February NPD: BioShock 2, Xbox 360 Top the Charts

The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 topped the sales charts in February, moving half a million copies in a month packed with big game releases, the NPD Group said Thursday.

Boosted by BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and continued sales of Modern Warfare 2, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling home game console in the U.S. last month. On the software side, Wii hits New Super Mario Bros. and Just Dance continued to sell boatloads, and Sony’s innovative Heavy Rain had a strong showing for such an experimental game. If you look at the charts, you’ll see it actually outsold the PS3 version of BioShock 2.

All in all, it was a $1.26 billion month for the business — down 15% from last year.

“Honestly, I had expected the industry to perform somewhat better this month. Nonetheless, strong new releases and Easter gift-buying bodes well for industry performance in March,” said NPD analyst Anita Frazier in an emailed statement.

Hardware Sales, February 2010

1. Nintendo DS 613.2K
2. Xbox 360 422.0K
3. Wii 397.9K
4. PlayStation 3 360.1K
5. PSP 133.4K
6. PlayStation 2 101.9K

Top 10 Software Sales, February 2010

1. BIOSHOCK 2* 360 TAKE 2 INTERACTIVE Feb-10 562.9K
2. NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Nov-09 555.6K
3. CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* 360 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 314.3K
4. JUST DANCE WII UBISOFT Nov-09 275.4K
5. WII SPORTS RESORT W/ WII MOTION PLUS* WII NINTENDO OF AMERICA Jul-09 272.5K
6. CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 2* PS3 ACTIVISION BLIZZARD Nov-09 252.8K
7. MASS EFFECT 2 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Jan-10 246.5K
8. DANTE’S INFERNO: DIVINE EDITION PS3 ELECTRONIC ARTS Feb-10 242.5K
9. DANTE’S INFERNO 360 ELECTRONIC ARTS Feb-10 224.7K
10. HEAVY RAIN PS3 SONY Feb-10 219.3K

Image courtesy 2K Games

Photo: Silent Hill Composer Rocks Out at GDC

SAN FRANCISCO — “Audio is my lover,” Akira Yamaoka said as he kicked off his presentation Thursday at Game Developers Conference. Pulling out his guitar, he played some music that he composed over the past day on his trip from Tokyo to San Francisco.

Yamaoka is best known for his years at game publisher Konami, creating the music and sound for the Silent Hill horror game series. He is now working with independent developer Grasshopper Manufacture, composing music and producing sounds for the horror game it is creating for Electronic Arts.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

GDC: Metroid Creator Inspired by Italian Horror Films

SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo’s Metroid games take their creative cues from an unlikely source: Dario Argento, the Italian horror film director.

At his keynote speech during the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto said that Argento’s films Susperia and Deep Red, which he discovered in his youth, awoke his creative sensibilities. The horror films were a big influence on the innovative, stylish space adventure Metroid games, he said.

“Deep Red has the greatest inspiration on my creative process,” he said. Sakamoto had always liked scary movies but always thought that there was “something missing” from other films. “I discovered that without a doubt, I wanted to create things in the same manner that Argento did.”

Sakamoto pointed to the director’s use of various tricks to control the “mood, timing, foreshadowing and contrast” to scare the audience, calling out Argento’s use of progressive rock music with its “almost indifferent echo of the stiff and robotic.” Much in the same way, the Metroid games use eerie, sparse music to great effect, heightening the player’s tension and fear.

Sakamoto said that his first “homage” to Argento was the Japan-only 8-bit game Famicom Detective Club II.

Argento’s influence might have touched Metroid in other ways. As I was coming back to the press room to write this, I ran into Game|Life writer and smart person Gus Mastrapa, and mentioned Sakamoto’s affection for Argento.

“Interesting,” he said. “I wonder if that’s why Metroid uses so many yellows and oranges and reds. Have you ever seen a Suspiria poster?” Sure enough, Argento’s visual style is echoed in main character Samus Aran’s suit, although that could just be a coincidence.

The balance of Sakamoto’s speech was a rundown of his creative process, how he used the techniques he gleaned from filmmakers like Argento to create games as diverse as Metroid: Other M, Wario Ware DIY and a Japanese game called Friend Collection, a quirky Nintendo DS game using Mii characters in comedic situations.

