Power On Games

The world of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is less generic than it seems.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts

If you’ve seen the incredibly dull marketing campaign for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, which makes the upcoming role-playing game look like just another generic Tolkien clone, you probably aren’t that excited. But this Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC game, to be released Tuesday, is an addictive good time.

I’ve spent about 10 hours immersed in this fantasy RPG created by a squadron of proven talents: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind game designer Ken Rolston, writer R.A. Salvatore and artist Todd MacFarlane, all with the backing of former MLB pitcher and gaming entrepreneur Curt Schilling. I’ve had nothing but good times hacking and hunting my way through its monsters and dungeons. Sort of like a cross between Fable and World of Warcraft, Amalur’s world is a delicious mixture of vibrant reds, greens and blues. The art team knocked it out of the park, crafting a large variety of landscapes that feel both unique and harmonious: alluring, mystical elf havens or industrious, worn-out villages.

Uniting this world is a widespread belief that its people’s fates cannot be changed. In Amalur, each person believes he has an immutable destiny, one that defines how, and how long, he will live. Until you come along.

But of course, your character is the anomaly, somebody who can change both his own fate and the destinies of the people he interacts with. So, naturally, it’s up to you to save the world.

It’s a fun world to save, mostly thanks to a flashy but simple combat system that owes more to action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta than it does to games in its own genre. You can use several types of weapons, like hammers, bows and an extensive and satisfying set of chakram to unleash combination attacks on your foes. There’s also magic, ranged attacks and a host of other special abilities.

Further enhancing this system is the fact that you can customize your character’s skills without getting too pigeonholed in one specific archetype. There are three different skill trees — Finesse, Might and Sorcery — and you can mix and match between them to create any sort of hybrid character that you can imagine. Skill trainers across the world allow you to easily reset these skill trees, in case you screw up or change your mind.

Though there is a lot to love about the world, it’s hard to stay attached to any of the people in it. Amalur’s user interface is designed much like a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, liberally sprinkling yellow exclamation points and markers all over your mini-map in order to show you where to quest next. It’s easy to ignore the people and their plights in favor of endless side quests.

Like any good RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is adept at digging its claws into that part of your brain that just loves accomplishing things. It can be exceptionally soothing to sit on your couch for a few hours and just bang out quests. If you need a taskmaster in your life, this just might do the trick.

Vehicular-combat game Twisted Metal is just one of the things on creator David Jaffe's mind in this week's podcast. Image courtesy Sony Computer Entertainment

David Jaffe, the outspoken and razor-sharp game creator who brought us God of War and Twisted Metal, joins the cast of this week’s Game|Life podcast.

After discussing his recent reboot of the car-combat series, to be released Feb. 14 for PlayStation 3, we delve into all sorts of topics, from online passes (Twisted Metal has one, over Jaffe’s objection) to used games to Jaffe’s plans for the future. Wired magazine senior editors Chris Baker and Peter Rubin join me as we quiz Jaffe for a good hour-plus.

The Game|Life podcast is posted every Friday, is available on iTunes and is embedded below. It can also be downloaded directly (.mp3).

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You asked, and we deliver (if belatedly): Here’s the full video of our “Retrogame Roadshow” panel at Penny Arcade Expo 2011 in Seattle.

Playing to a live crowd of PAX attendees, our group of classic gaming experts asked audience members to come on stage with their gaming treasures of days gone by. The panel, in a manner reminiscent of Antiques Roadshow or Pawn Stars, talks about the item — what it is, why it’s rare (or not!) and how much it’s worth.

During this panel, we had an amazing array of rare and interesting games and memorabilia that you may not have known existed. There’s a portable Japanese game machine that pre-dates the Game Boy, a sealed copy of the rarest Sega Saturn title and a remarkable home game console made by Capcom.

We’ll be doing Retrogame Roadshow again at PAX East in Boston, during the weekend of April 6-8. Be there and bring your best stuff!

Special thanks to J Eckert and Nick Hutchins for putting this video together.

Tell me about it, lady. Image: Square Enix

by Garret Martin, Ars Technica

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place three years after Final Fantasy XIII. Vanille, Fang, Snow and Lightning are gone; either dead, encased in crystal or disappeared to unknown adventures. Serah Farron, Lightning’s sister and Snow’s fiancée, hides her pain while teaching the children of New Bodhum and helping her friends in NORA. Images of Lightning engaged in an epic battle haunt her dreams, but she knows her sister is gone forever.

