The first trailer for Grand Theft Auto V was released today at noon. You’re not going to find out much about the game from it, other than:

• It takes place in what seems to be present-day “Los Santos”, the analogue for Los Angeles in the world of Grand Theft Auto. Los Santos is one of the three cities in the sprawling Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.
• The plot seems to involve a guy trying to start a new life in a new city, not unlike Grand Theft Auto IV’s Niko Bellic or Grand Theft Auto: Vice City’s Tommy Vercetti. I think it’s safe to assume that his plans get waylaid and through a series of bizarre circumstances and friends and associates with poor life-planning skills (no shortage of such types in the world of GTA), our hero lands himself in a whole world of trouble. It would also be safe to assume that he gets out of said trouble by causing a lot of mayhem.
• The voice-over in the trailer sounds a helluva lot like Ray Liotta, who played Tommy in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

As with most of Rockstar’s trailers, this one’s all cinematics and mise en scene. There’s no indication of what the gameplay is like, whether you’re playing the story or in multiplayer mode. There’s also no indication of what platforms it’s coming out for (although it’s safe to assume that Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 will be supported, with a PC version to follow later) nor when the game will be released (I assume sometime in 2012).

Mari0, a creation of StabYourself.net, the people behind videogame alterations such as Not Tetris 2, combines Super Mario Bros. with Portal for some weird and wonderful 8-bit gameplay. This is a supposedly real working game, and I can hardly wait to get my paws on it!

YouTube user JoshuaMutter, who makes a lot of Minecraft machinima, created this video that mashes up the gameplay from Deus Ex: Human Revolution (which I still have to get) and Men Without Hats’ 1982 dance-synth-pop classic, Safety Dance. All it needs is the little minstrel from the original music video.

No Escape is a short film set in the world of Portal, and it’s seven very well-done minutes.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

How does a gamer propose marriage to another gamer? If the first gamer is well-connected, he gets a level designer, an artist and the voice actor behind GLaDOS (your cybernetic tormentor in the Portal games) to create a special set of Portal levels (and not simple ones, either) which conclude in a big church-like chamber and GLaDOS popping the question on his behalf. The video above shows gameplay from these levels.

If you have the PC or Mac version of Portal 2, you can take these levels for a spin:

• Download them from here
• Put the VPK in the addons directory
• Put the bik files in the media directory
• Open up the console and type map la_bringing_together

First the zombie-themed engagement photos and now marriage proposal videogame levels. Are these signs of a geek marriage chic trend?

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

I was a teenager in the 1980s, which meant that along with watching Knight Rider, going to Depeche Mode concerts and playing blocky games on an Atari 2600, I had a Rubik’s cube. These puzzle toys were such a big craze at the time that toy and game stores couldn’t keep them on the shelves. I’m told that even decades later, it’s still considered to be the number one-selling toy of all time.

It’s nice to see that Ottawa-based developer Magmic, who specialize in mobile casual gaming, are bringing Rubik’s cube – the real officially-licensed thing – to Windows Phone 7. Naturally, you can try solving the classic 3 * 3 * 3 cube that we all know and love…

…but the game lets you go beyond the classic with:

• Four different sizes of cubes
• “Free play” or the more challenging “Timed mode”
• A timer to keep track of your best solution times
• Variations like “CRAZY cube” and “Picture cube”
• A solution guide to help you learn how to solve the puzzle
• Anaglyphic 3-D mode (3-D glasses not included)

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Week-Long Discussion

Andrew Stellman, co-author of O’Reilly’s excellent and easy-to-read C# intro, Head First C#, is holding a week-long “Inner Circle” discussion on C# and .NET 4.0 in the forums for O’Reilly’s “Head First” book series. In this discussion, he plans to cover a wide range of topics, including:

• Why use C# instead of any other language?
• C# best practices
• Becoming a better C# developer
• Dealing with objects
• Productivity hints
• The best of C#

If you want to follow the discussion, simply point your browser at the Head First Labs Forums’ “Head First C#” section and look for topics started by Andrew Stellman. You don’t have to log in to just read, but you’ll have to register for the forum if you want to join in the discussion and comment back.

