Despite the new mobile OS being heralded as a return to form for Microsoft, the main features of WinPhone 7 aren’t the ones I’m most excited about. Instead, there’s a whole clutch of features that I think are going to be incredibly useful for anyone who uses their phone for social networking. The big one is the way that the phone integrates all your contacts from various networks into one place. While it’s great to see Facebook and Windows Live statuses sitting side by side, I’m hoping to see plugins for Twitter and maybe LinkedIn appear on here as well. I’m also hoping that it’ll play nice with Google’s Mail, Contacts and Calendar push services, although these will probably go through an Exchange-style interface.

The People hub: OS-level social network integration

The great thing for me here is that I can unlock the phone and see what’s going on – I don’t have to treat each service separately by going into it’s individual app. Since I started heavily using Twitter, I’ve almost abandoned Facebook and the huge number of contacts I have there. I’m hoping that centralised services like this will help to bring me back the other way and reconnect with my Facebook friends. More than this though, I’m hoping that it’ll allow for some great cross-pollination of ideas. Being able to forward posts from one service to another would be incredibly useful.

The other great thing for me is the integration of XBox Live. It finally means that the people I hook up with for videogaming don’t get treated as a separate entity but instead get pulled in to my other social networks. The inclusion of multiplayer gaming on the handset is great news as well – I think that turn based games such as Chess, Poker and even Civilization will work well on the platform. Although gaming has taken off in a big way on the iPhone, it still remains very much a single player affair. By introducing social gaming to the platform’s core, more multiplayer titles should start to emerge.

The Game hub: Finally, XBox Live integration

The way that WinPhone 7 draws social networks together and integrates them is a big plus. Microsoft aren’t the only people who have spotted this trend – Google recently launched their Buzz service in order to achieve much the same thing. The key difference though is in the level of integration – Microsoft are unifying the networks together, but not adding anything further on top of it. Google on the other hand are encapsulating all merged content with a Buzz wrapper, allowing comments and ratings to be added on almost anything regardless of where it came from. The key challenge for Google will be to mimic the level of integration into Android in a way that doesn’t upset an established userbase – not a straightforward challenge at all. There’s also a groundswell of opinion that goes against

I’m looking forward to getting some hands-on time with the Windows Phone when it comes out later this year. While it’s unlikely to be an iPhone killer, I think that having an alternative way of doing things and a different product in the market can only be a good thing. I think it will encourage more people to take the smartphone plunge, sitting alongside the iPhone and Android as a viable option. That said, the next smartphone battle isn’t going to be for users. With several directly competing platforms each competing for a developer’s attention, getting them on board and developing apps for one system in favour of another is going to be challenging.

The problem is that as gaming takes on more co-operative multiplayer aspects, it becomes less a discrete or isolated activity and more a part of that player’s social network. Although the underlying technology is different, there’s not much difference between challenging a friend to a game of Scrabble on Facebook or inviting them to play a few rounds with you on Street Fighter 4 on a console.

Uncharted 2: one way Twitter flow.

When you move to MMO or virtual world gaming, a player might build up a list of tens or even hundreds of social contacts based on the various activities that player might take part in. A player might also have a social network on Facebook, Twitter or Bebo that’s completely isolated. Where games do connect with social networks, it’s all one-way.

There are ways around this problem: PC gamers can run their games in a window in order to track their various social networks. Console gamers have it slightly easier – the Xbox 360 for example has integration with Windows Live Messenger but it’s limited to that single service. It’s not an elegant solution, which is why many gamers turn to separate devices to monitor their social networks.

The interesting thing is that this kind of activity, where you’re displaying small snippets of personalised information to a user, has been around for a while in the smartphone and web industries. A widget engine, can create an environment for small applications to run, which can then interface with services running on the internet. All you would need is for the widget engine to be incorporated either into the console or the PC operating system. Developing and publishing widgets is then a fairly simple affair.

There are several challenges that immediately become apparent when trying to encourage widgets as a platform for displaying external information in-game.

• Controlling the user experience: Developers are keen to refine and protect the look and feel of a game. System alerts are acceptable, but others are kept to the background. There’s no reason though why developers couldn’t extend the widget API in order to control look and feel, allowing widgets to blend in with the game interface. There are even imaginative ways this could be used, such as projecting messages onto in-game scenery before fading away, or adding Flickr photostream images as poster backdrops.
• Gaining mindshare: Persuading developers to take this on might be challenging. There is evidence though from the PC gaming platform that gamers are willing to learn the skills needed to customise their own gaming experience. These customisations can be shared with others, and there are already established networks such as Curse.com available for users to upload, rate and share addons.
• Allowing shutoff: Just like when you watch a film at the cinema, sometimes you want to switch off contact from the outside world. Features like whitelisting for important messages or contacts might also be an idea.
• Being extensible: New networks and utilities come online all the time, and it’s important for any framework to be flexible enough to cope with new additions. Likewise, being able to control which networks you interface with is pretty crucial.

Games have already started publishing updates to social networks. If these changes come into play, our social networks can start updating our games as well.

One particular emerging service is open authentication. Groups such as the OpenID Foundation have emerged in order to promote a common set of standards for developers to use, while several decentralised OpenID providers have sprung up. In essence it all sounds like a good thing, with a site visitor benefiting by being able to use an existing username and password combination. The developer also wins by only having to use a set of freely available modules in order to support authentication instead of designing it themselves from scratch. Everything sounds perfect, right?

