“Indie developer NinjaBee has built up a major catalog of XBLA titles – from Cloning Clyde and Band of Bugs through the upcoming A Kingdom Of Keflings, and president Steve Taylor takes Gamasutra through the XBLA development process – from certification to user-generated content restraints – in this in-depth interview.”

Forgot to link this because it happened smack-bang in the middle of my time in LA covering E3. It’s a good interview, though.

“In ForumWarz, players choose one of three classes and begin a largely single player adventure to gain levels, earn Flezz (the world’s currency) and “pwn forums”. Each player is allowed a limited number of forum visits per day. Players who choose to can take part in multiplayer aspects, including clans, “Forumwarz Domination” (a player vs. player challenge), building new forums or Incit, a mini game about creating amusing text to accompany images.”

ForumWarz is absolutely great – and produced in Toronto, too, apparently, though I’ve never met the fine folks at Crotch Zombie Productions personally. It’s one of the few browser-based RPGs that I enjoyed almost unreservedly, and I await the second episode with more anticipation than I’ve ever had for any other kind of episodic content (including the Half Life 2 episodes.)

Also! Some interviews I did for Worlds In Motion that I have forgotten to link:

Q&A: Eric Hayashi And Steve Hoffman Talk Rocketon
Q&A: Vivaty’s McCurdy On Being More Social Than Social Networks

“Well now. The original Arkanoid was (and far more blatantly than Space Invaders) inspired by the original Breakout, only in this case the difference was – to put it charitably – “subtle”. That’s not to say that the things that Arkanoid added aren’t appreciable – moving enemies, power-ups and even bosses were all added to the original design to spice up what was otherwise a clone – but the series hasn’t stuck in our minds the way Space Invaders has.”

The second part of my diptych of reviews of Tatio’s franchise re-inventions. Arkanoid DS is so poor that when I first played it I was nearly physically sick. I’m not even joking! I think it was the realisation that I was painfully bored and was forcing myself to be so by continuing to play the game – and my body just revolted against whatever small part of my brain kept me playing.

Thankfully, I need never play it again.

“Hey! Did you know that Space Invaders was originally inspired by Breakout? I didn’t – until I looked at Space Invader’s Wikipedia page in a desperate attempt to come up with an interesting fact to begin this review.

As it turns out, it’s not only a suitable theme for this intro, but I can use it to link to the Arkanoid DS review too. Thanks Wikipedia!”

I’m pretty sure that all journalists, not just the lazy ones, use Wikipedia the minute they want to find anything out. If you’re a good journalist, you’ll bother to find a second source for whatever you find out, so I really think there’s no shame in it.

In other news, Space Invaders Extreme is very good indeed.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – Capcom, Warner – More chat about Street Fighter IV, because it’s coming out for PC, and I really liked it a lot. Also a little about Lego Batman: The Videogame and Project Origin.

RPSish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – EA – a lot of writing about EA’s upcoming stuff. I’m especially impressed by Dead Space – it’s very atmospheric and very fun – but also quite fancy Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Mostly because of my previously mentioned like for Games Workshop properties, but also because it doesn’t look like an annoying, grind-heavy MMORPG. But we’ll see.

Interview: GSC on STALKER: Clear Sky – My final bit of E3 coverage for RPS, even though it hasn’t been titled as such. There are some more of my final thoughts on E3 in this article too, if you read it all the way to the bottom.

Konami can’t keep time in the music game wars – Here’s an interesting fact about Konami’s Rock Revolution that I didn’t realise until after I played it – it’s being developed by Zoë Mode (who are based in Brighton). I initially assumed it was just a version of Guitar Freaks/Drum Mania being slapped together by a bored team of Japanese game development ninjas, but no – it’s actually being developed by a real developer and everything (they did Crush! they’re doing You’re In The Movies!) and yet it’s quite possibly the worst rhythm game I’ve ever played. It’s not the worst Konami game I’ve played recently, though. That (dis)honour goes to Castlevania: Judgement, which manages to be what people who hate the Wii think Wii games are – a game where all you do is wave your arms in the air while hoping something fun happens.