The Challenge

In his first discussion topic, Andrew issues a challenge: build an old-school, text-mode game in C#! In the 1980s, the computing world was seen through the command line in an 80-character by 24-line grid (40 characters if you were on an Apple ][, Commodore 64 or Atari 400/800, even fewer if you were on a VIC-20), and that’s how we played a lot of games, whether they were commercial or typed in from source code in magazine or books like the ones scanned into the Atari Archives.

If you’ve never written a text-mode game before (or in my case, if it’s been a long, long time), he’s written an article to help out — Understanding C#: Use System.Console to Build Text-Mode Games.

Your efforts in building an old-school text-mode game will not go unrewarded. Submit a text-mode game and you can win a prize! He’ll judge them on the following criteria:

• Game play
• Fun
• Technical coolness
• General awesomeness
• “Retro nostalgia” for extra point

The winner will receive five O’Reilly eBooks of his or her choice. He’ll also choose runners-up who will get a free O’Reilly eBook.

If you’re looking for ideas for an old-school text-mode game, check out these books at Atari Archives, with source code written in old-school line-numbered BASIC. Some of these take me back to my high school days:

• Creating Adventure Games on Your Computer
• BASIC Computer Games
• More BASIC Computer Games
• Big Computer Games
• BASIC Computer Adventures

Video Q&A: Stellman on C#

As a prelude to the discussion, Andrew recorded videos of his answers to questions about the C# programming language and the second edition of Head First C#…

Why should developers learn C#?

What kind of applications can you build with C#?

How hard is C# to pick up?

What’s the toughest thing to learn in C#?

What’s new in the second edition of Head First C#?

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

It’s On!

When Windows Phone 7 was first shown to the public in March, we got a taste of the Games hub and were told that Microsoft was working with a number of big game developers to bring games to the new phone platform. Late yesterday, we got the announcement of the first games coming to WP7:

It’s one thing to see a slickly-produced ad showing the games, but it’s an entirely different thing to see actual games being played on an actual phone. Here’s Engadget’s video of the game experience on one of the prototype phones – the Samsung “Taylor”, which I have and which you might have seen at the last “Coffee and Code” event in Toronto:

Here’s what Engadget had to say about the experience:

We’ll preface this by saying that both the hardware and software we demoed was still unfinished (the latter being the Samsung Taylor dev phone and the LG QWERTY model we broke news of on the Engadget Show). Regardless, the gameplay for the arcade titles seemed excellent, with frame rates holding fast even during graphically intensive 3D sequences (such as the chaotic, scattered-pixel play of Rocket Riot). The Harvest, while a bit familiar to our eyes, still showed the graphic promise of the platform. Gameplay was definitely well suited to a touchscreen device, though Microsoft’s Kevin Unangst told us that developers could target controls for both touch and QWERTY-equipped phones (provided that a touch version was always present). The screen response seemed accurate and sensitive, reacting quickly to our input. Particularly in the Crackdown title — a tower defense game "set in the Crackdown universe" — pinch zooming, rotation, and finger tracking was excellent.

The New New Xbox Experience

The “New Xbox Experience” or “NXE” – the revamped Xbox user interface that introduced avatars – comes along for the ride on Windows Phone. You can access your Xbox Live account on WP7, check out your gamerscore and achievements, and like Xbox-based games, your avatar can also be used within WP7 games and apps.

In this Engadget video, we see avatars being used to give a little twist to some standard smartphone apps such as “flashlight”, “spirit level” and “coin flip”:

Here’s another video showing more avatar action as well as some of the social networking features of Xbox Live, as done on WP7:

The Games

The games that have been announced for Windows Phone 7 so far:

