OnLive will be released on June 17 for the PC and Mac, the same week as E3 2010. The cloud gaming service promises to offer instant streaming of PC games from various publishers such as Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, 2K Games and many more. The service will run for $14.95 and additional subscription plans will be announced closer to the launch.
OnLive will be available in the United States and the first 25,000 people that sign up for the service will get three months of access for free. Some of the launch titles will include Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age: Origins, Assassin’s Creed II, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Borderlands and Metro 2033. The MicroConsole TV Adapter that will connect OnLive to your TV will be announced later in the year.
Despite everything I’ve heard about the OnLive service, I’m still not sold on the idea. How about you? Have any of you been in the beta for OnLive and if so, what did you think of it?
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Nick and I are here at Sony’s press event, and when we walked in and took our front row seats, we found that we were flanked by Sony’s yet-to-be-named motion controllers. We don’t know what’s going on yet, but we’ll let you know as soon as you know.
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We’ve heard a bit from an unnamed source, actually. Before even seeing it, we hear that the device has a globe that changes colors to indicate players. There’s a trigger button called the T button. There’s a ring of buttons around a center button. We are hearing that the buttons are a little weird, though we’re not quite sure what that means.
More to come in the next hour or so. Stay tuned.
Update: There’s a game called Move Party on stage. Looks silly. It’s officially called PlayStation Move.
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What if you were to build a full-on third-person shooter from the ground up, with the controls and action that you’re used to, and then work the world of Transformers on top of it? That’s exactly what they did with Transformers: War for Cybertron. This way, the design focus was on control, and the end result of this is a game with third-person shooter controls and concepts that you’re already familiar with. Exploration of the Transformers world is like icing on the cake, especially for fans that would like to fully explore the lore.
So, think third-person, like Gears of War, but you’re controlling Autobots and Decepticons. Yeah, it’s like that, and it looks pretty sharp so far.
This game takes place totally on Cybertron, set in the last stages of the civil war there. This all goes down well before planet Earth is ever involved, so you need not worry about any of that Michael Bay nonsense. The opening sequence was set in Cybertron’s capitol, in a vast, skyscraper-filled, all metal world where doors and gateways sort of…transformed open. Imagine the peak of Transformers civilization, and you’ll have a good idea of how this city looked. Being set during the war, gunfire lit up the sky and ships came crashing down into set pieces. The stage looked to be perfectly set for an immersive third-person shooter.
T:RotC supports anytime jump-in-or-out 3 player cooperative play, and we were teased with the multiplayer aspect, though no details were revealed yet. With the co-op, you can play with anyone on your friends list, or let AI take over at any time. There’s two separate campaigns, with the stories of the Decepticons and Autobots being the obvious focus. Each feature completely different stories with completely different levels, characters, and content.
The first segment I saw was played as Optimus in his pre-Prime stage. The Autobots story side follows his rise as a leader. In this time of war, all hopes were on him for arising as a new leader for the Autobots, but he is still a humble up-and-comer at this point.
Gameplay wise, you’re looking at a game that is set up just like many other shooters that you’ve played. A similar HUD, damage and weapons status reflected in the mid-screen reticule, equippable weapons, grenades (on a dedicated button), and the like. R3? That’s a melee attack. The bots all have character-specific abilities. Optimus has a fast-moving dash ability and a resource-based AOE damage buff called Warcry.
I watched on as Decepticon troops were blasted and smashed in a cinematic style. Gateways opened up in a fantastic, multi-staged way (very Transformer-ish), and explosions lit up the sky. Later, I saw some turret game play. Optimus and his two mates were able to walk up to a turret and then unify with it, making a sort of fused weapon. Later I saw that you were able to break the turret off and use it as a limited-time weapon. And here’s a really nice touch: each weapon picked up sort of becomes a part of the bot using it. Even the colors change to match the user. For example, if Bumblebee were to pick up a gun, it would turn yellow.
The difference, of course, is the ability to transform. All the bots can transform anywhere and at any time between vehicle and bot forms. Driving and flying (as a jet) game play features the same controls as the walking/running play, encouraging players to switch as they please. In each form, each character will see different advantages, such as weapons that are set to specific modes. For example, while driving, you may not have access to your abilities, but you could have something like a ramming ability. Driving, you can both hover and boost. Hovering has players strafing while floating over the ground, making for fast movement. Changing does not change the pace of play. Boosting (holding down a trigger) is more traditional, like a nitro boost on wheels. Finally, I saw some jet game play. Each jet has two weapons, dodging and evades, like barrel rolls. The idea is to combo from one form to another to best fit the situation.
You might have plenty of shooter notches in your belt, but Transformers: War for Cybertron is unique in that you can change forms on the fly, making for a game that opens itself to a new kind of flexibility. And while we didn’t get to see much of it yet, I feel like these forms will work with the game’s three-player cooperative play in some pretty interesting ways, promoting teamwork play. Aside from speaking to the dedicated Transformers fan, I feel like Transformers: War for Cybertron is equally inviting to those want to try a new twist on the third-person shooter.
