HBO’s Game of Thrones is a violent fantasy series with a huge production budget. That cash enabled the producers to hire a linguist to develop new languages for the fictional civilizations that populate the world of Westeros and its surrounding continents.

The linguist who created those new tongues, David J. Peterson, told media website Vulture that he had a lot of fun designing the flourishes that make up the High Valryian language that some of the characters from the southern islands speak on the show. He also revealed that at least one of the words he coined is a secret reference to Konami’s 1988 NES classic Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.

“The word for chain is belmon,” Peterson told Vulture. “That’s clearly a shout-out to [Castlevania II:] Simon’s Quest.”

Simon Belmont is the hero from Castlevania II. In the 2D platforming game, Belmont hunts down demonic creatures in his ultimate pursuit to destroy Dracula.

Belmont starts his adventure with a leather whip, but you can eventually upgrade it to a stronger chain whip.

Therefore, “belmon” is a reference to the chain whip that Simon Belmont carries in Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest.

Check out some characters speaking High Valyrian from the ending of the most recent episode of Game of Thrones. Spoiler warning:

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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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HBO’s fantasy saga premiere of the third season of Game of Thrones broke more torrenting records last night than the bells on Khal Drogo’s braid, the gold in the Lannister coffers, and the number of wildlings swarming into the Seven Kingdoms. Now that I’ve impressed you with my Game of Thrones knowledge, here are some actual numbers.

Hundreds of thousands of people illegally downloaded the show last night, breaking the record for the largest BitTorrent swarm in history, according to TorrentFreak.

“Never before has there been a torrent with so many people sharing a file at the same time, more than 160,000 simultaneous peers,” TorrentFreak founder and editor-in-chief “Ernesto” wrote.

Current estimates show that the episode has already been downloaded over a million times. Last year, the popular fantasy HBO series was the most pirated TV show of 2012, with 4.28 million downloads for a single episode. Despite these staggering numbers, director David Petrarca is unconcerned. He said that pirated consumption only fuels the “cultural buzz” surrounding Game of Thrones and makes the show even more popular and pervasive.

Game of Thrones is certainly popular in the tech community, which has some crossover with lovers of fantasy fiction. You can’t throw a stone in SOMA without hearing whispers of “winter is coming,” and it is perfectly appropriate to refer to huskies as “direwolves.” Granted, when you mention you watch the show to people outside of this community, say to your mother during a Passover Sedar, it is not uncommon for them to be shocked and appalled that you would tune in to a show that espouses rape, violence, and explicit sexual content and make you feel shamed over your matzoh (this is purely a theoretical situation).

Certainly, the entertainment and buzz contribute to the high rates of piracy. However, the legal way to watch involves an expensive subscription to HBO, which involves an expensive subscription to cable, and those who aren’t real-world Lannisters (or even Lords), must resort to illegal methods to get their GOT fix. That said, HBO still has plenty of paying viewers. Sunday’s premiere attracted 4.4 million viewers last night, up 13 percent over last year’s premiere.

HBO has been hinting at making its content more accessible to common folk through its on-demand streaming service HBO Go. At a premiere event last month, HBO’s chief executive Richard Plepler said there was a possibility of selling standalone access to HBO Go as part of a bundled broadband subscription plan.

Until then, legions of fans will continue to illegally watch as the battle for control of the Seven Kingdoms unfolds. Resistance is as futile as stabbing a Whitewalker.

All week long, Comcast customers with an Xfinity TV account were granted access to full seasons of a slew of hit television shows — thus enabling viewers to embark on what’s known as binge watching (aka watching an entire season in a single sitting).

The promotion, called the Xfinity Watchathon Week, allows you to view these shows via cable boxes, mobile devices, or web browser, and includes shows such as Game of Thrones, Downton Abbey, Dexter, Girls, Spartacus, Mad Men, Revolution, The Walking Dead, Psych, and more. The move is significant because many of these shows are either about to end their current season or start a new season, and the alternatives to not catching up on these shows is either to miss them entirely or watch them illegally via torrents or unauthorized streaming video sites.

And while there’s still a couple days left before Watchathon ends, Comcast shared with VentureBeat some information on what’s getting binge-watched the most.

“We’re seeing double-digit percentage increases in views across platforms so far,” Comcast VP of video services Maggie Suniewick told VentureBeat. “Premiums [TV shows] are doing extremely well, and we expect that to continue as customers catch-up leading into the premiere of Game of Thrones on Sunday night.”

Everyone is most certainly frothing at the mouth waiting on Season 3 of Game of Thrones, but the most binged-watched show thus far is actually Showtime’s Shameless series, according to Comcast. I’ve never actually seen the show, which is about “an alcoholic man lives in a perpetual stupor while his six children with whom he lives cope as best they can” and stars William H. Macy. Yet, if I’d already seen every episode of Game of Thrones and Doctor Who three times over, I might decide to check it out while waiting for their respective premieres this weekend.

