Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Bungie stepped out of the shadow of Halo this week and revealed its new game. The Bellevue, Wash.-based rockstar development studio is making Destiny for the PlayStation 4 and other platforms with publisher Activision Blizzard.

The studio finally showed off extended gameplay this week that demonstrated how the massively multiplayer online first-person shooter game will work. It involves not only breathtaking art but also some innovative thinking in allowing multiple players to participate in a shared, narrated experience, said Pete Parsons, the chief operating officer of Bungie, in an interview with GamesBeat.

The most interesting part of the demo Bungie showed was the “public space,” where a group of players entered an area and teamed up together to take down a fierce Spider Tank. That’s just one example where Bungie will innovate in its next-generation game, Parsons said.

Here’s our edited interview with Parsons.

GamesBeat: So you got a chance to show it for the first time, or to show it extensively. How does that feel for you?

Pete Parsons: You’ve seen it. We have more than 400 of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and we’ve been working on Destiny for years. The opportunity to bring it to [the Electronic Entertainment Expo] and show it off to the world, show it off to our community, it just couldn’t be more exciting for us. We’ve been working on this project, depending on how you count it, for five or six years. A lot of the ideas were around in 2002. It’s been a long time coming.

GamesBeat: How did you choose what to show first?

Parsons: Destiny is a massive, persistent, living world. We had to figure out, what are the things we want to show that will be interesting to people? In the end, what we wanted to show is that you come in and have your own really tight personal story that we feel good about delivering — whether you do it by yourself or with friends — but then when you proceed in that story, you come into a public space. That’s something that everyone will experience.

GamesBeat: Can you explain more about that public space?

Parsons: Public space is where players converge. No matter what their activity, they converge from all across the game. Some players might be moving through their more narrative-driven story-like experiences. Some might be going off to raids. Some might be going off to more familiar multiplayer-type activities. But all of them have this crossroads.

At that crossroads, they can continue to move along in their journey, or something like a public event triggers. In the demo we’re showing, a big Fallen craft screams across the sky, drops off dropships and the Devil Walker, and I can choose to just jump in. It’s certainly high-intensity combat, but it’s low-intensity in the sense that nobody’s counting on me to be the only thing between success and failure. I can just jump in, have a great time, take down something like the Devil Walker we showed, and get a reward for it. Then I move on my way. That’s a lot of fun. That’ll happen throughout the game, whether you’re playing more story content or playing other types of activities.

GamesBeat: You also have a pretty heavy storyline.

Parsons: We do, and that was a huge challenge. We faced a number of challenges with Destiny. One is, how do you combine great story and narrative with these more public living spaces and worlds? How do you break down the barriers between what it means to be doing player-versus-player multiplayer or cooperative play or narrative play? How do you break down those walls so that when I’m investing in building and growing my Guardian over time, I can move from the story with that exact same build and exact same skills right into a multiplayer experience? What’s our new 30 seconds of fun, where we’re combining space magic and deep investment in your armor or weapons? Ultimately, what does it mean when we go back to the Tower, which is a purely social space? What do I do there, and who am I meeting, and how does it send me off on new adventures?

We spent tons of time trying to solve all of these things, let alone what happens on the back end, where all that seamless matchmaking happens. What are the tools we need to develop to build so much content over time? How does it continue to grow so you feel like you’re a part of something and not just another piece of content that’s being dropped in?

GamesBeat: Sony came to you a long time ago to get this relationship going.

Parsons: Yeah. Certainly our relationship with Xbox remains strong and long-lasting, but it was interesting. Sony came to us years ago and wanted our feedback about what they were doing — not just on what’s next for PlayStation 4 but what we thought of the PlayStation Network and what our needs were. They definitely listened to us. It was great to begin building a relationship with them. We haven’t been on a Sony platform since 2001, with [the game] Oni.

GamesBeat: You haven’t quite spelled out what that relationship means yet. Is there more to come on that?

Parsons: Yeah, there’s more to come. Right now, we think they have definitely lent an ear to understanding what our needs are for the future, both for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4. It’s a great opportunity for us. We’re welcoming more people to the Bungie family. And they’re a bunch of great guys.

GamesBeat: And you got Jason Jones to go up on the stage.

Parsons: It was the first time since Gamestock in 2001, with Halo: Combat Evolved. I remember that moment, when we said, “What better than to have Jason get back up on stage with Joe and show off the thing we’ve been working on for so long?”

Honestly, across the studio, this is the game that we’ve always wanted to play. We had to expand quite a bit. We’ve almost doubled our size. We were bringing in some of the most talented people in the world, and we couldn’t actually tell them what they’d be working on. They had to make that leap of faith. It was really gratifying to have them come on and say, “Oh, man, if we can even pull half of that off, we’re going to have a game that I’ve always wanted to play.” I feel like we’re well on our 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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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — Games. Exclusives. Exclusive games. Microsoft largely shifted the emphasis well away from the Xbox One console itself — and much of the controversy surrounding it — in order to showcase the one thing everyone really wanted to see: What we’ll play on it.

But they also took some time to show the outgoing Xbox 360 some love. For starters, it won’t be outgoing anytime soon. Microsoft debuted a new version (no price mentioned) and an exclusive game to go with it. Free-to-play PC hit World of Tanks will get its own custom-built Xbox version and remain free-to-play on the 360 servers

Then Microsoft went full-bore into Xbox One’s opening salvo, with only one crossover title mentioned: Metal Gear Solid: Phantom Pain, the first open-world entry in the long-running action-stealth franchise.

Only two represented the smaller, indie fare that buoyed Xbox’s Summer of Arcade downloadables — Max: The Curse of the Brotherhood, a fantasy platformer from Press Play (and sequel to Max & The Magic Marker) and Below, from the creators of hit tablet game Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP.

The other 14 were solidly top-tier, Xbox One exclusives. Expected sequels like The Witcher 3, Battlefield 4, Forza 5, Killer Instinct II, Dead Rising 3, and a new iteration of Minecraft all looked like promising — and gorgeous — additions to their franchises. But new IPs got special attention at the conference and generated more excitement.

The crowd cheered when Panzer Dragoon creator Yukio Futasugi’s name appeared on the screen. His new game, Crimson Dragon, looks like it’s won’t divert far from that series’ popular (and long-absent) gameplay. Ryse: Son of Rome showed off a beautifully rendered Roman onslaught, though its combat did look like it was heavily quick-time-event-based. The original Max Payne himself, Sam Lake, spoke about Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break as a game with a personalized experienced that goes beyond what we’ve seen before. Titanfall, from the creators of Call of Duty, might just be the safest bet a new IP can make, featuring infantry fighters going hand-to-hand against giant robots.

And after the lukewarm reception for Fuse, Insomniac Games appears to be back to crazy-firearms form. Ted Price, Insomniac’s CEO, stepped onto a Microsoft stage for the first time to introduce Sunset Overdrive, a wild, parkouring shooter that saw skinny kids headshooting mutants with smiley-face bullets, decapitating LP launchers, and energy-drink-fueled zap guns.

The other big surprise turned out to be Spark, a create-your-own game that can be played co-operatively through Microsoft’s SmartGlass. Its demo featured a game world apparently created on the fly mainly through voice commands and touch controls, right down to the time of day and adding textures. Even more impressive, the tablet player could manipulate the environment to send the player on an earthan tidal wave across a battlefield occupied by goblin airships and elemental mechs.

And as is their custom, Microsoft ended with a teaser trailer for a new Halo game staring the Master Chief. Oddly, though it was described as a first-person shooter, at no point did anyone refer to it as Halo 5, the expected sequel to last year’s Halo 4.

The Xbox One itself also left a lot of questions hanging. Microsoft spent almost no time on the console itself, with only brief callouts to SmartGlass and its social features. Gamers can edit and upload gameplay — which the Xbox One automatically records as you play — and live-stream your sessions with audio commentary via Kinect, the Xbox’s built-in motion-control camera/microphone. That functionality was slipped into a Killer Instinct II demo.

Along with the Spark demo, that also represented the only mentions Kinect rated during the entire conference. Microsoft also gave up the Xbox One’s retail price: $499, about a hundred dollars above what analyst Michael Patcher predicted.

By debuting game after game after game, Microsoft went with the old (and not incorrect) theory that people don’t buy the hardware … they buy the games. And while plenty of mysteries still surround how the console will work, what it will and won’t allow, and what customers must do in order to use it, Microsoft did finally give their fans plenty of reasons to buy in to Xbox One come November.

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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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Halo: Spartan Assault is debuting on a Windows tablet, bringing the blockbuster franchise to mobile fans for the first time. It’s a twin-stick, arcade-style action-shooting game that uses a top-down perspective of the sci-fi battlefield.

You control the game with your fingers, tapping the screen turn shoot or turn your character. (Here’s our full preview). The vision was to give Halo fans a new way to experience the franchise that has sold more than 50 million copies since 2001 and generated more than $3.4 billion in revenue. The team tried out more than 15 versions of the mobile game over a period of years before they felt they got it right.

You play as Sarah Palmer, the character from Halo 4′s Spartan Ops missions. The time is set in 2552, when the cease-fire with the Covenant alien races has been broken. You can customize your armor and acquire boosts. You can choose to use just about everything from the franchise assets: vehicles, weapons, armor abilities, and Skulls. The graphics do look good, but it’s hard to say if hardcore gamers are going to go crazy of this.

Vanguard Entertainment made Spartan Assault under the direction of Microsoft-owned Halo development studio 343 Industries. It runs on Windows 8 and Windows 8 Mobile devices. The game will debut in July for $6.99. It’s a risk for Microsoft to make it captive to its own hardware, but it might also be one of the only ways to get the Microsoft-branded tablets to sell. It has 25 missions.

We sat down with developer Graeme Jennings of 343 Industries at a recent pre-E3 preview. Jennings told us that the team spent a long time making the game more accessible. One of the challenges was making the game easy to play for people with different hand sizes.

“It took loads of user testing to get it right,” Jennings said. “One of the key things about this game is production values.”

Here’s our video interview 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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Halo on your Windows tablet. Let that idea sink in for a moment. Now allow me to manage your expectations.

Vanguard Entertainment, under the auspices of Halo developer 343 Industries, has crafted the first official, non-console entry in Microsoft’s premier shooter franchise. Halo: Spartan Assault is a top-down, twin-stick shooter that puts Mjolnir-armored boots on the ground and brings nearly the entire franchise sandbox to bear — vehicles, weapons, enemies, armor abilities, skulls, you name it — on a mobile platform.

It looks like Halo. It sounds like Halo. It smells like Halo. It just doesn’t feel like Halo.