The audience loved Sakamoto’s demo of Friend Collection, which put little cartoon versions of Sakamoto, Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime and Samus Aran into a variety of scenarios. Sakamoto didn’t say whether Nintendo had any plans to bring this game outside of Japan. (Full of Japanese humor and digitized speech, it would be a localization nightmare, but since it’s about to pass the 3 million copies sold mark in Japan, it could be another Nintendogs-style moneymaker for the company if it pulls it off.)

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

White House: Ask What Game Developers Can Do For Your Country

SAN FRANCISCO — Kumar Garg, policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wants the game industry to address America’s “national challenges.”

In a keynote entitled “Grand Challenges for Game Developers” delivered at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, Garg focused on videogames’ unique ability to engage, immerse and teach.

“We don’t allow kids to fail and iterate,” Kumar Garg said of our country’s current approach towards education. Garg believes that games have much to teach educators, and that gamemakers have many opportunities to contribute to the public interest.

In this spirit, he revealed a new initiative spearheaded by First Lady Michelle Obama to encourage game creators to make games that encourage kids to eat right and exercise. The new Apps For Healthy Kids programs offers cash rewards, in the style of the X-Prize, to encourage developers to participate.

Additionally, Garg suggested that game developers do what they can to make socially impactful games by providing sabbaticals to employees so they can donate their time towards the efforts to make games in the public interest.

Other ways that publishers and developers can contribute to the effort include forming relationships with universities, providing tools and media assets to serious games efforts, offering prizes, funding research and forming partnerships with government agencies, he said.

Photo: Gus Mastrapa/Wired.com

See Also:

• What Videogames Can Teach Teachers
• What is Michelle Obama Reading to Kids?
• U.S. Spies Use Custom Videogames to Learn How to Think
• Teaching Your Kids Where Your Food Comes From

GDC: Sony’s Motion Controller Underwhelms With Janky Games

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony’s motion controller is called PlayStation Move and will be released this fall, the gamemaker said Wednesday. Whether any killer app games will be released with it is still in question.

At a lavish press briefing taking place a few blocks away from the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the final name and specifications of Move, which it first showed off at last year’s E3 Expo.The controller itself is almost exactly like the Wii remote, although Sony says it is more precise: PlayStation Eye, Sony’s already-released camera peripheral, sits near your television and tracks a glowing plastic ball on top of the controller. This allows it to track the controller’s movements. Sony says that the primary advantage of the controller’s precision will be that hard-core gamers will embrace Move even if they don’t think Wii is accurate enough.

“We are bringing consumers what they have been asking for: A more precise, immersive and responsive real-world gaming experience,” said Shuhei Yoshida, president of Sony’s worldwide game development studios, during the presentation. “The types of games we can make with it are amazingly diverse… it has the potential to breathe new life into many established game genres.”

Having said that, the games Sony showed off were largely cribbed from Wii’s playlist: table tennis, bowling, golf, archery, etc. Most of these are included in a single game tentatively called Champion Sports.

Also like Wii, the PlayStation Move will be expandable with a second piece held in the left hand that features an analog joystick and buttons. For example, in the shooter game SOCOM 4, the left hand controller moves the soldier around the screen and the Move is used to aim his gun with an on-screen reticle.

Sony's Champion Sports features Wii-style games like table tennis.
Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Sony let us try a few of the games after its presentation. On the whole, they weren’t that much fun, feeling more like rough proof-of-concept tech demos than software that’s going to excite consumers. If the Move is more precise than the Wii remote, it didn’t much matter when PlayStation 3’s versions of tennis and bowling just felt jankier than Wii Sports. At this point, the software isn’t living up to the promises of the technology.

Another mini-game in Champion Sports was called “Gladiator Duel,” or as I like to call it, “Beat a Woman To Death With a Hammer: The Game.” This actually used two Moves to play: One controls your sword, the other your shield.

One unique thing that Move does that Wii can’t is augmented reality. The camera can show the player on the TV screen and overlay images onto the controller, making it look as if you’re holding a whip, a sword, even a hair trimmer. The game Move Party showed off these features, but it seemed more like a slick visual gimmick than an exciting new type of game.

An area where Move seems markedly inferior to Wii, based on what we played, is pointing at the screen. Two games used the controller as a gun — the aforementioned SOCOM and a cartoony shooting gallery called The Shoot — and the control felt laggy, as if the cursor was trailing after my movements instead of reacting right alongside them.