What happened to Final Fantasy? The elaborate narrative and groundbreaking graphics of Final Fantasy VII turned the franchise from a significant cult favorite into a mainstream blockbuster in 1997. Since then, though, almost every Final Fantasy has struggled to find the correct balance between game and story, with CGI cut-scenes and anime clichés taking up as much time as the gameplay.

Final Fantasy XIII might have been the natural endpoint of that style. It sacrificed level design to story, with a long series of shotgun hallways dressed up with fancy backgrounds that give the illusion of depth and space. By foisting an unusual linearity upon a series marked by exploration, and by including one of the most obnoxious videogame characters of all time, XIII remains the most divisive entry in the series.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 feels less like a standalone sequel than a concerted effort to bring back fans disappointed by the last game. Somewhere within the bowels of Square Enix, there’s a memo that details every major criticism of XIII. The sequel addresses enough of those points to make it feel different from FFXIII, but without making the game as a whole all that much better.

Sidequests make a triumphant return this time around, so rejoice if you love helping lazy people perform the simplest tasks. And you can walk around various towns full of talkative strangers who say little of interest. More importantly, though, the ability to roam throughout the time stream and revisit previous levels opens up the world a bit, recreating that classic sense of Final Fantasy adventure even without a standard world map.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place 10 years after Final Fantasy XIII. Serah and her mysterious, sword-wielding partner Noel Kreiss reconnect with an old friend who’s also been impacted by Lightning’s absence. Together, they reminisce and investigate a weird piece of technology destined to play a key role in the fate of the world.

The world of XIII-2 is more expansive than that of its predecessor, but the goals are as focused. You travel throughout time, fixing paradoxes that pop up throughout the world of Gran Pulse at various times after the fall of Cocoon, in an effort to set the one true timeline right again. You won’t stumble into surprising situations or ever be at a loss of where to go, but this time the game gently nudges you in the right direction instead of forcing you down a straight line.

The gameplay progresses in the finest Final Fantasy tradition, the story spurred on by those chattering non-player characters and dramatic set-piece battles with elaborately designed bosses. Instead of the large parties of old, though, you’re basically restricted to two main characters, with a rotating cast of captured monsters filling out your three-person squad. This story has more settings, but a smaller cast than the one that came before it.

Despite the more open-ended structure and millennium-hopping plot, XIII-2 somehow manages to feel less epic than its predecessor. The small party and asinine side-quests make the game’s world-ending threat feel less threatening, and the story is a Möbius strip of nonsensical time travel claptrap and absurd characters that, like many Final Fantasies before it, often seems like an unintentional parody of anime.

Proper Paradigm selection is key to success in battle, against giant Cactuars or anything else. Image: Square Enix

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place 100 years after Final Fantasy XIII. Society has collapsed and humans now eke out an existence via hunting and primitive agriculture. Serah and Noel help as best they can, but it’s a hard life on the steppes and monsters are a constant threat.

XIII‘s combat system, the best thing to happen to this series since 1997, returns this time around with only minor changes. Once again, characters earn Crystogen points in each battle and put them toward unlocking and leveling up various combat roles. Commandos deal the most damage, Synergists buff your team’s offensive skills, Saboteurs undermine opponents with poison and other spells, Sentinels soak up damage and Medics heal the party.

Ravagers might play the most important role, as their quick, constant attacks can be combined with the skills of a Commando to fill up an enemy’s “stagger meter.” Even the strongest foe breaks down when staggered, as their reactions are slowed and every hit inflicts far more damage than usual.

The dominant strategy in most battles is to stagger your enemies as quickly as possible and then pour on the pain with a frontline of Commandos. Still, figuring out the best way to stagger each new boss or monster type adds a bit of the type of strategy that is often missing from more straightforward RPG battles.

Once again you can juggle these various character roles and permutations through the Paradigm system, which lets you preset six combinations for your party and easily switch between them during a fight with the press of a button. Different permutations come in handy for different situations; a three-Sentinel lineup might be useful when facing foes with an incredibly strong spell or special move, while a Synthesist/Saboteur/Sentinel troika can provide a quick edge at the start of battle. Juggling these different lineups forces you to be active and attentive during battle, and remains a welcome change of pace from the patient, polite turn-based combat of old.