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EA Sports announced yesterday that a full sequel to the tremendously successful, critically acclaimed workout program
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If Ryan Kesler’s name sounds familiar to you, then you’re either a fan of hockey (perhaps specifically, of the Vancouver Canucks), or you watched the USA hockey team make their way to a silver medal in the 2010 Winter Olympics last month. (Or both!) Well, if you plan on picking up 2K Sports’
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Soren Johnson spent five years working on the Civilization series for Firaxis, eventually landing the job of lead designer for Civilization IV. He also did work on Spore, amongst many other things. He also gave the keynote address of the 2010 Serious Games Summit.
Johnson’s talk, “Theme is Not Meaning,” opened with a simple question: who decides the meaning of a game? The designer, or the player?
Hit the jump for the answer to that question, and a summary of Johnson’s keynote.
It’s the player.
The designer might want a mechanic or a story to mean one thing, but the player is the one intimately dealing with that game, and so his decision as to what the overall theme is will always be the correct one.
When comparing a game’s theme versus a game’s mechanics, though, what defines that game’s ultimate meaning? The theme is, in Johnson’s words, “essentially the skin of the game.” You can buy Star Wars Risk or Lord of the Rings Risk, but it’s still Risk from a mechanical standpoint no matter what the game tokens look like. But to the player, theme is important: you buy Star Wars Risk because you really like Star Wars.
So, thinking about theme, which is the true successor to Warcraft: World of Warcraft, or Starcraft? One takes place int he same fictional universe but with drastically different gameplay, while the other is basically “Warcraft in space.” Depending on whether you value theme over mechanic or vice-versa, your answer may differ.
Johnson moved on and talked about Ticket to Ride, which he called “one of the greatest board games to come out of the last decade.” Over the course of the game, you draw cards and create routes, and you get more points based on how long your route is. It’s a typical railroad management game.
The problem is that the manual thematically frames the game as a sort of Around the World in 80 Days-esque adventure, where the objective is to see which of the game’s characters can travel by rail to the most US cities in just 7 days. According to the manual and the designer-authored theme, the game isn’t about management and building an empire, it’s about travelling.
The actual mechanics, however, don’t jibe with this. If you’re just a traveler, why can you claim routes in any order? Why do claimed routes close for other players? Why does your physical presence on the game board not matter?
So, who decides what Ticket to Ride is about? The player will say they’re playing as a rail baron, and they’re not wrong just because the manual says otherwise – it’s their experience, and they’re the ones playing.
Going back to Risk, Johnson compared it against a similar board game called Democracy. Both games involve conquering territories and using army tokens, except for two seemingly minor distances: Risk has sequel turns while Democracy has simultaneous turns, and the combat in Democracy doesn’t involve any die-rolling.
Though these may seem like small changes, they completely change the experience of playing each game. Democracy is about mystery, and trying to read your opponents and imagine what they’ll do, and Risk is about everyone knowing what everyone else is doing, and potentially taking risks to go reach their objectives. There is a great coupling between the the thematic and the mechanical: “Risk is about risk,” Johnson said, “and Democracy is about Democracy.”
Having worked on Spore, Johnson brought it up as a thematically contentious game. It was pitched as a game about evolution, but the creature creator was more about encouraging and exploring the player’s creativity. The theme and the mechanics didn’t sync up.
But are there any games that are truly, mechanically about evolution? Johnson argued for World of Warcraft as a possible contender, due to the community-created idea of builds. Whatever type of character you wanna create, there is an optimum series of upgrades and things you need to do. Johnson referred to this as “Paladin Natural Selection,” as the idea of optimizing your own specialized character shares a lot in common with Darwin’s finches, even though the authored theme is about orcs and war.
Similarly, the Mario games are about timing, not plumbing. Peggle is about chaos theory, not unicorns. Even though Battlefield 2 and Left 4 Dead have different outward themes — “modern combat” and “zombies,” respectively — they are both actually about cooperation.
X-Com is about limited information, not aliens, thanks to the fog of war.
Gears of War is about cover, not aliens.
Starcraft is about asymmetry, not aliens. The three races are fundamentally different gameplay-wise. You can rush, you can boom, or turtle.
Galaga is about pattern matching, not aliens. The player has to predict where are the aliens gonna come from, where are they gonna end up.
After four consecutive examples in this vein, Johnson pointed out that “aliens” is a really common theme for games because it’s an easy theme to map your own mechanics onto.
Players come to certain games with expectations of what they should be, and sci-fi prevents you from relying on those sole expectations. When you play Civ IV, you feel that archers MUST do a particular thing based on what you know about archers — they’ve gotta be long-range attackers. Conversely, in Alpha Centauri, you have no idea what a “mind worm” is, so the designers can create totally new mechanics for that unit without worrying that they seem thematically wrong, in some way.
But what happens when a game’s mechanics don’t match its theme? Johnson brought up Jon Blow’s argument that BioShock claims to be about altruism and the difficulty of being a good person, but the fact that you get the same amount of Adam for either killing or harvesting all the little sisters makes this a thematic lie. “Players see right through this,” Johnson said.
So, who decides what a game like Spore is about?
Science magazine reviewed Spore’s basic depictions of biology, and found it a total failure.
That’s because they were sold on the idea that the game was specifically about evolution. Not only was Spore not giving you something meaningful about evolution – it was giving you WRONG information about evolution. If you bought into the whole “evolution” theme, that was a real problem.
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