Nintendo is planning to launch a new version of its handheld DS gaming device on which users can get the illusion of 3D without using special glasses, it said today.

The device, provisionally called the 3DS, will be launched in Japan before the end of March 2011, the company said. No further details were provided, but Nintendo said it would disclose more information at the upcoming E3 gaming event. E3 is scheduled to take place in Los Angeles from June 15 to 17.

3D has emerged as the latest big trend in consumer electronics and most major TV makers are planning to launch 3D TV sets this year. Those sets display two slightly different images, one for each eye, and glasses are required so that each eye sees the appropriate image and the brain is tricked into perceiving depth in the picture.

An alternate way of achieving a 3D effect is to place a filter directly in front of the display panel that consists of thousands of small lenses. The lenses focus each image to a fixed point in space and the viewer gets the 3D illusion as long as they are watching from that position. It has the advantage of not requiring glasses but restricts the viewing angle and typically means only a single person can see the 3D effect.

The new DS will launch as sales of the handheld are declining. In the last nine months of 2009 the company sold 23.4 million DS devices, a drop of 9% on the same period in 2008. Software sales during the same period were down by a quarter to 121.4 million units, according to Nintendo figures.

Nintendo most recently relaunched the DS in November in Japan, when it put out a version of the dual-screen handheld with larger screens. Each of the screens on the DSi LL is 4.2 inches in size, which makes them about double the area of the screens on the DS Lite and larger than the 3.25-inch screens on the DSi.

The timing of today's announcement is unusual because it comes just days before the March 28 launch of the larger DS in the US, where it is called the DSi XL. The handheld was launched earlier this month in Europe.

By disclosing its plans for a 3D version of the DS Nintendo risks potential customers putting off planned purchases of the DSi XL until it discloses more details about the upcoming 3D version.
Martyn Williams

Posted by Ted Gibbons at 1:58 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

The highly anticipated hack and slash game God of War III went on sale in New Zealand today, picking up where its 2007 predecessor left off.

Sony Computer Entertainment said in a media release that the God of War series had sold more than 3.9 million copies to date and the finale released today was expected to do just as well.

A lot has been made of the game's graphics, which feature some of the most advanced shadow effects of any game on the market. God of War III was the poster child for shadow effects at the recent Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco, where the techniques behind some of its most stunning graphics were showcased.

When it comes to gameplay it's all about non-stop bloodthirsty battle action. You will talk to a few people and enjoy the odd cut-scene but fans of the series know the bulk of the game is about slicing down hordes of enemies on the way to the next "boss" character.

In God of War III, you again play as Kratos, a former Spartan captain who is seeking vengeance against the Greek gods who have wronged him. That involves plunging your "Blades of Exile" and "Cestus" into every living and undead thing you come across as you continue your fight up Mount Olympus to take them all on. It's a tough task, but Kratos is up to it, and if you're willing to part with some of your hard earned cash to buy the game, you can go along for the ride.

Posted by James Heffield at 5:25 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 1 )

Gaming is becoming more and more connected and developers are being forced to rethink their creations to cater for new online expectations. As the Game Developers' Conference draws to a close in San Francisco, a panel of experts discussed what gaming's connected future might hold.

BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka and Valve director of business development Jason Holtman said providing the ongoing support required to satisfy an online community forced modern developers to think further in advance, considering future iterations and add-ons as well as the product they were about to release.

"We have to think of it as an ongoing service. It's not fire and forget anymore," Muzyka said.

Holtman said providing ongoing support to an online community could be resource intensive, but that didn't prevent smaller studios from doing it. Some smaller studios were more agile than large ones and could react and change their mode of business more quickly if required, he said.

When it comes to social networking games, few are better known than Farmville, produced by Zynga. Whether you love it or hate it, you are bound to have seen an update on your Facebook page at some point about somebody's turnips ripening or their brown cow escaping. Zynga's chief game designer Brian Reynolds said much of the game's popularity and its continued survival was due to the regular updates the game had received.

"Farmville was built in five weeks... But if you are thinking about how complete it was then, it's a lot different now. Social networking games are a live website."

Blizzard Entertaiment executive vice president of game design Rob Pardo agreed regular improvements were vital but said a balance needed to be struck between constant additions to online games and keeping them accessible to new users. In World of Warcraft, more casual gamers were joining up and they had different desires to hardcore gamers.

