Pity Koei, originator and now final bastion of the pseudo-historical battlefield brawler. Its flagship Dynasty Warriors, at one time the biggest-selling series in all of Japan, is viewed by most of the Western world with disdain or, worse, indifference. Once notable for pushing more polygons around an environment than just about anything else and tasking its player to carve their way, often single-handedly, through overwhelming, spear-wielding odds, the series fast settled into a rhythm of bi-annual updates that, on the surface at least, have done little to freshen the formula.

A one-trick war-horse, then? It’s a familiar but unfair accusation, as too often critics and gamers ignore each iteration’s subtle tweaks and novelties simply because of the aesthetic similarities to what has gone before.

Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce is a concerted attempt by the developer to approach the series in a new way, asking, more forcefully this time, that players reassess this peculiar and bombastic brand of action game. Set within the now-familiar Three Kingdoms era of Ancient China, you choose a faction and a character within that faction to play as and set about winning the war, battle by battle.

These are, in the main, similar to what has gone before, as you cut through enemy troops, a furious one-man blur of steel fury, cartwheeling through the encroaching enemy horde as if suspended on stunt wires. The kill count for each mission often reaches the hundreds, as what the opposition lacks in competence it makes up for in sheer numbers, line after line of jabbing Chinese warriors chipping away at your health as they hassle from all sides.

Once again the visuals are functional rather than beautiful, with plain lighting and scrappy textures and a camera that must be continually wrestled into providing the best window onto the action. As a port of a PSP game, play areas are far smaller than those encountered in, say, Dynasty Warriors 6 or Bladestorm, reducing the impact of what has always been one of the unique selling points of this style of game.

Irritating loading screens punctuate each and every transition from one area to the next and the structure of each mission is abridged and simplistic: go here and defeat this person or go there and acquire that item, with none of the tactical considerations that have crept into the series recently. The voice acting throughout is camp and overstated, like a seventies kung-fu overdub, and despite the rich historical context, storytelling is both brief and shallow.

And yet, despite this litany of shortcomings and mediocrity, an engaging game emerges.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here

‘Creature most vulnerable while heaving with sobs‘

Miss Universe Pageant winners, sorted by planet. GO US!

New type of wasp found that makes spiders do its bidding. Cut to grainy video of wasp riding a spider about like a pony; making it cups of tea with milk and two sugars; fetching its slippers.

Timing is everything: How OK Go’s amazing Rube Goldberg machine (which you’ve all seen by now, right?) was built.

The Sound of Summer: Wins advertising today.

Jim’s contribution to Schell debate.

Japanese DSiWare game that uses head-tracking to alter perspective and allow players to find letters hidden in 3D space.

Don’t look at the numbers too long, lest you become one of them.

The new record from De De Mouse features artwork by Final Fantasy Tactics’ Akihiko Yoshida *licks*

One time this guy stuck a bunch of Lego together and this happened.

GTA: Gordon Brown: Taiwanese news visualisation of Britain’s Prime Minister punching, like, everyone.

Auto-balancing Lego Segway built entirely from the from the standard NXT 2.0 set:

Unintentionally lewd logo designs.

Kid hits lion with samurai sword to protect dog. Turns out the lion was actually a raccoon. Hate it when that happens.

Almost half of all primates face ‘imminent extinction’. Another reason why you should call your mum tonight etc.

Pretty much the nicest thing anyone’s said. Here’s to encouraging people whose work you admire, no matter who you are.

Margaret writes for Wired about the parlour game Werewolf/ Mafia. A super read.

Link of the Week

Holy smokes a lot of TV is green-screened these days. Amazing before and after reel:

In recent years the distinctions that once separated videogame genres have blurred and faded. Is Mass Effect 2 an RPG or a third-person shooter? Is Heavy Rain a point-and-click adventure or a QTE thriller? Puzzle Quest is as much a Tolkien-cliché RPG as it is a match-three puzzler, while Peggle is Pachinko meets NBA Jam meets LSD rainbow unicorns. Blockbuster series such as BioShock and Uncharted are slippery in the hands of genre, borrowing as they do elements and ideas from a broad lineage, while WarioWare and Retro Game Challenge boil down gaming’s first principles into a hotchpotch stew that defies easy classification. Systems ooze into systems, enriching one another, and so the old videogame terminology becomes obsolete through promiscuous evolution.

