For the first time in its 11-year history, Medal of Honor leaves the WWII theatre and enters the modern setting of war-torn Afghanistan. The game is told through the lens of a small band of fictional characters. Medal of Honor introduces players to the Tier 1 Operator, an elite warrior and relatively unknown instrument of the U.S. Military that operates under the National Command Authority to take on missions no one else can handle.

Limbo follows the story of a little boy searching for his sister. The story is somewhat unremarkable, but is complemented by the game itself. When Epic Studios unleashed Gears Of War on the world in 2005, the term “destroyed beauty” was coined. Limbo has taken that term and renamed it “horrific beauty.” From the moment the player awakes in a smokey black and white world, you know that you have stepped away from the world of video games and into the world of true art.

The art is of course a major component, but is in no way the only area that makes Limbo shine. The puzzles that the player must solve are as good as the art style. Limbo is one of the only games I have ever played that rewards the player for dying. Each time you die in this masterpiece, you are one step closer to solving each of the puzzles that are put in the players path. Death is a major mechanic that is made even better by the game’s wondrous art. From giant inky black spiders to decapitating giant bear traps, Limbo doesn’t disappoint in delivering fear to the player.

Many people I have talked to have met my praise of Limbo with doubt and suspicion. “Why is a arcade game that is a mere 3-5 hours long cost the gamer $15?” I look at these naysayers and reply “A person pays millions of dollars to hang a Picasso on their wall, and we have the ability to pay fifteen for an interactive piece of beautifully horrific art. I would take Limbo over a Picasso any day.” To me, Limbo is the beginning of a truly great game studio. Trust me when I say that Playdead is a studio to keep our eyes on.

The mechanics of this game are as awesome as the art style, the death sequences, and the story itself. Every ability in performed by the game’s character is very fluid and is as if a little boy was doing them. Equally each of the NPCs in Limbo are as fluid as the little boy. This includes everything from the giant spider to the clans-people.

So thats it kiddies. There is a reason that the debut title from Playdead Studios has recieved a Metascore of 92 from www.metacritic.com. It is because Limbo is one of the most original, unique, and generally awesome games to come out for some time. In the land of endless sequels and spinoffs, it is nice to know that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Even if that light is the dark, twisted, and amazingly beautiful world of a little 2D platformer.

Limbo gets a 5 out of 5!

If you’d love to back up all your Nintendo DS games and carry them around on a single and inexpensive game cartridge you can play on any DS, DS Lite, DSi, DSi XL, this guide is for you.
Earlier this year we showed you how to backup and play your Wii games from an external hard drive. Many of you wrote in asking when we would do a guide for your other gaming darling, the Nintendo DS. You asked, we listened, and now we’re back with a start to finish guide to backing up your Nintendo DS games. We’ll be swapping out the bulky external hard drive for a nice slender micro SD card but the basic premise remains the same.

Note: Unfortunately this technique relies on you using a Nintendo DS or DS Lite to do the backups. Your DSi can play the backups, but the architecture of the DSi simply doesn’t support easy ROM dumping. We’re sure it has been done, but likely not without a lot of work, solder, and cannibalizing a few units in the process. If you have a DSi and you want to back up your games, we suggest you find a friend or hit up Craigslist or eBay for a used DS unit for the backing up. After you’ve backed up, you can play your backups on your DSi without problems.

Even better, while the chances are of bricking your Wii using our guide were nearly 0%—but still technically possible—your chances of damaging your Nintendo DS with this guide are 0%. None of steps will require you to alter your actual DS unit—all tweaks and hacks occur entirely on the flash cartridge we will be setting up. The NDS is a robust little gaming platform and there is next to nothing you can throw at it that a simple reboot won’t fix. Should you ever want to sell your DS in “stock” form, all you need to do is remove the flash cartridge and wipe your system settings.

Note: Screenshots for the two flash carts (short for cartridges) we tested were taken on both a Nintendo DS Lite and a Nintendo DSi unit, as we tried out features to ensure functionality across models.

Why Backup and What You’ll Need

Why back up your Nintendo DS games? Why not back them up? You paid good money for those little NDS cartridges. Do you really want to shell out another $30 because a tiny little plastic postage stamp of a game goes missing? Just like backing up your fragile DVD-based Wii games to an external hard drive protects them from damage and your sticky-fingered kids, backing up your NDS games provides the same protection. Photo by el monstrito.

