Category: Game

It’s a setback for EA, and for anybody hoping for this legal issue to be settled The U.S. Supreme Court won’t consider a lawsuit regarding Electronic Arts’ use of the likenesses of retired NFL players in its Madden NFL series, the court announced today.
EA had asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, Electronic Arts v. Davis, after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the publisher’s request to dismiss the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds in January 2015. The Supreme Court’s denial leaves that 9th Circuit ruling in place, meaning that the retired players’ case will continue in the federal appeals court.
Thousands of retired NFL athletes originally filed suit against EA in 2010, alleging that the publisher violated their state-law right to publicity by using their likenesses on historic teams in Madden titles from 2001-2009. Like the collegiate athletes who received $60 million in the settlement of a similar case, the NFL players in question did not appear in the Madden games under their real names. However, all other identifying traits — height, weight, ethnicity and the like — were true to life, and the virtual athletes were rated to perform like their real-world counterparts.

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Retired NFL players’ lawsuit against EA’s Madden series can go forward, court says (update)

EA did not compensate these players for the use of their likenesses. Since 1994, the publisher has paid licensing fees to the NFL Players Association for the rights to use active NFL athletes’ names and likenesses. Retired players currently appear in Madden’s Ultimate Team mode, and are paid for it.
In the Davis lawsuit, EA argued that the use of the retired athletes’ likenesses was covered under the First Amendment as “incidental" to the creation of the Madden games in question. The 9th Circuit disagreed, ruling last January that "EA’s use of the former players’ likenesses is not incidental because it is central to EA’s main commercial purpose — to create a realistic virtual simulation of football games involving current and former NFL teams."
By deciding not to hear EA v. Davis, the Supreme Court is leaving unanswered an important legal question about how to weigh the First Amendment against claims like trademark infringement and the right to publicity, said J. Michael Keyes, an intellectual property partner at the law firm Dorsey & Whitney.
"The lower courts still have little guidance as to what the proper standard is on how the First Amendment interacts with state law claims," said Keyes. He added that the Davis case "would have been a perfect vehicle for the Court to provide much needed guidance" in this area, because right now "there are multiple different tests used by lower federal courts."
A representative for EA declined comment to Polygon on the Supreme Court’s decision. We’ve asked the attorneys for Davis for comment, and will update this article with any information we receive.

Series debut introduces the primate scientist Blizzard debuted a new animated short film based on the world of Overwatch, its upcoming character-based shooter, exclusively through the Xbox YouTube channel. “Recall" is the first in a new series of CGI videos produced by the company that will air ahead of the game’s launch.
Overwatch will hit stores May 24 on PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. Blizzard first announced the game with an animated teaser featuring a similar, Pixar-esque style to the video above. While that short gave players a glimpse at Overwatch’s cast of character, this new series of films will go in-depth with heroes like Winston, the genetically engineered gorilla who stars in "Recall."
Overwatch is currently in closed beta, with an open test period running May 5-9. Xbox One players can access the multiplayer game early; the open beta will be available May 3.

Third-person camera makes this Vive game a giddy experience Last week, following a GDC demo for The Gallery, I wrote about the weirdness of vertigo in Virtual Reality. A few days later, I experienced an even more intense sensation of height-fright while playing Marble Mountain.
Like most early VR experiences, The Gallery is a first-person game, Marble Mountain makes use of a third-person camera. It’s a Marble Madness-style platform game in which the player rolls a ball across landscapes and through obstacles, taking care not to lose control and plunge over cliff faces.
I played it on Vive with a regular controller. Against the advice of the developers, I played standing up. The giddy sensation I had felt with The Gallery was even more pronounced during Marble Mountain. The camera swings through space in arcs that are predetermined, and which follow the Marble’s moves from a variety of directions. It’s these arcs of movement that really unsettle the player’s sense of balance.
I was swaying like a drunk, especially during sequences when the camera is behind the Marble, careening down a steep slope. It was clear from my conversations with the developers that this is a perfectly normal reaction. You can avoid it by sitting. And yet, I didn’t want to sit. The physical sense of place is a big part of what makes VR so fun.
You can get some small sense of how this works from the trailer (above) which features a few shots which take the player high above the action. If anything, the lack of detail on some of the lower parts of the crevice structures diminish the effect of vertigo. Developer Shannon Pickles said that he had cut out some details for that exact reason, smoothing the lower reaches of the world to a fog.
Marble Mountain is a launch title for Vive on April 5, and will also be available Oculus Rift as well as non-VR platforms Linux, Mac and Windows PC via Steam.