I spent some time tooling around in Spartan Assault (releasing this July for $6.99 on Windows 8 and Windows 8 Mobile) during a special event hosted by Microsoft, and while it never struck me as worthless, it’s far from exceptional. This Halo feels more like a vicarious thrill than an actual one.

That said, I’ve got to give full credit for the attention to detail. Elites rage when you pop their shields. Puny Grunts do the same spin-drop collapse when shot dead and run away when their nerves break. (Microsoft confirmed Brutes but did not show them.) You can pick up dropped weapons, jump into vehicles, and stick enemies with plasma grenades. Vehicles smoke when damaged. The sights and sounds are instantly familiar to any fan of the series, and Vanguard threw in an impressive depth of field as well. It all moves buttery smooth.

Those aren’t the only positives. Spartan Assault stars Sarah Palmer, the standout character from Halo 4′s Spartan Ops missions/movies, and rewinds the calendar to tell a bit of her backstory via fully animated cutscenes and five-stage missions.

Like the best entries in the series, those stages change things up nicely. A Covenant splinter group has broken the ceasefire with Earth and unwisely attacked the moon that Palmer’s standing on. That initiates a series of very Halo-ish objectives. I started out on a cliffside platform, defending it against all comers with a few marine A.I. helpers. Like Halo 4, your mayhem earns Spartan Points. Spartan Assault converts them to credits that unlock new weapons and abilities. Naturally, you can buy those credits with real money.

Next, I led a small squad though a few corridor-canyons to take out objectives. Then it dropped me into a Scorpion tank (complete with passengers) to slowly wander a map looking for the last few Ghosts and Wraiths to bombard.

That’s when the limitations really start to peek out. The maps I saw lacked inspiration, and combat operates like a foregone conclusion. It just isn’t worthy of repetition.

From a conceptual approach, Vanguard didn’t move very far off its Gorilla Games roots. They’re the team responsible for the nicely gratuitous Gatling Gears, another twin-stick shooter with tougher multistage missions that played beautifully on Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and PC. More accurately, it played beautifully with physical controls. Spartan Assault gets itself into the most trouble with its contextual touch controls.

Tight, smartly designed controls really did evolve the combat in the first Halo, and the updated control scheme for Reach made it even smarter. Spartan Assault’s virtual twin sticks materialize wherever your thumbs make contact with the touch screen — that’s a good thing. But they also try to move with you as your thumbs inevitably slide around, and that inevitably leads to serious control issues. Before long, it just couldn’t tell the difference between my thumbs drifting and my attempts to make a Spartan move around and shoot things.

Learning to manage both the tank’s machine gun and its revolving turret on one “stick” also required way too much patience. I overheard one developer mention how he couldn’t even remember how many different control styles they’d tested until they hit on this particular scheme. I don’t doubt it, but I do think they stopped looking too soon.

Watching another 343 rep play, I noticed he briefly lifted his thumbs to re-center the controls roughly ever three seconds. Nice trick, and it worked, but something seems wrong when you have to reset your inputs every few moments in order to make them work right.

Even with that strategy, aiming weapons tips too far toward trial-and-error, and throwing a grenade falls somewhere between guesswork and prayer. Melee attacks respond poorly to the double-tap input to the point of being pointless. Worse still, it locks grenades, armor abilities, and all pick-up/use functions to buttons on the edge of the screen; it’s impossible to do any of these things without stopping dead in your tracks, taking a hand off the tablet, finding the button, and touching it.

Picture doing that on an Xbox controller.

Even the story feels oddly removed. Spartan Assault presents it as a series of historical tactical simulations held aboard the UNSC Infinity, à la Halo 4′s War Games multiplayer. I’m not sure how this “It’s all a dream” approach can avoid bleeding all dramatic tension out of Spartan Assault, but I wish Vanguard the best of luck with it.

And indeed, a lot of those control issues might vanish on a PC … or when Vanguard patches in support for the Wired Xbox 360 controller on Windows 8 PCs, tablets and Surface sometime after launch. On top of that, Palmer’s a reliably entertaining presence when the writing backs her up, and I want to see more of her. She deserves her own vehicle.

Unfortunately, as-is, Halo: Spartan Assault is a vehicle without a reliable steering wheel. Putting “Halo” in the title raises the stakes considerably and invites a much more critical eye. This game has enough problems already; it suffers more for playing around in a franchise where expectations are so high. But a lot must happen — and I hope it does — before anyone can reasonably call this a Halo game.

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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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343 Industries general manager Bonnie Ross has just announced a new live-action television series based in the Halo universe, and Steven Spielberg is on board as a creative partner.

“The Halo universe is an amazing opportunity to be at that intersection where technology and myth-making meet to produce something ground-breaking,” said Spielberg in a prerecorded message.

As yet, no further information exists on whether Halo: The Television Series will involve the Master Chief, when in the continuity it’ll take place, when it will premiere, or even how many episodes have been ordered. But it’s likely to be similar in design to the Forward Unto Dawn web series and, given its origins, exclusive to the new Xbox One console.

For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

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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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No one can keep a first-person fighter down … they’ll just keep spawning somewhere else.

Respawn Entertainment, the studio founded by former leads of the Infinity Ward Call of Duty team, filed a trademark on April 11 for “Titan,” according to VG24/7. It’s likely that Titan has something to do with the developer’s upcoming debut title.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has Respawn Entertainment filing for Titan for use in “video and computer game programs, video game discs, [and] video game software.”

I’ve reached out to Respawn to determine exactly what “Titan” is and will update with the studio’s comments.

In March 2010, Activision fired Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella for “breaches of contract and insubordination.” The two developers, who oversaw the Call of Duty franchise at its zenith, quickly formed a new studio called Respawn. Publisher Electronic Arts seized the opportunity to fund the coveted duo. West and Zampella eventually convinced over 40 other Infinity Ward staffers to join them at Respawn.

Since then, Respawn hasn’t revealed much about what it is working on. It did post a blurry picture of its anticipated title, but most expect an actual reveal at the coming Electronic Entertainment Expo gaming trade show in Los Angeles the week of June 10. If it does make an appearance at that annual event, EA would show it off at its own press conference and possibly at Sony’s or (more likely) Microsoft’s.

With around three years of development, it’s about time the studio starts revealing concrete details about its first game. Unconfirmed rumors claim it is a sci-fi shooter designed to take on Halo, but anything is possible.

In March, Jason West revealed that he was retiring from games to deal with personal issues. Reports claim he hasn’t been actively working at Respawn since May.

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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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Little by little, Bungie is opening up. The company has had to keep a lot of secrets, especially since it split from Microsoft in 2009 and began working on a top-secret project. We now know that the secret, code-named Tiger, is a new game series called Destiny.

A visit to Bungie’s headquarters is an enviable journey. It’s like going to Oz and seeing the man behind the curtain. Gamers and budding developers would love to get a foot in the door — and perhaps make off with a souvenir. But having been there, I can tell you it’s pretty secure place. Fans have to keep out, but the whole place seems like it is built in the service of fans, like a physical homage to Halo and the company’s next big project.

After a couple of leaks spilled the beans, Bungie acknowledged Destiny and said it would make a series of games over the next ten years, all to be published by Activision. For the first time since the Halo series started more than a decade ago, the new game series will be multi-platform, publishing on platforms such as the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, not to mention the next Xbox and perhaps the PC.

We recently interviewed Pete Parsons, chief operating officer, about what it’s like to work at Bungie. Eric Osborne, community manager and writer at Bungie, led me on a tour through the company’s 80,000-square-feet headquarters in Bellevue, Wash., a suburb of Seattle. The place has no signs visible from the street, and you would never guess that it is housed inside a shopping mall in an office park. It used to be a theater complex and a bowling alley. This is the place where a team was willing to bet on the future and walk away from a multibillion-dollar game property.

A Halo museum, invaded by the Sexy Sax Man

The past is in the downstairs, where the former bowling alley was. Security is tight.

In fact, the day before I got there, two security officers had to escort a woman who was breaking the rules by trying to talk with every employee who exited the building. She wanted speakers for her class, and she also wanted to find out how her son could get work at Bungie. A few days earlier, a guy named Sexy Sax Man burst in to play music, and he got thrown out too.

Osborne says that the downstairs area is where they show fans who come into the building during shows such as Penny Arcade’s PAX event. During such times, dozens of fans mill about the entrance, hoping for a peek inside.

Just past the lobby, the downstairs hallway leads to a series of rooms: an arcade game room and interview rooms. In those interview rooms, a potential new hire could spend a whole day, being interviewed by one Bungie staffer after another. Bungie contends it has never lowered its standards for hiring. The hallway itself is littered with Halo paraphernalia on the walls and behind glass cases. Props from marketing campaigns of years past sit around.

A 3o-foot glass case houses a bunch of Halo toys and life-size replicas of weapons. Another glass case holds the trophies — all of the awards, like Halo’s first million games shipped. A big metallic award with a lightning bolt sits above a big couch. Nearby is a theater where Bungie entertained the gaggle of press that recently came to see Destiny. We were in there all alone, lucky to have our own private tour. The theater seems way too big for our small group. It has seating for 80.

Further down the crooked hallway is the Laboratorium, where a bunch of cubicles are equipped with game machines, monitors, and webcams. The team shoots video of players as they play snippets of the upcoming game. They gauge the reactions and emotions of the players. The team can even do eye-tracking, or monitoring which part of the screen the player is looking at. If those players get lost in a maze, the team goes back to designing something better.

Still further down the crooked hallway is the Spandex Palace. This is the motion-capture studio, a big empty space with floor mats and rigs that mount 22 motion-capture cameras. The team can capture all movement in the room, including that of performance actors as they speak their lines. The cameras record the movements in 3D and store them in digital form.

Game artists can take the entire performance — the body movements, the lip movements, the voice acting — and bring it directly into the game. They can then enhance it with their digital artistry, so it looks nothing like actors in spandex and more like alien creatures and space marines. The fact that Bungie has its own mo-cap studio shows it is working on the high end; many other studios hire motion-capture experts to do the work for them.

One painting on the wall, by Seattle artist Ken Taya, stands out. Created for Bungie’s 20th anniversary, it has a bunch of events from the company’s history woven into a single, overcrowded painting. At the bottom is a chair, and by the chair is a tail. It is a tiger’s tail, and it was a hint about what was coming up.

There’s a snack room with all sorts of free goodies. Bungie employees get a lot of free food. And executives like Parsons go out to lunch with most new employees, so they can get a download on what works and what doesn’t.