It also protects your games from theft. Should your NDS be stolen after you switch to using backups, you’ll be painfully out one NDS unit—but you’ll have all your NDS game cartridges safe and sound at home—and likely the original backups still on your computer. If that’s not enough for you, playing your games from a backup flash cart gives you access to all sorts of neat bonuses, like Action Replay cheat codes, unlimited game saves, and—depending on the flash cart you use—even in-game, on-the-fly cheat application and game speed tweaks.

So what do you need to get started with this backup magic? For this guide you will need the following items:

• A Nintendo DS or DS Lite unit with power cable on hand.
• A Flash cartridge (which we’ll refer to as a flash cart from here on) such as theAceKard2i or the SuperCard DSTwo. The Acekard2i is $23.95; the Supercard DSTwo is $38.95.
• A micro SD card and card reader. 2GB+ is more than sufficient for most people.
• A wireless router.
• Nintendo DS game cartridges to backup.
• A computer—we’ll be using a Windows PC for this tutorial.

Selecting Your Flash Cart

For this guide, we purchased and tested two NDS flash carts. There are more than a half dozen flash carts on the market with varying features like hardware emulation, media playback, and more. We researched flash carts and selected one from the more economical end of the price scale and a premium cartridge to see if the build quality and features were worth the increase in price. All flash carts were ordered from ModChipCentral. They’ve got excellent prices , reasonable shipping, and all of our orders—we made two just to make sure our first expedient delivery and great customer service wasn’t a fluke—arrived promptly. The flash cart market is rife with cheap imitations and outright scams so it’s worth using a merchant somebody can vouch for.

Rather than overwhelm you with the specifications of the two cartridges we ordered—you can read their product pages for those—we’ll help you choose a flash cart based on your needs. These aren’t the only flash carts on the market, but they are the ones we were able to test extensively and can give you some insight on.

If you just want to backup and play your Nintendo DS games and don’t really care about emulation, media playback, or other fancy features, the Acekard2i is for you. It’s a solid cartridge, it has a development community behind a robust cart-specific operating system called akAIO, and for basic playback as well as homebrew-based emulation you’ll be just fine. If playing Gameboy Advance games is important to you, however, keep in mind that this flash cart cannot play Gameboy Advance backups on the Nintendo DSi—this is a hardware limitation, due to the lack of a Slot 2 for GBA games, it can still play Gameboy Advance backups on the DS and DS Lite. TheAcekard2i is $23.95 at ModChipCentral.

If you want to backup and play your DS gamesand use enhancements like cheat codes, real-time saving, as well as playing games in emulation like Gameboy Advance and SNES games, and you’d like to enable movie and music playback, the SuperCard DSTwo is for you. It handles the basics of backing up and playing NDS games perfectly but then goes a step further by layering an interface over your NDS game playback—accessible by pressing L+R+Start at anytime during playback—which gives you access to game guides, real-time cheat codes and game saves, slow motion playback, and a really cool “Free Cheat” mode where the SuperCard looks for open variables in the game that can be modified like those for health or ammo left. In addition the SuperCard has a built-in chipset for emulation of the GBA on the DSi, hardware-based SNES emulation, and media playback. The Supercard DSTwo is $38.95 at ModChipCentral.

Setting Up Your Flash Cart

Once you get your flash cartridge in the mail, you’ll need to load and update their software. The process differs between the two carts we’re covering, so if you’ve got the Acekard2i, go here; if you bought the Supercard DSTwo, jump ahead to here. After this setup, the instructions are the same for both.

Setting Up the Acekard2i: Download the Acekard21 loaders. Extract the contents of the ZIP file to the root of the micro SD card you’ll be using for your Acekard2i.Download akAIO—an alternative but practically “official” OS for the Acekard. Extract it to the root of your micro SD card. Download the WiFi update. Extract into/__aio/plugin/ on your micro SD card. Make a folder labeled /ROMS - NDS/ on the root of your micro SD card. You could call it /Games/ if you won’t be using any emulators or other NDS software, but we like to keep things well categorized around here. Your games will go here once you’ve backed them up.

If you intend to use the Acekard2i in a Nintendo DSi that is has been updated to menu version 1.4 (go into the system settings and look in the corner of top screen to check), you will need to update the Acekard2i’s firmware.

