News surrounding yesterday’s company-wide layoff at Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning developer 38 Studios continues to roll in as people in and around the event speak up about exactly what happened between the company and the government of Rhode Island, which funded the studio through a $75 million loan.

“We are doing our best to salvage this, but the situation is very dire,” Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee said today in an interview with Bloomburg Television. “It was really insanity on the part of the previous administration to get into this high-risk industry, and now we’re seeing the ramifications.”

Further, because the studio did not give the state advance notice about yesterday’s firings, it is now back in default on its loan, Chafee said in a press conference this afternoon. The studio has 30 days to come out of default before it can receive millions of dollars in tax credits it asked for, and the governor is requesting a forensic audit of the company.

Meanwhile, former 38 Studios environment artist Victor Cortis claims the state government “flat out lied” when it promised to give the studio those credits after it made a $1.125 million payment to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, according to a forum post at game-artist community site Polycount. “The million dollar + payment that went to Rhode Island was in assurance we would receive the tax credits of [$8 million]. We even had buyers lined up for the credits and the government was sitting there telling us ‘You give us the million, we give you the tax credits,’” Cortis said. “We gave them the million. They did not give us the tax credits, which would’ve not only [paid] the employees, but saved the studio most likely as we had several publishing deals in the works.” (via Twinfinite)

Fantasy author R.A. Salvatore, who wrote the Reckoning and was consulting on its massively multiplayer online follow-up, Copernicus, came to 38 Studios’ defense in a thread on political blog Daily KOS. ”38 didn’t go begging for a handout from Rhode Island,” Salvatore wrote. “Rhode Island offered to secure a bond for them when the credit crunch reigned, trying to lure them out of Massachusetts.”

Speaking more generally about this experience with the team, Salvatore said, “I have to tell you that this was an amazing team of designers, engineers, artists, animators, writers, audio team and all the rest, all chasing a common dream — all pushing the envelope in their respective fields [. . .] And lord, I love ‘em all and miss them already.” (via The Escapist)

I'm scared, you guys.

Up until now, movies based on video games haven't bothered me. Resident Evil? Who cares. Silent Hill? Meh. Tomb Raider? Whatevs. Those are series I don't really have a huge emotional attachment to, so I didn't fret when their big-screen counterparts turned out to be awful.

But Shadow of the Colossus? That's a game too dear to my heart -- something I don't want inevitably ruined by the machine of Hollywood. No matter how much the director says he likes the game. 

So, Hollywood executives, if I could just pull you away from your cocaine for one moment, I have a single suggestion for your film: Use Koh Otani's original soundtrack.

Shadow of the Colossus is an interesting choice for a film in the first place. It has a cast of...well, five characters, if you count the horse. (Also, one of those characters is dead.) Every word of spoken dialogue in the game probably wouldn't cover a single Metal Gear Solid cut-scene. And aside from a handful of lizards and other critters, the 16 colossi are the only enemies.

That's why Shadow of the Colossus leans so heavily on the atmosphere it creates: the vast, empty landscape; the sun-drenched, bloom-lit environments; and most importantly, the soundtrack.

These things aren't just ambient window-dressing. They're what define the story.

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Listen to that composition above. The instrumentation is noticeably sparse at first, and the grace notes provided by the flute perfectly represent your character as he entered the Forbidden Land. (And we know the land is forbidden even before we are told; the choir, with its unintelligible lyrics and mournful melody, communicates that.) 

By the time the strings kick in, soaring to climax around the 2:10 mark, we've moved beyond words. The music is speaking on a deeper level, telling and describing in a way that no actor could. 

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The battle themes in Shadow of the Colossus are suitably heroic and epic, each befitting the mood and environment of the fight. But I'm more interested in the post-battle dirge that plays as each giant topples to the ground.

The tune isn't, as you'd expect, triumphant; the character (and by extension the player) should be celebrating his mastery over such behemoths. Instead, the music is lyrical and sad, almost funereal. And even as the string melody enters to resolve the minor key to a major one, a lingering note of doubt remains as a minor-second interval repeats (from 0:57 to the end). 

Even if you haven't played the game, you can pick up on what the music is communicating: sorrow, regret, accomplishment tinged with trepidation. And all without saying a word.

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George Lucas once said (you know, pre-Jar Jar) that he considered Star Wars a silent movie, and that John Williams' music played a much larger role in the storytelling than it would in other films. Lucas, of course, forgot this truism and packed his later Star Wars films with needless dialogue. But that serves as a perfect object lesson for a potential Shadow of the Colossus movie.

Please, Hollywood. I'm begging you. Use this soundtrack. And then shut up and get out of the way.

Facebook’s Timeline doesn’t let you customize your profile the way MySpace used to do, but it does allow users to upload a wide cover image at the top. It’s the perfect excuse to show others your passion for video games.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme, that you can use to decorate your Facebook profile:

• Sunday: The Modern Era
• Monday: Modern-Retro
  
• Tuesday: The Indies
  
• Wednesday: The 8/16-bit Era
  
• Thursday: Social and Mobile
  
• Friday: Arcade (today)
  
• Saturday: Future Games

Today’s batch of covers features 10 quarter-guzzling arcade games from the ’80s and ’90s. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures, then right-click (or ctrl-click for Macs) them and hit “save image as” to save to your computer.

Donkey Kong

Final Fight

Mortal Kombat

Out Run

Double Dragon

The Simpsons Arcade Game

Street Fighter II

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

R-Type

Golden Axe

Check back tomorrow for more Timeline covers.

Video Blips:

• Fun fact: Pairing "The Ride of the Valkyries" with footage of heavy air combat is totally original. Thankfully, PlanetSide 2's impressively super-scaled shootouts compensates my bout of chronic sarcasm.

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Continue after the break for crashing a party assassin-style in Hitman: Absolution's Sniper Challenge and defending more motherland in a content update for Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad.

• Outsnipe your friends and competitors in Hitman: Absolution's Sniper Challenge pre-order content. You'll know your jacket satisfies the party's attire requirement if it lacks bullet holes.

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• Freeze your ass off once more in Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad's free Game of the Year content pack. "Quick, comrade! Shiver towards those Germans! They hate complicated body language!"

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Adventure game grandfathers Tim Schafer (Grim Fandango,  Full Throttle) and Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island) recently held a special media event at Double Fine Productions’ San Francisco headquarters to unveil the developer’s latest offering: The Cave.

An idea that’s been floating around in Gilbert’s head even before some of the titles he’s best known for, The Cave is a 2D sidescroller with all the fixings fans have come to expect from Double Fine and adventure games. Best described as a cross between Trine and Oddworld with a touch of Castlevania, The Cave is ripe with platforming, humor, and imaginative puzzles. But unlike all three of the aforementioned titles/franchises, The Cave leans towards casual fun over hardcore challenge. So while death may be common, it won’t reset your progress more than a few in-game steps.

At the beginning of each campaign, you choose three characters out of seven total: the monk, the adventurer, the hillbilly, the scientist, the “adorable” twins, the knight, and the time-traveler. You can then swap between those three characters at any time, and a second or third local player can even hop in for some couch co-op. The threesome approach is integral to The Cave’s gameplay and puzzles. In one example given, a dragon was guarding a bit of treasure that could be used to impress a princess. A head-on approach left the player characters scorched in their tracks, but by activating the knight’s special invincibility skill to withstand the creature’s flames, a second player was able to sneak in behind the preoccupied dragon and steal the gold. Of course, the dragon then gets free and causes some chuckle-worthy chaos as the off-screen NPCs panic and scream out things like, “Who left the gate open?!”

I was particularly fond of the creature designs: the dragon and a large crystal monster from a different puzzle were very imaginative and well-executed. I’m looking forward to seeing what else art director Andy Wood and his team come up with. And FYI, Tim Schafer’s personal favorite piece of art is a giant hot wiener that pops out of a vending machine. There are witnesses who can confirm this …

The Cave is being developed by Double Fine Productions and published by SEGA, and will be released on PC, XBLA, and PSN in early 2013. If you have any questions about how the game works, leave them in the comments and we’ll answer them as best we can or check with Double Fine if we can’t!

It’s rare to see Tesla coils, a man in a giant cardboard robot suit, an R2-D2-building club, steam punk accessories, and video games share a common zip code, much less congregate in one confined space. Yet they were all part of this past weekend’s celebration of do-it-yourself culture at Maker Faire 2012 in San Mateo, Calif. Packed with exhibits and experiments, Maker Faire is a chance for “makers” — that is, anyone who actively seeks to create something with their own hands — to not just show off their projects and hobbies but to inspire the thousands of people who came to see them.

Video games were just a small fraction of what was on display, but collectively they composed an insightful reflection on the history of the medium. On the fairgrounds were not just one, but two organizations who have dedicated themselves to the preservation of video games: the Digital Game Museum (DGM), who aims to preserve and explore the history and impact of digital games (but lacks a permanent home), and the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment (MADE), who has similar goals but also possesses a dedicated physical space in Oakland, Calif. to house its work.

Walking through the carefully curated DGM exhibit felt surreal — underneath a series of glass cases were game boxes, jewel cases, manuals, and other paraphernalia that were neatly placed next to their corresponding placards. Games were treated with the same level of reverence and respect that is normally reserved for 18th century books at other museums; except not too long ago, people could just walk into a store and buy these classic titles off the shelves.

The exhibit served as a physical reminder to just how far the medium has evolved over the last two decades, especially as consoles, handhelds, and PCs move toward a rapidly approaching, digital-only future. This emphasis on the corporeal presence of games was not limited to DGM alone: At the adjacent MADE booth, an assortment of consoles, both old and new, attracted the wandering eyes and fingers of the many people who passed by.

Through the massive crowds and sniveling children, and across an art installation that featured fire-breathing umbrellas, I found the Center Stage, where at 3:30 p.m. on a bright Sunday afternoon, Double Fine Production’s president and CEO, Tim Schafer, was speaking with a panel of crowdfunding experts. Earlier this year, Double Fine raised an astonishing $3.3 million on Kickstarter, a popular crowdfunding platform on the web, to develop a new point-and-click adventure game. Kickstarter, along with other crowdfunding sites, has since become de rigueur for independent developers looking for alternative ways to fund their creations.