Four renowned developers create touching games meant for a lifetime of play To mark the 30th anniversary of the Game Developers Conference last week, organizers brought back the game design challenge panel, hosted by NYU professor and GameLab co-founder Eric Zimmerman. Four well-known game designers were given the difficult task of creating a game that takes 30 years to play. The result was an hour-long presentation that was equal parts thought provoking, heart warming and laugh-out-loud funny.
Here’s a summary of the game pitches that came out of the panel, and a few links where you can experience them for yourself.
Nina Freeman’s virtual soap opera
Nina Freeman, level designer at Fullbright and independent developer of the game Cibele, looked to television for inspiration in creating her game. There are few genres in TV that have lifespans as long as soap operas, Freeman reasoned, so her solution blended soaps with interactive fiction.
“What’s so special about soaps is that they’re driven by real, human characters," Freeman said. "They’re about the conflicts these characters face and that any one of us might face in our daily lives. Soap viewers dive into the daily dramas of these people’s lives for decades, every day of the week, exploring their vulnerabilities, their love, their strengths and their challenges.

"This draws viewers in and helps them feel connected to these stories, like they’re checking in with a friend about what they’re up to every day. Soap operas make long-time viewers feel like it’s real and they make viewers feel like part of the family."
Players would receive daily updates to Freeman’s game, each with a collection of scenes revolving around the show’s main characters in the form of text and still images. Players would have the opportunity to interact with these images, in a manner similar to otome-style games. They could click on a given character’s cell phone to read their conversations, or hunt around on their computers or read their diaries. Then, at the end of the day’s scenes, players would be able to provide input as to their understanding of how the main characters were feeling in the form of emoji.
This player feedback would go directly to the game’s writers, and help them steer the narrative arc in a way to surprise and delight committed fans.
"It’s also inspired by reality TV," Freeman said, "In this game the writers are relationship DMs, or drama managers. Players would also be able to see an aggregated version of this relationship interpretation data as well. This is important because the players are reacting to the scenarios, not writing them. They’re not making decisions for the characters, or making decisions about plot points. But they can see how their personal interpretation factored into how the story is moving forward."
Zach Gage’s Generation Lamp
For game designer Zach Gage (Ridiculous Fishing, Tharsis) the problem of the 30-year game was particularly difficult. To illustrate his point, he used poker as an analogy.
"If I play poker with my friends sometimes," Gage said, "that’s a great game. But if I play poker with my friends one night a year, with a $100 buy-in, and we continue that ritual for 30 years, it’s going to turn it into a brilliant game and probably be one of the most meaningful play experiences of our lives.
"To a player, these two games are vastly different, and the 30 year rule is an incredibly substantial change. And yet, paradoxically, as the designer, despite having added the key rule of 30 years, I feel like I haven’t really made a meaningful contribution. It’s still just poker."
What Gage did was rapidly prototype as many games as he could in the weeks leading up to the presentation, several of which he shared with the audience.

First came Duel, a one-on-one game where players race to be the first one to type "bang" into a text box in 30 years’ time. But, Gage said, it "didn’t feel quite weighty enough." So he supplemented his presentation with The Password Game, which he describes in the video below.

With these two tongue-in-cheek games out of the way, Gage finally shared his true solution to the game design challenge, an idle game called Generation Lamp.
"You get three 30-year blocks in life, at best," Gage said. "Being able to look back over 30 years as a human is fairly astonishing. 30 years ago I was less than a year old. There was no internet. There were barely computers. I was basically not even a person yet. In 30 more years who knows where we’ll be, who even knows how many of us will still be around when we get there.
"To be totally honest, I’m not sure there’s anything more meaningful to the actual person playing my game than just betting that they’ll still be here, and winning that bet."
To play Generation Lamp you take an old smartphone or tablet, log in to Gage’s website, turn the brightness to high, turn off the auto-lock, and plug it in. After that, your smart device will become an constant companion, slowly changing through more than 16 million possible colors at the rate of one per minute for the next 32 years.