Download the Acekard2i update for the 1.4 system menu here. Extract the contents to the root of your SD card. The update can only be run from a DS, a DS Lite, or DSi with menu version 1.3 or lower. You cannot update the flash cart from a DSi unit with system menu 1.4+ because of restrictions in the current system menu. When it is in a compatible DS unit launch the Acekard flash cart like a game and navigate to the root of your micro SD card.

Run the ak2ifw_update_14_DSi.nds to update your flash cart. Even though the update takes under 30 seconds, plug your NDS into the wall to play it safe so you don’t lose power at a critical moment.

Once you’re done setting up up the flash cart—whether you had to update for menu 1.4 or not—pop it into your NDS. Run the “game” and you’ll be greeted with the akAIO menu as seen below. Now you’re ready to set up your DS for game backups, so skip the SuperCard DSTwo setup below and jump straight to the instructions for setting up your Nintendo DS for game backups below.

Setting Up SuperCard DSTwo: If you read over the steps required to set up the Acekard2i and thought “I wonder if the pricier one is easier to set up?”, it is. You’ll pay almost twice as much for the SuperCard DSTwo over the Acekard2i, but the increase in price comes also increases the ease of setup, and the bonus of some really cool in-game cheats and hardware emulation.

To set up the SuperCard DSTwo you’ll need to download the SuperCard firmware here. Extract the contents to the root of your micro SD card. Make a /NDS - ROMS/ folder to park your future game backups. Pop the micro SD card back into the flash cart and then back into the NDS and you’re done. It already comes updated for system menu 1.4, no tweaking necessary, so you’re ready to set up your DS for game backups.

Setting Up Your Nintendo DS for Game Backups

At this point, regardless of which cartridge you picked, you’re now ready to play NDS backups. The problem is we don’t have any backups yet, so we need to grab some of our game cartridges and create some. Before we can start backing up our games, however, we need to do a quick setup. From this point forward the guide is flash cart agnostic. Unless explicitly noted all instructions apply to any flash cart.

At this point you’ll need your Nintendo DS or DS Lite, your wireless router, the game cartridges you want to back up, and a computer to back them up to. We’ll be using a a Windows 7 PC.

First, configure your router. Unfortunately Nintendo never really got on the secure-wireless bandwagon when it came to the Nintendo DS line. If you’re running your wireless access point wide open, you’re all set. If you’re using encryption stronger than WEP you’ll have to temporarily crank it down to old-school—and insecure—WEP security. Sorry! You can change it back as soon as you’re done backing up your games.

Second, make sure your NDS can connect to the wireless router. If you have a Wi-Fi-enabled game start the game and use it to configure your wireless settings—the NDS and NDS Lite lack a system-menu option for configuring it without a game. If you don’t have a game with Wi-Fi play that would allow you to configure things, that’s okay. You have a flash cart now that we can run some homebrew software on. DownloadDSOrganize—a homebrew NDS personal organizer and file manager.

Extract \DSOrganize\ to the root of your micro SD card. Load up your flash cart and browse to the DSOrganize folder. Launch the DSOrganize.nds file. Once loaded, go to Configuration, then click the start button to navigate across the tabs until you reach the last tab with the Wi-Fi symbol on it. Use one of the three available slots to set up your Wi-Fi information and save it. Reboot your NDS, you’ve now configured the wireless settings sans a Wi-Fi-enabled game.

Finally it’s time to download and configure the backup tool. Download a copy of Backup Tool 0.31 here. The Backup Tool (BT) is a homebrew application that uses your DS’s WiFi connection to copy games over the network to an FTP server. BT comes with a copy of smallFTP, which is perfect for the task ahead.

Inside the BT ZIP archive you’ll find two folders NDS_Backup_Tool_WiFi andsmallftp-1.0.3-fix. Copy the NDS folder contents—but not the folder itself—over to the root directory of your micro SD card; extract the smallFTP folder over to your computer.

You’ll need to do some very brief configuration before we jump back to your DS. On your micro SD card, open the file NDS_Backup_Tool_Wifi.ini. Replace the server IP with the local address if your computer on the Wi-Fi network. You can check this by typing ipconfig at the Windows command prompt or by browsing to your router’s administration page and checking there. The rest of the settings can stay the same, as they are pre-configured to work with the copy of smallFTP included with BT—change them if you had to set up your own server with different settings. The default dump directory for smallFTP is c:\temp\. If you would like it to dump somewhere else, open up ftpd.ini in the smallFTP folder and edit the last line to the directory you want. Make sure the directory exists, otherwise the backup tool will error out.

