Onlive - The Future of Gaming?

Just when we thought gaming had hit a critical milestone with web-broswer games on Kongregate.com or Instantaction.com, a new service plans to surpass cloud gaming and take on the 3 console gaming giants themselves. At GDC 09', Steve Perlman presented a 55 minute introduction to this service that's been in "stealth development" for the past 7 years.

Onlive is a new service that is set to come out in Winter of this year. It is a games on demand service, that will be releasing titles the same day as they hit store shelves. Rent them, buy them, demo them or even spectate someone playing them before you buy; Onlive is determined to take advantage of their streaming features. Complete with your own profile that includes avatars and your recorded "brag clips" they've made it a social experience as well. All it requires is a high-speed internet connection. 5mb will get you streams in HD resolutions while 1.5mb will translate to a standard def look. Perlman also explains that Onlive will be supported on both PC and Macs and will have an optional Micro-Console for your TV. Essentially you won't have to worry about your computer's hardware because the Onlive servers will take care of all that information crunching for you. Your machine becomes a "thin client" capable of running games on their high settings. The beta will be running this summer so the signups are available at their site, Onlive.com.

This brings up a couple of things to think about. Will the latency break the service? Gamers are picky, picky little girls and I could see this being a problem if the lag is significant enough to ruin the game. This is definately what could be the make or break feature for them. Onlive also will patch and update automatically so no need for waiting, downloads, and most importantly, no need to purchase new hardware which could be a direct blow to the Big 3. Is a possibly more affordable micro-console that plays any game from any system enough to win over your wallet? Could this be the beginning of the unified console myth that we've read about? Will Batman escape from the shark infested tank? Tune in next time to find out!

Level Up Awards 2008

Welcome to the first annual Level Up awards! After about 5 months of trying out everything on these lists, I wanted to compile something fun and entertaining. Initially, I had a more ambitious project planned for this but it requires too much time and resources. Something I will probably leave for next year. But on to the awards! I have to say 2008 was an extraordinarily good year for games. We saw epic final battles unfold after 10 years of storytelling (MGS4), we witnessed the birth of a brand new genre (Mirror's Edge), monster sequels (Gears 2, GTA4) and the invigoration of old ones (Fallout 3). This year also solidified the existence of downloadable games and that even handheld games can make big waves in the industry. The Wii is an unstoppable powerhouse, the 360 thrives in Japan and Ps3 barely starts to catch up. Meanwhile the PC quietly makes millions through digital distribution!

The nominees all deserve high praise for their hard work. Always raising the bar and yet bringing back familiar themes we love. I had a great time playing all of them and I feel it shouldn't have to come down to just one winner. I kept the list short and stuck with genre because they give a general feel as opposed to "best PS3 game" etc. Those aren't as interesting to me. All categories include all systems if applicable. And now, without further adeui, the 2008 Level Up Awards!

The Nominees are...

1. Bionic Commando Rearmed

2. Castle Crashers

3. Mega Man 9

4. Braid

5. Geometry Wars 2

6. Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo HD Remix

And the Winner is....

Castle Crashers stole my heart the second I saw the intro. What I loved about it was the arcadey feel it gave off and sparked fond memories to the days of Gauntlet. Finally, an XBLA game that I can play with 4 of my friends while sitting in the same room. Castle Crashers was fun everytime I picked it up and it provides superior replayability. Character unlocks, pets, and new weapons are all just some of the incentives to keep playing. With the ability to level up your character and customize his strengths, you can't argue with how great a game this is.

The Nominees are...


1. Chrono Trigger DS

2. God of War: Chains of Olympus

3. Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia

4. Final Fantasy: Crisis Core

5. Patapon

6. Professor Layton and the Curious Village

And the Winner is...


Call me a sucker for Final Fantasy games but no one can argue about the epic story jammed into this little UMD. Where the other Compilations of Final Fantasy games failed, Crisis Core redeemed the name. Crisis Core has the best visuals I've seen on a PSP and with it comes great gameplay that mixed RPG with turn-based elements. The introduction of Zack Fair as a main character was a fresh new perspective to the usually-gloomy story plots. There is hope for the FF7 universe afterall.