As you’ve probably guessed, there is a fly in the ointment. That fly is the relentless barrage of security nightmares that we face every time we switch our computer on and connect with the outside world. Everything from phishers to keyloggers are out there to try and find a chink in our virtual armour or our achilles heel. All of them lie in wait, hoping for a whiff of a password or a hint of a credit card number that they can then trade in underground markets. Don’t think that videogames are immune from this as well – indications are that credentials for World of Warcraft accounts can sell for up to twice as much as a set of credit card details.

Of course, the next step is to look at where your open authentication might be used. A collection of social networking sites might not be that big a deal – both Facebook and Twitter are setting themselves up as identity providers. At the moment, all that you’d be likely to lose is your reputation if someone managed to gain access to your Twitter account, particularly if you have a large number of followers. If it becomes possible to access your web-based email through the same service then suddenly all the other websites you use with a “forgotten your password?” function suddenly become vulnerable as well. This might expose things like names and addresses of friends and family members, which other online communities you visit and how you access them, and so on.

Paranoid yet? Potentially you should be, but that doesn’t mean that a solution can’t be implemented. Two-factor authentication has been kicking around for years, with reliance on something you know (a password) combined with something you have (a fingerprint, a retina scan or a key-ring with a digital display that changes every minute) in order to get around keyloggers and phishers sniffing your credentials out of the ether. Trouble is, fingerprint and retinal scanners are expensive, while it’s difficult to make a case for sending out tokens and dongles when a firm is effectively supplying a free service to customers.

There is another option. With the mobile phone becoming an increasing necessity in our lives, it’s becoming safer to assume that anyone using popular online services has one. As a result a number of free apps have emerged in order to support two-factor authentication, most notably from Blizzard Entertainment and Verisign. With these, the only cost is in developing the app itself before uploading it to the handset supplier app stores.

Twitter has also been moving towards OAuth as a way for granting applications access to a user’s account. The trouble with such techniques though is that they still fall back on the standard username and password, except that the user is logging in to Twitter directly instead of the website requesting access. It also grants access permanently until removed, meaning that the third party now has continual access to your details instead of the time required to support the transaction. For occasions where regular access is not required, the use of OAuth tokens is not suitable. That doesn’t mean that OAuth should be scrapped entirely – for apps that regularly need access to our individual identity data, a periodic refresh mechanism is fine. Sitting it alongside a solution that works for those one-off moments, or even to approve regular-access apps/OAuth tokens, would be a good move.

But why bother going to all this expense? At the end of the day, it’s about two things: the damage that someone misusing your credentials can cause, and the amount of time it’ll take to fix them again. Having to fix either of them is unappealing, yet whenever we use open authentication we run the risk of this happening. It’s crucial that this problem is addressed as part of the move towards identification services in order to maintain confidence in the social networking infrastructure as it moves to support them. Without it, all it takes is a couple of large scale compromising incidents for growth in the medium to stall.

As always, comments are welcome. If I’m wide of the mark or spot on, feel free to add your thoughts.

The service is called OnLive, and it’s the product of seven years of development by incubator Rearden Studios and it’s founder Steve Pearlman. In fact, if you read Steve’s resumé you’ll find firms like Atari and Apple listed on there. Simply put, OnLive uses a cloud computing platform in order to provide a gaming experience to end users, regardless of the platform being used. The processing, interfacing and rendering is all managed on a backend server farm with the result streamed to a simple device that decodes the stream to display on the TV. For the PC and Mac, you don’t even need the device as all the work can be done on something as low-spec as a Macbook Air or even a netbook. All the grunt and horsepower you’d normally have in the latest console or high end gaming PC can now reside in a warehouse miles away from you, and you’d never need to worry about upgrading again. Sounds great, right?

To get into a bit more detail, the broadband connection suggested by the service is about 1.5mbps for standard 480p TV, while hi-def 720p will need a meatier 5mbps connection. This is great news for those of us huddled round the local exchanges, but for those out in the sticks the service might not run too well. It works by using a new video compression algorithm that inserts about a 1ms delay into shunting the video to it’s destination, but when you compare that to the 100ms delay that can be experienced when playing multiplayer games in Europe it quickly becomes tiny in comparison. There are five server clusters planned for when the service launches in the Summer once beta  trials are complete, hopefully meaning that network latency is kept to a minimum. The box itself uses a micro-USB socket for power, with a paur of full-size USB sockets there for additional controllers or a mouse/keyboard combo, and has HDMI to squirt the signal up to your HD-ready TV. There’s also an optical SPDIF for hooking it up to audio gear as needed. Bluetooth is also in there for those of us who hate wires trailing everywhere. For those who want to play on PC or Mac, you’re looking at a 1MB web browser plugin before you can start shopping for games. Once you’ve picked and purchased a title, it’s on your screen in single digit seconds.

The OnLive Console: Boxing clever?