Plug your micro SD card and flash cart into your DS and boot it up. While it is booting you can start up the smallFTP server on your PC and make sure it’s active.

Browse on your NDS to the NDS_Backup_Tool_WiFi and run the .NDS file you find inside. You should see a blue and white screen that prompts you to remove the current flash cart and put in the game you want to back up. Do so and press A to initialize. You should see a screen like the one below.

This screen is for backing up your saved games. Nearly every flash cart will manage your saved games for you as long as the .SAV file is the same as the .NDS file. Now is great time to copy the .SAV file over. When the transfer is done press the Right paddle button to navigate to the Save Restore menu. Press it again to switch to the ROM Backup menu. You’ll see the screen below with the ROM information changed to reflect whatever game you’ve inserted.

Press B to get started. Depending on the game you’re transferring, you’ll need to be patient. Now is a good time to double check the smallFTP window on your computer—or whatever FTP server you’ve set up—to make sure the file transfer looks good on both ends.

NDS games range in size from around 3-130+ MB. Transfer over the WiFi network takes approximately one minute per 0.85MB of data transferred. Play it safe and just round up to 1 minute per MB. This particular ROM was 64MB, and when we checked back in an hour later it had just finished a few minutes prior.

Once the transfer is complete check in your download directory.

Success! You’ve copied the your game and can now copy that .NDS file onto your micro SD card and into the /ROMS - NDS/ folder. Let’s do that now.

Our test game, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, copied perfectly and loaded with no trouble from both the Acekard2i and the SuperCard DSTwo—showcased above. For those of you who aren’t satisfied until the fat lady sings—or in this case the Curious Professor travels—here’s a screenshot of the game loaded.

Now just rinse and repeat for every game you want to backup to your flash cartridge. Snazzy!

Send an email to Jason Fitzpatrick, the author of this post, at jason@lifehacker.com.

I have been a hardcore player of first person shooters, having made it to multiple levels of prestige in each of the newer Call Of Duty games. I have even spent hundreds of hours set up in system-link playing Halo 2 and 3 with my family and online. So naturally when I witnessed the hands-on play of Bulletstorm, I was thoroughly excited. In this pulp shooter the player is dropped onto a planet where everything in the enviroment has mutated and is a weapon for use. The point of the game is “skillshots” and this game looks to have many ways to do this. In the demo I saw, the player did things like kick an enemy into a cactus-like plant and then get swallowed by a giant fly catcher type plant. Another moment I witnessed the player kick down a giant door and smash an enemy with it. Honestly, it looks as if anything in the environment can be used to get a kill. For each of these kills the player is awarded with skill points (similar to style points in John Woo’s Stranglehold) which can be used to buy weapons and new skillshots. Weapons are able to be bought and transferred at a “dropshop” or a aerial dropped supply point. The player is able to carry two weapons at once, and at the start is ready for mayhem. So that brings me to the weapons. My favorite weapon demoed was a gun that launched two grenades attached to a chain. It launches and wraps around an enemy to cover an enemy in death. The secondary fire on the weapon superheats the chain to allow it to cut through flesh like butter. And great feature is the “leash.” This electrified rope gives the player the ability to grab enemies and pull them close or even toss them into the air. Another awesome ability of the “leash” make enemies enter a stasis field which makes them easier to kill.

So thats it kiddies. Bulletstorm is coming February 2011, and promises to be great fun. So check back again to see more on my E3 2010 coverage. Peace!

Medal Of Honor has returned! One of my favorite games of all time was Medal Of Honor: Rising Sun for the last generation of consoles, but after that game the franchise went into the toilet. After the footage today, EA has shown the world a game that will easily compete with the juggernauts of the FPS genre. During the conference, EA brought in 24 players to unveil the multiplayer of this amazing game, and all that can really be said is WOW! Footage revealed a fast paced and graphically astounding game, but it is the mechanics of this game that really make it shine. EA has revealed that instead of specific modifications for specific weapons, the player unlocks weapon mods that can be attached to a weapon (up to three per weapon) to make literally hundreds of combinations. Another mechanic that will shine are the Tactical Support Actions. These are like the killstreaks in Modern Warfare 2, without being forced to use only a specific loadout. EA revealed that there are defensive as well as offensive choices to use. This allows the player to help teammates with extra armor or increased health, or on the flipside we can be selfish and call in a missile or a mortar strike. According to G4, this game mixes the best of MW2 and BF:BC2 to create a new entry into the FPS world.

