"Die, GameStop, Die!" You won't see game developers saying that for publication--but they're all thinking it. Trust me. Get a few drinks in them (as I did this week at the [DICE summit]), and they'll vent about how the game retail giant is old news. But on the record, never is heard a disparaging word.

Juicy details after the jump...

This very easily could have been some tirade about the evils of second-hand games and how the resale market bleeds money from the game development community. After all, a retail chain that makes millions by selling used games and doesn't pay a dime in royalties to the game makers on those sales is slowly killing some game makers. It almost was that rant, but in chatting with developers and executives at the summit, I got to thinking. Between the recession and advances in digital distribution, 2009 will be the year that everything changes. Let me count the ways...

1. Indie games will become a lot more sophisticated.

Small developers get a chance to play with the big boys, thanks to easily accessible online sales--but the big boys are learning lessons from the indie crowd as well.

With fewer retail chains and less money to invest in stocking stores, game retailers won't be putting nearly as many "risky" games on their shelves. Oh sure, you'll find the top 10 safe bets--the Madden NFLs and Grand Theft Autos of the gaming world--but the really out-there games won't stand a chance. How do you explain [a game about flowers] to a buyer from Walmart? (Hint: Use sock puppets).

Something clicked, however, when I recently downloaded [The Maw] on the Xbox 360. Here's a game that sells for 800 points (10 real-world bucks) and yet is so slickly polished that it could've been packaged as a full retail product. You control this cute, cuddly alien mouth that is basically the hungriest, gooniest pet in the universe. Sweet graphics, neat gameplay mechanics--I highly recommend that you download the demo to see what I'm talking about.

2. "Second-tier" games will continue to move online.

Given the economy and costs that come with publishing physical discs, more big developers are adopting an "online-first" mentality.

Watchmen hits theaters on March 6, and Watchmen: The End Is Nigh is the tie-in game. It's tightly packaged with slick comic-book cut scenes and two-player button mashing that operate the way you'd expect a full-fledged, full-price game to behave. It's just shorter. And cheaper. And available only online.

Funny story about that: For a brief period, it was going to be a disc-based retail game. But rather than rush a half-done product out the door, the development team decided early on to focus on making it a downloadable episode. Smart move.

3. Is the end of sequels nigh?

More developers will ditch the traditional sequel mentality and instead provide major downloadable content updates. After all, tell people that new additional material is coming soon, and they'll be more likely to hang onto the original discs. (Developers would never admit it, but it's a pretty clever way to keep people from reselling their games.)

Sequels will never, ever go away--they account for the vast majority of those safe bets that stock store shelves. But instead of rushing them out as quickly as possible, developers can just keep adding great downloadable content. Over the past few weeks, I've downloaded a full series of additional missions for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and I've grabbed the Operation Anchorage expansion for Fallout 3. Both added some new gameplay and story on top of what I'd already seen and done.

And this past week, the guys at Rockstar did it again. [The Lost and the Damned], going for 1600 points (20 bucks), feels like a whole new game built on top of GTA IV. Cut scenes, scripting--the works. Like Operation Anchorage, TLATD ingeniously uses the open world already there and adds a new layer over where you've already been.

4. Prices are gonna go down!

This recession should finally shake up the pricing of some games. Does a game really need to cost 60 bucks--and with this recession, can it stay that expensive? And hey, why is it that you can buy a game on Valve's online Steam service, but the digital version costs just as much as a boxed copy?

Just the other night, Valve Software founder [Gabe Newell] gave a few great examples of how digital sales are the future--while jokingly apologizing for being a "Steam Whore." Last year's hit, Left 4 Dead, has done brisk business, with good sales both online and at retail stores--neither cannibalizing the other. But thanks to a major sale over the Presidents Day weekend, Valve sold more copies at 50 percent off than it did at full price when the game debuted. The trick is to find the magic price point where developers can sell enough additional copies of a game to justify the price cut.