XIII-2‘s improvements on its predecessor shouldn’t be understated. The fact that the eternally aggravating Vanille is spoken of more than seen, for instance, makes a huge difference. But overall it’s not as big of an improvement as it could be. The emphasis on extravagantly rendered cut-scenes and pedantic dialogue that describes every plot point in exhausting detail still feels old, especially when compared to recent RPGs like Dark Souls and Skyrim that let players unravel the story at their own pace. And while the superfluous, BioWare-style dialogue trees do represent a change, it’s one that amounts to a pointless diversion.

As more games tentatively embrace subtlety, the “show and tell and tell and tell” mentality of Final Fantasy XIII-2 comes off as an outdated throwback to a bygone era. It’s less a new videogame from 2012 than a curio dug up in a time capsule.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place 700 years after Final Fantasy XIII. Lightning is fighting an outrageously powerful purple-haired villain who looks like a member of Tokio Hotel. It’s the end of time but also the start of Noel’s journey. He leaps into a time gate, floating back to New Bodhum where he first meets Serah, triggering Final Fantasy XIII-2′s complicated time-hopping plot. The only time the gate can’t travel to? Whenever Final Fantasy last mattered.

The good:

• World is a little more open than that of Final Fantasy XIII
• Combat system is more engaging than many turn-based RPGs.
• Less Vanille than the last game!

The bad:

• Dialogue is pedantic and overly expository.
• Story is a confusing, time-traveling mess.
• Small parties restricted to just three characters.
• Whole structure feels dated and less gripping than many modern RPGs.

The ugly:

• Time-traveling storekeeper Chocolina, an inexplicable cross between Saturday Night Live’s Target Lady, Kids in the Hall’s Chicken Lady and an Italian pornstar-turned-politician.

The verdict: Skip (unless you love all things Final Fantasy)

Pictured: Michael T. Astolfi (L) and Aaron Rasmussen, creators of upcoming game BlindSide.
Photo courtesy Aaron Rasmussen

Aaron Rasmussen was 16 years old when a chemistry teacher told him to mix red phosphorous and potassium chlorate.

The two chemicals are volatile when mixed, but they don’t normally combust without some form of impact. But these chemicals were in their pure form. The blast hit Rasmussen straight in the eyes, knocking him out. When he awoke, he was blind — a condition the doctors said might be permanent.

“Step one was figuring out what room I was in,” he said. “Step two was running into things. Step three was getting the hang of navigating blind.”

To Rasmussen, it was reminiscent of the careful learning process of a new videogame. Over time, Rasmussen’s vision slowly healed, but the memories of blindness never faded. He decided he wanted to share the experience with the world in the form of a game where the player must stumble around in the dark. To fund the game, called Blindside, Rasmussen turned to Kickstarter, the crowdsourcing website that lets artists with a big idea but no money seek funding from potential customers.

Within a month and a half, Rasmussen and Astolfi had raised over $14,000 from 550 different sponsors hooked by the idea of a game that can’t be seen.

BlindSide, which Rasmussen expects will be released early this year, isn’t an anomaly. Since its founding in 2009, Kickstarter has already generated millions of dollars in funding for gaming-related projects as diverse as a museum of gaming culture and a zombie-fueled workout game for your phone. Developers are finding that the combination of free publicity and early engagement with the gaming community can help generate fans for a project while it is still just an idea. And crowdsourced funding lets inexperienced coders avoid the complicated and frustrating process of wooing big game publishers. In 2011, film and music projects were the most popular Kickstarter projects, but games boasted the largest increase in backers: nearly 46,000 backers pledged over $3.6 million last year, a 730 percent increase in funders from 2010. Some 253 gaming projects were deemed successful.

“BlindSide is a passion project, so we would’ve made it happen however we needed to,” Rasmussen says. “[Without Kickstarter] it just would’ve taken much longer, and we would’ve had to cut a lot of corners.”

