Check back next time for a podcast discussion on Gears of War!

So that’s it folks, the end of a gaming era is here.  The three PS3 Resistance games, as well as the Resistance property itself was all created by Insomniac Studios, and now they’re making it official that Resistance 3 was the final game in the Resistance series that they will be working on.  The property is in the hands of Sony and currently Nihilistic, who is developing a new handheld Resistance game for the Sony Vita.

I know this had made news in the past few days, but I wasn’t willing to post it up here unless there was some sort of official confirmation about it.  When this was posted it met my requirements of “official confirmation”.  As far as I’m concerned, Insomniac is the reason why so many people picked up a Playstation 3 at launch, and I still consider the original Resistance: Fall of Man to have some of the best multiplayer on the PS3.

Good luck to Insomniac with all their future game developments.  They are really good at their jobs.  Here, here.

OS: Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7

PROCESSOR:A dual core processor is required:

• AMD: Athlon X2 2.8GHz
• Intel: Core 2 Duo 2GHz

MEMORY: 2 GB

HARD DRIVE: 8 GB

VIDEO CARD:DirectX 10 compatible or later with 512MB RAM

• AMD: ATI Radeon 3650, 4450, 5550, 6450 or higher (per series)
• NVIDIA: GeForce 8600GT, 9500GT, GT120, GT430, GT520 (per series)

SOUND CARD: DirectX 9.0c compatible

INPUT: Mouse and keyboard, Xbox360 controller also supported

The game will be downloadable through Steam, and you can expect it to take full advantage of Steam’s features.  It will not support the Games for Windows platform.  However, there are some pretty sweet features that the PC game will have.  A cool little PC feature is you will be able to play Alan Wake on multiple monitors, perfect for extreme widescreen aficionados.  It is also compatible with Nvidia’s 3D technology, but is very resource demanding, you’ll need a top of the line GPU to take full advantage of it.

Alan Wake is Coming February, 2012 to PC.  Both DLC episodes will be also released alongside the game.

I wasn’t expecting Valve to do this, but it does make sense.  The fact is that Microsoft has already released a similiar program worldwide to allow mobile access to Xbox Live, and Sony has also released a similiar application for the Playstation Network (although it has not come to North America yet).  Valve obviously intends to continue to extend Steam accessibility past the PC.  We’ve already seen them release console games that have Steam connectivity (Portal 2 for the PS3) and it looks like this is the next volley to continue that expansion.

However, don’t expect to be able to use the program just by downloading it.  Valve is currently not accepting all users into testing this app right now, but if you want a chance at joining this program in beta testing, you will need to have a Steam account and download the program to your mobile device of choice.  Once you log into the app for the first time you will need to verify your device by e-mail, and Valve will add your account to the list of possible beta testers.

You can grab the iOS version here and the Android version here.

The Darkness II is coming Feb 7th, 2012 for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.  Here are the PC system requirements.

Minimum:

• OS:Windows XP/Vista/7
• Processor:Intel Core 2 @ 2GHz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+
• Memory:1.5GB RAM
• Hard Disk Space:10GB
• Video Card:256MB NVIDIA GeForce 8600 / ATI Radeon HD 2600
• Sound:DirectX Compatible
• Additional: Requires installation of Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, DirectX and nVidia PhysX version 9.11.1107 (included with download)

Recommended:

• OS:Windows XP/Vista/7
• Processor:2.4 GHz Quad Core processor
• Memory:2GB RAM
• Hard Disk Space:10GB
• Video Card:512+ MB NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX
• Sound:DirectX Compatible
• Additional: Requires installation of Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable, DirectX and nVidia PhysX version 9.11.1107 (included with download)

The PC version of the game will require STEAM.  If you want to check out how the game runs on your PC before its released, you can download a playable demo through the STEAM marketplace free of charge.

If you’re interested in knowing more about The Darkness II, 2K Games will be streaming the first hour of the game here at 4PM PST today.