Nevertheless, this diversification works best through osmosis, not Frankenstein-style stitching. In the case of White Knight Chronicles, the bolting together of a traditional single-payer JRPG with an MMO-lite multiplayer component is somewhat awkward. The first 20 minutes of the experience are spent designing an avatar who takes at most a secondary role in the main bulk of the adventure, only slipping into the protagonist’s shoes when taken online to engage in multiplayer side-questing.

Of course, RPGs have always expected their players to assume a transient role controlling a group of characters, but the disconnect between the character you create as your likeness for White Knight Chronicles and the character who drives the narrative forward is a little too jarring for comfort. It’s best approached as a game of two halves then, despite the fact that your character’s weapons, skills and competence carry back and forth between the two modes, and achievements reached in one area are relevant to the other.

As a single-player RPG, White Knight Chronicles continues Level 5’s breezy, fairytale approach to the form. As with the company’s work on Dark Cloud and Dragon Quest VIII, a grand yet bubbly orchestral soundtrack fills the warm air of some of videogaming’s most welcoming vistas. Rolling hills seasoned with flowers in full bloom connect the game’s expansive, enchanting towns and cities, and you’ll often pause to admire the rickety wagons winding their way along sunset-drenched pathways in between clobbering the local hostile wildlife. It’s a sentimental rendition of countryside living, for sure, but no less engaging for it and, for a genre that’s perhaps grown too po-faced in recent years, White Knight Chronicles provides a breath of fresh air.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

Nathan Copeland, a 7-foot African-Irish breakdancer voiced by the bastard child of Liam Neeson and Samuel L. Jackson, slouches heavy on a leather couch. He is framed centre of a widescreen window in an office apartment at the top of a skyscraper in which people who earn more money than you go about earning more money than you. On either arm purrs a lithe, olive-skinned twin. They have matching afros, skimpy swimwear and the sort of high heels that make you proud to be a biped.

The lift doors carrying Travis Touchdown to the unlikely scene tsshck apart, and he steps out, aviator sunglasses masking quick eyes. Nathan Copeland holds the silence for a second before rising to his feet and using the momentum to lift the twins into the air. In a single arcing motion he hurls them at Travis Touchdown, who steadies himself against the incoming fleshy projectiles by placing his weight onto his back foot and firing his beam sword to humming, luminous readiness. Catching the twins mid-trajectory, Travis flurries his weapon back and forth across their twitching bodies, each suspended in midair by anime cliché.

Nathan Copeland leaps in slow motion towards the scuffle, his arms turning into two oversized ghetto-blasters as he does. The scene freeze-frames for a moment and the orchestra ducks sheepishly under the silence. Nathan and Travis catch eyes and the camera drops like a yo-yo to the floor, just in time to catch the coconut donks of two identical lipstick-wearing heads drop torso-less in front of it. Beat.

The world un-pauses and No More Heroes 2’s director Goichi Suda presses the beam sword into your palms. Three minutes later, or however many continues it takes you, Copeland is vanquished. Travis Touchdown has cleared the second boss on the road to revenge and, perhaps more pertinently for his pubescent players, to the knickers of the pretty French girl who’s promised you maybe-sex should you defeat them all.

If Dante’s Inferno sought inspiration in 14th Century Catholic nightmares, then No More Heroes 2 peers into the wet dreams of every 14-year-old boy with a boner and a power fantasy. The result is no less fearful, but, if approached as a celebration of juvenility rather than evidence for its condemnation, far more enjoyable.

It mixes toilet humour with lightsabres, decapitation with banal one-liners, themes of stiff-lipped revenge with themes of pet care, Telecaster riffs with violin soliloquies and John Woo action mechanics with Famicom-aesthetic mini-games. And somehow, in amongst all of the confusion and tension and mess, a videogame of coherent vision and engaging execution emerges.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.

The Westerners saving the Japanese games industry from within.

James Kay decided at a young age to turn his hobby into a vocation and design games instead of merely consuming them. It was a dream he realised quickly, working at a clutch of British developers in the late nineties. But despite succeeding where many others have failed, Kay wasn’t satisfied with his lot. Mario, Sonic and all of the other icons of his childhood were Japanese, their prominence in gaming’s canon matching Japan’s seemingly inextinguishable dominance of the global games industry.

What could be better for Kay than working at a Japanese studio, making the best videogames in the world under the leadership of the medium’s best-known auteurs? In 2001 he emigrated to Tokyo, landing a job at a prestigious Japanese developer, working alongside his idols. Kay had made it big in Japan.