The second game that blew my mind during this press conference was Dead Space 2. The first Dead Space in my opinion revived the long defunct horror genre in gaming. The second game however will be a game that defines the genre, like Silent Hill and Resident Evil 2 did years ago. The demo footage showed the game’s hero, Isaac, battling new terrifying enemies. The best of these new demons is a baby-like monster that attacked Isaac en masse. Another horrifying reveal was the game world itself. Dubbed “The Sprawl,” this graphically beautiful city is monstrous in proportions and is as equally terrifying as the new Necromorphs. This city is of course a far cry from the tight corridors of the mining vessel Ishimura. I don’t think this a problem though as the unnerving music and in-your-face action sequences have made a return.

It is still the first day of this wonderful trade show, and I believe that there is still much more amazement to come. Check back through the week to get my take on the events as they unfold. Happy E3 to you all, and I hope you are all enjoying it as much as myself.

In stores July 13th EA Sports has released new videos highlighting the cover athlete Tim Tebow, behind the scenes and some new features found in NCAA Football 11.

Tim Tebow on NCAA Football 11:

Behind the Scenes:

Locomotion:

Offensive Styles:

Real Assignment AI:

Lets break it down.

Halo Reach

Can you get any bigger than the supposed last Halo made by Bungie? In a game they keep saying themselves is the biggest and best Halo yet?

I don’t think so. Halo has more than any other FPS pushed the genre forward to accomplish things never to be achieved prior. This next Halo game looks to apply the same philosophy.

With just what they have been talking about and revealing in the past few weeks it appears that other companies again will have a benchmark to try and achieve when it comes to multiplayer functionality, accessibility and options.

You will now be able to store thousands of video clips and custom content. You will not have to use the Xbox guide button to access anything if you choose not to do so.

Remember what Halo 2 did for Xbox Live with ease of use and functionality? I think their could be another huge leap forward with this title.

Ghost Recon: Future Soldier

I am putting this game right at the top of the list without even seeing any gameplay so far. Hear me out on this. Do you remember what life was like on the Xbox 360 before Halo 3 and Modern Warfare?

Well for us shooter fans there was Call of Duty 2 and then that got old. We were all rewarded for our patience with the new benchmark in graphics and realistic shooter game play in Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. G.R.A.W. 1 and 2 were about all we had for awhile until Rainbow Six Vegas came out and we were still happy. These games were great and were very well supported by Ubisoft. Last time I remember I had almost 30 maps for G.R.A.W. 2.,some free dlc and some not.

It seems as if people have forgotten about how much fun and how good G.R.A.W. was, because I am suprised that after the original teaser trailer this new game wasn’t getting much hype.

Ubisoft have had a long time to work on something new and with what they accomplished at the time on the console which was way past everyone elses work I am sure we will be awe struck and in for a treat once we get our hands on Future Soldier.

Another thought, do you think Ubisoft would dish out all that money for that bad ass live action trailer they just released if they weren’t super confident in the product they’re putting out?

Medal of Honor

Its overdue that this franchise got a reboot. EA has decided to invest in this game and have it compete with the Call of Duty franchise once again. They are taking it to the modern day in an intriguing storyline that follows the story of real Tier 1 operatives in Afghanistan.

If you’ve seen the trailers you might think it looks like Call of Duty and you might be right but if you see it in HD you might just notice that the gameplay shown seems have a more polished look and maybe even better graphics. Also EA has decided to hand over the multiplayer side to this little known developer that makes these semi successful games called Battlefield maybe youve heard of them, DICE Games?

Yea that was sarcasm, EA is bringing out the big dogs for this one leaving nothing to chance. We’ll see how it all works out but I sense that next year it might be Call of Duty feeling a bit jealous.

Call of Duty 7 (Treyarch)

Yes another Call of Duty title will come out this year rumored to be in the Vietnam era. I have some suprising thoughts on this game though. You all might know by now what has happened with the Infinity Ward founders getting canned after a falling out with Activision.

It seems Activision is content owning the technology and the rights to Call of Duty now but not the talent behind the technology. Surprising, I project Treyarch’s upcoming Call of Duty surpassing the latest Infinity Ward Modern Warfare 2.

