Category: Game

It isn’t about you, and that’s OK
Cibele is a deeply personal game. The Star Maid Games-developed title tells the tale of Nina, a young woman who meets, falls in love with, and eventually sleeps with someone she meets on the internet. But while creator Nina Freeman expects players to see parts of themselves in this experience, she’s adamant about one thing: “Cibele is not about the player."
During a GDC panel called "How Game Mechanics Helped Players Embody 19-Year-Old Nina in Cibele," Freeman spoke about her goals to help players understand Nina as a character. She describes it as a theatrical experience in which players perform as Nina while they play, using her hands and eyes to exist in the game’s fictional online space.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship."
"It’s essential to Cibele that the player embody Nina, not control her," Freeman said. "The player always has a sense of self of course, but they hopefully suspend that sense of self when playing a video game as a character … The player will always project their own goals and motivations onto the character to a certain extent, but as a designer, it’s my job to remind the player of the goals and motivations of the character that they’re mean to perform as."
Cibele began as a prototype while Freeman was a student at NYU. After realizing original scope of the project was simply too large, Freeman eventually cut it down to a handful of key scenes and conversations.
"I asked myself what the player needed to know about these two characters in order to understand their relationship and why they meet up for sex," she said. "I whittled this larger relationship down to three key conversations between Nina and Ichi that illustrated why they wanted to meet up at all."
Each of these represented a different phase in the characters’ relationship.
"The first is the light flirting phase," Freeman said. "The second is whatever the conversational version of heavy petting is. And, finally, the last conversation is about their decision to meet up. I guess the second conversation is less heavy petting and more like that and also becoming emotionally close."
Although these scenes didn’t full encompass the breadth of the relationship, they did offer up an answer as to why the two would meet up at all.
"I wasn’t trying to tell the story of an entire relationship," she said. "I was trying to tell the story about a particular moment during a larger relationship."

“What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it." After an initial reveal last August, followed by a notable period of silence, LawBreakers — the first-person shooter formerly known as Project Bluestreak in development at former Gears of War designer Cliff Bleszinski’s new studio, Boss Key Productions — has re-emerged with some changes.
Bleszinski and team announced those changes — most notably a move away from Boss Key’s plans for a free-to-play model, and a new art style meant to help it stand out from a busy crowd — during a GDC presentation today titled "Surrounded by 800lb Gorillas! Standing Up to the Competition."
"Is there a grey area between free-to-play and 60 dollars?" Bleszinski asked the crowd.
"We did a lot of discussions and even more research. There are some core free-to-play games that do well, but for us, we didn’t want to go down the well of players buying ‘energy’ or other sleazy things," Bleszinski said. "A lot of core gamers have a negative reaction when they hear free-to-play because they think they’ll get ripped off."
"We are more in the line of Team Fortress with less classes that are deeper, and we didn’t want to throw 20 classes in and limit that depth," COO Arjan Brussee said. Boss Key feels like the limited number of characters doesn’t lend itself to the character-for-pay business model of the biggest free-to-play titles. The studio also observed the "rampant" negativity around free-to-play among the core gaming audience.
That’s not the only thing LawBreakers has in common with Valve’s Team Fortress. The game will be exclusive to Valve’s Steam platform. "
The team debated on using a launcher like other free-to-play titles. "I don’t want to make new friends," said Brussee. "We don’t want people to have to jump through hoops and sign up with their emails to play our game," Bleszinksi added. "We want to go where our players are," said Rohan Rivas, the studio’s communications manager. But the game’s business model wasn’t the only thing to change. The art style has also undergone alterations.

"We didn’t go from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs to Gears," Boss Key art director Trammel Isaac said before revealing the game’s new look and logo, quoting boss Cliff Bleszinski. He later added, "What sets us apart is we recognize when something is wrong, and we change it."
"We knew we weren’t going to reinvent the wheel," Bleszinki said in response to a question from the audience. "Randy Pitchford played our game at PAX and said ‘be the M-rated game’," Bleszinki said, noting that games like Overwatch and Battleborn are very T-rated games in their character design and aesthetic.
Developing …

Look at that cat go. Adventure on Clover Island is one of those games that you just want to fall into. At least, until you get to the bit with the lava.
The action-platformer follows Skylar and Plux. Skylar is a cat who has been augmented with a mechanical arm that was meant to turn her into a weapon. Now, she and Plux are taking on the evil AI that did the deed, before it destroys Clover Island.
Watch this level of gameplay to see why I’m kind of in love with this level design. From its sandy beaches to its nightmarish lava caves, Clover Island is really beautiful. You’ll also see how wicked fast the gameplay is. Skylar vaults from platform to platform, punches robots in the face, and swings over lava pits at not-quite-Sonic but certainly dizzying speeds.
Adventure on Clover Island is being developed by Right Nice Games, and will be released on the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2016. A PC version is in the works as well.