Fara, an action-RPG released for iPhone and iPad last year, may not have been possible without Kickstarter.
Image courtesy Pixel and Texel

Selling Ideas

Founded in 2009 by day trader Perry Chen, Kickstarter is a crowdfunding tool that has evolved into a literal marketplace of ideas, facilitating generosity and serving as a financial pipeline between auteurs and their fans. The website allows anybody to pitch their projects and seek funding from potential customers.

The process is simple. First, somebody asks for donations to fund a project, like a book or a webseries or a set of graphic novels. He sets a financial goal and a deadline by which to meet it. If he raises enough money before the deadline, the project is funded. If the goal isn’t hit, nobody pays.

It’s a process that has done wonders for many aspiring gamemakers and indie developers. Game ideas on Kickstarter have found loads of success, even when they’re not as unusual as BlindSide.

Fara, a mobile action-role-playing game created by two former employees of Doom maker id Software, earned almost $6,000 on Kickstarter. That money was was essential to getting the game off the ground, said co-creator Andrew Strickland.

“We had put so much of our own personal money into buying advertising and paying for our cost of existing while the game was finishing,” he said in a phone interview. “I think near the end we thought we might be in some trouble if we didn’t have somebody supporting us.”

“Without Kickstarter, we might not have had any advertising money.”

Strickland and co-creator Brett Estabrook used the Kickstarter cash to place advertisements on gaming websites like Destructoid.

“Without Kickstarter, we might not have had any advertising money,” Strickland said. “It doesn’t go real far, but helps to know that you’re at least spreading the word.”

Kickstarter can get customers invested, both literally and figuratively, in a game before it is released. With nothing but an idea, a bit of video and a few screenshots, a developer can start building a loyal fan base.

The promise of fostering a personal connection with a game’s developer can get people to open their wallets in advance. Jon Krusell, a frequent Kickstarter donator who helped back Fara, says he isn’t even interested in RPGs.

“If I like the personality of the team, I may donate even if I don’t intend to use the product myself,” Krusell said in an e-mail. “By donating to Fara I was able to live vicariously through the dev team.”

Jeff Hsu, whose iPhone game Catball Eats It All earned over $4,000 on Kickstarter, feels similarly. He says he used the crowdfunding website as a way to drum up publicity and collect early feedback from potential players.

Kickstarter also allows developers like Hsu to circumvent the traditional process of getting a game published. For inexperienced, small developers, getting funding from big game publishers can be a Sisyphean task.

“Pitching to a publisher or other major investor is a really involved process,” Hsu said. “It requires that you first get in touch with them, find the right people to talk to, pitch your game, catch their interest, and if you get
that far, then you’ll need to negotiate funding and terms, including who gets what. It’s simply too much work for time-strapped indie game developers.”

We’re hiring at Game|Life!

As you may have already heard, Game|Life contributor Jason Schreier is finishing up his tenure here at Wired. He has left behind big shoes to fill, like Sideshow Bob. We are looking for a Sideshow Mel, bone-shaped hair accessory not required but encouraged, to write daily news posts and contribute occasional reviews, news features and opinion to the Game|Life blog. This will be a contract position; pay to be determined based on experience. As Jason will attest, this is an excellent opportunity for a talented enthusiastic writer to get his or her foot in the door.

Details on how to apply are below.

But wait, there’s more! Additionally, I would like to say that Game|Life is also now accepting pitches for individual feature stories. What we’re ideally looking for are stories like “Quest For the Golden Nintendo Game” — evergreen news features about a particular trend in gaming, written for a general audience. We’ve got a few coming up that are going to further illustrate what we’re looking for, so keep an eye out for those.

To apply for Game|Life’s Contributor position, send an email (no attachments please unless you draw us a comic) to wiredkohler@gmail.com with the following:

- A paragraph about yourself. Who are you? What have you done that makes you qualified for this?

- Three writing samples, published or unpublished: A news post, a piece of game criticism and a longer feature.

We’ll pick out a few applicants and get back to you with more requests (sorry, the sheer volume of emails we get means we can’t write back to everyone).

Capcom's Dragon Dogma will be out for consoles this May.
Image courtesy Capcom

A demo for the forthcoming horror game Resident Evil 6 will come packaged with the action RPG Dragon’s Dogma when it is released in May, publisher Capcom said Tuesday.

Dragon’s Dogma, which Capcom will release for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on May 22, will come with a download key that allows players to get the demo. Xbox owners will get to test out Resident Evil 6 on July 3, but PlayStation users won’t see the popular zombie game until September 4, Capcom said.

