VentureBeat

SAN DIEGO, CA— The Comic-Con show is on the rise, with so many game companies showing up there to unveil new games that it is probably a contender to replace E3.

Over 150,000 fans flocked to downtown San Diego for Comic-Con less than a week after the E3 Media & Business Summit, which is undergoing a big makeover as we write. While E3 focused on a core group of journalists, Comic-Con International is an event squarely targeted at consumers. And not just any consumers, but those are the most likely to pre-order both mainstream and genre games, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs; order their “Dark Knight” tickets for the first midnight screening; and collect comic books, action figures and any type of merchandise associated with their favorite movies, TV shows, and games.

As Hollywood has learned over recent years, if you can win over the Comic-Con crowd, as Paramount Pictures did last year with the film “Iron Man,” you can just about guarantee a hit when the movie debuts. This year’s focus was on Warner Bros.’ upcoming comic-based movie, “Watchmen,” which also has a episodic (where gamers download and play one episode at a time, much like they watch one TV episode at a time) downloadable game in development with director Zack Snyder (“300”) on board. Come next March, this movie should replicate “Iron Man’s” success (the comic might be too cult for “Dark Knight” box office). It also could help episodic gaming take off on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. The PC space has had success with this emerging form of interactive entertainment, but a popular Hollywood/comic license like “Watchmen” could get consumers used to buying and consuming games as they buy and consume TV shows.

Although E3 and Comic-Con were back-to-back this year, Comic-Con now receives the type of mainstream media coverage that the old E3 of two years ago once received. Game publishers who take part in the show will get all of the regular game coverage, as well as a lot of mass market coverage that the new E3 format no longer attracts. But perhaps most important, Comic-Con does what E for All hasn’t been able to achieve—it attracts 150,000 consumers with disposable incomes and many with blogs and puts the latest games in their hands. It’s this active group that can make or break a film, so they certainly have some say over games, as well. Hollywood has learned this, and it seems game publishers are learning, as well. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time in a few years, I’m not one of the E3 judges who evaluate the best games of the video game industry for GameCriticsAwards.com. Not to worry. I’ve filled up my schedule and I won’t have to try to see every single big game. But I’m a game fan at heart and I’ll be going to the show not just to write about business, but to evaluate the best games from my own point of view. Here are my picks for the “most anticipated” games of the show. This post is much more in tune with my old job of being a game reviewer. But you can expect me to voice my opinion on the best of what I see. It’s a good exercise to give readers a flavor for where the innovation is strongest in the $50 billion video game industry, which is finally drawing its share of high-caliber financial investors.

Fallout 3 (PC, Xbox 360, PS 3) Bethesda Softworks, Oct. 2008. Although I hesitate from putting anything with a “3″ after its name on a list of innovative titles, this game has consistently won buzz and it takes pains to create a graphically beautiful rendering of a world after a nuclear war in the year 2077. The Capital Wasteland is chock full of radioactive creatures and mechanical beasts. It’s also got a wry sense of humor, which tells you that mixing serious subjects with humor — such as playing happy music in the midst of a destroyed world — is one way to broaden the audience for a first-person (action role-playing game) shooter. That’s a lesson of last year’s BioShock.

Gears of War 2 (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Epic Games, Nov. 2008. OK, OK. More of the same. Yes, it’s in a post-apocalyptic world again. But these one has been ravaged not by nukes but by an underground race of demon thugs who are among the hardest things to kill with a game controller. This is the kind of game with gripping sound and graphics that makes you want to buy a 1080p high-definition TV. The story picks up six months after the last epic battle to save humanity and takes the previous third-person shooter title a step further in tactical combat. You can, for instance, duel another player with a chainsaw bayonet and wound your enemies in the legs before you decapitate them. The previous game helped get the Xbox 360 established in the market and sold 4.7 million units worldwide. That’s $282 million sales at retail.

Wii Music (Nintendo Wii) Nintendo, no date. Now we’re finally getting into the cute little Nintendo characters that everybody loves. The industry’s leading innovator has taken its own sweet time with this title. Consider it Nintendo’s answer to Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It’s overdue for release and predictions suggest that it’s highly likely that Nintendo will finally show off this title. Music has become extremely popular in games and it represents the most-proven way to broaden the video game audience to females, young kids, and older gamers. This title will be innovative because it can make use of the Wii’s motion detection to allow you to play conductor for a virtual orchestra by moving your arms around. Nintendo demoed this game at E3 in 2006. It’s time to let it out of the bag.