“We have a free-lunch program so we can make sure new employees meet older employees,” Parsons said. “We even have something called Bungie University where there’s more than 60 hours worth of video. Starting from when we kicked off Destiny to the team at large in August 2009, you can watch all the way until now.”

There’s also something called Tiger University, which brings new employees up to speed on the new project.

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The nanosuit is a technical masterpiece. It bonds with the user on a genetic level, giving you the power to augment your strength, protect yourself with extra armor, or turn you invisible with its cloaking capabilities.

But the most effective piece of equipment in Crysis 3 (out today for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC) has nothing to do with the suit, the fancy guns, or the explosives — that honor belongs to the hunting bow. It’s all you’ll ever need to take out your human and extraterrestrial foes with extreme precision.

The bow is just one example of developer Crytek’s refined focus on combat in Crysis 3. The first-person shooter (reviewed on the Xbox 360) arguably has the best implementation of the do-whatever-it-takes style set by its predecessors. You’re given complete freedom to dispose your enemies in any way you see fit, a process streamlined with improved nanosuit abilities and upgrades.

The story picks up 23 years after the events of Crysis 2, where the threat of the alien species known as the Ceph continues to grow stronger. But no one except the lone hero Laurence “Prophet” Barnes is aware of this danger, so he must convince everyone else (and stop the conniving Cell corporation) to help him save the world from destruction.

Crysis is typically known more for its taxing PC requirements — and the gorgeous results — than for the actual content on the disc. But Crysis 3 should change that as Crytek delivers a great-looking game with a riveting narrative and the intoxicating gameplay to back it up.

What you’ll like 

The Predator Bow

Crytek had a good reason to prominently feature the Predator Bow on the cover of Crysis 3. It’s a permanent fixture in your arsenal — even if you wanted to, you can’t swap it out with something else. And with so many ways to customize it, the bow is the most versatile weapon you’ll wield.

You can adjust its draw weight, which affects the speed of pulling an arrow taut before you release it and alters how much damage it deals. The “medium” draw weight is good for all-around situations, “low” has a fast draw speed meant for weaker targets, and “strong” is best for tougher enemies with its slow draw speed and high damage (it can pin humans and aliens to a wall). In addition to your normal hunting arrows, you can use special types that deliver an electric shock, a timed explosive, or an “air burst” that’s useful for killing groups of weaker enemies.

When you combine the bow with your cloaking ability, you’re unstoppable. Shooting arrows doesn’t disrupt the cloak and leave you vulnerable in the same way that using your firearms does. Cell operatives will cower in fear as you pick them off one by one, with the last survivor making one last desperate attempt to call for reinforcements. What he doesn’t know is that you’re already standing some distance behind him, with your bow aimed squarely at the back of his head.

Stalking your prey

Though we’ve seen the Ceph tear through New York City before in Crysis 2, Crysis 3′s version shows a city dressed in its best postapocalyptic Sunday clothes. Nature’s reclamation of the famous urban jungle — liberally spreading tall leaves of grass, flowers, trees, and swamps between dismantled skyscrapers — makes it nearly unrecognizable.

This makes it the perfect playground for you to use your weapons. While not an open-world game, you have a lot of room to explore and adapt to the many Cell soldiers and Ceph roaming the area. This is where your nanosuit’s tactical visor becomes your best friend: enemy targets and weapon caches clearly appear onscreen (marked by light blue arrows) after you “tag” them with your visor. It’ll also give you detailed information, such as the type of soldier you’re facing, the weapons they carry, and whether they notice you (via a color-coded system).

So you can plan your attacks even before you enter a hostile area. You can kill enemies off quietly with silenced weapons, approach them directly with your armor ability turned on, or find some happy medium between the two. A variety of nanosuit upgrades can further influence which of these paths you take. Think of them as like the multiplayer “perks” you find in Call of Duty (and in Crysis 3), but in a single-player campaign. These upgrades can give you a longer cloaking time, increased health, and over a dozen other nanosuit benefits.

With all these tools at my disposal, I challenged myself to come up with some creative kills, such as shocking groups of enemies in a shallow pond with an electric-powered arrow or stomping them from the air and destroying the survivors with a large machine gun. Swapping between my upgrades on the fly made each combat encounter feel like a thrilling and dynamic puzzle. At the end of my eight-hour adventure, I was still craving more.

‘It was never just about the suit’

The narrative in the first Crysis was too flimsy for my tastes as it was barely more than window dressing for the sandbox-style combat on the fictional island of Lingshan. Crysis 2 fared a bit better but suffered from some last-minute and inexplicable twists. Surprisingly, Crysis 3 brings all those threads together in a coherent and, at times, poignant sort of way.

Much of this centers around Prophet and his struggle over being both man and machine. Covered head to toe with the nanosuit, you’d be forgiven for thinking Prophet is just another cybernetic warrior who came from the same supersoldier school as Halo’s Master Chief. But he’s much more than that. Shaped by the traumatic events of Crysis and the developments in Crysis 2, Prophet isn’t even sure he’s human anymore. Characters and collectible documents often refer to him as an “it” or a piece of “hardware.” Other reports you find have him callously calculating the veracity of people’s statements, and he uses hard numbers and statistics to explain situations rather than communicate with his feelings.

At the outset of Crysis 3, he’s no longer Laurence Barnes the man — he’s Prophet, the most exceptional posthuman soldier ever created. The Cell corporation and the Ceph are obviously more significant threats to the world, but Prophet’s personal narrative is compelling. Seeing how he changes and the way his allies react to those changes is fascinating.

Crysis 3 isn’t some grand philosophical treatise on the dangers of merging humans with technology, but the fact that Crytek attempts to add some meaningful discussion to this sci-fi trope is impressive and way more thought-provoking than I expected.

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A variety of  people compose the game-development community, but they all want something similar: the ability to make a decent living while making decent games.

The IGDA advocates on the behalf of developers to help them accomplish that goal, and today the organization appointed Katie Edwards as its new executive director to oversee its mission.

“Kate’s knowledge of the global game industry and local cultures make her ideal to lead the IGDA,” said IGDA chair Dustin Clingman. “Her long service to our organization and commitment to the global development community will lay a foundation for ongoing international growth.”

Edwards worked for years with Microsoft as its senior geopolitical strategist. She helped the company adapt its business for new markets around the world. Edwards joined the IGDA in 2004. Her international experience helped her when she founded and chaired the association’s localization special interest group in 2007.

Throughout her career, Edwards has consulted on games like Halo, Mass Effect, and Fallout 3.

“Game development is an artistic endeavor with mass appeal,” Edwards said. “Developers and fans alike are increasingly aware of the diversity of those who both create and play games. Today, we’re engaged in creating great games for a global audience, and the IGDA remains the relevant focal point for supporting developers in the broadest sense of the definition. I’m thrilled to be given the privilege to lead and nurture this awesome community.”

Edwards lives in Seattle where she will perform her duties as IGDA director.

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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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Gears of War is bombarding the childrens’ toy market this month. French toy manufacturer Meccano has created a range of construction sets based on the violent, Mature-rated third-person-shooter gaming franchise, and it is marketing them heavily at boys 8 and over. The sets are on sale at toy stores in the U.S. and the United Kingdom (one place you can find them is at Toys ‘R’ Us). Nickelodeon, Disney XD, and Cartoon Network have also been running advertising spots for the toys on U.K. television  in the lead up to Christmas despite a target demographic that should never have played the games.

Wandering around Toys ‘R’ Us with my two children last week, this marketing strategy and the in-store placement of the new Meccano range struck an odd chord. Nestled snugly alongside pictures of Sonic the Hedgehog and brightly colored constructable cars, Gears of War protagonist Marcus Fenix’s face staring out from its Meccano box looked strangely out-of-place. It made me wonder why such a range is being aimed at young children.

Aspiring gamers

I contacted Meccano (U.K.) to ask why it’s targeting such a young audience, and whether it’s concerned about cross-promoting Mature-rated games to that demographic. “The Gears of War range is targeted at 8+,” said a spokesperson for Meccano. “Our focus is on vehicles from the game as well as characters and weapons, which is not dissimilar to Mega Bloks’ Halo models. The ambition of the range is to broaden Meccano’s appeal to younger modelers as well as to older modelers who are also gamers and who will be familiar with the 18+ game.”

The Halo Mega Bloks range is a similar concept to Gears of War Meccano line. First released in 2009, Halo Mega Bloks — based on Microsoft’s series of first-person-shooter games — are found prominently displayed in most major toy stores. It’s easy to forget that Halo, too, is a gaming franchise aimed at a mature audience.

“It would seem a tenuous proposition to aim [Gears of War] toys at 8 year olds based on a license they ‘shouldn’t’ know,” said Sean McGowan, a toy industry expert and senior analyst at Needham & Company, via email. “But aspirational marketing is nothing new, is it?”

“The success of the Halo toys tells us two things,” said McGowan. “Firstly, that kids like what their older siblings  – or even parents — are doing, and a watered down toy version lets them participate. Secondly, that collectors who are ‘of age’ like to have toys depicting their favorite properties.

“I can tell you that the median age of buyers of Halo blocks from Mega is much older than the average for their blocks, so maybe it won’t actually be little kids buying Gears of War toys. But, still, you have to wonder how it could be a responsible idea.”

Epic Games: We don’t market Gears of War to children

I approached Microsoft to discuss the Gears of War and Halo toys and the implications of involving young children in the world of Mature-rated games. “Generally speaking, video game figures and collectibles are not necessarily created with a younger market in mind, so we would not look to comment on Halo-branded items,” said a Microsoft spokesman. It also declined to comment on Gears of War Meccano, leaving that to Gears developer and intellectual property [IP] owner Epic Games.

“It’s always been the stance of Epic Games that we don’t market the Gears of War series to children under the age of 18,” the studio said in a statement. “We do not condone the actions of Meccano, and we will do everything in our power to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”

When asked for more details on the license negotiation, the studio issued an additional statement: “Epic Games owns the Gears of War IP and we advise our licensees on high-level branding for the franchise. We vigorously support the ESRB/PEGI ratings system. If a licensee comes in conflict with that, we make every effort to correct the situation.”

That is a strongly worded response, showing that Epic Games is not at all happy with Meccano’s use of its license. What it means for the future of Gears of War Meccano toys, though, is not totally clear.

A case for the ESRB?

The Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) provides video game age ratings for the benefit of consumers, helping keep unsuitable games away from minors. But its jurisdiction doesn’t extend to related products, meaning the sale and marketing of these toys do not contravene ESRB regulations.