The Nominees are...

1. Valkyria Chronicles

2. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

3. Red Alert 3

4. Tom Clancy's Endwar

5. Sins of a Solar Empire

And the Winner is...


Valkyria was a fresh new experience. Who knew I could get my action-rpg, strategy, epic anime fix all in one place? I'm okay with turn based combat, but throwing in active movement and strategy elements completely sold it for me. I wish they could have let you done more with the customization of your armies but this game could open up a whole new grey area of multiplayer. Sadly it got crushed in the onslaught of game releases in the November-December window. I hope it has legs for the unfortunate souls who have yet to experience its majesty.

The Nominees are...

1. Persona 4

2. Fallout 3

3. Tales of Vesperia

4. Fable 2

5. The Witcher: Enhanced Edition

And the Winner is...

The hours I have sunk into this game are scary. At this point in time I haven't even completed it but I've been staying away from the main quest line since I've read it stops the game. Yes there's a patch out but I wanna finish it correctly! Fallout does feel like Oblivion with guns but it does alot of new things right. They definately captured the Fallout universe really well and give you that sense of walking alone in the wasteland which is something we all need to experience atleast once in our lifetime.

The Nominees are...

1. Gears of War 2

2. Call of Duty: World at War

3. Resistance 2

4. Left 4 Dead

5. Grand Theft Auto 4

And the winner is...

Left 4 Dead is special. Valve totally nailed the fun in the multiplayer department. You can't have replayability without a fun multiplayer and it seems Valve had this in mind. Co-op campaigns are always fun, so when they incorporated the multiplayer experience into that I was skeptical at first but it totally works with both the pacing and the gameplay. Left 4 Dead was definately a new enjoyable experience. With new free maps and modes coming, you can't go wrong.

The Nominees are...

1. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures

2. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King

3. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

And the Winner is...


Warhammer online caught me by surprise. I didn't expect an MMO game to feel so easy and stress-free. People could argue about balancing issues and end-game content all they want but those issues plague almost every MMO out there. Warhammer is the first title to even come close to WOW and I commend them for it. They introduced public quests, capitalized on RVR combat and gave you great incentives like achievements and live events. Warhammer had a great launch and remains to be a tough competitor.

The Nominees are...

1. Dead Space

2. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

3. Mirror's Edge

4. Grand Theft Auto 4

5. Prince of Persia

And the Winner is...

You have to hand it to Rockstar for being the studio that tends to keep pushing the boundaries and playing with your perceptions and moral values. GTA4 took that sandbox game we all know and love and gave life to it. I've never seen a city feel so alive and real as Liberty City, it's the ultimate playground. You learn to even care for Niko Bellic, the tragic yet funny protaganist. The animation and dialogue are superb, you truly feel like you are making conscious decisions with the people you call your friends. Rockstar never seems to dissapoint and has been the most consistent innovater.

The Nominees are...

1. Left 4 Dead

2. Far Cry 2

3. Gears of War 2

4. Resistance 2

5. Call of Duty: World at War

And the Winner is...

Gears of War 2 blew my expectations out of the water. Based on the campaign from part 1 you would think they would stick some kind of generic storyline to a bland plot but Gears 2 definately broke through that stigma. They added new enemies and new weapons sure, but they changed the perception to the Gears universe and really brought you into this visceral world. The pacing was unstoppable. I felt like I didn't want to put the controller down because I'm in the middle of a movie and I wanted to see what happened. Add an already stellar multiplayer mechanic with it's own set of upgrades and you got yourself a winner.

The Nominees are...

1. Fable 2

2. Grand Theft Auto 4

3. Fallout 3

4. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots

5. Left 4 Dead

6. Gears of War 2

7. Dead Space

8. Call of Duty: World at War

And the Winner is...