But the reality fell some way short of the dream. As one of only a few foreign game developers in Tokyo, work was lonely. Moreover, he found the salaryman studio culture that demanded employees work long hours into the night wearying and infuriating, perceiving the practice to be merely for show and not endeavor. Partly to vent his frustrations, and partly to expose the grim realities of life at a Japanese games developer, Kay assumed the penname JC Barnett and started blogging his experiences at Japanmanship.

“I hope my writing didn’t come across as disillusioned so much as unapologetic,” he says today. “Too many people were still enamoured by Japanese games and would hear no wrong about the system that produced them. People dreamed of working in Japan without really understanding what that entailed. I hoped that I could offer a realistic view of the situation, and I was always sure to encourage people to make the move, so long as they were fully informed.”

The site fast became the go-to place for young men who, like Kay, dreamed of working abroad on the sort of games that had enriched their childhoods. But the timing of the site’s popularity ensured Japanmanship became far more than just a travel guide-cum-careers advice column. As the industry collapsed around him Kay became a reporter on the frontline, offering a window into a secretive industry in decline. With the keen, raw insight of an insider, Kay offered a glimpse of how and, perhaps more crucially, why the Japanese games industry was coming apart at the seams.

“I do not, as they say, have what it takes [to work at large Japanese games company],” he wrote in December 2008, soon after leaving to set up his own Tokyo-based company, Score Studios. “I blame my low bullshit threshold and my desire to have professional, rational work practices… I still care deeply about my work and the final product, which is why I let things get to me so easily.

“It’s not that I always know best, but I can recognise disaster… Japan has been getting away with too much for too long. Because Japanese games enjoy a certain amount of adoration, people have been too ready to forgive the many little issues that have been growing over the recent generations, and now things have come to a head. With even big-name Japanese products being technical disasters, [we have] to come to terms with the idea that, well, Japan isn’t the Mecca of video games… not any more.”

While the rest of the world watched, Kay’s posts charted the last days of an empire.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here

The pressure to reinvent is the curse of every one-time maverick. Find success in tearing up the rulebook with bold originality and it’s only too easy to merely iterate on that first idea or innovation for the rest of your life. So the idea becomes a series, becomes a franchise, becomes an institution. And the young, brash innovator finds herself head of a new establishment, replacing that which she came to undermine.

So it is with Nippon Ichi, the diminutive Japanese developer who in 2003 reinvented the strategy RPG with Disgaea. The game’s irreverent approach to both narrative and mechanics took apart the genre’s stagnating, Chess-like elements and put them back together as something at once fresh and familiar.

And while Nippon Ichi’s unconventional approach has continued to be expressed in new IP, its flagship Disgaea series has shifted only in subtle ways across its trilogy. Now, as the developer ports each title to handheld formats, it’s that much harder to search out the nonconformist heartbeat that gave life to the first game.

All of which is not to say that a handheld version of this sequel is unwelcome. Few games suit portable play so well as Disgaea, which can be savoured equally in nibbles or gulps of time. And the ability to dip in and out of a particularly tricky stage with a flick of the on/off switch makes the journey through the game immediate and smooth, even it’s a staccato rhythm.

Moreover, Nippon Ichi has lifted a number of the new character classes and systems found in the most recent PlayStation 3 title and reinserted them into this older game, changes that ensue this is undeniably the definitive version of Disgaea 2.

However, it’s hard to shake a sense of re-release ennui. Disgaea games aren’t taken on lightly and, for those who have plunged into the time-sapping depths of three distinct yet similar titles now, no amount of tweak and polish can freshen the formula. This isn’t helped by the fact that Disgaea 2’s story is the weakest of the trilogy, lacking the style and pizzazz of the first game, which remains the series highpoint. In both the first and third games, you play as an anti-hero, a likeable Netherworld dweller whose moral vacuity plays off the traditionally conscientious RPG plotlines to great comedic effect.

In Disgaea 2 you play as Adell, a typically upright Japanese RPG protagonist on a quest, not to save a princess from a castle, but to return her. Her father, the Evil Overlord Zenon, has turned Adell’s town, which forms the hub of the game, into a netherworld and its inhabitants into monsters. Rozalin, the Dark Lord’s daughter, summoned to the village by mistake, agrees to convince her father to reverse his spell, if Adell can return her home safely.

