Machinima Series Red vs. Blue Ends Tour of Duty
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Red vs. Blue, the cult hit web-video series created from in-game Halo footage, concludes its genre-defining run as it airs its 100th and final episode Wednesday evening. The comedy series took the emerging machinima medium mainstream.
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The journey had ended. All the years, all the games, all the moments were complete. They were girls again, Lisa and Dawn, and for a moment, everything else faded into the background.
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Toshiba will stop making its HD DVDs, ending a battle with rival format Blu-ray over which would be the standard.
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Gabe: I had planned on making a couple posts last week but I ended up getting some kind of devil virus. It was the sort of sick where you don't really sleep. You just curl up in the bathroom and hallucinate that wolves are encircling you. I'm feeling better now though.I had wanted to talk about some stuff but I forgot almost all of it during my spirit quest. Let me see if I can remember anything. Sorry if this is sort of scattershot.I did go to the Pokemon Tournament and I ended up taking fourth. It was my first tourney and I was using a pretty crazy deck I'd built just a few days prior. Kiko also went and he took fifth even though we had the same win loss record during the day. They used some special Pokemon math to push me in to the final four and give him fifth. I pretty proud of both of us. It was a new level of competition that we'd never seen before and I think we played really well.If you're a fan of Transformers I highly recommend the new animated series on Cartoon Network. Some people might be turned off by the look but I think it's incredible. It's got a very Teen Titans look which makes sense seeing as it's by the same people. Even in vehicle mode these transformers are expressive and full of character. I read Amulet over the weekend (don't believe the date on his site, it is already in stores) and if you are a fan of comics I suggest you do the same. I don't want to say too much about it. I think that Kazu is one of the most talented individuals working in comics today. With Amulet he has created something timeless. I've collected all your Dickerdoodle pictures and there's some pretty great stuff in there. Give me some time to sort through them and I'll start posting my favorites soon. I'll get Tycho to help me pick a winner and we'll find something cool here in the office as a prize.-Gabe out
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I had an exciting talk with Ryan Sohmer last week about the future of Animated PvP. We sat down and went over our plans for the year and tried to come up with the smartest plan of attack for moving forward. Working on the animated series has been one of the toughest and most rewarding creative [...]
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For the final installment of its wildly popular Xbox 360 first-person shooter trilogy, Microsoft pulls out all the stops short of actually blowing stuff up.
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Tycho: Two things: first, I forgot to mention one of the game's coolest features. When you wreck another person, their camera snaps a shot of them. And it's exactly the shot you would expect! The best ones I saw were from a guy who had a friend over, which showed him clearly frustrated and his cohort cackling with joy. It really added a lot to a game I was already really enjoying.Also, in a radical reversal - like you might see in a wrestling match - the Playstation 3 version is clearly the better of the two. Clearly. People can talk about the contrast of the comparative images all night, if they would like, slight texture differences and so forth. Both look excellent. The 360 version quite simply doesn't have it in the performance department. It runs, and well, but once you've played it on the PS3 you start to notice performance dips and lost frames that used to just fade into the background. Also, this is the rare case where the 360's consistent UI is actually a hindrance to a cohesive experience: PS3 owners pull up an entirely in-game menu to select friends to play with. 360 owners get the same experience up until the end, when you leave the game UI altogether while this huge blade thing sweeps in and obscures the game. Typically, joining and invites occur outside the actual game experience. It's only jarring here because the distinction between single player and multiplayer is so liquid. Still, I thought it was interesting, particularly if that becomes a trend. (CW)TB
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Tycho:  Having already purchased two fifths of The Orange Box over the last few years, the level of value I have derived from it is "fantastic" but not "supernatural."  For Gabriel, who never finished the second Half-Life and never purchased the first episode, the aforementioned Box represents an intimidating and possibly even brutal level of content for one's holiday dollar.  It's hard enough trying to keep up with all the games that are coming out, but when you start putting more than one game on the disc the difficulty is compounded.   We're lucky, then, than the best thing on there can be completed in only a couple hours.     I've tried to make my rounds through the disc, but I kept coming back to Portal until I'd completed it.  I expect every part of this strange collection to be full of virtue, in the way that Valve's anomalous position in the games industry allows: self-funded development in their sky-high Bellevue commune until each product sings.  But Portal is strange, even for them.  Risky on every axis, we may now say that the "first person puzzle comedy" has now been proven out as a genre.  The gameplay is strong, but Portal's unique combination of hilarity and menace elevates it, resulting in a few perfect, indelible hours of gameplay.          My TeamFortress 2 experience so far on the console has been fairly uneven.  Coming from the PC beta, where I sometimes battled with stability concerns but the games played smooth, I'm now grappling with the reverse.  I love the play experience, as I've already expressed, and I'm rarely of the opinion that having more players automatically improves a game - so the differential between the PC and 360 platforms isn't as important to me as it might be to others.  No, the problem with TF2 on the 360 (and likely the PS3, as well) is that peer to peer hosting just ain't cutting it.  There are games that seem to manage it better, but with Vista PCs authenticating into the service now peer to peer games should be an option.  This needs fixed overnight.     I'll try to complete the second Episode over the weekend, interleaved with finishing the writing on my own game, which has become more difficult since completing Portal.  I'm starting to think that Precipice needs a greater concentration of synthesized ladies.      I would be abdicating my duty if I neglected to mention the EA thing, which is really the EA/BioWare/Pandemic thing.  I was under the impression that BioWare and Pandemic had merged precisely to give themselves leverage over monolithic publishers like Electronic Arts, but who knows.  The biggest fallout in the short term is that, beyond the first Mass Effect, a multiplatform release is almost certain.  Of course, I wholly endorse that kind of thing, but I imagine that Microsoft might hold a different opinion.  After spending years promoting the series, enduring delays, and now having spent months beating the shit out of it in test, it's fair to say that MS was investing in a larger trilogy - one that gamers would associate exclusively with their brand.
