Updated at 6:20 p.m. Pacific with corrected video timestamps and on May 5 with updated information on Page 3.

Everything is subject to desensitization. In professional wrestling, a leg drop was once a finishing maneuver. Then it became a basic part of many wrestlers’ tool kits, so now they have to do the leg drop from the top rope or off a ladder to stand out. Eventually someone says “Screw it: I’m going to do a leg drop off the top of the Titantron!”

Fighting game supermoves have undergone a similar transformation. What were once merely enhanced versions of special moves are now extended showcases of flashing lights, bone-shattering blows, and dynamic camera angles. Let’s take a look at the evolution of these ultimate attacks and find out how we’ve come to this point.

Note: I’m counting the length of the supermove from the moment the move activates (the “superflash”) to the moment the character can move freely again. For Fatalities and Instant Kills that automatically end the round, I’m counting the moment the move activates to first indication of the KO screen.

The Street Fighter Super Combo

Super Street Fighter II Turbo: Chun-Li’s Senretsukyaku:
1.5 seconds

Back in the day, the First Lady of Fighting Games’ Senretsukyaku (Super Lightning Legs) lasts barely more than a second if it connects.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike: Chun-Li’s Houyoku-Sen: 2.9 seconds

Super Combos were a big hit, so the World Warriors got more of them in the Street Fighter Alpha and Street Fighter III series. This barrage of kicks takes twice as long as the original version, as Chun-Li now takes time to sting her foes with both legs and a straight-up thrust kick. I guess that’s why it has a different name from before. But it’s still fairly brief.

Street Fighter IV: Chun-Li’s Hosenka: 8.1 seconds

In the SF4 games, landing the new, glossier Ultra Combos takes greater priority over mere Super Combos. The posing Chun-Li does before and after her Hosenka are about as long as the attack itself, and other Ultra Combos give people enough time to mimic the motions before returning to play without any problems. What happened?

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Injustice: Gods Among Us is a silly name for a game focused on one of the most disastrous “What Ifs” in DC Comics: What would happen if Superman lost his mind? The answer is create a menacing one-world government fueled by his descent into madness. Built in a similar style to NetherRealm Studio’s successful Mortal Kombat games, Injustice scales down the gratuitous violence just a tad and replaces it with sheer superhuman spectacle.

I’m the biggest fan of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but Injustice redeems itself with a touching and well-executed story mode that makes you feel like you’re doing more than playing one arena fight after another. Most of all, NetherRealm manages to make the audience care about Superman — a feat rarely achieved thanks to the character’s seemingly impervious moral code.

Good, dynamic Superman stories are possible. Legendary comic book writer Alan Moore proved that in For the Man Who Has Everything, a story arc in which Mongul (the ruler of the weapon-planet Warworld) imprisons the Man of Steel in his mind, and the only means of escape is to destroy what he cherishes most. Injustice takes that sentiment and makes it a thousand times worse, and sprinkles in a touch of interdimensional travel.

What you’ll like

Over-the-top but totally accessible combat

Characters in Injustice build individual fighting styles off of the same basic set of controls. One quick combo for Superman has the same controls as a similar attack for Batman, but only the speed of the strike differs. Heroes (and villains) that use special powers, like Green Lantern and his ring, also have switchable fighting stances. Injustice introduces these mechanics with Batman and Superman. Once you master those two, you can control anyone. The real difference between “tech” and “super-powered” characters is just how fast they are.

Where the combat really shines is Injustice’s clever take on the classic Mortal Kombat fatality. Rather than splattering ridiculous amounts of blood everywhere, these special supermoves highlight the excesses of a character’s power. When you use Hawk Girl’s special attack, she grabs her opponent by the collar and hurls them into the sky, where she repeatedly beats them with her mace before hurling back toward the ground. You get a light amount of blood splatter from this, but you’re more overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle than by the gore. She didn’t have to repeatedly bash your face in while falling through the air, but it sure looked cool.

The best thing about Injustice’s design is that it works well with a normal controller. A lot of fighting games feel stunted when you use a standard directional pad or analog stick instead of a fighting stick, but Injustice keeps up. I’m sure I would have had an easier time besting the A.I. if I were using a stick, though.

Intriguing story mode

I love Injustice’s story. It’s rare that I find myself caring about Superman. He’s too good, too shiny, and that generally leads to flat stories about triumphing over evil. But when his stories truly captivate me, Superman is struggling with himself to do the right thing for mankind. Without giving too much away, this tale utilizes many of the same elements found in Greek mythology, primarily Hercules’ stories. Hercules and Superman are very similar – both are powerful figures but are often blinded by their naïve hope that the world isn’t full of corruption.

Injustice preys on Superman’s worst fear: that he is unknowingly used as a weapon. This has direct ties to a Hercules myth where he commits terrible acts of violence thanks to Hera’s manipulation. In Injustice, the Joker assumes the role of Hera as he pushes Superman beyond his breaking point.

Mostly, I really like being able to draw mythical connections in popular culture.

Smashing through walls and throwing missiles

One of the most iconic things about superheroes is how most of them use their environment to do the fighting. Throwing cars and crashing through buildings is an everyday occurrence in most comics, and brought to life in the interactive stages in Injustice. Each arena has two segments that fighters can bash through. If you’re unlucky enough to get thrown from one part of the stage to the other, you’ll see your character crash through walls, planes, and giant fans as they tumble to the next area.

Beyond throwing people around, each stage also has usable items like discarded missiles and cars. Correctly timing your attack near one of these objects will cause your character to pick up or smash someone into them with all their might. My particular favorite moment was repeatedly smacking the Flash with missles as he tried to throw me.

What you won’t like

Online multiplayer

The trouble with playing fighting games online is that a lot of players will focus on easily exploitable tricks and moves to dominate the rankings. From my admittedly brief experience with this, I saw a lot of ranged characters crouching in the corner of the screen just spamming their long-distance attacks. I’ve even seen two of the same character repeatedly shoot at each other in the most boring fight, ever.

Rather than risk attacking up close and deal with the quagmire of blocking and throws, a lot of people playing online right now focus on such exploitative tricks. I didn’t particularly enjoy how gruff assassin Deathstroke moved while playing through the story mode, but every other person I encountered online used him. Deathstroke as a relatively simple long-range attack and is the main offender in crouching on one side of the level and just unleashing hell.

Hopefully, as more people start playing Injustice, this experience will change. Right now, I am so sick of seeing Deathstroke fight himself.

Repetitive computer behavior

Fighting titles are notorious for imbalanced challenge in their later stages, and Injustice definitely suffers from that. But the challenge I faced while finishing up the story and battle modes was the A.I.’s overreliance on a small set of moves — most of which are virtually unblockable throws. You can counter a throw in Injustice, but the timing is difficult, and I’ve honestly not pulled it off outside of the slower-paced training sessions.

Did this color my opinion of the A.I.’s behavior? Absolutely. I do not enjoy the feeling that I’m punching at a brick wall that seems to get priority over every combo I pull. You can do some amazing, and devastating, things in Injustice, but the artificial intelligence is right behind you. My strategy against this was spamming a quick set of moves in turn so I would move in fast and do a simple three button sequence to keep the A.I. at bey.

I don’t like playing that way, but I was beating the computer at its own move-spamming game. Hopefully you have better luck countering throws.