Unlike the other panelists, however, Schafer was the sole representative of a crowdfunding success story, and he espoused the benefits of using Kickstarter as a way for fans to fund the games they want to play. He mentioned that, if possible, Double Fine would love to somehow make crowdfunding a part of a recurring business, since it would allow them to “directly work with the customers and not worry about any large companies getting involved.”

Despite its recent popularity, however, crowdfunding is far from being a sure bet. “It’s not a magical process that’s going to change everything for you…if you haven’t built a personal brand where people trust you and know you,” warned panelist Hiroshi Wald, managing director for venture capital firm Austral Capital Partners, “you do need to have a lot more in place [than just a website asking for donations].”

When Wald polled the audience for those looking to use crowdfunding as either a means to get a project off the ground or as a way to create a “start-up for life,” a young, scrawny man sitting behind me immediately raised his hand. “Code Hero!” he shouted. He was wearing a black hat and a black t-shirt emblazoned with the game’s logo. “We’re $170,000 in the hole!”

That man was Alex Peake, founder and CEO of Primer Labs, a small development team who had recently raised over $170K via Kickstarter for a game that teaches players how to program. As someone who had failed his programming classes back in college, I can personally vouch that learning how to code is no easy task, making Code Hero look all the more intriguing.

“First-person shooters can shoot science as well as bullets,” Alex proclaimed in a Code Hero presentation earlier that day, citing Valve’s Portal games as inspiration. Indeed, Code Hero will look familiar to anyone who’s ever played an FPS before — except instead of being handed a machine gun, the player uses a pair of glasses known as a code ray. This code ray can shoot strings of code into the game world, where the commands are then executed in real time. The team is confident that the game — through a series of puzzle levels (not unlike Portal) along with a narrative that incorporates the history of computational programming — will be teaching players to learn how to program in no time.

While other titles have flirted with this idea of making a game-within-a-game before (like Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet franchise), Code Hero appears to be the first to teach you coding skills that are applicable in the real world. It’s the latest push for the democratization of tool sets — already seen with Epic’s Unreal Development Kit, as well as the ubiquitous Unity engine — that allow people to develop the skills and confidence necessary to create games on their own.

This DIY mentality — also known as the “maker mentality” — for game design has the power to diversify an industry that has largely been the domain of triple-A publishers and developers. Perhaps the future of the medium isn’t going to be dependent on the newest tech engines or consoles, but on the ingenuity of millions of people who, when given the right tools, have the potential and drive to create great games.

“It starts with what you want to have,” said Adam Savage, co-host of the popular Mythbusters TV show. “When you want to learn something, you’ll make it better.” He was addressing the large maker crowd early Sunday morning with an inspirational speech about why we make what we make — his enthusiasm for the culture was infectious. With the Tesla coils towering behind him, he proceeded to deliver a thunderous declaration: “What unites us is that we are creatures of creation…make what [you're compelled to] make, because it will make the world a better place.”

If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best games stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, game developer 38 Studios laid off its entire staff after ongoing financial troubles, BioWare laid off a number of people working on Star Wars the Old Republic, Take-Two faces a larger than expected financial loss, and Blizzard announces its first patch for Diablo III.

You’ll also find previews for Defiance, Kingdom Hearts 3D, and When Viking’s Attack.

The DeanBeat: Playstudios launches myVegas social casino games with MGM as a partner

Blizzard announces first Diablo III patches and delays the real-money auction house

Kingdom Hearts 3D welcomes casual fans back into the series (hands-on preview)

Bringing back Tomb Raider: Our need to fill the old archeologist’s shoes

38 Studios lays off its entire staff

Sony’s When Vikings Attack offers goofy street combat (hands-on preview)

Konami kicks off pre-E3 character battle (gallery)

GameFly buzzes into mobile publishing

GREE mobile gaming platform enters open beta, plans two new Moshi Monsters games

Diablo III sets launch-day record

ShootMania Storm is geared for mass, competitive gaming

Take-Two CEO says product delays signal an “unwavering commitment to quality”

Marvel Heroes’ online game world will let you smash evil for free

SOE announces free-to-play shooter, Bullet Run…which sounds a lot like Super Monday Night Combat

What does a game “producer” do, exactly? (exclusive)

Plant a money tree in Farmville as Zynga and American Express launch new rewards program

ArenaNet president discusses careful monetization of Guild Wars 2, the least greedy Western MMO

Twilight Zone table to rise again in Pinball Arcade with the help of crowdfunding

Origin offers 90 days of free distribution to successful Kickstarter games

VentureBeat:

Video game series contract will be tough for Bungie, easy for Activision

Square Enix’s Mike Fischer says Activision was “crazy” to abandon True Crime: Hong Kong (interview)

Gaming art for your Facebook Timeline (Part 5: Social and Mobile)

Nvidia expects a “breakout year” for mobile chips

Nvidia CEO describes strategic importance of cloud graphics

THQ releases Metro Last Light cinematic story video

Seagate agrees to acquire LaCie for at least $186M

Take-Two disappoints Wall Street with larger-than-expected loss

Activision reacts to fan response to Call of Duty: Black Ops II (video interview)

BioWare lays off staff on Star Wars: The Old Republic, EA to shift employees [updated]

Trion’s Defiance is one story told in an online game and SyFy TV show (hands-on preview)

YoYo Games unveils GameMaker: Studio for cross-platform development

RocketFrog wants to revolutionize online gambling with real-world prizes

How Ghost Recon is gunning to take over the hardcore and social markets (interview)

Are You a Human replaces annoying CAPTCHAs with games

Game of Thrones Ascent aims to please fans with a Facebook game (exclusive)

Leave it to Facebook to invent yet another way to keep us all glued to the site. The social network has made the status update stickier with the addition of embedded games that people can play as they skim the News Feed or a friend’s Timeline.

Friday, Facebook launched “feed gaming,” or the ability for users to anonymously play miniature versions of Facebook games in the News Feed or on Timeline with just a single click.

Feed gaming is both a feature for application developers and users of the social network. Application developers, with a few code tweaks, can now embed sample versions of their games into the story updates users already post to Facebook, and thus use the game-lets to hook new users.

So Joe Gamer plays Angry Birds as he normally would, but now when he gets a score he’s especially proud, he can post an update to Facebook challenging his friends to try to one-up him. The status update gets distributed, via News Feed and Timeline, to Joe’s friends who can then play the same level inside the update.

Game makers actually have a few choices here, so keep an eye out for mini-games, game replays, and level high-score challenges. Angry Birds, Idle Worship, Tetris Battle, and Bubble Witch Saga are a few games already employing feed gaming, Facebook engineer Gareth Morris said in a blog post on the new feature.

The addition of in-feed gaming is the logical next step for the social network, which has openly expressed interest in helping its games grow. Carl Sjogreen, director of product management for Facebook Platform, said at a conference in February that games are the reason millions of users keep coming back to the site.

“It’s critically important to us that games are successful,” Sjogreen said at the time. “We have a whole Platform team focused on just making sure games are going well. That includes building games-specific features … to create discovery for games.”

Of course, this all boils down to a new paradigm for game discovery on the social network. Facebook games find you and beg for just a second of your attention. A second turns into the promise of a few coins and soon you’re off installing the full version of the application to collect your rewards. Next you know, you’ve wasted away the workday trying to beat your buddies. Genius, right?

Photo credit: Matt Harnack/Facebook

Don’t hang up that dented armor just yet. The North American servers for Atlus‘ cruelty-machine Demon’s Souls will stay on for the foreseeable future.

In a statement released today, the publisher took an about-face from its planned May 31 shutdown of the role-playing game’s online support which enabled heroes access to cooperative and competitive play within other gamers’ single-player worlds. This is the second server extension for the nearly three-year-old title after Atlus pushed ahead from the original September 2011 closure date. Just like Souls’ monstrous denizens, the servers seemingly won’t go down easily.

“While it originally seemed as though it would be unfeasible for us to continue to sustain the servers, a number of developments have made it possible for us to continue to invest in and support our fans as they have continued to invest in and support us and Demon’s Souls,” said Atlus vice president of marketing and sales Tim Pivnicny.

Requests for clarification from Atlus resulted in no further information as of press time.

Diablo III: It's diabolically good
By William Schink

You've probably heard from plenty of people how good Diablo III is, but William's voice is a bit unique because he didn't like Diablo II. Despite his lack of love for the second installment of Blizzard's action role-playing series, the third entry won him over. Read his review to find out why.

Review: Metro 2033
By Ryan Juel

I know you're all excited about those shiny new releases, but Ryan wants to tell you about 2010's underappreciated Metro 2033. I mean, you aren't going to find very many other shooters based off of Russian novels, so you should give his write-up a look.

Max Payne 3: The tale of the angry, pill-popping gringo
By Danny Mercado

Danny shovels a lot of praise upon Max Payne 3's altar, giving extra props to the shooter's multiplayer experience. I've been too busy to playing Diablo III to give this game a try yet despite all of the excellent things people like Danny have said about it. Right after I kill Diablo, I swear.

Minecraft for Xbox 360 mines its way into my heart
By Joseph Jordan

That sounds painful, Jordan! I hope your heart is all right. Oh...he's being metaphorical. Turns out he just really likes the Xbox 360 version of Minecraft. Well, I'm glad you're having fun, but heart problems are nothing to joke about, Joseph! Anyway, he details his early experiences with the block-building title, so please give his review a read.

Prototype 2 review (PS3): A bloody good time
By Tristan Damen

Tristan is a big fan of sandbox games, so Prototype 2 and all of its over-the-top, gory action is right up his alley. He has a few issues with the title, but you'll have to read his review to find out what they are. Seriously, I'm not going to tell you. Click that link. Click it!

As the Los Angeles Times reported, the 27-page document is the most detailed revelation of how to cut a modern deal between a super game studio and a giant game publisher. And based on a look at the contract, it seems like the deal is quite favorable to Activision and very challenging for Bungie, which signed with Activision after spending a decade working on Halo with Microsoft. The deal says that Bungie will make four massively multiplayer online (MMO), sci-fi, fantasy, action shooter games for Activision. The contract speaks volumes about publisher-developer relations.

The contract designates these as Destiny Games #1 through #4. The first game debuts in the fall of 2013, with a sequel following every two years. A major downloadable content (DLC) title (code-named Comet) also debuts in between major releases. Initially, Destiny will be an Xbox exclusive, but the PlayStation 3 version will come out in 2014. Bungie itself will hand off the PS 3 version to another developer. Bungie will own the intellectual property.