There’s a little bit of community stuff in there as well. As well as being able to spectate on other users playing their games, you’ll be able to build up a friends list for multiplayer action and also capture your own game sessions as brag videos, should you want to show off your skills. Since the video is captured in the cloud, it’s online and shareable instantly in all it’s high-quality glory. Big-name publishers like EA Games, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft and Atari are among those who are signed up to offer games on the system, although there won’t be any platform exclusives as there are with traditional consoles. 16 games were shown including the new Prince of Persia, Mirror’s Edge, Burnout: Paradise and Crysis. Even independent developer 2D Boy has ported the incredibly popular World of Goo to the platform. Transferring a PC game to the OnLive service apparently takes a couple of days, with an SDK available to make it easy.

So what’s the snag? As with any new service the price has to be right in order to make it appealing to the gamers. While the price of the box is said to be very cheap (we’re looking at the £50 to £100 mark) it’s the ongoing costs that are the great unknown with this one. It’s not clear if you’re going to be paying a subscription in the same way as Xbox Live, or if you’ll be renting or buying games. Trialling games will be available to give gamers an idea of what a title is like before picking it up, something that XBox Live supports but only if you download a demo copy to the console. Although the service might be cheap and easy to pick up and install, it could work out to be more expensive over time. There’s also the mindset of more traditional gamers that owning your own consoles and media is important. There are a lot of Super Nintendo and Sega Megadrive consoles kicking around that get pulled out of the attic and dusted off every so often, and some gamers are rightly concerned that they’ll still be able to enjoy the games they buy today in five to ten years time. There’s also the variable effects of the network – with broadband providers having concerns over the use of peer-to-peer, BBC iPlayer (and Hulu in the States) and anything else that required a constant level of bandwidth there may be difficulty in getting broadband providers to agree to treat the service fairly.

That said, there’s definitely potential to the service. It might be that the service has legs initially, but I’d probably suggest that it would work incredibly well with Valve’s Steam service. There are also a handful of other ways I can think of that could make service uptake even better, but I’ll wait to see what other announcements come out of the GDC. I am curious though as to whether other applications of this cloud service have been thought of by Rearden Studios, and I’m sure other experts will pick up on them shortly. It’s an interesting development, and time will definitely tell if it proves to be a success. Till then, roll on summer!

Update: IGN have a video demo of the service here. Gametrailers have video interviews with Steve Pearlman here(part 1) and here (part 2)

PlayStation 3: Nice box, hefty price

Starting off, we have a pile of stuff around the Playstation 3. There’s been murmurings around a price cut for months now, with developers crying out for one and Sony steadfastly refusing to do anything about it. With this there’s a bit of history – at launch the Playstation 3 wasn’t a must have accessory. People weren’t queueing up to buy it as they had all picked up Xbox 360s and were having fun with them. The only real pitch Sony had was to position it as a cheap Blu-ray player as well as a games console and pick up some purchases from the enthusiast AV/home cinema crowd. Moving forward, now they’ve got a stack of top quality games on the platform but there’s still nothing there to help persuade players to switch from the Xbox or Wii. In fact, there’s a handful of reasons why players like myself aren’t running out there and buying one.

• That £300 price tag. It doesn’t matter if the build quality is better or the technology’s superior if there’s two other consoles out there for significantly less dough. With the 360 for £170 and the Wii at £180, I’m really struggling to justify parting with three hundred notes for Sony’s box. I don’t have a blu-ray player and my TV only does 720P, so I’m in no rush to upgrade to hi-def film and will probably only do so when my upscaling DVD player breaks.
• The friends list tie-in. On Xbox Live I’ve got all my friends listed there. I get alerts when they come online and get invites to multiplayer sessions through it. It’s all seamless, and it all ties in with my MSN/Windows Live neatly. If I move over to the PS3, I lose all that and have to rebuild it again. Coupled with the problem that most of my mates aren’t PS3 owners anyway and it means that most of my tine would be made up of solo play or multiplayer with some random teenager with Tourette’s.
• The lack of compelling exclusives. Most of the stuff I want to play is available on both platforms and where you have an exclusive deal on one you can usually find an equivalent title on another (think Gears of War, Killzone and Resistance: Fall of Man). There is stuff on there like Flower and Pixel Junk: Eden, but these are just downloadables and certainly not something I’d splash out a huge chunk of wedge just to play.

Now I might not be your typical Sony customer, but it’s just the way I read things at the moment. The only thing the PS3 has going for it at the moment is the technology. If it can hang in there for about another year, you’ll start to hear developers complaining of capping out on what the XBox 360 is capable of. If that starts to happen and you get simultaneous releases that have a huge difference in quality between versions on the two consoles, you might find people more willing to bite the bullet and migrate. Until then though, about all Sony can do is change the price and encourage more people to give the system a try.

The PhysX Card: Substituted with a Software API

The next thing I’m struggling to grapple with is the flavour of the month feature of doing physics work on the GPU. This has been kicking around ever since NVidia bought Ageia, a small company that specialised in making expansion cards and an accompanying API (called PhysX) purely to deal with physics based calculations. The idea was that effects could be made more realistic by performing more accurate collision modelling, cloth effects and so on. NVidia bought the tech, turned it into a software API and got it it run on their own graphics processors. They’ve now licensed the tech to Sony for use in the Playstation 3, meaning that developers can now use the GPU instead of one of the Cell cores for physics work. I’m still trying to work out why anyone would bother with this, as devs are still struggling to push the Cell to it’s maximum performance with current titles. Besides, most places seem to be using Havok for their middleware, so why trying to grapple with something else that’s not really needed? And wouldn’t it be more sensible for someone like Intel to pick this one up if it was really needed and cram it into their line of processors before shunting the frames off to the GPU for assembly and rendering? The whole thing feels like a tick-box feature without any real use and will probably be made redundant with CPU development over time, just like maths coprocessors.

