At 6am on 7th May 2004, Axel Gembe awoke in the small German town of Schönau im Schwarzwald to find his bed surrounded by police officers. Automatic weapons were pointing at his head and the words “Get out of bed. Do not touch the keyboard” were ringing in his ears.

Gembe knew why they were there. But, bleary-eyed, he asked anyway.

“You are being charged with hacking into Valve Corporation’s network, stealing the videogame Half-Life 2, leaking it onto the internet and causing damages in excess of $250 million,” came the reply. “Get dressed.”

Seven months earlier, on 2nd October 2003, Valve Corporation director Gabe Newell awoke in the large American city of Seattle to find the source code for the game his company had been working on for almost five years had leaked onto the internet.

The game had been due for release a couple of weeks earlier but the development team was behind. 12 months behind. Half-Life 2 was going to be late, and Newell had yet to admit how late. Such a leak was not only financially threatening but deeply embarrassing.

After a few moments pondering these immediate concerns, an avalanche of questions tumbled through Newell’s mind. How had this happened? Had the leak come from within Valve? Which member of his team, having given years of their life to building the game, would jeopardise the project in the final hour?

If it wasn’t an inside job, how the hell did it happen? Did someone have access to Valve’s internal server?

But the question which rang out loudest of all was the one anyone who has ever had something stolen from them cannot push from their mind: who did this?

You can read the rest of the story over at Eurogamer here

It started with Defender. Eugene Jarvis’ dastardly shoot-’em-up was the first videogame to wear its difficulty on its sleeve, just as players would wear its mastery as a badge of honour following its October 1980 release. Defender divided gamers into two camps: those who played games for pleasure and those who played games for prestige. Soon after its release, it was taking 150 million quarters a week across the US from those hoping to bask in cathode ray kudos.

It’s a tradition that Cave, Shinjuku’s premier boutique shoot-’em-up developer, picked up 15 years later. The company’s work with the Donpachi series established its own devilish sub-genre, ‘bullet hell’. For years, Cave’s precise, inimitable games have challenged the best arcade players to pick their way through squalls of pixel chaos. Those who manage to do so in a single credit are gods among men; their high scores are numerical read-outs of prescient hand-eye co-ordination and the ability to plot a route to victory through a curtain of pandemonium.

More recently, with the decline of the arcade, Cave has been attempting to find ways to serve a less twitch-proficient audience, both by way of its iPhone ports and this, the first of the company’s arcade titles to be released in Europe in a box. Deathsmiles, which debuted in arcades in 2007, is a horizontal shoot ‘em up that manages to serve both types of player that Defender split apart: those who play the game for pleasure and those who play it for prestige.

Its solution is simple. Each of the game’s eight stages can be completed at one of three ‘ranks’, difficulty levels that can be adjusted on the fly as you move between levels. For those who want to play simply to make it to the credits in one piece, the challenge can be reduced to make the game suitably accommodating. But lowering the difficulty level of a stage also reduces the amount of points on offer, ensuring that those players who want to play for the awe and respect of their peers are provided with a suitable challenge.

You can read the rest of this article on Eurogamer here.

Street Fighter IV is the Beethoven’s Fifth of fighting games. All weighty drama, considered changes and measured movements, it’s an experience that heaves and builds to a studied climax. There are fireworks and flames, sure, but they are yoked to tradition, and for all the screen-filling Ultra finishes the game maintains a Ryu-like distinguished grace.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3, by contrast, is the Flight of the Bumblebee. Fast-moving and skittish, it creates its drama by bamboozling the mind with blink-and-you’ll-miss-it florid action. The tradition here belongs to comic books, not martial arts, and Capcom’s artists have been egged on to create ever more outlandish, screen-filling, Wolverine *KAPOW*.

Historically, the Marvel vs. Capcom series has been viewed as a light-hearted enterprise, an upbeat crossover to entertain the Westerners. Certainly this was true of the first arcade release, a game intended to introduce Capcom’s poster boys and girls to comic book fans, and not much else.