“ESRB enforces guidelines that prohibit inappropriate target marketing of Mature-rated games to children,” Eliot Mizrachi, the ESRB’s director of communications, said in a statement. “These restrictions pertain to ads placed in media [in the U.S. or Canadian markets] whose audience is known to be composed of a certain proportion of children but do not apply to ancillary products that may be associated with or related to a Mature-rated game.”

The European equivalent of ESRB ratings is the PEGI system, overseen by the Video Standards Council. When asked about the Gears of War toys, the VSC was unconcerned . “There does not appear to be any attempt to directly use the toys as a means of selling the game which, in any case, is legally restricted to 18-year-olds and above,” VSC Communications Officer Gianni Zamo said.

Mega Call of Duty?

With no guidance from the ESRB or VSC on the sale of such toys, responsibility seems to fall on the shoulders of individual companies. Where there is a clear market, though, it will inevitably be targeted. Mega Bloks’ success with Halo has set an example for other mature gaming franchises to follow, and Needham and Company analyst Sean McGowan said he would “not be surprised to see MegaBrands do toys tied to Call of Duty, too, considering their link to Activision through Skylanders.”

For the time being, Gears of War seems set to continue its infiltration of the toy store, with blind-bagged figures joining the fray. Soon being traded in a schoolyard near you.

You can see the initial TV advertisement for Meccano Gears of War below. Meccano/Erector (U.S.) director Robert Grey told me there is no plan to run such television spots in any North American market.

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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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Video game publisher Electronic Arts is opening new online stores and changing its approach to e-commerce.

Back in August, EA worked with Treehouse Brand Stores to launch a new store for its subsidiary PopCap Games and one of the casual-game developer’s hottest properties, the tower-defense title Plants vs. Zombies. Now, that partnership continues as the two companies establish an official EA website that carries products from its individual stores. These include Mass Effect creator BioWare, American McGee’s dark twist on Alice in Wonderland, PopCap, and Dead Space studio Visceral Games. Treehouse also made stores for Microsoft’s popular first-person shooter Halo and Skyrim developer Bethesda (coming later this year).

Together, these companies are doing video game e-commerce right and putting the attention where it needs to be: on the brands and the people who love them.

A different kind of consumer

“Basically, the idea was there were lots of really cool brands — particularly in the video game space — that were not getting any love at retail,” Jed Seigle, the chief executive of Treehouse, told GamesBeat in a phone interview. “And if they were getting into Target or Hot Topic, it would just be a logo slapped on a shirt, and it was shitty quality. So we essentially went to these video game publishers and said, ‘We’d like to build your official store, and we’ll design products that are going to be targeted not at the lowest common denominator but more the fans who really play the game.’”

Brennan Townley, the director of brand licensing at PopCap, spoke to GamesBeat previously about the Plants vs. Zombies store. He more recently told us, “With the Treehouse model, we can react quickly to new trends, fan feedback, and developments within our game,” said  “Ultimately, it allows us to put out great product and reach our broad fan base in a meaningful way.”

Seigle explained that when game companies try to run their own online stores, they often don’t have the time to do them right. Treehouse relegates these efforts in a way that pays off and better serves the fans. These stores then become home to not only the publisher or developer’s products but also other licensees, allowing customers can find everything in one spot.

Selling brands in retail — at brick-and-mortar stores like Wal-Mart — works differently than e-commerce. “Those stores have very limited floor space, so if you’re willing to create an item, it’s gotta be really, really explicit about what that’s about,” he said. “Which is why you get Call of Duty or Mass Effect or Halo — basically a marketing logo and image or box art slapped on a T-shirt. There aren’t hoodies. There aren’t hats. There aren’t sort of cool, custom pieces.”

E-commerce stores weren’t always immune to this problem. “When you started getting some of these online stores up and running maybe six, seven years ago, it was basically logo-slapping,” said Andi Riordan, the president of Creative Minx Marketing, who is representing Treehouse on the Halo Waypoint Store. “A lot of them were unauthorized. There were a lot of cease-and-desist letters that went out. And so what happened is, what we liked [about] Treehouse — it wasn’t just T-shirts going up on a store. They really took their unique approach to come in and to make sure to work with the games teams and to become part of the community and address those consumers. Not to cannibalize the product that was going to go out on a retail level, but instead come up with different product that was addressing an additional consumer that was buying these games.”

“These fans invest so much time in these games,” said Seigle. “But they’re also fairly savvy. I would never wear a T-shirt that said Mass Effect across the chest, but I’d definitely wear my N7 hoodie with the N7 emblem and the stripe. And that type of stuff doesn’t work in traditional retail. Because we’re smaller, because we’re online, I don’t have to do 10,000 of a design. I can do 200 or 500 to see if it works. So we really cater to the most passionate fans, and I think that’s the reason why our stores have been successful and why it’s harder to do it in more traditional retail channels, particularly the apparel section.”

Getting the most out of online stores and communities

The benefits to e-commerce, besides putting more fan-oriented products (novels, statues, replicas, apparel, and so on) in one place, is to make sure the quality is high and that it’s priced correctly, said Seigle. It also allows companies like Treehouse to offer a greater range of products and act as a significant retail channel for other license partners. “And that allows them to take more risks and do more products,” he said.

“We’re always cognizant of having new and interesting product,” he said. “As it relates to the types of products and the designs that go in, we have a design team here, and almost everybody at the company plays games. … A lot of the ideas we come up with [are because] we spend a lot of time playing the game. Because if we’re going to folks who are really committed and themselves spending a lot of time, we have to do that, too. There’s no way to sort of get yourself immersed in the universe and in the lore around the game unless you spend a lot of time playing it.”

Ideas come from within the games — for example, items like a watch that Isaac Clarke wears in Dead Space — or from the communities. Siegle said they’ll engage with forum members and other gamers online to find out their favorite quotes, moments, iconography, and what they’d most like to see out of a product.

“The purchasers of online store products tend to buy higher price points,” said Riordan. “They’ll spend 40 or 50 bucks on a T-shirt, but they want it quality, they want it cooler, and they don’t want something that then 80,000 units are being shipped out to a midtier or big-box retailer.

“What the [development] teams tend to love — you have to also make sure to do that additional research and take those extra steps to know that that is in conjunction with what the consumers will actually buy and actually wear. There might be a team who thinks, ‘God, this is the greatest design ever.’ And this is their baby. But it might not sell at retail — ie., a brick and mortar shop — because they might not get it. It might be a more casual gamer.”

Appealing to a core consumer, who would shop online, means listening to what people are most highly anticipating and marrying that to what the team has in mind, said Riordan. It’s a balance between accessories, apparel, and cool, detailed products. “So it’s a very thoughtful and strategic process that you want to go to.”

Riordan believes this is a huge, untapped revenue stream, but it’s not something that replaces brick-and-mortar retail. “It complements it because it’s two difference audiences that you’re focusing on,” she said. Younger gamers might not want to spend $40 on a T-shirt online, but they’ll spend $14 on one at Wal-Mart and then spend the extra money on something else.

“Your online consumers and your PC gamers with certain games tend to have a little bit more money, and they’ll spend more money,” said Riordan. “You need both audiences.”

What the target audience thinks

One gamer we spoke to sees the situation somewhat differently. “As far as official brand stores go, I enjoy the products, but prices are so often far too high — as well as shipping costs — to justify anything but the best products being purchased,” said 32-year-old Jeff Yenzer, who we contacted via Twitter and email.

But his concerns did reflect the changes Treehouse is trying to make. “Merchandise sold by publishers is so often well designed but not always well executed, leaving the purchaser with a garment or product that erodes quickly or breaks easily,” said Yenzer. “If there was anything I could change, it would be merging the design ingenuity, product knowledge, and creativity of publishers with the efficient production and shipping methods that larger retailers can bring to the table.”

Yenzer has bought from online stores such as BioWare, Bungie, Jinx, and ThinkGeek, among others, but also likes to shop at brick-and-mortar retailers “if for only the ease of purchase that comes with finding products at a local store,” he said. “Trying clothes on before buying is always a plus, as well.” But the designs, he admits, do leave a lot to be desired.

One thing you can’t always find in video game stores, though, is equality in male and female apparel. Riordan said it’s critical — especially around launch — for companies to overindex the male design because a female can still wear it. But a male won’t wear a female’s design because of the difference in body style. We asked a couple female gamers via Twitter for their opinions.

Laura Klotz, a 36-year-old who’s been gaming since she was young, told us, “In general, I don’t mind buying unisex sizes of clothing mostly because it enables me to share my T-shirt collection with my husband. However, it would be nice if a greater range of options were presented if only because it would mean that the industry was recognizing that they have more of a female fan base than they have previously tended to acknowledge. The way things are now, it seems like they still think the majority of players are guys or dress like guys.”

Wendy Vermeers, 33, chooses to buy her gaming apparel at online stores “because they make me feel more comfortable being a female gamer” whereas local stores are more male-targeted.

“I usually buy my gamer-related clothing from places like Threadless, Shirt.Woot, [and] ThinkGeek,” she said. “Or if I do find something out and about, I can occasionally find stuff at Hot Topic. These companies seem to be a little more all-inclusive, and I feel comfortable and wanted as a female gamer and customer.”

So it seems that in both e-commerce and retail, a little more attention to the female consumers who are playing these games is needed as well. The new EA Gear store currently features 12 items in its apparel section that are made to fit females, like this ladies’ FemShep illustrated tee. Comparatively, it sells 37 apparel items for men. The Halo Waypoint store contains 10 articles of clothing in men’s sizes and none for women though it does display a gender category. The Plants vs. Zombies store is much more balanced, with eight for women and 12 for men.

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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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Warning: This column has some story spoilers.

All these years, we thought that the Halo sci-fi video game series — which has generated $3 billion in sales and 46 million happy customers for Microsoft — was about combat. After all, the original Halo game from 2001 was subtitled Halo: Combat Evolved.

Forget that subtitle. It’s a romance. It should be called Halo: A Love Story. Cortana and Master Chief are in love, and the latest installment in the series — Halo 4 — reinforces that story.

At the beginning of Halo 4, Cortana awakens Master Chief from cryo-sleep in the midst of the wreckage of Forward Unto Dawn, the UNSC space vessel that was torn apart at the end of Halo 3. We learn from her that artificial intelligence companions have a seven-year life span, and Cortana has just turned 8. She is on the verge of “rampancy,” or being in danger of thinking herself to death.

Cortana — who is now fleshed out as a full, voluptuous character in contrast to past Halo games — becomes emotional during the conversation. Master Chief vows to get Cortana fixed. That sets up one of the main narratives of the game. This narrative is the most emotionally stirring and personal. No longer is Halo just about an epic interstellar war between humanity and the aliens known as the Covenant. It’s not about racking up the kills in combat. And I could care less about why I’m fighting this new race of Prometheans and a character named the Didact, who is beyond mysterious even among the enigmatic aliens.