“Hey everyone” There was a bit of internet bellyaching when the recent trailer for Captain America: Civil War showed a little too much of the film for some fans’ tastes (specifically a certain wall-crawling web head who may or may not be in the film, but definitely is). Modder and YouTube user UpIsNotJump may have found the perfect middle ground with his painstaking recreation of the contentious trailer in Fallout 4, with the help of copious mods.
It’s perfect for those want to avoid movie-ruining spoilers like "What does the fifth version of Spider-Man movie costume look like?" but who still want to get a basic idea of the story and set pieces. UpIsNotJump has previously provided this exciting spoiler-filtering service for the Daredevil season 2 trailer. Here’s hoping he can keep pace with all the TV shows and films the internet simultaneously wants to know everything and nothing about (which is to say all media that is, ever has been or ever will be).

Her Story took home the Seumus McNally Grand Prize and Excellence in Narrative awards during tonight’s Independent Games Festival.
“Make the games you want to make," Her Story developer told the audience after accepting the grand prize.
Here’s the full list of winners:
Excellence in Narrative: Her Story

Excellence in Audio: Mini Metro

Excellence in Design: Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

Excellence in Visual Art: Oxenfree

ID@Xbox Rising Star Award: Laila Shabir, Samantha Lee, Samantha Ho, Cassia Haralson, Karen Xu, Avery Xu, Avery Johnson, Ivy Wooldridge, Wendy Wang and Evan Rusboldt of Girls Make Games

Nuovo Award: Cibele

Best Student Game: Beglitched

Audience Award: Undertale

Seumas McNally Grand Prize: Her Story

Why Rez is more than a game about purifying cyberspace Game designer Tetsuya Mizuguchi talked about the “creative serendipities" that opened his senses and led to the pathway to creating Rez, the 2001 musical shooter that experimented with the concept of synesthesia — or, as Mizuguchi described it, "the expression or impression of cross-sensational feelings."
At his GDC 2016 postmortem, Mizuguchi, who sometimes spoke through a translator, also revealed the underlying concept of Rez. While the game appears on its surface to be about a hacker traveling through and purifying cyberspace, it’s also a metaphor for conception and birth. The player avatar, Mizuguchi said, is like a sperm cell traveling and trying to connect with an egg, a metaphor the developer tried to communicate through the abstract player forms and Rez’s ending movie.
Rez’s origins date back to Mizuguchi’s high school years. He said that two games — both vertical scrolling shooters — were early influences on his idea to combine music, color, sound and shooting action. The first was Namco’s 1982 arcade game Xevious.
"I was a high school student when I discovered it," Mizuguchi said. "The more I played, the more I was sinking into the illusion that as I played it was creating music back at me. That opened up my imagination about what this all means, and how do I create something off what I’m experiencing right now."
The other early influence was The Bitmap Brothers’ Amiga game Xenon 2: Megablast.

"When I was in university, my friend turned me on to Xenon 2," Mizuguchi recalled. He said the game’s music would repeat in his mind, over and over. "It really almost shocked me … this game gave me a sense of ‘This is a new media, a new media perspective’ — meaning games as an art form can exist. The marriage of sound and music was something undiscovered at the time, until I met this game."
Xenon 2 featured music from electronic dance musician Bomb the Bass, and Mizuguchi remembered that hearing dance music and seeing game mechanics "being intertwined in a real balanced way was something I didn’t know existed."
"Back then I think it was still pretty unusual," he said, "but it gave me a sense of hope that this could be a new space to express new entertainment experiences."
After university, Mizuguchi went to work at Sega, where he worked on arcade titles like Sega Rally. The job, he said, opened his eyes to new "multi-sensory" experiences and exposed him to an international audience. His work at Sega’s arcade division also brought him to Europe. During one trip, he attended Street Parade, a massive music festival, in Zurich, Switzerland.
"It was my first techno experience," he said. "The beats, synchronized to the color of the lights and the movement of the people … I was just blown away.
"The word synesthesia popped into my head."
Mizuguchi, also inspired by the work of Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, began to think about how to express what he was seeing and hearing, but in computer form. He described his inspiration for what would become Rez in the following words:

a marriage of game and music
create music as you shoot down enemies
the best sensation in a game
keep you coming back for more
puts you in a trance
bodily sensation — vibration matched with music
synesthetic effect — sounds affecting visuals

Mizuguchi and the team at Sega’s United Game Artists started "experimenting with shapes, sounds and colors, and how it makes you feel when it’s fed to the screen." Their research include watching and repeatedly rewatching a video of Kenyan street musicians and dancers, as they tried to get to the root of the "groove" inherent in the video. The Rez team tried to find an answer to the question, "What is it that makes us feel good to watch this?"
They attended taiko drum festivals and went clubbing in Japan in the name of research and discovery. Mizuguchi said the team studied DJs, and the interaction of sight and sound, in their attempts to recreate certain sensations in a video game.