Sony VP Peter Dille extols the virtues of PlayStation Move at a press briefing in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Sony said that a bundle package containing the basic controller, the required PlayStation Eye camera, and a game would cost “under $100″ this fall. The company also said it would bundle the controller with some PlayStation 3 hardware this year, and also sell the controller on its own.

It did not say how much any of these other packages would cost. But it’s plain to see that a full suite of Move hardware is going to be an expensive proposition: You need two of the controllers to play “Gladiator Duel” and the completely separate Sub-Controller attachment to play hardcore games like SOCOM.

For that kind of outlay, Sony’s going to need some better games.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

GDC: Google Courts Game Devs With Free Phones

SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones.

At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the company gifted a Motorola Droid to every developer who listened in on Palevich’s pitch session.

Google launched the Android operating system for mobile phones in 2008. Now that several carriers have started providing hardware that runs Android Google is using the Game Developers Conference to court developers to create games for phone’s Android Market — a software clearing house similar to Apple’s App Store. Google suffered a minor PR setback last year when Gameloft finance director Alexandre de Rochefort said publicly that his company had “significantly cut our investment in Android platform.”

The generous swag hand-out might just work. An enthusiastic young developer in the audience for Palevich’s talk proclaimed “holy crap!” when he discovered that the phone he nabbed at a Google panel the day before came with twelve months of free service.

Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com

See Also:

• Android Army Pumped for All-Out Attack on iPhone
• Android's Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried
• Android Phone Grows Up, Becomes Brain for Real Robot
• AT&T Plans 5 Android Smartphones in 2010
• Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top

Classic Videogames Mutate in Game Over Art Show

Classic videogames like Street Fighter and Ms. Pac-Man inspired the artists whose works will be displayed in the Game Over 3 exhibition.

Put on by geek magazine turned art, design and clothing purveyor Giant Robot, the group gallery show will feature pieces from dozens of illustrators, painters, cartoonists, artists and game designers.

Game Over 3 runs Friday through Sunday at the Giant Robot store, 618 Shrader St., in San Francisco, California. Check out Wired.com’s preview of the show for an early look at the work that’ll be up for sale.

Silvio Porretta’s playful and somewhat perverse Play With Me painting features a life-size joystick protruding from the crotch of a life-size pixel person. Porretta is a videogame industry veteran since 1990 who contributed art to the Tony Hawk Pro Skater series.

OnLive: Money For Nothing

SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference.

Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that $15/month get you? Access to OnLive’s service, but no games — those will have to be purchased separately. I’d rant about this but Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality is already all over it, and why duplicate the same level of bafflement:

What happens if you decide to leave the service? I’m pretty sure that you’ll be hearing a giant flushing sound in regards to the games you “bought.” So you didn’t buy anything, really, except a rental with no expiration.

Well, no expiration until you stop paying $15 a month. …

To me, you can try the rental model (monthly fee) or you can try the purchase model, but what you absolutely cannot try is the $15 A Month For Not A Damn Thing model.

I think this idea is OnLifeSupport until further notice.

I subscribe to Netflix for the streaming service. I’m paying about $10 for thousands of movies. I don’t have to pay separately for each of those. I don’t know why I’d pay $15 every month for nothing. OnLive’s technology sounds like it’ll work, but I’m struggling to understand the benefit of a monthly bill that doesn’t have a bunch of content included with it. After a year of playing OnLive, you’ve spent enough that you could have just bought a used Xbox 360.

Image courtesy OnLive

GDC: Big Designers Find Satisfaction in Small Games

SAN FRANCISCO — Big-name videogame designers are thinking small.

Creators of legendary games of the ’80s and ’90s like Sinistar and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are increasingly working on social games like those found on Facebook, largely because the development of popular time-wasters like FarmVille closely mirrors the creative process that drove the early days of gaming: small teams, short production schedules and more creative autonomy for designers.

“It feels to me like 1981 or 1982,” said designer Brenda Brathwaite at a Game Developers Conference panel here Tuesday afternoon. Brathwaite worked on the classic Wizardry role-playing games and is now creative director at San Francisco social media company Slide. “I remember, early in my career we would make a game in six months. I love the idea of just putting a game together with a small group of people. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do.”