Touchy interactive items

I really love the interactivity found in Injustice, but sometimes it simply doesn’t work. Using items against your opponent is the same as executing a throw, only when you input the move in front of an interactive set piece, you will use that rather than the scripted throw animation. This requires you to position yourself with care or time your jumps so you can bring ceiling elements down on your enemy’s head.

The trouble is that when you’re rushing back and forth across a stage, this is often cumbersome. I rarely used the ceiling attacks, largely because the A.I. seemed to always lock onto them perfectly despite my repeated attempts to use the action previously. Stage transitions also seemed very tricky to use correctly, and most of the time I had to wait for my opponent to throw me before I could see the rest of a stage.

These are really cool elements in theory, but the often hectic pace in the average fight makes using items and transitions tricky.

Conclusion

Injustice’s greatest strength is that it makes you feel powerful regardless of your skill level. Even when you are struggling to overcome a series of grueling attacks, breaking through that with a well-placed combo or ridiculous supermove brings out the wonder in controlling an iconic hero or villain. NetherRealm was very clever with how they brought out the Mortal Kombat in Injustice. You get just enough MK for the fighting system to feel familiar, but not enough that you’re constantly suffering at the hands of other players who are much more experienced.

I wish Injustice felt more balanced. Maybe it’s the unpredictable nature of the interactive environments, or the frustrating move-spamming, but I frequently felt I was beating my head against a wall. Injustice really wants to bring in inexperienced players, and it is very approachable at first. But playing online or slogging through the various challenge modes becomes infuriating as you pick up on how your opponents exploit the game in ways you likely won’t understand at first.

Score: 85/100

Injustice: Gods Among Us is a fighting game released April 16, 2013 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U. Warner Brothers provided an Xbox 360 copy of the game for 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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You’ve probably seen gaming-themed valentines before (like the digital cards we received from multiple developers and publishers), but the ones in the gallery below are special. Why? Because I made them! I originally drew most of these masterpieces back when I was an intern at Bitmob (which later turned into GamesBeat).

I included all of the old valentines and a few new ones. These lovely cards feature characters from games like Mass Effect, World of Warcraft, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man, and more. Please share them with your friends, and let them know how much you care! You must expose the world to my artistic genius!

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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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Deathstroke was kicking Batman’s ass. The sheer amount of bullets that the supervillain fired into the air juggled Batman as if he were a bowling pin. The Dark Knight had seen better days.

But this defeat isn’t a true example of the difficulty that Injustice: Gods Among Us offers. A technical hiccup made Deathstroke untouchable in my first three fights against him — though I suppose that’s fitting, given the assassin’s history with Gotham’s infamous crime fighter.

NetherRealm Studios takes its first stab outside of Mortal Kombat fighting oeuvre with Injustice: Gods Among Us, which comes out April 16 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Wii U. The roster is a “who’s who” of superheroes and supervillains from the DC Comics pantheon: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, Green Arrow, and many more.

This isn’t the first time NetherRealm has gleefully played with DC lore — the team was also responsible for the 2008 release of Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe. Without any trace of its long-running gory tournament series within Injustice, however, NetherRealm is free to craft an entirely new fighting game that it hopes stands apart from the monumental shadow of Mortal Kombat.

The backgrounds are just as important as the characters

To distance itself from the Mortal Kombat games, Injustice introduces a new unconventional set of tools that you can use to destroy your opponents. You can interact with specific items in each stage to trigger a variety of attacks if you meet the right conditions. In Metropolis, you can make an APC vehicle shoot your opponent if you knock them into the air in front of it and press the right bumper on the Xbox 360 controller.

On a level that appeared to take place in the Justice League’s orbiting Watchtower, I made Batman grab flying robotic drones and toss them at Lex Luthor. Not every character can interact with these levels in the same way. In the story mode’s first fight between Batman and Deathstroke in Arkham Asylum, Deathstroke used a gurney to quickly bounce up and over the caped crusader before I could blink. If you used Superman or the hulking undead behemoth Solomon Grundy instead, they’ll just pick it up and smash their opponents.

“The successful players [will be] the players that are going to incorporate the background elements into the match versus just trying to play it like a normal fighting game,” said NetherRealm Studios producer Hector Sanchez. “That’s why the arena choices are so important at the beginning of a [multiplayer] match. Do I want to play in a match where someone has the opportunity to keep throwing stuff at me, or do I want to play a match that’s more about positioning?”

It’s an odd idea that’ll take some time getting used to. A practice mode explains the finer details of each level, pointing out all the objects you can use and how much damage they do.

Staying in the fight

One aspect of fighting games that is easy to take for granted is the round system: Battles visibly begin and end with specific animations as one character perishes, with a large number on your TV indicating the start of the next bout. That’s why it took me so long to realize that Injustice doesn’t have any rounds at all. Instead, characters have two health bars layered on top of each other, and when one of them loses the first part, the action briefly pauses as that character picks themselves up again.

This lack of interruption is also seen in the story mode, which moves at such a brisk pace that I was completely caught off-guard by Deathstroke’s attacks after a cutscene smoothly transitioned into the fight. Sanchez explained that this was one of the top priorities for Injustice creative director (and Mortal Kombat co-creator) Ed Boon, who wants the presentation to go “completely flawless.”

For some of these storytelling segments, you don’t even have to put down the controller. Timed minigames appear for certain groups of heroes and villains, and the outcome determines how much damage your opponent will already have going into the fight. One such event takes place when playing as Batman: Lex Luthor starts charging toward you, and you have to throw your Batarangs to slow him down.

It’s not a big deal if you miss some of the button prompts since you can’t really “fail” — your opponent’s health bar will just remain full or barely unchanged. But if you succeed, you’ll have a definite advantage.

“This was just a way that we could kind of evolve the presentation so it wasn’t just story scene, fight, story scene, fight,” said Sanchez.

It worked rather well. The narrative hooked me in right away and didn’t let me go until the demo’s cruel cliffhanger, where Batman and friends were racing to stop the Joker from activating a dangerous weapon. That scene had enough tension and drama to fill up an entire graphic novel. But this was just the first chapter.

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

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The NRA is an organization of lying hypocrites.

That was my first reaction upon seeing that the 501(c) organization had released an iOS shooter app in the wake of its own comments regarding violent video games.

But the finished product, NRA: Practice Range (by MEDL Mobile), is little more than a crude bait-and-switch (much like this article’s first sentence).

iTunes describes the app as the NRA’s “new mobile nerve center, delivering one-touch access to the NRA network of news, laws, facts, knowledge, safety tips, educational materials and online resources.”

NRA: Practice Range touts its educational benefits on the front page (of the iTunes site, anyhow). But it dresses this “edutainment” in the guise of a low-rent shooting game that serves as the proverbial “bait.”

One minor confession: I’m a gun owner and a supporter of the 2nd Amendment. I love taking my Smith & Wesson 1911 .45 to the local range. And the app’s gameplay won’t win any awards … to put it kindly. “Infuriating” would be a good way to describe NRA: Practice Range’s gyroscopic shooting action (the analog mode improves matters slightly).

I’m not concerned here with the morality of firearms or the objective or artistic merits of the app itself. I’m more interested in analyzing the app’s purpose (or lack thereof) when juxtaposed with NRA President Wayne LaPierre’s statement that “vicious, violent video games with names like ‘Bulletstorm,’ ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Splatterhouse” led – in part – to the Sandy Hook shooting.”

The game portion of NRA: Practice Range places you in an indoor range, outdoor range, or skeet shooting and tasks you with mowing down targets with an assortment of weaponry ranging from an M9 to an M16. And that’s about it.

