So it’s come to this, has it, Nintendo? You’re now content to skulk in the corners of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) with your innovative devices and sequels to 20-year-old Super Nintendo games? This once mighty company won’t even attempt to assert itself on a stage against the new titans of the age, Sony and Microsoft?

I’m not so out of touch as to think E3 in 2013 is as important as it was to the video game industry back when it started in 1995. So in one respect, I can understand why it seems like a good idea to skip the expense and hassle of a major press conference. I’d applaud the decision if I didn’t think it was yet another symptom of the isolationist culture that’s embedded itself somewhere deep within your business, Nintendo — leading you to behave like an old hermit stubbornly whittling away at the same wooden toys that used to bring the kids out to visit a long time ago.

The Nintendo Directs are welcome and informative, but you might be overestimating how widely they are spreading your message. Sure, dropping a prerecorded video message from some far-flung corner of the earth has gotten people plenty of attention before, but I doubt you want to apply that communications model to your free-market enterprise. There’s something to be said for putting on a show at a venue where media, distributors, and industry officials will be converging for several days. You don’t want to leave it up to everyone to watch a 24-minute YouTube video presentation set against a stark white background.

With the Wii U, you’ve met the bare minimum requirements to say you launched a new console: You shipped boxes of them to stores, released a glossed-up version of New Super Mario Bros. Wii, and put out a variation on the theme of “Look at Us, We’re Innovative” with Nintendo Land. There was no effective marketing done to actually sell the Wii U to the people who bought the original Wii. Your promises of third-party game support have thus far fallen short, your own lineup of software keeps suffering delays, and the latest series of advertisements for the console show families struggling to put two cogent thoughts together about why they even bought the damn console in the first place.

You’re not in the clear yet, and it seems like a bad time to rely on others to come to you, especially when Sony and Microsoft won’t be waiting patiently for people to pass by their E3 booths to show them their versions of the next big thing in gaming. It’s not that the IGNs, GameSpots, and Kotakus of the Internet won’t notice you at E3. They will, and the gaming-informed will be able to recite by heart your holiday release schedule by the end of the show.

The problem is with U.S.A. Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — the big types of mainstream news sources whose video game coverage largely consists of statements from congressmen and senators panning the medium for its portrayals of violence. They are going to be hard-pressed to find time for your discreet show when they are writing about how Microsoft will be taking over the suburban living room with the new Xbox this fall, with Sony’s PlayStation 4 tagging close behind.

Maybe in a year — when you’ve established a strong lineup of games for the Wii U, when the anticipation around next-generation consoles has died down, and when it’s just another time for more games — I might suggest forgoing the stage. In 2013, my only advice to you, Nintendo, is to “break a leg.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Electronic Entertainment Expo is approaching fast, but it’s starting to look like Microsoft may introduce the next Xbox home game console up to two months before that gaming trade show.

Rumors reported by several websites claim that Microsoft will hold an Xbox event in April. CVG and The Verge both have sources who claim the company will introduce the new console that month. GamesBeat spoke with a source in the wake of Sony’s PlayStation 4 event that made a similar claim.

Separately, a poster on the popular gaming message board NeoGAF uncovered a URL registration for XboxEvent.com. Eventcore, an event-management firm that has worked with Microsoft previously, filed for that URL as well as XboxE312.com (Xbox E3 2012).

Sony just demonstrated why it is so important to hold a separate event to announce a new console. The PlayStation 4 owned a majority share of the news coverage this week in the gaming media, and it attracted a great deal of attention from mainstream sources as well (including appearing on Jimmy Fallon’s late night talk show). If both companies waited until E3, most of the discussion would focus on which had the better presentation. Microsoft wants to avoid that, so don’t let it surprise you if Microsoft announces the event soon.

And unlike the PS4, expect the next Xbox to actually show up to the event based on this Tweet from Microsoft’s Major Nelson:

Announce a console without actually showing a console? That's one approach—
Larry Hryb (@majornelson) February 21, 2013

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The universe is innately captivating — even my son at the young age of 2-and-a-half marvels at the rocket ship decals, strung-up planets, and stars projected on his ceiling.

Last weekend, I visited Baltimore City’s long running and free Artscape festival that — you guessed it — showcases the passion of the area’s local, burgeoning creative community. This year, I saw the Gamescape exhibit, and within I witnessed a group of talented individuals likewise fascinated with galaxies, black holes, and exploding stars…and all the concepts they represent: the awe of discovery and the expanse of new, unexplored frontiers. In space, anything seems possible.

I walked through the double doors leading into the Bunting Center, a brick building on the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) campus. Just inside hustled a small group of local programmers, artists, and students who were setting up widescreen televisions, computers, and other equipment.

Pac-Man ghosts and Mega Man characters decorated the walls. An arcade room, sporting Mortal Kombat, Ikari Warriors III, and Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja (among other games) and allowing  just enough space for a half-dozen cabinets, lay hidden through an open archway. The cozy area provided for Gamescape had a “just thrown together” vibe; it lacked the bombastic marketing campaigns that characterize big video game conventions like Los Angeles’ Electronic Entertainment Expo.

I sat down to an inviting PlayStation 3 controller hooked up to a PC running the game Protostar by indie developer Bitty Bash. “Are you guys showing stuff yet?” I asked. I’d arrived early. Programmer Paolo Munoz responded enthusiastically, “Yes!” Protostar is a Galaga-type, top-down scrolling shooter set in outer space.

As I dodged enemy bullets and returned fire, Munoz explained to me that his kids had inspired him to make a game. At 7 and 4, they were just getting into titles like LittleBigPlanet and Mario Galaxy, and he wanted to create something they could all play together.

Using free tools from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology called Flash Develop, Munoz began building. “You can make a game, too,” with such things, he told me. Initially, his scope for Protostar was small, but that all changed when he brought in Scott Brown to create pixel graphics. Brown would come up with cool and interesting enemy designs, and Munoz then felt compelled to implement them into the game. With Jonathan Stuart rounding out the team as music composer and background artist, they completed a full-fledged title with a lengthy mission-based campaign.

Protostar is particularly traditional, but Munoz didn’t seem to mind. “You don’t have to be original to make something new,” he told me. “You’ll make something from the heart.” Heart was definitely on display, as I saw configurable ship systems (armor, shields, engines, blasters, launchers, and missiles) that function as a sort of self-directed, granular difficulty setting and missions that change when playing through a second time, keeping each experience fresh and encouraging multiple runs.

From this first 2D shooter, I made my way to the next, a game called Sinc by indie studio Seven Hills Games. Programmer and designer Greg Aring, who lives just outside the city in the Baltimore suburb of Catonsville, has taken the genre in a different direction by blending music with the standard gameplay and implementing the now common twin-stick shooter control scheme to the side-scroller.

Sinc is set in a post-Earth universe where you take control of the lone human left after an alien invasion of the planet. The twist is that all the world-destroying mayhem happened while you were away on a terraforming mission on Mars. The radio uplink back to Earth no longer transmits a reply. You can spend your time on the red surface looking at rocks, and if that sounds boring, it’s intentional. Aring even considered implementing a mode where you’d watch bacteria cultures grow…in real-time.

The meat of Sinc exists inside a hyper-sleep chamber where you spend most of your time. Since terraforming takes millions of years, it’s the only way to accomplish the job. But in there, your dreams will haunt you in the form of fast-paced shooter action.

Each dream is a journey to another distant planet in the Milky Way, and in your little space explorer, you’ll blast incoming enemies and eventually face a boss encounter. Aring told me that he considered making each level last the same amount of time that light would take to move between each location, but some stages became too long (Mars to Jupiter, for instance, would have been almost a half hour).

The game populates enemies onscreen based on the soundtrack playing in the background, and each trip features rows of digital decibel-level meters on the edges of the screen that shrink and grow with the music. The blend of sound and gameplay creates a captivating experience, and Aring has included a separate mode where you can just play the shooting portion of Sinc. There, you’ll collect “beats” that simultaneously change the pulsating soundtrack and create new challenges.

All of the music in Sinc comes courtesy of Zach Murphy and his band The Wet Dreams, which has a techno vibe that transcends into roaring cacophony as you approach the end of each stage. Boss encounters play to decidedly ominous undertones.

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Developer Konami is counting down to this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show (which will take place in Los Angeles from June 5-7) with a tournament-style contest between its most popular heroes and villains. Starting today, fans can exercise their “who would win in a fight?” muscles by voting in the first round of the E3 Character Battle, and these votes will determine which combatants will move on.

Since announcing the final contestants last week, Konami has allowed fans to project their own winners. Correct guesses earn more points in later rounds, and the person with the most points at the end of the tournament will be crowned “the ultimate Konami E3 fan,” although what exactly that means is currently unknown. Bracket submissions closed with the start of voting.

While it’s too late to turn in your own bracket for the contest, you can still play along at home and maybe get an office pool going — provided your office is full of people who have a real stake in the relative martial prowesses of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow protagonist Gabriel Belmont and the cutesy hide-and-seek-loving Elebits.

We’ve collected all of the contestants, Pokémon-style, in the gallery below. Who do you want to win?

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution — a sci-fi first-person shooter game from developer Eidos Montreal — is one of the first few high-profile titles to launch simultaneously on OnLive, the PC and gaming consoles Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. There are a lot of questions as to whether OnLive would take off, much less be able to handle a game launch like Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

Well, you can put those fears to rest. Human Revolution is the first in what looks like a series of fantastic blockbuster titles on the launchpad this fall. The game looked gorgeous and blazed along at something north of 50 frames per second on OnLive — slightly better than the kind of performance you’d expect from a high-power PC or an Xbox 360. There were a few glitches — which is natural for a newer service — but they did not really get in the way of the gameplay.

I’ve spent the better part of the week blitzing through the game using OnLive, a cloud gaming service that runs games on remote servers and streams them through a web browser like a YouTube video. The service can run triple-A titles like Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on computers and even on tablets that don’t have a lot of processing power. You need a decent Internet connection to play the games, but that’s not too difficult to find.

The game not only plays like a dream on OnLive, but goes out of its way to reward you for being creative and finding interesting solutions to problems and staying alive. When I first picked up the controller for Deus Ex: Human Revolution at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show in Los Angeles, Calif., this year, I was incredibly skeptical. The first title in the series, Deus Ex, came out in 2000 and holds a special place in my heart for introducing the idea of an open world with choices and multiple paths to an end.

But as I powered through and really got a better taste of Human Revolution, I was treated to an experience that doesn’t necessarily match the original Deus Ex but comes very, very close. And it has the added benefit of a decade of sophistication and evolution that video games and first person shooters have enjoyed.

OnLive actually included codes for a free copy of the game in retail versions of the game. The move actually frustrated game retailer GameStop, which instructed its employees to pull the codes out of the physical copies of the game because it promoted competition with GameStop’s own reported cloud gaming service. (The company later reneged on the move and is now offering free gift cards for players that didn’t get a code.)