Spore (PC, Mac), Electronic Arts/Maxis, Sept. 7, 2008. They’ve been talking about it since 2005, but EA’s Maxis division is at the finish line for Will Wright’s latest brainstorm. Nobody questions that this is an original title. You can create your own cell-like creatures, races of creatures, and galactic civilizations in the ultimate god-like simulation from the creator of SimCity and the Sims. The later has sold more than 100 million units since it debuted in 2000. If EA executes on Wright’s vision, the sky is the limit for the sales of this title. There are, however, plenty of people who are worried that this game is the most over-hyped in video game industry history.

Resistance 2 (PS 3) Sony/Insomniac Games, holiday 2008. I was thinking of putting Killzone 2 on the list and I have no doubt Sony will give a pulse-pounding demo again and we won’t see that game appear anytime soon. The next-best thing on the PS 3 is Resistance 2, the latest game from Ted Price’s Insomniac Games, one of Sony’s few golden geese in game production. The first title enabled the PS 3 to get off the ground in 2006 and it has a good grudge match going with the Gears of War 2. I trust that Insomniac is going to to up the ante to make sure that this title doesn’t get lost in the console war.

LittleBigPlanet (PS 3) Sony/Media Molecule, Oct. 2008. The biggest compliment for this game is that it’s something you would expect from Nintendo. It has cute rag-doll characters and is a side-to-side movement game, like the old 2-D platform games of years past. But it has photorealistic 3-D graphics and the ability to mix and match character appearances and their accoutrements so that they’re uniquely your own creations. Then you use those characters as a team to try and get past a series of puzzle-obstacles in their paths.

Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360, PS 3) Capcom, 2009. This title is going to be bloody and controversial, even more so than your typical zombie-shooting game. Gamers and the makers of this franchise have long known there is a joy to blowing the heads off of zombies. It’s likely to be a slow-moving game compared to other fast shooters, but that gives you time to think of how you’re going to take out the nearest zombies with limited ammo. You’ll be thinking, “My kingdom for one more shotgun shell.” The stories in this series are good, even if they’re some kind of weird derivative of “Night of the Living Dead.” If RE5 is anything like Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo GameCube, it will be a hit.

Final Fantasy XIII (PS 3), Square Enix, no date. I can’t say that I’ve ever finished one of these games but they’re always beautiful to look at. The series always has a new story that keeps the gamers coming back and the game play, which is in the turn-based role-playing game style that many don’t like, keeps on getting better. For sure, you spend a lot of time watching cinematics in this kind of game rather than mashing buttons, but this is where games are pushing the envelope on movie-like effects.

Fable 2 (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Lionhead Studios, Oct. 2008. Peter Molyneux, the head of Lionhead, always gives eloquent demos when he shows off his titles. He creates a kind of reality distortion field, and sometimes there is a comedown when the games don’t come out as good as he says they will be. But Molyneux is on the right track for making great works of art that emotionally move you. Fable 2 sets up moral dilemmas and dramas. You can use your pet dog as a scout, but you’ll regret if you let Rover die as he helps get you out of a scrape. That’s an emotional attachment that Molyneux is counting on.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (PS 3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS 2, PSP, DS), LucasArts, Sept. 16, 2008. This game was probably too long in the making and might be the reason for a big change in management at George Lucas’s video game studio. But it has lifelike environments with physically accurate features, like leaves that move in the wind or cliffs that create rock sides when they’re hit with explosives. It also has realistically animated human characters who react intelligently to what happens to them. That foundation is the perfect underpinning for a game that allows you to use “the Force” the way always wanted to. You can pick up anything in the game and, with Jedi powers, throw it at anything else. Also, the story is probably one of the most intriguing that I’ve ever seen in the Star Wars universe. It’s been a long time coming, but hopefully it will live up to the build up.