Sega’s Japanese developers see a Mad World – This one is a bit “out there” for a CBC audience, but I wanted to make the point that Japanese game developers are bolder about making tongue-in-cheek games about violence. Heck, Mad World even has John DiMaggio (Bender from Futurama) as one of the announcers – or at least, that’s who it sounds like.

It’s a shame that Sega didn’t allow any hands-on time, and even more of a shame designer Atsushi Inaba was on hand to demo the game but wasn’t available for interview (except to some outlets, I guess, though I don’t know who). Inaba looked incredibly bored playing his own game over and over again, the poor guy.

Capcom Looks To The Past – Street Fighter IV is excellent, Mega Man 9 not so much.

Final thoughts – Very much what it says it is – my final thoughts on E3. I talk a little about how the whole event is doing (not very well) and some of the themes of the show, but what I think is the most important I feel I should reiterate here. E3 should have a real press accreditation system. They should hire staff that know the games industry, know who the writers are and who the fanboy bloggers are, and work with the writers to make sure the coverage is as good as possible, and then trust that they’ll do a good job.

Right now the whole of E3 seems to be built around keeping the journalists at a distance – just close enough so the fanboys think they’re getting coverage, but not close enough that the journalists actually write anything meaningful. With fewer, higher quality press, E3 would be easier to manage and coverage would be higher quality.

Or at least, I think so, anyway. I really don’t think it’ll happen. Instead, the show is going to ramp back up to its old size – if not next year, at some point in future. Because it’s what people really want. Spectacle, not meaning.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 3 – Sega – Now anyone who knows me that I spend quite a lot of time railing against how much the larger blogs, specifically Kotaku, suck. I spent a lot of time doing this – usually moaning about their ridiculous post titles, their lack of fact checking, etc.

So it was incredibly disappointing to learn that the minute I was under time pressure I did the exact same thing when it came to fact checking – I didn’t bother. In fact, it’s rather amusing that the Kotaku poster who covered Alpha Protocol wrote mostly the same thing as me (that it looks exactly the same as Mass Effect) but bothered to check his facts.

Boy, is my face red. Still, I have to say – I will never commit the crime of assumption again. Never.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Day 4 – Bethesda Softworks – Oh well, at least this post got a good response from the RPS readers. I do wish I’d been able to talk more about the questing/NPC interaction, but I was generally warned against it and frankly, half an hour wasn’t enough to learn more than “it’s really quite a lot like Oblivion” so I didn’t go too deeply into it.

RPS-ish At-Ish E3: Housecleaning – SOE – My first post on RPS post-E3, as I saw a lot of stuff I just couldn’t get written up in time (and my Sega post reminded me not to rush out a post just to get something up, as you’re more likely to get something wrong/overlook something). SOE’s showing was rather weak – very little in the way of content, and most shown using video – so it surprises me I wrote as much about it as I did.

I guess I just thought it was all kind of interesting.

Nintendo is smug – but with good reason – So here’s the deal with Nintendo’s press conference. This is some analysis I didn’t put into this article, mostly because I had to chew over my thoughts on it for a few days (and have a huge argument with Chris Remo about it), but I don’t think it was that bad. On the basis of a very specific hypothesis, though. My idea is that Nintendo intended audience within the Kodak theatre was not the “specialist press” or even the mainstream press that are already au fait with video games (like the New York Times, etc.) but specially invited writers from women’s weeklies, and female newspaper columnists.

That’s pure speculation, of course, but why else would they allow Cammie Dunaway to walk out and spout this toe-curling script about being the world’s best mom? This is a woman who has worked in PR and marketing for a long time – and that includes working with Pepsi on kids and teens marketing – so I’m pretty sure she knows how to play the game (and that’s the marketing game, not Shaun White Snowboarding, which she’s horrible at.)

The overwhelming message of this approach was that Nintendo simply could not care less about the “core gamers” market, and are throwing their lot whole-heartedly to new “mom” market. As in, they sat down in a meeting, you know, Reggie, Iwata, etc. and said “let’s get moms interested in the Wii. Let’s do a press conference at E3 for the moms.”