Finally, this year’s conference seems to have a large chunk of it devoted to the legendary Casual Gamer. The general punditry goes that the Nintendo Wii is a casual gaming platform designed for casual gamers. As it’s shown that there is a market out there for casual gamers due to it’s astronomical sales, the logic follows that developers should be making games to target them. Now, without getting into the whole debate over what a casual gamer is (I’ll save that for another blogpost) are these people actually picking up many thirdparty titles to play on their console? I’d love to see some stats on this, as my gut feel (and I hope I’m wrong) is that most Wii owners are playing Wii Fit/Music/Sports, or a Mario, Sonic or Zelda game and not much else besides. My other wonder is how platforms like the DS or iPhone come into it – are these casual gamers trying something out, or hardcore gamers having a bit of a “game snack” during their free time? Again, I’d love to see some stats.

So, while the yearly developer gathering takes place it’ll be interesting to see what comes out. I also wonder what their hopes are for the year and what direction they’d like to see the industry head in. Till then, it’ll be gamers like ourselves who are peering in from outside, guessing at what’s going to happen next. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll work out if I fall into the Hardcore or Casual bracket.

Nokia N-Gage: Clunky

A long while back I was asked on my thoughts around gaming on the mobile phone. At the time I replied that there was no simple answer, that there were a number of scenarios that made being able to design strategies and methods for achieving success in these markets very difficult. Problems ranging from device compatibility through to user experience all contributed to make the platform unappealing. Compared to the familiar and well-used processes used to support traditional video games, the mobile phone was treated as a niche platform. A couple of attempts were made to crack the mechanism – Nokia’s N-Gage phones were one such example – but ultimately they failed to gain a foothold in the marketplace due to only offering a limited range of games. So what’s changed since then? In a word, everything.

Apple's App Store

Back in July 2008, Apple launched their App Store, offering 500 applications that customers could download direct to their iPhone. In the weekend since it was launched over 10 million applications were downloaded, with those chosen being a mix of free and paid content. Since then, estimates have put the amount of revenue the App Store at $1 billion with Apple keeping 30% and passing the rest on to developers. Fast forward to late January and Apple are now saying that there’s been 500 million downloads from a catalogue that’s expanded to 15,000 applications. By far the largest category of applications on the App Store is games, although it’s impossible to quantify how many of those are ‘limited feature’ free versions in order to tempt players into forking out for the full blown version. Suffice it to say, games have been a huge success on the iPhone. It’s no wonder that traditional games developers are taking a keen interest in the platform for future titles. Not only that, but Microsoft, Palm, RIM’s Blackberry, Google’s Android, Samsung and Nokia are all working on having their own app store catering for paid applications shortly. It’s unclear if any of these other stores Will be as successful, as Apple already has a billing relationship with their customers via iTunes and used their close relationship with the existing OS X developer community to ensure a selection of applications was available at launch.

That’s not to say that the Cupertino crew have had things all their own way – commentators feel that being reliably able to search for games or get auto-recommended a list of titles to try would be a huge welcome, as would being able to look for top rated games in particular genres.  The shop storefronts also feel a little static, with little scope for uploading a youtube video of the app running or audio commentary from the developer. That said, there’s also the question of what the App Store as a concept will introduce for desktop software. For desktop videogames at least, an online shop has been kicking around for some time, either in the form of Steam or Direct2Drive. With all of this laid out in front of them, surely it must represent some kind of Golden Age for developers and publishers to connect smoothly with customers? Well, not quite.

The trouble with developing videogames is that they cost money. In the case of PC and console videogames it can be a as much as $30 million, while customers are increasingly concerned about the value they get from the games they buy. Conventional industry wisdom states that for a game with top flight production values, a publisher will need to shift about 1 to 2 million units in order to break even, due to the complexity of the latest consoles and the relative cost of developing for them. Compare that with the iPhone, where a nine year-old can write code that will run on the platform. But a shallower platform, where users are becoming accustomed to a low price-point in games brings it’s own problems, and although indie developers can crank out a game relatively easily, they find they have to keep producing rapidly in order to sustain that income. There are already development tools that can make the process a little more streamlined, but largely speaking it’s still a new area. Even then, there’s always the complication about developing a game for all of the emerging app stores – which ones you pick, how you spread development, what maximum technology level you develop for. It’s always a risk that you’ll start developing for a platform that falls out of favour, leaving you with a game but no market to sell it to.

Aurora Feint: Asynchronous

So, is there an alternative? Well, it just so happens that there might be. One relatively unexplored area of videogame development on the mobile platform is the MMO. Currently, there are some tentative steps into this area through titles such as Aurora Feint, but these tend to be asynchronous experiences where the player can chat with others using an IRC style interface and use ghosting (competing against another player’s saved session) in order to provide the multiplayer experience. Parallel Kingdom allows players to play alongside each other using GPS, but relies on a solid data connection to maintain gameplay continuity. In a realm where data connections aren’t always present, it’s important to either allow action to take place at a slower place so that every player gets a chance to take part in the action, or allow portions of the game to be carried out offline. Luckily, the concept of turn-based games has been around for a fair while, with their ‘tick’ based variants such as OGame being particularly suited for massively multiplayer gaming. From there, it’s a matter of developing a sequence of game mechanics and content, as well as the clients that run on the various mobile devices that are available. The wonderful thing about developing the infrastructure in the first place is that it can be recycled – the same mechanisms could be used to facilitate a football team management game as much as one revolving around tribal warfare.