• 3D Brick Breaker Revolution (Digital Chocolate)
• Age of Zombies (Halfbrick)
• Armor Valley (Protégé Games)
• Asphalt 5 (Gameloft)
• Assassins Creed (Gameloft)
• Bejeweled™ LIVE (PopCap)
• Bloons TD (Digital Goldfish)
• Brain Challenge (Gameloft)
• Bubble Town 2 (i-Play)
• Butterfly (Press Start Studio)
• CarneyVale Showtime (MGS)
• Castlevania (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• Crackdown 2: Project Sunburst (MGS)
• De Blob Revolution (THQ)
• Deal or No Deal 2010 (i-Play)
• Earthworm Jim (Gameloft)
• Fast & Furious 7 (i-Play)
• Fight Game Rivals (Rough Cookie)
• Finger Physics (Mobliss Inc.)
• Flight Control (Namco Bandai)
• Flowerz (Carbonated Games)
• Frogger (Konami Digital Entertainment)
• Fruit Ninja (Halfbrick)
• Game Chest-Board (MGS)
• Game Chest-Card (MGS)
• Game Chest-Logic (MGS)
• Game Chest-Solitaire (MGS)
• GeoDefense (Critical Thought)
• Ghostscape (Psionic)
• Glow Artisan (Powerhead Games)
• Glyder 2 (Glu Mobile)
• Guitar Hero 5 (Glu Mobile)
• Halo Waypoint (MGS)
• Hexic Rush (Carbonated Games)
• I Dig It (InMotion)
• iBlast Moki (Godzilab)
• ilomilo (MGS)
• Implode XL (IUGO)
• Iquarium (Infinite Dreams)
• Jet Car Stunts (True Axis)
• Let’s Golf 2 (Gameloft)
• Little Wheel (One click dog)
• Loondon (Flip N Tale)
• Max and the Magic Marker (PressPlay)
• Mini Squadron (Supermono Limited)
• More Brain Exercise (Namco Bandai)
• O.M.G. (Arkedo)
• Puzzle Quest 2 (Namco Bandai)
• Real Soccer 2 (Gameloft)
• The Revenants (Chaotic Moon)
• Rise of Glory (Revo Solutions)
• Rocket Riot (Codeglue)
• Splinter Cell Conviction (Gameloft)
• Star Wars: Battle for Hoth (THQ)
• Star Wars: Cantina (THQ)
• The Harvest (MGS)
• The Oregon Trail (Gameloft)
• Tower Bloxx NY (Digital Chocolate)
• Twin Blades (Press Start Studio)
• UNO (Gameloft)
• Women’s Murder Club: Death in Scarlet (i-Play)
• Zombie Attack! (IUGO)
• Zombies!!!! (Babaroga)

…with more on the way, as big game dev companies sign up and Microsoft’s Mobile Games Studio kicks into high gear.

How Do You Get in on Some of That Action?

If you want to just play Windows Phone 7 games, it’s easy – the phone comes out in the fall, in time for the holiday shopping season.

If you want to build Windows Phone 7 games, it takes a little more work, but it’s worth it. You’ll need to:

1. Get your hands on the development tools. They’re free-as-in-beer and you’ll get:
   • The IDE, Visual Studio for Windows Phone Express (and if you have Visual Studio 2010, the necessary parts to do WP7 development)
   • Windows Phone emulator
   • Silverlight for Windows Phone (app-building framework)
   • XNA 4.0 for Windows Phone (game-building framework)
   • Expression Blend for Windows Phone (UI-building tool)
2. Learn XNA development. There are a number of good tutorials out there, including:
   • The Channel 9 tutorials on game development for Windows Phone
   • The many tutorials and starter kits at XNA Creators Club
   • Charles Petzold’s and Microsoft Press’ free-as-in-beer ebook, Programming Windows Phone 7
   • You can learn a lot about Windows Phone game development by learning from any book on XNA 3.0, which you can find at your local bookstore. I particularly liked O’Reilly’s Learning XNA 3.0, which covers the development of both 2-D and 3-D games.
3. And finally, keep an eye on this blog. As a Windows Phone 7 Champ, I’ve got a direct line to the WP7 team, I always point you to the good stuff, and I’ve got some surprises in store!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

BulletAsylum by UberGeekGames is a gorgeous game for Windows Phone 7 that’s part Missile Command, part Geometry Wars and all awesome. It’s written using XNA and coming soon to both WP7 and Xbox live and coming out later this year.

Here’s their blurb:

BulletAsylum is a new spin on the classic defend-the-city-from-meteors genre. Simply touch the screen on a WP7 device, or push the thumbstick on the Xbox 360 to create a literal fireworks show out of your enemies with an impenetrable wall of firepower. Instantly purchase new towers and cities without breaking up the action. Split your fire in two directions by touching the screen in two places or using the right thumbstick. Unleash the screen-clearing Overdrive when you’re in a tight spot.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I’ve been spending summer playing a couple of Xbox 360 games situated in dark nightmare worlds. One is Microsoft Studios’ and Remedy’s Alan Wake, which could be described as an homage to Stephen King (so much so that they name-drop him in the opening credits); the other is Limbo, an Xbox Live Arcade game: 

Calling Limbo a “2-D side-scroller game” does it as much injustice as referring to Red Dead Redemption as “a cowboy third-person shooter”. Limbo is the most gorgeous and haunting side-scroller I’ve ever played.