The data doesn’t include all viewing information from cable boxes, which is typically delayed by four days. (My guess is that this weekend will probably see lots of people using their cable boxes, too.) But regardless of what shows get watched the most, hopefully the data will send a clear message to big cable providers that people are more interested in binge-watching good shows than watching four different version of essentially the same cable channel.

Image via Comcast

Right now on The Pirate Bay, thousands of people are downloading the first two seasons of Game of Thrones.

To anyone at HBO paying attention, that’s probably a big deal. People pirating Game of Thrones tend not to be people paying to watch Game of Thrones — at least in theory.

But to director David Petrarca, that kind of piracy doesn’t detract from his show’s success. It adds to it.

At the Perth Writers Festival in Perth, Australia last weekend, Petrarca said that the piracy factor for shows like his is negligible because Game of Thrones capitalizes on the amorphous “cultural buzz” that surrounds it. As far as I understand it, this means that any sort of piracy is good as long as it makes the show more culturally popular. This is bigger than just ratings.

And he’s probably right. Game of Thrones is the most pirated TV show of 2012, which means that a lot of people have seen the show that weren’t willing to pay for an entire cable subscription to do so.

Grabbing more eyeballs, no matter what the context, has significant effects on the overall popularity and cultural pervasiveness of a show. (For example, I’ve never watched a single episode of Game of Thrones, and yet I still snicker when I see a “Winter is coming” meme. You can’t even buy that sort of cultural ubiquity. )

As with most things involving HBO, this conversation is one that unavoidably ties into the dicey subject of à la carte TV pricing, which Cablevision brought back into the news just yesterday.

The conversation is, by this point, pretty well understood: The “have it your way” millennials want television subscriptions on their terms, and the “have it our way” media and cable companies want to keep raking in the cash with existing business models.

No matter how you slice it, you can clearly make a lot of money in figuring out how to bridge the gap between the two.

In October of last year, reader Edfire77 sent the above image to Kotaku. The photo shows Tommy Chong of comedy duo Cheech and Chong, and it was used to “celebrate” Hispanic culture. Not only was the choice to use a film about the misadventures of two stoners to observe Hispanic culture in poor taste, but the image did not even feature Cheech Marin, the only Hispanic member of the stoner duo (Tommy Chong is not Hispanic; he is of Chinese, Scottish-Irish, and French descent.)

The flub came and went without so much as an apology from Microsoft. Sure, chances are this was merely an oversight, but it was an insensitive move nonetheless. Hispanic gamers make up a large portion of Xbox owners. According to Microsoft, in an article posted on Viacom’s blog, Hispanic gamers contributed to 23 percent growth in sales while non-Hispanic gamers stood at 10 percent. The article also mentions that “Hispanics are 32 percent more likely to consider video games their main source of entertainment.” Considering these numbers, Microsoft should have been more careful about how it chose to portray this group. Rather than relegating Hispanic culture to a movie about potheads, the company could have used a positive film such as Stand and Deliver, the fantastic Pan’s Labyrinth, or the historically relevant Motorcycle Diaries.

Shifting paradigms in demographics plainly illustrate that Hispanics and other minorities are becoming a larger part of gaming culture. With such a significant number of minority gamers contributing to the growth of the market, one would think it would be a no-brainer to be sensitive to the nuances of these cultures. Unfortunately, as seen in the above image (and in many other instances I will discuss), this has not been the case.

Insensitivity towards minorities, as well as exaggerated and stereotypical depictions in video games, is nothing new. Anyone who has ever played Final Fantasy VII will remember the outspoken Barret Wallace. The only black character in Square’s epic role-playing game had the tongue of a sailor and spoke in an exaggerated Ebonics. No one else in the game was given this accent. Not the other denizens of the slums. Not Barret’s longtime friend Dyne. No one. Why would only one character speak in region-based slang? Because he’s black? It didn’t make sense to me in 1997, and doesn’t make sense now.

Localization standards have improved since then, and although Final Fantasy XIII’s black party member, Sazh Katzroy, has a few things in common Barrett (both single parents, both use guns, both begin as partner to an ex-soldier), he is not nearly the caricature Barret turned out to be. Whereas Barrett was loosely based on Mr. T, Sazh bears a closer resemblance to a different kind of television and movie stereotype: the funny black sidekick. Sazh’s “frocobo” didn’t help matters much either. Perhaps Square Enix should stop basing their black characters on problematic Hollywood tropes.

Another kind of stereotyping can be seen in fantasy titles where dark-skinned races are often depicted as being less intelligent, barbarous, prone to violence, and less civilized than their fair-skinned neighbors. The recently released Fire Emblem: Awakening’s Basilio and Flavia are two of the games few dark-skinned characters. They hail from the Kingdom of Regna Ferox, where brute strength is valued over all else. In one scene, Basilio tells another character to kiss his “big brown arse.” Another Japanese strategy RPG classic, Dragon Force (released on the Sega Saturn), featured a southern kingdom called the Bozack Nation, whose citizens were dark-skinned and beast-like and whose leader, Gongos, was considered less intelligent than the other rulers in the game.

