Have you ever really felt bad about the way you feel after playing a game you were looking forward to?

Of course you have, I think it might be one of the few constants of the gamer experience – disappointment when a game fails to live up to its potential and promise. Well, Prototype is one of those experiences for me.

It has all the ingredients of a smashing good time – a super powered hero, a sandbox city, even a conspiracy relating to the military industrial complex manipulating people for their own nefarious ends only to have it go wrong somehow.

Well, despite the mix of interesting pieces, the sum of Prototype just ends up coming out as a fairly bland experience. Maybe my expectation was improperly set by the history of the developer. These same talented folks turned out one of the best super hero games ever developed – Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction. That title featured a super powered hero running around in a sandbox New York city setting solving missions and running side missions just like Prototype but somehow the fun factor seemed to be higher in that title.

Read the full article

The Beatles: Rock Band debuted at E3 with a star studded lineup. Surviving band members Sir Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr were joined by Yoko Ono Lennon and Olivia Harrison for the premier. Here’s a look at the E3 2009 The Beatles Rock Band trailer.

EA also revealed a The Beatles: Rock Band Xbox 360 exclusive track, “All You Need is Love”. Proceeds from the DLC go to the Doctors Without Borders charity. “All You Need is Love” will be ready for download on Xbox Live June 9th.

For more details on The Beatles: Rock Band career mode and the new peripheral set styled after the instruments used by the band, see the press release excerpts after the jump. You can also watch the video of the E3 The Beatles: Rock Band Demo and see the new peripherals in action in case you missed the live streaming video coverage of E3 earlier today.
Read the full article

Tom Ohle, long time wordsmith and all around great guy, takes some time on his new public relations blog to talk about how PR nightmares’ evolve and how crisis communication disrupts public relations.

Tom takes time to discuss the process of crisis communication in the PR industry using the example of last weeks rumors of The Witcher related game cancellations and major changes at CD Projekt Red.

One of the best examples from his after-action illustrating the interesting role that good PR reps at game companies play:

This is one of the greatest dilemmas in a PR rep’s day — you have journalists, many of whom are friends, asking you to respond to rather unsavory accusations, and you can’t give them a straight answer. Then the stories — rightfully so — turn to “Company will not deny the rumors, leading us to believe they’re true.” And now, as a PR rep, you’re in a position you don’t want to be in: other people are controlling your messaging for you. It sucks to watch people drag your name through the mud… even consumers who see only one side of the story start to change their opinions of your company. And even if you have a chance to eventually address the rumors formally, a number of those consumers are bound to miss the news update, and their opinion of your organization may have been negatively affected forever.

Tom worked on a lot of big titles for some companies some of you may have heard of, but I first met him when he was representing Bioware and later at E3 2006 when his small PR company – Evolve PR – picked up a little known( in the US anyway) Polish game company called CD Projekt Red and their new as yet unsigned game – The Witcher – based on some obscure but supposedly famous Polish Author’s fantasy novels.

Sometimes its hard to deal with people on a regular basis while covering this industry and not remember that they are often in difficult situations. We work hard to cover the news and give a voracious reading audience information about their and our personal favorite games but we seldom stop to think about the impact we have on companies we report on or developers that are effected by these negative reports. While the role of a “journalist” is to report facts, this isn’t an industry that will bring about world peace or the fall of nations and it makes me wonder if sometimes our reports don’t do more harm than good in pursuit of readers, ads and a click-through.

Video games are full of colorful characters from speedy blue hedgehogs to scientists who know their way around a rocket launcher. That doesn’t mean games are without their stereotypes though, and I’m not talking about the fact that every gritty shooter needs at least one black soldier ready to blast some hip-hop music at any given opportunity. No, I’m talking about the overweight individuals who packed on a few pounds and then decided that was reason enough to get in everyone’s way somehow. When it comes to those portly video game characters that aren’t plumbers sporting red overalls, most of them just tend to be plain old bastards. Here are six of the biggest fat bastards in gaming that I could think of.

Read the full article

Sadly today’s news seems to reflect a trend in the games industry of developers in crisis. The latest victim of the economic down swing is Cheyenne Mountain, developer of the Stargate Worlds MMO. Apparently the payroll is dry and it’s now been 26 days since its employees have been paid.

A Cheyenne Mountain representative spoke with GameSpot about the crisis to reassure the Stargate Worlds community that things aren’t as grave as they seem. The developer is seeking additional investors and plans to go forward with a new phase of beta testing in January.

It would be a shame to see three years of work go down the tubes this late in the development process. Unfortunately it wouldn’t be the first time a start-up developer has gone under in the eleventh hour. For further details check out the Cheyenne Mountain comments from Gamespot’s Stargate MMOG developer can’t make payroll? article.

It’s one thing for a company to announce they’re laying off a bunch of employees; it’s quite another to have an employee reveal financial issues that everyone in the company has noticed. Factor 5 artist, Sam Baker, has apparently noted the developer’s economic problems in a blog post — that has since been removed — citing the loss of some benefits, the cancellation of projects, and the fact that no one has been paid in awhile:

“I find out no one at Factor 5 had been paid in a month…. and we weren’t going to any time soon…If we left, there would have been no hope in F5 staying afloat. We had faith in the projects and the company, so there was no reason to bail just yet…

“Then we lost health care. Ok, who needs it? If we’re going to eventually be paid, some sacrifices would be worth it. I had my own on the side, so I wasn’t sweating it. Then things turned bad…

“Without proper funding on the project I was working on, the company was forced to stop production…The president of the company basically told us that if we didn’t receive funding in 1 week, all of us should move on and look elsewhere for another job. I had no idea how bad this economy was getting until something like this affected me personally, and yea, it sucks. I have 1 more week left at Factor 5.”