Sometimes, you’re forced to make some severe leaps of logic as to just how plausible a video game’s grounded reality can be.  Some things we’re willing to take for granted, like enemies will simply just carry health and ammunition supplies with them at all times, and you will be immediately able to make use of them.

But then sometimes there will be moments in gaming which skirt the bounds of reality and you are forced to ask yourself…COULD THAT REALLY HAPPEN?  Fortunately for me, I happen to have a bunch of friends on speed dial with science backgrounds and when I ask them questions, they have no problem filling me in on just what reality would do in these situations.

So this is Science Check, where I take a look at the leaps and bounds of scientific logic that games have made over the years and check if it would indeed work, or if you tried doing it in the real world, you’d be totally screwed.

Now I want to mention that I’m going to be talking about the whole of the Jurassic Park movie franchise.  I will sprinkle in facts taken from the various Jurassic Park games and if needed anything presented in either of the bi-coastal theme park rides.  I’ve never actually read any of Michael Crichton’s original books, but I am familiar with a few factoids in them that did not appear in the movie when applicable.

For those of you who have not seen the Jurassic Park movies (seriously, go watch the first movie, its one of the greatest movies of all time), here’s the concept behind it.  A theme park was able to create living dinosaurs by extracting DNA from intact blood left behind in fossilized mosquitos.  Mosquitos existed alongside dinosaurs 65 million years ago and would bite them.  Sometimes the mosquito with this dinosaur blood still inside would land on a tree and get stuck in its sap.  The sap would fossilize after millions of years, preserving the mosquito and the dinosaur blood inside it.  Jurassic Park scientists would find the fossils inside massive mines, extract the blood from the mosquito and use it to create dinosaurs.  Using the DNA of a frog they filled in any gaps in the gene sequence.  It was similiar enough and saved time, had they used a complete intact DNA strand it would have taken much longer.  With a complete genetic code, a dinosaur could be created inside an empty ostrich egg.

The whole park was monitored by an automated system programmed by Dennis Nedry.  The animals were kept enclosed inside electrified pens to keep them from getting out (or other animals getting in).  The point of the movie was to show that even with the most sophisticated control system imaginable you can’t keep living creatures under control, especially ones that don’t belong in modern day.

While I don’t have the museum’s pamphlet with me any more (I was 9 when I went to see Jurassic Park for the first time) I do clearly remember the case that the museum made as to why the cloning of dinosaurs on the scale that Jurassic Park used would not have worked.  The museum did not deny the possibility that fossilized amber could hold intact DNA from fossilized mosquitos. They did argue however that with the technology available at the time, it would have taken fifty years to go through all the DNA and create a dinosaur with it. If there was any mistake, they would have to start the process all over again.  In fact the Jurassic Park movie clearly stated that if you looked at a fast moving screens of genetic codes once per second for eight hours a day, it would take two years to read the entire DNA strand.  They claimed that using “virtual reality” (yeah that was big at the time) they could break down a strand in minutes and show the scientists where the gaps were in the DNA sequence.

Here’s the thing.  These numbers were crunched based on 1993 figures (or 1987 figures if you want to base it off of the book’s timeline) of computing power.  In the game Trespasser, John Hammond did confirm that InGen spared no expense to the computing power for the genetic scientists and had access to multiple Cray supercomputers, which were used for the gene sequencing.  At a cost of about fifteen or so million dollars a piece, they had about half the power of an original model Xbox.  Computing power was still very low, and even if Jurassic Park spared no expense with what kinds of computers they were able to buy, they were still limited by the computing power of their day.  Nowadays a current model iPhone costing around 300 dollars is about ten times more powerful than a computer costing fifteen million dollars was back in 93.  Would it take less time now?  Well, we were able to map the human genome in less than fifteen years, and during the time it was being worked on there were already other organizations trying faster methods to do it in less time.  I’m sure if you put some of today’s fastest and most expensive supercomputers in the world at the task they would be able to do it in a hell lot faster than fifty years.