Western RPGs haven’t fared much better in this regard. The Elder Scrolls series’ Redguard race, also dark of skin, has traditionally had lower intelligence stats and higher physical attributes than other races. This kind of depiction of dark-skinned races is not exclusive to games. The wildly popular Game of Thrones features the nomadic, barbaric Dothraki. Dark of hair, eyes, and skin, the Dothraki resemble Middle-Eastern peoples in both appearance and language. Compared to the “civilized” seven kingdoms of Westeros, the people across the Narrow Sea are seen as backward, exotic, brutish, and savage. Although these races are all fictional, their representation has a hint of real-world Orientalism that can inform notions about minorities and dark-skinned races and cultures.

The dearth of minorities as main characters is another issue worth noting. Many big-budget titles seem to feature a white male — an everyman — as their protagonist. While it may be argued that game developers who stick to this formulaic approach to character design are merely playing it safe and choosing not to use minority characters that may be construed as offensive or insensitive, it does not help the fact that the market is oversaturated with Nathan Drake lookalikes and sorely lacking in minorities as central figures.

But hope is not completely lost. Smaller developers such as Minority Media (which is comprised of a culturally diverse team and headed by lead designer Vander Caballero) may be the shot in the arm the medium needs. Minority’s first title, the PlayStation Network exclusive Papo & Yo, features Brazilian-inspired visuals and sounds as well as a dark-skinned young boy, Quico, as the protagonist.

Thatgamecompany’s highly praised Journey circumvented the problem of race altogether by making the main character completely nonspecific and ambiguous in not only race but gender and age as well. While these smaller, independent developers seem more inclined to deal with the problem of stereotyping in video games, Ubisoft — the creator of Assassin’s Creed — is also pushing for multicultural awareness in its titles. Its first PS Vita game, Assassin’s Creed: Liberation, featured a half-black female protagonist by the name of Aveline de Grandpré and proved it is not entirely impossible for developers to feature minorities in their titles without resorting to offensive cultural stereotypes.

Video games are becoming bigger than Hollywood. With yesterday’s announcement of the PlayStation 4 and the beginning of a new generation of games, developers — both independent and corporate — have a chance to start leaving behind the single-minded tropes and stereotypes that film and other mediums have held on to for so long. As creators and visionaries, they have an opportunity to challenge stereotypical notions, not reinforce them. With minorities becoming such a driving force behind the growth of video game culture, here’s hoping we begin to see more cultural diversity in in the medium.

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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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Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes actually praised Netflix during today’s Q4 2012 earnings call, despite the streaming video service being a rival of his company’s premium cable network HBO.

That’s probably the last thing you’d expect to hear during an earnings call — especially since Netflix just debut its first HBO-quality original TV series House of Cards.

During the call, Bewkes gave credit for its efforts on House of Cards, the service’s nice user interface, and consumer friendly support across services.  He then followed up by informing shareholders that Netflix is not really in the same ball park when it comes to subscribers and original programing — and thus, not quite worth comparing to HBO.

HBO has a total of 114 million subscribers across the globe, which is over three times the total number of subscriptions from Netflix (33 million worldwide). HBO is also producing multiple original series, including newcomers Girls and Newsroom as well as certified hits True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, and Game of Thrones. Additionally, the debut of HBO’s HBO Go streaming service to domestic subscribers helped boost overall usage (streaming and cable viewing) by 80 percent compared to the same period last year.

“The strength of programming on HBO and Cinemax and the success of HBO GO and MAX GO helped generate the best subscriber gains in a decade,” Bewkes said during the call. “Both brands are an improvement at virtually all of our major affiliates [and] together, they added 1.9 million subscribers domestically for the year.”

While HBO has more overall subscribers, it’s worth noting that Netflix brought in more domestic subscribers in a single quarter than the pay channel did in an entire year. Netflix is also poised to launch more original programming later in the year, including a resurrected Arrested Development.

Still, HBO is forging ahead by increasing its international presence. Time Warner launched a standalone version of its HBO Go streaming service in the Nordic market, which doesn’t require subscribers to get HBO through a cable TV provider the way its domestic customers must do.

Today HBO also announced a new two-year exclusive contract with Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin to as a creative consultant on the show as well as develop new series for the cable channel.

Image via HBO

GamesBeat has reported on some of our favorite Minecraft creations to date, but none of them took over 100 builders to make. That’s what the team at Westeroscraft is claiming was required for their painstaking re-creation of King’s Landing from A Song of Ice and Fire (or Game of Thrones for the literary-challenged).

Sharing some recent images on Reddit, user pizzainacup says that the custom Minecraft map currently adds up to 35 GB of data, with around 3,000 unique buildings all hand-made and with “fully decorated” interiors:

But King’s Landing is just a taste of things to come as pizzainacup states that a Minecraft iteration of the entire Westeros content is about 70 percent complete, with the continent of Essos planned “one day.” You can view the map live here (when Reddit isn’t crashing the server) to see the ongoing progress.