The full version of Resident Evil 6 will be out on November 20.

Animator Joel Furtado released a fake trailer Sunday showing off his gorgeous depiction of a potential new Zelda game.

Though “The Legend of Zelda: The Lost Oracle” will likely never be much more than a trailer, its Wind Waker-inspired visuals look like a watercolor painting brought to life, the type of game most Zelda fans would love to play.

Or, as one YouTube commenter writes: “I KEEP THROWING MY MONEY AT THE MONITOR!! NOTHING IS HAPPENING!!”

Could the Xbox 720 (or whatever Microsoft’s next game console ends up being called) take steps to kill off the market for used gaming? We discuss the possibility on this week’s Game|Life podcast.

But first, Wired magazine senior editors Chris Baker and Peter Rubin and Game|Life’s me opine, from a position of near-perfect ignorance, on the lack of a 2012 BlizzCon show. Wired.com managing editor Marty Cortinas, former editor of World of Warcraft magazine, probably knows a great deal more about this but he was out sick when we recorded this week’s show.

Additionally, Baker takes the “Whatcha been playing?” segment and really runs with it this week, going off about a new indie game called Q: Compressing the Heart, a Choose Your Own Adventure book called Inside UFO 54-40 and adult-themed Minecraft fanfic (note: do not actually read those stories unless you want to be horrified).

Game|Life’s podcast is posted every Friday, appearing on iTunes and embedded below. You can also download it directly.

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Image: Stephan Mosel/Flickr

At a briefing this week for investors and media in Japan following the release of its most recent financial forecasts, Nintendo outlined major new steps it would take to bring its online gaming service for its upcoming Wii U console up to speed with the competition.

Announcing a rebranding of the service from the somewhat unwieldy “Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection” to the more sensible “Nintendo Network,” Nintendo worldwide president Satoru Iwata announced a variety of new features that would come to both the Nintendo 3DS and the upcoming Wii U console.

Nintendo said it will finally support multiple user accounts on the Wii U hardware. It will also introduce what Iwata referred to as “digital distribution of packaged software” — offering users the choice of purchasing its top-tier videogames either at retail stores or through direct download.

“This concept was built into the design of the Nintendo 3DS, and we already have the necessary infrastructure,” Iwata said of the plan to sell games digitally. “We will prepare the same infrastructure for the Wii U. However, we have not decided the concrete timing of when we will start it. The decision must be made by taking into consideration such factors as the relationship with the wholesalers and retailers, and the best way to be embraced by consumers, as well as the environment surrounding the market and consumers, such as the required memory capacity on consumers’ SD memory cards. However, as an option for the future, the significance of this business field will increase,” he said.

Nintendo has long said that it would launch Wii U, which features a tablet-based controller, in 2012. This week it confirmed that it would launch the new machine in four major territories — Japan, the U.S., Europe and Australia — by the end of the year.

“The company is aiming to firmly complete the development of the entire system and prepare sufficient software so that the Wii U will be at its best at the time of the launch,” Iwata said. “Needless to say, we have learned a bitter lesson from the launch of the Nintendo 3DS.”

Recently, Nintendo made significant improvements to the Nintendo 3DS’ online eShop service, offering demos of retail games, the ability to store a credit card number for later use and the ability to download multiple games while the system is in sleep mode.

Image: Nintendo

Nintendo will release a new Mario game for its 3DS handheld at some point during the next fiscal year, it said Friday.

The new game, which Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said will be “a key title for the Nintendo 3DS,” could be out any time between April 1, 2012 and March 31, 2013. Iwata said it will be a two-dimensional sidescrolling game.

Last fall, Nintendo released Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 for its glasses-free 3-D handheld. Each of the plumber-helmed games moved a million copies in both the U.S. and Japan.

Super Mario 3D Land image courtesy Nintendo

The Resistance shooter franchise has been Sony's answer to Microsoft's Gears of War.
Image courtesy Insomniac Games

Developer Insomniac Games will no longer work on the Resistance shooter franchise, the company said Thursday.

“We won’t be making any more Resistances,” Insomniac CEO Ted Price said to gaming website VG247 on Thursday.

An Insomniac representative later confirmed the news to Wired.com.