Each mode offers one free weapon (you may purchase additional guns for $.99). The gameplay – via gyroscopic or analog controls – is repetitive and downright annoying.

But the raison d’etre of NRA: Practice Range is the “Facts” and “Gun Safety Tips” that display during loading screens – much like the historical facts and quotes in a Call of Duty or Medal of Honor title.

Some of these “Tips” – like “Never use alcohol or drugs before or while shooting” – seem simple to the point of pandering. Others – like “Always keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot” – aren’t so readily obvious to those weaned on Hollywood’s lax depiction of gun safety.

The app also provides separate links to Gun Safety, NRA News, Hunting Season, Gun Laws, and gun-related Legislation on the NRA site.

These are all useful links and – for the novice shooter – afford a great primer on the basics of gun ownership and pertinent background info. And most of the “Facts” and “Gun Safety Tips” are at least somewhat illuminating (though anyone who’s picked up a firearm in their life should have internalized most of them already).

But I question the existence of the shooting game. With its derivative gameplay, what purpose does it serve other than a bait-and-switch for the educational portion of NRA: Practice Range? I’d have no problem with an app that educates about responsible gun ownership – but then, the “game” segment is right there in the app’s title. It’s fundamentally dishonest.

And what is the purpose of the shooting game? I can’t picture anyone tolerating the infuriating gameplay for longer than 5 or 10 minutes. And coming from an organization dubbed the National Rifle Association – dedicated to educating the populace on firearms and their responsible operation — NRA: Practice Range is surprisingly light on gun-related details.

To its credit, NRA: Practice Range gets some minuscule details right. For example, the M16 only fires in semiauto mode (civilian AR-15 models don’t reach full-auto). But at its core, the shooting game is simply point-and-shoot. You’re not shooting at living targets and your victims don’t spew blood and guts, so no one would (or should) accuse the NRA of hypocrisy for simultaneously criticizing violent video games and endorsing an app like this.

But the game portion of NRA: Practice Range serves little to no purpose. Unlike the popular iOS shooting App, i-Gun by Vanilla Breeze, you won’t even learn the proper way to load a weapon and cock the hammer (for revolvers) or rack the slide (for semiautomatic pistols). It won’t familiarize you with the basic layout of a range (mainly because you won’t have the patience to play for more than 5 minutes), and you won’t learn anything about the real crux of firearms – the wood and metal of the firearms, themselves.

NRA: Practice Range isn’t hypocritical. And unlike some of my contemporaries, I see no problem with teaching responsible gun ownership to young shooters (though the iTunes site, in fact, rates it “12+”, which clashes with earlier reports). But the app serves little purpose, the game portion is a transparent bait-and-switch, and interested parties would do better to browse www.nra.org for pertinent info.

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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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It’s been a week since the tragic mass murder at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Conn., and the United States’ most powerful pro-gun organization came out in defense of weapons and put the blame on video games and the media.

The National Rifle Association’s press conference, led by its chief executive officer Wayne LaPierre, confronted many of the claims people in and out of the media have made against assault weapons and other types of guns. LaPierre called this “dishonest thinking.”

“A child growing up in America witnesses 16,000 murders and 200,000 acts of violence by the time he or she reaches the ripe old age of 18,” said LaPierre. “And throughout it all, too many in our national media, their corporate owners, and their stockholders act as silent enablers, if not complicit co-conspirators. Rather than face their own moral failings, the media demonizes lawful gun owners.”

Said moral failings, in the eyes of the NRA, include the media covering up for what LaPierre called “a callous, corrupt — and corrupting — shadow industry that sells, and sows, violence against its own people.”

“Through vicious, violent video games with names like Bulletstorm, Grand Theft Auto, Mortal Kombat, and Splatterhouse,” said LaPierre, listing the games he believes leads to real-world violence. “And here’s one: it’s called Kindergarten Killers. It’s been online for 10 years. How come my research department could find it and all of yours either couldn’t or didn’t want anyone to know you had found it?”

What is Kindergarten Killer?

Kindergarten Killer is a 2002 web-based Flash game from indie developer Zsoa. It features a crudely drawn janitor shooting kids who are also armed and firing back at the player. It is a callous game, but it also doesn’t support the claim that the media is protecting violent titles so that the shareholders can rake in the money no matter the cost.

Kindergarten Killer is a free indie game. It’s not owned by any of the corporations that run national newspapers or one of the 24-hour cable channels. Likely, no one has even thought about this unfun Internet sideshow — including its developer —  for years.

Although, it is interesting to note that the kids in Kindergarten Killer are armed and are the only thing that can stop the player from killing more.

One of the NRA’s major points at the press conference is that by making schools “gun-free zones,” we’ve announced to would-be shooters that these are safe places for them to attack. Kindergarten Killer supports LaPierre’s argument that only a good person with a gun can stop a bad person with a gun.

The media covers for violent video games?

The other four games are the products of major publishers. Oddly, two of the games (Mortal Kombat and Splatterhouse) don’t even feature guns — at least not prominently.

Yet the organization didn’t have anything to say about games that focus on real-world weapons like the best-selling Call of Duty: Black Ops II.

Again LaPierre stepped all over his own arguing points. He claims the media is ignoring the alleged violent effects these games have on people, but the media circled endlessly around both Mortal Kombat and Grand Theft Auto games in the past.

The “Controversy of Mortal Kombat” has its own article on Wikipedia. In the entry for Grant Theft Auto, each game in the series has its own separate controversy section. These were media-fueled drives to blame video games for all kinds of violent and anti-social behavior.

The NRA likely knows about those games and the media outrage they produced. That’s probably why they included them in the news conference. Gun advocates know that new antigun legislation is in the works, and the NRA is hoping to get the media riled up over gaming to draw the attention away from any proposed new laws.

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

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The horror is still fresh around the deaths of 20 children and six adults in the Newtown shootings. And with game-playing at a peak after Christmas, the debate on video game violence will be a conversation for many families during the holiday season.

In the aftermath, the attention is once again focused on what could have driven a shooter so mad. Should we blame video games for the shootings, simply because the gunman played them? For all of us, the pain of these shootings gives this academic debate about gaming violence a renewed sense of urgency.

The mass media are already diving into the issue; some of this coverage is thoughtful and some of it not. On the thoughtful side, The Washington Post conducted a study looking at 10 countries, comparing video game spending and gun-related homicides and found no statistical correlation. The U.S. has the highest firearm murder rate in the world, but other countries where video games are popular have much lower gun-related murder rates. And countries where game playing is the highest are some of the safest in the world.

As for the not-so-thoughtful media coverage: One particular angle was to blame Mass Effect, a game that the reported shooter “Ryan Lanza” supposedly liked, according to his Facebook page. But then the inconvenient fact arose that the killer was actually named “Adam Lanza,” and the Facebook page belonged to somebody else. Not being quick to judge isn’t one of the virtues of mass media.

This isn’t going to go away

The coverage has begun to shift toward the political reactions that are already in motion. The politicians know what their roles are.

“The violence in the entertainment culture — particularly, with the extraordinary realism to video games, movies now, etc. — does cause vulnerable young men to be more violent,” Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., told the Associated Press.

Lieberman has been involved with the topic of violent games since the bloody Mortal Kombat debuted in 1992, prompting a debate that led to the industry’s creation of the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, which puts ratings with age recommendations on games. At the time, game makers knew it had to adopt ratings or face government regulation and perhaps even censorship. Those ratings have proven remarkably resilient in calming concerned parents and holding off further legislation.