"It’s about celebrating and marking your time," Gage said. "When you start, you’ll see a lot of whites and blues, then eventually more yellows, then greens and onward. And because it’s living on a server, you don’t have to worry about losing it. As you live, as you move, as your devices presenting it die out, you can plug in new devices and point them to the same link and continue living with your lamp until you — or it — dies."
Anna Kipnis’ Drawing Conclusions
Double Fine senior gameplay programmer Anna Kipnis’ game took a decidedly philosophical bent. For inspiration, she initially looked to a quote from the French philosopher Albert Camus.

At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures — be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.

She wanted her response to the 30-year game challenge to be a vehicle for self-reflection, but she also wanted it to be engaging. For that she invoked a few other inspirations, including party games like Telestrations, a version of the folk-game Would You Rather and the work of renowned neurologist and author Oliver Sacks.
The result was Drawing Conclusions, a game about sharing and interpreting abstract thoughts through Crayola drawings.
"The curator draws a picture in the form of a question," Kipnis explained. "Basically, just a drawing that needs a response. To make the question clear you put a question mark somewhere in the drawing. Then you hand this question to the player.
"They answer your question by modifying the drawing you made, preferably in a different color so you can still tell what the original question was. And then step three the player hands back the drawing to the curator. The curator looks at the answer and tries to come up with some analysis based on the player’s answer."
Those interpretations can be as long or as short as the curator wants, but the idea is to think hard about how the player answered and return to them some insight on themselves.
"The important thing is that you save the drawings, either the physical copies or some electronic version so that you can look back at them later in time and reflect on yourself."

It was Kipnis’ game which would go on to win the challenge, based solely on audience applause.
Chris Crawford’s design process
Designer and author Chris Crawford, the co-founder of the Game Developers Conference, finished off the panel with not so much a game as a series of amusing and poignant thought experiments.
Crawford posited that just about any interactive experience that players engaged with for 30 years was, more likely than not, going to be incredibly boring. To keep players engaged, designers had to constantly feed them information over 30 years — a nearly impossible task.
So he searched for experiences that already existed in the real world, that took place over a long period of time and sought to determine what made them special. Then, he cleverly made a go at comparing them to games.
What followed was more of a heart-warming series of jokes than a real game pitch, and perhaps the best goof came at the expense of organized religion.
"If we think in the terms of the divine," Crawford said, "there’s a game that’s been running around for thousands of years. It’s called religion, and the game designers are called priests.

"The basic idea of this game is that you get points by doing good, and you lose points by doing bad. In the Hindu religion those points are called karma, in the Christian religion they’re called grace. In the Hindu religion your goal, the victory condition is to attain nirvana. In the Christian religion it is to get to heaven. … As we all know it’s a good idea to give players multiple lives, and in fact the Hindu religion is very generous about this. You get an infinite number of lives. You just keep playing until you win. That’s a very positive, constructive attitude towards it. The designers of the Christian religion on the other hand are not so generous. You get just one life to win or lose the game."
In the end, Crawford said, he decided to narrow his design goals somewhat. Instead of tackling all of being and morality, he elected for something a bit more finite. He called it The Marriage Game.
"The idea of this game is to get married and to be happy for at least 30 years," Crawford said, showing a slideshow of pictures from his own life and marriage throughout.
"It’s all very enjoyable," he said. "You work together. You play together. You share in each other’s triumphs, as well as your tribulations. And I can assure you, if you play this game with determination and serious effort that you are going to win this goddamn game no matter what. This is the best game in the world."