As videogame hardware has gotten more powerful and gamers’ expectations of quality have grown, game budgets have ballooned in recent years. One estimate pegged Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s budget at between $40 million and $50 million. Meanwhile, social game companies are reaching millions of users with games designed by small teams, sometimes in a matter of weeks.

For gamers, having designers with so much experience working on social games is bound to bring higher levels of quality. David Crane, the creator of classic Activision games like Pitfall!, is doing iPhone apps. Ultima creator Richard Garriott is turning his attention to Facebook with a high-end game platform called Portalarium.

“It’s becoming acceptable to make smaller games again,” said game designer Eskil Steenberg, one of the developers at the conference who is talking about the move away from big-budget games. “We used to be at a point where everything went triple-A, but now indie scenes and all these kind of games are taking off, and it lets you work alone.”

Steenberg is at GDC showing off a work in progress called Love, a one-man project on which he is artist, programmer and designer all in one. He says he savors working on the smallest of small teams.

“There’s no office politics,” he said. “You don’t have to communicate with anybody about anything.”

A bit extreme, perhaps, not to mention impossible for anyone who doesn’t have Steenberg’s many talents. But the designers at GDC who are gravitating toward small teams share many of his feelings.

Steve Meretzky, who created cult classic text adventures like Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, took a job with social game publisher Playdom in 2008 after becoming frustrated with how even smaller, casual games were becoming bloated. He spent two years working on the game World of Zoo, and in that time it was only two-thirds finished. “Working really, really long years to get a single product done … (was) a pace of game development that was a lot less satisfying,” he said.

Noah Falstein, who began his career working on the Atari 2600 and created the classic arcade shooter Sinistar, said that he had a “feeling of being increasingly detached” as game design got more complicated. “GDC was getting really depressing for me because everybody was talking about these $20 [million to] $30 million games,” he said.

Falstein was depressed not only because bigger teams made game design a more fractured creative process, but also because the big budgets brought significant risk aversion.

“Nobody wants to (take risks) on the gameplay side,” he said. “You end up with World War II first-person shooters and science fiction first-person shooters. With this new explosion, there’s a much smaller monetary risk…. It suddenly frees you up to be much more creative.”

Since social game design brings with it new challenges — connecting players to their friends is as important as the game itself — it’s not as if these industry veterans are resting on their laurels. And that’s why experience is so important in this emerging medium, argued Falstein: When you’ve been creating games since Atari’s heyday, you’re used to having to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technology just to keep your head above water.

“It does take a certain level of experience,” he said.

Photo: Left to right: Noah Falstein, Brian Reynolds, Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky speak Tuesday afternoon at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• I Want It Now! The Fierce Urgency of Videogaming's Future
• John Carmack to Recieve Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC
• Pitfall! Creator David Crane Is Named Videogame Pioneer
• Hands-On With Tokyo Game Show's Hottest New Games

Eyes On: Power Gig, Music Game With Real Guitars

SAN FRANCISCO — Think the music game market is already crowded enough? Here comes a new challenger, a full-band game that will use real electric guitars for controllers.

PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, published by Seven45 Studios, will be demoed on the Game Developers Conference show floor this week. It’s scheduled to be released this fall on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Wired.com got an advance look at the game and the guitar peripheral (above), which looks like a Rock Band plastic axe and an inexpensive real one had a baby.

For the most part, Guitar Hero fans will feel right at home with the gameplay: Colored Notes travel down the screen, and you hit them by holding any of the strings in that colored area of the guitar’s neck, then strumming. Easy enough. Where Power Gig gets complex, and where the game’s creators feel its appeal lies, is in the “chording” gameplay.

If you turn chording on, the colored notes on-screen suddenly have numbers inside them. A number “5″ inside a green note means that you have to hold down the fifth string in the green fret area, plus the fourth string in the yellow area. The game teaches you each of these chords and ramps them up gradually as you progress through the songs.

Since these are actual power chords, you’ll be learning to play the guitar. And since it’s an actual guitar, you can unplug it from the console, plug it into an amplifier, and wail away.

We didn’t get to go hands-on with Power Gig, so I couldn’t tell you if it’s any fun. And there are more questions than answers right now about the game: What music will be included? How will the drums and vocals work? How much will it all cost?

