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Spore springs to life
If you wandered into Thursday night's launch party for Electronic Arts' new Spore game, you would have found yourself inside a planetarium listening to a lecture by an astrophysicist. Or you might have joined other members of the press at a black-tie event, where attendees accessorized their clothing not just with ties and handbags, but feathers, spikes, and faux-carapaces.
Held in Golden Gate Park's California Academy of Sciences, this was clearly not your typical launch event. Then again, Spore is not exactly a typical game.
Spore comes from a shining star of video game developers, Will Wright, the man behind such famous games as Sim City, Sim Copter, and The Sims. Anticipation for his latest project was naturally stellar, and the sheer ambition of the project makes it a true hallmark of gaming. Wright wasn’t just shooting for the stars with this one, but trying to encapsulate entire galaxies. How’s that for scale?
Chalkboard Sports Baseball for iPod released
D2C Games today released Chalkboard Sports Baseball, a single-player arcade baseball game for the iPod. The game is available through the iTunes Store for $5.
The main game mode features a batter and five fielders (pitcher, catcher, and three outfielders); fielding is done automatically. To pitch, you swipe your finger around the clickwheel; to hit, you press the Select button. Games are three innings long, and can be paused and resumed.
Chalkboard Sports Baseball doesn't have a Major League Baseball license. Instead, the game uses customizable SPOGs (Sports Player Object Gyros) to represent player avatars. A SPOG is a disc that resembles a Pog (discs that were used in a game that was popular in the 1990s). You can import your own images to be used in the SPOG.
E3: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
Last week the E3 Media and Business Summit took place, but you probably wouldn’t have known it unless you’re in the video game business, or make it a point to check video game news sites regularly. This is in stark contrast to past years—well, 2006 on back.
In fact, there was precious little news from this year’s event. Most of what was shown off had already been announced, and there weren’t any earth-shattering announcements. No major game announcements. No inkling of major new hardware. Nothing of real significance or import.
2006 was the final year of the “old” E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo. It was a grand event put together by the Entertainment Software Association, or ESA, that assembled as many major video game publishers, developers and hardware makers as could fit under the massive eaves of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Every nook and cranny of that center was filled, and tens of thousands of people—many who had nothing to do with the industry, professionally—flooded hotels throughout L.A. to attend the event. Shuttle buses carted game executives, buyers, retailers, and game enthusiasts by the coachload from Century City, downtown hotels and elsewhere.
Logitech ClearChat PC Wireless headset
Lightweight and comfortable, the ClearChat PC Wireless headset is suitable for marathon gaming sessions that last until the wee hours.
For massive multiplayer online games like the popular World of Warcraft (
), it’s helpful to have a headset if you’re trying to coordinate efforts with other members of a team or guild. Rather than tangle up your desk with messy wires, a wireless headset is a nice option. For $100, Logitech sells the ClearChat PC Wireless, a headset that’s lightweight, comfortable, and sounds good.
The ClearChat PC Wireless headset works with Mac OS X and Windows. It has a USB dongle about the size of a flash thumb drive as a transmitter, and communicates using the 2.4GHz radio frequency, similar to band used by a cordless phone.
The headset features a plush, padded headband and ear pads that are comfortable to wear for hours at a stretch. The right headphone integrates audio controls; you can adjust volume up and down and also mute the microphone by tapping the outside of the headphone.
First Look: Spore Creature Creator
Let’s get this out of the way at the start: Electronic Arts’ (EA’s) Spore Creature Creator is not a game. It’s a software toy. Having said that, it’s loads of fun and very addictive, especially for whole families. It’s also a clever bit of marketing.
Will Wright is arguably one of the most important game designers ever. The products he’s created include SimCity and The Sims. They belong to a genre of gaming loosely called “god games” because you’re an omniscient presence in a world that goes about its business blithely unaware of your existence, but one that keenly reacts to everything that you do.
With SimCity, Wright tackled the concept of urban planning, enabling you to plot out industrial, commercial, and residential sectors of a modern metropolis, complete with transportation, utilities, parks and recreational facilities. Gradually, Wright increased the complexity of the world through sequels. Later he’d turn his focus inward in The Sims, focusing on the trials and tribulations of individual people—Sims—in a virtual world where you can adjust your Sim’s interactions with others, responding to their likes and dislikes, even decorating their homes.
Fable: The Lost Chapters
Software development can be unpredictable; it’s as much art as it is science, which is why release dates are so often missed in this business. Even still, Feral Interactive took too long to get Fable: The Lost Chapters out on the Mac-they first announced it in mid-2005. It’s a fun action/role-playing game romp, though it is showing its age.