Virtual Reality was the major topic of last week’s Game Developers Conference with roughly 100 games and “experiences" on show for the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive and PlayStation VR.
But the one I found most compelling was the most mundane creation for Vive: The SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode.
Slip on the black plastic headset and instead of dropping into a fantastical world of mouthy orbs, atop a mountain with a robot dog or inside a game, I found myself sitting in a chair in a fairly non-descript room facing a big television screen.
To be specific, in this case big means about 19 feet.
To give me a sense of what the early beta of what SteamVR Desktop Theater Mode can do, a Valve employee loaded up a copy of Broforce from the Steam library.
Despite the (virtual) size of the screen, the game looked amazing, just like it does on my home computer running a GTX 980 TI. Because I was in a virtual room sitting in a virtual chair staring at a virtual screen, I could behave as if I was playing on a massive screen. That meant looking around, focusing on whatever I wanted, even moving my chair back a bit if I felt too close.
My time playing a game within an experience was limited, but I quickly forgot I wasn’t in an empty room playing on a giant television. The floor, which seemed to be highly polished, lit up with a light reflection of the game playing on the television. It was surreal.
The concept behind the mode is to allow users to play non-VR games within VR systems like the upcoming HTC Vive. While the room is fairly generic right now, I was told that it’s very likely that new takes on the room could be released. The system will support "most" games I was told.
While visiting Valve’s booth at the show, I also got a chance to check out the company’s latest version of The Lab. The Lab starts you off in a big room filled with all sorts of momentos. Imagine a museum created by a game developer. Each of the dozen displays feature floating globules of water. By picking one up, you can gaze into it and if you like what you saw you just dunk your head in and you are there.

My first visit took me to an experience that Valve refers to as a postcard.
This postcard was created by a Valve employee that took a bunch of pictures from the top of Washington State’s Vesper Peak. The team used photogrammetry to recreate the mountain top in VR. I was able to teleport short distances to different spots on the peak and look around at my surroundings. It was stunning. The devs also dropped a little robot dog into the setting, giving me something to play with if I was up for tossing the sticks scattered around the peak.
In the next experience, I tried out a game called Slingshot, which placed me inside some secret factory in Portal calibrating robot personality cores. The cores, it turns out, are all ball shaped and calibrating them involved launching them with a giant slingshot across the mammoth factory and into teetering towers of explosive barrels and stacks of crates. Each core also has a personality and chatters on a bit as you set about finding a target. The variety of bots and dialogue absolutely made the game. My favorite of the personality cores was the spider core which promised to release spiders upon activation. I shot that one pretty quickly.
Next was a game called Longbow, which had me fending off an army of flat enemies from the walls of a castle with a boy. Despite being fairly straightforward, the sensation of nocking an arrow, drawing and loosing it on an enemy felt so physical that I found this one of my favorite experiences.

Finally, I tried a 3D shoot-em-up called Xortex. The game has you holding a spaceship in your hand and moving it around to avoid the increasingly thick cloud of fire coming at you from basically everywhere. The entire game takes place inside a sort of big virtual sphere. You fire by pulling the controller’s trigger. Because Xortex is played in a 3D space, I found myself spinning around and swooping up, down, forward and back as I played the game. Initially, without even thinking about it, I was actually trying to avoid the incoming fire with the ship and my body. But after realizing that wasn’t necessary (and how stupid I must look), I focused on maneuvering the ship.
Xortex has the sort of pick-up-and-play, hard-to-put-down feel of Geometry Wars or, really, any good SHMUP.
With just a third of the dozen experiences sampled, I’m sure that this freebie for the Vive is going to be one of the system’s first early hits. Paired up with a program that gives you access to most of your purchased Steam games on an unusually large television screen, these certainly aren’t programs that will drive sales, but they could make dropping $800 on a computer peripheral a bit easier to excuse.
VALVE AND HTC’S VIVE STAND AT THE PRECIPICE OF VR’S FUTURE, BUT THEY MAY HAVE A LONG WAIT

Warzone Firefight is due this summer Halo 5: Guardians’ newest multiplayer is Warzone Firefight, and 343 Industries showed it off in this trailer released yesterday during the Halo World Championship Finals.
As the name suggests, this mode is a combination of Warzone from Halo 5 and Firefight, a very popular mode from 2009’s Halo 3: ODST. In it, teams of up to eight human players work cooperatively against enemy AI in over five rounds of increasingly difficult objectives, according to this post on Xbox Wire.
Halo 5 multiplayer’s REQ system is available in Warzone Firefight (as it is in Warzone) to help the ream repel the oncoming threat, which 343 says will feature “the most on-screen enemies in the history of the franchise." In addition to the standard class of enemies, Warzone Firefight will also introduce "Mythic" class bosses to toughen the challenge even more.
Warzone Firefight comes to Halo 5: Guardians sometime this summer.