One of the game industry veterans from that time worries that the political aftermath of the shooting will be long-lasting.

“Its going to be hard for the next couple of years no matter where you sit in the games business,” said Greg Fischbach, a startup investor and former chief executive of Acclaim Entertainment, in an email to GamesBeat (his company got into hot water for publishing Mortal Kombat). “On top of that, you have to expect that Congress will attempt to pass some legislation that could impact the Call of Duty’s of the world. The ramifications of the Newtown disaster will impact Hollywood as much as the gun industry.”

Lieberman is retiring, and Fischbach isn’t in the game business anymore. This isn’t their fight anymore. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), may be picking up Lieberman’s mantle as the video game industry “watch dog.” He introduced a bill to have the National Academy of Science investigate the impact of violent video games.

Those who are coming fresh to this discussion should know that anti-game legislation was passed, making it a crime to sell violent video games to minors in California. The law was signed by former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who starred in many violent films. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the game industry’s favor, saying that limitations on video games violated free speech and singled out the medium for blame without considering other forms of art or causes. The court found no convincing evidence of a causal link between violence and media.

A generation of feuding

But judging from the reactions in the past week, the Supreme Court didn’t end this debate. I don’t want to see this turn into a Hatfields and the McCoys feud. But the raw emotions on this subject run deep, as an exchange involving two old foes illustrated this week.

Hal Halpin, the president of the lobbying group that represents gamers — the Entertainment Consumers Association — issued a measured statement that noted how close to home this struck. Halpin’s association is based in Wilton, Conn., not far from Newtown, and he said that some in his office had friends and families who suffered deaths in the shooting. Hal’s brother, Spencer, made a thoughtful documentary called Spencer Halpin’s Moral Kombat, in which I played a role. The film is still surprisingly relevant today, even though it was released in 2009 and made much earlier.

“Regarding media requests for a statement about what role violent media — movies, music, games, etc. — has played, I’d simply and respectfully point to the lack of evidence to support any causal link,” Hal Halpin said this week. “As our local law enforcement — involving most of the surrounding towns — work in concert with state and federal authorities, we will likely learn more about all involved and perhaps even more clarity about the murderer, his health and family. But until there are any details that point to media-related blame, it’s premature to make any such assumptions.”

Jack Thompson, the anti-game crusading Miami lawyer who was once the scourge of the industry and is now disbarred, called up Hal Halpin and left him a voice mail message.

“Hey Hal, Jack Thompson in Miami. I think it’s tragic, and maybe it brings the tragedy of others to home … to your home, that this is happened now in Connecticut. Uh, you know, I did what I could to try and prevent these things … I was called a ‘massacre chaser’ by you and your friends … when I all I wanted to do was prevent these things from happening. So maybe now you’ll get it, Hal. Maybe now you’ll get it … though somehow I doubt it.”

No doubt, if he could, Thompson would pass the mantle on to his son to take on the video game companies. It would sadden me to see everyone fall into their familiar roles, with no compromises, and no changes in point of view.

Your views can change

I think that Halpin and Thompson could both agree that we don’t want this to be a problem that we pass on to our children to solve. My oldest child came out to discuss the shootings with me while I was playing a round of Call of Duty: Black Ops II multiplayer combat. The discussion reminded me. Game violence is always the elephant in the room. I would not play Black Ops II in front of my youngest child. With my oldest, I can joke how bad I am at the game compared to her friends. And in real life, I would never own a gun.

I can admit that my views on game violence have evolved. My own brother died at the hands of two gunmen, 19 years ago. Just after that happened, I couldn’t play violent games. But over time, the pain wore off, and I was able to separate fantasy from reality again. Today, I play violent games again, and I see no great contradiction in that, because I have rebuilt the capacity to understand the difference between play and real life. Every one of us will change how we view violent games during our lifetimes, as we move from child to parent, or from one state of life to another.

I can look at this game violence issue from across a generation. But this discussion isn’t about who has the most scars or the freshest ones. I do think that we can all learn something from the debate, but not if we fall back to our well-rememberd, knee-jerk reactions. And that is the only opportunity that I see for all of us to seize in this tragedy.

The debate to me has never been just about whether we should have the freedom to create what can entertain us. It has also been about the responsibility to create something that is meaningful. And it is about whether it is even possible to control and measure the effects of the goodness or badness of media. It is hard to balance these competing concerns, and that is why it has taken more than a generation to solve this problem. To do that, you have to figure out what is fun, what is art, what is safe, what is harmful, and what is like pouring gasoline on a fire. If you shift your point of view slightly, you’ll see that video games can be all of these things.

At some point, when we’re all ready for a sober discussion, we can all raise our heads and address this issue, for once and for all. But I recommend that, rather than digging in, you should try a new point of view.

[Image credit: Peter Kaminski, Flickr Creative Commons]

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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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God of War: Ascension’s multiplayer mode is an interesting blend of first-person shooters, fighting games, and unsurprisingly, the series’ solo campaign. “It sounds cheesy, but we really did look at ourselves for inspiration,” said Whitney Wade, the senior producer at developer Sony Santa Monica. “Obviously were not a shooter — I think those are the most successful types of multiplayer games — and we just don’t have that type of gameplay. So it was more of a challenge.”

The developer is instead cherry-picking the best elements from those and other competitive games. I checked out how this new God of War installment is branching out from its single-player roots at a Sony open house in Santa Monica, Calif. Fans will be able to test out this new mode when the beta comes out — “soon.” Until then, here’s my take on the game’s unique blend of genres.

Controls like a fighter, plays like a shooter

One of the first things players will notice about Ascension is that the controls and moves are pretty deep. Anyone who has made it through a previous God of War game shouldn’t have too much trouble. Sony Santa Monica did stress the importance of the tutorial, however, and had all the visiting journalists work through it before we could knock heads.

After we survived basic training, we knew how to throw down with an array of light and heavy weapon attacks, kicks, grappling chain moves, blocks, parries, dodges; you get the picture.

It feels like a fighting game in that regard, especially when you factor in the special moves. With the hammer, I could pound the ground and rattle nearby opponents or knock them into the air and string together a combo. The way these special moves recharge on a timer adds a nice strategy element.

While Ascension’s multiplayer mode might control like a fighting game, the 4-on-4 team mode “Favor of the Gods” flowed more like a shooter. We got to run around the nice, open areas of the Desert of Lost Souls. I appreciate how the stage was big enough for me to provide support for my comrades instead of constantly fending off attacks.

Players earn points for their teams from killing opponents and collecting orbs from chests, maintaining control over special altars, and springing traps successfully. I didn’t catch whether my three-kill streak (that I knew about because a sentence announcing it flashed on my screen) resulted in a bonus for my side or not. I’d be surprised if it didn’t  though, since if you land a nice combo or take someone out in a particularly brutal fashion, the gods award your team extra points.

To accent the kill, Ascension borrows the fatality finishing move aesthetics from Mortal Kombat and puts it to good use. I remember bashing one opponent’s skull in with my giant hammer and gutting another one with my sword so that his intestines burst out. Rather than that ending the match, however, those guys respawned and everyone continued to compete for the highest score.

At the end of the round, you see who had the most kills, deaths, assists, and so on. Based on your performance, the game awards XP points to level up with, similar to the more recent Call of Duty installments. You can eventually unlock new armor to upgrade your warrior. The developer emphasized that they’ll have a match-making service to ensure that the bouts stay as balanced as possible.