Insomniac has done the bulk of the work on the PlayStation franchise, helming three Resistance games for PlayStation 3 over the past six years. Other developers have tackled portable games in the series: Sony’s Bend Studio developed Resistance: Retribution for PSP, and Nihilistic Software will release Resistance: Burning Skies for Vita later this year.

At E3 2011, Insomniac announced that it will release a co-op spy game called OverStrike for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at some point this year.

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If you check out our Product Reviews section today, you will see that I wrote a review of the Japanese PlayStation Vita. I even did the exciting video feature above. Expect a lot more as we get closer to the U.S. launch on February 22.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata announces the Wii U at E3 2011.
Image courtesy Nintendo

Nintendo has revised its financial forecast for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, predicting a net loss of 65 billion yen ($837 million). In October, it had forecast a net loss of only 20 billion yen ($258 million).

“We had higher expectations for the year-end season, but failed to meet them,” Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told reporters in Osaka, Japan, according to a Reuters report.

Although Nintendo 3DS had a rocky start, Nintendo stuck to its original forecast of 16 million units during the fiscal year on the back of a drastic price cut and the back-to-back releases of killer app software Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7.

While this did stimulate sales, it didn’t have the effect Nintendo expected and the company revised down its forecast to 14 million 3DS units this fiscal year.

Nintendo also revised down its expectations for Nintendo DS and Wii hardware sales this year, from 6 million to 5.5 million and from 12 million to 10 million, respectively.

Jill Valentine splatters a zombie's brains, not that he has any, on the wall in Resident Evil Revelations for Nintendo 3DS.
Image: Capcom

I have no idea what the heck just happened in Resident Evil Revelations, but it was pretty awesome.

Somebody high up at Capcom seems to be laboring under the tragic misconception that a human brain can actually process what goes on in the stories in a Resident Evil game. The latest, to be released Feb. 7 for Nintendo 3DS, has all of the ingredients: About a dozen characters that I kept confusing for each other, a plot that involves layers of secret conspiracies masking other secret conspiracies, and most importantly a whole mess of made-up words. The bioterrorist organization behind everything is … Velcro? Valtrex? Something.

Oh well. So I forget what happened. The important thing is, Resident Evil Revelations is a kickass action game. It follows in the footsteps of Resident Evil 5, ditching the plodding “survive against insurmountable odds” gameplay of the early games in the series and going straight to “make zombies explode into a pile of goo with a machine gun.” This is the first game I’ve played on 3DS that really pushes the hardware — if you want a 3-D graphical showpiece for your new console, this will be the game you brag to your friends about.

Revelations allows you, in its options menu, to adjust the 3-D intensity. Go ahead. Crank it all the way up to “Very Strong” and let it assault your eyeballs. The 3-D didn’t work perfectly for me — no matter where I held the 3DS, I got some ghosting where the images didn’t align correctly — but it was good enough that I left it on the whole time. Okay, not the whole time. When I was fighting the final boss, easily the game’s most taxing encounter, I had to turn it off because I was moving the 3DS so much as I furiously whirled around blasting my shotgun. Otherwise it was 3-D throughout the campaign, which took about 10 hours.

While the main story of Revelations generally follows Jill Valentine, heroine of the first game, it’s split up into episodic chunks that also occasionally introduce other player-characters in totally different locations and time periods. This rapid-fire Dan Brownian jumping from place to place does keep things from getting repetitive, although it also stops you from growing any attachment to one character. Each episode begins with a cute little “Previously On Alan Wake…” style recap of the last few cinema scenes.

You can use the Circle Pad Pro, that upcoming 3DS peripheral that adds a second analog stick onto the system, for the dual-stick aim-and-move controls. But I found the single-stick controls to be just fine, at least for the Normal level of difficulty. The zombies still stagger towards you slowly enough that having to rotate in place to turn around isn’t that big a deal.

The gameplay retains many of the vestiges of Resident Eviltry past but dispenses with the actual details of it. You find Green Herbs still to replenish your health, but you no longer must combine them with Red Herbs or anything like that. You needn’t find any rooster keys to open chicken doors. On the one hand it is nice to be rid of some of this busywork. On the other hand, there was a certain reward to exploration and backtracking in previous games that doesn’t really exist in this more linear, episodic structure.