You play as Adam Jensen, a security specialist that was gravely injured in a fight trying to protect a piece of technology in his company. Doctors used prosthetics and cybernetic enhancements — called augmentations — from his company Sarif Industries to restore his limbs and keep him alive. He returns to work shortly after being nearly killed to uncover the story behind the attack and quickly gets caught up in a feud between augmentation companies.

It’s a near-term dystopia where humanity is on the cusp of unlocking the species’ true potential through the use of augmentation. But it’s littered with problems as the human body over time begins to reject augmentations and you need to take a drug called Neuropezyne to stop the rejection. It leads to addiction and a whole host of problems for people who can no longer afford the drug. That leads to riots and the emergence of political movements to try and halt scientific advancement in augmentation.

It’s a Deus Ex for a new generation, and it’s a blast to play.

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Dust 514 is one of a number of games called “free-to-play” in industry terminology, which means that they don’t require a subscription fee to play online.

Despite the terminology, players will have to buy between $10 and $20 worth of in-game credits that can be used to purchase equipment and better weapons in the game before they can access the online world. That means game players won’t have to pay the maker of Dust 514, CCP Games, to play it; they just need to start buying virtual goods. It’s similar to some other games that are requiring a cover charge to access online content, like Mass Effect 2′s Cerberus Network. It’s designed to discourage gamers from buying used versions of games.

The goal of a “cover charge” is to create a gate for the content that ensures the game progresses in a slow and predictable way, CCP Games’ CEO Hilmar Veigar Pétursson told GamesIndustry.biz. It discourages groups from creating “spam” accounts in a game that disrupt the flow for other players. But by converting the cover charge to in-game credits, CCP Games could also give players a taste of the premium parts of the game and encourage them to buy more virtual goods.

Dust 514 was one of the most delightful games to debut at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June this year. It’s a first-person shooting game that’s built into an existing massive online role-playing game universe called EVE Online, which already sports 400,000 subscribers.

Dust 514 is much like other FPS games at first, dropping players into closed, team-based matches with certain objectives like capturing a position or eliminating the opposing team. Each match that a Dust 514 player participates in is actually a contract created by an EVE Online player, a completely separate game set in space above the the planet where Dust 514 takes place. EVE Online features tactical space combat and lots of player-driven politics. Squads on the Dust 514 planet’s surface can fire artillery into space to damage ships in the EVE Online game, and ships in the EVE Online universe can initiate orbital strikes on the planet’s surface to help Dust 514 players.

They are two completely different games. EVE Online is geared towards hardcore MMO players and the average play session lasts around 3 hours. Dust 514 is a game for FPS gamers who only have 10 or 20 minutes to play. But they exist in the same universe and regularly interact with each other, creating an experience another MMO game has yet to match.

The game will be available for the PlayStation 3 in Summer 2012 and will go into private beta testing toward the end of this year.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Gaikai embeds games in Facebook — Gaikai is the business-oriented equivalent of OnLive that gives game publishers a way to stream high-quality games through a web browser. The company showed off the technology by letting companies render their high-quality games like Dead Space 2 in Facebook. The service could run OnLive off its rails by giving publishers a way to directly stream games through the Internet without having to go through a middle-man game service like OnLive. Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers in the world and the publisher behind triple-A titles like Mass Effect 3 and Battlefield 3, is one of the first companies that Gaikai is working with to bring its games to web browsers.

Gamers can switch between remastered and classic Halo graphics on the fly — Microsoft announced that it would remaster the first game in the Halo series, Halo: Combat Evolved, for the Xbox 360 at E3 this year. The new version will feature high-definition graphics that appear in the latest games in the series like Halo: Reach and recreate the first maps of the Halo franchise for multiplayer games. But players can switch back to “Classic Mode,” which will revert to the same graphics the original version of the game had when it shipped in 2001, at any time when they are playing the game.

The whole game is part of the 10th anniversary of the release of Halo: Combat Evolved, which helped popularize first-person shooter games on home consoles and created a franchise that has given Microsoft an incredible cash cow. 343 Industries — which took over the development of the Halo franchise from Bungie, the development studio originally responsible for Halo: Combat Evolved — is working on the game.

OnLive renders a web browser in the cloud — OnLive, an online service that runs games on remote cloud servers and streams the game over the Internet, unveiled a web browser that uses the same technology at E3 this year. But the advantage OnLive has, along with its super fast cloud computers, is an incredibly fast internet connection that can download a lot of information very quickly, compress it and stream it over the Internet to end users. The whole experience usually ends up being much faster than typical web browsing, which can take upwards of a minute to fully download the contents of a website. OnLive can download that same content in a matter of seconds and stream it over the Internet at about the same quality and speed as a YouTube video.

That means websites that use heavy-duty Flash videos and games are suddenly much more accessible on mobile devices like tablets and smartphones. It also gives iPhone and iPad users, who have had to go without games and other web sites running on Flash, a way to access those websites and run them at the same quality that other tablets and personal computers can.

Sony lets gamers take their games anywhere with PS3, PS Vita connectivity — Sony is dead set on getting their games into every aspect of a gamer’s lives. To do that, the company is working with game developers to give players a way to transfer a player’s saved games, which store all the information about where a player was at a given time in the game, between PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita versions of the same game. That will give players a way to play the same game regardless of where they are.

Konami is one of the first companies that will use that capability — though the company is labeling it as “Transfarring.” Sony also showed off the technology with a new PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita title called Ruin, a brawler-style role-playing game that plays a lot like the Diablo series released by Blizzard. The new tool will also be available in the Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders HD Collection, though Sony wouldn’t indicate what other games would use it when the PlayStation Vita comes out later this year.

The Wii U packs a punch — Nintendo isn’t known for having the best graphics in the business. The Nintendo Wii, for example, is much weaker than the other consoles in the current console generation and doesn’t play games in high-definition. That’s going to change with the Wii U, which looks like it will be more powerful than the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Nintendo showed off a high-definition demo of Link, a character in The Legend of Zelda, fighting off a giant spider — and the whole demo looked gorgeous. Everything in the demo shifted dynamically when the lighting changed or when there was any kind of wind in the room and the characters looked great.

Nintendo even tried to show off a little bit by giving E3 attendees a way to quickly change the lighting from a daytime setting to a nighttime setting, which would normally required the game to re-render everything to account for a new lighting setup. The Wii U was able to do that without missing a beat, changing the lighting completely and still chugging along at somewhere between 45 and 60 frames per second while still showing off a giant battle and high-definition graphics.

The PlayStation Vita’s rear touchpad is surprisingly cool — While at E3, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi and I got a chance to try out a few games on Sony’s latest console, the PlayStation Vita. That device features a touchpad on the main screen of the device and a touchpad on the back of the device. The touchpad was pretty fun to use in games like Uncharted and LittleBigPlanet and it ended up feeling like a useful part of the experience without getting in the way of the game like some new controller peripherals tend to do.

For example, when playing Uncharted, you have to swipe down on the back of the touchpad to climb up a rope. At first it seems a bit strange, but it then feels surprisingly intuitive after the second or third time doing so. Climbing ropes suddenly has a unique gesture that you instinctively know to use when you approach a rope. Likewise, in LittleBigPlanet, players use the back touchpad to push things that are in the background of the game to the foreground. That means that if players can’t make a jump without falling off the edge of the world, they can push a platform from the background into the foreground and just run across the gap.

Dust 514 is the next step in massive online games — Dust 514 is much like other FPS games at first, dropping players into closed matches that consist of team-based matches with certain objectives like capturing a position or eliminating the opposing team. But the whole game is tied very closely to EVE Online, a massive role-playing game where gamers play as pilots in space in the EVE Online universe. Each match that a Dust 514 player participates in is actually a contract created by an EVE Online player, a completely separate game that features tactical space combat and lots of player-driven politics.

Both Dust 514 and EVE Online are run on the same servers, so they regularly interact with each other. For example, the squads on the planet’s surface can fire artillery into space to damage ships in a battle in EVE Online, and ships in the EVE Online universe can initiate orbital strikes on the planet’s surface to help Dust 514 players.  They are two completely different games. EVE Online is geared towards hardcore MMO players and the average play session lasts around 3 hours. Dust 514 is a game for FPS gamers that only have 10 or 20 minutes to play. But they exist in the same universe and regularly interact with each other, creating an experience another MMO game has yet to match.

Be sure to check out VentureBeat for a full wrap up of the show and some of the crazier things we saw last week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Franchise reboots are as stylish as ever — Tomb Raider is the latest franchise to receive a fresh face, with a new take on the classic heroine — and it looks fantastic. The game puts players into the shoes of 21-year-old adventurer Lara Croft, who in her younger days was a lot more innocent and naive than the battle-hardened badass that gamers are accustomed to in the Tomb Raider series. It’s an attempt to humanize the character a little more and make her likable — much like the lovable rogue Nathan Drake in the Uncharted series, which feels very much inspired by the original Tomb Raider.

But Tomb Raider is not the only franchise to receive a second look. Square Enix also showed off Deus Ex: Human Revolution at E3 this year — though it doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as Tomb Raider, which is also a Square Enix title. Still, it looks like a very solid game and should please fans of the original Deus Ex series, which was critically acclaimed and came out more than a decade ago.

There were a number of other franchise reboots, such as the Spyro series, that also look quite good. Even though game developers aren’t coming up with radically new franchises, it looks like they are working a lot of magic on existing concepts that should delight gamers of any type.

Kinect is expanding to hardcore gamers — I know when I’m playing a difficult video game I sometimes find myself shouting at the screen. It’s usually when one of my squad mates does something stupid, like running face-first into a hail of gunfire and taking a dirt nap shortly thereafter.Luckily, Microsoft is turning shouting into a useful feature with its Xbox 360 motion controller, the Kinect. That device features a microphone and some other features that will let gamers have additional controls in some of its newest hardcore titles.

The best example was when Microsoft demonstrated Mass Effect 3 on stage at its press conference last Monday. Instead of shouting at a teammate, like the psychic-like biotic Liara, for doing something stupid, I can tell her to quickly run behind cover while I continue laying the smack-down on an oncoming enemy that’s marching through my line of fire. It gives gamers a whole new way to interact with hardcore games like first-person shooters (FPS) that still rely on typical controllers. And it doesn’t interrupt the flow of the rest of the game.

Dust 514 might be the most innovative MMO of 2012 — One of the show’s hidden gems, Dust 514, was tucked away in the concourse center, an underground part of the trade show floor that didn’t feature all the extravagant sets and booth babes. But it was just as delightful, if not more so, because it was one of the newest ideas we’ve seen in gaming. It’s a FPS game that’s built into an existing massive online role-playing game universe that already sports 400,000 subscribers called EVE Online.