Fable was originally developed for the Xbox and PC by Lionhead Entertainment, home of famed game designer Peter Molyneux, the brains behind legendary “god games” like Populous and Black and White, as well as previous Feral releases like The Movies (). Molyneux’s games often deal with the balance between good and evil, and the choices that we make that take us down one path or the other. Fable is no different in that regard: In this RPG, the choices you make directly affect your character.
The plot, in a nutshell, is that you’re a young lad who has been spared from his village’s destruction at the hands of brigands. You’re cast into a reluctant student at an academy where you learn the art and trade of becoming a hero. You’re faced with key decisions along the way-do you steal from people? If so, you’ll develop a reputation as a thief. Do you help a mother with her sick child? If so, you’ll earn the respect and love of the townspeople. Those decisions will have a cumulative effect both on your character’s appearance and abilities, though the game’s designers don’t seek to punish you or reward you one way or the other.
Analysis: Will iPhone games lead to more on the Mac?
The banners hanging in the lobby of San Francisco’s Moscone West conference hall for this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference tell you all you need to know about the event’s agenda. One banner reads “OS X Leopard” and the other says “OS X iPhone.” With both platforms—the Mac and the iPhone—so closely tied to each other, could the burgeoning game market on the phone side of things lead to an upswing of Mac games?
Developing for the iPhone requires both a Mac and a working knowledge of Cocoa, the Application Programming Interface (API) that Apple uses for Mac OS X, and a Macintosh to develop on. So intuitively, it seems to make sense that developers creating iPhone games might eventually make Mac games too.
“That might be what happens,” said Glenda Adams, director of development for Aspyr Media, the veteran Mac game publisher behind such hits as The Sims 2 and Guitar Hero 3. “It’s possible that iPhone games might lead to a new crop of little games for the Mac.”
Getting in on the ground floor of iPhone games
Independent Mac software developers Freeverse Software, Aspyr Media and Pangea Software are focusing on what many companies attending this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference have in their sights—staking a homesteading claim in the burgeoning iPhone application market.
Freeverse producer Bruce Morrison thinks that planting a stake early is going to be vital to Freeverse’s success on the iPhone.
Freeverse, which develops and publishes games and other software for the Mac, is starting out its iPhone efforts in an area it’s already comfortable with: games. First up is a 3-D racing game called Wingnuts Moto Racer. A series of sports games, branded under the Flick Sports moniker, will follow.
iPhone games are front and center at WWDC
Veterans of Apple-focused trade shows may have noticed a significant change of pace at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference keynote and the Mach rollout of the iPhone SDK. Gaming—long an area that Apple has, quite frankly, given short shrift—has been featured front and center. Say what you want about the moribund state of Mac gaming, but Apple is clearly on message when it comes to iPhone’s potential as a gaming device.
It’s little wonder. Gaming on mobile platforms has been a burgeoning market for a while, and the iPhone’s accelerometer and touchscreen make it a natural for a new breed of games that is hitting the market in the wake of the success of Nintendo’s Wii console, which uses hand-held controllers that offer gesture-based interaction. Adopting tilt and touchscreen actions is a logical evolution—in fact, it’s similar in principal to Nintendo’s DS touch screen display, which has been enormously popular for the last several years.
The iPhone’s game potential has given a new opportunity for Mac game veterans to make their mark in the iPhone space. Joining Steve Jobs on stage at Monday’s WWDC keynote was Brian Greenstone, the man behind Pangea Software, which develops games such as Nanosaur and Bugdom for the Mac. Greenstone’s first two productions for the iPhone are Cro-Mag Rally, a kart racing game, and Enigmo, a kinetic puzzle game. If they sound familiar, it’s because both games have been released for the Mac before. Greenstone adapted his source code to run on the iPhone instead, and both games seem to make a natural transition to the mobile device. Other Mac game developers are also in town this week, catching up on the many iPhone development sessions Apple’s offering in Moscone West throughout the week.
The iPhone’s a game changer for phone games
I agree with my colleague Dan Moren that the Nintendo DS doesn’t have much to worry about when it comes to competition from the iPhone. But third-party games on the iPhone are definitely going to change things when it comes to mobile gaming.
The iPhone won’t threaten the DS’s dominance in the marketplace. The DS is a fraction of the price and focuses on a younger demographic. It’s also a device with a single focus—games. The costlier iPhone does a lot more. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that games on the iPhone will be any less compelling, fun or challenging than they are on the DS.
Games and cell phones have been together for a very long time. I remember one of my first mobile handsets included a black and white version of “Snake,” a simple arcade game that can trace its ancestry back to the homebrew computing culture of the late 1970s.
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