Perhaps not in sales, but in fun. Yes, Modern Warfare 2 was a great, hugely successful game but it also had its failings. The first Modern Warfare was fresh, fun, new, innovative and pushed the genre forward. This last title as too similar to the first to do any of those things except be fun. It wasn’t fresh anymore, it wasn’t innovative anymore, it was pretty much the same game with spec ops and a few things kicked into the same multiplayer experience. I was expecting more. I think I might get that more with Treyarchs version though.

Think about it for a moment, with the time Treyarch had to work on World at War which was about 2 years, the same amount of time Infinity ward had for Modern Warfare 2 they added way more into the game.

World at War introduced Nazi Zombies, in addition to the single player campaign Treyarch added 4 player co-op campaign with a score and challenge approach to it. It made the game fun even though the game really lacked a great story. The most amazing thing about World at War, making a WWII game that felt fresh and fun again. Activision is investing highly on them to produce for them yet again, but I think this time their game will take the extra leap. With another two years working on the same engine they can add even more cool ideas and uniqueness to a franchise that needs that spark again.

Throw in the rumor that this title will be in Vietnam then you are making it just modern enough to incorporate some pretty sweet weapons into the game. Keep an eye on Call of Duty this fall, it might just surprise you.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Remember when I mentioned DICE in the section about Medal of Honor? Well BC2 is an example of their talent. Bad Company 2 is a great example of a sequel done right. You keep the core element of the gameplay that people love, that great feel of the weapons and then you expand on that with new ideas and push it forward.

The first Bad Company launched with just one game mode called Rush. Well now theres more, Squad Deathmatch, Squad Rush and Conquest also make the cut on day 1. The maps are all great and beautiful to look at.

This multiplayer is very addictive and will last an extremely long time and it alone this year would have gave me my FPS multiplayer fix. The single player also was kicked up a notch this time with frantic action, intense moments, and a better story than the original all while keeping that humor and charm of the first game. I absolutely love this game.

Conclusion

That is five AAA multiplayer first-person-shooters all in the same year. We might usually get 1 or 2 of those quality games in 1 year but not 5! Just imagine looking at your friends list and seeing all different friends playing Halo: Reach, Medal of Honor, Call of Duty, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2. Who will you join!?

Maybe there are still games to be announced as well?

I will also mention a couple of honorable mentions that have already been released this year that didn’t quite make the list.

MAG – published in January and boasting 256-player is an impressive technical achievement, but other than the high player count it doesn’t really stand out from the pack.

Bioshock 2 – released in February has an interesting multiplayer mode but still has much room for improvement. Still a great game though especially the single player, loved it.

Curious what maps you’ll be getting for $15 (1200 Microsoft Points)?

• “Bailout” – a multi-story apartment complex
• “Salvage” – an arctic junkyard
• “Storm” – open-area industrial park
• “Crash” – urban area centered around a downed chopper (originally from Modern Warfare)
• “Overgrown” – sniper friendly outdoor map with a creek bed in the middle (originally from Modern Warfare)

Look for Red Dead Redemption on shelves May 18, 2010 for North America and May 21, 2010 in Europe for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

[source]

Developer Airtight Games presents us with jet-pack powered dog-fighting and ground-based combat that you control third person. I have to admit, the Dark Void demo didn’t really get me excited about the game. Graphics lacked detail and the gameplay didn’t feel fresh or exciting. The fact that Dark Void is only a single player experience lacking any type of multiplayer options really is a missed opportunity, a co-op or even simply capture the flag or deathmatch mode would make this game so much more appealing, in my opinion.

Who knows maybe the demo doesn’t do the full release justice, we shall see January 19th when it’s available in stores. In the meantime check it out yourself, let me know what you think in the comments below.

Bayonetta (PlayStation 3)

This week, Zero Punctuation reviews Assassin’s Creed 2.

Ian Milham, art director on Dead Space 2, guides us through the process of creating one of the new abominations that Isaac will face in the follow-up to the 2008 horror hit. You’ll see the early designs, find out what didn’t work, and see how the process resulted in what players will eventually see in the game.

Remember that most of these designs are from the conceptualization process, and won’t be appearing in the finished product. Even the “final” version may change, given that there is plenty of time between now and the game’s ambiguous future release date.

“The original Dead Space did a lot of stuff great, but we also had to fall back on some game design standbys. Like kill doors – eliminate all the enemies and they open.