And will we really learn guitar by playing it? A music game that actually teaches you to play music is the Holy Grail of this business. It’s something that Harmonix has long hoped to accomplish, and with Rock Band 3 coming this holiday season, perhaps the originators will attempt something similar.

For the time being, you can head down to the Game Developers Conference to get the same brief demo we did.

Image courtesy Seven45 Studios

About That New Lufia DS Game

You might have heard that Square Enix recently shipped a new entry in the all-but-forgotten Lufia series of role-playing games in Japan. Or maybe you didn’t. Called Estpolis: The Land Cursed by the Gods in Japan, the game shipped in late February to little fanfare and meager sales (it didn’t even make the top 10). So it’s definitely a B-game. But it’s not bad, if you’re looking for an action RPG. A few of my scattered thoughts follow.

Although the game’s plot is loosely based on the 1995 Super NES game Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals, in most other respects it’s a completely different game, a 3-D action RPG instead of a 2-D turn-based one. The playable characters from the first game are there, but instead of controlling them all in your party, you swap between them as you make your way through the game’s levels, since they all have special abilities that you need to use on the battlefield.

For example, main character Maxim can launch himself horizontally to cross wide gaps. His love interest Tia can get across even wider gaps by throwing out her hookshot onto special poles in the environment. Big burly Guy can use his massive hammer to break apart big rocks and crystals in your path. You swap between the characters by tapping their faces on the touch screen –like Square Enix’s Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles games on the DS, you use the D-pad and buttons to play, occasionally thumbing the lower screen for special functions.

Estpolis seems to use the same 3-D engine as many of Square Enix’s other DS projects, except instead of being a bunch of cute little big-headed munchkins all of the characters are more realistically proportioned. This doesn’t look so great on the small screen with such low polygon counts. Combine that with the fact that the visual design in general isn’t so hot and you have a game that often looks, not to be too subtle about it, butt ass ugly. It seems to realize it, and often splashes the entire screen with high-res portraits of the characters so you don’t have to cut your eyes on the geometry during the story scenes.

From what I’ve played (the first few hours) there’s not much story — what’s there is very lighthearted and, well, 16-bit. Here is pretty much the whole setup:

Some Woman: You must go on a world-spanning adventure and kill some dudes.

Maxim: lol k

Although you do a fair amount of talking in the towns between the dungeons, Estpolis is mostly about fighting and solving environment-based puzzles. While you can use special attacks and charged blows to pummel enemies, I found that just wailing away on them with the attack button often did the trick. After an enemy falls to the ground dead but before it disappears, you can beat up its lifeless corpse for extra EXP and gold, which is cool — the game rewards flipping out and killing shit with impunity, which I enjoy.

The puzzles mostly involve pushing bricks, picking things up and putting them in other places, etc. You can screw up the puzzles, which requires you to either use the Reset feature, which bumps you back to the last checkpoint without the EXP and items that you earned, or just exit the dungeon and fight your way back to where you were. The first option can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you’ve picked up a random item drop. So I usually ended up just exiting the whole dungeon, keeping all my loot.

And that’s the new Lufia in a nutshell: Not the best game out there by a mile, but a solid, workmanlike experience in a neglected genre (and better than Legends of Exidia). Don’t know if Square Enix will give it a Western release, but it’s pretty import-friendly for an RPG.

Images courtesy Square Enix

Valve Brings Hit Games, Steam Service to Mac

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday.

The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2, as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time.

The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that mashed characters from Valve games into retro Apple ads. Dan Connors, CEO of Telltale Games, called Apple and Steam a natural fit.

“If there’s anything like iTunes on the PC right now for games, it’s Steam,” Connors said. “So you’ve got two great leaders in digital distribution coming together.”

Steam is the pre-eminent digital distribution platform for PCs. With more than 1,000 games and 25 million user accounts, Steam is by one estimate responsible for more than 70 percent of digital game purchases.

Valve wants to position its games not as static products but as part of an ongoing, constantly updated, ubiquitous service, company co-founder Gabe Newell told Wired.com in advance of Monday’s announcement.

“The traditional model has always been that you have these really extended development times … where you do nothing for customers for several years and then you try to drive everybody into the theaters or into the stores on a given date,” Newell said. “It makes it hard to steer your decisions based on customer feedback, and customers don’t particularly like that. They would like to have the experience of being part of an entertainment community where they’re getting something on a daily or more frequent basis.