It’s about saving Cortana. Behind the orange face mask and underneath the gravelly voice, you can sense the emotion within Master Chief, who is about as machine-like as any person can get.

The interesting thing about this more personal story is that it comes amid an interesting change in the guard. Bungie’s decision to hand Halo off to Microsoft’s 343 Industries, a brand new studio, is a little like George Lucas handing off Lucasfilm and Star Wars to Disney.

I was worried about that hand-off, as was our Halo 4 reviewer Rus McLaughlin. But now that I’ve played through the entire game — which debuts worldwide on Nov. 6 — I think that 343 has done an excellent job of elevating the relationship between Cortana and Master Chief to the main stage.

In the first Halo from 2001, Master Chief and Cortana (pictured left) bantered a lot. They made jokes as they faced overwhelming odds, and Cortana’s screams were meant to supply a sense of danger to the mission that Master Chief was about to undertake. It was like a buddy movie, with a hero and a sidekick. The original Halo was really about kicking the enemy’s butt.

But in Halo 4, Cortana is up for best actress, not best actress in a supporting role.

“Everything that you see has been lovingly reimagined for Halo 4, including Cortana,” said Josh Holmes, the franchise creative director at 343 Industries, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have a story in Halo 4 that is focused more on the personal dynamic between Cortana and the Master Chief.”

Everything in the game seems built to support this point. The 3D graphics are better so that you can detect more emotion in Cortana’s eyes and face. The cutscenes, or cinematic sequences between the action, give lots of air time to Cortana as she briefs the Chief on his progress.

The love story raises interesting questions about what is human. Facing her own mortality, Cortana understands the meaning of sacrifice in a way that many humans do not. And the machine-like Master Chief has to come to terms with his humanity and his ability to love someone, even if that someone is a computer program.

This part of the story was clearly the right part to focus on. Halo is an action game. But it has a “quieter, more personal story,” as Holmes said.

“For us, finding [quieter] moments within the action to explore that more personal story has been the challenge,” he said. “Chief and Cortana are on this amazing adventure. How do they deal with, in the Chief’s case, his own humanity, and in Cortana’s case, her own mortality? That was a fascinating story for us to explore as a team.”

The personal connection between the Master Chief and Cortana brings home the larger sadness of the Halo series. For the most part, Halo is about the human race losing an interstellar war. Master Chief fights nobly to prevent that, but he doesn’t have something personal at stake in it. For him, in Halo 4, Cortana becomes the thing that he might lose. Cortana still delivers levity during breaks in the action, but there is a darker, different tone to the whole story in contrast to previous games. She’s come a long way, baby. The love story may be platonic, but it’s very moving.

And that is where 343 Industries really delivers. They have shown that they can step up and provide a full-throated, epic love story that some fans have always wanted to see. It will be interesting to see if gamers, who relish the kill and beauty of Halo’s combat, will admit their own humanity and acknowledge that this love story is really what has held their attention for more than a decade. Halo? Yeah, I play it for the love story.

See our video interview with Josh Holmes, the creative director for 343 Industries, 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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Update: We’ve added a version of the halftime show that was shot using a camera from this century. You can see the original video here.

Mario, Pikachu, and Epona made a dazzling appearance at the halftime of Saturday’s Big Ten football matchup between Ohio State and Nebraska.

Ohio State’s marching band put on a musical show featuring many of gaming’s biggest characters and musical numbers. The ensemble represented classics like Space Invaders and modern-day hits like Halo. The Zelda-sequence at around the six-minute mark is the show’s most impressive moment.

Check out the entire performance in this video:

Here’s each featured game in the order that they appear in the above video:

• Space Invaders
• Pokémon
• Tetris
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario World
• Halo
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Pac-Man

I’m a Michigan fan, but I’m glad that Ohio State has a marching band that’s this talented. It’s something that the Buckeyes will still be able to take pride in ever after the Wolverines stomp the football team in November.

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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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John Spinale (pictured above) is the senior vice president of social games at Disney. He’s in charge of making sure the company takes its big brands and familiar characters into the social gaming market in the right way. He runs the Playdom division, which Disney acquired for $763.2 million in 2010 to help transition older brands into the new medium of Facebook and create hit games.

Spinale joined six months ago, after a stint as the top publishing executive at cloud-gaming startup OnLive. He has had a long career in games and has seen a lot of change. Hal Halpin (pictured below right), the founder of the Entertainment Consumers Association, interviewed Spinale in a fireside chat at our GamesBeat 2012 conference. Here’s an edited transcript of Halpin’s interview with Spinale.

[How do you look at the game world?]

John Spinale: We frequently started off taking a very platform-centric view of the world, which was a great way to look at it a couple of years ago. You had console games, PC games, games for kids, games on social networks, and games on mobile platforms. More recently we started to evolve to the view of, “These platforms are actually blending into one another; they’re starting to blur the boundaries.”

Social networks are tied into consoles, consoles are tied back into the social networks, and everything’s linked to the PC. Some are open and some are closed, but they all talk together pretty nicely now. So we’re starting to take a little bit more demographic or psychographic view of who we’re making games for. It’s still kids, but core gamers are going to want deep, rich gaming experiences, while some people want to have more casual, light, intermittent gaming experiences. People largely still on mobile platforms are going to want mobile games.

I mind the store for the social games side of things: casual games for either absolute casual, inadvertent gamers — the ones who find themselves on Facebook and are not self-identified gamers — or some of the midcore gamers who are starting to flock to social platforms, as well.

Hal Halpin: You entered the job six and a half months ago, at a time when the identity of social games was at a crossroads. Where it was a year ago, it could be identified really easily, and now it’s kind of nebulous….

Spinale: Yeah. I mean, what’s a social game? I think that’s a fair question. Starting out with games on Facebook, or games on whatever social networks used to exist — MySpace and so on — those were social games. And now most games are actually connected to those platforms. Some are exclusively on those platforms, and some run on mobile, but they talk back to Facebook. So lately what we find is that socially connected games are not purely an online experience, but the bulk of the gameplay is doing your thing and then sharing and connecting with your friends to enhance the experience. And it’s still a fuzzy line that we draw.

Halpin: Being part of Disney, you have a tremendous amount of assets, brains, characters, and IP. How do you leverage all that, and what lessons have you learned?

Spinale: Historically at Disney, we probably haven’t done the absolute best job of being a games company. We’ve started off as a film company, then television, and parks, and continued to broaden out the portfolio of things that we did. But I think games until recently were more of an afterthought. It was viewed as a marketing extension of what we did. So, “Hey, here’s a movie. How do we make the game?”

That worked okay for the company, but I think when you look at the growth in the entire games business, it’s pretty obvious that this is a big piece of the media pie that’s just going in the right direction. Disney made a decision a couple of years ago to treat games as a first-class citizen. It really is quality first and consumer experience. What do people want? And then we’ll worry about how the details play out later.

That was the mandate given to us in the games group a little while ago, and I think you’re starting to see the by-products of that just now come out in the marketplace. If you look at us in any channel right now, Disney went from “who are they?” in the games space to stealthily owning the top spot or, at least depending on what cycle we’re talking about, getting into a top 10 spot.

Halpin: How do you differentiate between Playdom and Disney?

Spinale: For Playdom, we have two demographics: the casual players who wouldn’t ever call themselves a gamer but are actually playing millions of hours’ worth of games a month now, and we’ve actually started doing games for gamers as well. But again, the through-line for those two things is nobody expected to be playing games on Facebook, but they are. And once you get there, now the games market has been on Facebook for three-plus years. It’s a maturing market.

Standard things are happening to that maturing market. The expectation for quality goes up. It all started with text-based RPGs, where people were just chattering back and forth. You could make a game in a month or two. We had this horrible thing going on where we were cloning each other, and every company was coming out with its own derivative of whatever game the other guy had made a month before. It was pretty awful.

I think it was a bad experience for consumers. They didn’t know what was what, what was good, or what was bad. It didn’t really matter. I think the good thing for our market now is — especially being part of the Disney family — our mandate has been to make great products. Do that first, and when it’s appropriate, borrow from the Disney brands that we have around the table, whether it’s Marvel, Pixar, or an animated film. Or not, and create new brands, and actually feed those back into the pile of Disney intellectual property that we have. With that mandate, we’re very much out of the space of trying to keep up with the Joneses. It allows us to do things that are innovative.

So, for example, in Gardens of Time, which is a social game on Facebook, what we did is take the concept of these hidden object games, which existed in the casual download space, pulled that into the social network space, and took something that was inherently a solo activity [and] turned it into a social activity. It had a really nice, cohesive product with characters, stories they could care about, and experiences that they could keep coming back to. Figure out how to monetize it in the free-to-play world. We did that on our own. There was nothing else out there in the market like that. It gives us the space to innovate and do things that are very relevant to consumers.

The same thing with Avengers Alliance, which was a game on Facebook for the more hardcore boys audience. We knew there would be an Avengers movie coming out at some point. It’s a very big franchise in the world of Marvel. We had these characters, and we thought we could come up with a great storyline and backstory that was exciting. Instead of making a movie tie-in, we kind of turned that upside down and said, “Let’s actually make a game first, in the same time frame, that will be relevant to the movie audience. But it’s also completely independent.”

We came up with the game earlier this year — four or five months before the movie launched — and we were able to build an audience on our own of 8 million players who were playing up until the time the movie came online. And that gave us the opportunity to start collaborating with the studios and Marvel, rather than just trying to hit their movie launch dates. The game was in development for two years. We had all the time and energy we wanted to make it a successful product in its own genre, and that’s an opportunity that we wouldn’t really get unless we were integrated into Disney.

Halpin: A few questions about tapping into your past and perspective…. You were there during the Eidos Lara Croft heyday. Where do you think the franchise is now, how to capitalize on it, and have they improved?

Spinale: In my career, I’ve been lucky enough to touch some really interesting intellectual properties at almost every company I’ve worked at. One of my previous employers was Crystal Dynamics at Eidos, which is now part of Square Enix. We built and grew Tomb Raider and Lara Croft, the intellectual property and character, that was turned into films and games. I was lucky enough to be the steward of that for a little while.

I think like many franchises, we learned the lesson that if you don’t make great games first and foremost, your audience will find other ones. You can have great characters and great stories, but in the game media world, you have to make great games. We strayed from that path. We put out some products that were average at best, and we were punished. We more or less had to sit out the PlayStation 2 era and start back up in the PS3 era.

