the other, on each subsequent frame until the bullet hits something. This means that you'll have a huge number of line tests to manage every frame and that's a killer for performance."

If it makes so much sense to have infinitely fast invisible bullets, why even consider having slower bullet-speed bullets that look like bullets?

The list of reasons is short.

If a game developer shows the bullets and makes them objects in the world, they can have them physically interact with the objects in it. They cann depict them dropping as the in-game gravity tugs at them. They can have them ricochet off an object or enemy using the same type of physics system that determines how a video game car carroms off a video game guard rail or how a video game body falls off a video game skateboard. But, as teams like Creighton's Bodycount crew realized, you may not see value in such rewards.

"We investigated having more complex ballistics in Bodycount, but the associated cost really wasn't worth it," Creighton said. "So we're doing an approximation that adds in a delay between the firing of the bullet and when it hits. Bodycount is very much an arcade shooter. We're not looking to make a perfect simulation of the characteristics of each weapon; we're after the effect."

It's more likely, Creighton and other game creators interviewed for this story said, for games that emphasize sniping or other more clinical aspects of focused gun conflict to render their bullets in their virtual air. Games that show gunplay in slow-motion, such as the pioneer creations of "bullet time," the Max Payne games, also render their bullets as objects in their virtual world.

Why You Can Live — Or Die — Without Seeing Virtual Bullets

While nothing in a video game world is tangible, some things are more virtual than others. Stand your character, his or her back toward you, in a room in a three-dimensional game and you can assume that what is in front of the character is being drawn by the hardware on which the game is running. Of course it is. You can see it. But whatever is down the hallway, around the corner and through a locked door tends not to be drawn, certainly not in full detail, not when it is so far out of sight. Is that other part of the game world, the part that you can't see just yet, there or not there? The game designer might tell you that it is as there as it needs to be.

You could have an existential argument about trees being rendered in a forest where you can't yet see or hear them. Or you could just agree that only the results matter. What needs to be seen will be seen — when it needs to be seen. You can say the same about virtual bullets. But note the implicit irony: you don't need to see the bullets. After all, in real life, when a bullet is in the air, who can?

Doom co-creator and game historian John Romero recently told Kotaku that he believes that programming a bullet so that it's a visible object flying through a game world is, usually, a waste of time. It doesn't give the game designers much of a prize. "The reward is the feedback for what the bullet does," he said. "The feedback is in the flash, the ejection and the particle effect on the wall that it hits. Just like in real life, the feedback you get is the same you get in the game, which is muzzle flash, sound and something at the end."

The game creator can just calculate the pull of gravity and have the bullet make its impact lower than the height from which it was fired. They can time-delay it, as the Bodycount developers are doing, so that it seems to have traveled, for a split second, through the air. Who needs to see the thing fly? Who could?

And here's the core question: If you can't see the bullet, but if a bullet's path has been determined, its speed has been calculated and its impact has been rendered, was the bullet really not there? Was the bullet in any way different in its existence vis a vis the virtual people near it than a bullet in the real world? If games are about faking reality, some might argue, that's one fake that is good enough.

There could be a day when the machines the run games are powerful enough that bullets could be in all of our shooter games. Each bullet could whiz past our character's head or arc across a battlefield. Even then, though, Creighton points out that gamers might not even notice it. "If they can't see far enough and with a great enough level of detail to notice the delay between the muzzle flash and the bullet impact, then it might not be worthwhile."

Guns have been an integral part of video games since the time when video games were invented. Bullets? Still optional, still debatable, still not quite there, depending on your point of view.

Have an iPad and a bit of time? Might want to check out the free preview of the Fallout: New Vegas All Roads graphic novel.

Bethesda Softworks teamed up with Dark Horse Comics to create this graphic novel penned by Chris Avellone, the game's senior designer. The freebie gives you 12 pages of the graphic novel. Here's a small taste.

Duke Nukem is back and he needs to take a piss.

The Duke Nukem Forever playable demo here at PAX 2010 makes the seemingly impossible a reality. People, including your Kotaku reporter, are playing Duke Nukem Forever, maybe a dozen years after we expected to. Duke, from what I can tell, hasn't changed.

He's still cracking jokes, chewing bubblegum, and getting oral sex from two ladies at a time when he's not using his guns — or his buggy — to obliterate his enemies.

Duke Nukem Forever is, of course, a first person shooter. The controls are standard, mapped as you'd expect on the Xbox 360 controller on which I played the game. Zoom on the left trigger. Shoot on the right. Click the right stick to crouch. But, before all that, at the start of the demo, pull the right trigger to piss.

The demo starts with a first person view of the urinal. You can make Duke urinate as much as you want. The wait is over!