No snipers allowed!

No one likes a cheap death. One thing I always hate about shooters is quickly dying from a hidden sniper or someone sneaking up from behind with a shotgun. Ascension’s third-person view and emphasis on close-range combat should hopefully result in a lot less unexpected casualties. In fact, environmental hazards are the main instant ways to die as spikes or flames might shoot up from traps in the ground. Even though they only go off when your opponent walks over trap, the flames will still burn indiscriminately. I learned this the hard way.

To mix up the action that echoes the popular brawler PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale, nonplayable background characters mess with scrappers on the field. Hercules periodically sends out a shock wave that’ll knock late jumpers off the ledge. Polyphemus the giant cyclops likes to smash puny humans with his elephant-size hands.

We’ll see when the beta comes out if the PS3 faithful like God of War: Ascension’s multiplayer mode enough to put down Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 or PlayStation All-Stars. From the looks of it, they just might, since Sony Santa Monica is putting in a little something for each of those types of fans.

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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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Twitter has over 500 million users. That’s a lot of potential eyeballs checking out your tweets. Now that Twitter lets you add a header image at the top of your profile, why not show your followers cool art from video game series that you enjoy?

We’re releasing seven days’ worth of artwork, each with a different theme:

• Monday: The modern era
• Tuesday: Popular franchises
• Wednesday: PC
• Thursday: It came from Japan
• Friday: Mobile
• Saturday: Retro arcade
• Sunday: Consoles

Today’s batch of headers features 10 entries from popular video game franchises. Right-click (or Ctrl-click for Macs) the picture you want and hit “save image as” to save to your computer. To add the header to your Twitter profile, please follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your account.
2. Go to “settings” and click on the “design” tab.
3. Scroll down to the “customize your own” section.
4. Click on “change header” and select the image you want to upload. No need to scale.
5. Click “save.”

Gears of War

Street Fighter

Castlevania

Grand Theft Auto

The Legend of Zelda

Mega Man

Mortal Kombat

God of War

Super Mario Bros.

Sonic the Hedgehog

For gaming-themed Timeline covers for your Facebook profile, click here.

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

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The Feng Shui in my entertainment den is slightly askew. I know! I just need a 13-inch statue of Wonder Woman kicking the crap out of Batman with a maniacal grin on her face.

The DC Comics fighting game Injustice: Gods Among Us is due out in April of 2013 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. That gives fans plenty of time to pre-order the $99.99 Collector’s Edition of the brawler, which comes from publisher Warner Bros. Interactive and Mortal Kombat developer NetherRealms .

This special package includes an exclusive statue of Wonder Woman beating Batman with the Last Son of Krypton’s escape ship while standing on Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.

I feel like this introduces some continuity errors.

According to the press release, the bundle also includes a special version of “a brand-new DC Comics series.” We’ve asked DC Comics for details about the book, and we’re awaiting its response.

NetherRealms is also packing in a download code for the DC Universe animated film Justice League: Doom and three exclusive character skins for Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. Designers created those skins from imagery of DC’s rebooted The New 52 universe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Since launching in February, the PlayStation Vita really hasn’t had that “must own” title that every new piece of hardware needs. Sure, we’ve seen ports of PlayStation 3 games (like Mortal Kombat and MLB 12 The Show) and new editions of popular Sony franchises (like Uncharted: Golden Abyss and Wipeout 2048), but Sony has yet to release something original enough, impressive enough, and — most importantly — fun enough to showcase why people need a Vita.

Well, enter Gravity Rush, an open-world, physics-bending game developed by Sony Computer Entertainment’s Japan Studio. The concept alone and the fact that it’s a new intellectual property immediately earn it top marks in the originality department, but can the gameplay match up?

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Oh, what a (gravity) rush

The main selling point of Gravity Rush is obviously the ability to control and play with, you know, gravity. A push of a button makes you float off the ground, and another press sends you flying in the direction you aim. Since you can stop mid-air and readjust your course, you basically have the gift of flight. Landing on a surface will readjust gravity, so the side of a building becomes as easy to walk across as the ground below.

Yes, the mechanic is as much fun as it sounds. The citizens of Hekseville, the city the game is set in, nickname the game’s protagonist, Kat, the Gravity Goddess. It’s a fitting title, because you really do feel god-like as you zip across the city and use the laws of nature as your plaything. The whole thing can be disorienting, but in the best my-mind-is-blown kind of way.

Gravity manipulation also has its uses in combat. While Kat does have some basic ground-based attacks in her arsenal, she can also send herself diving at her foes with a kick that’s more powerful the further it is from its target. She can also grab small objects in a stasis field, which she can use as ammunition to fling at the bad guys. These are all clever ideas that encourage aerial combat on a scale usually reserved for superhero movies.

A beautiful world to explore and enjoy

Gravity Rush creates a lush, living world that is a joy just to look at. Most of the game takes place in Hekseville, a large, industrial city held up far above the clouds by a large pillar. From the entertainment district, which glows with an atmospheric red light, to the downtown area, which is littered with skyscrapers, the whole world is a pleasure to explore. Plus, the city is built in layers, which encourages you to use your gravity shifting to discover out-of-the-way areas that you couldn’t easily access just by walking and jumping.

Of course, if beauty alone isn’t enough incentive to search every nook and cranny of Hekseville, exploration is also a great way to find gems scattered around the town. You can use these to level up your abilities, like the strength of your attacks or the speed of your gravity skills.

The characters look just as good as the world, thanks to a great use of cel-shading, a graphical technique where characters and objects are surrounded by a thick outline (you may have seen cel-shading in The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker or Jet Grind Radio). Strong, charming personalities and well-written dialogue make the cast just as appealing characteristically as they are aesthetically.

And while we’re on the subject of beautiful things, I really have to applaud the music. The sounds of Hekseville are just as pleasing as the sights, thanks to a standout soundtrack that perfectly complements the moods of the city.

Tasteful touch and gyroscope controls

A lot of Vita launch titles fell victim to the hazardous pitfall of touchscreen gimmicks. Uncharted: Golden Abyss, for example, was a fun time except for when it made you needlessly rub your system a hundred times to simulate the “joy” of charcoal rubbings. It was beginning to feel like a rule that every game for Sony’s newest portable hardware required lame, contrived touch controls.

Gravity Rush does use touch mechanics, but it does so cleverly. For example, holding the bottom corners of the screen causes Kat to “gravity slide,” sending her gliding while you tilt the Vita to steer. Releasing one of the corners lets you drift, and shaking the system makes Kat jump. It’s a fun way to get around quickly that actually works better and is more functional than it would have been with just buttons.

Technically strong

Open-world games like Gravity Rush are usually plagued with technical glitches and performance issues (like a woman’s face getting replaced with a donkey’s in Red Dead Redemption), so it’s surprising how proficient the title is, especially since it’s on a portable system. Slowdown is rare, and I didn’t notice any major graphical blemishes during my 10 hour playthrough.

SOE Japan Studio even does a great job of handling the the issue of draw distance, which determines how far away you can see objects. Buildings and landscapes further off lose their detail (thus taxing the hardware less) but gain a thicker outline, a brilliant artistic method that helps the game look like a comic book brought to life.