And then that’s what they did.

The interesting thing is that my hypothesis only makes sense if Nintendo literally care so little about the “core gamers” market that they don’t care about the backlash at all – as they would have to have foreseen it. And to be honest, why would they? They’re making money hand over fist, and there is still a huge untapped audience of people who don’t play games out there. They’re advertising to moms at E3 because their demographics tell them that’s who they should aim for next, not because they’ve all gone insane and forgotten who their “real fans” are. They couldn’t give a damn about their “real fans.” And from a business standpoint (if not a “moral” one) that’s completely acceptable.

What I didn’t find acceptable though was the MotionPlus accessory. Why? Well because it proves I was right all along about the Wii Remote not sensing exactly where it is in 3D space. I said that in my Wario Ware: Smooth Moves preview from E3 2006 and was so disagreed with by “the internet” that the article was edited to make little to no sense (and remains that way even now.) Yes, I am still bitter about it. But by god I can’t help but almost forgive Nintendo for it when I tried out the MotionPlus. It’s absolutely superb – it does everything they said the Wii Remote was going to do, and feels amazing. It really is like waving a sword in Wii Sports: Resort’s sword fighting game; it really is like throwing a frisbee in the disc dog game.

It’s tremendously exciting, even if it is yet another add-on to the Wii.

Nintendo plays a different tune with Wii Music – I wouldn’t say I found Wii Music exciting though. I thought it fit in very well with their current strategy, looked cute and fun and everything, but it wasn’t exciting, no. It won’t be displacing Guitar Hero or Rock Band any time soon, but as I say in the article, Nintendo obviously have no interest in competing with them.

Or, when it gets down to it, with anyone at all.

Sony fails to inspire, but why? – Unlike Sony, of course, who need to get to competing fast – real fast. This was almost certainly my most divisive article for CBC – at least one commenter would like to pain me as a Microsoft “fanboy” disappointingly – but I think it’s perfectly fair. I’m very excited for Flower and Valkyria Chronicles, but they’re otherwise utterly floundering.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 2, Part 1 – Valve – In restrospect, this article makes me cringe a little. Left 4 Dead was great fun to play, but I do myself no favours by fawning over Chet Faliszek (from Old Man Murray/Portal of Evil) because in person he was so nice (and ordinary) and online he’s rip me apart for it (isn’t it interesting how people’s on and offline personalities differ so?)

Anyway, people still don’t like the character redesigns, even though they’re so obviously influenced by Team Fortress 2′s “silhouette” philosophy (Gabe Newell even said this.) Can’t please everyone, I guess.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 2, Part 2 – Atari – Some coverage of the new version of The Witcher and the latest Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion. Doesn’t sound that exciting, but it was. Well, at the time, anyway.

So as you can see there’s a reason E3 was a bit of a blur – I decided to blog about it for two different outlets. To be honest, I probably shouldn’t have, but before heading out I thought it was going to be totally easy to write multiple blog posts a day while also spending a full day in meetings to give me the material for said blog posts.

It wasn’t! But still, it was absolutely my pleasure to write some coverage for PC gaming blog Rock Paper Shotgun, not least because it’s run by several gentlemen I respect very much indeed. The posts are less analysis heavy than my coverage for CBC, instead interviews, hands-on impressions and so on written with a sense of humour about it, but I thought the different style would suit RPS better.

RPS-ish at-ish E3: Day 1, Part 1 – MS – This first post has a “letter” feel because I initially wasn’t given my own posting title. But they retroactively changed that so it seems a little silly. As I said, this is broader and more light-hearted coverage than what I wrote for CBC – including reference to “speed dobbers” and cute sparrows.

RPS-ish At-ish E3: Day 1, Part 2 – EA – I witter on about film in this one at the beginning, but do redeem it by talking about games for the rest of it. Well, apart from the bit where I express my surprise that David Lynch has created a monster in Spore – something I still find surprising. What on earth would he make of the iPhone version, eh?