The crafty action star returns to TV Lucas Till will play Angus MacGyver in an upcoming revival of the classic action TV series, Variety reports. The actor, best known as the mutant Havok in the recent X-Men movies, will play a 20-something version of the infallible problem-solver in a pilot produced for CBS.
Joining Till will be actors Joshua Boone and George Eads as MacGyver’s trusted companions; actor Henry Winkler serves as a producer on the reboot. Winkler, who was a producer on the original series as well, joined on back in October; the project was first announced back in February 2015, with Till’s casting marking the end of a long search, according to Variety.
MacGyver premiered in 1985 with Richard Dean Anderson in the starring role. The series lasted seven seasons on ABC where it found cult acclaim, spawning merchandise, two TV movies, featured spots on The Simpsons, Saturday Night Live parodies and more.

Can the Zero Escape series win new fans over with its final installment? Spike Chunsoft’s cult favorite Zero Escape series will conclude this June with trilogy-ender Zero Time Dilemma —€” but that shouldn’t deter total newcomers from trying out the dark, story-heavy puzzle game, according to director Kotaro Uchikoshi. Speaking with Uchikoshi through a translator during Game Developers Conference 2016, he was adamant that when the game launches in June, it will attract its own set of fans to the franchise.
“I think that, as a fan of something, you want to get as many people as possible on board," he said. "So we wanted to make a title to be accessible to as many people as possible."
But broadening the appeal of a series with an admittedly … complicated storyline without alienating existing fans is no easy task. At a GDC press event, Uchikoshi and members of Zero Escape publisher Aksys Games were on hand to demo the series’ final release, focusing on its combination of approachable tweaks and narrative payoff for the devoted.
Zero Time Dilemma, like its predecessors 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors and Virtue’s Last Reward, tells a complicated story of nine participants in something called the "nonary game," an escape-the-room quest with mortal consequences. It’s hosted by the mysterious masked figure Zero, whose attempts to pit the players against one another are either successful or thwarted, depending on choices made during the lengthy cutscenes.
Making the complex story approachable
To pad out this basic premise is a heavy dose of violence, time travel, the supernatural and, of course, tricky puzzle-solving. The Zero Escape series has carved a niche and found relative success for itself thanks to these highly involved facets. Its three games almost demand to become the object of players’ obsessions; falling deeply into the highly complicated timeline and universe of the Zero Escape heroes might be the only way to truly grasp their story.
While that story has unfolded over the course of several years now, starting with 999 on Nintendo DS (and later iOS) before continuing onto 3DS and Vita with Virtue’s Last Reward, Zero Time Dilemma attempts to welcome those with no prior knowledge of the series while also answering the myriad questions fans have about the overarching plot.
One of the ways in which Uchikoshi hopes to draw in new fans is by setting Zero Time Dilemma in the middle of the Zero Escape chronology. Instead of directly following Virtue’s Last Reward, the game takes place one year after 999. This gave the team leeway to introduce completely new characters alongside familiar ones from the other two games, as well as hitting the reset button on the story by throwing these characters into a new iteration of the franchise-spanning nonary game.
Unlike the previous games, Zero Time Dilemma is also far more flexible in terms of discovering that story. All three games require players to make life-or-death choices in order to progress; in Virtue’s Last Reward, a linear flowchart showed which of the branching storylines your choices were sending you down, making it easier to define your decision-making around reaching certain longer pathways.