“The Mac represents a great opportunity to deliver these things.”

Bringing Steam to Mac will give gamers several cross-platform benefits, Newell said.

• If players already own the PC versions of Valve games, they’ll get Mac versions at no extra charge through a feature called Steam Play.
• By using the Steam Cloud feature that the company introduced in 2008, players can save in-progress games online, then call up those saved games no matter which version they’re playing. If you’re playing Half-Life 2 on your home PC but then head out on the road with your MacBook, you can continue your game-in-progress.

Easy updates

While Valve also releases its games on consoles, Steam lets the company take full advantage of the freedom that the PC and Mac platforms give it to constantly update and tweak its games. For instance, the developer has updated its 2007 game Team Fortress 2 more than 100 times, Newell said.

This wouldn’t be possible on a closed system like Microsoft’s Xbox Live, he said: “Microsoft’s QA fees … would be several hundred thousand dollars to do the updates that we did to Team Fortress 2. And that ignores the fact that the cycle on these closed platforms would have taken years to get all these updates through.”

Most recently, Valve leveraged its ability to push updates through Steam and engage its fan base by dropping hints into its 2007 cult hit Portal about the game’s upcoming sequel, letting the fans be an active part of the game’s announcement.

“We want to bring content creators and consumers closer together to minimize the latency between what somebody on the team does versus a fan’s ability to participate in that experience, not put more barriers between them,” Newell said.

Valve isn’t the only PC developer with a strong, engaged fan base looking to Mac. Telltale Games, creator of the episodic Sam and Max games, announced last month that it would be moving to Mac, even inviting fans to vote on which of its games should be ported over first.

While Telltale has not confirmed any of its games will be on the Mac version of Steam, Connors called getting his companies titles on Valve’s digital-distribution platform “a no-brainer.”

“We have games that run on the Mac and we have games that run on Steam, so our goal is to be there,” Connors said. “We think they’re going to do a great job with getting the Steam client over there and we want to continue to be a part of it.”

Asked to name other developers that we’d see on Steam, Valve’s Newell demurred. But Steam’s popularity means that as Valve goes, so go other gamemakers. Steam on Mac means many more games on Mac.

“(Mac) has all of the right pieces, and we know other developers see that as well,” Newell said.

See Also:

• Portal 2 Is Official … and Maybe for Mac
• Geeky Clues Suggest Portal Sequel Is Coming

Portal 2 Is Official… And Maybe for Mac

Portal 2 is real, and coming this Christmas, Valve said Friday. And it looks like Mac owners might get to share the love.

The Seattle gamemaker announced that it would release the sequel to Portal, its space-time-bending, hilarious 2007 sleeper hit later this year. If you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Game Informer magazine. And Valve’s not done making waves: A slate of teaser images released this week that the company is bringing its games, and Steam direct download service, to the Mac platform.

Portal 2 also had its share of teases: On Monday, an update to the original game brought with it a pile of hidden clues that suggested a sequel was inbound.

Right after leading fans down the Portal rabbit hole, Valve started teasing the notion of Steam for Mac. A series of ad parodies that mash Valve’s characters into retro Apple ads more than suggests that the company will be launching their game marketplace and social network for Mac computers in the near future.

We’ll make sure Valve gets us the official news when it’s ready to stop being such teases.

Image courtesy Valve

See Also:

• Geeky Clues Suggest Portal Sequel Is Coming
• In 'Portal,' Violating Physics Proves Weirdly Satisfying
• Portal Prodigy Vacates Valve
• Valve Says Downloads Picked Up Steam in 2009
• Valve's Newell: Next Console War to Be Decided by Steam-Like Services

It’s Okay to Be Gay on Xbox Live

After much deliberation, Microsoft has changed its policy about self-identifying one’s sexual preference, race, religion or nationality via its Xbox Live online service.

In an open letter written Friday, Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the Xbox Live Terms of Use and Code of Conduct will now allow players to “more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles.”

Specifically, it is now kosher to use the words “lesbian,” “gay,” “bi,” “transgender” and “straight” in a user name or profile. The new policy does not yet outline proper uses for reference to race, religion and nationality.