Loading can sometimes take awhile, especially before and after side missions, but that’s a pretty small annoyance that is easily overlooked.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Unanswered questions

The plot does a good job of progressing the action and allowing the characters to grow and interact with each other, but you’ll still have a lot of unanswered questions after the credits roll. I guess these were left vague for a potential sequel or maybe downloadable content, but major conflicts introduced in the very beginning of the story and confusing concepts about the origin of the game’s world are never explained. In fact, if the title didn’t tell you when it was about to end, you’d probably be surprised that things were wrapping up already.

This isn’t to say Gravity Rush is short, and if you’re going to have a problem, I suppose leaving your players wanting more is a good one to have, but I still can’t help but feel a little unfulfilled by the ending.

CONCLUSION

Gravity Rush is one of the best open-world games available, portable or otherwise. The atmospheric world, likable cast, and clever, entertaining mechanics make it a title that you can easily sink many joyous hours into, even if you spend a lot of them just flying around the city and hunting for gems. I don’t know if anyone is going to go out and buy a Vita just for this one game, but if you already own the new system, you really should experience all the gravity-shifting mayhem for yourself.

Score: 93/100

Gravity Rush comes out on June 12, 2012 for the PlayStation Vita.  A copy of the game was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.

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

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

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

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

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

Donkey Kong

Final Fight

Mortal Kombat

Out Run

Double Dragon

The Simpsons Arcade Game

Street Fighter II

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

R-Type

Golden Axe

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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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Shao Khan was defeated, Earth Realm was saved, and Bill Clinton was getting “special service” in the Oval Office. It was 1993, and the colorful cast of Mortal Kombat II was unemployed. What happened? Did they go on food stamps? Beg for loose change? Or, god forbid, get a real job?

Sub-Zero discovered that lobbing giant blue balls at people isn’t a marketable skill. So he ventured into the burger-flippin’ world of McMinimum wage. The Lin Kuei assassin made a smooth transition from ripping out spines to cleaning up grease and supersizing your value meals. And speaking of blue balls…

Mileena tried her hand at stripping, modeling, and a stint on The View. But none of them could satisfy her insatiable desire for carnage and human flesh. She got all that and more as Donald Trump’s co-host on The Apprentice. You don’t wanna be fired. Trust us.

Shang Tsung pursued his lifelong dream of becoming a hoarder. Then he discovered that hoarding wasn’t a real job, and he became a fortune teller.

Jax came out of the closet in ’94. He marketed his own line of crotchless jeans and married his life partner, Johnny Cage, in a private ceremony in Poughkeepsie. The bodybuilder splits his time between South Beach and a cottage in upstate New York. In 2012, he’ll star in the Broadway revival of Annie.

Scorpion tried out for the Los Angeles Dodgers, but the club’s offer of five tacos and a Dodger Dog couldn’t entice the ninja hellspawn from giving up his lucrative career of panhandling. Then the Phillies matched L.A.’s offer and upped it by a burrito, and Scorpion has been on easy street ever since.

Liu Kang and Kung Lao did what any self-respecting Shao Lin monks would do after saving the world: open a magic-themed variety show in Las Vegas. Their eclectic mix of Libertarian politics, social commentary, and humor won them millions of new fans and a series on Showtime.

Raiden, whose real name is David Goldberg, joined the litigation wing of the Anti-Defamation League and successfully prosecuted war crimes charges against Mel Gibson.

Kitana joined the National Organization for Women and started an online campaign to recognize and combat the rampant sexual harassment in organized death tournaments. Mai Shiranui, Cammy, Morrigan, and Mileena all stepped forward to share their stories.

Johnny Cage’s obsession with punching other dudes’ junk concealed an embarrassing personal problem: an inability to get it up. He became a natural spokesperson (and client) for Viagra’s new celebrity outreach campaign. Jax has never been happier.

Reptile ate some hobo’s head and died of dysentery. Scientists dissected his body and, by extrapolating the genomes found in his unique anatomy, discovered that he was actually a palate-swap ninja with three shitty moves.

Baraka got his own cooking show on the Food Network, but after five decapitations and the mysterious disappearance of Emeril Lagasse, the FCC took “Slicin’ and Dicin’ with Baraka” off the air.

Written by Jason Lomberg. Illustrated by Samir Torres.

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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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Ticket sales for Penny Arcade’s Seattle event, PAX Prime, began on May 2. By May 3, excited convention-goers had claimed every available pass. From the weekend badge that permits access to the whole of the festivities down to the single-day Friday, Saturday, or Sunday tickets.

“The bottom line is that we have something like 200,000 people who want to attend a show that only holds about 60,000,” Penny Arcade’s Mike Krahulik wrote in his blog. “No matter what we do, there will be 140,000 upset people. So what is the answer?”

Krahulik says the organizational team has considered a third PAX, moving the current Prime to a bigger venue, and extending the show into Monday. None of that will help you this year, so here’s five alternative gaming conventions that you and your friends can still get tickets to:

California Extreme
Santa Clara, California — July 28 and 29
Tickets: $60 – Weekend, $40 – Saturday, $30 – Sunday

Each year, a group of private pinball and arcade-game collectors bring their babies out to a Santa Clara Hyatt and set them all to free play. The list of available titles is staggering (see them all here). The odds are high that the floor will have more than a few classics that you’ve never seen in person before. Tournaments and seminars on how to become a pinball wizard round out the event which lasts late into the night.

California Extreme is getting more popular each year, and it can get moderately crowded throughout the afternoon. If your favorite machine has two or three people waiting, just check back later in the evening after most of the families have taken off.

Evolution Championship Series
Las Vegas, Nevada — July 6 – 8
Registration: $50 plus $10 per event for tournament participants, spectating is free

The Evolution Championship Series, or Evo for short, is the world’s largest fighting-game tournament. It brings together the best players across several different popular titles. The marquee event this year is Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, Version 2012. Other tourneys include Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Mortal Kombat 9, Soul Calibur 5, King of Fighters XIII, and Street Fighter X Tekken. If you’re good enough (you probably already know if you are), then register and compete to win respectable sized prizes. If you’re just someone who loves fighting games, then the good news is that it’s free to enter and spectate.

Don’t be scared. Evo makes it pretty clear that everyone is welcome. Each event features relaxed free-play consoles for people who find themselves jonesing for some action after watching the best of the best do their thing.

Portland Retro Gaming Expo
Portland, Oregon — September 29 and 30
Tickets: Sales begin May 6

The Portland-based Retro Gaming Expo is run by a non-profit organization that aims to educate people about the history of video games. It achieves this by preserving the software and hardware and presenting them in their original state to the public. Tournaments and panels flesh out the two-day convention, and the live auction sounds like it could scratch that Antiques Road Show itch that we all secretly harbor.

This is yet another expanding show. It just moved into the Oregon Convention Center, which is much bigger than its previous digs. With tickets going on sale tomorrow, it could see an influx of interested north-western gamers who missed out on their yearly pilgrimage to PAX Prime.

Strategicon GameX
Los Angeles, California — May 25 – 28
Tickets: $40 – full con (pre-register), $50 – full con (at the door), $30 – one-day (Saturday/Sunday), $10 one-day (Friday/Monday)

Board and card games are a huge part of the PAX experience. Strategicon’s late-spring GameX may fill the gap with board games (Ticket to Ride), card games (Dominion), live-action role-playing (Cthulu Dice), and more. That doesn’t mean GameX is bereft of digital entertainment. Open tourneys involving League of Legends and Diablo III are scheduled for each day.

A “GameX Stand-up Comedy Show” and “Gamemaster Piece Theater” both sound like the perfect panels to shake off your hand cramps from hours of shuffling through Munchkin cards.