Metal Gear Solid 4, what an emotional journey. Tying up all the loose ends for the past 10 years and marrying it with a great new control scheme and innovative gameplay. Hideo Kojima has really captured the art of storytelling and no video game comes close when it comes to the genre. You feel the cycle of life pass through this game and the controversial topics it covers. I was thinking to myself how incredible it is that you only really play as snake 2 times out of the 4 games. The cutscenes are beautiful and so realistic in their execution. I couldn't believe the amount of work that was put into such a huge project. The Metal Gear series ended Solid Snake's story with a powerful and enthralling ending. Well done Mr. Kojima, well done.



So there you have it. After 2 weeks of fighting with my busy schedule I bring you the first Annual Level Up Awards. 2009 seems to be just as promising and I look foward to bringing you my ambitious project in the future.

-Frank

Aion Scheduled for Fall 2009

NCSoft has many great titles under it's belt but Aion looks to be the most ambitious yet. I've been anticipating this title for quite some time now and finally theres a confirmation for this year. The Aion Community Manager Lani "Liv" Blazier presents us with a letter from Lance Stites....

Originally Posted by Liv
Hello everyone,

I'd like to thank you for your patience while I collected feedback, comments and suggestions from various Aion communities' across Europe and North America. I used this information to create a list of questions that I felt needed to be addressed right away by our development team. This list does not cover all of your questions, I realize this, but I wanted to provide what information is available at present. The rest I am still working on.

I have spent the last week discussing the current state of morale within the community and the general excitement for the game with our production team and after reviewing the community report, one member in particular wanted to address you all directly. I would like to introduce you to Lance Stites, Executive Producer of NCsoft West's Game Production Studio.

Greetings to all, As Executive Producer, my responsibilities include preparing and supporting the launch and ongoing operations of product for the "Western" market—including North America and Europe. I've worked with NCsoft since 2001, including 5 years in the Austin office and after a brief time away from the company I returned to spend almost a year in the European office. I've worked to launch or support multiple products or expansions, including the Lineage and City of Heroes franchises.

As you've probably seen, NCsoft West is undergoing restructuring which involves the relocation of certain key staff. We're building a dedicated production studio to support titles like Aion and the Lineage franchise. We've added Lani "Liv" Blazier as our Aion Community Manager recently and she is already taking an extremely active role within the community. Within the MMO community, this role is of vital importance and great to have someone who understands the importance of the player base and will be a tireless advocate of the community needs. Liv has spent the past several days gathering information and answers that are important to the community. We want to continue this open dialogue with the players and look forward to more as we move toward and past our Aion launch.

We really have an exciting time ahead of us in regards to ongoing updates to existing products, new releases on the horizon, and closer cooperation and coordination between the European and North American territories.

Cordially yours,

Lance Stites
Executive
Producer, Game Production Studio
NCsoft West

The Community Team is
committed to listening and responding to your needs. Please find below the answers to 5 questions that I wanted to make you had answers to sooner, rather than later.

1) When will Aion be released in North America/Europe?

We expect to ship Aion in NCsoft West territories in the fall of 2009.

2) Why is localization taking so long?

The localization effort is enormous, with a vast amount of content. Aion is not simply being translated, a team of dedicated content writers are re-creating the written dialogue and content to provide AAA quality and to ensure that it is culturally relevant for our audience. We are going to do this launch "right" rather than fast.

3) Has a date been set for our Preview Event?

While we are not ready to release specific details regarding the Preview Event, we can tell you that participants will include those who signed up at last year at FJV, PAX and Leipzig. We will also be extending invites to long time NCsoft customers and dedicated legions. As we get closer, we will be offering more opportunities for fans to get signed up for this exclusive event.

4) Will there be community support for Europe?

Absolutely. We realize that many in the community were surprised with our announcement regarding the consolidation of the North American and European operations. We are deeply committed to our European community and will have native speaking Community Coordinators for our supported languages (English,German & French).

5) Will there be servers for each region?

We will have servers physically located both in Europe and North America for launch. We know you have more questions and they are being addressed. My goal is to have another update for your within the next few weeks.

Thank you,

Liv
Community Manager, Aion

Aion looks amazing. If you get around to it, check out some of their gameplay videos online. Too much awesomeness for this blog...too much.