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Tycho:  I watched this video myself on Friday, and then watched it again, and then watched it a third time when Khoo came in - providing commentary throughout, which I'm almost certain was unwelcome.  I urge you not to watch the embedded, nasty  version over at GameVideos, but to take advantage of their "Download" or "Watch Larger Version" options.  This way, you can obsess as I have - pausing on each screen of the character generator or battle interface, drinking deep of their  forbidden texts.  (CW)TB
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One of the year's weirdest and most exciting arena tours makes a scramble of the notion of red America versus blue America.
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Gabe: Wired has a pretty big article about Penny Arcade in it's latest issue. We've done a lot of interviews but Wired actually sent a writer named Chris Baker out to spend a few days in our office. Sort of like a geek version of Jane Goodall, He hung out with us all day and took notes while we played games and made the comic. Chris interviewed everyone here and even found time to question our wives and friends. Living with us the way he did I think he managed to get some pretty candid stuff out of Tycho and I. Things we might never have divulged during a standard interview. By the end of the week I think we all considered Chris a friend and a valuable addition to any Halo 3 team. The resulting article is a pretty complete look at our little company here as well as the most honest interview I think anyone's ever managed to get out of us. If you're interested you can read it online right here.   -Gabe out
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A beloved franchise comes to an end with the cancellation of 'Enterprise.'
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The sequel to the best-selling Xbox game, Halo, is finished, say its makers.
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Tycho:  Last year's iteration of Tiger Woods had a fairly serious glitch in multiplayer, in that the game could not be played in multiplayer mode.  Or, it worked sometimes, but there was no way to know how or when - what combination of dances and burning herbs would right this aloof mechanism.  It was most likely the rush of new owners securing tee-times on simulated links, but after a week of trying to use the product without success I decided that I had better things to do than try and contextualize EA's grave miscalculations.    The few times we were able to jump on and actually get in there were the kind of epic, unadulterated "guy fun" one sees lionized in hilarious summer comedies.  Golf as a sport (and as a videogame) has the strong undercurrent of shared misery that one usually finds only in dive bars.  The recently released demo for this year's product - on both PSN and XBL, now - recalled those moments to us, independent of the rage that bookended each round of powerfully communal spirit lodge golf.  This year's product has a huge focus on Gamernet, a kind of user created content initiative that will hopefully see them approach the performance of their online infrastructure with more conviction.     GameFace, their face making thing, has seen a significant jump this year as well - it can take pictures from your console's camera and create actual face geometry, and I understand that photos can even be uploaded online and then brought down on the console for processing.  We were able to get some pretty good results with the earlier versions of the tool, but this is very much appreciated.  Of course, in the wrong hands, every tool is a weapon.     Ubisoft is now saying that Haze is an exclusive exclusive for the PS3, and not one of them timed or partial exclusives one might see in the lesser houses.  Truly monogamous games are rare these days, and this is certainly a surprise, but this thing has been hopping back and forth for months.  There was even a leaked document that showed this "exclusive" being released a week later for PC and 360, though all traces of the document were soon obliterated.  Assassin's Creed was (as you'll recall) a PS3 exclusive as well.  For a week, at any rate.        I'm really excited for Haze, but I'm not sure if that's a universally held belief.  The writer made a good impression on me at E3 several years ago, and Free Radical makes a good impression on me whenever they make a videogame.  It's also a four player co-op experience with a unique, asymmetrical multiplayer proposition that you've probably read about.  But, as with Bioshock, I'm really in it for the story - and, also like Bioshock, I think anything that limits its potential audience is a serious mistake.
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Microsoft Corp. (MSFT.O) has closed a studio operation that made some of its sports video games, cutting 76 positions, a spokeswoman said on Friday.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Tycho: The whole reason I wrote that other post was to link the new article about it at 1up, and I didn't even manage to do that - here you go. In a way, I'm glad I didn't link it before - in the intervening period, a new episode of the 1up show has dropped that has a ton of interview and video material for every part of Episode 2 - including TF2 and Portal. It's the top video on this page. Unbelievably delicious.(CW)TB