Blip Festival
New York City, New York — May 25 – 27
Tickets: General admission starts at $31, three-day pass — $64.60 (prices could vary)

A good chunk of people attend the Penny Arcade Expo almost solely for the music. If the chiptunes genre (music made with video-game sound effects and audio synthesizers) is your scene, then this three-day concert event is the seemingly random combination of incomprehensible noises that you’ve been looking for. The lineup features 17 artists including MisfitChris, Bit Shifter, and Chipocrite.

The tiny Gramercy Theater has a 499-seat capacity which will provide an intimate venue comparable to the PAX experience.  The only real difference is that this place actually has seats.

Be it PAX or GameX, all conventions are nothing without the people you attend with. So if you and your friends are planning an alternative to your traditional Seattle trip, let us know in the comments. Hell, some of us may end up joining you.

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

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

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If you ever doubted the impact that blockbuster games have on monthly software sales, then this new infographic will convince you of the importance of AAA titles.

The image below (created by the fine folks at Statista) shows the year-over-year change in monthly software sales while noting big releases. The last four months have experienced the largest declines seen on the chart, which shows data from all the way back to 2006.

However, hugely-popular titles like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 and Batman: Arkham City helped the 2011 holiday season perform slightly better than the previous year’s. The largest increase from 2010 to 2011 occurred in April, when Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat brought some heavy-hitters to what is usually a quiet month.

Be sure to click the infographic so you can see the full-sized image.

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

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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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Crossovers are common in the fighting genre these days, with franchises like Marvel vs. Capcom and the upcoming Street Fighter X Tekken competing for attention and sales. Even silver screen boogie man Freddy Krueger and God of War’s Kratos managed to make appearances in Mortal Kombat. But this latest move by Team Ninja is odd when you consider the fact that studio head Yosuke Hayashi told VentureBeat’s Sebastian Haley back in December his team didn’t need to rely on crossovers to create a strong game.

“Itagaki might have left, but the hatred for Tekken is still around in the team [laughter]. So when we see Street Fighter X Tekken and those kinds of games…We’re coming out with Dead or Alive. We don’t need to rely on anything else to present Dead or Alive as a strong fighting game in the genre. We don’t need that kind of thing to prove ourselves.”

It seems Hayashi has had a change of heart. You can check out a vignette of Akira Yuki in action in the video below.

Dead or Alive 5 is headed to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in September 2012.

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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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King of Fighters XII, released in 2009, was notable for administering a much-needed graphical overhaul, something the 15-year-old series was sorely in need of. While it had the looks, it came up short on content, eschewing any story element whatsoever and, among other things, limping in with a paltry 22 characters, one of the lowest in the franchise’s history. Two years later and King of Fighters XIII is upon us. Has developer SNK learned anything? The answer is a resounding “Yes!”

Expanded roster and gameplay

King of Fighters XIII boasts a serviceable roster of 31 characters, plus a few new console-exclusives over the arcade version. Whereas its predecessor inexplicably eschewed longtime series mainstay Mai Shiranu, this title wisely brings her back along with a number of other welcome, familiar faces. Even with an expanded selection of combatants, it’s likely that one of your favorites may still be missing, as KOFXIII is a far cry from the 66 that were featured in King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match. Downloadale content (DLC) has been announced, but so far it seems primarily focused on delivering variations of already included characters.

Regardless, SNK has clearly put a lot of effort into ensuring that fighters have been designed and fine-tuned to provide a broad spectrum of interesting and enjoyable styles. Official teams also make their return, pairing up certain characters in groups of three contextual to the story, but you’re free to mix-and-match as you see fit should one of these not fulfill your needs. Battles play out in a three-on-three match, with each round restricted to one-on-one face-offs. If you were forced to simply choose one character and were stuck with them and them alone, the limited movesets would eventually become a concern. Thankfully, the current setup allows you to create teams of characters that keep the game from getting stale. The ability to switch teammates on the fly has been removed (last seen in King of Fighters XI), and especially compared to games like Marvel vs. Capcom 3 or Street Fighter X Tekken, its presence is definitely missed. Hopefully that’s something SNK considers resurrecting for the next installment.

The Guard Attack, Critical Counter, and Clash system have also been removed since King of Fighters XII. In their place is the EX system. Similar to Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter IV, players can use one bar of the power gauge to boost a special move, increasing its potency. There’s also the ability to cancel out of special and super attacks, which drastically increases combo potential. While this adds some excellent depth to the game, a lot of the bigger combos boil down to repeatedly canceling and spamming one of a character’s few special attacks, then ending it with a NEO MAX desperation move, the final gameplay addition. NEO MAX attacks are essentially ultra powerful super moves that require three bars of the power gauge. These allow players to finish combos and enemies off with impressively flashy and devastating attacks, lending the game some extra visual flair.

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The state law restricted the sale or rental of violent video games to minors, but the court upheld a Ninth Circuit court of appeals ruling that said the act violated the First Amendment. For the first time, the highest court in the country will give games the same legal protection that books, plays, and movies enjoy, because games “communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.” The court cited a previous case that held, “the basic principles of freedom of speech do not vary with a new and different communication medium.” With that, a long chapter of legal warfare will end and the video game industry can enjoy its own measure of creative freedom.

The Justices voted 7-2 to strike down the California law. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion, while Justices Stephen Breyer and Clarence Thomas offered dissenting opinions. Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts also concurred with the majority and wrote a separate concurring opinion.

The decision lifts a cloud that has for years hung over the video game industry, which is becoming one of the biggest forms of entertainment. Faced with regulatory restrictions in the 1980s, the game industry introduced a voluntary ratings system for games to help parents shelter their children. But opponents ratcheted up their efforts to ban violent games state by state, and the industry responded with its own legal efforts that have now succeeded. Game designers can now create games without worry that they will fail to get mainstream distribution based on the content in the games.

“We are thrilled by today’s news,” said Jennifer Mercurio, vice president and general counsel of the Entertainment Consumers Association, a game industry consumer group. “We had hoped that we would see this decision, and it’s been a long time coming. That being said, there will probably be one or two legislators who attempt to test these new parameters, and the ECA will continue to fight for the rights of entertainment consumers.”

See more reactions here.

One of the big problems with the law was its attempt to define what kinds of violence were considered inappropriate for children. Not only is it hard to create such definitions, it’s also hard to justify them with scientific research.

Scalia noted that Dante’s Inferno and the Grimm’s Fairy Tales depict violent scenes but have never been restricted. “Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones. Crudely violent video games, tawdry TV shows, and cheap novels and magazines are no less forms of speech than The Divine Comedy.”

“California’s act does not adjust the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech to ensure that a definition designed for adults is not uncritically applied to children,” Scalia wrote. “The state wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken.”

He went on to say that the court found unpersuasive the state’s claim that video games are special because players participate in the interactive act of violence. The state failed to justify singling out video games in arguing for a “compelling government interest” in the restrictions. Scalia said that psychological studies purporting to show a connection between “exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children do not prove that such exposure causes minors to act aggressively,” as the effects are small and indistinguishable from the effects produced by other media.

Scalia said the game industry’s existing voluntary rating system accomplishes the goal of giving parents a choice about whether to restrict their children’s access to violent games.

“We have long recognized that it is difficult to distinguish politics from entertainment, and dangerous to try,” Scalia said.