At most times during your adventure you will have the use of a Metroid Prime-style scanner that adds a new wrinkle to the gameplay: You can scan the room for hidden items, but you can also scan monsters before or after you kill them. Scanning them alive and when they’re really close to you gets you more points, and 100 points gets you another Green Herb. A clever risk-reward mechanic.

Many people will probably just gun through the campaign and be done with it. If you want more, there’s Raid Mode, which can be played solo, or with a friend online or off (neither of which we were able to test in time). This lets you blast through story-free chunks of the single-player game in which you face off against stronger, crazier enemies, trying to set the best time and best kill streaks to earn points. You can use these points to buy more weapons, making your character strong enough to try more Raid levels. If you want to try to perfect your gameplay, Raid Mode should keep you occupied for long.

As for me, I was more than happy just playing through the story. Resident Evil Revelations is just the sort of thing Nintendo 3DS needs right now, a high-quality original production.

WIRED Intense action, gorgeous graphics, lots of replay options.

TIRED Convoluted, ridiculous story, occasional weird framerate hitching, several errors in subtitles.

Rating:

$50, Capcom

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

Miffed at the possibility that new game consoles could lock out used games? Get used to it.

“I’ve heard from one reliable industry source that Microsoft intends to incorporate some sort of anti-used game system as part of their so-called Xbox 720,” Kotaku’s Steven Totilo wrote on Wednesday morning. I have no reason to doubt that he heard that. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s happening — at this point, Microsoft is probably considering all sorts of features for its next Xbox console and floating them by game developers to see what the reaction is. But I’m sure it’s something that’s being very strongly considered. Also, the death of used games is inevitable.

PlayStation Vita, Sony’s next portable game machine, should be seen as an interim step on the road to the no-used-games future. Every Vita game that is released on cartridge (read: can be sold or traded) will also be released as a cheaper download (read: one owner). Sony would love it if Vita was like iPhone, and every game was sold digitally — no cost to produce the goods, no possibility of used sales. Customers currently expect gaming consoles to act a certain way, though. They expect to be able to go to the store, buy a game and sell it back. And they expect to be able to buy pre-owned games at a lower price.

But the success of digital-only, one-owner games on PC, phones, tablets and social networks must surely be helping to change consumers’ attitudes about what a game system is “supposed” to do. So as soon as Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo et al. think they can get away with it, the disc or cartridge will simply disappear, replaced entirely by digital game sales. What we are possibly looking at now is an interim period in which the disc as a delivery method is still around but it becomes more like a PC game, which are sold with one-time-use keys that grant one owner a license to play the game on his machine.

Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games are already locking away significant content, like Catwoman in Batman: Arkham City, behind just such a scheme. It’s not that far of a leap to just locking up the whole game. The only thing keeping them from doing so, besides customers’ expectations, is the fact that an Internet connection would be required. In 2010, a study said that 78% of PlayStation 3 owners and 73% of Xbox 360 owners had their consoles hooked up to the series of tubes. That’s a lot, but 27% of Xbox 360 owners is still a few million people who can’t play any content that requires online verification.

Should Microsoft come up with some scheme that ensures only one owner per game without requiring an Internet connection, that would be a whole different ballgame.

Now, would this mean that used games would instantly disappear from the shelf at your local GameStop? Maybe not. What could happen is exactly what happened with the Catwoman situation. GameStop sold used copies of the game along with new Catwoman download codes, which is presumably purchased in bulk from the publisher. Thus, the publisher gets its cut of the used game sales, which is all it’s really after. I would not be surprised to see a similar deal, wherein GameStop pays the publisher to get a new code for each used game it sells. If you’re wondering where all that money would come from, you need look no further than your own wallet. GameStop will simply pay customers less for each game disc that they trade in.

The disc still has a use. If the so-called Xbox 720 is going to use Blu-ray discs (and I do not see why it wouldn’t), then it would still be impractical to download and store a library of games that take up 20 GB of space each. The disc would still be necessary to store all the content, but it can fill that role while still being only tied to one owner.

Note that nowhere in this analysis have I raised the question of whether or not this is a good idea. In 2010, after a creative director at a major game publisher that is currently having serious financial difficulties suggested that used game buyers are “cheating” his company, I (largely relying on great analysis by Bill Harris of Dubious Quality) pointed out that the relationship between used game sales is much more complex and symbiotic than game publishers would have you believe. One wrinkle: People who buy new games sell those games back to fund the purchase of more new games.