What we saw at E3 looks great. I’m completely divorced from it, so now I’m all objective, but I think they’ve done a great thing. They focused back on making a great game, got away from the jiggling body parts, and turned it into a really exciting version of what it was known for originally: great stories, great characters, and really great gameplay that actually leverages physics and puzzles in the way that modern games can.

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When Microsoft first announced its Surface tablet, many wondered how it might work with games for the Xbox 360 (or any future Xbox console). Microsoft’s president for interactive entertainment business had a morsel of insight about this today.

Speaking during a panel at VentureBeat’s GameBeat 2012 conference, Microsoft exec Don Mattrick mentioned that the upcoming first-person shooter Halo 4 will work with Surface. VentureBeat reporter John Koetsier confirmed this with Mattrick after the panel.

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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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Sir Paul McCartney, the former Mr. Heather Mills, announced on Twitter that he is working on music with Bungie, developer of the sci-fi first-person-shooter Halo. It’s a match made in the mind of a baby boomer who is desperately trying to reconnect with his angst-ridden son.

“I’m really excited to be working on writing music with Bungie, the studio that made Halo,” McCartney said. The 70-year-old knight included a picture (seen above) of him working closely with long-time Bungie composer Marty O’Donnell.

In January, McCartney told German website Zeit Online that he was already working on video game music.

“It’s a fascinating market,” McCartney said. “A new computer game sells so much better than a new CD these days. Young people will hear my music for the first time in a game.”

McCartney’s first active involvement with video games was promoting The Beatles: Rock Band from Harmonix, MTV Games, and Electronic Arts in 2010.

Bungie and McCartney have yet to announce what they are working on specifically, but it’s not Halo. After Halo: Reach, the studio has left the series behind and in the hands of Microsoft.

In May, a judge unsealed the contract between Bungie and its new publisher Activision due to ongoing litigation between that company and some members of Infinity Ward (the developer of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games). The contract revealed a series of games code-named Destiny that debut in the fall of 2013.

Since the rock legend is working with Bungie, we’re hoping McCartney rerecords “Band on the Run” as “Man on the Run” for a new Marathon game.

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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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Minecraft lovers should be happy to hear that the Xbox 360 Edition is getting a sizable bundle of new content. One of the aspects that makes the PC version more enjoyable are the fan-created customizable skins that anyone can download. While that’s still not a possibility on the Xbox 360, there will be over 40 skins released between the free 1.7.3 title update and the DLC “Skin Pack 1″, both of which are currently in certification and set to be released “soon.”

With the Skin Pack, you may choose from a number of familiar faces (albeit much more pixelated than they may be used to). The following characters have been announced so far:

• Creeper Man
• Clayton Carmine (Gears of War 3)
• Covenant Grunt (Halo)
• Trials Man (Trials HD)
• Banjo (Banjo N Kazooie)
• ‘Splosion Man
• Ms. ‘Splosion Man

Ms. ‘Splosion Man is semi-notable for being the first official female in Minecraft. Creator Markus “Notch” Persson explained at GDC 2012 that when he originally attempted to design female skins, the result was extremely “sexist” due to the blocky nature of the game’s visuals. I’m not sure Ms. ‘Splosion Man fully counts as a normal female counterpart to Steve or any of the other new skins, but it’s a step in the right direction.

In addition, the long-awaited 1.7.3 update adds pistons (among other things), also enables players to choose among the original eight Steve skins, instead of automatically distributing them only in multiplayer games.

Check out our gallery of images for the upcoming update and Skin Pack below. No release date for either has been announced. Next, bring on the texture packs and Adventure Update!

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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 year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) had plenty of people in costumes. Some were cosplayers showing their love for a the characters they were portraying, and others were there with the exhibitors promoting games or products on the show floor.

The expo is a fun event, but with so much running around between meetings, many of us don’t get the time to check out the costumes. Luckily, we managed to snap photos of some of the folks who chose to dress up for 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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BBC News in the U.K. has mistakenly used the logo for Halo’s United Nations Space Command during a serious report about the ongoing conflict in Syria.

During the broadcast, which occurred last Thursday, the UNSC logo – more commonly associated with Master Chief than Kofi Annan — was attributed to the United Nations Security Council.

A BBC spokesman has now responded to the error, telling Eurogamer, “”BBC News makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all images broadcast, however very occasionally mistakes do happen. Unfortunately an incorrect logo was used during a segment on last week’s News at One bulletin and we apologise [sic] to viewers for the mistake.”

Apparently the image was not broadcast in later editions of the program, but, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, it has been preserved for posterity on YouTube.

Unfortunately the BBC is not the only media outlet confusing gaming with real life right now, as the CanAsian Times is currently using the same Halo logo in its own Syria coverage. The logo is still live on the site at the time of writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Prophet wants blood. It’s difficult to blame him. After all, he’s been hunted since Manhattan crumbled from an alien-engineered virus in 2011’s sci-fi first-person shooter, Crysis 2. The diabolical CryNet Enforcement & Local Logistics (CELL) organization seeks his powerful Nanosuit technology. The monstrous Cephalopod invaders — tentacled space squids — just plain kill anything they meet. And on top of it all, his consciousness’ mental roommate is a half-sane soldier who shot himself after saving the world.

Enough running. As Prophet himself eloquently states: “We’ll see who gets hunted.”

Set 24 years after the events of Crysis 2, Crysis 3’s New York City sags beneath over two decades of decay and utter ruin. CELL is in full containment mode, erecting a gargantuan Nanodome around the wrecked city as a means to quarantine the rampant virus outbreak introduced by the Ceph. Overgrown flora chokes avenues and buildings with a dense mire of twisting vines and massive trees. It’s a common sight for post-apocalyptic sci-fi — and a clear throwback to the franchise’s wilderness roots — but according to Rasmus Hojengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, it’s the climactic stage for the series’ crescendo.

“It’s essentially a highly advanced greenhouse,” he said during a recent press event. “We didn’t want to just paint a little green color over the cracks and call it a day. We wanted the city to define the shape of the rainforest, which in turn shapes the mood and storytelling of Crysis 3.”

Hojengaard also hinted CELL’s ulterior motive for constructing the dome wasn’t quite benevolent. Spoiler: It involves the words “world” and “domination” in it.

And yes, before you ask: The game looks amazing. CryEngine’s double reputation as the bleeding edge of graphical fidelity and the most consistent slayer of any PC hardware that’s not a supercomputer makes Crysis 3 pop off the screen like James Cameron’s wet dream. “We’ve probably invented the most insane lensflare system ever conceived,” Hojengaard boasted. Take a hike, Abrams.

The developers also demonstrated a set of new weapons for Prophet’s hunt. The compound bow’s utilitarian construction allows the player to shoot deadly spear arrows while cloaked, adding a “whole new layer to stealth gameplay and the feeling of becoming the hunter,” Hojengaard explained. Some example attachments included an automatic reload system, electro arrows, and explosive arrows.

In a short gameplay video, Prophet showed off the bow’s effectiveness in silently dispatching Ceph grunts from afar with carefully placed arrows, a mixture of high- and low-tech reminiscent of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter’s Tek Bow. Long-range shots provided a dramatic arrow-cam tracking the bolt piercing its target with a satisfying crunch.

As Prophet stealthily traversed the remains of Chinatown, an aerial remote — small, hovering probe-like enemies — stripped his cloak and sapped his suit’s energy in mere seconds. Hojengaard said “plenty of new countermeasures” such as the remotes exist to prevent players from simply sticking to the bow-and-camouflage combo throughout the game. Rambo would be disappointed, but that gives Prophet all the reason he needs for touting louder (and more explosive) weaponry such as the Typhoon rifle.

In a word, the Typhoon is ridiculous. In two, it’s really ridiculous. Its rate of fire settles somewhere between caffeine injections and cocaine, and it sprays lead with a sound like an angry wasp hive belching its contents. Going rock-and-roll on CELL and Ceph alike never gets old, but ammo management will be critical.

Prophet’s sleek Nanosuit doesn’t skimp on pimpage either. A new suite of hacking software conveniently installed itself after Crysis 2 closed up. In addition to the still-cool standbys of armor, speed, and stealth suit enhancements, Prophet can now tinker with certain electronic objects from afar, starting from simple turrets and door switches before scaling to “epic proportions” at end-game, Hojengaard said.

The Nanosuit also busied itself infusing increasing amounts of alien technology into its systems. As a result, Prophet’s arsenal swells with the capability to pick up and use Ceph weaponry. Halo players will feel right at home here — like the Covenant, every Ceph gun has a finite power cell before draining completely.

The Nanodome beckons. Manhattan rots away into nothingness. Prophet is locked in with everyone who wants him dead. But come Crysis 3’s spring 2013 release on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360, everyone will learn they’re locked in with Prophet.

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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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“We are beginning a new saga with Halo 4 and embarking on a journey that will encompass the next decade of Halo games and experiences,” said Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios. “Millions of fans worldwide have been eagerly awaiting the opportunity to step back into the boots of Master Chief, and with Halo 4 leading the charge, we’re confident 2012 will be the most successful year in Xbox history.”

The first title in the new “Reclaimer Trilogy,” Halo 4 is set four years after the events of Halo 3. Lost in space and adrift on the remains of a UNSC frigate, Master Chief and artificial intelligence sidekick Cortana return to face an ancient evil that threatens the fate of the entire universe.

Halo 4 is the first game in the series that studio Bungie, which created Halo, is not developing. Microsoft subsidiary 343 Industries has taken over the franchise. This latest entry will no doubt face some stiff competition in the busy November blockbuster season. Capcom’s Resident Evil 6 is set to hit store shelves on November 20. Grand Theft Auto V and a new Call of Duty could potentially launch that month as well while Assassin’s Creed 3 will release a week earlier on October 30.

Best Buy has already announced that it is accepting preorders of Halo 4 in stores and on www.bestbuy.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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Bungie Studios is in the process of severing its final ties to the Halo franchise and has shut down the multiplayer stat-tracking on Bungie.net. To commemorate the hundreds of thousands of years gamers have racked up playing various Halo titles online, Bungie has released the all-encompassing infographic seen below.

“We have followed your careers with great interest here on Bungie.net,” read a blog post on the official Bungie site. “…[Y]ou have gifted us a mountain of heroic moments to memorialize. It is with a sense of awe that we step back and admire the impact that you have had on our games and upon our studio. Thanks for sharing your stories with us.”

In less than a decade, players have logged 20 billion online multiplayer matches played across all Halo titles. If only homework, dieting, and curing diseases were all as easy as teabagging random nubs over Xbox Live….