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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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HBO will soon launch its first-ever streaming-only service with access to its extensive catalog of great TV shows and movies. Unfortunately, for now, the service will only be available in the Nordic countries and nowhere else.

Cord-cutters in the U.S. and around the world have been clamoring for some time for a way to subscribe to streaming-only HBO Go service without having to pay for cable. Regardless, HBO had continually pushed back and said only cable subscribers will get access to HBO content online.

But now it looks like HBO has decided to experiment with the Nordic countries. Variety reports that the new “HBO Nordic AB” service will be available in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland starting in mid-October. It will cost less than 10 euros a month.

Without mentioning it, HBO is setting itself up for a bloody fight with Netflix in international territories. Netflix just announced a few weeks ago that it intended to launch in the same four Nordic countries as HBO’s new service before the end of the year.

What we’re really interested to see is if HBO’s Nordic opportunity is successful, would HBO be willing to bring a streaming-only service to those in North America or other territories? Our guess is that HBO’s model is too profitable in U.S. right now for the company to offer Americans a streaming-only option. But other parts of the world could be looking at an HBO online invasion if the Nordics gain traction.

“Each market is unique, and HBO approaches each one with what we consider to believe the best business model specific to that territory,” an HBO spokesperson told Variety.

Game of Thrones photo: HBO

Hollywood films based on video games are notoriously bad, but every once in a while there’s a rare exception. The original Silent Hill film was remarkably close to being one of those exceptions, and six years later, it’s finally getting a sequel.

You can see the new trailer for Silent Hill: Revelation 3D, which opens in theaters on October 26, below:

Despite the addition of Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow (actor Kit Harington) and some new CG creatures, Revelation looks to be more of the same. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but the recycling of the Bubble Head Nurses and Pyramid Head is not only getting old — it doesn’t make any sense.

Both characters first appear in Silent Hill 2 and are manifestations of the main protagonist’s fears, sexual deprivation, and guilt. As James Sunderland is not a character in the film, there’s no reason to include these villains other than the fact that Silent Hill 2 widely remains the most fondly remembered entry in the entire franchise, and the obvious notion on the developer/filmmaker’s part that “these are the only reasons anyone still cares about Silent Hill.”

Still, if you’re looking forward to seeing someone have their skin ripped off or get dissected by barbed wire in 3D, Silent Hill: Revelation is probably your kind of movie.

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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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GamesBeat previously interviewed Pauline Acaline, co-founder and creative designer at 72pins, to learn about the process, legalities, and business model of using old Nintendo Entertainment Cartridges as art canvases. Now the team is taking their signature retro pixel art on the road with the 72pins art show.

In addition to new and classic cart art like the Sword & Sorcery image above (by Matej Jan), there will also be more traditional paintings like this awesome Samus piece by Austin James.

The full list of artists whose work will be appearing and event details are below:

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The awesome HBO Go service has landed on Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet, but like Jon Snow at The Wall, all other Android tablet owners are still out in the cold.

HBO Go’s service gives HBO subscribers access to the premium TV channel’s catalog of original programming, including newer shows like “Game of Thrones” and “True Blood,” as well as classics such as “The Wire” and “Deadwood.” The service has thus far been available on the iPad, iPhone, some Android phones, Xbox 360, and other devices. But it has not been on Android tablets until today, perhaps because the Kindle Fire is easily the most popular Android-based tablet in the U.S. so there is more incentive to develop for it.

Notably, HBO Go has attracted scrutiny this week because some folks were upset HBO won’t offer it as a stand-alone service. At this point, you have to pay for HBO through your cable provider to get access to the service. HBO is not ruling out the possibility of changing its business model, but for now it will continue to be quite pricey to get access.

Watch the short HBO Go Kindle Fire announcement below:

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10 -11 in San Francisco, is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Microsoft sure loves its Game of Thrones. Every chance the software giant got to show off its new SmartGlass technology, it used the hit HBO fantasy series. It got to be rather difficult to cover for a journalist who’s only on episode three of the first season, trying to avoid spoilers.

But SmartGlass, a software-based application that extends Xbox 360 experiences onto smartphones and tablets, does shine best when paired with television or movie entertainment. That’s where programmers have fleshed out the most whiz-bang features at this time, but game designers have clever plans for this tech, too. Here are four general and specific uses for SmartGlass that are either in concept stage or ready for real products when it releases this fall.

Enhanced television and movies

Think of SmartGlass as your know-it-all TV- or movie-watching friend, only much quieter. It knows what you’re viewing on your Xbox 360 and will fill your phone or tablet with synopses, quotes, episode guides and timelines, and more, all accessible with a simple touch. It’s ultimately up to the content provider to decide what to include — in one Game of Thrones presentation, for example, Microsoft showed off the family trees of the different Houses, so you can learn more about the different characters in the show and how they’re tied to each other.

A lot of the data is interactive and can sync with where you specifically are in the program at any given time. During the opening credits of Game of Thrones in this demo, as the camera panned around the map of Weteros, SmartGlass simultaneously highlighted specific locations on the handheld screen, giving background information about the particular locale that was currently on the TV.