What happens to the sales figures of new games when they can’t do that anymore? Nobody knows. But if Microsoft does take steps to curtail used-game sales on the next Xbox, we’ll find out.

Photo: Akyan/Flickr

A Warcraft cosplayer bares her fangs at BlizzCon 2010. Blizzard said on Wednesday that it would not hold a convention in 2012. Photo: Karen Chu/Wired.com

Perhaps giving credence to the theory that the world will end this year, developer Blizzard will not hold its annual BlizzCon convention in 2012, it said Wednesday.

The StarCraft, Diablo and Warcraft publisher will instead host an event in Asia called the 2012 Battle.net World Championship that will host tournaments for competitive StarCraft II and World of Warcraft players.

“Blizzard gamers and eSports fans from around the world will be invited to attend and witness some of the most skilled pro players on the planet battle it out for cash and glory,” the company said on its blog.

BlizzCon has been held each year in Anaheim, California, since 2005. The two-day 2011 convention drew 26,000 fans and included a massive cosplay contest, hands-on gameplay of upcoming titles and a StarCraft II tournament among many other activities. Blizzard said the show would return in 2013.

Blizzard added that it is “heavily focused” on finishing its upcoming PC games Diablo III, StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria.

Diablo III is expected to be out this year, though Blizzard has not yet announced a release date for the upcoming hack-and-slash RPG.

You can warp into both inanimate and animate objects in Warp.
Image courtesy Electronic Arts

The puzzle-stealth-action platformer Warp will kick off Microsoft’s Xbox Live House Party, an annual lineup of weekly downloadable games, the Xbox 360 maker said Monday.

Warp will launch for Xbox Live on February 15 at 800 Microsoft Points ($10). Publisher Electronic Arts said it will be downloadable on the PlayStation 3 and PC on March 13, also at $10.

On February 22, Microsoft will release Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, the downloadable sequel to 2010′s Alan Wake, for $15.

The following week, publisher THQ will release Nexuiz, an arena-based first-person shooter based on the eponymous freeware, Quake-inspired 2005 game. It will be downloadable on Xbox 360 for $10 on February 29.

Publisher Ubisoft will release post-apocalyptic action-adventure game I Am Alive on March 7 as a download for Xbox 360. It will run you $15.

You might think that after two years of non-stop Minecraft maps, mods and artful re-creations of everything from Mario statues to genitalia, nothing that modders do could be that impressive anymore.

Well, you be the judge: YouTuber Benny Girard has re-created the entire overworld of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. As you can see in the video he’s made to show off his work, the whole game seems to be packed in there, from the Great Deku Tree to the gardens of Hyrule Castle.

The Entertainment Software Association, the trade association that represents most major producers of videogames in the United States, dropped its support of the controversial proposed bills Stop Online Piracy Act and Protect IP Act on Friday.

Here’s the full statement that the ESA mailed out to the press:

From the beginning, ESA has been committed to the passage of balanced legislation to address the illegal theft of intellectual property found on foreign rogue sites. Although the need to address this pervasive threat to our industry’s creative investment remains, concerns have been expressed about unintended consequences stemming from the current legislative proposals. Accordingly, we call upon Congress, the Obama Administration, and stakeholders to refocus their energies on producing a solution that effectively balances both creative and technology interests. As an industry of innovators and creators, we understand the importance of both technological innovation and content protection and are committed to working with all parties to encourage a balanced solution.

This comes several hours after Congress said it would indefinitely delay votes on both SOPA and PIPA.

Many pundits and journalists have criticized both proposed bills, which could allow the U.S. government to shut down sites it suspects to contain copyrighted content. On Wednesday, sites across the Internet including Reddit and Wikipedia blacked out to protest the bill. Wired.com censored the headlines on its front page.

Earlier this week, Firefall developer Red 5 Studios called upon the videogame industry to boycott the ESA-run Electronic Entertainment Expo conference this year to protest the ESA’s support of SOPA. Other game studios, including Gears of War developer Epic Games and League of Legends developer Riot Games, have also spoken out against SOPA in the past few weeks.