"The DJ makes us all feel good," Mizuguchi explained. "He’s the mood maker, the mood designer — atmosphere, tone, all of that. With every new track, or beat, he’s trying to elevate our feelings. He’s feeding us a feel-good quality with level changes.
"How can we design that in the game? If I could figure out how to make that happen … that’s what I want players to experience."
Mizuguchi showed work-in-progress versions of Rez, when it was little more than just a cursor on a screen, hitting targets and firing off musical sounds. At one point, the player character ran through Rez’s cyberspace world. At another, the avatar was more mechanical instead of humanoid. Mizuguchi said the team found Rez’s "magic" with quantization, syncing the various, sometimes random, sounds to a beat.
As for the player character, which ranges from spheroid to human-shaped to its highest form — that of a baby — Mizuguchi said the human forms are part of Rez’s larger metaphor.
"We all know the story of Rez … you’re hacking the system, purifying, cleansing, rebooting the network back to normal," he said. "We had another story. This is really hard to explain. Everybody had the same experience: You were sperm. This long but short journey we all took before our birth, the lone surviving sperm is traveling, trying to find and meet the egg. The story ends here with Rez … it’s right before the actual birth."

Rez was first released 15 years ago on Sega Dreamcast and PlayStation 2. A high-definition remake was released for Xbox 360 in 2008, and Rez will return later this year with Rez Infinite. That version of the game is bound for PlayStation 4 and PlayStation VR, and will go beyond a the scope of a remake. Mizuguchi and his new company, Enhance Games, will add a new level called Area X, which he said was "an experiment."
"We’re using the current technology," he said of Rez Infinite’s new area. " what is a VR-oriented Rez. The concept is particles moving with the music."
Mizuguchi said he hopes to release Rez Infinite alongside the launch of PlayStation VR, which is scheduled to hit this October.

Plus, more Four Horseman footage Professor Xavier and his team of mutants are preparing for war in the new trailer for Bryan Singer’s X-Men: Apocalypse.
This time around, the trailer spotlights the film’s main villain — Oscar Isaac’s Apocalypse — and reintroduces the concept of his Four Horseman. Based on the comics, the Four Horsemen are a group of mutants whose bodies and minds are altered to better serve Apocalypse, the world’s oldest mutant. They remain his closest allies during war and are the main group he turns to when he needs a violent act carried out.
The trailer also spends a little time introducing characters like Jean Grey and Scott Summers, otherwise known as Phoenix and Cyclops, but for the most part, focuses on the battle between Charles Xavier and Magneto. It’s a clash of ideologies as Magneto is drawn to Apocalypse’s message of wiping out the weak and keeping only the strongest mutants alive, which is something that the professor has always been against.
Set directly after the events that occurred in X-Men: Days of Future Past, Apocalypse is the last installment in Singer’s trilogy and the ninth film in the X-Men franchise. It focuses on a younger generation of mutants, with everything in the film occurring before Singer’s original X-Men movie from 2000.
X-Men: Apocalypse hits theaters May 27.