While the premise gently turns convention on its head, in the context of Nippon Ichi’s irreverent world-building playing as a good guy simply isn’t as fun as playing as a hapless demon. Numerous PSP-exclusive cameos from characters from the first game including Etna, Fallen Angle Flonne and, of course, Laharl only reveal how memorable the original cast is by comparison.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

In videogames bigger has always equated better. Marketing men spray ever-greater numbers at us like schoolboys competing to see who can pee furthest up a wall. ‘Wonder at how many colours a MegaDrive can display!’ they say. ‘Marvel at how many minutes of cut-scene you can store on a PlayStation disc!’, ‘Quiver at the number of polygons that now comprise Lara Croft’s cleavage’.

The inference is that quality always stays abreast of ambition; that the bigger, faster and more numerous the virtual things we have to play with, the happier we will be. As a result, it’s numbers that fuel the fires of the console hardware cycles, and it’s numbers that justify gaming’s interminable sequels, explaining in neat accountant’s rows why it is that we need another Gran Turismo, even when in the hands, the difference can be imperceptible.

More recently, however, there’s been a trend away from obsessing with figures. Nintendo’s Wii and Microsoft’s Natal are arguably technological sidesteps, focusing not on multiplying the underlying numbers, but on changing the way we interact with them. And as gaming hardware has begun to languish, so developers have been forced to focus their ambitions elsewhere. Why the shift in focus? It’s financial, for sure. As the boundaries of what’s possible in a videogame have widened, so the costs of meeting this potential has become unaffordable. But also, there’s a realisation that bigger doesn’t always equal better; that, while the promise of battles featuring 256 players make for fantastic headlines and excitable playground whispers, players are nowadays more concerned with quality than bulk. Gamers, perhaps more than anyone, know that size only superficially matters. It’s what you do with it that counts.

It’s a distinction that Zipper Interactive, developer of the world’s largest scale first-person shooter, has clearly kept to the fore of their minds. While most press attention has been on MAG’s unprecedented scope, in play it fast becomes clear that the game’s value is not in merely delivering a giant war-game that maintains a solid 30 frames per second, but in what the developer has done next.

Not that you’ll perceive their cleverness at first, however. As you enter your first 256-player battle, a tiny camouflaged cog in the fearsome machinery of war, there appears to be little rhyme or reason to the battlefield. Bodies scarper over hills, through bushes and in and out of buildings with no apparent tactical cohesion. Dive into the throng and, to begin with, you too will act like a headless chicken, applying your default Modern Warfare lone wolf tactics to the sprawling battlefield, and floundering in a wash of bullets, blood and confusion. Stand atop a hill looking down on the action, and you’ll see little more than a sea of insects in a scramble for territory, one that’s mostly devoid of logic or strategy.

You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here

“Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me.” Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, the Brighton-based developer responsible for Chime, is adamant. “I still want to make something that people think is awesome. The aim wasn’t to make a game as a half-hearted thank you to people for donating money to charity. It was to make a game that’s worth every one of your 400 Microsoft Points, with the added warmhearted glow that comes with gaming philanthropy after purchase. Zoe Mode doesn’t do business with corporations that kill puppies, by the way. I’m not sure if that’s company policy or whether we just haven’t found one yet.”

Chime is what happens when you cross the music of classical composer Philip Glass with the blocks of Tetris, the principles of music sequencers and the philanthropic drive of Bob Geldolf. A music-based puzzle game, it’s the flagship title of OneBigGame, the charity project that has commissioned fifteen developers to each create a game and donate the proceeds to worthy causes. The brainchild of Martin De Ronde, co-founder of Killzone’s Guerilla Games, OneBigGame has secured the involvement of developers as diverse as PaRappa the Rapper creator Masaya Matsuura, Broken Sword creator Charles Cecil and Earthworm Jim’s Dave Perry. But it’s fallen to Curran, best known for his role as co-host of Resonance FM’s award-winning videogame radio show, One Life Left, and his team to launch the first game in the project – five years after its inception.

“The idea for Chime predates One Big Game – but when the opportunity to build something for OBG came around it felt like a perfect fit,” Curran tells me. “Because, if nothing else, it gave us some hard deadlines. And yeah, doing things for charity is good. Obviously. But it hasn’t changed the way the game has been handled at all. It’s a full-time project like all the others in the studio, with a team and goals and all the joy / frustration / fast food that comes with that.”