The funniest part I found after watching these movies nowadays is that the computing technobabble (most of it spouted by Dennis Nedry) is actually quite accurate for the time.  He made it clear that any changes he made to the park’s code base would use up the memory and cpu cycles used by other portions of the park while it was operating.  This was quite accurate.  With software as complex as what it took to fully automate Jurassic Park with a minor staff, its software would take a while to debug, reprogram and compile.  The computing hardware that would be available to the park at the time was limited by today’s standards but accurately used.  Nedry had his own set of Macs to debug and build the park’s computer code.  In the movie they mentioned the park used a UNIX system designed for SGI workstations.  Back in the day, SGI workstations were considered the cream of the crop when it came to design power.  I’ve seen plenty of people online use them to replicate the interface Jurassic Park used, so it’s quite possible they can operate as shown in the movie.  To provide the computing power needed, Nedry networked together eighteen connection machines, which is typical for that kind of system.  If the server drives which contained the park’s operating system was set to read only, resetting it would clear out any changes made to it since it was installed, however it would have been a lot simpler and safer to restore a working backup.

As far as I can tell, if there was one thing the movies got completely wrong it was the electrified fences.  Modern electric fences, like the ones that are used to keep animals penned in wild preserves are only dangerous when touched by something grounded.   This still would be effective against ground based animals (I can’t imagine a T-Rex or Triceratops would be jumping very high).  However, Monkeys are notorious for violating electrified pens like this by simply jumping onto the fences.  There was no way Tim would have been shocked while climbing the perimeter fence, but he would have needed to jump off once it had turned on.

So that’s Jurassic Park, science checked.  If you haven’t seen Jurassic Park yet, you really should.  The Jurassic Park game is out for purchase on the Xbox 360, PC or Playstation 3.  You can find the PC version for download on Telltale’s site, the Xbox 360 version at retail and the PS3 version for download through the PSN.

There’s been a lot of buzz about the game since it’s preview at this year’s Consumer Electronic’s Show.  All the gameplay of Alan Wake returns.  The game will also feature both licensed music and new music exclusive to the game, including a brand new single by The Old Gods of Asgard (who sound eerily similar to Poets of the Fall, wink wink).  The game’s storyline promises a four hour campaign storyline and a separate game mode called Fight ‘Till Dawn, where you’ll have to defend yourself against respawning enemies until the sun rises.

Alan Wake’s American Nightmare, developed by Remedy, the creators of Alan Wake and Max Payne, will be released February 22nd, 2012 exclusive to the Xbox Live Arcade.  The final cost of the game will be 1200 Microsoft Points or $15US.  Since this is an Xbox Live Arcade release, there will be a free demo/trial version of the game released alongside the full version.

Quakecon is the yearly event which is a celebration of all things id Software created. There is always a major bring your own computer gaming tournament, and previews for upcoming games.  Best of all it is free and open to the public. In order to participate in any competition you simply just need to register. Signups are not yet posted, but I’ll be sure to keep you all posted on when they do.

In my opinion, adventure gaming saw a resurgence in the latter half of the last decade primarily fueled by the episodic gaming experiment of 2006. While it was expensive and time-consuming to make a shooter and release it episodically, there was something about adventure games that lended itself well to an episodic formula. Telltale Games were probably the only survivors of the episodic experiment that I can think of, and it is still their preferred business model. However, they weren’t the only ones doing well with this new generation of adventure games. New adventure games started to see retail release and not only see decent review scores but sell pretty well. Quantic Dream released Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) and started a whole new model of adventure games and called them interactive movies. They followed Indigo Prophecy up one generation later with Heavy Rain, which also saw great sales, had very high review scores, and personally convinced me to be an early adopter of the Playstation Move controller system.

However, in the 90s the adventure game was a staple of the PC platform before the FPS craze took over. There are a lot of classic adventure games that people have been talking about for the past twenty years that some people were never able to play. A lot of them were shot in Full-Motion Video (FMV). While the FMV trend was universally hated after it left us towards the end of the 90s, there are a lot of people talking about these games again, and inspired by internet personalities like The Spoony One, want the chance to play these games. Boxed copies of older games (especially unopened ones) can cost large amounts of money, or you could hope that they could see a downloadable release through an online service like STEAM or Good Old Games, but there’s still the chance of compatibility issues. You could have an older computer still lying around that could play the game, but the chances of them having long since broken down is very high. You could try to emulate the older operating systems that the game requires, but that would require either having a copy of the older OS in your archives still or buying a new boxed copy off eBay or Amazon.