Dust 514 is much like other FPS games at first, dropping players into closed matches that consist of team-based matches with certain objectives like capturing a position or eliminating the opposing team. Each match that a Dust 514 player participates in is actually a contract created by an EVE Online player, a completely separate game that features tactical space combat and lots of player-driven politics. The squads on the planet’s surface can also fire artillery into space to damage ships in EVE Online, and ships in the EVE Online universe can initiate orbital strikes on the planet’s surface to help Dust 514 players.

They are two completely different games. EVE Online is geared towards hardcore MMO players and the average play session lasts around 3 hours. Dust 514 is a game for FPS gamers that only have 10 or 20 minutes to play. But they exist in the same universe and regularly interact with each other, creating an experience another MMO game has yet to match.

Sega finally built another fun Sonic game — It’s been a while since a decent Sonic game made it to store shelves. And none of the recent Sonic games have been able to match the same magic that was created in the original Sonic trilogy and Sonic & Knuckles, which featured fast-paced side-scrolling gameplay with a lot of creative levels and multiple pathways to the finish line. It looks like that will finally change with the release of Sonic Generations.

I got a chance to try out a demo of the game at E3 this year and it looks like the game will feature something for both fans of the original Sonic games and the over-the-shoulder style gameplay featured in Sonic Adventure. The levels are well-designed and there are enough breaks in the action for clever platforming that each mission feels like a blast to play. And better yet, the level design harks back to the old days of Sonic the Hedgehog, with multiple pathways to the finish line and secrets hidden throughout each level that give players an incentive to be both quick and clever.

The PlayStation Vita is actually pretty cheap — The PlayStation Vita, Sony’s next portable gaming console, will cost gamers $250 for a wi-fi enabled version and $300 for a 3G-enabled version that’s on AT&T’s wireless network. That’s a pretty slim price tag, considering the device is about as powerful as a PlayStation 3 and has a host of launch titles that should impress even the most cynical gamers who felt spurned when the PlayStation Portable was not able to compete with Nintendo’s DS handheld console.

The PlayStation Vita will have games like Uncharted and LittleBigPlanet, two games from critically-acclaimed franchises that haven’t come to handheld devices yet because the devices simply weren’t powerful enough. The games look just as good as their PlayStation 3 counterparts and feature some additional controls courtesy of the device’s design. The PlayStation Vita has a touchscreen, a motion sensor and a camera, and the back of the device also has a touch pad that players can use to interact with some games. For example, when playing LittleBigPlanet, players can touch the back of the device to push objects in the background into the foreground of the game.

Konami is working on another Contra title — Konami announced that it is working on another Contra title at its Pre-E3 show in San Francisco the week before the show began. The last major Contra game, a series that features fast-paced side-scrolling shooting, came out in 2007 with the launch of Contra 4 on the Nintendo DS. Since then, two downloadable games based on the series have come out, but there hasn’t been any indication of a new Contra title coming out any time soon.

The Contra series is significant because it was a landmark series for Nintendo that sold several thousand copies of the game and helped push the original Nintendo into popularity. It’s also the first game that featured the “Konami Code,” a continuing trope in pop culture that basically every gamer has memorized to this day.

Sports games actually work with motion controls — There are two ways to go about making a sports game with motion controllers. The first way is to try and emulate the sport using motion controls, like Microsoft has done with its Kinect motion controller — a device that lets gamers basically use their whole bodies to control a game. Microsoft showed off the next version of its Kinect Sports series, and I got a chance to play a few of the games. Like the original Kinect Sports, the games control pretty well and it’s a pretty fun experience, even if you feel a bit silly playing the games in front of other people.

Sony, however, is taking a different approach with NBA 2K12, the latest iteration of 2K Games’ basketball franchise. Players take control of a single player with the main controller and point the PlayStation Move, Sony’s version of a motion controller, at the screen to direct a cursor across the court. If players want to pass the ball, they point to the player they want to pass to and hit a button. If players want to go for a steal, they point at the person carrying the ball and press a button. The controls are surprisingly intuitive — enough so that NBA star Kobe Bryant was able to play the game and go toe-to-toe with the Miami Heat, this years’ runner up in the NBA Finals.

Brothers in Arms: Furious Four is the coolest World War 2 game this year — It seems like there’s a new FPS game based on World War 2 just about every year, and this year was no exception. Except this time, Gearbox studios — the team behind Brothers in Arms: Furious Four — decided to take a few creative liberties with the story of World War 2, much like Quentin Tarantino did last year with the critically acclaimed film Inglorious Bastards.

Brothers in Arms: Furious Four puts players in control of a member of the Furious Four, a rag-tag team of misfits that are on a mission to kill Adolf Hitler and end World War 2. The art style is a lot like Team Fortress 2 in that it consists of very bright colors and vivid environments, along with a bunch of comic weapons and elements. For example, one character in Furious Four can throw down a bear trap that has a grenade attached to it and mows down Nazis with a minigun. The game supports four-person co-operative play.

Be sure to check out VentureBeat for a full wrap up of the show and some of the crazier things we saw last week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To pitch a startup at the Who’s Got Game contest at GamesBeat 2011, click here.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This was my first time covering E3 with VentureBeat’s gaming guru Dean Takahashi, so I had almost no idea what to expect. Dean said that it would be pretty crazy — after all, there are more than 45,000 media professionals, analysts, retailers and game developers who regularly attend the conference in Los Angeles. It spanned two huge conference halls, with massive presentations and booth babes galore. The sheer size of the show made it a challenge to report on; and then there were these tech challenges:

The iPhone, our mobile video studio

It was almost impossible to upload videos and photos with thousands of reporters on the wi-fi connections. We could have shot video with our high-definition video cameras, but it would have taken time to transfer that to the computer and we’d still have had to find a way to upload it. And we had to make sure we uploaded videos as quickly as possible. After all, being second in the news industry is basically equivalent to failure.

So we turned to our next best weapon — our iPhones, which were connected to AT&T’s 3G data network. Dean and I alternated recording some of the major announcements at the E3 press conferences and uploaded videos to YouTube directly from the iPhone. It’s a feature a lot of people probably don’t know about, but it works like a charm. When the 3G networks were stable, we could upload a video in about 10 or 15 minutes. That was just fast enough to make sure almost every story we wrote about an announcement had a video to go along with it — and how we were able to upload nearly 40 videos of the show quickly altogether.

Tablets, when PCs failed

With wi-fi useless and our 4G adapters running slowly, we almost ran the risk of not being able to publish stories on each announcement. Luckily, Dean brought an iPad 2 that was connected to AT&T’s 3G network and passed it over to me just in time for Nintendo’s press conference. It’s not as powerful as a laptop, and we weren’t able to upload photos directly, but we didn’t really have another option. So I fired it up.

The connection was slow, but it was just fast enough to give me time to pre-write a story about Nintendo’s announcements for The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and its official unveiling of the Wii U. Dean furiously texted another VentureBeat writer, Anthony Ha, to add photos to the story after it went live. Luckily for us, Anthony was in San Francisco with a stable Internet connection and was able to edit the stories and add additional media quickly.

Text Messaging, because it just works

Both Dean and I were running back and forth throughout the show to cover as much as we possibly could. When I was deep in the confines of the concourse center interviewing CCP Games for their latest title, Dust 514, Dean was out speaking with Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime. There were more than a few times that we needed to team up to shoot video about some of the cooler games, and we coordinated through text messages rather than our usual email and internal collaboration service.

When all else fails, analog prevails. Data networks were strained constantly at E3. Both AT&T and Verizon’s data networks were, at best, pretty terrible. And I needed some way to get in touch with Dean as quickly and as often as possible. We didn’t need to communicate a lot, but we needed to know where we were and what we were doing. And, after all, sometimes the simplest solution is the right one.

(Almost) no room to breathe

I’m still not quite sure how I made it through the first day of E3, when press conferences were held back to back and there was almost no room to breathe. The press conferences were strewn across Los Angeles rather than being centered at the convention center. Microsoft held its press conference at the University of Southern California, while Electronic Arts’ press event was at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles. Luckily, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi had a car and we were able to get to each event in time.

It was still pretty frustrating that the companies were whipping reporters left and right and we literally had four or five minutes to grab something to snack on while driving to the next press conference or running to our next meeting on the other side of the convention center. I know the entertainment industry is pretty glamorous and everyone is short on time. But if I have about three minutes to play a demo of a game, it’s a huge help if a company can facilitate that so I can get the best impression of the game and get it across to my readers — not get ripped away from it so retailers can play the game, like I was while trying to run through the first few levels of Sonic Generations.

Wireless Hotspot Failure

While it was pretty cool that we were working with what felt like a pretty low-tech way of filing stories, it was frustrating that the technology that was supposed to be reliable was not working when we needed it most. The worst offender of all were our 4G wireless hotspots.

Of the press conferences we attended throughout E3, the wireless 4G hotspots we brought only worked in one of them — the Ubisoft press conference where Assassin’s Creed Revelations and a whole host of other games were announced. Ubisoft requested that everyone stick to the wi-fi they provided, but that wasn’t working anyway, so everyone shifted to their 4G hotspots — which further damaged the wi-fi network that was present. Dean was able to continue posting as normal and I spent most of the time shooting video for each cool game the company showed off. Since I didn’t have access to any wireless, I spent the remainder of the time preparing stories that I would file as soon as I could.

Dean was a pretty firm believer in his 4G hotspot before our disaster at E3. I’m pretty sure the conference changed his opinion of it, since it was basically useless in some of the largest press conferences. We had almost no connectivity throughout the press conferences for Electronic Arts, Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (luckily Microsoft had some pretty hefty wi-fi that was stable.) VentureBeat’s Anthony Ha said he had plenty of issues with the service and that he wanted his old 3G wireless hotspot back after switching over to a 4G hotspot. I’m pretty confident his concerns are valid after we had to fight with the technology to get it to work throughout E3.

Press Conferences still have bad wi-fi

It seems like some companies that throw a major press event still can’t create a stable wireless connection for their attendees. I understand that there are a lot of complications when thousands of reporters are trying to connect to a single wi-fi network. But if that were the case, Microsoft’s wi-fi network would have been just as strained and useless as every other company’s wi-fi network. It wasn’t, and Hewlett-Packard’s wi-fi connection was fine when it unveiled the TouchPad, the company’s first WebOS tablet, as well.

Instead of jumping on the wireless networks that the companies provided, which were basically useless, reporters had to jump onto wireless hotspots. As I said earlier, that didn’t work out too well, and it also makes things worse when everyone tries to jump onto a 4G network all at once. It’s our job to get the information a company is presenting on stage to our readers as quickly as possible. We’d love it if the presenting companies could make our job a little easier and give us decent wireless.

But at the end of the day

All these are mostly minor complaints that really didn’t hamper the overall experience. It was an incredible five days, and I’m really looking forward to checking it out again next year. Be sure to check out all of VentureBeat’s coverage of E3.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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After several down years with title after title that failed to match the magic captured in the initial Sonic trilogy, it looks like Sega is finally poised to release a Sonic game that can stand near its original games in the lunch line without feeling ashamed.