But in exchange for that, Kirkland, Wash.-based Bungie gave up a lot. Observers believe the games could easily cost $40 million to develop, with marketing budgets equal to that. If you add in 10 percent for overhead, the breakeven number for sales would be about 4.7 million units, according to one source who declined to be named. To get all of the bonuses, the average Bungie Destiny game might have to sell 13 million units or generate $804 million in revenue including the expansion pack’s sales.

Ben Schacter, an analyst at Macquarie Equities Research, said in a note that the bonus and royalty structures in the Bungie-Activision contract are “meaningful and quite positive for long-term investors” in Activision Blizzard. The game series as a whole must hit an operating margin of 25 percent before Bungie is eligible for meaningful royalties. That means that employees may have to stick around for years before they see a big bonus, and it could be tough for Bungie to hold on to its talent for a long time.

The contract was dated April 2010, so it is possible that it has been amended. In the document, the royalty payments are based on a series of operating income thresholds. The operating income hurdle is operated as a deficit account. That means that the deficit in one year will be subtracted from the following year’s operating income before calculating any royalty payments. Operating income is the money left over after you subtract game-related development, marketing, advertising, promotion, production and distribution expenses from net revenue. Activision can also terminate the contract if the first game does not sell 5 million units within the first six months.

The contract shows that Bungie is very confident that it can hit the 25 percent operating margin hurdle. For operating income up to $100 million, Bungie will receive a quarterly royalty of 20 percent. For operating income of $100 million to $400 million, the royalty rises to 24 percent. For $400 million and up, Bungie gets 35 percent. If the series hits $750 million in operating income, Bungie gets $25 million. It gets $25 million more if the operating income tops $1 billion. Activision can reduce the royalties if the games come out late. Bungie is contractually required to focus most of its resources and key people on Destiny, and the release of the games may come as either digital downloads or physical disks. The Destiny game is expected to debut on both the Xbox 360 and its successor.

If Bungie’s games hit a 90-plus rating on GameRankings.com, a review aggregator, then it gets another $2.5 million. That tells you that ratings for games aren’t viewed nearly as important as the operating income targets. In other words, making a ton of money from consumers is more important than pleasing the critics.

The contract also showed that Bungie is working on a successor to Marathon, the original Bungie game that became a cult hit after it was published in 1994 on the Mac. But Bungie can devote no more than 5 percent of its staff to work on the Marathon title. In 2018, Bungie is free to work on action shooters other than Destiny as it wishes. And while other developers may work on the DLC, Valve, Gearbox, and Epic are banned from doing any Destiny or Comet adaptations.

Other miscellaneous contract stipulations include: The game will fit into a “teen” rating, each Bungie employee can only receive two Activision games as gifts each year, and Bungie also has to disclose all Easter eggs, or secret rewards, hidden in the game.

We’ve asked Bungie and Activision for further comment on the contract and have not heard back from either party yet.

Warner Bros. Interactive announced today Harry Potter for Kinect, a celebrity-studded exclusive for the Xbox 360 that leverages the motion control peripheral’s camera and gesture features to send you into the vaulted halls of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Developed by Eurocom, the UK-based studio behind Dead Space: Extraction and the upcoming 007 Legends, Harry Potter for Kinect covers all eight films and various activities within author J.K. Rowling’s mega-creation.

Players personalize their witch or wizard by scanning their own face into the game. As if that wasn’t magical enough, spell-slinging entails flicking an on-screen wand while calling out the spell’s name as you battle beside Harry, Ron, Hermione, and the rest of the Hogwarts gang. And no, balling your hands into fists and yelling “Fus Ro Dah” won’t work with this brand of magic.

“Harry Potter for Kinect will engage Harry Potter fans old and new by bringing them into the wizarding world as truly active participants,” said Warner Bros. Interactive senior vice president of production and development Samantha Ryan. “Kids and parents will enjoy recreating their favorite Harry Potter adventures from flying a broomstick in a Quidditch match to battling pixies and dueling other wizards.”

Harry Potter for Kinect releases this fall for the Xbox 360.

Social casino game startups are the cliché of 2012. Everybody is either starting a new company in this hot market — on the bet that the U.S. will allow online gambling sites again — or spending a lot of money acquiring casino game startups.

But Playstudios believes it is different because it is a blend of Silicon Valley and Las Vegas. The company was founded by Andrew Pascal (pictured right), a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur and former casino empire executive. He has rounded up some talent, such as ace casino game designer Nicholas Koenig (pictured left).

Together, they’ve played both sides in the intersection of a market where most new entrants come from either Silicon Valley or Vegas, and they’ve signed up MGM Resorts International, which owns 80 percent of the casino properties on the Las Vegas Strip, as their marketing partner.

“The idea is to capture the fun and excitement of a Las Vegas weekend,” said Pascal in an interview with GamesBeat. “Here’s an interesting fact: More people will play slot machines on Facebook this month than visit Las Vegas this year. The profile of the player is very similar — affluent, middle-aged women, with an above-average education.”

Today, the company is revealing the result of its work. The myVegas app on Facebook is a social gaming destination, where players can come to enjoy games such as Blackjack or slot machines. You can earn virtual currency by playing the games and earn real rewards such as trips to real-world casinos. Then you can build out your own fantasy version of the Las Vegas Strip in a kind of meta-game (pictured at top).

The best thing about the new games is that they’re authentic casino games with high production values. The app is in closed beta testing now and will be available in the summer. In one of the cool games, you can play Bet the Farm, a slot machine with an isometric 3D viewpoint. When you click on the slot machine play button, the wheels roll by in a pseudo 3D look.

In the meta-game, you design your own casinos and then populate the world with your friends. You can click on your friends as they walk down the street and you’ll see their stats or the games they’ve played recently.

Playstudios has raised $12 million in two rounds of funding since early 2011. The company has launched free-to-play casino games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual currency, which they can trade in for rewards.

Many companies, such as Caesars Entertainment and IGT, are looking at creating gambling empires that stretch from the free-to-play Facebook games to the offshore online gambling sites to the real-world casinos. Caesars bought Playtika. IGT paid $500 million for Double Down Casino, a 70-person development studio that makes casino games for Facebook. Such hybrid companies will become the norm.

But Pascal, who has two decades of experience in games and gambling, believes that the social casino game market is a great business on its own. Roughly 65 million of Facebook’s 900 million users play casino games on the social network.

“We are focused on virtual currency-based social goods gambling,” Pascal said. “A lot of people are very excited about for-cash gambling as an opportunity. It is an enormous prize when it gets sorted out. Everyone will position themselves for it. But having been in that business, I fully appreciate its complexity.”

His team has put a lot of work into polishing the company’s games, such as the slot machine title Lost In Time: Jules Verne (pictured above). In that game, you play a slot machine. But once you hit a certain level, you can play a bonus round where you pick out objects hidden in a scene.

Once you win earnings, you can get loyalty prizes, including a weekend at MGM Grand, a chance to choose the song for the Fountains of Bellagio show, an intimate dinner at a Wolfgang Puck restaurant and tickets to the latest Cirque du Soleil show.

Pascal said that Las Vegas itself was the “very first social game.” It is a widely “shared experience that relies on alternate currencies.” He should know because he was the former president and chief operating officer of Wynn Las Vegas and Encore, two of the biggest properties in Vegas.

He worked for casino magnate Steve Wynn when he owned only the Golden Nugget in downtown Las Vegas. Pascal helped open the Mirage hotel in 1989 and watched as it reinvented Las Vegas. Then he left to do the startup thing again in Silicon Valley, where he grew up.

“I felt I was too insulated, wasn’t learning as much,” he said. “I connected with a couple of guys who were enamored with gambling. We felt the content of the industry wasn’t changing. So we reinvented the slot machine.”

The problem in the recent past was that many games in real-world casinos stagnated. The one-armed bandits were pretty boring, but Pascal started a previous company, Silicon Gaming, to attack that problem by using computer and game technology to make casino games more fun. He sold Silicon Gaming to the world slot machine leader, IGT, in 2005.

After he sold that business, Pascal returned to Wynn and opened the Wynn and Encore resorts in Las Vegas. At its peak, he ran a business that had 14,000 employees and $1.4 billion in revenues. But he got the startup bug again and incubated another company, WagerWorks, in Europe, where internet-based online gambling became legal.

He Left WagerWorks in 2010 and started exploring social casino games in the spring of 2011. At that time, he attended his first Game Developers Conference and was struck by how the social game makers talked about their customers as if they were chasing high rollers in Las Vegas.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Pascal said. “I was thinking, ‘Am I in Las Vegas or at the Social Gaming Summit?” He added, “There are just so many interesting parallels.”

At Playstudios, Pascal assembled a team that included Monty Kerr, a casino game veteran and former executive at Hi5. Rather than just build a game, they decided to build a full platform to launch a bunch of games. Playstudios previously operated under the stealth name incuBET. But now it goes by Playstudios and has 30 employees.

Under the marketing partnership with MGM Resorts International, Playstudios gets the exclusive social and mobile gaming rights for big Las Vegas properties, including  ARIA, Bellagio, MGM Grand, Mandalay Bay, The Mirage, Monte Carlo, New York-New York, Luxor, Excalibur, and Circus Circus.

Bill Hornbuckle, MGM Resorts International’s chief marketing officer, said, “We have actively watched the explosion of the social gaming landscape and evaluated the options for extending our brands through these increasingly important channels.  In partnership with Playstudios, we have created a platform that will engage and entertain existing MGM Resorts customers, attract new ones, and allow us to strengthen our brands in a new and relevant fashion.”

MGM Resorts International hopes to drive its tens of millions of customers to the social casino games. In turn, those games will feed customers to Las Vegas hotels. It’s a cycle, and Pascal says we are very early in it.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Mike Fischer is the president and chief executive of the U.S. division of Square Enix. The Japanese parent company is the publisher of hit video games such as the Final Fantasy series, but it isn’t satisfied with just a strong position in Japan and Europe. The company is “westernizing” its content much the same way that Japan’s Sega tried to do. But Square Enix, which bought Eidos and has a number of North American game developers, is having an easier time crossing borders and is cherry picking the titles that make the most sense. The Japanese company is still making money (while others are losing money), and Fischer says he can choose the best of the content from Japan and Europe and then republish it in North America. But Fischer is also aware that the video game market is changing, and big publishers have to change with it. Among the big titles coming is Sleeping Dogs, which Square Enix picked up after Activision canceled it (under the previous name True Crime: Hong Kong). Here’s an edited transcript of our conversation.