The consensus around DICE is that retail isn't going to dry up overnight, but the game publishers and developers are rethinking how they interact with the community and how they release games. I can only hope that the end result is better, cheaper games for you--and more money going into deserving developer's pockets.

Until next time...

By Darren Gladstone

Need even more nerdity? Follow Casual Friday columnist and PC World Senior Writer Darren Gladstone on [gizmogladstone on Twitter ]for more time-wasting tips.

Posted by Scott Bartley at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

That's right, your real American heroes are finally coming to life on the 360, PS3 and Wii (what, no PC?), in August this year. Obviously, this would never had happened had it not been for the movie coming out; seems EA would be too afraid to launch the game without a movie backing.

The game looks set to pick up where the movie ends, and should include most of your beloved characters. Press release after the jump.

Here's the PR spiel from EA:

G.I. JOE for all major video game consoles will feature an exclusive storyline that picks up where the live-action movie, from Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Entertainment, in association with Hasbro, leaves off, allowing players to re-create and re-live the greatest moments from the film, cartoon series and action figure toy line. The game will feature 12 G.I. JOE characters, each with unique abilities and weapons. Adding to the adrenaline rush will be an intense single-screen co-op mode allowing two players to easily unite as a team in a classic struggle between good and evil to defeat the powers of COBRA. G.I JOE is set to launch on the Xbox 360® videogame and entertainment system, PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, WiiTM, PlayStation®2, PSP® (PlayStation®Portable), Nintendo DSTM and mobile devices this summer.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

In Resident Evil 5, you play a two-legged bull with mad knife-fighting skills. Make that a two-legged elephant-necked bull with arms like a cement mixer. I'm not sure when Chris Redfield got his hands on A-Rod's stash, but holy arms-like-pythons and barrel-chested beefcake, Batman. Goodbye welterweight jock of bygone games, hello Lou "Mr. Olympia" Ferrigno.

While those chiseled biceps won't lend Chris's knife arm any extra RPMs, it does seem to imbue him with superhuman strength in RE5. Step next to a slavering bloody-eyed-zombie-thing and you'll have the option to pop hooks or uppercuts that send the bad guys flying across the screen. "Rescue" your teammate from a pileup and your punches knock the entire group off its feet. Step over a fallen figure and your stylish stomp splatters skulls. Goodbye Chris Redfield horrified-barely-survivor, hello Chris Redfield super-action-hero.

But let's back up. Have you played the demo? The final version embarks a few areas prior to the teaser's "public assembly" level, the one where you (as Chris) and your African-English-European-Jamaican-Irish-East-Indian-composite partner Sheva tango with hordes of virally amped-up locals. It's been 10 years since the events of the first game, and you're investigating some hardscrabble village in a fictional African country that's experienced an "incident," and we're not talking just a finger in a bowl of chili.

Forget the sublime transition from status quo to surreal here, you're deposited sans niceties at the outskirts of a town inhabited by scowling weirdos. These guys lean against awning struts and roll their eyes as you wander by or simply glare from the shadows. Their heads swivel robotically as you pass, tracking your motion like CCTV cameras. They're not pulling pitchforks and machetes at this stage, but friendly chatter (much less handshakes and hugs) is clearly off the menu.

In terms of the visuals, it's hard to imagine the game looking any better — or bleaker — at this point. Here's how I described the two-level Japanese demo back in December.

[Heaps of] rack-and-ruin building[s] flanked by corrugated sheets of metal. Oily plumes of smoke rise in the distance. A few tires are half-sunk in the ground with the characters 7BER5 gouged in grimy rubber. The sun flares at the edges of objects. The sky is clear blue with a few wispy clouds.