In the concurring opinion, Justice Alito argued that it was important that the state only restricted the sale or rental of games, rather than the “creation or possession” of violent games. But Scalia and others in the majority opinion found that to make no difference.

Justice Alito’s opinion opened with a comment on how the effects of new technology are unpredictable. He noted that spending hours controlling the actions of a character who guns down innocent victims might actually be different in kind from reading a description of violence in a work of literature. He found the increasing realism of violent games to be disturbing. Motion-sensing systems (such as Microsoft’s Kinect) can now enable players to mimic violent actions to produce a violent effect on the screen, like swinging a baseball bat to “smash a skull.”

“These present-day and emerging characteristics of video games must be considered together with characteristics of the violent video games that have already been marketed,” Alito said. “In some of these games, the violence is astounding.”

Those in favor of the law curbing the sale of violent video games argued that the case was similar to obscenity laws, but Alito and Scalia pointed out that there is a long history of agreement about what constitutes obscenity in the country, while there isn’t a similar tradition about violence.

Justice Breyer, in his dissenting opinion, said parents are simply unable to keep track of all of the content their children consume. He noted that 5.3 million grade-school age children are routinely home alone. He also noted that Federal Trade Commission tests show that kids are able to buy mature-rated video games in stores without parental approval as many as 50 percent of the times they try. Applying a “modest” restriction on speech to help parents in the compelling need to protect children is a small price, Breyer said.

He said that it is possible to define violent games that are the most realistic and potentially damaging. He found California’s description of violence with words such as “kill,” “maim” or “dismemeber” to be precise enough to be enforced, much like the term “nudity” in anti-obscenity laws. Breyer said that evidence submitted by California about the effects of violent video games on children was more extensive than that submitted for obscenity laws.

“The statute prevents no one from playing a video game, it prevents no adult from buying a video game, and it prevents no child or adolescent from obtaining a game provided a parent is willing to help,” Breyer wrote. “All it prevents is a child from buying, without a parent’s assistance, a gruesomely violent video game of a kind that the industry itself tells us it wants to keep out of the hands of those under the age of 17.”

Justice Thomas, in his dissenting opinion, argued that parents have authority over children and can thus control what speech their children hear or see. He says there is a long tradition behind that belief and that video game publishers do not have the unfettered right to speak to children without restraints. He noted that the law does not ban the sale of violent games to minors; rather, the law allows parents to buy violent games for minors if they so choose.

The high court’s members had signaled that they didn’t favor restrictions on video game sales back in November, during oral arguments.

The case is the culmination of a six-year legal battle in California. The state’s Attorney General Zackery Morazzimi, on behalf of new Gov. Jerry Brown, argued that the “deviant level of violence that is presented in a certain category of video games” requires legal restrictions to protect children.

But during the oral hearings, Justice Scalia almost immediately interrupted, pointing to Grimm’s fairy tales and saying, “So are you going to ban them too?”

Scalia added, “You are asking us to create a whole new prohibition … what’s next after violence? Drinking? Movies that show drinking? Smoking?”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said, “What about films? What about comic books? Why are video games special?”

Morazzimi also came under fire about the vagueness of California’s law, which seeks to define video game violence but does not spell out exactly what is allowed or not. Justice Elena Kagan asked Morazzimi if Mortal Kombat should be banned from sale to kids, and he said he didn’t know. Scalia joked that he played the game.

Back in 2005, then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law authored by state senator Leland Yee of San Francisco that made it a crime to sell games to kids under 18 where the game depicts acts such as “the needless mutilation of the victim’s body.” U.S. District Court judge Ronald Whyte blocked it on First Amendment grounds, as had other courts around the country with similar laws.

Sony’s PlayStation Network suffers big outage — The good news is that Sony has more than 70 million registered users for its PlayStation Network online service for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Portable. The bad news is that they’re all angry because Sony suffered an outage this week.

AT&T craps on T-Mobile, self, in FCC filing — Like the kid who beat you up at the bus stop because he felt bad about being obese, AT&T is a bully because it hates itself. At least that’s how the mobile giant appears in its enormous and unintentionally hilarious FCC filing.

Hackers deny involvement in PlayStation Network outage — Anonymous, the hacker group that had attack Sony sites earlier, said it was not behind the shutdown. However, Sony did later say that an external attack brought down the network.

Select devs get souped up iPhone 4 with A5 chip to prep for iPhone 5 — Apple is reportedly helping select game developers to gear up for the iPhone 5 by handing out super-powered iPhone 4s equipped with its new A5 chip.

iPhone 5 said to have 8MP camera; white iPhone 4 appears in UK — Here’s the latest round of iPhone gossip.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Apple explains slow second quarter iPad sales — The biggest loser in Apple’s powerhouse second quarter was by far the iPad, which managed to ship just 4.69 million units when analysts expected somewhere between 6 and 8 million.

How GroupMe and SMS saved 14 lost souls at Coachella — VentureBeat’s Matt Lynley explains why text messaging will never die.

Zillow files for a (small-ish) IPO — Online real estate site Zillow joined the wave of consumer Web companies filing for initial public offerings.

“Portal Kombat” shows the duality of gamers (poll) — Tuesday’s launches of Portal 2 and Mortal Kombat show how very different game audiences can be.

Netflix to offer more streams at once with family plans – It’s likely that a family plan would allow Netflix customers to add multiple users to a single account at a discounted price./

The two game launches show how very different game audiences can be. This “Portal Kombat” video from The Country Club illustrates the duality that lies within most dedicated gamers. I’m one of those people who could enjoy both games at different times. The fact that the two games launched today is a rare test in the market over what appeals more to hardcore gamers. Both have the potential to be runaway hits selling millions of units.

Mortal Kombat is a fresh retelling of one of the most violent video games every created. The original game from 1992 was considered so violent that members of Congress such as Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl denounced the it and considered laws to ban such violent fare to stop it from falling into the hands of children. That kicked off one of our nation’s longest culture wars that should come to a head this spring as the U.S. Supreme Court decides the fate of a California law that made it a crime to sell mature-rated games to minors. The hardcore fighting game featured the ability to grab an opponent’s heart and rip it out of his or her chest. That’s relatively tame compared to what you can do in the game today with signature “finishing moves” to kill your opponent.

By contrast, Portal and Portal 2 are tame. In these games, you play around with physics to solve puzzles. You can shoot an entry portal into a wall and an exit portal into another. When you enter into the first portal, you disappear and come out of the second portal. This leads to all sorts of cause and effect puzzles that you must solve as you evade the murderous artificial intelligence, GLaDOS. The new Portal 2 is four times longer than the original and has all of the big budget and marketing polish that the original indie game never had. Portal 2 is all grown-up, with a real marketing campaign behind it, but it may not be able to defeat the more visceral Mortal Kombat for the attention of gamers.

When I feel like beating the living daylights out of some digital bits on a screen, I’ll play Mortal Kombat. Who cares if it’s the most crass creation that game developers can come up with? Every now and then, don’t we all want to see visuals like grabbing someone’s head, pulling it to our knees, and watching the bones of its skull crack in slow motion?

But when I want to be the wise old gamer, I will support Portal 2, remembering the indie roots of the original Portal, the game that was created by students and then turned into a mass market cult hit by Valve.

Which game will sell the most units? It will be an interesting struggle between the Dark Side and the, uh, Luke Skywalker side. The soul of gamers is up for grabs. Which game do you think should be the blockbuster of the month?

Which game are you hoping will sell more? Please take our poll.

Online Surveys – Zoomerang.com

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