The world of Limbo is a monochromatic one, shrouded in gloom and fog and nothing but the game itself. The screenshot below shows what the game actually looks like while you’re playing:

No heads-up display, score or distractions of any kind: it’s just you and Limbo’s world. The controls are minimal – you just use the left thumbstick to move, the A button to jump and the B button to perform actions on things (typically push or pull objects). Where Limbo goes deep is gameplay – this game really sucks you in.

You control your character, a young boy who wakes up in a dark forest, with no idea what’s going on. There’s no opening cinematic, no explanatory text, no little pop-up hints, but somehow the game manages to convey a sense of what to do next solely through the way the game reacts to your actions. The developers, Playdead – an indie game dev shop in Copenhagen – did an amazing job in programming Limbo to communicate just through gameplay.

With its black-and-white graphics, smooth animation, minimal sound (you only hear things you need to hear) and the many, many ghoulish ways your character will die as you learn to navigate the game’s many deadly puzzles and traps, Limbo feels like the sort of ghastly-but-addictive game that Edward Gorey might have conjured up, had he decided to take up programming rather than becoming an illustrator.

As of this writing, Limbo has a Metacritic score of 90, placing it just below Super Street Fighter IV and Red Dead Redemption, having earned heaps of praise from all sorts of reviewers, including this one.

Limbo may just be the best Xbox Live Arcade game ever released, and I suspect it’ll be in my “Top 5” for 2010. If you’re looking for a stand-out game for your Xbox 360, Limbo is well worth the 1200 Microsoft Points.

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Hand Eye Society describes itself as a “not-for-profit coalition of people and projects in support of Toronto’s videogame communities”. Their goals are:

1. To help people make games
2. To connect game makers with each other and with an audience, offline
3. To foster diversity in game creation and public perception of games

I shouldn’t be surprised that one of the people behind the Hand Eye Society is Jim Munroe. He’s a former Adbusters editor turned self-publishing author of a number of enjoyable science fiction books such Flyboy Action Hero Comes with Gasmask and Angry Young Spaceman, developer of indie games including the interactive fiction piece Punk Points (the online version requires Java), maker of movies and all-round Toronto DIY-espousing creative type.

Also connected with the Hand Eye Society are other indie videogame notables including:

• Capy (whom you might know as Capybara Games)
• Superbrothers
• Metanet
• Queasy Games
• RSBLSB (short for “Right Square Bracket, Left Square Bracket”)

The Hand Eye Society is throwing a social this Thursday, May 27th in Toronto at Unit Bar (1198 Queen Street West, a shade east of Dufferin/Gladstone, halfway between the Drake and Gladstone hotels). The doors will open at 7:00 and there may be a set of curated videogames for you to check out.

At 8:00 p.m. special guest dignitary Brandon Boyer, Chairman of the Independent Games Festival and contributing editor for Boing Boing and Boing Boing’s games blog Offworld, will, as the Hand Eye Society’s blog puts it, “deliver some form of immensely significant communication to the assembled videogame creators, enthusiasts, organizers & slack-jawed onlookers.”

If I weren’t going to be in Montreal that evening for the Make Web Not War conference, I’d most certainly at this event (I’ll definitely catch the next social). If you’re in Toronto and love videogames (especially ones that break from the mainstream) and especially if you love making them, catch the Hand Eye Society’s social this Thursday!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I was 10 years old when Space Invaders came out, so this photo brings back happy memories:

Click the photo to see it on its original page.

I think we’ve got an early contender for the title of “Weirdest Videogame of 2009”: Muscle March for the Nintendo Wii. As if the game weren’t weird enough, the trailer below ramps up the weirdness by presenting it in that oh-so-Japanese style with epilepsy-inducing jump-cuts and a hyper-enthusiastic Japanese TV announcer:

[Found via Waxy.org.]

AWWWWWWWW YEEEEEEEAAAHHHH!