Even if you’re not interested in all the extra goodies about whatever you’re watching, at the very least, you can use your smartphone or tablet as a remote control to start, stop, pause, and so on.

Karaoke/Dance Central song selector

“One of the things that slows down a session of karaoke or Dance Central,” said Xbox 360 group product manager Peter Orullian, “is waiting for the new player to select the next song. SmartGlass eliminates that wait.” Since the app knows what you’re playing, it can give the next player a chance to pick the next tune in music-based games (pictured above). So if you’re on deck to show off your living-room moves in Dance Central 3, instead of standing up and replacing the last player, going through the menus to find the song that you want, then starting the session, you can just queue it up ahead of time and have it ready to go the instant it’s your turn. “It works just like a karaoke machine and takes out the downtime,” said Orullian.

A separate controller

At a press conference earlier today, Microsoft showed off a concept video where a Madden player could use a separate tablet screen to select plays and which receivers to throw the football to, keeping his plans and strategies away from the big screen, so his opponent can’t see them until they’re in motion.

In the game Home Run Stars, due out this fall for Xbox Live Arcade, one player can bat on a traditional controller and the television while the other does nuanced pitching on the smaller screen with some privacy. The reverse works as well: The batter can play on a phone while the pitcher uses the TV.

“I think the most exciting thing about SmartGlass,” said Robert Bowling, president of Robotoki and former creative strategist at Call of Duty maker Infinity Ward, “is that developers can use this extra screen to offer extra buttons and input options to players that the regular controller doesn’t have.”

“Those things are potential options,” said Jose Pinero, senior director of public relations for Xbox, of Bowling’s idea. “A good case of that would be using a swipe motion [on SmartGlass] for a move in a game. You already have all these buttons on the Xbox 360 controller, but maybe it would make sense for you to ‘pinch’ or open something in the game with your fingers through SmartGlass.”

Extra game info

In the upcoming action game Ascend: New Gods, your SmartGlass screen can display boss-monster stats (pictured above) or a more complete minimap than what most games typically show in the corner of the television screen. That’s a simple, obvious application of a smaller secondary display, of course. But developers can also add much more data here if they choose to. In the press conference, Microsoft showed how players can access Halo Waypoint while playing the upcoming Halo 4. So while you’re shooting aliens on the big screen, you can check out game stats and canonical info on your phone.

A lot of the ideas coming out for SmartGlass aren’t revolutionary on their own — we’ve seen multiscreen connectivity in the past with Nintendo and Sony gaming machines (and both Microsoft competitors are also promoting this strategy heavily at the Electronic Entertainment Expo trade show going on right now in Los Angeles). But MS is looking at this technology as a persistent buddy that’s always ready by your side, an ever-changing app that adapts to your current entertainment choice.

“People are second-screening [with smartphones and tablets] in their homes,” said Orullian. “They’re getting a companion for the Super Bowl and for the Grammys and for the Oscars. They’re getting them for direct TV providers; they’re getting them for social networks; they’re getting them for game consoles. What we said is, instead of having 50 or 100 or 200 apps that you’re launching for individual things, why not just launch one app? Launch one app, and we’ll do all the work for you.”

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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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Game startup Disruptor Beam has announced today the first Facebook game based on the award-winning novels by George R.R. Martin and the award-winning television show on HBO. Titled Game of Thrones Ascent, it is slated for an unspecified “future release” on Facebook. The developer plans to impress fans of the show and books alike with an authenticity and close-hewn relationship to the story-lines and characters of the popular series.

In Game of Thrones Ascent, players will lead the life of a noble during the time of upheaval as portrayed in the books and the series. Set in Westeros against a background of political and sexual intrigue, players will choose their allegiance to a great house, secure their holdings, develop their lands and reputation, and assign adventurers to quests while forging alliances with Facebook friends.

There will be an open beta for Game of Thrones Ascent, details of which can be found at Disruptor Beam’s website or their Facebook page.

“Everyone at Disruptor Beam was a huge fan of Game of Thrones long before we began working on the game, so we recognize that other fans expect character-driven conflict and intrigue to take center stage in our new game,” said CEO of Disruptor Beam, Jon Radoff, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat. He promised this won’t be just another media tie-in experience.

Disruptor Beam is a Boston-based game company backed by a group of technology and gaming entrepreneurs from the Boston area. HBO is a premier-content cable entertainment company that produces and airs Game Of Thrones, a television show based on fantasy novels by George R.R. Martin. Radoff was the former chief executive and founder of gamer social network GamerDNA.

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

This week, Diablo III launched and promptly caused a stir with persistent server issues, Activision and Electronic Arts settled over the Infinity Ward lawsuit, and former N-Control sales specialist Paul Christoforo revealed details in his lawsuit over the Avenger controller debacle.

You’ll also find reviews for Max Payne 3 and Game of Thrones, as well as a preview for Zombie Swipeout. GamesBeat’s guide to Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition is also available.

Other GamesBeat stories included:

The DeanBeat: Can Microsoft’s Kinect gain cred from hardcore gamers?

With Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Sony hopes to bring a classic character to the PS3

Slicing zombies and chasing coins in Zombie Swipeout (preview)

Epic unveils Unreal Engine 4 for eye-popping next-generation game graphics

Aeria Games’ Ignite service connects free-to-play gamers in over 30 countries

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 stages coming to HD remake

Activision and EA settle Infinity Ward lawsuit

Ratings board wants parents to think twice before buying that video game

God of War Ascension multiplayer features over-the-top show-off killings

New DC Universe Online expansion on the way, Mark Hamill returning as the Joker

Max Payne 3 suffers multiplayer issues, Rockstar responds

Minecraft digs upwards and becomes most-played Xbox Live Arcade title

The Last of Us demo shows brutal, dramatic survivalist combat

Call of Duty co-founder reveals his new, free-to-play shooter

Gamers rip Diablo III a new hellhole on Metacritic

Max Payne 3 is a glimpse into the future of video games (review)

World exclusive Diablo III review!!!!

Game of Thrones brings the pain…and not in a good way (review)

How a lucky fan became an Uncharted character

Former N-control sales specialist Christoforo claims company threw him under the bus

Witcher dev CD Projekt Red hiring for “new and different” role-playing game

New Pokemon Black 2 and White 2 info

Minecraft (Xbox 360 Edition): Tips, tricks, and achievement guide

(Updated with new pictures) Student reveals the origins of his real-life Portal turret

VentureBeat:

Microsoft’s Kudo Tsunoda on broadening Kinect games to hardcore fans (interview)

The EA-Activision legal feud takes unexpected twists

6 reasons E3 might suck this year

Mobile startup Fun Machine believes games can do social good

CrowdStar expands into China and South Korea with mobile game partners

Conversion rates up, spending habits down among social gamers

Starting with a graphic novel, The Inventor will chronicle the life of Nikola Tesla (exclusive)

AMD contends its split-personality PC brains are better than Intel’s

Zynga acquires Wild Needle casual game maker for an estimated $3.8M

Nvidia teams with Intellectual Ventures to acquire patents

Walmart.com strikes again: more mind-boggling game descriptions

Former Xbox 360 exec’s $1B pain and advice to entrepreneurs

If Walmart.com’s horrible copy writers were to describe 2012′s biggest games…

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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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George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire universe has some advantages for a writer who wants to tell a new story there. For one, it has some elbow room. It’s detailed, it’s fleshed out, but not so much so as to leave no space for new ideas. Martin hasn’t filled up the sandbox to the point where trying to build something new would knock down what’s already there.

For another, people in the Ice and Fire stories are allowed to be somewhat recognizably human. Characters can swear and crack jokes and possess active sex drives. It’s not like, say, Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where nobody ever says “shit” or shows more than a chaste, plot-driven interest in the possibility of romance.

Telling a story is only part of making a game, though, and that’s where the Game of Thrones game falls down. (Warning: We will have to abuse the word “game” here even more than game reviews usually do.) This feels like a novella turned into a role-playing game against its will, which makes it tough to recommend, no matter how addicted to Ice and Fire a fan might be.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Well-crafted side-story plot
Despite the obvious logo and stirring theme music from the HBO TV adaptation, this is a production for fans of George Martin’s novels. The plot and even some of the gameplay systems hinge on dozens of details from the books that the TV version’s writers either cut out or simply haven’t gotten to yet. Some bits won’t fully make sense to players who haven’t read all five, although by and large you can get away with having just read the original Game of Thrones.

That isn’t unequivocally a problem, but followers of the TV show alone should know that they’re going to be confused from time to time if they play the game. At the very least, they’ll miss out on a lot of the little plot threads that weave the game together with the existing world and story.

While the story has some fundamental problems (more on that later), the way it fits in to Martin’s world is very cleverly done. Events and characters from the novels exert an influence on the game in a way that makes it feel like a part of the larger epic, but at the same time, the game carves out its own territory in the world. It’s not simply retelling a chunk of the novels or TV series. The opening movements of the original story have a neat symmetry to them, too, as the adventures of two war veterans — a soldier from the Night’s Watch and a prodigal lord’s son — eventually come together and revolve around each other.

Put the bite on ‘em
Different aspects of gameplay build on parts of the novels, too. For instance, Alester the lord’s son is a priest of the fire god R’hllor, a plot element introduced in the second of Martin’s novels, and so his suite of combat abilities includes all kinds of interesting variations on the theme of setting his weapons on fire.

Meanwhile, Mors, the Night’s Watch man, has a nifty concept for a sidekick. Speaking in general terms, so as not to spoil too much, later books in the series introduce the notion of a “warg” or a “skinchanger.” That’s someone who isn’t exactly a werewolf but who has the ability to sink his consciousness into an animal and control it.