Previously, Microsoft banned those expressions out of concern that they could be used as slurs. But an instance in 2009, when a lesbian gamer was banned for self-identifying as homosexual in her profile, resulted in a re-examination of the policy, executed in close collaboration with GLADD.

Now, perhaps Richard Gaywood — the gamer whose real name once ran afoul of Microsoft’s policies — will be able to get his old Gamertag back.

Image courtesy Microsoft

See Also:

• Xbox Live Bans Lesbian Gamer, Microsoft Apologizes
• Microsoft Forbids User's Name as Gamertag
• LGBT-Friendly Campaign Targets Insensitive Gamers
• Xbox Live Trash Talk Leads to Arrest

Review: Beautiful, Boring Final Fantasy XIII Loses RPG Magic

The most important thing to understand about Final Fantasy XIII, the latest in the world’s most popular line of role-playing games, is that it isn’t a role-playing game.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask its creators: In a recent interview, the director of this PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game (available March 9) said the changes he made to this installment were so dramatic that it constituted a “new genre” outside the “RPG template.”

Various Final Fantasy directors have been making big tweaks to the series’ gameplay ever since it began in 1987, and it’s not as if there is some untouchable canon the series can never violate. In fact, coming up with fresh ideas is how Final Fantasy has stayed afloat in a stagnating Japanese RPG market.

This version’s gimmick is that it pares down the gameplay to a few basic elements: Turn-based battles against mobs of fantastic creatures and elaborate, movielike story sequences. But this time, Square Enix finally threw the baby out with the bathwater: The things that make RPGs feel so different from other games — the sense of a grand, nonlinear adventure and the rising and falling action of an open-ended world — are gone.

Final Fantasy XIII isn’t an RPG; it’s something less.

(Note: This review is based on 45 hours of play with the Japanese-language PlayStation 3 version of Final Fantasy XIII. I played the first hour of the English-language PS3 version, but was not able to try the Xbox 360 version.)

Final Fantasy XIII's story scenes are some of the most gorgeous you'll see in any videogame.
Images courtesy Square Enix

In large part, Final Fantasy fans play the games for the stories. These generally revolve around a ragtag group of misfits, living on the outskirts of an oppressive society, who level up until they are powerful enough to kill God — and usually have to before the end credits will roll. XIII’s take on the formula is a story of two worlds: Cocoon and Pulse. Cocoon is where all the good people live; Pulse is the freaky Other world that everyone would rather not think about.

XIII’s story is good — a little more human and less esoteric than in previous games — but it’s no Heavy Rain. It’s still over-the-top and cartoony, more like an anime box set than a feature film. The pleasure still comes largely from the design of the characters, the world and the legions of grotesque creatures that inhabit it. It bursts with color and variety, taking you from gorgeous natural environments to futuristic cities.

The music, which has been a hallmark of the series since Day 1, also excels. Longtime composer Nobuo Uematsu may be long gone, but in his stead Masashi Hamauzu (Unlimited SaGa) turns in a score with catchy hooks and blood-pumping battle melodies.

Through a series of hilarious misunderstandings and machinations by Cocoon’s transparently evil theocracy, our six heroes all get marked as servants of Pulse. Everybody on Cocoon freaks out, and the heroic half-dozen are branded enemies of the state, which means that they’re constantly fighting things everywhere they go.

And I mean everywhere. Final Fantasy XIII is an almost entirely unbroken string of battles against mobs of monsters. One of the reasons this isn’t an RPG is that role-playing games have some degree of variety. Previous games in the series, for all their differences, have been set in large, open-ended worlds that players can explore leisurely. You could find new towns and locations on the map, talk to people, buy new equipment and spend time hanging around the town fighting low-level monsters to raise your stats before tackling the next big dungeon.

In contrast, XIII is all big dungeons. The exit of each one is stitched directly onto the entrance of the next. You can never slow down and take the game at your own pace; it’s a constant rush forward, with no time to deliberate or relax. This is the big mark in the loss column for Final Fantasy XIII, because the sense of rising and falling action, tension and release, is what made previous games in the genre uniquely enjoyable. That’s why RPGs feel like epic journeys and not just really long videogames.

With the game design thus stripped down to a series of battles, the moment-to-moment action of the battle system — being the only meaningful interaction between the player and this game — must carry the player’s enjoyment all on its own. And although it has some appealing features, on balance, it didn’t do this for me.