There are, of course, some sticking points. How do you get people to pay for the thing? Traditionally web or browser-based MMOs have relied upon advertising for funding, while client-server variants have used either a subscription based mechanism or a microtransaction system where in-game items are sold for real currency. Either are possible with a mobile-based MMO, with transactions being possible in real-time via Premium SMS, or by charging an in-game allowance using facilities such as PayPal. There’s enough flexibility to even employ different charging approaches for different games released.

But what about that niggling doubt about developing mobile clients for all those different devices? Well, recently I had the luck of catching up with Paul Golding, who is somewhat of an expert in the field of mobile web technologies. It may be that one option is to open up the infrastructure and allow users, fans and so on to develop their own clients. Provide a standard interface for players to get a feel for the game and perhaps a client or two for a couple of major platforms, but otherwise keep it open and allow others to generate their own frontends to the game.  After all, players are already tweaking their games to create custom interfaces, so why not go the whole hog and allow them to create the client? It mimics the approach of Twitter, a fully web-based app that took off once others started developing clients and offshoot services to integrate with it. By allowing others to hook into the game’s exposed services, you increase the potential to promote it purely by word of mouth as well as avoiding funding development for a multitude of clients. And as long as you keep getting subscriptions, transactions or advertising eyeballs, you only stand to make more from your original concept.

So, while mobile gaming has come a long way already, we’re still only at the first step. By intertwining the data connection and payment relationship already in most mobile phones with compelling games that hook into a player’s other social services, it’s possible to really move forward. This amalgam of old and new ideas might just do the trick.

Chrono Trigger: old school

First up is one that’s hitting the shelves this weekend: Chrono Trigger on the Nintendo DS. For European gamers, this has been the end of a fourteen year wait for it to finally reach our shores. First released on the SNES back in 1995 and re-released on the PlayStation in 1999, it’s a traditional Japanese role-playing game from the same team that produced the hugely popular Final Fantasy series. But while we’ve seen twelve iterations of the FF storyline and number thirteen due to launch this year, Chrono Trigger only got a showing in Japan and North America. The rest of the world has been able to enjoy this classic since November last year, with Europe slated for 6th Feb. It’s not clear why there’s been such a gap in release schedules, with one possibility being a fear that European gamers brought up on more western fare would shun a traditional JRPG.

In fact, the DS is becoming a home for classic RPGs that are being brought out into the light for a new generation of gamers. Final Fantasy III, IV and Tactics have all made their way to the handheld, along with The World Ends With You and Dragon Quest IV. This may actually be a smart move, as RPGs typically take up many hours of time to complete. Although games like Fable II and Fallout 3 are doing well on home consoles, they require a fair amount of investment and commitment in order to be able to get the most out of them. As an alternative, a compact handheld that offers the ability to pick it up and play it pretty much wherever you are is ideally suited for games that have a long and involved storyline. Short session games can be fun, but their repetitive nature can bore players quickly. It’s no wonder then that the Nintendo DS is being seen as the RPG console of choice for 2009. It may well be that this trend migrates to other gaming platforms such as the iPhone, although this will probably involve generating new games instead of porting existing titles, as mainstream developers have yet to seize the platform in any meaningful way.

F.E.A.R. 2: Scary stuff

Next up is F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin, a horror-based first-person shooter from Monolith Productions. The guys over at Monolith have been in the first-person market for a while now, coming out with the successful Shogo: Mobile Armor Division (a heavily Anime influenced shooter featuring 30-foot tall mechs) back in 1998. Since then they’ve tended towards the horror end of the market with Condemned: Criminal Origins and the original F.E.A.R. The demo is currently available to download for XBox360, PlayStation 3 and PC, and is currently tailored to showing off some of the unique gameplay mechanics and storytelling techniques used in the game, rather than setting the scene or leading players in.

One of the key differences between the new release and the original is the use of open spaces in level design. One of the criticisms leveled at F.E.A.R. was that levels largely consisted of narrow corridors in order to help facilitate the close quarters combat and maintain the mood and atmosphere of the game. In the sequel, enclosed spaces are broken up with lobby areas and atriums, or completely open air segments. This in turn has required a development in the combat systems used and the AI that creatures have in these open environments. It’s this kind of opening up that has allowed the game to pull in influences from across the horror spectrum, and while it remains rooted in Japanese style, elements of Nightwatch and even Saw are noticeable. It should mean that rather than bashing the player with the same experiences over and over and eventually losing impact from it, that the experiences are mixed up a little, keeping the pacing fresh and interesting.