"All the hardcore gamers have pretty much tried it by now. We need to improve accessibility for new players while still providing content for hardcore gamers."

The fifth panellist, Nexon vice president of marketing Min Kim, said developers needed to consider what country they were launching in.

"In Korea we have PC cafes so we are not just playing in our own rooms. In the US 95% of gamers are playing alone."

The Asian market and the US market were different and games that worked in one would not necessarily work in the other. It was important to test a game thoroughly in a new market before making the jump, he said.

My GDC game of the day - R.U.S.E

If you're after a shiny new WW2 real-time strategy game, Ubisoft's R.U.S.E is worth a try. It's similar to the Command and Conquer series of old but with much slicker graphics and a few twists that add depth and a bit more realism to the experience.

One of these twists, as you might have guessed from the name, is the ability to use "ruses" during a battle to fool the enemy. These include things like "camouflage net," which prevents the enemy from gaining any intelligence about your forces located in a particular zone on the map, and a range of diversions, which provide fake information to the enemy.

Fog of war in R.U.S.E is more complex than most real-time strategy games; instead of having an area of the map blacked out, you will instead only get small portions of intelligence about the type and strength of enemy units located there. How much information you get will depends on where your units are located and also whether your opponent has used and ruses against you.

Other nifty features include the ability for your infantry to hide in forests to ambush the enemy and the inclusion of cover and lines of sight for your units on the map. Roads are also in the game, allowing your supply trucks to generate income for you by travelling to and from any supply depots you have built. If you want to gain more income and hurt the opposition, you can station units on roads between the enemy town and their supply depots, grabbing resources for yourself. The game will include more than 20 battle maps at release and caters for online multiplayer play between up to eight human or AI opponents.

All in all it looks like an interesting experience, albeit maybe not quite as groundbreaking as some other games being launched soon. An open beta-test is currently available worldwide (yes, that includes New Zealand) via Steam. The final game will be released on PC, Mac, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Take a look at this R.U.S.E trailer on YouTube.

Posted by James Heffield at 8:29 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Strategy gaming icon Sid Meier received a rockstar's welcome when he strode on stage for his keynote address at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco today. Meier was the brains behind the groundbreaking and hugely popular Civilization series and led development of all time classics Pirates and Railroad Tycoon.

He is currently the director of creative development at Firaxis Games and says his blockbuster development days are not over yet, hinting that there may still one day be hope for Dinosaurs - a game he began developing a decade ago but never released.

During an address to a crowd of thousands of his peers, Meier said developers needed to remember the games they created were "all about the player. Keeping them feeling good about themselves is what it's about".

Understanding the psychology of the gamer was also important - if a game didn't have an intriguing and rewarding first 15 minutes, developers risked losing their audience, he said. To do that, developers needed to make sure gamers were able to "suspend their disbelief" and feel that were part of the game or in the shoes of its main character. Humour, music and atmosphere added greatly to a game, but modern developers could not rely solely on technology and graphics if they hoped to succeed.

"Use the player's imagination, no matter how cool your graphics are or how cool your tech is."

The best games took players on an "epic journey," allowing them to make interesting and meaningful decisions as they learnt and progressed through the game. Meier promoted a "one more turn" philosophy, telling developers to keep gamers "constantly learning forward".

Designing a journey that was "multi-epic" (ie. could be played more than once) and offered an experience that was significantly different each time was the final ingredient required to make a game great, he said.

He had some regrets during his time as a developer, saying his initial plan to make Civilization a real time strategy game instead of a turn based one was "the first bad thing I did in life".

"What we found with the real time version of Civ was that the player became an observer. Our mantra was that the player had to be king."

As I'm sure you all know, Civilization was released as a turn-based game and is now one of the top selling game series of all time.

My GDC game of the day - VisualSoccer on Visual Sports System

Okay, so it's a bit of a gimmick and it's far too easy to score if you've got a smidgen of football talent but I had to mention this one purely because it's a cool idea. The Visual Sports System, due for release in the US early next year, is a peripheral designed for PC, Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. It features a small netted "arena" you place in front of your screen and motion tracking cameras.

In its VisualSoccer incarnation, it allows you to physically boot a ball at your TV screen (which sits behind the netting) or a projected image, in a simulated penalty shootout.