GamesBeat: You have a big line-up coming. How do you view these games in terms of westernizing your content?

Mike Fischer: I think this is a great time to be answering this question. It would have been a lot harder a year ago. We had MindJack and Lord of Arcana (pictured right) to brag about. I think you’re seeing a couple of different trends and a couple of different strategies all coming to fruition at the same time. One of them is obviously the blending of East and West. So you’ve got Kingdom Hearts here for the 3DS right up against Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs (two major upcoming titles).

I’m really lucky to be in charge of the U.S. market and getting the benefit of these big investments made by Square Enix Europe, which used to be Eidos of course, and Square Enix Japan. I’m supplement that by adding games that we’re sourcing and producing here in the U.S. The great thing for me is, because I have the benefit of these massive triple-A blockbusters, I don’t have to try to replicate that. So I can go out and sort of seek lower-risk, smaller-scale intellectual property investments that obviously I hope will eventually, over time, grow into big franchises of their own. You take a look at something like Quantum Conundrum (pictured below). We’re small enough so that we can really give a title like that the attention and love that it deserves. But we’re big enough that we can put the resources behind it so it gets an enormous amount of attention. That’s the kind of added value that I’m looking to bring to the company.

GamesBeat: The range is from a small iPhone game all the way up to a console title. That’s the amount of freedom that you have?

Fischer: That it is. I don’t go in and say, “I want an iPhone game,” or “I want an Android game,” or “I want a downloadable game.” I’m simply looking for great IP investments. And finding the right platform to fit them. And the great thing for me is there are just fewer business model limitations than we’ve ever had in the past.

GamesBeat: What’s the state of progress into those games and those business initiatives?

Fischer: So far so good. Ultimately the consumer’s going to judge, right? The two examples that you see here today are Motley Blocks and Quantum Conundrum. And they’re very different. Quantum Conundrum is a downloadable game, it’s from Kim Swift, the creator of Portal, it’s a very whimsical puzzle platformer game. Motley Blocks is a very abstract. I don’t want to give it a blank-meets-blank type of explanation. B, you know, it’s a very unique, fun, quick to play phone game, but it also incorporates some user-generated content opportunities that put it in a class of its own. We’re not looking for one model of success. Our point is that these new platforms allow us to reach audiences that, up until now, have either been very difficult to reach or very uneconomical to reach. We’re always going to need the scale of these big blockbusters like Hitman and Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs and Kingdom Hearts, to really give us the scale that we need to make all of these games successful.

GamesBeat: EA has this approach where they seem to want a certain percentage of revenue to come from digital, in a certain time frame. They’re in a big rush. They think all of the industry is going in that direction. Do you guys have that same sense of urgency, that maybe the revenue mix is going to change drastically for the whole industry?

Fischer: To EA’s credit, I think they’ve invested. I can only speculate on their actual motivations. But I think it’s a great way to create a call to action internally for teams. I’m a content guy, not a platform guy. I’m simply seeing these platforms as opportunities to bring content to market that wasn’t possible before, and to monetize audiences that were out of our reach in the past.

I’m not trying to set an arbitrary goal. I think the retail market is still dominant. Hitman, Tomb Raider, Sleeping Dogs, Kingdom Hearts are all massive retail hits. I don’t think it’s an “or” solution anymore, it’s an “and” solution. I think we could have a big online hit tomorrow and shift a massive proportion of our games online. And then we could have a massive retail hit the quarter after that and the bar swings the other way. That’s kind of like asking yourself, you know, is Warner Bros. or Fox primarily a theatrical company or primarily a home video company? What percentage of their revenue is the right mix? I think they just want a hit movie. I just want a hit game.

GamesBeat: How about on the other trend of titles moving from east to west, or west to east?

Fischer: It’s fascinating for me to look at the difference in approaches that creators take for their games. I think the western developers tend to be built around the paradigm of the independent studio contracted with a big publisher, payments made on a milestone schedule, based upon a massive game development document. You ask a western developer, ‘why is this game going to be great?’ Boom, here’s a 400-page document.

I’m exaggerating for effect. I remember a conversation many years ago where someone asked one of the Japanese developers I was working with, “Why do you think this game is going to be great?” And he said… “Ore no game dakaran da yo!” Because it’s my game! Because I made it! There was a sort of auteur model. ‘I’m going to shut the doors and come out when it’s great.’ I think the ideal scenario is somewhere in between there. Getting it just right is like balancing on a ball. I think it’s like the platforms, I don’t think there’s any one model that’s right for every developer. But what I’m seeing that’s really nice is, some of the best practices from each team getting shared with the others, and some of the creative dialogue that can happen as you have folks that are more exposed to different ways of making games.

GamesBeat: Sleeping Dogs (formerly Activision’s True Crime: Hong Kong) has an interesting history there. How did you redirect that games and put it on its current path?

Fischer: The game was, in a sense, discovered. I’m making air quotes: ‘discovered’ by the folks in Wimbledon. The minute they showed it to us, we really felt like we had found a diamond in the rough. Obviously the game was originally True Crime: Hong Kong from Activision. I can’t speak to why they let that go. I’m not going to speculate on their behalf. All I know is, they’ve gotta be crazy. Because this game is just fantastic. The scale and scope of the game really encompasses all of everything you’d want to do in Hong Kong. The acting, the story, the characters are very deep.

There’s clearly a lot of inspiration from [the movies] The Departed and Infernal Affairs. You play an undercover cop who starts to feel mixed loyalties. But the open world feels like Arkham City, the combat feels as good as a fighting game, the driving is as good as a Need for Speed, and the story is every bit as rich as compelling as a Mass Effect. All in one game. In a sense it reminds me a little bit of Dead Island, which Square Enix America did the sales and distribution for. Nobody had heard of that game coming into E3, and in the U.S. alone it sold over 2 million units. It’s great to have a sleeper.

GamesBeat: Because of the great trailer for Dead Island?

Fischer: The game had to deliver at the end of the day. It offered, I think, role-playing-game-style upgrades, online co-op play, the zombie setting. It’s not a digital masterpiece, but it’s what everybody wanted. It’s great to bring out a Tomb Raider or a Final Fantasy, but the challenge there is, everybody expects it to be so great, right? Just meeting expectations is a challenge. Surpassing them requires masterful work.

The thrill that I love in bringing out a game like Sleeping Dogs is when nobody sees it coming. And then, boom, it’s the surprise of the holiday. The game’s coming out early in the year, so it has time to find its audience. We’re in a world where everything’s about social media, word of mouth. And yet you still see marketing presentations that are built around how big your TV campaign is. And again, it’s not an either/or. You have to have both components.

But we live in a world where word of mouth about a great game like Sleeping Dogs, combined with what I expect will be very good reviews and a strong marketing campaign, coming out early in the year, we’ve got the elements for a success. There’s something wrong when someone can tell you 12 months out what all the great games are going to be the next holiday. That means there’s no surprise, there’s no innovation. So it’s nice to come in here with big franchises like Hitman and Tomb Raider that everyone’s known about, Kingdom Hearts, everyone’s expecting. But also to bring in new stuff like Sleeping Dogs and Quantum that bring a little bit of innovation and hopefully will show our industry that consumers are still hungry for something new.

GamesBeat: I imagine Hitman: Absolution has a lot of buzz already. Something like that may not need that kind of help; it’s already got the ball rolling.

Fischer: You know, we’re a publicly traded company, so no matter how big people’s expectations are, it’s my job to beat it. So all that means is… [laughter] the numbers that I have to deliver are just that much higher. I wish there was a game in my lineup that I could just kick my feet up and let itself. There’s no game that big, and probably never will be.

GamesBeat: Has it seen a smoother development than, say, Sleeping Dogs?

Fischer: Hitman has been in development a long, long time. Some of that’s been smooth; some of that hasn’t been. But the fortunate thing is, we gave this game the time and the resources that it needed to be great. You saw the Glacier engine mentioned at the beginning of the trailer. The crowd dynamics that you saw — where the guy’s just having to literally push his way through people — show all of them reacting individually. That’s not just like walking down a busy street. That’s like being in a really crowded concert type of environment. That type of technology takes time to get right, and we took our time to get it right. The same thing applies to Tomb Raider, right? We just announced the game’s going to be coming out in 2013. We could ship that game now, it’s so good. So imagine how awesome it’s going to be when it hits the market.

GamesBeat: Is there an explanation for that, too? As far as why it needed to go out further?

Fischer: I can look you in the eye and tell you, honest to goodness, we want this to be the best game of the generation. And the time that we’re giving it is going to allow that to happen. Look, you’re going to see the game at E3. Tell me if you think I’m blowing smoke your way. It’s really that good.

GamesBeat: Yeah, I think as long as it doesn’t go to three E3s, right…? [big laughs]

Fischer: I think there is kind of a three-E3 rule. No game has ever been to three E3s and turned out to be a hit. You’ve got a good point there.

GamesBeat: We waited nine years for Diablo III…

Fischer: Yeah, but was it at E3?

GamesBeat: I don’t think so. Not until the last couple years. So yeah, it’s a diverse lineup; it’s a big slate. You guys are one of the only Japanese companies to make some money last year.

Fischer: It’s a hit-driven business. If there was a formula to success, all the companies would be equally successful. I think one of the things that’s helping us out is we do have a broad base of development now. We’re making games in Japan, in North America, and in Europe. That’s helping us develop a consistent line-up that’s not only cross-border,but it’s also going from casual to hardcore. And hopefully now we’ve smoothed out our release cycles so you’re not going to see as many peaks and valleys as maybe you have in the past.

GamesBeat: I assume most of your developers are in Japan, some are in Europe, and the smallest number is in North America?

Fischer: Well, it depends, because again, North America covers the Eidos Montreal studio, which is actually pretty significant. Of course we’re making Sleeping Dogs in Vancouver, but that’s an independent studio, United Front Games. We have the headquarters staff in Wimbledon, we have the IO studio in Copenhagen. I think there are certainly more individual developers in Japan than any other region. The net, east versus west, I can’t say.