All these problems beg for these games to see a re-release on a new platform better suited to handle an adventure game’s interface. When you think about what translates a mouse’s point and click interface the best the answer becomes obvious, it’s the touch screen. A modern iPhone nowadays has more processing power than a computer made at the time these classic adventure games were released and the downloadable marketplace can take advantage of the low filesize of some of the older games, and their expanded internal storage capacity can certainly fit the large filesizes of the larger games that used multiple CD-ROMs.

Adventure games are already out for the iPhone and iPad. In fact I remember shortly after the app store launched someone released the original game Adventure from the Atari. The tilt sensor translated perfectly as a control system in lieu of the lack of a directional pad. Telltale releases many of their adventure games to the iPhone/iPad since the third season of Sam & Max.

Older adventure games like Myst and The 7th Guest have already been ported to the platform, where they have access to a wide customer base with no fear of running out of product. There’s been a demand over the past two years to see more of these games get re-released for the iPhone, I think the most vocal demand has probably been to Konami and Kojima Team for a Snatcher iOS re-release, but I can think of a bunch of more games that would work perfectly ranging from Policenauts, to The Daedalus Encounter. Also I think a lot of people want the chance to play some of the games that reviewers have been bringing back into the limelight like Ripper, Phantasmagoria (and it’s sequel), and Johnny Mnemonic.

Having played (or seen played) some of these games personally I can attest they would work perfectly with a touchpad interface, and could probably be remade with just some minor tweaking to the game’s interface (like occasionally bringing up a keyboard/keypad). While its possible that many of the companies that made these games originally have long since gone out of business, someone must have those original game assets lying around in a vault somewhere. While these developers may not exist anymore the publishers certainly do, or have had their assets absorbed by other currently existing publishers. It would be a lot more profitable to work with already existing assets and release them to guaranteed sales in a market where they can’t sell out than build more full priced retail games from scratch.

Since the release of the teaser I have had so many questions about the project.  Fortunately, I was able to get an interview with the documentary’s director, Martin Touhey.

Maniac: What is your documentary about and what do you plan to show your audience?

Martin:  The short answer on this is the documentary will cover the past, present and future of Dragon’s Lair. Vague, I know. There are many facets to this game beyond the game itself. I want to give some insight on how the game was conceived and created from its initial concept to its production and manufacture. It will cover the animation, music, and programming involved. This will include the technology of the laserdisc player and how it was groundbreaking at the time. I wish to show its importance in video game history as it was inducted into the Smithsonian. I’ll touch upon how the video game crash came and Dragon’s Lair was a hopeful addition to struggling arcades. I also want to give insight to the fan base that Dragon’s Lair had and still has to this day, along with new fans that constantly pop up. Showing the various merchandise, tv shows, and general hype that was created back in its heyday in the 80′s should be interesting as well. The home versions of the game will be covered and show the differences between them and the arcade version. The Daphne emulator will also be included in that list. I want to delve more deeply into the emotional impact it had on the creators as they struggled to meet deadlines and started running short on investment capital. I want to look into how a game that is nearly 30 years old is still ported to new consoles and devices and still sells well. The one thing that I want to know along with many other fans is what is going on with the 2d animated feature film. As I said, many facets. The trick to all of this is being able to make a film which will flow as a steady stream of consciousness. This in no way is a complete list, just what I can think of in one sitting. Besides I don’t want to give everything away.

I have a few goals I’d like to meet in regards to the audience. I’d like them to come away with a thorough knowledge of Dragon’s Lair, even if they’ve never heard of it before, I’d want people to seek out and play the game, and I want the audience to feel good about what they saw and to be excited about the long-awaited 2d animated feature film.

Maniac: What inspired you to make this documentary?