We’re trying to figure out ways to have players slow down and be a part of the world that are organic and logical and not artificial game design. This is an enemy that’s designed to do that. He’s called the Flytrap, and he’s basically half environmental hazard and half enemy. All they told us was that travels along the ceiling and dangles down – lures – to try to snare you. He’s not static – he is a live thing, and he has additional states. First, you’ve got to dismember his lure. That shocks him and gets him on the ground. Then he gets wild, kind of like a fish flopping on the ground, except he’s still dangerous. We’re still playing around with what that means.”

“One of the notions key to Dead Space is that the Necromorphs have an improvised terribleness to them. They’re people that have been broken and twisted into something else, but done so violently and improvisationally. The idea we have is almost like this infection has a plan about what it would like the thing to become, but can’t quite get the body there and makes due with what it is. Instead of teeth, it’ll have bone shards that have broken into teethy things, but they aren’t literally teeth. Instead of wings, it’s stuff that’s been bent backwards and stretched.

Some of the problems with the things early on were that they look too evolved. They look like monsters. We don’t want anything that looks like an evolved organism, because that just blows the whole purpose. Here, we’re starting to feel that a little bit more. The mouth isn’t really the mouth; the spine has been split. There’s something interesting there.”

“There’s a certain pathos here, without being so literal. We loved this sketch. We went from there, and started doing a lot of details on him. Remember this sketch for later; somewhere along the road to final, he turned into a goofy monster, and then we went back to this sketch and brought it forward.”

After over four years in development, including a widely-publicized break with former publisher Sierra-cum-Activision, the game was released by Electronic Arts on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this October.

These excerpts from the December 2009 issue of Game Developerreveal various “What Went Right” and “What Went Wrong” highlights from throughout the creation of the game, revealing how the company used effective management to overcome publishing woes and a “content explosion.”

Scrum

For Brutal Legend, Double Fine adopted agile development, hoping to eradicate the rampant crunching that defined Psychonauts‘ development cycle — and it worked:

“Prior to starting work on Brutal Legend, the Double Fine team had spent the previous 5 years developing Psychonauts — the last two years of which consisted of a giant, grueling crunch wherein the company lost its initial publisher and nearly shut its doors before ultimately releasing the game.

“When the euphoria of having shipped our first title wore off, it was apparent to all of us that Double Fine did not develop games the way other studios did, and that a different system of product development needed to be put in place. The main cause of Psychonauts’ horrifying crunch was due to our continued development of the game features even after the levels were built. With each improvement to the game mechanics came a corresponding rework of all of the levels. Lather, rinse, repeat. Double Fine, and notably Tim, needed to play the game, live it, breathe it, let it steep over time, and iterate continuously on what makes the game fun and funny.

“After research into methodologies, we were drawn to the advantages of agile software development and decided to adopt Scrum. Within the first few months of Brutal Legend development, the team was practicing Scrum, and the initial payoffs were impressive. Scrum’s emphasis on features over systems, on rapid prototyping and iteration, on cross-disciplinary teams, on people over process, and on the creation of a potentially shippable piece of software every sprint/milestone made the game playable at a very early stage in development.

“By month one we had a renderer, terrain, and a playable character (Eddie Riggs), by month two Eddie could drive his hot rod (the Druid Plow) around the terrain, and by month three Eddie could run over endless numbers of headbangers with his Druid Plow around a terrain height field. Hilarity ensued.

“We applied Scrum not only to meta-game creation, but to micro-projects as well. At the very start of the development process, we had no idea how to make an RTS, and had no suitable engine with which to make one. We solved both problems by creating prototypes with an off-the-shelf PC engine and with which a number of our team members had some familiarity: Unreal 2.5.

“The design demands of Brutal Legend were such that trying to develop the game using an existing FPS engine would have proven difficult, but having the initial access to the flexibility of Unreal Script meant we could test some of our early RTS ideas right on our development PCs. This approach allowed our designers and gameplay programmers to be immensely productive right away, while the programming team went to work building our new engine. This very early glimpse at the design challenges we would face during development, and the opportunity to iterate on something quickly with Unreal Script, gave us invaluable direction into how to architect our new engine and critical insight into the mechanics that would come to define Brutal Legend.”

Content Avalanche

Content creation: the bane of HD-era video game development. Double Fine faced a particularly difficult content challenge, as the volume of content unexpectedly increased exponentially nearly overnight:

“Brutal Legend is not a small game. Fortunately, we thought we knew what we were facing and invested heavily in data/build infrastructure. What went horribly awry was that we both underestimated the total content push and, more importantly, didn’t anticipate the huge content spike at the very end of production.