Battles in Final Fantasy games are about picking actions off a menu and watching your characters execute them. In XIII, you only directly control one character; the others are run by the computer. Besides this, the game begins no differently: You select “Fight” from the menu and watch everybody go to town, using potions as necessary to bump your hit points back up. But as the game goes on, it trickles new features in, slowly raising the complexity.

Soon, it’s not enough to merely reduce the enemy’s hit points; you have to build up another, separate gauge and get the enemy into the “Stagger” state, where he lurches around and becomes especially vulnerable to attacks. Once you’re comfortable with that, your characters can be assigned roles, which specialize in certain types of actions: the medic can use healing magic, the saboteur can weaken the enemy’s defenses, etc.

It’s run-of-the-mill stuff for the series, but here’s the twist: You can set up to six different combinations of roles before each battle, and in battle you switch between these combinations, which are called Paradigms. Final Fantasy XIII’s battles are about considering not just the six individual roles, but the many different combinations of roles that you can assign to your three characters, and how they work together during battle.

You'll take down a wide variety of crazy monsters on the surface of Gran Pulse.
Images courtesy Square Enix

Once the game gets to this fully operational status, the battles become much more interesting. But it takes around 20 hours, prior to which the game is boring as hell. Final Fantasy XIII ramps up achingly slowly, only giving you two characters at first, and limiting the roles and characters you can use. For much of the time, you’re just watching the game play itself. For the first half of the game, using the roles that you’ve been given to obliterate anything that comes your way requires less strategy than beating a toddler at Connect Four.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that Final Fantasy XIII is relentlessly linear. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: Many other RPGs are linear in the metaphorical sense, but the vast majority of this game is literally a straight line. Like the internet, it is a series of tubes in which you run forward, forward, ever forward, fighting battle after battle, breaking only to watch the lavish story sequences.

There’s a single exception. At about the 25-hour mark, you finally descend into the world of Pulse. Gran Pulse is a large open hub that breaks off into … well, more tubes, little winding capillaries that spider out from the heart. But the appeal of this area is less about the geography and more about what it represents — you can take a break from the story and undertake missions, which all involve killing some monster or another. These let you build up your stats, encounter side stories and generally avoid having to push forward.

This area came just at the right time, because I was sick of being in the tube. This was the most fun I had with XIII. But it’s too little and comes way too late: There’s not that much to do, because the missions just make you run back and forth across the plains killing monsters, and having to put up with all that bad level design just to get a little taste of (relative) freedom is the very definition of unbalanced. Then, once you’re done having fun, it’s back in the tube till the end of the game.

In a way, Pulse feels vestigial, the remnant of an old game design that the XIII team wanted to ditch but couldn’t entirely. For all the sacred cows that this game slaughters, it still clings to tons of almost-useless features. You can ride Chocobos (in one area, for a moment), you can use potions in battle (though you never need to), there are shops (that sell nothing essential), etc.

Taken together, these little bits of window dressing seem to be an apologetic gesture to series fans, little functionless adornments that remind one that this is still a Final Fantasy game. But it’s missing the big stuff, and that’s more important: I don’t need Chocobos to be happy, but I do need more than this.

Japanese RPGs, on the whole, have significantly lost their shine over the last few years. For all its flaws, Final Fantasy XIII has a certain level of polish that makes it more engaging than its peers, even if they hew closer to the old formula.

The fact that Final Fantasy designers are so willing to experiment is a good thing, because it’ll keep the genre from dying off. But Final Fantasy XIII should be considered a failed experiment. We can only hope it’s a stumble on the path to a brighter RPG future.

WIRED Beautiful graphics and music, lavish movie sequences, unique battle system.

TIRED Takes way too long to ramp up, boring level design, monotonous pacing.

$60, Square Enix

Rating:

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

See Also:

• Stripped-Down Final Fantasy XIII Is More Movie Than Game
• Active Time Babble: Discussing Final Fantasy XIII for 2 Hours
• Hands-On: Battling Through Final Fantasy XIII’s Brief Demo
• Video: IGN Spoofs Final Fantasy XIII Trailer
• Final Fantasy XIII Gets Social
• Video: Japanese Final Fantasy XIII Demo