Click on the image and then again on the next page to see the full resolution version.

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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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By the end of the year, we may finally solve one of the biggest mysteries in the gaming world: Why do red and blue Spartans hate each other so, so very much?

At Microsoft’s recent Spring Showcase 2012, we learned that 343 Industries has some grand plans for Halo 4, the sci-fi first-person shooter due out this holiday season for the Xbox 360. What are these plans? Heck if we know. The studio, who’s taking over franchise-development duties from Bungie, only teased us press guys with a few tiny morsels, never revealing much. But if you keep your eyes open, if you listen carefully, and if you talk to the right people, you might be able to glean a few juicy bits…like we did below.

Read on to see what we’ve discovered about Master Chief’s next adventure, and watch 343′s brand-new video documentary at the end of the second page to see if you can mine some more info from the elusive developers. Also check out our other news and previews from the Xbox 360 Spring Showcase.

1. The progression system won’t just be cosmetic

By earning enough experience in the Halo: Reach, you can unlock new shoulder pads, visors, visual effects, and other accessories for your online avatar. Too bad they really didn’t mean squat. “Armor upgrades — they were definitely aesthetic [in Halo: Reach],” says franchise development director Frank O’Connor. “And it works for a lot of people. I get an awful lot of [private messages] because I have some weird, fancy armor that people are obsessed with. So it matters to some people. But the reality is that they don’t have any impact on your game, other than it sometimes makes you a bigger target.”

That’s going to change with Halo 4, though details are non-existent at this time. “One of the things we wanted to do with Halo 4,” says creative director Josh Holmes, “was introduce a progression system that allows players to unlock things that not only change the way their character looks but also the way their character plays…that empowers players to make choices that have a meaningful impact on their gameplay experience in multiplayer. That’s a big change, but it’s one of the things we’re most excited about.”

2. On-screen icons will point out where weapon pickups are…for a special reason

New in Halo 4 are visual icons that point out which weapons are nearby (similar to Crysis 2 or Gears of War 3, only without the need to hold down a button to scan). This will be useful for newer players who haven’t yet memorized where every gun spawns, but it might also serve a deeper purpose, too. “We mark the shotgun for a reason,” says O’Connor. “There will be a very specific reason why the icon’s there that you’ll learn about later.”

3. Large feel-good text will tell you how you killed someone

In the brief demo that we saw, the words “Headshot kill!” or “Melee kill!” will flash on the screen when you’ve killed someone in the corresponding way.

4. Halo 4 will be higher resolution (but still not 60 frames per second)

Word is Halo 4 will run at a resolution of 1280×720, up a tad from Reach’s 1152×720. But if you’re hoping for Call of Duty’s silky smooth 60-frames-per-second speed, you’re out of luck. Halo 4 will remain at the series-standard 30 frames per second.

5. You’ll be able to customize loadouts

“You have the ability to choose from a wide arsenal of weapons and abilities that can be a part of your character’s individual loadout,” says Holmes. Right now, no one outside of 343 knows how much more ambitious this will be compared to what Reach offered.

6. Power weapons may not be on set timers

We’re hearing that power weapons may not respawn in at set intervals, adding some unpredictability as to when rocket launchers, Spartan Lasers, and WMDs may reappear on the battlefield. The point of this is to make sure experienced players won’t dominate matches by running timed circuits to grab all the best goodies.

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I still have trouble remembering the name of the last downloadable arena-style first-person shooter that I had to review (“CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars, CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars, CellFactor: Psychokinetic Wars…”). Despite the good times I had playing it, the game became entirely forgettable with its generic Unreal/Quake-style aesthetics and lack of online competition.

I’m positive I’ll be saying nearly the same things about Xbox Live Arcade’s Nexuiz in a few months.

OK, maybe “Nexuiz” will be a little easier to remember due to its history (having its roots as a free-to-play shooter from 2005). And as of this writing, during the week of its launch, the game also has many more online participants than CellFactor did when that first came out. That’s good news for developer IllFonic and publisher THQ.

The bad news? Only crazy people will be playing Nexuiz months from now….

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Speedy gunplay

Halo is one of the slower paced representatives in the shooter genre, but its Spartan combatants might as well be running around in giant sumo fat suits compared to the speedsters in Nexuiz. The zippy gameplay harks back to the days of the aforementioned Quake and Unreal Tournament, when instant-twitch action and reaction were perhaps more important than the actual weapons you were firing.

At first, playing Nexuiz involves a lot of circle-strafing, desperately firing at targets who can move faster than you can track them, missing more than hitting. It feels way too fast, way too furious. But as you adjust to the speed and learn the weapons’ nuances (and their secondary, alternative firing modes), you will start appreciating the game. You will anticipate opponent movements. You will find optimal routes to bring enemy flags home. You will dart through the labyrinthine stages, rocket jumping (which the game has a dedicated button for) and hitting launch pads with streamlined efficiency. All of a sudden, you’re pretty good at Nexuiz.

Random variables and all-around weirdness

Then you reach another plateau in your connection with this game when you learn to take advantage of its Dynamic Mutators. These can come from pickups, when capturing a flag, or via killstreak rewards, and they come in many different forms. Some are purely offensive in nature (faster firing, infinite ammo, double damage). Some are defensive (extra health regeneration, protection from head shots, heavy home flags). Some mess the game up for everyone (slick surfaces, light gravity, retro or black and white graphics). And some are just plain goofy (turn everyone’s heads into that of one of the designers).

That’s just a tiny sampling. Nexuiz has a huge arsenal of these game-modifying Mutators. Though this feature doesn’t necessarily make this a must-download winner, it does add a lot of unpredictability and variety to what would otherwise be fairly standard shooter fare. The problem is — and this goes back to that “crazy people” remark — you’ll have to play an unreasonable amount of online sessions to earn enough points to customize this system (to make certain Dynamic Mutators appear more often in your ranked bouts). It took seven matches before I could even start with one fraction of a singe level-one power, and they get progressively more expensive through the five tiers. You’d have to be awfully dedicated if you want to do any customization at all. But that’s all optional — and for the crazies — so it’s nothing most gamers would have to worry about.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Maybe you’re more tortoise than hare, and Nexuiz is entirely too speedy for you. That’s understandable. This one will only appeal to a specific subset of (probably old-school) shooter fans. But some of Nexuiz’s troubles are a bit more universal and may even turn off the most hardcore of players.

Painfully long waits

To start with, someone’s gotta work on optimizing load times and matchmaking. I was curious how long it took from choosing a Quick Match (with no other search restrictions) to actually playing one, and I’ve been clocking them from two to literally over four minutes. Some of that comes from the game looking for the minimum number of players (six), and some of that is just the actual loading of the stage. Four minutes is an awful long time to wait for a round to start.

Six-player matches (the most common) can be problematic, too. You only get to play team deathmatch or team capture the flag, so it’s almost always three vs. three. On the bigger levels, that leads to a lot of running around with no one to shoot. And if one or two people drop out, the shorthanded teams are simply screwed. I most certainly did not enjoy the time I ended up playing CTF by myself vs. three foes. I wasn’t sure whom I was more mad at: the guys who didn’t take it easy on me or the guys who left me to my fate.

Boring (*yawn*) weapons

For all the effort the developers put into creating Mutators, they seemed to have forgotten about the weapons themselves. They’re almost all forgettable, and their alt-fires show little creativity. A machine gun (which can shoot more slowly and more accurately with secondary fire). A rocket launcher (whose rockets you can detonate early). A sniper rifle (with –shocker — a scope zoom!). Yes, I’m picking the most boring representatives of the arsenals to make a point, but trust me, the other guns really aren’t worth writing about. I will say, however, that it is refreshing to have an unlimited-ammo shotgun as a starting weapon. It gives the first few post-spawn-in seconds a different, more up-close dynamic than we’re used to with shooters with standard-issue assault rifles.

CONCLUSION

Shooter fans who have trouble sitting still and want nothing but nonstop, fast, fast, fast action can enjoy Nexuiz for a little while. It’s a fully competent Quake or Unreal Tournament clone with extra unpredictability that comes from Dynamic Mutators. One second you might be flying around in temporary jetpacks, and the next you might be playing in a new, forced third-person view. Purists may shun these “instant mods,” but then they can just go back to, well, Quake or Unreal Tournament. These random variables add some flavor to each match. But with limited multiplayer options (and no single-player modes other than bot training), long waits for matches to start, boring weapons, and a carrot-on-a-stick progression system that is way more stick than carrot, Nexuiz is doomed to obscurity.

Except for the crazy people. Score: 71/100

The current version of Nexiuz was released on February 29, 2012 for the Xbox 360 (with PS3 and PC versions to arrive later in 2012). A download code 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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72pins is made up of a small team of retro art makers who take modern games — such as Halo or God of War — and reimagine them as classic Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) carts.

Cleverly coined as “NEStalgia” and named as one of Time Magazine’s top holiday gift picks for geeks, the end result speaks for itself. The unique pixel art is applied to an actual working NES cart, meaning that copy of BioShock may actually be Faxanadu or Duck Hunt. The name itself, 72pins, comes from the circuitry that connects an NES cartridge to an NES console. Longtime gamers will remember these pins as the part you had to blow into in order to make your aging games work properly.

GamesBeat sat down to talk with 72pins Co-Founder and Creative Director Pauline Acalin to discuss the process from beginning to end, potential copyright issues, and when we’ll be seeing that Half-Life cart we’ve all been waiting for.

GamesBeat: What’s the elevator pitch for 72pins?
Pauline Acalin: 72pins is a very cool art project that uses vintage NES cartridges as a canvas for 8-bit redesigns of modern games. We also offer custom designs for product and self-promotion, birthdays, weddings, parties/special events, awards, etc.

GB: How did the idea come about?
Acalin: I believe the exact words were, “How cool would it be if …”

GB: Can you talk about your starting budget for 72pins?
Acalin: Our initial idea was to see if we could create and sell around 100 carts on a budget of $2,500. This included the domain, Big Cartel marketplace fees, carts, vinyl, shipping setup and marketing. After we made a few samples, the ideas just started flowing and we got caught up in things. 100 went to 200, then 300 then 500.

GB: What were some of the main concerns early on and how did you address them?
Acalin: The main concern was to have something as close to the look and feel of the original that would give us a vivid canvas. After a few months of trying out various print combinations, we found something which we thought would look great and also be durable for years. We knew creating limited edition art wouldn’t be cheap to produce because we weren’t going to get any volume discounts printing only a handful of each design. Everyone thinks that it is easy to find hundreds of super cheap 25-or-more-year-old NES carts consistently. That just isn’t the case at all, unless you are willing to spend ‘mint condition’ prices at game shops or drive from flea market to flea market hoping to find a handful of quality carts. We were trying to produce cool art pieces that anyone could afford. That was tough at first, considering that over 25 percent of the carts we would bulk order just didn’t meet the standards we wanted for our canvases. We even looked at injection molded carts but realized that what we were creating was more about the art than the canvas.