Martin:  What inspired me to make this film was simply a love of the game. My story is a familiar one to many fans I’m sure. I was only 9 years old in ’83 and I loved video games. Anywhere I went I sought out an arcade, restaurant, or laundromat to play them. As I was in the mall one day I walked into the arcade and that’s when I saw it. A crowd of people standing around one game that completely threw me for a loop. It was Dragon’s Lair. Atop the machine was a monitor and what I saw was the most surreal and fantastic thing ever. An animated cartoon of a bumbling knight fighting his way through all kinds of perils and monsters. I was almost in disbelief that this animated film was a game. It blended two of my favorite things, animation and video games. I felt that childlike wonder and amazement and knew that this was something special. As time went on my love for video games never diminished and when versions of the game came out on computers and consoles I started flashing back to those childhood memories and bought version after version hoping the next would be better than the last. It took a number of years, but eventually the technology of home computers supported faster and more vibrant graphics, enabling a more authentic Dragon’s Lair experience. As I grew older I kept the memories of Dragon’s Lair alive and, with the advent of the internet, I found that I wasn’t the only one who had the same experiences. Growing up with an appreciation for art and film, I wanted to create movies of my own. I was particularly fascinated in documentaries and especially video game documentaries after the release of The King of Kong. In the beginning of 2009 I googled “Dragon’s Lair documentary” and found references to a french documentary short and a video which was an inclusion on the 20th anniversary dvd, but nothing that was feature length. I felt that Dragon’s Lair was a great subject for such a project so I decided to take it on.

Maniac: Who do you have scheduled for interview?

Martin:  At this point there is a long list of potential interviews. The ones I seek in particular are Don Bluth, Gary Goldman, John Pomeroy, Rick Dyer and David Foster. There is an open communication going on between myself and Dragon’s Lair LLC to shoot these interviews. Although there is nothing set in stone quite yet, I am optimistic and have had an encouraging conversation with the director of marketing at Bluth Films. Shooting dates are tentative and will be announced as soon as details are hashed out. Other interviews that will be scheduled will be with Syd Bolton, who is a great resource of information on the game, Dragon’s Lair music composer Chris Stone, Walter Day of Twin Galaxies, Daphne emulator creator Matt Ownby, Dragon’s Lair superfan Jason Finn. There are many others, many of whom have worked on the game as artists, sound engineers, or programmers. Effects animator Dorse Lanpher was to be interviewed, but sadly he recently passed away.

Maniac:  What equipment are you using to make the documentary?

Martin:  To shoot we’re using a Panasonic HDX-900 and a Canon 7D. Editing and graphics are done on Macintosh computers running Final Cut Pro and Adobe After Effects.

Maniac:  What do you expect the final runtime to be?

Martin:  Final run time will be approximately 90 minutes.

Maniac:  What is your projected release date?

Martin:  The final release date is up in the air. I’d love to release it on June 19, 2013. That would be exactly 30 years from the date that Dragon’s Lair made its debut. Realistically that probably won’t happen and the date may be closer to the end of 2013 if not early 2014.

Maniac:  How do you plan to release the finished product?  Any chance of a DVD or Blu-Ray release?

Martin:  Releasing the film is a tricky business. Once finished, I’ll be submitting the film to various film festivals such as Sundance, SXSW, and Tribeca. Most films that show at festivals are without a distributor and are there to seek distribution. At this point it’s too early to tell whether or not I’ll have a distributor lined up before the festival release. A theatrical release is possible, but may not be likely as the cost to do such a release is in excess of $35,000. It’s going to depend on how successful the film is and if there’s a possibility of it turning a profit. A DVD and Blu-Ray release has been a goal from the start. Releasing the film on various digital platforms such as Netflix and Itunes are also possibilities.

Maniac:  Thank you for your time, really looking forward to seeing the finished film.

Well there you have it folks.  Be sure to check out the film’s official Twitter feed for any updates on the project.  Thanks again to Director Martin Touhey for taking my questions.  If you haven’t seen that teaser yet you can check it out here!