Mors’s preferred companion is his pet bull terrier, who fights alongside him in combat and sneaks around for him elsewhere. Taking control of the dog introduces a stealthy element to exploring dungeons — he can fit through small spaces, and he can rip out a bad guy’s throat if he gets the jump on them. This is incredibly fun. Somebody making a better game ought to swipe the idea and run with it as soon as possible.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Unpolished combat, interface, scenario design…
Unfortunately, this is not that better game.

Start with the combat system, a massively-multiplayer-style scheme that takes place in not-quite real time. Players can pause in between dealing out automatic attacks to slow time down to a crawl, access a sub-menu, and queue up special attacks.

Well and good in theory but not so effective in this particular execution. Battles here need much more feedback of every kind. Visual effects, sounds, tactile response…none of it is timed right to make fighting feel like anything more than watching an enemy’s life bar tick down. The camera and A.I. deal very badly with enclosed spaces, so fights in any kind of corridor-type space often lead to allied characters disappearing behind walls or getting stuck around corners.

On a more detailed level, the interface has a lot of fiddly issues that need cleaning up. For instance, the minimap is missing vital details. It shows where objects and quest goals are sometimes, but it doesn’t show the layout of the area around them, so it’s impossible to follow a route without constantly dipping in and out of a sub-screen. Shop menus don’t show comparisons between existing equipment and potential purchases, and they’re also missing an option to automatically equip new gear. Again, that means toggling back and forth between inventories and shop screens to gather information.

During some of the more confusing quests, all that twiddling with menus becomes maddening. Some quest goals are simple and clear, but a lot of them are liable to send players running in search of a walkthrough. Many of the interior areas in Game of Thrones succumb to a bad case of the old “maze of twisty passages, all alike” design style, leading players to chase their own tail for ages through a mess of identical gray and brown rooms.

Cutscene, move, cutscene again
The quests that are easy enough to progress through are not necessarily fun. Imagine a section of a quest chain that involves going and visiting somebody at his house. First, find a marker that reveals the location of the house and watch a cutscene. Then walk to the house and watch a cutscene that introduces the house. Walk five steps into the house, talk to the character, and there goes another cutscene. Bad guys burst in during the middle of the conversation. Knock them off, then watch more cutscenes.

Some of the blips of interactivity between each cinematic here last no more than a couple of seconds. Most of them don’t take any thought or effort. Why that five-step gap between the house cutscene and talking to the householder? Heaven knows. The practical effect, anyway, is a nasty uneven staccato rhythm to gameplay and story both. It’s no fun being constantly jerked in and out of interacting with the game, especially when there’s no meat to those stretches of interaction anyway.

Action speaks louder
After a while you start to wonder what the game sees as the important part — the bits where you’re holding the controller or the bits where you put it down.

Perhaps the novels were too much of an influence on the game. Martin’s stories involve a lot of dialogue, a lot of politicking, a lot of behind-the-scenes machinations, and a surprisingly small amount of genuine action. As often as not, major battles and other physical confrontations happen “off-camera,” so to speak, or in between chapters. What action there is tends to take place in short, sharp bursts.

If this game were going to get away with doing so much talking, it needed better voice acting. Some of the cast members are quite good — Conleth Hill leads the pack reprising his role as Lord Varys from the TV series. The majority, however (especially the supporting roles), aren’t so effective that we want to listen to them for minutes at a stretch. Alester in particular is cursed with a voice that just can’t sell his dialogue properly. He’s flat at best and ridiculous whenever he tries and fails to get his supposed emotional dilemmas across.

Nice day for a Red Wedding
Regarding another possibly unfortunate influence, Martin’s novels are (in?)famous for doling out pain to their heroes. Now, to tell the truth, this reputation has grown a little in the telling. The Ice and Fire stories do have their moments of wrist-slitting misery, but they’re also often upbeat and hopeful. Sometimes they’re even genuinely funny.

The folks who worked on this video game, though, apparently decided to focus on the wrist-slitting misery. If there has ever been a grimmer, more depressing story in a game, we don’t want to play it. Our heroes can find their way to four different endings, and they range in tone from “bleak and uncertain” to “horrific and hateful.” Leading up to those endings, every awful thing that can possibly happen does. Something brutal befalls nearly every likable character. Many of the characters we like at first give us reasons to hate them before very long. The most uplifting moments come around when someone really horrible dies.

Do we display an excessive sentimentality in saying that it isn’t any fun getting kicked in the teeth at every turn of the plot? Maybe, but when you look more closely at the mechanics of the whole thing, the story here isn’t just depressing, it’s ultimately predictable. Once you understand that Game of Thrones is just going to constantly upend the pain-bucket over your head, you settle down to expect the worst, and when the worst indeed happens (again and again), it doesn’t have much impact.

CONCLUSION

Once again, if this had been something like a short spin-off novel, it might have worked. It would have ruined the reader’s entire day, but it might have worked.

It also would have gotten its business done a lot quicker. Instead, the interactive version stretches all that doom and brutality over 15 or 20 hours, and the gameplay filling space in between doesn’t do much to ease the pain. Somebody may one day make a fine game out of the Song of Ice and Fire. It hasn’t happened yet.