Sega showed off the most recent title in its classic Sonic lineup, called Sonic Generations, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today in Los Angeles, Calif. I got a chance to play through the first two levels on the Xbox 360 and the first two levels and a boss battle for the game on the Nintendo 3DS, and the game looks great.

I was a Sega kid growing up and the first four Sonic games are some of my all-time favorite games. I can say that many of the most recent Sonic titles — short of Sonic Colors and a few others — have been a bust. The first game for the most recent batch of consoles was critically panned, receiving a score of 46 out of 100 across 38 reviews on review aggregator site Metacritic. Sega’s most recent attempt to “sequel” the original trilogy with Sonic 4: Episode 1 was only met with moderate reviews, earning a score of 81 out of 100 across 13 reviews on Metacritic. Both games weren’t even close to what the first four games in the series were able to achieve.

Players in Sonic Generations take control of Sonic the Hedgehog, a speedy blue critter that can jump and curl into a ball that blows up everything in its path when it rockets through the level. The advanced version of the game introduces a “boost” feature, which lets the player immediately jump from standing still to running full speed with the press of the button and makes Sonic destroy every enemy in his path. He can also “lock on” to enemies and other objects in the levels and dash to them with the press of a button.

Inexplicably, Sonic Generations features a bit of both Sonic 4 and the 2006 version of Sonic the Hedgehog. The first level of each zone, called an “act,” plays more like the original sonic games and Sonic 4, running players through a two-dimensional side-scrolling level and only giving them access to a jump and ground dash. The second level plays more like Sonic the Hedgehog (2006), opening up the Boost and lock-on abilities. At face value, it sounds like a recipe that will repeat the previous titles.

In reality, the game plays very elegantly. The original Sonic games had excellent level design with multiple clever pathways and secret areas that lead to the finish line. Sonic Generations has pulled those design elements into the first level of each zone that plays like the original Sonic titles. The level that Sega demonstrated at E3 was the first level in the game, which was supposed to be a remake of the original Green Hills zone from the first Sonic game. It feels more like a re-imagining of the level and really evokes that same feeling of clever level design that the first games had.

The second level on the Nintendo 3DS titles also play like out like side-scrolling Sonic games instead of playing more like the 2006 release of Sonic the Hedgehog. That probably has to do with graphical limitations of the handheld console when compared to home consoles. The 3D graphics are decent but can be very distracting because the game is designed to be played at a very high-speed. So tilting the console a certain way can distort the image distract you until you fly into a spike pit or some other death trap very quickly. The Boost and lock-in skills are still there, but they work in the 2D environment.

Back to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the games invoke the same philosophy that Sonic Adventure did back when the Sega Dreamcast was first released. The camera sits behind Sonic as he blazes through a level at top speed. The controls are very simple — players tilt the control stick forward to run and hit a button to Boost and destroy enemies in his path. The Boost also works to let Sonic jet across the level at the top of his jump, giving players access to other parts of the level.

The second level of Green Hills features sonic blasting through the loop-de-loops, grinding on rails and running full speed from a giant robot fish. Where previous Sonic titles have tripped up is whether to send the player through the level full speed, keeping players on rails and taking away a lot of the challenge as they really only have to just hold the control stick up and jump a few times. The level I played in Sonic Generations was more challenging than that and it also bounces players back and forth between an over-the-shoulder camera and a two-dimensional platforming section.

The levels are still over very quickly and are designed to send players through them in the course of a few minutes. But they feel like they still have the same clever design and challenge that the first zone had — and really, the levels of Sonic Adventure and also the original Sonic titles had. There weren’t any frustrating spots that felt like the level was artificially slowed down. The platforming sections were fun and challenging and a nice break from the full-speed dashing. I actually couldn’t believe what I was feeling: a 3-dimension Sonic the Hedgehog was finally fun to play again.

Sonic at one point was the unofficial rival to Nintendo’s iconic Mario, who has appeared in more than 100 games. That competition died off when the Sonic franchise petered out and when Sega finally admitted defeat with its last console, the Sega Dreamcast. And the Blue Bomber probably won’t ever give Mario a run for his money again. But Sega might have finally given new gamers a reason to give Sonic a second look after they polish off the latest Mario title.

Sonic Generations will come out sometime later this year and will be available on the Nintendo 3DS, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. 3D versions of the game will also be available for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s a strategy that Bethesda Softworks now appears to be applying to the rest of its franchises. The company is changing the direction of its Prey series, which was originally more like a corridor-based first-person shooter (FPS) game that sent players from point A to point B, to be more like its open world games like Oblivion and Fallout 3.

Bethesda Softworks showed off a new demo for Prey 2, the latest game in its Prey series that features players traversing an alien world, at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today in Los Angeles, Calif. It looks like it’s the whole universe and vision of Prey with a dash of Fallout and a few extra slivers of Oblivion baked into the package.

Both of those games give players the option to explore a massive, vibrant world and carry role-playing game elements that let players incrementally improve their skills and equipment. And both Oblivion and Fallout 3 were critically acclaimed. Fallout 3 earned a score of 91 out of 100 across 48 reviews and Oblivion earned a score of 94 out of 100 across 90 reviews on review aggregating site Metacritic.

Prey 2 tells the story of Killian Samuels, a U.S. Marshall who was abducted by aliens when his plane got sucked into a vortex that landed him on an alien planet. He was captured by slavers and lost parts of his memory but was able to escape. The player joins Samuels when he has begun making a name for himself as a bounty hunter in the slum alien cities, using the skills he learned as a U.S. Marshall to effectively take down marks.

The game begins with Samuels waking up among the wreckage of his plane on an alien garbage area. The rest of the survivors are dead, so he breaks out his pistol and starts to move toward higher ground. He’s immediately ambushed by alien slavers and has to take cover and start chipping away at the bad guys. It’s a FPS that lets players see the game through Samuels’ eyes and hide from enemy fire with cover.

The game also has a few elements of Mirror’s Edge in that the player can execute some pretty sweet parkour-like moves. Players can vault over pieces of cover, climb up their surroundings and execute an action slide under obstacles and into enemies. They can also shoot enemies while doing any of those parkour-like actions. For example, the player can hang from a ledge and use the vertical building as a piece of cover when they peek over the ledge and open fire with a pistol.

It’s an open-world game like Oblivion or Fallout and takes place on the planet Exodus. That planet always has one side facing the sun and one side in the dark, with the largest city on the border between those two parts. That’s where the game takes place, and it features an “alien noir” art style that harks back to the old detective movies that focus on the gritty parts of cities like Los Angeles, Calif.

Since he’s trapped on an alien world, Samuels has access to a lot of cool alien gadgets that help him as a bounty hunter. He can activate a scanner that automatically turns non-playable characters a certain color — green if they’re harmless, red if they’re hostile and yellow if they might turn around and try to kill you. Enemies that the player is trying to track down and kill or capture are highlighted white and some additional details pop up — such as the reward for the quest or what the mark’s name is.

The whole game is a quest to help Samuels piece together his memory and try to find a way back to Earth. It’s carried out through a series of bounty quests that make Samuels use his abilities to chase down, track or assassinate certain marks. The longer bounty quests reveal more details about Samuels’ surroundings and how he ended up on Exodus, as well as clues to help him get home.

The bounty hunter quests reward the player with money that they can use to buy new equipment and weapons. Guns have upgradeable parts that add new features to each weapon and change the aesthetic look of the weapon. There are also different ammo types for each gun that the player can purchase, although Bethesda wouldn’t get into any additional details about that ammo system.

Like most modern open-world games, players are given the choice to be a nice guy or a complete dick. But it’s really over the top in Prey 2, and it’s fantastic. Sure, you can choose to kill baddies and help out people who are getting kicked to the ground. But players can also walk up behind a guy just minding his own business looking over a railing and kick him right off the ledge.

The consequences for being a jerk in the game are pretty minimal at first because it takes place in a slum-like area where there’s only loose authority. There are robots around the city that will track your movements and keep track of your actions. Those machines will start to open fire on you if you continue randomly killing people or just being a generally terrible person. The more bad actions you take, the worse the repercussions become — to the point of teleporting in reinforcements to take you down.

Prey 2 should come out sometime next year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That’s the uphill battle Square Enix faces with Deus Ex: Human Revolution, except the company isn’t just trying to reboot a typical cult classic; it’s trying to recapture the magic of a franchise that was already critically acclaimed.

The original Deus Ex title has a standing score of 90 out of 100 across 28 reviews on review aggregation site Metacritic. The sequel, Deus Ex: Invisible War, wasn’t as good as the original but still has a score of 80 out of 100 across 44 reviews and a whole batch of perfect scores. And there are even running jokes on the Internet that whenever someone mentions Deus Ex, everyone has to go re-install the game and play through it again. (I’m doing the same right now myself.)

Square Enix might be up to the task if you go by the demo it showed off at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today in Los Angeles, Calif. I got a chance to play through the introductory level that featured the series’ protagonist, Adam Jensen, trying to retake a biotech corporation under siege by human “purists.”

The purists in the game are people who think that human augmentation, a key trope in the Deus Ex universe, is a crime against nature. Human augmentation is basically adding cybernetic enhancements like bionic arms and eyes that improve strength and eyesight. It’s typically used to help paraplegics and other handicapped individuals, but it can be used for mercenaries to make them better soldiers. Jensen is one of those mercenaries, having lost his limbs in an attack. It gives him some unique abilities with his cybernetic enhancements, but at its core the game is still a first-person shooter (FPS).

Running and gunning is difficult in this game. At least with the character build Square Enix showed off at the show. Inexperienced FPS players will probably be flattened by a hail of gunfire the second they stand up. It’s possible to take advantage of the game’s cover-based shooting mechanics, but they are a bit clunky compared to other cover-based shooters like Gears of War. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s good enough. Most enemies go down in one or two shots, and they’re nice enough to stay in one place under cover for a while before they try to flank you.

Jensen has a few tricks up his sleeve, though, that make taking a stealthy approach better than charging in with guns blazing. He can throw gas and concussion grenades to incapacitate enemies and can deliver a quick non-lethal melee attack to remove an enemy from combat after sneaking up behind them. He can also activate a stealth field, but it only works for 7 seconds. The melee system is frustrating, though, because it takes time to recharge Jensen’s take-down ability and the game executes a cinematic whenever you try to incapacitate an enemy that leaves you standing up and makes it easy for you to get caught. It uses the same energy bar that your other skills, like the stealth cloak, use.

First impressions suggest the FPS elements are what you would expect with other games. Players can combine certain elements of their inventory to enhance their weapons. That can include adding augmented pieces of equipment like a silencer or a laser sight to turning a pistol into a straight up grenade launcher with explosive rounds. I started the level with a tranquilizer sniper rifle, but found it was pretty useless as soon as I got a pistol with a silencer and gave up on the non-lethal approach because it was so hard to move through the level stealthily.