Unfortunately the goalkeeper lacks some talent, but the simulator can track the velocity of your shots, the number you have scored and the total scoring percentage. It has a long way to go to make it more realistic but the idea of kicking a real ball at your expensive TV is so cool that it just might work.

According to its creator, Visual Sports, it will be released with a selection of other sports games as well, including baseball, golf, ice hockey and "zombie handball". No decision has yet been made as to whether it will be available in New Zealand.

Posted by James Heffield at 2:48 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Augmented reality and 3D gaming are among the major themes at this year's Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. Just wandering around the hundreds of games on show on the exhibition floor today, I couldn't help but think the line between "real life" and gaming is becoming seriously blurred.

Motion control has already been a big star, with the unveiling of the PlayStation Move controller last night building on the Wii's efforts to change gaming from a sit-down experience into a more active and physically involved one. That crazy looking Parrot AR Drone quadricopter that was first introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year was zipping around as well. Wannabe pilots control it using an iPhones linked via Wi-Fi to the chopper and the two cameras mounted on it and they can even play augmented reality games that make real life objects into targets you can shoot, on-screen, using a button on the iPhone.

As for 3D gaming, it has to be seen to be believed. From racers to sports games, it has a lot of potential to seriously soup up a gaming session and make it far more immersive. Unfortunately 3D glasses and an expensive 3D TV will be required but the richness of the experience makes it worth donning the dorky eyewear (and unlike 3D movies, you don't have to wear them in public).

The more serious side of the show takes place in the lecture sessions, where industry legends provide advice to the thousands of developers in attendance on everything from improving their games' graphics and audio to marketing their new products.

In two of the more interesting lectures today, EA Sports developers Joseph Harmon and Jayeson Lee-
Steere and Sony developer Ben Diamand discussed the importance of producing realistic shadows in Madden NFL 10 (EA Sports) and God of War III (Sony). Producing accurate shadows and lighting was vital to creating the graphically rich environments modern gamers desired, but rendering them at high frame rates in both of the games placed a lot of demand on hardware and memory, they said. That meant that if they were using current technology, developers had to either trade-off graphics in other areas of a game or create new programming code that was less resource intensive.

Another interesting session came from game audio legend Akira Yamaoka - the man behind the audio in Konami's Silent Hill series. He pushed for developers to make more effort composing and implementing the audio in their games. "It's sound that directly touches people's emotions," he said.

Interestingly, he also said game developers should make more effort to engage gamers' emotional sides through non-audio tools as well. Specifically, developers should regularly foreshadow upcoming events in the plot, much like the best novel writers do, and make people turn right regularly in horror games to create a sense of unease. According to Yamaoka, turning right repeatedly causes a person to become uneasy, while turning left is more natural. Sounds farfetched to me, but he even reckons that's why horses are usually made to run around a racing track anti-clockwise, always turning left, instead of running clockwise!

My game of the day - Power Gig

Guitar Hero may be a lot of fun but it won't exactly teach you how to play a guitar. Power Gig: Rise of the SixString, on the other hand, looks to be pioneering what every musically inclined gamer has wished for - the ability to use a real electric guitar as the controller. Seven45 Studios has one of the hippest stands I've seen at the GDC and was showing off the new title.

It won't be available on PC, but PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 gamers will be able to unleash their inner rocker using a 'SixString' guitar controller that is essentially a real six string guitar that can interface with their console. The guitar can also be plugged into a standard amp and used normally.

According to Seven45 Studios the game has two overarching modes - beat matching and chord play. Beat matching is similar to the gameplay in other band games like Guitar Hero, and requires gamers to strum specific strings in time with the on-screen instructions. Chord play is slightly more complex, requiring the gamer to place their fingers correctly on the strings to play specific chords and songs accurately.

Seven45 Studios is partly owned by musical instrument manufacturer First Act. Power Gig is due out in the final quarter of this year.

Posted by James Heffield at 9:39 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Sony's PlayStation Move motion controller disrobed for all the world to see last night and I was there to witness the moment. And judging by by its performance at the Game Developers' Conference event in San Francisco, it may well end up making the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft's soon-to-be-released Project Natal gaming systen look slightly inadequate.