Mechs: further gameplay options

One of the other additions to gameplay in the F.E.A.R franchise is the ability to pilot mechs. These aren’t the same gigantic robots that are found in Shogo, but instead have a similar look to the ED-209 from Robocop. Again, these serve to break up gameplay slightly – instead of being hunted by a number of AI creatures the roles are reversed as you chase them down with rockets and chainguns. It’s one of those dynamics that will work well if used sparingly, but trying to scare someone who’s inside an impenetrable suit of mech armour is a tough job at the best of times.

Both inside and outside mechs players can also invoke a “slo-mo” mode – a mechanic that works in a similar way to Bullet Time in The Matirx, or the Time Stop spell in Fable II. Although it allows for creative shooting or providing extra time to dive into cover, it’s not clear at the moment if it’ll be a key gameplay element or just another crutch for players to lean on. The demo hasn’t really shed light on this either, so it will probably have to wait until release to see how it shapes up. Either way, F.E.A.R 2 promises to deliver a different experience to Half-Life 2 or Halo 3 while still retaining a broad appeal to first-person shooter fans.

Street Fighter IV: Classic gameplay, gorgeous looks

Another treat for this month is the hugely anticipated Street Fighter IV. What’s surprising about this game is that it’s a complete reinvention of what many judge to be the best fighting game ever made – Street Fighter II. This arcade classic, first released in 1991 before being ported to various consoles, has been universally acclaimed for it’s cameplay, winning several awards. It even features in the Guinness World Records as the first fighting game to use combos and the biggest selling coin-op game. With such a strong heritage behind it, it’s hardly surprising that a new take was made on this classic game.

The great thing is that seasoned gamers who grew up on the original will feel right at home with the new version. All the old button sequences are still there and all the old combos still work, so if you remember how to throw a fireball or pull off a dragon punch, you’ll still be able to manage it this time round. There are a few new quirks on the gameplay in there, such as unblockable focus attacks that charge up over time, but the vast majority of feedback so far indicates that this is an authentic remake of a game that is still dear to many older videogamers.

In order to get the best out of the title, Capcom have done a deal with Mad Catz to produce officially licensed arcade sticks and other controllers. In lavish attention to detail, the Tournament Edition stick uses the same parts as the coin-op arcade machines in order to recreate the exact same look and feel. It could be said that this is over the top, and the £150 price tag much too high in today’s credit crunch economy, but Mad Catz seem confident that the stick will sell out rapidly based on the preorders already taken. Fingers crossed, the game will play well regardless of the controller you have in your hands.

So, while none of the titles above offers something strictly new, they all bring something that was classic for it’s time and show it to a new generation of gamers. In a similar way to the Lord of the Rings film trilogy or the soon to be released Watchmen movie, they widen the audience of something that fans have been enjoying for years. And just like fans of the original books or comics can also be fans of the films, so are players of the original games likely to be fans of this month’s new releases. There certainly seems to be a lot to enjoy here.

Almost any videogame can be neatly divided into three discrete sections or domains. The first and probably the most understood from a computing perspective is the technology that underpins it. This includes components such as the graphics and physics engines, networking facilities and so on. Some developers tend to construct the technology themselves, while others use middleware and toolsets available from various third parties. The second component is the set of rules, mechanics and principles that make up the game, such as lining up blocks to make complete rows in Tetris or traversing a series of obstacles and enemies in Super Mario Bros. Rules and mechanics can govern how a player can interact with various aspects of the game, but crucially also involve how elements may behave reactively to player behaviour. Finally, videogames have a story, plot or setting that surrounds the game and provides meaning for why the game mechanics exist. Some game aspects, such as art, model work, music and so on may straddle more than one area, as they may have an impact on the technologies employed or the way the story is revealed to the player. It’s also fair to say that different games will have different weightings on one of the three aspects, with a first person shooter being more reliant on a strong game engine, while an RPG would be more focused on providing a strong game world and a cohesive set of quests for the player to work through.

While this is all well and good, what relevance does it have? Well, as is traditional at this time of the year, the great and good of videogaming journalism have been providing their feedback on the greatest games of 2008. But while the similarity between the titles is interesting in it’s own way, even more so are the reasons why the particular videogames have been chosen. Titles like Fallout 3, Fable II, LittleBigPlanet and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King seem to be continually cited in “best of 2008″ lists not because they introduced new technologies but because of the stories they told (or in the case of LBP the stories it allows the players to tell). One quote I heard from the Custom PC Podcast was that 2008 was “the year of the story”, and while I’m not sure I feel as strongly about last year’s selection of releases, I can see where the quote was coming from. Technical aspects of a game can be rapidly developed through the use of off-the-shelf middleware and toolsets such as the Havok physics engine and the modeller/animator 3ds Max. Even entire game engines are available, with Valve offering Source, Crytek offering the CryEngine and id Software developing id Tech 5. Such an abundance of options available allow a developer to free up more resources developing and refining the game itself.

It’s difficult to say though if videogames are developing richer stories because they are able to spend more time on it, or if the industry as a whole is generally becoming more mature. Nowadays it’s not unusual to find a member of the development team responsible for the storyline or background of a new title. Professional writers are frequently consulted during development, from generating rough ideas or concepts through to penning the plot single-handed. As Clive Barker’s Jericho demonstrates, having a strong plotline and setting doesn’t guarantee an excellent game, just as Mirror’s Edge demonstrates a game where exposing more of Rhianna Pratchett’s story may have enhanced the game further. That said, there does feel to be a strong trend from technologically groundbreaking games such as Quake to more generally inspiring titles such as Grand Theft Auto 4 and Left 4 Dead.