GB: How did you come to the $16 price point? Do you find most people see that as too high, a great deal, or just about right?
Acalin: Our intention was to have a low price point, and $16 is pretty low. By that, I mean it’s enough to cover cost of the product itself and still be able to support the artist for their design. We didn’t think that people would question buying original art as a high quality print for $15 to $20, so we chose to go the more labor intensive route and use cartridges as the canvas simply because we thought it would have a more nostalgic feel to it and probably be a better conversation starter. We are not out to make a lot of money by any means … we just wanted to have a neat product. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true. A common correction we have to make to the few price scoffs we do get is that, we are not printing these on a home printer, or at a volume where we are able to get a deal on cost. They are professional grade vinyl on actual working NES carts, with many, many hours of design work on them. Overall, we get tremendous support from most everyone, and that makes us happy. We also promote sales and coupons on our blog and Twitter.

“We are not out to make a lot of money, by any means…we just wanted to have a neat product. I know it sounds weird, but it’s true.“

GB: What is Big Cartel, and how do they factor into 72pins?
Acalin: During the phase of researching a marketplace to house our store, we decided to go with Big Cartel. All of our payment processing is done though them, and it really has made things much easier for us. While the default customization on Big Cartel might be a little limited (there are only two in-house theme styles to choose from and one would not work), the ease of use, price and reliability have been great.

GB: How does the art and manufacturing work?
Acalin: We currently have six artists working with us, and each has a different style. In the near future we will be releasing non-8bit designs to our store, which is exciting. As far as design goes, we have a template that each artist uses as a base. We basically have a hefty list of games, and the artist just chooses from that list. Whatever inspires. The NES original “black label” design has a very limited canvas, and so each game design is somewhat of a puzzle. But once that basic design is laid out, we fine-tune it to death … send it around, give each other feedback. We have a great team and all work incredibly well with constructive criticism. Once finalized, we send it to print in a limited quantity. Once we get them back, they are applied to refurbished cartridges, along with the accompanying customized vinyl for the back (which is different for each game).

GB: It seems like there would be some major copyright issues to overcome. Can you talk about that?
Acalin: There actually have not been any issues. We have received positive feedback from several of the publishers and developers, some having commissioned us to design additional game art, or create more of an existing design.

GB: What are some of the most popular carts you sell?
Acalin: Bioshock, Halo and Katamari sold out immediately upon release and are constantly being requested.

GB: What are some of the most common requests you get?
Acalin: We are in the process of getting to each request in turn, the most recent being a Blizzard Series, including World of Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo. In the works are Assassin’s Creed, Uncharted and Mass Effect … and several others.

GB: Which carts aren’t quite as popular as expected? 
Acalin: We really haven’t had any bad luck with any particular design. Some have sold out at the speed of light, others start out slower but then have a surge in sales. We have no idea what to attribute that to; we’ve just been fortunate.

GB: Who is your average client?
Acalin: Overall, we really have no way of knowing, since we don’t track that info or ask for any personal information. But the range of responses we get from our customers lead us to believe they range across the spectrum … from fans of a particular game, to diehard NES retro folk (such as myself) … and even a couple people who just want to collect every single design we release! Amazing.

GB: Will you be adding different types of cartridges (Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, etc.)?
Acalin: We are totally open for trying out a new canvas to design on. If the demand is there, who knows.

GB: Where do you see the site going in the long-term?
Acalin: We really want our focus to be custom design … birthdays, weddings, parties/special events, awards, etc…. We have already created several designs for clients wanting NES carts for product and self-promotion, awards and television programs … and those are a whole lot of fun to work on. It’s something we hoped would happen.

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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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Northern Five Entertainment and Airsoft GI recently released their joint Left 4 Dead short film to the world.

Sporting Hollywood-level production values but produced on a shoestring, the video quickly surpassed half a million views on YouTube, and the teaser trailer alone garnered over 400,000 views.

GamesBeat sat down with Northern Five director and co-founder Adrian Picardi for an exclusive interview to discuss the film’s budget, concept, reception, and why Hollywood is so damn bad at making video game movies.

We also have a gallery of 173 (count ‘em!) exclusive behind-the-scenes images and a Making Of video on the second page of this interview.

GamesBeat: Can you detail Northern Five’s relationship with Airsoft GI? Did they put up the funds for the production?

Adrian Picardi: A childhood friend, Tim Seargeant, who is now the online face for Airsoft GI, had wanted to make a fun video with us for awhile. It wasn’t until when he convinced his boss to allow us to shoot at their property and store front that we were able to conceptualize the idea. This really wouldn’t have happened if both N5 and A.GI weren’t passionate on the idea. It’s like the Avengers only with our favorite videogame characters.

GB: What is the intent of the film? What are you or Airsoft GI hoping to accomplish with it?

AP: For N5, absolutely nothing but hope that it could bring a smile to the gaming community.

GB: Can you talk about the budget for the film, and break down how it was distributed?

AP: We had just enough of a budget to feed the entire crew, ship out the costumes from across the country, and pay for a couple of the props and some of the crew’s gas. Everything else was donated. The entire crew came out for two nights unpaid. I couldn’t believe how passionate everyone was. It was a really fun experience.

GB: I understand you had a crane? Is that a hard thing to acquire?

AP: Yes! Very hard. Luckily we worked with an amazing gentleman on a couple older projects and were able to build a great relationship with him and his company. When we told him it was fan film he was instantly on board and came out for a couple hours with the crane on the second day of shooting.

GB: How did you conceptualize the idea?

AP: At first we were going to do a full on Battlefield 3 video but so many had been already created. The same went for many of Valve’s other properties, so we felt it was time to try something different with one of our other favorite games. There are so many zombie fan films out there and since we wanted to make this for the gaming community we took it into a different and unique direction.

GB: What sort of script was in place?

AP: The script was worked on in a collaborative fashion. From there we had to accommodate what we could and couldn’t achieve in two nights and with the prep time of only two weeks. We actually had the entire Left 4 Dead cast in the film but couldn’t find an actor in the character’s age range who was willing to stay up for two nights in a row for no pay. So we ended up tweaking the script. We actually tore out 4 pages of the script on the first night of shooting because initially we were suppose to shoot for three nights but it was due to rain on the third day.

GB: How do you go about wrangling in all the necessary talent and crew?

AP: We posted a casting call online. From there we had to sift through the talent to see who looked like the video game characters the most. Since we had a very tight pre-production schedule we hired them without having the proper casting session but I feel we were very fortunate that we had found a great team of people who actually looked the part.

GB: What was it like working with cosplayers and models who don’t typically “act” as is needed in a film like this?

AP: I was actually extremely worried that they wouldn’t understand the filming process and just become fed up with all the madness. But everyone who came out for this shoot was amazing and was a blast to work with. Meagan Marie, whom I was a fan of after seeing her GOW Cosplay article, came out and was completely thrown off guard since she had never acted before. But after a few takes she picked up on everything very quickly and did a kick-ass job. They all were really fun to work with.

GB: I heard it was pretty cold during the shoot. Is weather something you planned for, and how did you deal with it?

AP: We were hoping for three dry nights but it rained the last day so we changed the script. Since everyone came out for free we couldn’t reschedule either. So we ended up not shooting the entire thing that was originally planned but it still worked out for the most part in the edit.

GB: I think my favorite thing about fan films is that none of them are directed by Paul Anderson. Hollywood has become notorious for taking popular video games and making nightmarishly-bad adaptations. Why do you think that is?

AP: Because I believe most of them never played the actual video game until they acquired the script! So far I can’t say I’ve seen a hands down amazing Hollywood “game to movie” yet.

GB: What is it about Hollywood filmmakers that makes them want to adapt something by stripping out pretty much everything that made the video game version popular in the first place?

AP: Money? Making a movie for only the gaming demographic means less money made. At the end of the day it’s still a business and risk-taking moves can be frowned upon at times, such as making a true-to-heart video game adaption. But I have no doubt in my mind after the comic book pool and 80’s-90’s remakes run dry the film industry will start diving into the video game arena even more so then now. I’m betting with the huge success of Call of Duty they are already planning on turning it into a movie… I mean they already made a Jeep based off the game why not a movie? I just hope they put the source material in the right hands.

GB: Did you look at any other fan films before making yours? Did you learn any interesting dos or don’ts that you’d care to share?

AP: We did. We realized we wanted to make something different, something they haven’t seen before, and rather something for the entire rapidly growing gaming community at large. One thing I learned — and I’m actually slapping myself in the face for not thinking of this — but we should have called it something different other than Left 4 Dead since the twist came out of nowhere for most people.

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Submitted as an April Fool’s joke for 1up.com earlier this year, this original animated video by Jan Neves is a glimpse into what we all know is coming eventually anyway. First the Halo Warthog is a featured vehicle in Forza Motorsport 4, then Master Chief is a featured backup dancer in Dance Central 3. It could happen…

Jan used 3D Studio Max for the modelling and animating, Adobe Premier for audiovisual editing, and After Effects for what he refers to as “some post-production sheen.” The entire process spanned roughly three weeks at about seven hours a day. The dance animations were rendered by hand, as Jan states that he has yet to add motion capture equipment to his arsenal.

“All of the stuff in the background is pretty basic and was fairly easy to model and animate,” says Jan. “I’ve been doing 3D for about 10 years now. I was lucky enough to have the software available to me at work and just started to play with it a bit. Then I started reading some tutorial books and after a while I got proficient enough to make some basic stuff. And I haven’t stopped since!”

The Dance Central: Halo video doubles as an opportunity to test out our fancy new GamesBeat video logo, also crafted by Jan. You can find more of his creations 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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As the gaming culture matures, a handful of impressive fan films paying homage to popular titles have continued to emerge. First, the “Escape from City 17” Half-Life shorts from two years ago set a new standard with their Hollywood-lite production values, then earlier this year Modern Warfare and Portal received similar treatments. Now another Valve-published game, Left 4 Dead, has been reimagined in this live-action eight-minute film.

Check back shortly for our exclusive interview with the film’s creators from Northern Five Entertainment, the same production company responsible for The Resistance web series that was picked up by Starz Media last year.

Full disclosure: The author of this post is in a relationship with Meagan Marie, who appears as Anya Stroud in this video.

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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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