But with the second game, thanks to the original title’s popularity in the States, Capcom increased the complexity to turn a throwaway fighter into something worthy of tournament play. The shift was best exemplified by Magneto, by far the most technical character in the game, around whom high level play began to revolve.

Fast forward to 2006, and Yoshinori Ono convinces Capcom’s top brass to let him start work on a new Street Fighter. Ono is paired with Ryota Niitsuma, and the two work together on creating the fighting game that will go on to spark a revival in the genre.

But, according to Capcom insiders, at some point, the two fall out. Niitsuma leaves the Street Fighter team to begin work on Tatsunoku vs. Capcom, while Ono starts work on Super Street Fighter IV. Following the success of his Wii project, Niitsuma is offered the chance to do to the Marvel vs. Capcom series what Ono was allowed to do to Street Fighter: update it for a contemporary audience.

Why is this petty company rivalry relevant? Because it goes some way to explaining why Marvel vs. Capcom 3, far from being a throwaway distraction, has been turned into a deep and complex fighter. Sure, there is an immediacy to it, an emphasis on simple-to-execute special moves that can give the impression of shallowness. But underneath the hood this is a complex beast, intended by its creator to stand toe-to-toe with Capcom’s other great fighter in the ring.

That said, the two are very different. While Marvel vs. Capcom 3′s vocabulary consists of Hadouken quarter circles and Shoryuken zigzags, the grammar and phrasing is completely new. Players hoping their Street Fighter IV game will be transferable will leave disappointed. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 requires you to go back to basics and – if you want to do anything more than splash around in the shallow end – re-build your game from the ground up.

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

Jade, plucky photojournalist and guardian to a lighthouse full of orphans, was never a typical pin-up heroine. With a shock of short black hair, loose trousers, furrowed brow and smear of green lipstick across each lip she always exuded a tomboyish quality at odds with gaming’s never-out-of-fashion big-titted, sassy female protagonists. As individual and characterful as the early years Lara, Beyond Good and Evil’s heroine nevertheless has a Parisian sort of appeal, her sexiness derived from a depth of character, inner strength and air of continental detachment, and not her voulez-vous-coucher-avec-moi eye shadow. With that in mind, is it wrong to be excited by the prospect of spending time with her in high definition?

Because Jade, much like the game she fronts, has always inspired infatuation. Partly it’s a sense of pride in her achievements. Here is a woman who, from Beyond Good and Evil’s opening moments, shows a selflessness and generosity in caring for those weaker than herself that is rare in video games. The very first act in the game is one of protecting the weak, albeit expressed in the down-to-earth-challenge of topping up an electricity meter that’s run out of credit in order to fire the shields that protect her and her orphans’ home from invasion.

Then, over the long haul of the game, the narrative curtain draws back to reveal a woman who grafts at her profession and, through the trafficking atrocities she photographs, inspires a planet to rise up against its invading captors. She can fight too, of course, but gaming’s default language of violence is muted in her in favour of other, more cerebral tools in her arsenal. That’s the sort of theme to fire an inspirational Hollywood blockbuster, not a video game: a protagonist who saves the day through steely determination, not steely weapons, and since the game’s launch, those who spent time in her presence have long clamored for her return.

So is it wrong to be excited by the prospect of spending time with Jade in high definition? Not at all. Because the only definition that ever really mattered in Beyond Good and Evil was that found beneath the skin, and that’s as sharp today as it ever was.

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

Few video games have drawn upon 14th Century Catholic poetry for inspiration, and yet this unorthodox starting point did little to distinguish Visceral Games’ take on Dante Alighieri’s poem Dante’s Inferno — released for consoles in February 2010 — from the pack.

The scenes featured in Renaissance Catholic nightmares, it turns out, share much in common with the stock environments of contemporary video games.

The bloodied walls, Hellish monsters and unending screams are as much a canonical part of gaming’s landscapes as the pea-green hills of Mario’s Mushroom Kingdom. The tone and imagery of the poem is already embedded into the medium, from id Software’s Doom all the way through to Brutal Legend.