Score: 40/100

Game of Thrones will be released on May 15, 2012 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. An Xbox 360 copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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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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Some of the modern world’s most iconic institutions can be found in Minecraft: the Empire State building, a 1000:1 scale Monopoly board, the U.S.S. Enterprise, and–oh yeah–the planet Earth. But the video below tops them all, as gamers have taken it upon themselves to recreate the world of Game of Thrones piece-by-piece. The things we do for nerd cred….

You can read more about The Server of Ice and Fire project here, and the recent Minecraft update 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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Below you’ll find a listing of every GamesBeat game review to date. They are listed in reverse chronological order with the latest review appearing at the top. Note that the dates listed are for when the review was posted, not necessarily the actual release date for the game. That information, along with platform tested and more, can be found in the actual review.

2013

5/13

• Metro: Last Light

5/6

• Star Trek

4/24

• Monaco

4/22

• Dead Island Riptide

4/19

• Defiance

4/18

• Cut the Rope: Time Travel

4/13

• Shootmania Storm

3/25

• BioShock: Infinite

3/22

• The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct

3/21

• Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon

3/18

• StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm

3/14

• Lego City: Undercover

3/8

• MLB 13 The Show

3/7

• God of War: Ascension

3/6

• Dollar Dash

3/5

• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow — Mirror of Fate

3/4

• SimCity

2/26

• Star Wars Pinball

2/25

• Tomb Raider

2/19

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
• Crysis 3

2/18

• Serious Sam Double D XXL

2/12

• Aliens: Colonial Marines

2/5

• Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time
• Dead Space 3

2/4

• Ni No Kuni: The Wrath of the White Witch

1/31

• Omerta: City of Gangsters

1/30

• Skulls of the Shogun
• Fire Emblem: Awakening

01/22

• The Cave

01/18

• Temple Run 2
• Tokyo Crash Mobs

01/15

• Earth Defense Force 2017 Portable

01/10

• Noble Nutlings
• Anarchy Reigns

01/07

• Seduce Me

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The company is already one of the biggest players in online games thanks to licensed titles such as Battlestar Galactica Online, which has more than nine million registered users. It is using big brands such as Game of Thrones to get an edge with its free-to-play online games.

The Game of Thrones TV series was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s fantasy book series, A Song of Ice and Fire. Since the HBO series debuted, video game fans have been chomping at the bit to see a game adaptation.

Martin and HBO spilled the news about the game last year, but Bigpoint hasn’t had a chance to show off its work until now. Bigpoint’s new web site for the game offers you the chance to sign up and “die for your house.”

Bigpoint grew big as a browser-based game publisher in Hamburg, Germany, but in the past couple of years it has expanded into the U.S. and moved its headquarters to San Francisco. The company will show a sneak peek of the game, a browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (an MMORPG that doesn’t require a long download) at the upcoming Game Developers Conference next week in San Francisco.

The game will be set in the fictional medieval world of Westeros and its Seven Kingdoms, where summers can last for decades and winters can last a lifetime.

“With a rich and complex story, expressed through an amazing level of detail, it’s easy to see why the HBO series … has amassed an army of fans worldwide,” said Heiko Hubertz, chief executive and founder of Bigpoint. “We intend to build a game that resonates intimately with its diehard community of followers, while also creating an authentic gaming experience that attracts newcomers to the franchise. The excitement of online games is that, over time, their collective input will help shape the game’s destiny; we’re eager to see how the story unfolds.”

Bigpoint plans to create high-end graphics to deliver a “visceral gaming experience” and capture the “bloodthirsty struggle for power, corruption, and deception” from the series. Players will have to master both combat and politics to ensure survival of their dynasties.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss of HBO said the series can be naturally extended into a game, which is one more example of transmedia, or the exploitation of a popular property across books, televisions, games, and other media. Norwegian game studio Artplant will develop the title for Bigpoint on top of the Unity 3D development platform. Artplant helped develop Battlestar Galactica Online.

Work on the game began last summer and a closed beta test is planned for the fall of 2012. Bigpoint has more than 250 million registered users. Last year, investors Summit Partners and TA Associates bought a majority stake in Bigpoint for $350 million in a deal that valued Bigpoint at $600 million. Bigpoint has more than 800 employees now.

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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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HBO has added support for its HBO Go streaming service to Xbox 360, giving gamers yet another reason not to turn off their console to watch television shows.

The news was announced last night at an Xbox 360 event by HBO Co-President Eric Kessler, reports Engadget. HBO Go service offers a variety of premium content, including popular movies as well as hit original TV series like True Blood and Boardwalk Empire. However, the only way to get the service is to subscribe to HBO through a traditional cable/satellite service provider.

The service will become available April 1, which coincides with the premiere of the second season of HBO’s Game of Thrones TV show, which is based off of George R.R. Martin’s series of novels. Previously, HBO has tried to give cable and satellite TV subscribers an incentive to use the HBO Go service by allowing them to watch next week’s episode after they finish the premiere — but, so far there’s no word on whether the same will happen with Game of Thrones).