The game also has role-playing elements in it with Praxis Points, which give Jensen access to new augmentations. That can improve Jensen’s armor, his jumping and his speed or give him access to new skills like the stealth cloak or the ability to see through walls. Those powers drain his energy — the same pool of energy that has to be full to execute a melee attack — and it takes upwards of 15 to 20 seconds to recharge fully. Jensen can have up to 5 bars of energy, but only the first bar recharges automatically. The rest have to be recharged with items, which makes the use of skills even more limited.

Even while being stealthy, though, the game is frustratingly difficult. The enemies spot you very quickly and the cover system is pretty glitchy and sometimes reveals you when you think you are still hidden. The cinematics leave you trapped in the open for several seconds, letting enemies easily catch you when you really mean to just run in and drop an enemy and quickly jump out, so that kind of kills the whole non-lethal stealth approach. Then there’s the tranquilizing system, but the darts sometimes don’t put an enemy to sleep right away and they alert other enemies to your presence.

You can die very quickly. I understand the game is trying to be realistic, but you can be taken down by three or four shots. As soon as two enemies converge, you’re probably going to die unless you have a machine pistol or some kind of powerful gun. Ammo in the game is pretty scarce, and even though it takes only a few shots to take down an enemy, it’s easy to quickly run out of ammo and be left helpless with just a melee attack — which will again expose you and get you killed.

There are plenty of examples of failures to reboot a classic series. One example is NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams — a reboot of the cult classic NiGHTS into Dreams title from the Sega Saturn. The game earned a score of 69 out of 100 across 47 reviews and was a pretty mediocre experience. It was the last game I bought without checking a review score, because I had high hopes that it would capture the same magic the free-floating jesters on the Sega Saturn title had.

After playing the original Deus Ex for more hours than I can count, I don’t know if I’d pick up Deus Ex: Human Revolution on a knee-jerk reaction out of my love for the original game. There are lots of good things about the game, and the difficulty might taper off as players get access to better armor and guns. But the energy system is difficult to handle and not having an efficient melee takedown system really hurts the stealth aspect of the game, turning it into a pretty straightforward cover shooter.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes out August 23 and will be available on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Windows computers and OnLive.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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BioWare’s latest Star Wars epic The Old Republic, a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game set in the Star Wars universe, is everything Star Wars fans are hoping for in an MMO.

BioWare showed off the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo today in Los Angeles, Calif. I got a chance to play one of the Sith Marauder classes on a quest — and it is about as good as MMO games come. But The Old Republic is following the recipe for a successful MMO, not a World of Warcraft killer. The only way to defeat World of Warcraft is to discover and create the next big innovation in the MMO genre, not adopt the same tropes World of Warcraft has spent years nailing perfectly.

That being said, The Old Republic is quite fun to play. The game plants players in the Star Wars universe as one of eight classes. There are two factions in the game that are at each others’ throats — four classes per faction — that players have to choose from: the Republic (the good guys) and the Sith (the bad guys.) There are advanced classes that players progress through over time, and each class has three different skill trees to help players specialize the character to their liking. (World of Warcraft classes also have three different skill trees per class.)

BioWare wants to make the MMO’s story a core part of the experience as well. Most MMO games — World of Warcraft included — gloss over the storyline and focus mostly on combat, exploration and progression. Each class in the game has story lines that are unique to the class. Each choice the player makes typically has some kind of an effect on the story line, so a player replaying a class should typically end up with a different experience. The classes also each have a companion character that helps advance the story.

Then there’s the whole Star Wars universe. The series is an iconic piece of pop culture that shows up in movies, books, cartoons, comics and even other video games — World of Warcraft included. Players get to travel to iconic worlds like the desert world of Tatooine and the lush forest planet Alderaan, which is unfortunately blown up in a few thousand years. There are dozens of alien races and tropes, along with the whole mysterious and fascinating story of the Jedi and the Sith. BioWare has a lot to work with in order to create a brand new MMO gaming experience.

BioWare plans to use its story-telling prowess — which is orders of magnitude better than many other game developers — to unseat the current MMO champion from its throne. But the company has been very tight-lipped about what kind of story the players are going to experience when they play through the classes. That’s understandable, because they don’t want to spoil the game, but it’s really the only thing the game might have going for it if it wants to give World of Warcraft a run for its money.

The gameplay is just as similar because World of Warcraft has standardized so many parts of the MMO gaming experience. The damage-over-time abilities, the healing skills, the vehicles and the fantastic animations are all there. Your character looks elegant as she flings around her lightsabers and mows down her enemies. But we’ve seen this all before, and we’ve seen it done very well by World of Warcraft. There is room for copycats, but a copycat game is not going to unseat the current champion.

The aesthetic gameplay similarities to World of Warcraft are endless. The names of some skills in World of Warcraft — like Rupture and Shiv — make an appearance in The Old Republic. Those skills are unique to the Rogue class in World of Warcraft, and they’re skills for the rogue-equivalent Marauder class in The Old Republic. Rage, a resource for some classes that charges up as you execute certain abilities, operates almost identically to the resource of the same name in World of Warcraft. Even the color of the text that appears on the screen and the font (white for damage, yellow for special damage, and purple for experience points) is the same as the MMO titan.

Star Wars Galaxies, the last Star Wars MMO game run by Sony, was relatively successful because it had a unique crafting system and skill progression system that was unlike other MMO games that were around at the time. Players could master several classes at once and create characters that truly suited themselves by cherry picking the skills they wanted. You could create a doctor who was a deadly sniper, or a fighting monk who could also build starships. It was also extremely difficult to unlock the Jedi class, but very rewarding.

World of Warcraft stole a lot of the game’s subscriber base, but Star Wars Galaxies still held onto a core population that enjoyed the skill progression the game had. Then Sony decided to revamp the game with “New Game Enhancements,” which turned the game’s original character progression into a class-based system that featured nine archetypes. It was much like World of Warcraft, at its core, and I don’t really blame Sony for trying to do what was already successful in the MMO genre.

The problem with that move was that there was already a World of Warcraft. Even with a Star Wars skin on top of it, Star Wars Galaxies was not polished enough as a World of Warcraft-like MMO to hold onto its core subscriber base. The company shuttered twelve of the game’s servers in 2009. I took a chance to explore the game one more time recently before the recent PlayStation Network outage and found the cities in the game to be completely desolate when they were once buzzing with doctors handing out buffs and hundreds of people clustered around auction terminals.

I’ve played through at least a dozen MMOs in my time, including the likes of Rift, Star Wars Galaxies, Everquest and just about everything in between. I haven’t seen anything come close to the level of polish that World of Warcraft has and the mass appeal it has with gamers — which is why the game has more than 11 million subscribers in its persistent world. World of Warcraft is still the game to beat, and I’m not sure that The Old Republic can offer players something new enough to unseat it.

The Old Republic will probably pull a small chunk of World of Warcraft’s subscribers over to its side for a period of time because they might be looking for something new. After all, World of Warcraft has been out for nearly a decade. But those same users might find themselves heading back to World of Warcraft because the team has much more experience operating a persistent world than the BioWare team and because it’s a world that is familiar and has a good number of people they know playing the game.

BioWare isn’t trying to create the next most innovative game mechanic for an MMO. It’s trying to create a very polished MMO gaming experience. And it succeeded in that.

Star Wars: The Old Republic should come out sometime later this year. (Sorry for spoiling that bit about Alderaan exploding if you still haven’t seen the films.)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Trion Worlds on Wednesday showed off a preview of Defiance, a persistent open-world shooting game that takes place in the same universe as an upcoming science fiction television show, also called Defiance, that will air on the SyFy channel. The company announced the game at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif.

The tie-in means that any event that’s significant in the world, such as a cataclysmic event or a change in the balance of power, will take place in both the game and the series. But the worlds are loosely tied: The game takes place in San Francisco and the series takes place in St. Louis. As a result, the game and series directors can efficiently coordinate events between the two parts of the experience without having to worry about the logistical nightmare of having them tied together all the time. The game and series will be closely tied together, but separate enough to be avoid major consistency headaches.

That also means that the show’s directors can decide to send a character from the series over to San Francisco, and that character will appear in Defiance’s in-game world. Players can interact with that character before he or she heads back to St. Louis to rejoin the cast of the show.

Characters on the show will also talk about some of the most powerful and well-known players in the Defiance world too, said Robert Hill, senior producer at Trion Worlds.

“A character might be like, ‘I just had the most amazing experience in San Francisco,’ and you can be like ‘I was there!’,” Hill said.

Defiance is a third-person over-the-shoulder shooting game like Gears of War. It’s set in the not-too-distant future when Earth has been attacked and partially terraformed by aliens. The open world is part of the San Francisco Bay Area, so it will feature landmarks and other indicators that show the world is still Earth — though it’s lush with alien vegetation and life forms.

Like other MMO games, there’s a progression system that lets characters get experience points for completing objectives and killing enemies. They eventually level up and unlock new skills and abilities and get more health and armor when they earn enough experience points. Some of the skills in the game include creating holograms to distract enemies, lassoing enemies with an energy rope and pulling them nearby or cloaking in a stealth field and sneaking by enemies.

The combat looks very fast paced and it isn’t like some cover-based over-the-shoulder shooters that can sometimes leave players stranded behind walls while they wait for the right time to strike. Players can dash, shoot, jump and jump a second time while in the air in order to avoid attacks from enemies. It seems like the game revolves more around “twitch” gameplay, which relies on players’ skills and reflexes rather than progression in the game to make them more powerful.

The game looks great for an MMO — but that’s to be expected from Trion Worlds, which also runs Rift, another MMO. Rift also looks gorgeous and the worlds are very dynamic and feature a lot of moving objects and environmental effects. The Trion Worlds employees demoing the game blitzed through three or four quests throughout a ten minute demo, so it seems like the progression is very quick and players will be able to cover a lot of events in a short amount of time.

It looks like the game is not relying on “instances,” which other MMO games typically use on to segment the world and make it a little more bearable for the servers on the back-end. For instance, in World of Warcraft, the system transfers players over to separate servers when they are running through a dungeon with five or more people. This use of separate instances helps the back-end servers because they aren’t constantly bombarded with information from everyone all at once. It also means the players get access exclusively to bosses in an instance rather than having to camp out and wait for a boss to re-spawn.

In contrast, Defiance looks like it has players rushing around the world and jumping in and out of groups on the fly to complete quests. When players run by another group completing a quest, they can quickly drop into that group and help complete the quest and then continue on their way. They can also turn and take potshots at the other players if they’re feeling particularly malicious.