Well, no that's not what this game is about. You're in a football locker room. There are a couple of hot tubs and, in the main area, some soldiers gearing up for a fight. On the whiteboard they plan their move against the beast on the field. Their strategy: cockblock. You can draw on the whiteboard. I drew straight lines. But on another TV playing the game here at PAX I saw someone drawing a penis.

The game is 100% in the spirit of classic Duke. By this point in the demo you've been hit with "Hail to the King, Baby," and sooner or later he's whistling, laughing at the bad guys he kills and lamenting that "Those alien bastards are going to pay for shooting up my ride."

When you leave the locker room, you race down some halls where aliens are fighting soldiers. These scripted sequences show some of the destructibility (mostly of your allies' limbs) and the smoke and explosion effects in the game. The effects look modern, though not beyond what we see in other games.

Out in the field, things became more impressive. A massive monster — the big aliens seen in leaked Duke artwork — is stomping across the grass. You've gone from just having your fists up to being armed with The Devastator, a big gun in each hand. Health is regenerative and the big bad guy wasn't that tough in the demo. I unloaded my ammo into him, waited for the next ammo drop, and then fired some more. Duke finished him with a button-prompted melee move.

The finale: press a button to do a "field goal," which is a punt of the monster's eye down the field.

Cue the Duke Nukem Forever logo and a camera pulls back to show that Duke, in first-person, was playing a video game. He's got a gold Xbox 360 controller with the face buttons re-named as D, U, K and E. There's a busty lady in a schoolgirl outfit near the bottom of your first-person view. And there's a second one. One stands up and wipes her mouth.

"What about the game, was it any good?" one of them asks.

"Yeah, but after 12 fucking years it should be," he answers.

After that the demo jumped forward to level 15, which began as a driving level. Duke was in a dune buggy, racing down a canyon as an alien shuttle streamed forward overhead. The buggy can boost for big jumps and, since aliens do run in its way, run over bad guys with a splat. Quickly, though, I was out of the buggy and running Duke toward an enemy turret, his laser-sighted pistol in hand. I was also able to get a railgun which had a scope and was good for headshots.

One of the most prominent tech elements of the game is a depth-of-field aspect which blurs enemies who aren't in Duke's focus. Of the obvious tech demonstrations happening in the demo — the destruction shown as cacti splintered from gunfire, the shattered mirror back in the locker room — this blurring effect was the only one that was distracting.

People wondered how Duke Nukem would make his return. Would a parody video game character steeped in 80s absurdity play in 2010? Or would he have to be a parody of a parody? It seems from the demo that Duke is strictly himself and that the kind of profane, naughty, steroid-injected humor of the Duke of old is indeed what will play in 2010 — or in 2011, to be more specific. The game is set for a 2011 release on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Gearbox Software is working on the game with other studios and, we believe, creators who used to be on the project at 3D Realms.

To those who don't know the Duke Nukem Forever story, the game might seem like a standard first-person shooter with a few technological gimmicks and a more absurd, played-for-laughs attitude than today's more straight-faced but equally gruff shooter games. For those who know the DNF tale, this is the king returned as if through a time machine, a playable time capsule of one of gaming's wrongest icons.

P.S. The trailer being shown behind closed doors for the game includes strippers and a three breasted giant monster. Of the latter, Duke says, "Hell, I'd still hit it."

We were encouraged to take as many pictures as we could of Duke Nukem Forever here at Penny Acrade Expo 2010 today. So I did.

Excuse the shaky framing; I was trying to play while snapping pics. These shots show the two-level DNF demo, scenes photographed in chronological order. Oh, and one bottle of Duke Nukem brand steroids.

The developers behind Super Stardust HD are bringing a new action-adventure to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live in early 2011: Outland.

Developed by Housemarque for Ubisoft, Outland focuses on the balance between light and darkness, a gameplay mechanic inspired from arcade classic Ikaruga. Players use their skills with swords, jumping, climbing, and running to save a world facing collapse.

Outland also features music from Ari Pulkkinen, who composed music for Trine. If you're at PAX, check out the game at Ubisoft's booth.

Got any tips, corrections, or feedback? Contact GamePro's news team or follow GamePro on Twitter.

Killzone fans: You might want to set aside Tuesday, February 22, as that's the release date for Killzone 3.

Sony announced Killzone 3's release date today on its PlayStation blog. Killzone 3, the subject of Features Editor Patrick Shaw's July cover story, is the fourth game (don't forget the PSP game) in one of Sony's flagship series. It's also coming in 3D.

You can play Killzone 3's multiplayer, which debuted at GamesCom last month, on the show floor during PAX, which began today and ends Sunday.

Got any tips, corrections, or feedback? Contact GamePro's news team or follow GamePro on Twitter.