The much-anticipated first downloadable “episode” for Grand Theft Auto IV, The Lost and Damned, is now available via XBox Live for 1600 Microsoft Points (US$19.99).

The Lost and Damned is a brand new story with brand new characters set in Grand Theft Auto IV’s Liberty City. In the story, you play the part of Johnny, a veteran member of the biker gang known as The Lost. Niko, your character in Grand Theft Auto IV’s main story had some pretty interesting run-ins with them, and as Johnny, you’ll have some pretty interesting run-ins with rival gangs – and probably with rivals within your own gang. (Has there ever been a Grand Theft Auto where a supposed friend didn’t stab you in the back?)

Here’s the first trailer for The Lost and Damned:

…and here’s the follow-up trailer:

I’ll download it tonight and report on my gameplay experiences later this week.

I wouldn’t mind having a setup like Videocrab’s:

Photo by Videocrab.
Click here to see its Flickr page.

Once again, it’s time for my favourite videogame reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, and his series of smartass videogame reviews, Zero Punctuation. This week, he covers Fallout 3. His verdict:

Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Its 93 rating at Metacritic — which gives it a standing equal to Gears of War 2 – comes from a number of glowing reviews from various sources:

• 1UP
• AceGamez
• D+PAD Magazine
• EuroGamer
• G4 TV
• Game Revolution
• GamePro
• GameShark
• GameSpy
• Official Xbox Magazine
• The Onion (AV Club)
• Yahoo! Games

I saw these at Future Shop a couple of days ago, beside the Rock Band and Guitar Hero packages. You too can have rock star hair for a mere $19.99 (in Canadian dollars)!

Interview with Chris Slemp, MSDN

Here’s another video interview featuring Yours Truly at the PDC: it’s with Chris Slemp, Program Manager for the Server and Tools Online group at Microsoft. In the interview, we talk about MSDN and its new social bookmarking feature.

Click here to watch the video.

“Grim Fandango’s” Puzzle Document

If you’re looking to get into the mind of a game designer and the design of one of the most highly-regarded computer adventures games, be sure to check out the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document. Tim Schafer, in “a temporary fit of Cake-induced Grim nostalgia,” decided to put the game’s puzzle design document online in PDF form (it’s 2.3MB in size).

Here’s a great summary of the Grim Fandango Puzzle Document, written by Andy Geers:

I use that word "crafted" because that’s exactly what this newly released document shows: true craftsmanship. We see the incredible attention to detail, the pacing of the narrative as it builds and as the puzzles get increasingly sophisticated, always coaxing the player along with them. As somebody whose spent the last few years trying to write my own adventure game, what struck me most about this document is the sheer simplicity of it – it’s well established that it takes a great deal of clarity and hard work to boil down something so vast as Grim Fandango into such a simple representation that conveys so much information in such a succinct way.

It’s a considerably more interesting read than most specs.

My Job-Related Reading List

Nothing gives you that frozen-caveman-thawed-in-modern-times feeling like returning to a software platform after not developing in it in seven years. Getting back into the swing of Microsoft’s development tools has been fun so far, but it is, as a lot of people have told me, like drinking from the firehose.

To quickly get acclimated with C#, ASP.NET and XNA, I’m expensing the following books I bought today:

• Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform by Andrew Troelsen
• Professional ASP.NET 3.5 in C# and VB by Bill Evjen, Scott Hanselman and Devin Rader
• Beginning XNA 2.0 Game Programming by Alexandre Santos Lobao, Bruno Pereira Evangelista, and Jose Antonio Leal de Farias

I’ll let you know what I think of these books as I read them.

“Zero Punctuation” Reviews

And finally, a couple of reviews from my all-time favourite game reviewer, Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. The first one’s for Saints Row 2, which includes a great argument for why it might actually be a better game than Grand Theft Auto IV as well as a brilliant concept for a new game:

and here’s the latest review, for Dead Space, which he summarizes as “competent but bland”. Luckily, his review is anything but…

Oh, how I enjoy Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s game reviews in his video series Zero Punctuation. In this installment, he covers (and savages) Will Wright’s long-awaited game, Spore. Thankfully, he skips complaining about the DRM, which I heard plenty about already. After hearing his review, DRM sounds like the least of the game’s problems…