The same is true for the games’ large-scale events, called Arkfalls. Those feature large alien-like structures crashing into the group in the open world. All players in the area take place in the Arkfall and have to fend off aliens throughout the event. The Arkfall in the demonstration had players gunning down a giant terraforming pod to spawn a boss. The players then have to take down the boss to get access to the game’s most powerful rewards, and they are split evenly among all players that took place in the Arkfall. It looks like there is theoretically no limit to the number of players that can participate, compared to the limits in other games like World of Warcraft, which cap raids at 25 players.

All that being said, the combat demonstrated at E3 today seemed a little clunky. The movement of the target reticule wasn’t smooth and the hit detection on enemies looked a bit dodgy. When they shot at an alien’s head, the graphic would show up on the alien’s legs and torso even when it was the first shot fired at close range. A lot of that probably has to do with the early nature of the game. The shooting seems a little less refined when compared to other shooters like Gears of War and Uncharted. It also seemed like the skills they were using on-screen weren’t really helping much and the players were just blasting through the game with guns blazing and there wasn’t much strategy involved.

A few companies have taken a crack at creating an open-world MMO that features twitch-based gameplay and shooting. Sony was an early candidate with Planetside, a first-person shooter open world that launched in 2003, to moderately good reviews but was knocked off rails by a weak expansion pack that frustrated gamers. While the Trion team demoing the game was showing it on both an Xbox 360 and a PlayStation 3 simultaneously, the games will all have discrete worlds. That means that PC gamers will only play with other PC gamers, Xbox 360 gamers will play with Xbox 360 gamers, and so on and so forth.

“Those decisions are only up to the platform holder,” Hill said. “Right now we can do cross-platform play but we don’t expect to have that at launch.”

The game will launch relatively close to the television show, but Hill wouldn’t give any additional details about when it will launch. It will go into a closed beta before it finally launches.

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That’s where Dust 514, a new first person shooter for the PlayStation 3 from CCP Games, comes in. It’s a game that appeals to more casual gamers, but still takes place in the EVE Online universe. Dust 514 players interact with those EVE Online players on a regular basis. And everyone is starting from scratch, instead of being dropped into a universe where players have already had 8 years to establish themselves.

“Dust is gonna make this crystal clear, everyone is starting over and Dust is a ground zero,” said Halldor Fannar, CCP Games’ chief technology officer.

Dust 514 is a first-person shooter, which means the players play the game from the perspective of the mercenary on the ground and see the world through that character’s eyes. Every character starts with zero skills and instead of selecting a class or an archetype, Dust 514 players build the character by learning new skills. That means players can make a character as specialized as they want or try and make a jack of all trades that can do a lot of things pretty well.

The game takes place in the EVE Online universe, which is one of the more interesting persistent worlds out there because it is driven almost exclusively by players instead of the game developers. There are super-corporations that control entire star systems, and there’s a very delicate balance of power that exists within the EVE Online universe. Whenever a super corporation falls or a massive space battle takes place, it typically makes news on a few gaming websites because it dramatically alters how the game is played for everyone else.

Dust 514 is trying to recreate that feeling with a first-person shooter (FPS) game. The game’s slogan says “your next shot will topple empires,” meaning the game wants to give Dust 514 players the chance to have the same kind of impact a pilot in the EVE Online universe can have on the way the entire game world runs. Dust 514 missions take place on the ground on planets in the EVE Online universe. When a player fires up the game, they select a planet they want to play on and they are dropped into a match similar to other first-person shooters like Call of Duty and Battlefield.

The actual game calls back to the early days of first-person shooter games, because it does not feature regenerative health like many modern FPS games do. Players spend Isk, the in-game currency for both the Dust 514 and EVE Online universe, to buy better guns and armor that will increase their health and shields. When players get hit enough times and their shields and health run out, they die and have to respawn — like Counter-Strike and other FPS games back in the early 2000s and late 1990s.

Players can customize their weapons and armor to turn themselves into quick snipers or walking killing machines. They can add modules that will add new features to the guns and armor, or they can purchase better equipment with Isk. They can also purchase vehicles that will help them charge in and complete their objectives set out in the contract they accept for a mission.

EVE Online players can create contracts for certain objectives they need to accomplish, such as capturing a planet or getting artillery support from the surface of a planet for a massive space battle taking place above the planet. Dust 514 players can then fulfill those contracts and get paid in the same Isk currency. It turns Dust 514 players into mercenaries for the pilots in EVE Online that are flying around in space trying to capture planets and solar systems. When a player starts the game, they’re presented with a list of available contracts and they select one to enter a match.

The interaction goes both ways. Dust 514 players can call in support from EVE Online players that are flying around in space if they need it. They can call down an orbital strike on a part of the planet. Fannar wouldn’t get into any additional details about what EVE Online players can do to help out Dust 514 mercenaries, but he said that was just scratching the surface. Both the space battles and the ground battles are literally taking place at the same time, and the two games interact with each other in real time because they are run on the same servers.

The game will be supported by micro transactions and downloadable content, Fannar said. Expansions will be free to download and install, because every Dust 514 player is going to need it for the universe to continue operating well in both EVE Online and Dust 514. There might be additional maps, but the majority of the support will come from players using real world money to purchase additional guns, armor and visual customizations. But it’s still possible for a player to go through the game without ever paying a dime, he said.

There’s plenty of room for casual gamers who want to play on their own, Fannar said. EVE Online players can create contracts that hire a handful of solo players instead of full groups. He said the average play time for Dust 514 should be around 20 minutes per session, compared to around 3 hours for most EVE Online sessions. But he still expects the best players to make a name for themselves in the game.

“You can have a band of mercenaries called The Expendables or something, that make a name for themselves and are some of the best,” Fannar said. “They can charge more for their services because they are more likely to succeed based on their previous record.”

Another unique part of the EVE Online universe is the ability to purchase monthly playing time with the game’s currency. EVE Online players can purchase an additional month of playing time and sell that on the regular market for Isk. It essentially creates a dollar exchange rate for Isk to real-world currency. Fannar didn’t say whether Dust 514 players would be able to purchase playing time for EVE Online.

The matches will typically feature 40 players total, though CCP Games plans to scale that up over time. When EVE Online first started, the space battles usually had a few hundred ships participating, and they are now in the thousands, Fannar said. CCP Games wants to recreate that same epic quality and create a completely chaotic battle that spans both the planet and the orbits above it, he said.

The game will be available in Summer 2012 and will go into private beta testing toward the end of this year.

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The first Wii was a huge success for Nintendo and started the motion gaming craze, leading Sony and Microsoft to also release motion controllers for their home gaming consoles. The Wii sold more than 86 million units total and was a smash hit with casual gamers. It has one of the widest install bases in the world and for a long time was the console to beat after it was released, with retail outlets selling the consoles literally minutes after they hit the shelves.

The new console will come out sometime next year, Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata said. Nintendo wants to include “something for everyone” in the new console. That’s probably an attempt to silence critics of the original Wii, which some said did not have enough content for hardcore gamers that were looking for good games from Nintendo’s main franchises.

“The new platform will create a deeper experience for even the most passionate gamers and a wider experience,” he said.

The Wii is credited with bringing home console gaming to more mainstream audiences, particularly casual gamers that wouldn’t typically go for a home gaming console like the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3. It included games like Wii Sports and Wii Fit, which were non-traditional titles that sold incredibly well thanks to the immersion of motion controllers and the Wii Balance Board.

The device features a controller with a touch screen, camera and microphone. It looks like the bottom half of the Nintendo 3DS and Sony’s PlayStation Portable, with the screen in the center that changes with the game. The controller can display and run games when they aren’t available on the TV.

The controller has a 6.2 inch screen and the console is backwards compatible with all Wii devices and Wii games. But the device is not designed to be a portable device, Iwata said. The images on the WiiU screen are transmitted wirelessly from the console. Nintendo also showed off an early tech demo for the Wii U, and it looks like it has about as much graphics firepower as the Xbox 360 — though it’s maybe just a tiny bit weaker.

Nintendo will be releasing a Smash Bros. game, one of Nintendo’s best-selling crossover fighting games, for the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS as well. The games will work together in some way, Iwata said. Nintendo is also working closely with Electronic Arts to bring games like Madden and Battlefield 3 to the Wii U.

Tekken, Batman Arkham City, Assassin’s Creed and Darksiders 2 should all be launch titles for the Wii U, according to Nintendo’s presentation. Along with other first-party titles, it looks like Nintendo is trying to make sure it gets hardcore gamers back with the Wii U. You can find a video of a tech demo for the system below.

Be sure to check out VentureBeat for wall-to-wall coverage of E3 this week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

Sony made the announcement at its press conference today at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif. The bundle includes a pair of 3D glasses — which cost $69.99 when purchased on their own — a 3D-enabled television and an HDMI cable. The bundle will also include Resistance 3, one of the titles debuted at E3 this year that the company expects will be critical for making 3D gaming more popular in living rooms and dorm rooms everywhere.

Resistance 3 will have a new feature for 3D televisions that will get rid of split-screen gaming and make two players see two different screens when looking at the same television if they are wearing the Sony’s 3D glasses. That will remove a lot of headaches that split-screen gaming brings on board — mainly having only half of a screen to play a game on.

Sony is throwing a lot of weight behind 3D gaming and is making a lot of its most popular or highly anticipated titles, like Killzone 3 and Resistance 3, 3D-enabled. It’s part of a 3D craze that started in theaters and was popularized by James Cameron’s Avatar, a film that grossed several billion dollars in theaters, before being relevant to gamers. Nintendo’s latest handheld gaming device, the Nintendo 3DS, has 3D gaming as a core part of its design — so it doesn’t seem like it’s just a gimmick anymore.

Still, that would bring the full price of playing a PlayStation 3 on a 3D-enabled television with this package — and with two players — up to around $900. That’s a hefty price tag that many casual gamers might not want to pay to play a video game, even if it’s in 3D. It could defeat the purpose of the package, which Sony executive Kaz Hirai said is to make 3D gaming more accessible and more popular among mainstream gamers.

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“We’re confident that the PlayStation Vita will be the first device that truly blurs those lines between entertainment and real life,” Sony executive Kaz Hirai said on stage.

The company also unveiled the official details about the device. The device features two analog sticks, a 5-inch OLED touchpad screen, a touchpad on the device, six-axis motion sensing technology and a front- and rear-facing camera. It will come in both a wi-fi enabled and a 3G-enabled model. It will be available on AT&T for the 3G version of its device. (The audience groaned when Hirai said that.)

It also features a chat feature that will let gamers chat with their friends through a headset or through the built-in microphone using a private social network for PlayStation Vita users called Party. Players can also recommend content and interact with their friends in a private social network called Near. The Vita will also have a new hand-held Bioshock game that still does not have a title, the company announced today.

The Vita is packed with a much more powerful processor than its rival handheld gaming console, the Nintendo 3DS. Sony has banked on delivering a more powerful handheld that can handle cinematic-intensive games like Uncharted instead of trying to find the next new feature that gamers will like. That strategy didn’t prove successful with the original PlayStation Portable, which was soundly beaten by the Nintendo DS. But the device does show some serious promise early on.