Zero Time Dilemma brings back this element with a twist: The developer has bucked the linearity of the flowchart, instead allowing players to dip into what are called "floating fragments." In this version of Zero’s mysterious puzzle game, each of the players (including the three new protagonists)€” gets dosed with a strange, amnesia-inducing drug every 90 minutes. When they wake up, they have no memories of what they previously encountered, and depending on which direction the player wants to go in, they either wake up sometime in the past or the future.
That nonlinearity is meant to appeal to the more casual player or budding Zero Escape fan who wants to uncover the storyline at their own pace, Uchikoshi explained. "The floating fragment system makes it so you can kind of move through different parts of the game episodically," he said. "You won’t get railroaded into doing one storyline from start to finish."
"We wanted to emulate the feel of a big-budget American TV show"
But that’s not the biggest change to the game —€” that would be, in keeping with that "episodic" concept, the newly cinematic cutscenes. These fully animated narrative sequences are meant to eliminate the at-times draining visual novel aspects of the series to create something a bit more familiar to Western players.
"We wanted it to kind of emulate the feel of a big-budget American TV show," Uchikoshi said of the change from the text-heavy cutscenes of entries past. "We think that giving it a cinematic look will give people who weren’t necessarily interested in visual novels of entry."
This might be the most striking difference to the longtime player of the series who, after two games, has likely become accustomed to spending as much time scrolling through the game’s text as in the escape-centric puzzle scenes. Although the cutscenes won’t be any shorter than before, the director said, players will be offered a reprieve thanks to full voice acting in both Japanese and English. For the full TV-watching effect, the developer even included the option to turn on or off subtitles.
Another way of courting the Western audience: Aksys will launch Zero Time Dilemma on Steam sometime later this year; it will hit 3DS and Vita first at the end of June. Bringing the game to PC makes it the first entry in the series to hit the platform; the publisher doesn’t yet have plans to port the previous games to Steam, although it’s looking into it as an option.
Yet even with all of this courting the English-speaking Zero Escape fan, Uchikoshi laughed when we asked him to explain the series’ unique Western success. Could he explain why the game — which by all accounts is a tough sell, thanks to its unabashedly complex storyline and visual novel features —€” has found more fans stateside than in its home country?
Uchikoshi can’t explain why Zero Escape has more fans in America than in Japan"
This is a good opportunity to ask you the same question," he replied with a grin. "I can’t for the life of me think of why."
We offered something about the murder mystery elements;€” Americans are really into that genre, we explained. But Uchikoshi saw it differently.
"To me, the main elements of the story is like a murder mystery, but also has these really out there science-fiction elements," he said. "Murder mysteries are huge in Japan, but they’re not really into science fiction.
"Those are two tastes that Western audiences are really into," he concluded.
Uchikoshi clearly knows his series best. But despite his insistence on introducing Zero Escape to those who might be on the fence about it if not completely unfamiliar with the series, he gave credit where it is due —€” back to those hardcore fans who made the third and final game possible in the first place.
"Originally we had planned to develop and simultaneously," he said, but due to "various circumstances" —€” like the games’ poorer sales in Japan —€” production was put on hold in 2014. After Uchikoshi announced the hiatus on Twitter, fans worldwide "besieged us and Aksys with messages of support."
"The higher-ups at the company saw these fan messages and were touched by how passionate fans were for the series, so that helped get things moving forward again," he said. The directer was able to unveil the game during last year’s Anime Expo.
For all of the efforts to make the game more accessible, then, Uchikoshi also insisted that fans will experience the most payoff from the storyline. All of the mysteries will be revealed, the director said, teasing that fans’ biggest questions based on the end of Virtue’s Last Reward will be answered.
They’re the ones who are making this game happen, after all, he said. "We wouldn’t be able to make without the fans."

The first time I ever played Thumper, upstairs in a restaurant a few blocks from last year’s Game Developers Conference, I was struck by a few things about it: primarily, the powerful sense of isolation, adrenaline and existential dread the game was able to instill in me, even while playing it in a sandwich shop on a stranger’s laptop with a huge pair of headphones on. After finishing my first session with the game and taking off my headphones, one of the first questions I asked Thumper’s creators was: “Have you considered virtual reality for this?"
It’s Thumper, but played at 90 FPS on a bright OLED screen inches from your face
At the time, the answer was no, but in the year since that meeting, Thumper was announced as PlayStation VR-compatible. The announcement had me thrilled — ever since I first played it, I’ve never been been able to shake the idea of how great Thumper in virtual reality could be, and hearing that it was coming true was genuinely super exciting.
Now, having played the PlayStation VR version of Thumper at this year’s GDC, I’m super relieved to report that it’s exactly what I hoped it would be: Thumper, but played at 90 frames per second on a bright OLED screen a few inches from your face.
At first blush, Thumper could seem like an odd fit for VR — after all, it’s not the type of game that requires you to crane your neck and look around at all while playing, and indeed, the 2D version of Thumper has no camera controls to speak of. But while most VR games we’ve seen so far use the technology to let you look around and explore a world from every angle, Thumper uses it for something much simpler: immersion.
Thumper uses VR as headphones for your eyes
Before now, the most important thing about playing Thumper was having a big pair of loud headphones to immerse you in its bassy, kaleidoscopic world. Thumper works as a VR game because it removes one more layer between you and its world, allowing you to easily immerse yourself in the intense, brutal audiovisual experience that is playing Thumper. No, you won’t spend much of your time in Thumper’s VR mode looking above, below, or behind you (although you’re free to), because that’s not why the feature exists — instead, Thumper uses the PlayStation VR as headphones for your eyes, and that’s exactly what a game like Thumper needs.