Ranging further afield in the final version, you'll find the entire town a dust-smothered mass of shanties with shaggy thatched roofs and cadaverous structures pieced together from dingy slabs of stucco and crooked shafts of wood. Several of the locals wear heavily stained pieces of clothing (Blood? Chocolate ice cream?) and engage in disturbing activities, like hacking fly-caked hunks of meat, or standing in circles and kicking a bag that's squirming. The churchy, gothic look of the earlier games is gone, replaced by something out of a Slawomir Idziak film, desiccated in lieu of haunted, contemporary instead of remote, and with its Black Hawk Down vibe, eerily familiar.

Getting around still feels on par with Resident Evil 4's third-person controls (for better or worse). The camera hangs behind Chris at approximately shoulder level and off to one side, providing an unobstructed field of view. You can't shoot and run, which actually seems appropriate considering you also can't (effectively) in real life.

The inability to walk and shoot, on the other hand (especially to walk backward while wielding a weapon) remains a serious problem. Since spinning in place is sluggish, and close-combat therefore clumsy, you'll typically react to swarms of assailants by sprinting forward out of range, spinning to fire, then repeating until you've culled the zombie herd down to a size that's more manageable.

While the environments look sharp and detailed, you can't really interact with them. Pull up the automap and you'll see areas are actually geometrically primitive, more or less a series of linked squares and rectangles. You don't explore so much as run your body along each area's edges to discover loot or glean info. There's more stuff to climb up or over and jump off or plunge through this time, but outside of combat, you're interacting with pop-up buttons and busting open crates or barrels, not engaging a flexible environment with freeform physics.

I called the demo "underwhelming" because the zombies were "fairly dumb," that there wasn't much to do, and that the controls were slightly annoying. I take the part about the zombies and the control scheme back. Partly.

Allow me to illustrate. At one point, Capcom producer Jun Takeuchi compared RE5's control scheme to Gears of War's. As it turns out, it's not. Chris can't roadie-run or shoot-and-scoot or stick to nubs of cover. But that's not the point. Takeuchi's comparison is misrepresentative for fundamentally unmissable design reasons.

In Gears of War, the bad guys are usually hunkered behind cover halfway across the screen. They'll attempt to assault and flank, but with care and hesitation. Close-combat chainsaw duels, when they occur at all, are risky, and typically last-ditch reactionary maneuvers.

In Resident Evil 5, the bad guys are right up beside you. Self-preservation isn't part of their programming. They swarm over chain link fences or pour from fissures in ceilings and lunge across gaps between roofs to get at you. There are no long term safe spots, no blocks of cover to hunker behind, no hanging back and fighting pitched battles by laying down suppressive fire. Tactics are positional, not ballistic. Head shots matter when you've got the time to pull one off, but staying alive is less about aiming and assault-flanking than finding fleetingly safe patches, preserving ammo, and properly partnering with your teammate.

You're meant to be unsettled, in other words, not carefully concealed behind objects or running and gunning like the superhumanly accurate protagonists in Gears. The sense that there's nowhere you can hide from these guys is what makes these games so unsettling, and RE5's no different.

Actually that's an oversimplification. The bad guys really do move faster here, lunging across space with preternatural speed. When their heads pop off and the creepy, slithery stuff issues forth, you'll find its reach has grown (to your considerable disadvantage). Enemies now hurl ranged weapons that keep you on your toes even at a distance, and whether it's the fact that I'm playing on the "veteran" difficulty setting or something in the stamina system itself, those enemies take much longer to kill, falling down and getting up repeatedly whether you're landing dead-on head-shots or plugging torsos and legs full of lead.

All in all? RE5's looking better than I expected after fooling with Capcom's mediocre demo. I wish they'd sprinkled the introductory areas with more backstory and slowed the pacing a bit, and the wacky logic puzzles are (so far) MIA, but I definitely want to keep playing. The story starts to crack open by the third chapter (there's six in all) and in spite of the silly-science and cheesy melodrama, I'm a sucker for Japanese-style horror.

And sometimes that's enough.

Matt Peckham's level-setting his expectations for the game's remainder. You can follow his impressions of the final version at twitter.com/game_on.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

seriously, wtf?