The PlayStation Vita will be available during the holiday season this year. The Wi-Fi only model will cost $249 and the 3G Wi-Fi model will cost $299.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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2K Sports demonstrated the new game at Sony’s press conference today at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Calif. The new version of 2K Sports’ NBA 2K12 features motion controls with the PlayStation Move, a Wii-remote-like wand that the PlayStation 3 tracks with a camera. Instead of using a typical controller with analog sticks, players point the controller at the screen and interact with the game by moving a cursor around.

It goes to show how prominent motion-controlled gaming has become as sports games are now regularly adopting motion controls. Some of the current console generation’s most popular games were sports games — like Wii Sports and Kinect Sports — that don’t try to mimic the experience of playing a sport, but emulate it with a type of swing or a simple motion.

If the player wants to pass the ball, they point at the player they want to pass to and press a button. If they want to steal the ball or guard someone, the gamer points at the player controlling the ball and presses a few buttons to try to steal the ball. The controls seem simple enough — even for a basketball player that’s already mastered the game in the real world.

Kobe Bryant, a superstar shooting guard with the Los Angeles Lakers, even came on stage to try the game out and see how well it stood up against his own knack for basketball. After all, the goal is to make the game more realistic and more intuitive — and make gamers feel more like they are playing basketball, even if it’s a few levels of abstraction away.

He had a little bit of trouble controlling his Lakers at first, but soon enough he was able to run and gun with the Miami Heat, which are now in the NBA finals. The Los Angeles Lakers were knocked out of the NBA playoffs during the semifinals series against the Dallas Mavericks, but would have faced off against the Miami Heat had they advanced to the finals.

You can see a full video of the presentation below. Stay tuned to VentureBeat for full coverage of E3 this week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The demo once again showed off Naughty Dog’s animated muscle by throwing players into a highly dynamic environment that ‘s constantly changing. Players are thrust onto a ship in the middle of the ocean during a violent storm that rocks the boat from side to side. The game’s hero, Nathan Drake, also finds himself swaying side to side with the boat as his center of gravity changes rapidly.

It looks like Naughty Dog is trying to focus more on dynamic environments as this is the second level the company has shown off that features a rapidly changing location. The Naughty Dog team demoed a 3D-enhanced level that had Drake escaping from a multi-story château that was on fire and collapsing at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco earlier this year.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves won numerous awards as the best game of the year in 2009. This demo shows that the Naughty Dog team that made the game for the PlayStation 3 wants to push the envelope even more with the newest game, which comes out this fall. If they succeed, then they could easily have game-of-the-year material again. And that would generate hundreds of millions of dollars for Sony.

Uncharted 2 featured a level where players were running along a moving train that was riding through the jungle. Just about every part of the scene was constantly moving and the game didn’t slow down at any point. The château scene featured loads of fire and falling pieces of wood as the house crumbled around the hero Nathan Drake and his partner Sullivan.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Trackmania 2 — The game’s racing tracks feature some ridiculous gravity-defying sections like loop-de-loops that everyday drivers could never handle. All the tracks in the game are player-created and shared across Trackmania’s social network. it’s supposed to be part of a massive online network that will feature two other games — called Shootmania and Questmania — that aren’t revealed yet.

Rayman Raving Rabbids: Alive and Kicking — This game lets players play a number of mini-games with Microsoft’s Kinect motion controller. It’s based on the classic Rayman: Raving Rabbids games that feature crazy rabbits in a lot of mini-games, such as drawing food and taking out attacking rabbits with plunger guns. One example of a new mini-game is a whack-a-mole type game that makes gamers stomp on crazy rabbits as soon as they emerge from the ground in their living room. Some mini-games in Raving Rabbids can support up to four players, such as a “fill the shape” game that makes the four players strike a collective pose to frighten away a bunch of advancing crazy rabbits.

Just Dance 3 — This is the next version of Ubisoft’s dancing game that will appear on every home game console. It competes with Harmonix’s popular Dance Central series, but it’s able to capture the audience that doesn’t own an Xbox 360 but owns a Nintendo Wii or a PlayStation 3. Just Dance 3 will be available October 11.

Rocksmith — It’s a music game that lets players rock out to songs with an actual guitar. It’s like Guitar Hero, but this time it features a real guitar instead of a fake plastic guitar with five buttons. Rock Band 3 also carries a similar feature with its Pro modes, which let gamers play with a “pro” guitar that’s more like a real guitar and a specialized Fender Stratocaster that works with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Rocksmith will be available in North America this October.

YourShape — YourShape is a fitness game that will let gamers keep track of their fitness stats and do a number of exercises. Ubisoft didn’t reveal any additional details outside of that. YourShape will be available November 2011.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The game features some pretty incredible draw distances that lets the gamer see very far. The game can render complex details — like trees, grass and other jungle elements — far away from the actual player. The whole island is highly detailed and the environments are vivid with bright colors — a far cry from some of the bland-looking shooters that have equated “realism” with brown, dirt and more brown.

But from a purely technical perspective, it looks like it’s about on par with Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3. The story is pretty simple — players assume the role of Jacob Brody, a man trapped on a remote island with his girlfriend. He has to survive an onslaught of crazy people trying to kill him and find a way to rescue his girlfriend and escape the island. It’s a first person shooter that’s prizes graphics and realistic effects.

The demo opens with Brody captured by some of the island’s crazies, who tie him to a cement block and leave him to drown. Naturally, he finds a way to survive and escapes — there wouldn’t be a game otherwise — and players immediately begin swimming out of the trap. As soon as he finds a guy with a gun, he’s able to take him down and steal everything he owns.

It sounds like the plot to a number of other first person shooters — much like the original Far Cry and its sequel. But it looks like the game sports a number of new ways to take down enemies, like being able to jump off a cliff and stab someone. The player on stage was also able to sneak up to another guy, steal his knife and throw it at a completely separate enemy.

It looks like the game is supposed to focus on stealth gameplay as well, because there is an alert reticule on the screen that indicates where enemies are. They are usually white, bu they turn red as soon as the player is discovered. Naturally, once the player is discovered, he turns into a one-man army able to take down hordes of enemies.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Assassin’s Creed is one of Ubisoft’s most popular franchises that exploded with the success of Assassin’s Creed II. That game started the storyline of Ezio and fared extremely well with critics — compared to the first Assassin’s Creed title, which received pretty mediocre reviews. There was a good chance that Ubisoft might have ended the Assassin’s Creed franchise with the first game, despite the many positive elements in the game that were unfortunately hidden by pretty repetitive quests.

Ubisoft was forced to take a chance with the Assassin’s Creed franchise, not knowing how successful the Assassin’s Creed franchise would be. The gambit proved successful and it has spawned a number of spinoff titles in addition to the series’ main trilogy. It has since become one of Ubisoft’s most popular pieces of intellectual property — after taking a chance that that many game publishers probably wouldn’t take today.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations will be the final game that features Ezio as the main protagonist, Ubisoft officials said on stage. It looks like it will feature locales ranging from ancient cities to towns and fortresses on the top of a mountain. Ezio looks as badass as ever, taking down hordes of enemies with ruthless efficiency.

The latest Assassin’s Creed game features Ezio searching for some of the lost relics left behind by his ancestor Altair. He’s following the trail of a Templar, one of the main antagonists of the series, while trying to elude a number of Ottomans chasing him. The game takes place in the early 1500s and will feature Constantinople as a major city — compared to Venice and Rome, which were prominently featured in the past two Assassin’s Creed games.

The demo on stage had players blowing up a tower with a bomb and invading a ship, fighting off enemies along the way. Players then took over a ship that had a gatling-gun-style flamethrower that lets them destroy the rest of the ships in the harbor. The plan goes well until cannonballs fly from Constantinople, leaving Ezio to escape from the burning wreckage of a few ships. Ezio manages to escape the city on a ship with enough gusto to utter a one-liner as he departs.

The series is actually a flashback of sorts, with series protagonist Desmond Miles diving into the memories of his ancestors and taking control of Ezio (and Altair in the first game.) The game looks stunning, with the level demonstrated onstage featuring heavily dynamic environments like those featured in Uncharted 2. Ezio’s armor looked damp as soon as he exited the water.

It looks like Ezio has a few new tricks up his sleeve too, including throwing down a smoke bomb and quickly executing a large number of enemies in the span of a few seconds. He can steal the weapons from stunned enemies and immediately take them out. He can also throw bombs at enemies that haven’t detected him yet and kill them immediately without having to fight them. Ezio also seems to be carrying a crossbow throughout the on-stage demo, along with his trademark hidden blades.

Assassin’s Creed Revelations should be available in November this year.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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If the game, called The Sims Social, is even half as popular as the typical Sims games on the personal computer, it will give popular social games on Facebook a run for their money. That includes the likes of Zynga’s Cityville and Farmville, which EA took a crack at on stage. The Sims Social lets players create a Sim — a virtual individual — for themselves and others and then lets them play along with Sims built by their friends.

EA bought Playfish in 2009 to expand its reach into social games, but it looks like The Sims Social is built by the Sims team rather than EA’s new social gaming team. The company didn’t give a specific date when the game would be available on Facebook, but it looked pretty far along judging by the demonstration.

The Sims franchise is wildly popular with more mainstream audiences than typical computer games. Players take control of individuals and families and decide how they live their lives — right down to when they use the bathroom and what clothes they wear. Or, you know, anything more sinister than that. We won’t judge.

Be sure to check out VentureBeat for wall-to-wall coverage of E3 this week.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive game technologies and business models at our third annual GamesBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the disruptive trends in the mobile games market. GamesBeat is co-located with our MobileBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To participate in our Who’s Got Game? contest for the best game startup, click on this link.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Halo was one of the games that put the original Xbox, and Microsoft, on the map for home console gaming. It spawned two sequels and a number of spin-off titles that have all sold extremely well. The first Halo game was announced 10 years ago, when console gaming was still becoming more popular with mainstream audiences.

Today, home gaming consoles are a staple for most living rooms. That’s especially true with the advent of motion-controlled devices like the Xbox Kinect, which lets Xbox 360 owners control the console’s main features with arm motions and voice controls. Console owners are able to access popular apps like Netflix and Hulu, which found their start on computers, on the Xbox 360.

The Halo franchise is considered partially responsible for making first-person shooter games, where users control a character and see the game through that character’s eyes, more popular on home gaming consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It popularized a number of features in first-person shooter games that are now staples — such as regenerating health over time and only carrying a limited number of weapons.

The 10th anniversary Halo remake will be available November 15th. The company still hasn’t announced the next Halo game yet, though an early leaked website indicates that there is a Halo sequel on the way.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Giving players new ways to control the game is one way to make the gaming experience more immersive. Adding voice controls gives gamers an array of new options to control their squads in Mass Effect 3. While still controlling series protagonist Commander Shepherd with a regular controller, players can tell their squad mates to advance on enemies and use special skills to disable them while Shepherd goes in for the kill.