There is one other striking feeling about the “Best of 2008″ lists – the domination of consoles as opposed to PC versions. Admittedly there’s the almost perennial argument about the death of PC gaming and the general failure of Microsoft’s “Games for Windows” initiative, or how Spore being the most pirated game of 2008 either demonstrates the folly of DRM protection or the folly of developing for the PC. That aside, the PC has traditionally been the traditional technology showcase for videogaming, being the platform where the newest concepts from industry stalwarts would be demonstrated. With consumers becoming less and less interested in the cutting edge of videogaming tech (as record sales of the Wii have shown), will the PC’s standing diminish? It almost feels as if the Xbox has done too well in encouraging PC developers to port to the console, as for me at least almost all the titles I’m getting excited about for 2009 are being launched either simultaneously or exclusively on the consoles. Could it be that providing the hardcore gaming community with a continually refreshed visual extravaganza is becoming less of a priority, and that instead developers are focusing on games that cater more for the middle road of gaming while letting the middleware developers provide the technological upgrades on a slower path?

For me, the videogaming industry will trend in similar ways to the cinematic one. By pulling away from being a direct innovator of technology but instead influencing technological development and direction and instead focusing on delivering a rich and entertaining product that many more of us can enjoy. Just like the minstrels from days gone by, who would seek to entertain us with the skills they had and the instruments available, so do I think today’s developers will share new tales with us with an altogether more modern ensemble.

Tabula Rasa: Neither epic, nor shiny

This whole line of thought got me thinking: are there any other benefits that a more critical analysis of games can deliver? If you compare videogames to other media in popular culture a film may get re-cut or scenes re-shot in response to feedback from critics and test audiences.  A song may get remixed or re-recorded if it’s recommended by disc jockeys or doesn’t go down well at a nightclub. A book may get rewritten in parts, depending on the advice from publishers and reviewers. But how often does a videogame get redesigned based on feedback from journalists or beta testers? How often is a game tested not to make sure that it’s bug free, but that it’s fun to play? It may be somewhat wide of the mark, but from my own experience it’s a rare thing to happen. Sometimes I wonder if Tabula Rasa would have been a better game if I’d made more effort to provide detailed feedback, instead of putting trust in Richard Garriot’s in-game chat during the beta test that numerous changes would occur. As it is now, the game is being closed down next month barely a year after it started up. The same applies to Age of Conan, now suffering an exodus of players and having to close over half the servers despite problems with the game being well known early on. Although these are just two titles, it does pose the question: how many titles could have benefited from early exposure to critics in videogaming media? Would it have made a title that’s average and mediocre into something better? It’s difficult to say for certain, but there is a feeling that there should be a two-way street, and that as well as informing the public on videogames in production we should feel confident that our desires and opinions are also fed back by the media in order to help create games we’ll love. Of course, this whole topic could be neatly nullified simply by assuming that I have an overactive conscience and a desire to rescue games which, in all fairness, should be allowed to die.

Digressions aside, one of my recent topics was about the recent closure of EGM and a chunk of 1UP.COM’s online content. The 1UP Show was a great example of gamers talking about videogames with each other, exploring aspects that made each game compelling and differentiated it from others in the genre. The shows never felt like a review, instead taking on the feel of a discussion or debate amongst friends, just like the ones we all have with our own friends about the games we love. The great news is that the producers behind the show are back with their own firm – Area 5 – and a brand new show called CO-OP. The new 30 minute film is available in high quality on Youtube and Vimeo, and although the camera footage is a bit washed out in places the overall package is a tier above the already good output that was at 1UP. Whether or not you followed them before, I’d really recommend taking the time out to sit back and treat yourself to something new for half an hour. Personally I’m amazed that after what happened earlier this month, these guys are going right back to what they love – creating something we can all enjoy.

Aion: JRPG influences

One concept that pretty much every videogamer has become aware of, even if it’s only at some subconscious level, is the idea of a Japanese role-playing game or JRPG. This unique variant originated from Western tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons being imported into Japan and translated, with homegrown variants springing up shortly afterwards.  These then translated into videogame products, which is where series like Final Fantasy come in. It’s difficult to say if later Korean MMOs such as Lineage are a direct result of the JRPG videogames, but there are some heavy influences that come through in areas such as art direction (smooth, anime-style characters) and gameplay choices (long, drawn out and repetitive grinding sessions). Players seem to love them, with Lineage notching up 3 million players at it’s peak, while the Final Fantasy series has enjoyed continued international acclaim. It comes as no surprise then to see NCsoft try and explore this market again with a high-fantasy MMO that has a distinctly different taste to the orcs, goblins and kobolds that typically inhabit more Western fare.