-Frank

Killzone 2 Demo Impressions

So I've come to the realization that Killzone has become a flagship franchise for the PS3 and I applaud them for it. Sony has been losing exclusives left and right for quite some time now, and I'm glad they are fighting back. This whole console war between the 360 and PS3 is like watching your kids fight, you want them both to put up a fight, but you don't want either of them to lose. I'm not a fanboy, or a hater as some would love to put it. I don't hate the Wii for that matter. I've always loved games, growing up, and having discovered this ugly underbelly of the video game industry, makes me think sometimes I should have taken the blue pill. It's very depressing, watching these flame wars and people's fake Internet personas clash over stupid shit. When did this even start? Either way, I'm done trying to tell everyone games kickass no matter what but I'll probably be called a fanboy carebear, or whatever word has been coined for the week.

But enough ranting, I'm here to talk about Killzone 2 - The Halo Killer!!! (see what I did there?). I completed Killzone 1 back when it launched not because it was dubbed "The Halo Killer" but because it caught my interest. I actually liked the gameplay and whatever story there was to offer. Which brings me to the K2 demo. Was it awesome? You bet! Is it perfect? Well no.

My only gripe with the Killzone games is the controls. I have to admit it doesn't help when you come off COD and keep meleeing or throwing grenades when all you wanna do is aim. But they have a control style for just such a person! And I found that to be genuine of them, to acknowledge that there are different FPS games out there. But that's not my complaint. I found the sensitivity to need some major tweaking.

Games like COD and Halo or even Gears for that matter, have the controls figured out. You don't get frustrated when you see a guy and couldn't kill him because the controls didn't let you, and that's what Killzone did to me a few times. I feel like maybe an aim-assist wouldn't hurt, but getting the controls right would be better. FPS's suffer from really bad controls. You feel disconnected because your connection to the game is the controller and if that's not working, the game is going to get pretty annoying.

Killzone 2's controls aren't as bad as I thought they were going to be. With some tweaking to the controller sensitivity I was ready to murder some Helghast! I ran through the demo 3 times trying out new tactics and strategies. "Strategies you say?" Indeed, K2 has you taking cover and staying in first person view, which also isn't as bad as I thought it was gonna be. It feels like Time Crisis but way cooler since the setting is darker and more visceral. So I found myself testing out different tactics. Throwing grenades instead of rushing right in. Running around to knife a Helghast while he thought I was still in cover instead of having a fire fight with him. And all these worked out, I couldn't really exploit much from the A.I. so I was happy. After that all I had to do was take in the pretty lighting and amazing gameplay.

The K2 demo rushes you into battle, after you've just crash landed. You find yourself in the middle of a warzone and have no other choice but to fight back. So off you go shooting, and sprinting to cover. You pick up a rocket launcher and blow up some explosives on the bridge. This moment is what practically sold me. The particle effects and animation to this game are insane. They really did come close to that video they showed us a while back. I couldn't get over how pretty this game is. The sky and the ocean look so beautiful and alive. You continue down the path where real-time events are occurring and it's just so seamless. A squad gets dropped off in front of you and it's perfectly executed. You've played FPS's before, you know how this plays out, but K2 does it better. As a matter of fact K2 doesn't really do anything shooters haven't done before, but it does everything a little bit better. I'm not saying it does Halo better than Halo, but it looks, feels, and smells like what a shooter should do.

I didn't want the demo to end. Sadly, it's one of the shortest demos I've ever played but wow, what a great 10 minutes. I have no doubts this game will have trouble selling. If you've already purchases Warhawk, Uncharted, and MGS4, then add one more to the list because Killzone 2 is the shooter for the PS3.

-Frank

Hanbitsoft reads Level Up Blog

It seems just like yeterday I was rambling on about Hellgate shutting down-well fear not! On January 26th Hanbitsoft claimed it will be continuing Hellgate's servers after Namco Bandai's Jan 31st shutdown date. Hanbisoft will be taking over the patching and updates and keep it going on it's FREE subscription model, how do you like that?