Cornonation Street, you know, the soap opera about brick houses and rain, is being made into a game for the Nintendo DS. I'd never heard of the developer, Mindscape, before and thought I'd get to know the other games they've made. With solid titles like MTV Fan Attack (oh-kay?), Pet Vet and Crazy Pig, this will surely be next summers blockbuster.

Just imagine, you can control your character and...uhm.. sit in a pub and... eeh... do british stuff.

There is no announcement on whether the game will include the number for the suicide hotline.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 6:19 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Chainsaw juggling clowns and drooling maniacs with weaponized shopping carts surrounded by concert-floor-thick crowds of groaning psychos and anything-you-see's-a-weapon made Capcom's Dead Rising the zombie game to beat. Better — deep breaths now — even than Resident Evil 4.

And now Capcom's made my month by announcing Dead Rising 2, a sequel set in a casino packing not hundreds, not thousands, but tens of thousands of zombies. Eureka!

The official trailer:

The sequel trades Dead Rising's mall-based milieu for a casino, and plans to pack in "a host of new in-game objects that can all be used as deadly weapons to stave off the zombie assault."

Oh goody, let's see: Slot machines? Roulette wheels? Craps tables? Shuffleboards? Billiards balls? Table brushes? Money paddles? Counter covers? Buffet carts? Pink flamingos?

Life-sized cardboard cutouts of Wayne Netwon?

The story angle, from Capcom's official press release:

Dead Rising 2 is set several years after the infamous zombie invasion of Willamette. Unfortunately, the zombie virus was not contained at the conclusion of Dead Rising, spreading unchecked throughout the United States and Dead Rising 2 depicts a country where zombie outbreaks continue to strike.

The game's actually not being developed by the original team, but rather an "up and coming Canadian developer" named Blue Castle Games. Not much to say about these guys, save for a couple of sports games, e.g. The BIGS and Major League Baseball 2K8. Capcom does note that some members from the original team will work alongside BCG through the development process, including Keiji Inafune, the producer on the original.

Instead of being Xbox 360 exclusive (not counting forthcoming Wii port "Chop 'Til You Drop") Dead Rising 2 is in development for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows PCs.

Like I said when I reviewed the original back in September 2006:

Say what you will about America's violent culture streak, it's hard to beat running a lawnmower over necrotic flesh and watching arms, legs and heads fly like bloody wood chips.

QFT.

Matt Peckham hopes they'll include more than a single save slot this time. You can follow him at twitter.com/game_on.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

The Sims 3 was scheduled to arrive in New Zealand on February 20, instead EA have pushed the release date to June.

Fans of the best selling PC game of all time will have to wait until June 5 to destroy their social life. Oddly enough, EA calls the game an "original IP", although the number 3 behind the title suggests otherwise.

From EA's release:

The June launch combined with the break-through game the team is building gives us the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3,„ said Russell Arons, Vice President of Marketing for EA. ”The Sims 3 will be the original IP summer blockbuster of 2009 as we build off the success of the best-selling PC franchise of all time to create awareness with both loyal Sims fans and new players.

For those of you who quit your job in anticipation for the February release, bad luck.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 1:29 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

One unique trait of MMO’s (massive multiplayer online) is that the games carry no classification (15+, 18+ etc), because it’s impossible to rate online interactions. Now the Attorney-Generals office is New South Wales have pointed out that the NSW Classification Enforcement Act prohibits publishers and retailers from selling unclassified games, thereby making most game stores in the state an instant criminal.

The Intereractive Entertainment Association of Australia, however, believes that games with no single player portion should be exempt from carrying a rating.

The NSW police, no doubt keen not to waste recourses on enforcing the law, are encouraging members of the community to contact local police if they see retailers selling these MMO’s.

So, virtually every game store across Australia is now effectively breaking the law.

GG Australia, GG.

Posted by Jan Birkeland at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 8 )