Another thing Thumper’s PlayStation VR mode exposes is how little the general public knows about predicting what will and won’t be nauseating in virtual reality. Thumper’s PlayStation VR announcement was met online with comments — some joking, some not — suggesting that the game would be nauseating or even seizure-inducing in virtual reality. While it’s easy to understand why folks who haven’t played Thumper could make that assumption, the experience of actually playing Thumper in VR is entirely non-sickening — perhaps because most VR-induced nausea is created by acceleration and deceleration, and Thumper’s movement speed, while breakneck, is also highly consistent. Whatever the reason, after my first VR session with Thumper was over, not only did I feel totally fine, I was ready to hop back in and play it again — which is exactly what I did.
Thumper in VR is fascinating because it’s one of the first examples of a non-VR game retrofitted into virtual reality in a way that actually makes perfect sense. It’s funny: while the benefits of playing Thumper in VR are relatively subtle compared to most VR games, they’re also completely undeniable. From the ultra-smooth framerate to the subtle head tracking, it’s hands-down the most immersive way to play Thumper, and the experience almost single-handedly converted me from a PlayStation VR skeptic to a possible day-one adopter.
For more from the 2016 Game Developers Conference, check out Polygon’s StoryStream of all the big news from this year’s show.

Could this have been the video game that finally got Superman right? Almost as a rule, Superman video games have been quicksand for their development studios, requiring tons of time and effort and licensing to pay off with a poorly reviewed product and sales to match. In 2007, however, Factor 5 was convinced it could get the Man of Steel right.
Factor 5 never got the chance. Did You Know Gaming?, chroniclers of all things canceled, got its hands on footage of this Superman game, from very early in development, and use it to tell the story of a perfect storm of circumstances in 2008 that took down Superman harder than any shade of Kryptonite ever did.
First, the game: as Did You Know Gaming? recounts, this was to be an open-world Superman game with an ensemble cast of iconic bad guys trashing the city and getting trashed by Superman.

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The most ambitious feature Factor 5 was going for was a means of Superman taking his foe and driving him all the way through any of the buildings located in the cityscape, which would require a destructible environment rendered in real time.

Factor 5 was also a big fan of the Wii, so much that they were going to build a version of this Superman game for that console even though they were not getting paid extra to do it. When Warner Bros. pulled Bryan Singer off a sequel to 2006’s Superman Returns and back-burnered the movie franchise, Factor 5 scrambled to keep its game going as a stand-alone title, rather than an adaptation of a film.
Then Factor 5’s publisher, Brash Entertainment, a venture focusing entirely on licensed properties, went under for reasons that seem entirely predictable: an inexperienced CEO, the high costs of licensing, and multi-game deals requiring them to deliver shovelware in order to get at the good stuff. The global financial crisis of 2008 seems like the least of anyone’s worries in a collapse that took down Brash and Factor 5 and ensured that “Blue Steel," this game’s code name, would never be anything more than a series of set-piece concepts that had yet to gel into a single game.
Still, it’s always intriguing to ponder what might have been, whether developers could have pulled off something as ambitious as plowing Doomsday through a skyscraper, and whether critics and the public would have found any of that fun. Brash Entertainment was definitely in over its head. Although Factor 5 delivered the very well liked Rogue Squadron series about 15 years ago, the open-ended, overpowered nature of Superman, his powers and his greatest foes have been nearly impossible to do justice in a video game.