With the good news comes the bad of course. Dragon Age: Origins has been delayed to later this year. Expect to see this title in the "last half of 2009." While this is a bit of a pain to take in I think the flood of new titles throughout the year should keep us busy. If you're like me you still haven't picked up every single holiday title and are thinking "SF4, RE 5, Killzone 2, DOW 2, and Demigod are all within a month of releasing. . . .Holy S**T."




Note: My brother and I are cooking up a special feature for our games of 2008. While we are a bit late to the party, it's better late than never! Plus, it's more than just a list! (hopefully)

-Frank

Ex-1uppers update

Talk about a comeback. The Rebel FM guys at eat-sleep-game.com have had mind blowing success and donation numbers that I'm happy to be a part of. Rising from the ashes of EGM/1UP the ex-1UP employees are making waves with their new homes.

Ryan Scott debuted his first Podcast on Jan 17th with guests Karen Chu, Ryan Higgins, Andrew Fitch, Greg Ford, and Ernie P. The Geekbox hit 10,000 downloads in under 29 hours! And the first podcast was epic. I look foward to episode 2 when its released on the 28th. Follow the link below to enter a soapbox of nerddom.

http://www.geekbox.net/

Also bouncing back are the ex-1up show production crew. Now known as Area 5, they released part 1 of their first show titled "CO-OP" on Jan 21st. The first episode brings together the crew and other fallen comrades for a discussion on 2008's biggest and notable titles. Feel free to check it out while its still free and we wish them all the very best. Follow the link to have a look see.

http://area5.tv/

-Frank

Dota Version 6.59

The newest Dota version is here and have brought some pretty significant changes. Here are some of the highlights.

* Added a new subtle cooldown effect to make it a little clearer when spells are in cooldown and when they finish. This is mainly for long cooldown spells where it is sometimes difficult to tell. More work will be done in this area soon, but it needs a bit more time to make sure that anything extra is not visually intrusive. (PGRu-Unexpect3D)
* Reworked Enigma's Conversion (see details below)
* Added a new experimental mode -er (-ExperimentalRunes, see details below)
* Rebalanced Necrolyte's Heartstopper from 250/500/750/1000 AOE with 1% drain to 700/800/900/1000 AOE with 0.5/0.75/1/1.25% drain
* Abaddon now uses the Death Knight model instead of the Evil Arthas one (practically the same, but commonly requested)
* Increased model size of hexed units a bit

Here are the details to Enigma's Eidolons.

Demonic Conversion:
=====================
Splits any non-hero unit into three Eidolons, killing the targeted unit.Eidolon's can duplicate themselves once whenever they attack 6 times.

Lesser Eidolon/Eidolon/Greater Eidolon/Dire Eidolon (Same as before)

Cooldown: 35
Manacost: 170

Notes: It cannot target Level 5+ Neutral Creeps


Experimental Runes:
====================
This temporary mode changes the rune system to a more experimental one. I will be changing how -er works from version to version to try out different ideas. I don't plan on any one version of the new runes to replace the current system directly, so do not panic. Instead, it will be used as something to create discussion, spark ideas, find flaws and playtest different concepts over time. How -er works for this version: Runes spawn simultaneously on both sides at 3 minute intervals (instead of 2). Again I have no plans to make this permanant.

And Icefrog follows with a very important note....

Notes: I wanted to release this sooner rather than later because of some
important code fixes. I am planning on finishing the traditional .x9 quest for
v6.59b (along with some more balance tweaks) and then followed by TC in 6.60 if
everythings work out right.

Enjoy

-- IceFrog

Update: I'm getting lots of emails asking me what .x9 and TC are. Every 9
version there is a hidden side quest in the map. TC is the Tauren Chieftain hero
model.

A new Hero!! And the Tauren Chieftan to boot. One can only speculate what kind of stuff their going to do with the character model but I'm assuming he's still going to be a strength hero. Hope it works out. For any other improvements, you can find the rest of the changelog here http://getdota.com/changelogs/index/33






-Frank