All these studios are really sharing resources. Which I think is unique to a company like ours. You see a lot of western companies sharing resources, but we’re actually doing it in Japan now as well. The Hitman trailer you saw, the end at night, that was actually co-produced by our Visual Works studio, that’s famous for doing all the computer-generated imagery work in Final Fantasy. It’s not just about where it’s made. It’s how it’s made.

GamesBeat 2012 is VentureBeat’s fourth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. This year we’re calling on speakers from the hottest mobile, social, PC, and console companies to debate new ways to stay on pace with changing consumer tastes and platforms. Join 500+ execs, investors, analysts, entrepreneurs, and press as we explore the gaming industry’s latest trends and newest monetization opportunities. The event takes place July 10-11 in San Francisco, and you can get your early-bird tickets here.

Diablo III’s first week hasn’t been an easy one. With an overwhelming number of server issues, rumored battle.net account hacking, and the slow start of the game’s real-money auction house, this launch isn’t going too well on Blizzard’s side — though Diablo did sell 3.5 million copies on its first day.

Blizzard community manager Nethaera revealed several upcoming patches through a post on the Diablo III forums. The first patches will address client issues and apply more fixes to the ever-present bugs in the game. Blizzard has already rolled out numerous hotfixes, or small patches, to help balance out character stats and overall game performance, but this patch will focus on general game stability and larger errors.

Unfortunately, players who lost achievements due to bugs will still have to wait for a fix as Blizzard looks for the best way to address the issue. Stability comes before achievements, folks.

Unsurprisingly, Blizzard is no longer aiming to launch the real-money auction house by the end of May. The company has not revealed a new official launch date but it will likely be sometime after it addresses the ongoing account hacking players are reporting. Blizzard’s official response is for concerned players to use battle.net authenticators rather than traditional passwords and says the number of confirmed compromised accounts is very small.

Reports of “session spoofing” or hackers comprising accounts as players enter public games have not been confirmed.

“Regarding this specific example, we’ve looked into the issue and found no evidence to indicate compromises are occurring in this fashion, and we’ve determined the methods being suggested to do so are technically impossible,” Nethaera said in the forum post. “However, you have our assurance that we’ll continue to investigate reports such as these and keep you informed of important updates.”

Back in the swinging sixties, you couldn't walk 10 feet through the American mid-West without tripping over an Italian film crew working on a spaghetti western. Tales of stolen gold, corrupt lawmen, and ugly Mexicans by people like Sergio Leone were ridiculously popular and continued to be for a good twenty years before the films dipped out of fashion. There have been a few noteworthy westerns in recent years, The Proposition, 3:10 to Yuma, True Grit, and so on, but so few western games and fewer still good ones.

The previous generations aren't the most given to gaming; if you were one of the lucky people who saw A Fist Full of Dollars at the cinema on its release date, you're likely mystified by all these floating shapes on your grandson's magic tablet thing right now.

Though recent western films feel vaguely archaic, there's clearly still a market for them, so why are there so few video games set in this kind of plot landscape?

Continental westerns are less important to us as a generation -- brought up as we were with the huge-budget sci-fi and fantasy adventures that fuel a lot of video game writing. But unlike film, games aren't categorized by things like overarching plot theme, chronology, and locale; their genres are based on particular design conventions, like camera perspective.

But they do fit certain archetypes of which western could be considered one, but compared to others (like World War II; modern war; the post-apocalypse; or Tolkienian, pseudo-medieval Europe), the Wild West seems woefully underrepresented.

The obvious example of a modern western game, Red Dead Redemption, was wildly successful and rightly so. Rockstar took all the technical advancements they'd made with Grand Theft Auto IV and applied them to their typically mature story style, stuffed it full of their usual cast of nutbags, boxed the whole thing up, and sold millions. It was a damn-near flawless concotion of dark, deadbeat humour and punchy drama, with copious distractions and a smooth enough control scheme to avoid ever seeming like wearisome toil.

It wasn't remotely surprising. Rockstar's approach to open-world design and adult themes was a perfect suit for the Wild West -- that much was obvious from Redemption's spiritual predecessor, Red Dead Revolver back in 2004, and even then, much of the original material Rockstar actually bought was from Capcom's Gun.Smoke project that was dropped in 2002 after seventeen years in developmental purgatory.

The desire to make western games was already there, but the tech wasn't. Some critics ripped Red Dead Revolver apart, citing broken controls as a particularly needling foible. The game was divisive but set many of the founding elements for its successor. You could say Redemption was the game Rockstar had wanted to make all along but that the hardware constraints just didn't allow them.

As well as being the most recent, Red Dead Redemption is also the most critically successful. One of the reasons it did so well was because it felt so refreshing -- outside the open-world or third-person shooter brackets, there was precious little competition. Of the limited other western games of the 2000s, most labor in mediocrity, like Call of Juarez, Gun, and Dead Man's Hand. Those that don't mostly sparked more interest by splicing western genre ideas with other, more familiar concepts, particularly sci-fi: Look at Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath's alien-snagging/bounty-hunting in a clearly defined Old West.

Quite a change from Abe.
 

Western themes do slip into more outwardly one-sided settings occasionally well enough that the archetypes could be considered blurred. Fallout 3 managed to quite successfully evoke a western feeling in a post-apocalyptic Washington, D.C. just by nuking the East Coast into a second Dust Bowl.

But because these formulaic settings are so dilligently overused, it's just easier for developers to jam fingers in multiple pies to make them seem more intersting. Sure, gin and juice is great and all, but if you've got the right stuff, both components stand up well alone. Rockstar proved that with the right team, it's possible to produce games with narrow but established plot ideas that can compete with the most complex, unrelatable thematic schemes....

All right, forget that. So developers just can’t help themselves. If that’s the case, then maybe it isn’t all that suprising that there are so few western games. If I want my fill o’ rootin’ and or tootin’, I’m going to have to do it the old fashioned way. By rustlin’ me up some cattle. Yee-and-indeed-Haw.

Starting today and continuing through June 1, a group of indie game makers is cutting prices in select digital distribution markets as part of the “Because We May” campaign.

Ron Carmel, co-founder of 2D Boy (makers of World of Goo), came up with the concept behind the initiative, which is intended to celebrate distributors who allow price flexibility. “We believe that developers should have the freedom to price their games how they like, without interference from the online stores that sell the games,” reads a statement on the event’s homepage. “Why? Because it allows us to promote our games more freely, as we are doing here! We rely on the ability to promote our games for our livelihood and control over pricing is an important tool for this purpose.”

Online stores participating in Because We May include Apple’s Mac and iOS App Stores, Google Play, and Valve Software’s Steam platform. Discounted games include World of Goo, Team Meat’s Super Meat Boy and The Binding of Isaac, and Hemisphere Games’ Osmos.

While the event is billed as a “celebration,” it may also be intended to call out companies like Microsoft (Xbox Live Arcade), Sony (PlayStation Store), and Nintendo (eShop), which retain full control over the prices of the products they sell. Nintendo recently announced that it is rolling out a digital distribution plan this summer that will turn pricing power over to retailers.

More information, including a full list of participating games and distributors, is available at the official website.

I almost find it hard to believe that Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance is the seventh entry in the franchise. Part of this is probably due to the fact that fans are still waiting for a real sequel in Kingdom Hearts 3, and the recent spinoffs have featured tons of new characters that have alienated me from the series that I remember. I must admit: I’ve fallen a little behind.

Thankfully, this time around, developer/publisher Square Enix is putting together a solid, traditional experience that focuses on some familiar faces and doesn’t involve confusing fractions (KH: 358/2 Days, I’m looking at you). It even takes advantage of some of the 3DS’s unique features. From what I saw at a recent preview event in Santa Monica Calif., KH3D looks like a good point for casual fans who’ve slept on the recent KH games to hop back into the series.

The story takes place after the events of the Kingdom Hearts: Re:coded (Nintendo DS) as heroes Sora and Riku learn that their combined strength isn’t enough to fight off a mysterious, impending threat. KH3D chronicles their quest to beef up and pass the Mark of Mastery exam to prove they can responsibly swing around their Keyblades.

For those of you like myself who might have missed out on a couple of installments, never fear. “Story-wise, there’s moments where the game helps recap what happened in previous titles,” said Raio Mitsuno, product manager for Square Enix. “By the end, you’ll be able to read a summary of each of the past Kingdom Hearts games, and you’ll know how it got to this point.” (Mickey Mouse, however, doesn’t seem to be aware of these recaps. He, along with Donald Duck and Goofy, doesn’t appear to remember his history with Sora in the section of the demo that I played.)

Combat in KH3D is fun and easy to jump into; the controls are pretty standard as far as third-person action games go. I did, however, have some difficulty landing one of Sora’s flying spin attacks. I frequently missed my targets and would get disoriented on the battlefield. Other times, the action would get a bit too hectic on the screen for me to figure out what was going on. The game will support the Circle Pad Pro accessory, with the extra nub for steering the camera. Hopefully that will help straighten things out. (It wasn’t available when I played.)

For more robust fighting, Sora and Riku have these quirky turquoise and purple critters called Spirits that tag along for the ride. The player can collect and train these eccentric animal creatures to make combination attacks, to provide field support, and even to teach new moves to the heroes. When I tapped on a little round Spirit’s icon on the touch screen, he put Sora on his back and did a stomach-bounce assault. Cute. But why do these Pokémon stunt doubles fill out the party instead of Mickey and friends?

“This story is designed around Riku and Sora becoming true Keyblade masters,” said Mitsuno, “and it’s a journey they have to take on their own. It doesn’t really work if Donald and Goofy are helping.” Fair enough. These little buggers can come in handy for gameplay purposes but aren’t really nuanced enough to add to or detract from the main narrative. To make them a little more endearing, though, KH3D lets players bring the Spirits into the “real world” using the augmented-reality feature on the 3DS.

Visually, this game is one of the most impressive I’ve seen on Nintendo’s portable console. The 3D effect really complements the series’ cartoon aesthetics and gives the levels a greater sense of depth.

Square Enix is taking Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance pretty seriously in terms of production quality. This isn’t a dumbed-down handheld experience by any means and looks to be one of the more significant third-party releases of the summer.

Facebook’s Timeline is here to stay. And although not everyone loves this new layout, we can agree that the option to display a big image at the top of your profile is pretty cool — especially if it lets you show off your favorite video games.