There has to be something in it for Zoe Mode though. Is Chime really a purely philanthropic project for the company? “Zoe’s a business and businesses always need some kind of logical motivation,” Curran explains. “But you can find lots of those that don’t clash with charitable concern. And we’ve donated all of the revenue we’d get from the sales of Chime – we’re not covering our costs here. In terms of personal motivation, and I do not have an ounce of compassion in my cold robot heart so this is simpler: I like the game, I want to see other people play it, and I want to build on it.”

Curran’s playing down of the charitable aspect to Chime could be interpreted as dismissive, but it reflects the wider concern of the OneBigGame project: to base success on the merit of the games released, not on the worthiness of the concept. Contrary to what one might have expected, the clutch of developers involved want to release the very best games they can, as a matter of pride – not to merely create a giveaway experience to thank donors for their 400 MSP. In the case of Chime, the length of the game’s gestation is testament to the ambition.

You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here

H. G. Wells reviews Metropolis. I’d describe his general tone as ‘pissy’

Professor Layton no doubt relieved to have ‘only’ been accused of giving children rickets in the papers this week.

David Simon interviewed on the Journal. Well worth the time.

If I ever have to own a gun, I’m going to get me one that fires owls like this one.

The World’s Most Important 6 Second Drum Beat:

“If I’m lucky…Mr. Talent…will rub his…tentacles on my art.” Cartoons are funny!

Main quest or mini-game. The eternal dilemma…

If you were in any doubt about Unity being the most exciting middleware tool in gaming right now, read this.

Wutang vs. The Beatles. Properly amazing. (Very subtle use of the latter, in case they annoy you.)

It was Martin Luther King day last week. Here’s a cute, poignant story about why that matters.

The first level proper in MW2 and parts of Episode 2 of Generation Kill are frame for frame identical. Someone should do a side by side comparison! Exhibit A.

Candyman: the David Klein Story. “Spilling the beans”. A good day in the office for whoever came up with that tagline:

First Person Tetris. Will make you sick in 20 seconds max.

1983 comic themed around computer games. This is genuine treasure. Go look.

Suki’s pretty upset with game journalists this week. If you wrote a dumb/ over-reaching review of Bayonetta, ready up.

“Self-potato?” Amazing incorrect answer on Wheel of Fortune.

Wooden recreations of extinct animals. I had a panda toy when I was a kid. They said it’d soon be extinct so I’d sniff it so I’d always remember the scent when they were gone. *ahem*

12,000 years of population growth in a single graph.There’s no room at the inn.

Link of the Week

The Eurogamer 2009 Score Analysis. Like games? Like statistics? You’ll like this! Turns out I am soft on games; soft on the causes of games.

Is it possible to exhaust a genre’s potential? There may be only seven stories to be told in the world, but in the multitudinous hues of character and scenario it’s possible to dress them in infinite ways – and so keep our bookstores stocked with novelty.

Not so game systems, which in their stark mathematical and tactile nature are near impossible to disguise. Tetris is Tetris, no matter what colour the blocks or which imagery is used for the background. And so it seems feasible that some genres can be exhausted, mined of potential permutations to the extent that there are simply no truly new games to be made in that particular form.

It’s an argument given credibility by the story of the strategy RPG, that Japanese sub-genre that marries chess with Tolkien and anime eyes. From its origins in the Shining Force series through Yasumi Matsuno’s Ogre Battle games up to his masterpiece, Final Fantasy Tactics, the genre quickly pressed up against its self-imposed boundaries, leaving precious little room for any newcomer to manoeuvre.

More recently Nippon Ichi smashed through these constraints with its dazzling Disgaea series, opening up dizzying potential for customisation and pushing the conservative framework in new and interesting directions. But as a result the strategy RPG arguably became something else. Even if it was evolution rather than revolution, a great many players were left disorientated and disenfranchised by the complexities it introduced.

In the face of Nippon Ichi’s bold innovation most Japanese developers walked away from the genre, and those who didn’t consigned their creations to orthodoxy and handheld formats. The genre, it seemed, had been exhausted.

It’s into this landscape that Konami steps – resurrecting its SRPG property from the genre’s PlayStation heyday, handing development over to a Western studio and choosing to publish to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, where Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment joins Band of Bugs as just the second grid-based tactics game on the service. And while there’s a lot of expectation on the game’s shoulders, both for fans of the original duo of Vandal Hearts titles (to which this is a narrative prequel) and for fans of the genre, poorly-served for so long, this is a game that does little to refute the argument.

You can read the rest over at Eurogamer here.