Atreia: a world of two halves

The setting of the game lends it to a range of environments, with one half of the world of Atreia being continually bathed in light while the other languishes in darkness.  These two halves occupy the inside of two hemispheres, with the rubble and rock between them described as ‘The Abyss’. The background to the story involves the central tower being shattered halfway, with the inhabitants of each hemisphere blaming the other. Thus, the stage is set for conflict between the radiant Eloys and the shadowy Asmodians, providing PVP fanatics with all the reason they need to gank with impunity. Mindful of the upset that can be caused if one faction starts to dominate, a quirky design trick is to introduce an AI controlled faction called the Balaur in order to maintain some sort of balance. Depending on the amount of control each faction exhibits, the Baular can switch sides from fighting alongside to against them. It’s a clever solution to a problem that can cause heavy issues in PVP specific realms where one faction heavily outnumbers another.  NCsoft are trying to christen this type of realm design ‘PvPvE’, but it does feel to be more of a case of PvE with a special PvP zone between the two PvE areas.

Eloy: Bunch of posers

Aion: The Tower of Eternity has all the feel of a Japanese or Korean videogame. The visuals are stunning to look at, with clever texture and model work benefiting from the Crytek CryEngine used in Far Cry. Atmospheric lighting and glow effects are all there, with sunny Elysium, gloomy Asmodae and the Abyss all providing a range of environments to work with. Although influences from other fantasy settings are evident, the styling and art direction provide enough distinction to make this feel a game in it’s own right rather than just a collage of borrowed ideas. For a start, nothing looks ugly – not the creatures, not the landscapes, not the non-player characters – nothing. Whether it’s due to it’s unique heritage or just a by-product of game lore, but there is a definite aura of beauty about it. The characters themselves look like they’ve come out of a top anime movie, complete with Dragonball-Z hairstyles, plated armour and humorously over-sized weapons. The character choices themselves though are fairly straightforward – you can either choose an Asmodean or an Eloy, but there are no other racial choices available. Customisation is in a similar ball-park to Age of Conan, with sliders for almost every option conceivable. While having a limited number of choices is likely to upset players who want to play Mr Ugly, it does mean that all those issues such as racial abilities and balancing them are removed.

Classes: Simple choices

Character development is also straightforward. Four classes are initially available: Scout, Warrior, Mage and Priest. From there, players can later specialise into one of two subclasses, depending on what their personal preference is. For a warrior, this means specialising as either a tanking Templar or a general combat Gladiator. Unlike other games where switching between these two types is easy, in Aion the change becomes permanent. Although this can be a limiting choice, characters can also pick up ’stigma stones’ from the corpses of defeated monsters and use them to gain the abilities of other classes. This can mean that a mage would be able to wear heavy armour, or a warrior could gain some healing abilities.  Characters are restricted with how many stigma stones they can use and when they can swap them, and some stones will be harder to find and become bound to the character when used. It does mean though that some of the characters designed mainly for group roles such as healers and tanks will have a little more versatility during solo play. It also means that character skills can be bought and sold, providing something new for player economies to haggle over. Characters also gain the ability to fly at their tenth level, although it’s fairly tightly controlled. At first, a character can only fly for a minute, although this can be increased through the use of items, potions and general character development. Flight will also be useful in combat, with a number of flight-only abilities such as dive-bombing being possible.

Combat: Button-mashing optional

Adventuring in Aion is available in three ways, with either solo-play, 6-man parties or 9-party raids available. Most of the content is open-world, including the dungeons, with only limited content being instanced. As far as combat goes, it’s a fairly standard hack-and-slash or spellcasting affair, with a combo ability mechanism bolted on to provide even more spectacular visuals. Combo trees are also talked about, allowing a player to customise an attack to add a particular effect. Now, while I’m not averse to having combo-mechanisms to pull off spectacular attacks instead of blindly mashing buttons, I do get a little nervous when they start talking about combo trees. If the options are nice and simple I can’t see a problem with it, but if you end up with about ten different combo tree options for each ability it rapidly becomes unwieldy. There’s also what happens if a combo fails – do you deal some damage, or do you have to complete it exactly in order to do anything at all? It’s these subtle choices that can take a cool design idea and either make it something that adds a little uniqueness or something that makes it inherently frustrating. Then there’s the death penalty – not only does your character suffer debilitating effects for a short time and restart at a fixed location, but there’s also an experience point penalty. I thought we’d moved beyond these penalties, as it means that if you’re having a bad day questing or just continually getting ganked in PVP you can actually lose levels and start moving backwards. Yes, death should be harsh and unrewarding, but XP penalties are one of those design choices that should have been discarded long ago.

Crafting: can be a gamble

Crafting also seems to be one of those areas where game design choices seem to reward with one hand and punish with the other. Although the usual rollout of professions are there, the way they are implemented is cause for concern. As well as having a regular crafting success or a critical success to make an item with increased stats, a character can also fail to craft anything at all. This places increased risk on crafting economies – just imagine collecting the resources to craft a difficult to make set of armour and finding a blacksmith willing to make it, only to have your materials wasted by a failed crafting. As a consolation, players will be able to transmute resources from one type to another (such as wood into iron), but it means that you’re more likely to sell materials and buy completed items instead of finding a crafter and paying a small fee to get an item made.

At the end of the day, Aion is as much a game trying to interlock two gaming cultures together as it is about two factions opposing each other. In making concessions to western gameplay styles while still keeping eastern roots, it’s attempting to carve out a niche for itself that it hopes will make it appealing to a wide range of audiences. But while design choices seek to punish players for unlucky play sessions, reaching audiences in depth may be more of a challenge. Although it’s easy to attract a number of players keen on the more hardcore aspects of an MMO, pulling in the large numbers of casual gamers out there may prove more of a challenge.