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme, that you can use to decorate your Facebook profile:

• Sunday: The Modern Era
• Monday: Modern-Retro
  
• Tuesday: The Indies
  
• Wednesday: The 8/16-bit Era
  
• Thursday: Social and Mobile
  
• Friday: Arcade
• Saturday: Future Games

Today’s batch of covers features 10 addicting games from mobile devices and social networks. Click on the thumbnails to enlarge the pictures, then right-click (or ctrl-click for Macs) them and hit “save image as” to save to your computer.

Angry Birds Space

Bejeweled Blitz

Plants vs. Zombies

CityVille

The Sims Social

Fruit Ninja

Hidden Chronicles

Words With Friends

FarmVille

Doodle Jump

Check back tomorrow for more Timeline covers.

Fans will be pleased to learn that yet another feature from the 2012 Game Jam is making its way to Skyrim in the next update. Bethesda announced today that incoming version 1.6 will included mounted combat, allowing melee and ranged attacks to be performed while riding a horse. Bethesda previously added slow-motion kill-cams and Kinect functionality, both of which were first shown off during the Game Jam presentation.

Does this mean flying vampires and dragon mounts are coming soon? Let’s speculate wildly!

The update also fixes a number of bugs, most of which are tied to the two aforementioned features (kill-cams and Kinect support).

NEW FEATURES

• Mounted Combat – Skyrim now allows you to do melee and ranged combat while riding a horse

BUG FIXES

1. General stability and memory optimizations
2. General AI pathfinding optimizations and bug fixes
3. Optimizations and crash fixes for data leaks
4. Fixed rare crash with lighting
5. Fixed crashes related to loading and saving games
6. Fixed crash with summoned creatures/NPCs
7. Fixed rare issue where saves would be corrupted
8. Improved logic for when ranged kill cams are played
9. Fixed issue with ranged kill cams while killing a dragon
10. Fixed rare issue with certain ranged kill cams not playing properly
11. Fixed issue with nirnroot lighting not properly cleaning up
12. Fixed issue where bow damage was being calculated incorrectly
13. Fixed rare problem with werewolf kill moves would not finish animating properly
14. In “The Break of Dawn” fixed rare issue where Meridia’s Beacon would disappear from player’s inventory
15. Fixed occasional issue where followers would disappear after player pays off a bounty after committing a crime
16. Fixed issue where certain creatures and NPCs would fail to respawn properly
17. Fixed rare issue with dialogue subtitles not displaying properly
18. Fixed issue with water appearing blurry when loading a saved game after creating a save underwater
19. Fixed issue where map cursor would occasionally disappear after closing a message box with Kinect enabled (Xbox 360)
20. Fixed rare issue with shouts only performing the first level and not other unlocked levels with Kinect enabled (Xbox 360)
21. Fixed issue where the shout buttons would stop working properly if users mashed LB and RB during cooldown with Kinect enabled (Xbox 360)

“Fortune and glory.” Those two driving forces inspired a hero in 1977, when George Lucas took the advice of fellow filmmaker Steven Spielberg and gave the world not Indiana Smith, but Indiana Jones. The fedora-hatted character, whom Harrison Ford played on the big screen (in addition to portraying another rascal with a winning smile in the early Star Wars films), straddled an epic divide only possible in Hollywood. In the classroom, Jones would elicit laughs as he fumbled over spelling and nervously side-stepped the lusty gazes of young female students. Placed outside the stuffy academic setting, he assumed a whole new persona: that of a charismatic ladies’ man and daring adventurer, fast on his feet in a crisis and brave despite his chronic fear of snakes.

“He’s the original prototypical fictional adventurer,” says Hal Barwood — designer, writer, and narrative assist on Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures, and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine for LucasArts and most recently Indiana Jones Adventure World for Zynga. For decades, movies and video games have clambered to fill those shoes since Ford originally stepped out of them.

Arguably the most widely known example is Lara Croft of Tomb Raider, a brilliant and buxom female adventurer who shared Indy’s love of archeology and need to protect the world’s most precious relics from falling into the hands of those who would abuse their power. Only instead of charming the ladies and brandishing a whip, Lara teased the boys and fired dual pistols, a shotgun, Uzis, and whatever else she found in tombs and remote locales. Rather than squaring off with the high priest Mola Ram, she wrestled with bears, dinosaurs, Yetis, and countless other monsters — including some that used to be human.

“She comes from a long line of adventurers,” says Stellalune, owner of the renowned Stella’s Tomb Raider Site and also BrickRaiders.net. “But just focusing on Lara and Indy for a minute, I think they share a kind of devil-may-care attitude but also a thirst for knowledge. Sometimes that means they’ll have to do things in an unorthodox way in order to achieve their goals, but underlying all the urn-smashing and whip-cracking, there’s a basic reverence for human history and mythology.”

Tomb Raider struck gold. Lara quickly became one of the biggest icons in video games, let alone a female one. First conceived in early 1995, Lara embarked on her first console adventure in November 1996, and commercial success soon followed. Between 1996 and 2000, her games sold 21 million copies worldwide, and the leading lady appeared on the covers of over 200 publications (including Playboy). Details magazine named her one of the world’s sexiest women, while the Guinness Book of World Records called her the “Most Successful Human Virtual Game Heroine.” Her legacy spawned a line of comic books, two movie adaptations, toys, and of course, a barrage of “Nude Raider” codes and pornographic Internet images. The shower scene ending of Tomb Raider II (in which Lara disrobes for the camera but tells her viewers, “Haven’t you seen enough?” before blasting her shotgun point-blank in their faces) was undoubtedly a response to the overwhelming male attention.

“I have mixed feelings about that scene,” admits Stellalune. “I understand why the developers included it, though. As I’m sure you’re aware, the character’s original designer, Toby Gard, had intended Lara to be a bad-ass adventurer along the lines of Indiana Jones — sexy, certainly, but not a sex symbol or a pin-up. The marketing people obviously had different ideas. They exaggerated Lara’s figure and used suggestive poses and double entendre to sell the product, and when rumors began to circulate about a cheat code that would make Lara nude in the game, they didn’t do much to squelch them. I guess the developers thought they’d take a little jab at the Nude Lara crowd by using humor to subvert the classic trope of the sexy shower scene.”

Despite Lara’s sex symbol notoriety, young women wanted to be her and men pursued her (in the games, quite literally). Lara turned them all down. No one had a handle on her.

While her popularity has shrunk in recent years, largely because of a string of disappointing games (Angel of Darkness fared the worst, so much that fans cringe at the slightest mention of it), interest in the archaeologist/adventurer-type character, male or female, runs strong. Hot on Lara’s trail came Nathan Drake in Naughty Dog’s smash hit for the PlayStation 3, Uncharted.

“They’re all cut from the same cloth,” Barwood says. “I love ‘em all.” For him, his favorite part is “the welding of gameplay with storytelling. Adventurous games naturally embody narrative, and the mix is what entertains me.”

A star of cinematic gameplay, Drake revived the Hollywood good looks, humor, and reckless spirit of the Indiana Jones films while matching Lara’s stride in terms of gameplay. There was less climbing, jumping around, and grumbling over complicated puzzles but just as much shooting and exploring. And unlike Lara, Drake didn’t travel alone. He partnered with “dirty old man” Victor “Sully” Sullivan, wooed Elena Fisher, and flirted with Chloe Frazer as the cast (like the solo Lara) trotted around the world in search of treasure. It was a change of pace for an old concept that refused to retire. Once again, someone was filling the old archeologist’s shoes.

But much like in Tomb Raider Chronicles, Lara was about to prove that even death couldn’t stop her. In fall 2010, Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light released to critical acclaim. It marked a dramatic new outing for Lara, and the first of her games to exclude the series’ name, Tomb Raider. And for good reason. The top-down, isometric style distinguished itself from the third-person, over-the-shoulder viewpoint of past titles, even pairing Lara up cooperatively with a Mayan guide named Totec. It was Tomb Raider, miniaturized, with the fast-paced action of the arcades. The healthy reception of Guardian of Light marked a standout success for Lara and developer Crystal Dynamics.

In reality, the company had been working for years to rebuild Lara’s ruined empire, and its attempts have been not only impressive, but also fruitful. After long-time developer Core Design failed with Angel of Darkness, some feared that Lara would have been better off buried under tons of rubble in Egypt (as in Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation) than resurrected. Parent company Eidos thought differently, but they realized a proper excavation was in order. They transferred franchise development from Core Design to the California-based studio Crystal Dynamics and invited Toby Gard, who hadn’t worked on the series since its inception, to help with Tomb Raider: Legend. It was the first game to finally set aside Lara’s daddy issues and focus equally on her relationship with her mother. Legend lived up to its name, achieving the best critical response since Tomb Raider II in 1997 and the best commercial feedback since The Last Revelation in 1999. Lara was still alive.

“I think the various development teams just had different visions of what the character should be,” Stellalune said when asked if she felt the developers ever lost touch with Lara’s personality. “The early Lara was not a well-developed character. Much was left to the player’s imagination. Consequently, a lot of players filled in the blanks when it came to Lara’s identity and motivations.”

Tomb Raider: Anniversary also performed well critically at least, retelling the events of the original Tomb Raider with improved graphics and gameplay. Already Crystal Dynamics seemed to be toying with the idea of starting Lara over from the beginning. When Underworld — the team’s third endeavor and a continuation of Lara’s adventures that revived characters such as Jacqueline Natla and Lara’s weird doppelganger — failed to repeat the remarkable success of the previous two games, the developer created the aforementioned Guardian of Light and found the reassurance they needed. Now that they had audiences’ attention, Lara Croft needed an even bigger makeover.

Some fans, however, have viewed this transformation less optimistically. “When Crystal Dynamics came along and attempted to give Lara a detailed backstory and more emotional depth, many players viewed this as a betrayal,” Stellalune says. “This new, emotional Lara was not the character they had imagined. Likewise, the fan reaction to the upcoming game has been mixed. Some players who’ve seen the first trailer for the game have focused on Lara’s youth and inexperience, seeing her initial weakness as being out of sync with the strong, experienced adventurer they’ve come to know over the years.

“I think the ‘old’ Lara still had some life left in her,” Stellalune says. “But I understand [Crystal Dynamics’] reasoning. I imagine they wanted to free themselves of the tangled backstory the character carries up to this point, so they can take her in some new directions.”