Mass Effect 3 also features extensive dialogue options, but traditionally gamers have had to select a specific response. Players can now say a response aloud, and Commander Shepherd will continue the conversation without missing a beat. Mass Effect 3 will be one of the major releases for hardcore gamers that will feature Kinect features — along with Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier and a number of EA Sports Games. Microsoft is ensuring there’s enough Kinect content for both casual and hardcore players.

The company has tried to market its Kinect motion controller as an “experience” by giving Xbox 360 owners ways to control other parts of their Xbox 360 with motion controls — like the menus in the console’s dashboard that let owners access popular applications like Hulu and Netflix. That includes rebuilding games — even hardcore games like first-person shooters — with those same Kinect features.

The Kinect is a strong part of Microsoft’s portfolio and has been a large factor in the company’s recent success. Revenues from Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division was up 60 percent to $1.9 billion in the third fiscal quarter this year, from $1.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Revenue rose 13 percent to $16.4 billion, up from $14.5 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

The Xbox 360 manufacturer already leaked information about three of the games that the company would present on stage at E3 this year — including a Disneyland adventure and a long-awaited motion-controlled Star Wars game. Those games were designed to bring motion-controlled gaming to an even broader audience, taking a page out of Nintendo’s playbook as the company has tried to attract more casual gamers.

Microsoft accidentally let slip that it would announce a new Halo game. That coming release puts Microsoft in direct competition with powerhouse developers like Activision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which have extremely popular first-person shooter games like Battlefield and Call of Duty. Microsoft recently took over development of the Halo franchise when it created in-house studio 343 Industries.

You can see a video of the whole presentation below. Stay tuned to VentureBeat.com for more details from E3.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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A new Halo game would be a big announcement for Microsoft, which recently took over the development of the Halo series after it created in-house gaming studio 343 Industries. It puts Microsoft in direct competition with powerhouse developers like Activision-Blizzard and Electronic Arts, which have extremely popular first-person shooter games like Battlefield and Call of Duty.

“The news millions of Halo fans have waited for: Halo 4 is on the way,” the site said before it was taken down, according to a number of reports.

The Halo franchise is considered partially responsible for making first-person shooter games, where users control a character and see the game through that character’s eyes, more popular on home gaming consoles like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. It popularized a number of features in first-person shooter games that are now staples — such as regenerating health over time and only carrying a limited number of weapons.

The Xbox 360 manufacturer already leaked information about three of the games that the company would present on stage at E3 this year — including a Disneyland adventure and a long-awaited motion-controlled Star Wars game. Those games were designed to bring motion-controlled gaming to an even broader audience, taking a page out of Nintendo’s playbook as the company has tried to attract more casual gamers.

Dance Central 2, a sequel to a launch title with the Kinect that lets players dance and records their moves and grades them, was also on the site’s landing page. It also featured Kinect Sports Season 2, another sequel to a popular Kinect launch title that includes a number of sports mini-games. The company is making a strong bet that its popular motion controller will continue to be a core part of its business this year, based on those early announcements.

The Kinect is a strong part of Microsoft’s portfolio and has been a large factor in the company’s recent success. Revenues from Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division were up 60 percent to $1.9 billion in the third fiscal quarter this year, from $1.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Revenue rose 13 percent to $16.4 billion, up from $14.5 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The game will let players take a virtual tour of a carbon copy of Disneyland, a popular theme park in California that features Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. Microsoft has rebuilt the whole experience of visiting the Magic Kingdom piece for piece, except for one small difference — players can fly through Disneyland instead of walking.

It’s one of the new ways players can interact with games since the advent of motion-controlled gaming. Nintendo’s Wii was the first console to popularize motion-controlled gaming by giving players a remote-and-nunchuk combination to control games like The Legend of Zelda. It was a risky move, but the gambit proved successful in making motion-controlled gaming more appealing to mainstream audiences because it was much more immersive than using typical controllers.

Microsoft is pulling out all the stops to make sure the Kinect is as appealing as possible to just about every audience. The Wii was successful initially because it was able to hit both casual audiences with games like Wii Sports and hardcore audiences with games like The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Most games for the Kinect, like dancing game Dance Central, have been more appealing for casual gamers — but that’s poised to change at E3 this year with the presence of games like Child of Eden and the new Star Wars title.

The Kinect is a strong part of Microsoft’s portfolio and has been a large factor in the company’s recent success. Revenues from Microsoft’s entertainment and devices division was up 60 percent to $1.9 billion in the third fiscal quarter this year, from $1.2 billion in the third quarter last year. Revenue rose 13 percent to $16.4 billion, up from $14.5 billion in the same quarter a year earlier.

The Disneyland adventure game looks like it will be less of a “game” and more of an “experience,” which is what Microsoft is trying to evoke by immersing gamers even further with motion-controlled gaming. The company has tried to market its Kinect motion controller as an experience by giving Xbox 360 owners ways to control other parts of their Xbox 360 with motion controls — like the menus in the console’s dashboard that let owners access popular applications like Hulu and Netflix.

Microsoft will also launch a long-expected Star Wars game that will let Kinect owners control characters in the Star Wars with their own bodies. That means they’ll be able to swing around Lightsabers — the iconic sword of the mystical Jedi in the Star Wars universe — and use magic-like Force abilities within the game. Most Star Wars fans (myself included) have been gunning for a proper motion-controlled Star Wars game that features decent swordplay since motion-controlled gaming became popular. That shows that motion-controlled gaming can appeal to hardcore gaming audiences as well as more casual audiences.

The Xbox manufacturer is also targeting children with its Kinect motion controller by releasing a game that lets kids and their parents dive into the world of Sesame Street. Players can interact with characters in the Sesame Street universe, which is populated by puppets like Elmo and Cookie Monster — both of which are iconic images in children’s entertainment.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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That means that the web is inundated with a huge number of rumors about what new releases might be announced next week and what to expect from some of the industry’s biggest players. VentureBeat is here to keep score of some of the more popular rumors that are swimming around, and we’ll note which ones have since been confirmed or busted.

CONFIRMED — Activision is releasing a premium subscription-based Call of Duty game: The Call of Duty Elite social network will work as a layer on top of other Call of Duty games, including the company’s next title, Modern Warfare 3.

UNCONFIRMED — Grand Theft Auto V will make its debut at E3: It’s been about three years since the last Grand Theft Auto game, which is one of Take Two’s most popular franchises. The last iteration in the franchise shipped around 15 million units, and Take Two has been struggling financially, according to its last earnings report. The company might be forced to release another triple-A title like Grand Theft Auto V if it wants to remain competitive.

BUSTED — Microsoft will cut the price of the Xbox 360: There were some early reports that Microsoft would cut the price of its Xbox 360 bundle, which includes the motion-sensing controller, Kinect, by $100. The company responsible for the rumor, Target, later backpedaled and said it priced the console incorrectly, which started the rumor. And, seriously, if you had one of the top-selling devices on Amazon and among other retailers, would you really leave money on the table by dropping the price?

UNCONFIRMED — A new Halo game might be in the works: We’re nearing the 10th anniversary of the Halo series, which has become a staple of Microsoft’s Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles. Microsoft’s in-house studio 343 Industries has said it has something special planned for the anniversary. We might also hear about the next game from Bungie, which was originally responsible for the Halo series.

CONFIRMED — Nintendo will announce a new console: Nintendo confirmed it has a new console on the way, which the company will debut at E3 this year. Nintendo’s last console, the Wii, sold more than 86 million units. The console is rumored to have a touchscreen and camera on the controller and will not have a hard drive.

UNCONFIRMED — Sony will announce the release date, price and more details about its Next Generation Portable: The company’s next portable console carries some pretty formidable hardware and is a bet that hardcore gamers still want to get the most out of their devices. Several games released by Konami, which are slated for 2012, will also appear on the NGP along with PS3 release counterparts — indicating the console should come out sometime next year. That means we might finally see a release date and some additional details about the device, which VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi got a chance to try out.

BUSTED — Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima’s will announce his next game: Kojima said at a pre-E3 Konami event he would not be attending E3 this year so he could spend time working on his next project, which will remain unannounced. The new game, however, will feature a brand new game and graphics engine built from the ground up by Konami.

UNCONFIRMED — Sony and Microsoft will announce new consoles: There were reports that an initial version of Microsoft’s next console was already present somewhere in Electronic Arts — which threw some water on reports that the consoles would not come out until 2014. With Nintendo set to announce a new console, there’s a good chance Microsoft and Sony will want to steal some of the company’s thunder.

BUSTED — Konami will announced a release date for Metal Gear Rising: Metal Gear Rising, the next spin-off from the Metal Gear Solid series, will not be coming out this year. Fans won’t get a final release date either, as the game is still planned for release some time next year, series creator Kojima said at a pre-E3 Konami event.

UNCONFIRMED — Nintendo might announce a new Zelda title: Nintendo registered the game “Zelda Universe” with the Electronic Software Rating Board. The company might announce the game at E3 next week for the franchise’s 20th anniversary. The new Zelda title could also be a launch title for Nintendo’s next console.

Stay tuned to VentureBeat next week for all the top news from E3!

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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This isn’t the first jab Apple has taken at a video game conference, either — it announced the release of the next iteration of its tablet computer, the iPad 2, during the Game Developers Conference in early March. Apple’s press event took place at around the same time Nintendo took the stage for a keynote address at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, Calif.

One of Apple’s largest success stories on the iPhone is its massive game library. That includes the likes of casual games like Angry Birds and Popcap’s strategy game Plants vs. Zombies. But the mobile phone also sports some more “hardcore” games like Epic’s Infinity Blade and a mobile version of the parkour extravaganza Mirror’s Edge. Those are the kinds of games that are highlighted at E3, which is typically one of the largest and most extravagant events for triple-A titles in the industry.

But the conference has traditionally shied away from games on mobile devices like the iPhone — instead focusing on the major consoles and handheld systems like the 3DS and Sony’s next generation portable device, the NGP. That could be frustrating for Apple, which might take the chance to show its gaming clout at WWDC this year after pulling a substantial number of developers to the conference — and likely away from E3, because there is a lot of money to be made making iPhone apps.

Apple might announce that it will delay the release of the next version of the iPhone’s software, iOS 5.0, until the fall. Apple typically holds an iOS preview event in early spring — last year it showed off multitasking in iOS 4.0 at the beginning of April. While primarily an event for developers, Apple has also made major announcements at past WWDCs. In addition to iOS and iPhone announcements, the 2011 WWDC will also feature over 100 technical sessions to help developers get the most out of Apple’s platforms, as well as Apple’s annual Design Awards for iPhone, iPad, and Mac OSX apps.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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