Unfortunately I haven't had the opportunity to get hands-on with Project Natal just yet so I can't draw any firm conclusions, but the PlayStation Move combined with the PlayStation Eye allows for an amazingly precise gaming experience.

The Eye allows your console to map your head and body on screen as a reference point. It can then use the sensors in the Move to precisely map all of your movements in relation to that point. Its a package that allows for more accurate depth tracking of movement than the Wii can manage without a camera, and Sony is claiming it will also outdo Project Natal which lacks any controllers.

Many Move-compatible games will actually use two Move controllers, one in each hand, to map the exact location of both of the gamer's hands. This proves particularly effective in fighting games, like the upcoming Motion Fighters, and it will get gamers' swinging punches and grabbing the air as they destroy their on-screen opponent.

In terms of its layout, the Move features Dual Shock vibration-feedback technology and has many of the standard PlayStation buttons including the four action buttons (X and O etc), a shoulder button, start and select. The bright RGB LED sensor on top can be set to the colour of your preference or utilised by developers to add to gameplay by changing colour at pre-determined points (eg. casting a "fireball spell" in a game may turn the LED orange).

Senior vice president of PlayStation marketing and the PlayStation Network Peter Dille said the device would be popular with both casual and hard core gamers, due to its accuracy.

"It's precise, responsive and ultra-sensory... from the tiniest twitch to the strongest punch.

"We'd like to think that the migration path from the Wii household to the PlayStation household is a natural one."

Accessories like the PlayStation Move Sub Controller will also be sold, he said. The sub controller can be held in a gamer's free hand and includes the arrow keys found on the normal PlayStation controller, making walking around in in games easier.

The Move is expected to arrive in New Zealand late this year and according to Sony all of the big international gaming studios are on board and have Move-compatible games in the works. It will go on sale in the US for about US$100 with a PlayStation Eye and a game, but no New Zealand pricing has yet been announced.

Posted by James Heffield at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

After months of beta testing and plenty of speculation as to whether the OnLive service is really ready for primetime, the company announced the launch of its service today at GDC in San Francisco.

While we've been able to observe the Onlive gaming service in controlled environments, the true test of cloud gaming is when it's finally available to the public at large. The creators of Onlive will put their service to the test when it launches on the PC and Mac platforms on June 17. Onlive will cost US$14.95 per month, though the company is promising cheaper multi-month bundles (to be announced at E3), as well as a major incentive for early adopters - the first 25,000 users to sign up for Onlive will get their first three months for free.
Right now, however, it's unclear as to how much gaming the US$14.95 fee will get you, as the announcement notes "the service fee does not include the purchase or rental of games." It seems as though at least some games will carry premium fees, as the announcement states "top-tier, newly-released games will be for sale and for rent on an à la carte basis."

For now, we await Onlive's ultimate test, as it comes to home computers in June, with a TV adapter set to be announced later in the year, followed by Onlive "steadily expanding to other devices over time." Hopefully, we'll be able to play Crysis on the iPhone sooner rather than later.
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John Davison and Dave Rudden

Posted by Ted Gibbons at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )

Sony Computer Entertainment will shed more light on its fabled and as yet unnamed motion controller next week during two seperate events at the The Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco.

The first event on Thursday (NZ time) is media only and is shrouded in mystery. The conference schedule also has an "Introducing the PlayStation 3 Motion Controller" session pencilled in for Friday (NZ time) and many PlayStation 3 fans will be hoping the presenting Sony developers Kirk Bender and David Coombes can give more insight into the controller's capabilities.

The Friday session's description says the motion-sensing device will allow gamers to interact with their console in HD using 3D position and orientation tracking, camera input and a controllable RGB LED. It will "bridge the gap between camera, motion and traditional interfaces", Sony says.

If successful the controller should put some serious pressure on the Nintendo Wii, which has dominated the motion controller market in recent years. Microsoft's Xbox 360 motion sensing interface, codenamed Project Natal, is due later this year and also looks very promising. Instead of a traditional controller like the Wii Remote, Nunchuk or PS3 motion controller, Natal will allow players to control games using an RGB camera, depth sensor and multi-array microphone.

Sony has been very protective of its motion controller imagery and specs but I'll be on location next week to update all of you New Zealand PC World readers on the latest news.

Posted by James Heffield at 3:57 PM | Permalink | Comments ( 0 )