“From the start of the game through the end of 2008, both our rate of data churn and data growth were fairly steady and corresponded roughly to increases in staffing and team productivity. This was expected and planned and supported by the technology. But then, in January 2009, everything exploded. All at once. After three years of development we had accumulated about 2.5 GB of optimized/packed game data. Less than four months later, we’d jumped to over 9 GB.

“The central cause of this was a very large increase in asset delivery from a number of teams simultaneously. For example, we went from 0 localized files to about 100,000 in a matter of weeks. We received the high resolution video assets for the Jack Black intro and all our main menus in one heap. We made a late decision to contract additional audio work, and new ambiences and sound effects were quickly added to the game. And so on.

“This simultaneous significant increase across a number of types of content put a massive burden on our entire infrastructure, in particular our build machine, Perforce server, and network backbone. To exacerbate matters, we started to see cascade effects—where a massive hit to one system (such as a check in of 10,000 .wav files) would bog down Perforce, causing a bottleneck in all of the dependent systems (like our build server and individual check ins) and these bottlenecks would then cause other bottlenecks.

“These large content dumps also put significant strain on our runtime systems. The per-line memory overhead in the voice system was not prepared to handle tens of thousands of lines, causing us to panic about our ability to even fit on a dual layer DVD. Across the board, these unexpected increases in content caused ripple effects throughout our IO, memory, and processing profile. And because the rate of increase was both high and unexpected, the engineers responsible for wrangling these systems were pulled from their assigned work and redirected to emergency firefighting.

“Moving forward, we will be much more cognizant about working with content creators to proactively estimate the total amount of data that they plan to create and to factor these numbers into our technical designs to ensure that we meet the final needs of the product. Additionally, we plan to invest more in scalable data infrastructure in the hopes that we can be better positioned to bring new capacity online quickly should it prove necessary. With those improvements and a little luck, hopefully content avalanche handling will be something we brag about in our future projects.”

Double Fine Gets Served

And, of course, Double Fine had to contend with the infamous three-way conflict between it, new publisher Electronic Arts, and former publisher Activision, which inherited Sierra’s publishing contract before letting the game go:

“In June 2009, Activision Entertainment Holdings, Inc. filed suit against Double Fine, claiming breach of contract and seeking a preliminary injunction to stop the release of the game by Electronic Arts on Rocktober 13. Less than 2 months later, the case settled out of court. I can’t talk about any of that in this article, or any article really. I bring up getting sued as something that went wrong because of the impact the between-publishers transition and subsequent lawsuit had on the development of Brutal Legend.

“Let’s go back a little bit. We had been working collaboratively and successfully with various groups at Vivendi for two years until Vivendi merged with Activision and we lost touch with both publishers while a lawsuit percolated. The merger announcement and subsequent diminution in publisher contact with Vivendi personnel, especially after such a previously harmonious relationship, caused internal unrest and morale dips among the team. Company meetings often included frustrating discussions about what little we knew about the current situation at our publisher, and what the various possible outcomes would mean for Double Fine.

“This demoralizing uncertainty lingered for months, during which time the leads continued to motivate the team to hit their scheduled milestones while watching our coffers run dry in the absence of any publisher payments. We learned Activision was not going to be publishing Brutal Legend through an official press announcement issued by Activision that listed the games they would be shipping, ours conspicuously absent. Again, the team was abuzz with anxiety—and the official hunt for a new publisher began, distracting Tim, myself, and various team leads during an already intense development period.

“Even after the game was re-signed with Electronic Arts, we enjoyed only a brief reprieve before the legal communications began among Double Fine and Activision and Electronic Arts. Most of the team was shielded from the drama that unfolded between December 2008 when Electronic Arts announced that they had picked up the game for publication and July 2009 when the lawsuit settled. But Double Fine’s leadership was not, and the distraction and stress took its toll on individuals and on our deliverables.

“The lawsuit was filed just as the game went Alpha, with a stipulation that it be heard prior to Gold Master being submitted—relegating Tim and myself and a cadre of team leaders to the unenviable job of information gathering, declaration writing, lawsuit reading, witness interviewing and all around non-game-making during the crunchiest, most critical time of development. The lawsuit took its toll on the team, on the company, on our product and on our optimism. Wrong, any way you slice it.”