Baker has since deleted the blog post in question, but it can still be found cached here. He also replaced it with a note saying that certain projects at the company are still doing well and that some of the financial problems were related to the demise of Brash Entertainment, one of their partners. Still, it’s looking like the Factor 5 house isn’t too stable at the moment, and with other developers dropping left and right due to the economy, I wouldn’t get too attached to them.

Most people were gunning for a video game console on Black Friday, and it looks like a large chunk of them were specifically going for a Wii. Nintendo prez, Satoru Iwata, has stated that his company sold 800,000 Wiis over the Thanksgiving weekend. That’s more than double the 350,000 that they sold during the same time frame last year. So what does Iwata attribute this growth to? Why, the economic crisis of course:

“When the economy is strong, people tend to buy three things from the top of their wish list,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “But when things are bad, people often buy only the first thing on their list – Fortunately for us a lot of shoppers put our products at the top of their list.”

He also reported that the DS sold about 20% better than last year too. Now I’m just waiting for Microsoft and Sony to fire back with their Thanksgiving sales figures.

Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Monolith have released the first in a series of Behind the Scenes videos for their upcoming first-person/action title F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin. In today’s video, Primary Game Designer Craig Hubbard, takes some time to talk about the story in the game.

The sequel to F.E.A.R. will continue the original game’s spine-tingling supernatural suspense story of an escalating paranormal crisis that threatens to destroy a major American city. At the center of the calamity is the mysterious Alma, whose rage against those who wronged her triggered a chain of events that have spiraled completely out of control. Now that she has free reign, the consequences will be unimaginable.

F.E.A.R. 2 is expected to be released for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 on February 10, 2009.

Craig Morrison, game director for Funcom’s Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, has confirmed via the MMO’s forums that the company is currently at work on merging the North American and European servers.

Morrison issued a two-part statement yesterday regarding some of the upcoming gameplay changes that will be occurring over the next few weeks, which mostly entail added content and an enhanced PvP consequence system which can result in a player no longer being welcome in certain parts of the game should they choose to gank another player. These changes have been expected for quite some time now, but the most interesting thing Morrison decided to address was the possibility of a server merge which had been discussed by gamers on the forums.

According to Morrison:

“I can today confirm that we are actively working on an approach to merge servers, both in Europe and North America. It’s important for us to ensure the best gameplay experience for you all, and more healthy populations on each and every server will make sure we maintain healthy communities for the game in the future.

That work has now started, and we are naturally making sure that guilds and players can get to new servers in the best possible way. We will come back with more info on this, but I hope that this will serve as a positive injection to the social scene in the game.”

This could mean one of two things. First, an easier way to manage the servers from an IT standpoint, or secondly, Funcom is loosing money on Age of Conan and it is more cost effective to combine the servers into one locale. I would almost assume the latter is the case because according to some research by Joystiq, stock in the company has fallen to $5 per share, which is down $20 since July and down $50 from Age of Conan’s pre-launch. Stock in Funcom was already headed downward before the current economic crisis.

Also mentioned by Morrison in the forum post was that the long-awaited DirectX 10 version of the game was almost ready for launch. This version has been kept on an internal test-server for quite some time now, but when the next update is made players can expect to see some DX10 functionality in the test environment.

“How long it will take to transition to live will depend on the testing of course,” stated Morrision, “But it’s starting to shape up nicely. Having done some reviews of it internally over the last few weeks I can admit that a few of the features really do give some added visual punch.”

Hopefully, both the merging of the servers and the launch of the DirectX 10 version will give Funcom the much needed boost it needs to keep Age of Conan going and draw newcomers to the fold, despite the plummeting stocks. I know a lot of gamers out there who actually enjoy the game, and I would hate to see an MMO with so much potential go by the waste side so soon after a promising launch.

The Entertainment Software Association proudly announced winning a $282,794 check from California. The money partially covers legal fees spent over a 2005 Videogame Law that was declared unconstitutional by Judge Ronald Whyte in August 2007. The ESA had originally requested a $324,840reimbursement for legal fees last September.

Undaunted by this set back, not only is California’s Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appealing the injunction he intends for the ESA to pay back the check if the state prevails in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court appeal.

According to GamePolitics, the arrangement between the ESA and the state of CA was reached in November 2007. An excerpt from the agreement reads:

If, after all appeals have been exhausted or the time for all remaining appeals has expired, plaintiffs [the video game industry] are no longer the prevailing party in this case, the plaintiffs shall pay back the amount stipulated in paragraph 1 within thirty (30) days of the disposition of the final appeal or the expiration of time for all remaining appeals.

Given California’s budget crisis, it’s easy to see how the state could hope to recover the dues paid to the ESA. However it’s more likely that the already stressed state budget will have to cover more of the ESA’s legal fees.