How localization — and tweets — won over fans new and old Andrew Alfonso, localization director for Capcom games like the Monster Hunter franchise, is a big fan of memes. His appreciation for internet jokes was obvious to those watching the slides that accompanied his Game Developers Conference 2016 talk on adapting games for worldwide audiences: He peppered in funny images and references to illustrate his story about translating Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate, which launched on Nintendo 3DS last year.
But that game — which went on to garner acclaim for its strong script and localization tweaks — lacks the memes that Alfonso himself enjoys and has included in previous games, like Capcom’s Ace Attorney series.
“I started thinking that I don’t want people picking up my games on release saying, ‘I like these in-style meme references,’ and then another player picking up the games four years later and thinking, ‘They referenced 300 — that sucks!’" he told the crowd.
Staying away from "meme country" was one of several strategies that Alfonso devised when localizing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. He and his team at Capcom wanted the game to be their highest quality project yet, hoping to finally bridge the gap between the Japanese audience that goes wild for the role-playing game series and the American gamers who have been comparatively lukewarm on it.
translating the game to a new audience overseas
Alfonso spoke to the crowd about the importance of an entertaining script and other localization tweaks in appealing to Western audiences. As a localization director, finding what American gamers respond to the most is one of the biggest parts of his job. But with this Monster Hunter game, it was even more important that the team get it right.
"Up until 4 Ultimate, we had yet to break a million units sold overseas," he said. "We wanted to do something to help the game break that plateau."
The director came up with several ideas that would help Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate not only be the strongest localization project yet, but appeal to established fans of the series as well as total beginners. These included completely revised loading screens which offered hints to players instead of bland data; truncate the game’s slow-paced tutorial quests; and a unique demo that would teach new players about the often complicated set of weapons available to Monster Hunter players.
As the American-based localization director, however, Alfonso had to answer to the Japanese higher-ups at Capcom. Not all changes were received well — or at all. The Western team was working on translating the project while development on the Japanese version was still in progress, and the company heads emphasized the importance of staying on schedule and under budget.
Many of the changes that Alfonso pitched, while thoughtful and of obvious use to him as a fan and longtime player of the series, were not easy additions. To learn how to better sell his ideas to the Japanese side of Capcom, however, he studied the differences in business practices and communication between Western and Eastern companies.
the localization team doesn’t hold all the power
His research, which also included defining the different demographics for the franchise in its native country and stateside — Japanese Monster Hunter fans are much younger than American ones — ultimately helped him score several localization victories for the game. Other than cutting down the length of dialogue from the original Japanese version to tighten the script, the Western version of Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate also includes the ability to skip over beginner tutorials. Alfonso also pitched new optional text to guide total beginners without impeding veteran players, a feature that Capcom liked enough to add to the Japanese version as well.
To further appeal to Western gamers, Alfonso and his team came up with a Twitter campaign that offered short video-based tips. New players, Alfonso said, felt inclined to like the clips, while hardcore Monster Hunter players retweeted them to "spread the knowledge."

#DidYouKnowMH you can chain multiple launching attacks? We call this "Hunter Volleyball" https://t.co/UZWoppLCtd
— Monster Hunter (@monsterhunter) August 19, 2015

While Alfonso had a lot more ideas for how to make Monster Hunter Ultimate 4’s localization Capcom’s strongest project yet, he was only able to accomplish so much; a localization team doesn’t hold the final decision-making power on what makes it into the finished product, he explained. Even so, the team felt satisfied with their "smart localization," which he noted many reviewers picked up on and mentioned favorably.
Overall, Alfonso said the game managed to break through to both the newer and veteran players that he’d wanted to attract in equal measure; it ultimately went on to ship more than a million units in the West.
"If you want something changed and you’re not the one making the decision, you’re going to find more success focusing on the tangibles as opposed to the subjectively better things," he said.
And while he’d encouraged his colleagues in the industry to stay away from memes, he could help but end with one himself: His final slide included wrestling champ John Cena telling the audience to "never give up."

For the the love of all that’s holy, have you not yet caught ’em all? Though the unbridled Pokémon craze of the late 90s (Pokémania, if you will) could have been mistaken at the time for a fad, the series has proven itself to be an international, cross-media cultural touchstone. The latest evidence of this evolution comes from Famitsu, by way of Yahoo! Japan, which reports that the main series of games have crossed the threshold of 200 million units sold (in fact, by the end of February, they hit 201 million). This doesn’t include spinoffs like Pokémon Snap or Pokémon Mystery Dungeon, which bring the figure to 279 million.
The last milestone of this sort came in 2005, when the series hit the 100 million shipped mark, according to this GameSpot article from the time. Considering the series began in 1996, that (very roughly) means nine years to sell the first 100 million and 11 years to sell the next 100 million. Though sales have slowed slightly, that’s still a remarkably steady performer in an increasingly tumultuous video game industry.
Also, Arceus created the universe of Pokémon and without him no other Pokémon would exist and so by extension he is the best Pokémon so please don’t comment about Mewto anywhere on this post. Thank you.

And don’t get used to that costume Spider-Man is going to make his Marvel Cinematic Universe debut in Captain America: Civil War, and directors Anthony and Joe Russo think fans will be pretty happy with how the superhero turned out.
Speaking to Collider, the Russos said they spent months nailing down Tom Holland for the role, having him test first with Robert Downey Jr and Chris Evans to see if he mixed well with them, before having him test with the other actors involved.
Joe Russo said they always intended to have Spider-Man be a part of the movie, but didn’t want to say anything because of the incredibly secret meetings Marvel was having with Sony to acquire sharing rights to the character. The director added that he has a very special role in the film that should please fans. According to his brother, Spider-Man is the only character in the film who doesn’t have baggage that the rest do from the previous Avengers movies, which puts him in an interesting place.
The directors also touched upon Spider-Man’s new costume, heavily influenced by the artwork of iconic artist Steve Ditko, and said that although they loved the design and Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige was a fan, the hero’s costume would change if he was brought into future films. They did not confirm, however, whether or not Spider-Man would be included on the roster for the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War — Part 1. Spider-Man will get his own movie, produced by both Sony and Marvel, on July 7, 2017.
Captain America: Civil War hits theaters May 6.