Other titles worth noting:

Halo Wars (Xbox 360) Microsoft/Ensemble Studios/Bungie, Oct. 2008. Like playing Halo, only with little tiny miniatures in real time.

Tomb Raider Underworld (Wii, PS 2, PS 3, Xbox 360, PC, DS) Eidos/Crystal Dynamics, holiday 2008. The latest in the Lara Croft series.

Rock Band 2 (Xbox 360, PS 3, Wii), MTV Games/Harmonix, Sept. 2008. Bang a drum. Get it on.

Call of Duty: World at War (PC, Xbox 360, PS 3) Activision/Treyarch, fall 2008. The same engine as Call of Duty 4, but back in World War II in places such as the Pacific theater. That means jungle warfare.

Here are some other lists to compare mine to:

Big Download’s top PC games list

Next Generation’s top 30 anticipated titles

GameSpot’s list

IGN’s top PC games list

GamePro’s list

Inspired by the Nintendo Wii’s clever wand-like game controller, gesture-recognition start-ups are coming out of the woodwork. Israel’s 3DV Systems is one of the contenders and it is showing more of its cards.

The Yokne’am, Israel company said it plans to launch a low-cost gesture-recognition camera for game purposes in 2009. And it has hired a well-known video game veteran as its general manager for the North American market. Charles Bellfield, the new hire, has worked at a variety of video game companies in the past 15 years.

3DV is one of a number of companies that want to make it much easier to control games. It has refined a sophisticated camera, the ZCam, that can detect the gestures a person is making and translates those gestures into controls for a video game. You can thus stand in front of a game machine with the camera, wave your arms about, and control everything in the game.

The idea riffs off the motion sensor in the Nintendo Wii but takes it to a much more precise control through simple gestures. You could, for instance, turn up the volume in a game by making a thumbs-up sign. Or you could drive in a racing game by holding out your hands as if you were gripping a steering wheel. I demoed an early version where I was able to fly a plane in a game by putting my hand up in the air and using it as an imaginary joystick.

The 11-year-old 3DV has been making the cameras for years and still sells a $250,000 version for broadcasters who use it insert images into TV shows in real time. The company refined the technology and took out the costs so that it can apply it to the consumer market. By the end of this year, the company will be mass producing the consumer ZCam cameras and it will launch with games in 2009, Bellfield said in an interview.

I knew Bellfield as the die-hard spokesman for Sega, as that company’s Dreamcast video game console business was sinking. Bellfield didn’t tolerate anyone feeling sorry for poor old Sega. More recently, Bellfield did stints as a marketing executive for game companies Capcom and Codemasters. Think of him as the P.T. Barnum of video games. He will be joined by 3DV’s vice president of interactive entertainment, Rich Flier.

Bellfield said 3DV can come in as a differentiator for video game companies. Innovative ideas such as musical-instrument games “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” allow their makers to charge $99 and $169 respectively for their unique games. He said that at a time when low-end Flash games are becoming a commodity and high-end games are becoming increasingly expensive to make, developers should turn to novel approaches to gaming to set themselves apart.

Bellfield said the device will run across a variety of platforms and plugs into a universal serial bus (USB) port on any computer or game device. It will be about the same size as a webcam. Bellfield said the company is talking to a variety of developers and publishers. Those game makers are thinking of either enhancing existing games, such as making shooting games better, or creating new categories of games.

Traditionally, gaming peripherals don’t sell that well. But the Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Wii itself have turned that notion upside down.

“It’s hard to launch something new, but what we have here is a more disruptive technology,” Bellfield said. “You touch nothing, but you can control everything.”

Demonstrations like those by 3DV have spurred the imagination, but they have also drawn out the competition. Another Israeli competitor claiming to have the best 3-D gesture control system is Prime Sense in Tel Aviv. Other rivals include Softkinetic, XTR, Oblong Industries, Canesta, ThinkOptics and GestureTek. We’ve written about 3DV and these others here and here.

Clearly, not all of these companies are going to survive and they’re going to have live through a long gestation before their products see the light of day. The ultimate blessing would be if a game console maker adopts the newfangled controllers, but the next console systems aren’t going to be out until 2010. Meanwhile, there is a rumor that Microsoft will join the motion-sensor control party with a new controller next week at the E3 show.