With Naughty Dog putting a cap in Nathan Drake’s adventures with the PlayStation Vita’s Golden Abyss, the time is ripe for another adventurer to step foot in exotic territory. In the wake of powerful female leads like Bayonetta and the forthcoming debut of Juliet Starling (shades of Buffy Summers of Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame) in Lollipop Chainsaw, who better than the woman who started it all? A Tomb Raider reboot is scheduled for next year.

“We’ll always have an itch for adventurous narrative, and some character and scenario will always be around to scratch it,” Barwood says. “Before I revived Jones in video games, it was Tomb Raider. Now it’s Uncharted. Next year, who knows?”

Indiana Jones might be the stuff of the past, but his successors will carry on his spirit for generations to come. Once again, that mantle could belong to Ms. Croft.

A month ago, when publisher Activision announced 007 Legends, a first-person shooter incorporating six of secret agent James Bond's greatest missions (including Skyfall, the upcoming film), the potential seemed endless. People immediately started making up their wish lists and then sat back, fingers crossed, and waited for their dreams to come true.

Cut to this week, when Activision revealed the first of Bond's "greatest hits": Moonraker.

Granted, we can't really expect the makers of Legends to lead with the big guns. They do have to save something for the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in a couple weeks, after all. But still...Moonraker? Really?

In an unscientific poll I conducted among my feelings and emotions, Moonraker ranks somewhere between "accidentally sitting on my balls" and "watching puppies get run over." It's a cheesy, stupid film, a low point for the franchise in which the filmmakers tried too late to cash in on Star Wars and ended up with a ridiculous farce in which a maniac tries to eradicate the entire human race with space lasers and replace them with people who look like they were kicked out of the auditions for Blue Lagoon for being too stupid.

Basically, I'm not a fan.

I'm sure the other movies in the game will be better than Moonraker (they'd have to be; science says so), but I have a crazy section of my brain that heard that announcement and wondered what would happen if Eurocom (the developer of Legends) allowed Moonraker to set the pace for the rest of their selections. What I ended up with might be the most terrible licensed game ever made, which is saying something in a world in which Charlie's Angels exists.

Let's see how bad the last four choices can get.

Bad choice 1: Octopussy

Octopussy represents everything that was stale and horrible about Roger Moore's run as James Bond, not the least of which is a title that is impossible to say without cringing unless you have just emptied an entire can of Axe body spray into your mouth. The gadgets are ridiculous, the script contains so much sexism that it feels like the screenwriters had gotten a bulk deal on the stuff, and at one point, Bond puts on a gorilla suit.

That's not a cute nickname for a clever Q device, either. I'm talking about a real-ass suit in the shape of a gorilla.

What I'm saying is that Octopussy hates you for watching it.

Imagine the possibilities in Legends. The developers could use that gorilla suit (and, later, a clown costume; I forgot about the clown costume because it saddens and frightens me) to shoehorn some stealth into the game. Everyone loves a forced stealth level in their FPSes, right? Plus, you could press a button at a key moment and make Bond do a Tarzan yell, because that was another thing that this movie does to its viewers.

Bad choice 2: You Only Live Twice

I like Roald Dahl a lot. I read The Witches so many times when I was in the third grade that my teacher brought it up to my parents at conferences out of concern that I was, in some way, "satanic." True story. Even now, I admire Dahl's clever rhymes and insane characters, even if I couldn't help but notice even at the age of nine that he sure did have a problem with fat people. But still, I liked Roald Dahl and everything he wrote.

That is, until he wrote You Only Live Twice, in which he has James Bond disguise himself as a Japanese person and invents the instantly ridiculous Volcano Lair.

Since Legends takes place from a first-person perspective, it would be hard to achieve maximum offensiveness with Bond's race drag in this one. Maybe when he talks, he could sound like Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's.

[vb_video src=http://www.youtube.com/embed/A1EvQLtoUSA width=640 height=480 method=iframe]

Bad choice 3: Never Say Never Again

Yeah, I know. Never Say Never Again isn't even canonical. It stands zero chance of ending up in 007 Legends because EON didn't even produce it. But that's also why it would be perfect for this nightmare version of the game. It's a horrible remake of Thunderball, which is one of the best films in the Bond series. Imagine playing through something that is just enough like Thunderball to make you think of Thunderball, but without all of that quality to make you actually enjoy yourself.

And while we're blatatntly disregarding canon:

Bad Choice 4: Casino Royale

No...not 2006's Casino Royale, which made the series good again after Die Another Day ruined it with its invisible car and unlistenable Madonna song. I'm talking about the 1967 parody, which is still one of the most glorious train wrecks in film history. That movie had 11 screenwriters and nine directors, which works out mathematically to zero jokes. Someone will have to check my work, though; I think an asymptote may be involved.

The premise of this movie is that James Bond, in an attempt to throw off the bad guys, has six other people designated as "James Bond," and that's not even counting Woody Allen's character, Jimmy Bond. Meanwhile, Orson Welles shows up to play baccarat, and Peter O'Toole is HOLY SHIT I'M SO ANGRY NOW.

What would this mean for Legends? To get the true Casino Royale experience, Eurocom would have to let everyone in their office have a go at designing a section of the level, including the disgruntled interns and the guys who only show up when the copier is broken. They'd also have to cram in as many tired jokes as they possibly can in the name of comedy, which means that the harder they try, the worse it will get until they end up with something that makes Duke Nukem Forever look like Portal 2.

I'm still optimistic for 007 Legends; plenty of excellent Bond movies haven't been given the game treatment yet, and I think it's time that they get their due. I just hope that Moonraker is the exception and not a dark harbinger of what is to come.

Once again, we peer into the future and...hey, are those lottery numbers?

Two weeks from today, game-industry trade show Electronic Entertainment Expo will wind down, and the survivors will limp off into the night like escaped slaves from a Krispy Kreme factory. But here in the pre-awesome glow of not-yet-E3, we can all still feel our feet and dreamily swoon (read: ceaselessly bitch that BioShock Infinite won't be at the show) over the endless possibilities. And since last year's E3 predictions nailed every last detail, let's spoil those possibilities. Because we care.

What say you, panel of experts? What's on tap for the biggest week in gaming?

“A’course, we a-bringin’ the Wii U and alla our new third-party support! Wah-HOO! So we gonna have-a the EA, we gonna have-a the you-be-soft, and oh, f*** me, I can't keep-a the straight face. No, it’s a-gonna be Family, capice? Me, a-Pikmin, Smash Bros., alla the made guys. Maybe we bring-a the new kid, Star Fox. Hey! He’s almost-a 20 years old! Time to getta him puke-drunk and make him a man!”

- Mario, Super Mario Galaxy

“I'm taking revengence on whoever invented the word ‘revengence.’”

- Raiden, Metal Gear Rising: Revengence

“Sony will formally announce Shenmue 3, and the sun will explode before they can add, ‘for the PS Vita.’"

- Ryo Hazuki, Shenmue

“That Microsoft conference is gonna be 10 minutes of Halo 4 and the Master Chief shootin’ up tire-lickin’ alien trash, then 90 minutes of [Microsoft President of the Interactive Entertainment] Don Mattrick just standing there with his arms folded, nodding to the applause LIKE A GOD-DAMN BOSS.”

- Sergeant Avery Johnson, Halo 3

“I’ll sneak into the L.A. Convention Center dressed as a gaming journalist and silently assassinate [PlayStation spokesman] Kevin Butler. It should be my easiest disguise ever...a pair of khaki shorts and a t-shirt with cartoons on it.”

- Agent 47, Hitman: Absolution

“I just want [Nintendo COO] Reggie Fils-Aime to rip his shirt off, turn green, and smash whoever hosts Ubisoft’s press conference.”

- Link, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

“They’re going to make me have a multiplayer mode, aren’t they? Who could possibly want 16 of me running around, quite muddy and sweaty and shooting each other, and I just answered my own question."

- Lara Croft, Tomb Raider

"I have too much money to go to a trade show. Instead, I think I'll buy Los Angeles and outlaw the color blue. Eat it, Facebook!"

- Angry Bird, Angry Birds

“All nine dozen free-to-play shooters coming to E3 will gang up on my Black Ops II lads until Activision beats them to death with large sacks of money. Maybe my boys'll just catapult booth babes at them from a distance."

- Captain Price, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

“If history’s any judge, a few hundred dorks will put their arms around me, so their friend can take a picture of us right before I dislocate his face. Let's just say I’ve adopted a zero-Nerd-Shoulder-tolerance policy.”

- Chun-Li, Super Street Fighter IV

“Johnson’s wrong. They’ll announce Kinect support for Halo 4, and God will cancel E3 in protest.”

- Master Chief, Halo 4

After several financial and political setbacks, 38 Studios (the developer behind Kingdoms of Amalur Reckoning) laid off its entire staff. A source close to the incident broke this news to the Verge earlier today. GamesBeat contacted Curt Schilling, the studio’s founder, for comment.

The studio employed 379 people as of March 15. If confirmed, the news is a big setback for a company that was creating an ambitious multi-game transmedia property, built around a world created by sci-fi novelist R.A. Salvatore and Spawn animator/creator Todd McFarlane.

38 Studios’ trouble began when it missed the May 1 deadline for payment of $1.125 million owed to the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation. Schilling met with the EDC shortly after the missed payment to discuss possible governmental assistance with paying back the studio’s loan debt.

“It’s a balance of making sure that 38 Studios is successful so that we can recoup our huge investment and not getting further exposed if the company, ultimately, is not gonna make it,” Governor Chafee said in a press conference. “That’s a tough balance.”

On May 18, 38 Studios managed to pay the $1.125 million but Providence news station WPRI reported that the company later did not make payroll.

[Update]

A former 38 Studios employee confirmed that an email Gamasutra ran regarding the layoffs is accurate:

It came from eBay often focuses on weird and ridiculously overpriced auctions on eBay, but today's item is a little more affordable -- it's just useless.

This weird game-development trinket is a GameCube NR (not retail) disc. If you've ever seen a debug console or pre-release build of a game, it was likely on one of these. It's simply a branded burnable disc. In the GameCube's case, anything put on an NR was actually primed for testing and debugging, but only the NR reader could boot up information in this format. 

Even if you tracked down a reader, this disc is still pretty useless. The one featured above is apparently blank and currnetly on auction for $25. If you were extra determined, I suppose you could use this in your ongoing GameCube indie development. 