As such, EA’s eagerness to generate a storm of controversy ahead of the game’s release – even going to far as to hire actors to pretend to be Christian protesters at E3 in 2009 – seemed wholly misguided.

For one, the original’s author would no doubt be thrilled at the prospect of his poem being turned into a hack-and-slash video game, rendered in all its gory detail, in the hope of shocking a new godless generation into repentance. But more than that, Dante’s Inferno is a work that visualizes the horrors of hell, a rich pool of inspiration perfect for a video game artist to plunder, albeit perhaps without the subtext of hope for the player’s salvation.

Indeed, the only classic in danger of desecration at Visceral’s hands was God of War. It was from David Jaffe’s game from which the developer borrowed not only a slew of interactive vocabulary – from the button-mash weak and strong attacks to the Quick Time Event interludes – but also a general approach in turning ancient myth to modern game.

Squint and Dante himself even looks like Kratos, the bare, ripped torso distinguishable only by way of the crusader’s cross stitched into the flesh. Meanwhile, in the hands, the two characters are almost interchangeable, Dante’s scythe offering melee and ranged attacks with which to combo together kills, while his double jump and wall-scaling abilities facilitate rudimentary platform puzzles.

Arguably, however, the sequential circles of hell, each themed to one of the deadly sins offer a more robust framework for the game to fit within than the scattershot myths of Sony’s work. The sin in question themes the enemy design, while the notable villains from history that Dante encounters slot within each environment according to the wrongdoing from which they found their fame.

So a 50-foot topless Cleopatra from whose pert breasts knife-wielding infants leap represents the darker side of lust. There is no subtlety or nuance here, but then, Alighieri’s imagery left little to the imagination and even less to question.

Less successful than the game’s bold recreation of the poem’s monsters, however, was its ability to communicate the wider message of the original work. Impale an enemy on the tip of your scythe and you are given the option to either punish or absolve them via a gruesome finishing move.

Punishment earns you Unholy points, opening up offensive moves for purchase on Dante’s ability tree, while absolution earns Holy points that unlock new defensive and ranged attacks. While one might expect development towards ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to be mutually exclusive, morality choices within Dante’s Inferno have no meaningful outcome over the long term, instead merely dictating which areas in which the hero excels in the short term.

Even more interesting has been the commentary on the game from the academic community following its release, the game attracting criticism for its twisting of the relationship between Dante and his lover Beatrice Portinari. In the poem, Beatrice’s role is to lead Dante towards salvation, a theme that is inverted in the game to the more orthodox video game premise in which the hero is on a journey to save the girl.

Columbia University Professor Teodolinda Barolini, a former president of the Dante Society of America, said of the narrative twist: “Of all the things that are troubling, the sexualization and infantilization of Beatrice are the worst. Beatrice is the human girl who is dead and is now an agent of the divine. She is not to be saved by him, she is saving him. That’s the whole point. Here, she has become the prototypical damsel in distress. She’s this kind of bizarrely corrupted Barbie doll.”

That the game should appropriate (and exaggerate) the imagery of Alighieri’s poem but discard the meaning may be troubling to Ivy League professors, but in a sense, the editorial lobotomy reflects the intent of its creators. Alighieri’s desire was to challenge readers’ beliefs. By contrast, Visceral Games’ intent was merely to entertain, not to evangelize. Far easier to do that by having players rescue a damsel in distress than encounter a ghost who leads the way to a spiritual epiphany.

In a Western culture that has largely turned its back on notions of guilt and afterlife punishment, the Hellish visions in the game instead assume a kind of pornographic quality: they exist to delight through their riotous perversion, not to offer a sort of spiritual disincentive.

But even judged purely on that quality, the game falls short of its potential, the stand-out boss battles failing to elevate what is a woolly, imprecise God of War cover version. So while Dante’s Inferno the video game may rank higher than Dante’s Inferno the poem in a Google search today, it’s unlikely to be nearly so enduring as its inspiration.

This column first appeared at Gamasutra here