While researching this disc I stumbled across an amazing piece of information: Did you know the GameCube supported stereoscopic 3D? The first and only game to utilize this functionality was Luigi's Mansion. Quick, someone with a 3D television test this!

Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang told analysts today just how important cloud graphics will be to the world. The company announced last week that its recently announced Kepler-based graphics chips are capable of cloud graphics. That means they can process graphics for multiple users in a data center and then dispatch the appropriate graphics as needed to the displays of distant remote users.

That allows big new applications for cloud computing in the enterprise. You can, for instance, use your own puny laptop to access huge visual projects such as engineering designs. Your computer will tap the graphics computing power in the cloud to render the images that your laptop could never display in real-time. One graphics processing unit (GPU) in the cloud can supply the graphics for at least four remote users today, compared to just one for prior chips. That makes cloud gaming and enterprise cloud graphics applications far more economical than in the past.

“Now we have a GPU for the cloud, a virtual GPU,” Huang said at Nvidia’s analyst day in Santa Clara, Calif. “What that means is that a whole bunch of users can see one GPU and use it as if it were their own.”

Nvidia has created a lot of software that enables the virtualized GPU, which can take graphics processing commands from a variety of users and process them on the GPU without regard for where those commands are coming from. No longer do the processing tasks have to come from just one computer.

This allows the graphics chip to catch up to the central processing unit, or CPU, which, when combined with hypervisor software originally created by IBM for sharing mainframe computers among many users, can serve many users from a single chip in a data center.

Huang said this cloud GPU will be valuable to the world’s 25 million product designers around the world. These users now buy Quadro-based graphics workstations in the millions each year. Power graphics users then make use of those designs and then share them. Other enterprise workers have to access high-end graphics, but in the enterprise, many of them don’t have beefy computers. Virtualization gets around that problem, so you can run high-end graphics applications on a device as simple as an iPad. Hundreds of millions of enterprise users could benefit from cloud graphics, Huang said.

“That is completely empowering,” Huang said.

The Nvidia technology can handle virtualization quickly. It doesn’t use a software layer, or emulation, because that approach is too slow. The hardware has been tweaked for virtual GPU tasks.

“We wanted to put this in the cloud and for the first time, a GPU needs to be aware that a display may not be directly connected to the GPU,” he said. “It could be anywhere in the world. You just tell the GPU an address, and the bits coming out of the chip are sent to that address” to display the graphics on a distant computer.

Huang demonstrated an iPad running Windows and other demanding PC graphics applications running on the cloud. The iPad was able to show a high-end design program displaying a photorealistic image of a car. A total of 1,536 Kepler cores were accessible to the iPad, so it could handle the computing task easily.

As far games, Nvidia wants to use cloud graphics to make games instantaneously convenient to play as TV shows. This taps a technology dubbed the GeForce Grid. You no longer have to download a big game for hours and have a powerful computer to play it. That’s similar to the vision that OnLive and Gaikai have, and both are partners with Nvidia in cloud graphics.

“This will do the same for video games what TV has done for video,” Huang said. “We think it could expand the market.”

Of course, high-end games that are played remotely could suffer from lag, where the inputs that a gamer makes aren’t immediately translated into actions in the game.  So serious gamers are playing online games on PCs, rather than consoles, since the delays on a high-end PC are about 65 milliseconds and they are 166 milliseconds on an online console.

With the GeForce Grid powered by Gaikai, Nvidia can reduce the lag of the cloud graphics games to 161 milliseconds, or essentially just as fast as a game console. That could enable large numbers of casual gamers and non-gamers to play high-end games on relatively simple computing devices, Huang said.

Huang showed a demo of Hawken, an upcoming high-end 3D downloadable game, working in a cloud-based environment.

“For the game developer, we can expand their reach,” he said. “Today, you need to have the right hardware. But we can make it run on any hardware.”

On top of that, cloud-based games are piracy free, Huang said.

[Photo credit: Dean Takahashi]

Sony is unveiling a goofy PlayStation 3 and Vita game dubbed When Vikings Attack; at a recent Sony event in Santa Monica, Calif., I got a close-up, hands-on preview. In the game, you control a pack of town citizens who must defend their neighborhood against hordes of those invading Norse pirates.

You move these groups from an isometric viewpoint and pick up items on the terrain. You can, for instance, direct your little mob of citizens to pick up a car and heave it at the vikings in order to take them out, which feels like you’re bowling to get a strike by knocking all of the vikings down in one fell swoop. But the Norsemen move around and pick up things, too, and they dish it right back at you.

You can dodge their attacks. Sometimes, they just pick off a few of your people. If you lose too many citizens, the game gets harder because the only items you’re able to pick up, such as mailboxes, become smaller and deal less damage. But all isn’t lost. You can pick up wandering citizens and bring them into your mob. You can also find power-ups such as a green missile, which will convert your enemies’ allegiances to that of your town.

It’s a cute game with a tight focus on a small patch of a suburban neighborhood. Neil McPhillips, associate producer, said in an interview with GamesBeat that up to four players can compete in versus mode, where everyone tries to take one another out. Or you can play cooperatively, trying to knock out the invading Norsemen. As you defeat the vikings, you level up and move on to a new scene. You can find more weapons to toss at your rival players, too. But you have to be careful since they can catch a projectile with a deft button press and toss it back at you.

Neil McPhillips also said that When Vikings Attack supports cross-platform battles between players on PlayStation Vitas and PlayStation 3s. You can compete against friends to get high scores.

“We call it a hectic arcade brawler,” McPhillips said.

The game, developed by Clever Beans, comes out in October, and it looks like a bunch of fun. Check out our gallery of screenshots below.

Metro Last Light, the sequel to the first-person shooter game Metro 2033, is coming out in 2013. Today, THQ released the first video trailer showing the story behind Last Light, and it’s quite well done.

In the trailer, an old man listening to a short-wave radio hears about the onset of nuclear war. He warns people to start moving to the Metro, or the underground subway, in Moscow. No one believes him until the emergency alarms go off. A woman who was singing to her baby runs toward the Metro entrance. Moscow’s own nuclear missiles launch into the air and a panic ensues.

The trailer is set in 2013, and it features an all-Russian cast. Not a word of English is spoken unless you count the prophet of doom screaming, “Armageddon! Armageddon!” But you can understand exactly what is happening. The woman with the baby shouts at a Russian officer guarding the entrance to the subway. She gives him her baby. He takes it, and heads underground. The doors close, and the nuclear bombs go off.

The original Metro 2033 debuted in the spring of 2010. It was based on the post-apocalyptic novel of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky, and it was made by 4A Games, a Russian developer that helped make the shooter Stalker: Shadows of Chernobyl. Metro 2033 features a ragtag group of survivors living underground in the Metro subways of Moscow. They go to the surface to scavenge for materials, but they face horrific mutated monsters that are only too happy to eat humans for a meal. 4A is also making Metro Last Light.

Last Light’s live-action video is really moving, and it establishes the origins and setting for the game quite clearly. It’s an example of video game marketing at its best since it aims to hook the player emotionally into the title’s fiction.

The video closes with a soldier wearing a gas mask and then switches into game art, showing the mass destruction in Moscow 20 years after the attack. Nothing stands except the shells of stone buildings and the facade of the Metro, where survivors live underground. The trailer closes by revealing that the game is coming in 2013, assuming, of course, that the world doesn’t come to an end first.

Normally, accepting a blood-colored treat from a disheveled, fly-ridden vagrant means a flying dive into the nearest Starbucks for safety, but this time around calls for special restraint: Social gaming giant Zynga non-accidentally released a 40-(dead)man flock of zombies into both San Francisco and New York City today promoting its upcoming slice-n-dicer Zombie Swipeout for iOS mobile devices.

Kicking off during the magically empty space between your bleary morning commute and takeout lunch break, the shambling street team will spend three hours on a “blood drive” involving handing out mint-flavored blood pops (calm that queasy stomach: the pops contain just lime juice, mint, and cane sugar), a lot of moaning and grasping motions, and a creeping trek through each city’s downtown area.

Starting at 11 a.m. PST in San Francisco, the horde will loop around Market Street while detouring on Drumm Street, South Park, and Union Square Park for maximum freak-out factor for us normals. Need a map? Right here.

Manhattan’s rotting crew hunts for candyless victims at 10:30 a.m. EST within Union Square Park, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park, and Central Park’s Columbus Circle. Get a map here.

Zombie Swipeout, developed by Game Doctors, is a “spiritual successor” to the tower-defense title ZombieSmash. Players use a variety of sharp and blunt pieces of metal to bludgeon, slice, and chop flying zombies while obeying a single, simple rule: Don’t hit Joey. Zynga says Swipeout will hit markets globally “in the coming weeks.”

Familiarize yourself with Swipeout’s denizens in the gallery below, and make sure your Z-day kit remains locked up tight at home for these friendly freaks.

It’s a bit overwhelming to think that Ryu launched his first Hadoken 25 years ago, when Capcom’s beloved fighting-game series Street Fighter debuted in arcades. The developer certainly should be proud of such a remarkable milestone, and it looks to celebrate with an equally remarkable anniversary package.

The Street Fighter 25th Anniversary Collection Set is simply massive with an incredible amount of content: Buyers get the four most recent titles in the series (Street Fighter X Tekken, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, and Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition), along with all of the accompanying downloadable content; a two-disc Blu-ray collection featuring the animated TV series, the animated movies, and a documentary highlighting the impact fans have had on the franchise; an 11-disc soundtrack spanning the entire series; a hardcover art book; an 8-inch statue of series star Ryu with a light-up base; a full-size replica of Ryu’s belt; and a certificate of authenticity for the avid collectors.

Those interested should be looking to save up $149.99, a rather affordable price considering all of the goodies listed.

Capcom is also looking to promote international Street Fighter tournaments for all of the games in the Collector’s Box. These will be starting in July and will run until the end of the year. The company is offering substantial prizes for contestants — about $500,000 worth — so competitive players who are satisfied with the games they already own have something to be excited for as well.

Seeing events and packages for such excellent franchises really shows the love that both developers and gamers have for the medium. Whether it’s a compilation of classic titles, as Nintendo did for Mario’s-25th anniversary, or full-blown international events, such as the Legend of Zelda symphony orchestra tour, these milestones stand as reminders of what made these much-lauded games so great. Unless of course you’re Metroid; then you’re simply ignored.