Storied Japanese publisher Capcom slashed its forecast and canceled a number of games because its traditional video games aren’t selling as well as expected.

The struggles of the Japanese video game publisher — known for the Mega Man, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter franchises — are similar to those of rivals such as Square Enix, which recently reported a huge loss and parted ways with its CEO.

Capcom took a special loss of $73 million due to game cancellations. It blamed a drop in game quality on excessive outsourcing of projects to cheaper overseas developers. It also cited “insufficient coordination” overseas. In the future, it will focus more on internal game development.

The company also said it is doubling down on “digital strategies,” such as increased downloadable content (DLC) for its retail titles. Capcom still forecasts a net profit of about $29.5 million for the fiscal year ended March 31. That is due in part to strong sales for its Resident Evil 5 slot machine.

The DmC: Devil May Cry title is expected to sell 1.15 million units, down from the original forecast of 2 million. Resident Evil 6, once expected to sell 7 million units, is now forecast to sell only 4.9 million units.

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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 this generation of gaming is coming to a close, I’ve been mentally cataloging the titles that are still worth mentioning — the games that transcended the “eh, it’s all right” and moved on to being classics and legends. The real must plays. Right now, it’s not a terribly difficult to become overwhelmed by all of the choices. Recent releases like XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Dishonored show that there’s still more room to explore and innovate in old genres, and the innumerable sequels released every year remind me of how much I liked their predecessors (especially in the case of Ninja Gaiden 3).

But something about this bothers me — something intangible and difficult to explain. With the emergence of digital distribution as a valid way to deliver classics (read: great place to dump games while people still vaguely remember them), those forgotten titles have had a chance to regain the following they may have once held, but I have to wonder how many still deserve one.

Time has a tendency of weeding out the weaker picks because of the public’s ever-changing taste in video games but also because some titles have fallen to the wayside due to poor design choices. The role-playing, the adventure, and especially the horror genres have all seen massive advances just within the last year, and that leaves the genres’ forerunners in an awkward position. It’s easy to recommend the classic PlayStation Resident Evil over Resident Evil 6, but how difficult is it to convince someone to play the original X-Com?

Source: Capcom

I still have nightmares … if only they were about the monsters.

X-Com: UFO Defense (pictured top) is a fantastic game and cheaper than ever now that it’s available digitally, but there are still so many obstacles to overcome in order to properly play it. Learning to use the interface is no small task, and the game’s high learning curve can make many encounters frustrating. And depending on what operating system the computer is running, it may not even work correctly.

XCOM: Enemy Unknown doesn’t have these problems, and it’s not because it’s an unworthy successor. It’s strategic, intelligent, and at times brutal — everything a modern X-Com should be. The developers at Firaxis Games managed to create the game that X-Com fans really wanted and that casual strategists longed to play. There’s little to no excuse anymore for rounded gamers to avoid giving the series a go, and it’s hard to blame them for not doing it sooner.

The fact of the matter is that audiences aren’t quite as tolerant anymore. Now, that’s hardly an excuse to avoid playing something different, but that doesn’t seem to faze people. Day after day, I see people coming back to the same franchises. Even when they have other uncompleted games available, they’ll continue playing for hours just to unlock that next thing or find the last collectible. It’s a sad thing, really, but this a problem that has become increasingly real to me.

Anyone who knows me well knows my love of obscure and independently developed games; it’s like an addiction. It probably is an addiction. There’s something incredibly appealing about finding a system’s hidden gems — the games that, while not always remembered fondly, bolstered the system’s library to include titles beyond the initial triple-A system sellers. Off-beat games like Odama, Indigo Prophecy, and Way of the Samurai are the pride of my collection, and I can’t even begin to list some of my favorite indie games.

Owning so many games and being able to play through them is an amazing experience. But as time has progressed and life has become more complicated, it’s begun to lose a bit of its appeal. Make no mistake; many of the games that defined their respective genre can still stand on their own today: Super Mario 64, StarCraft, Mega Man, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, The Secret of Monkey Island, and Half-Life — some games are just impervious to the passage of time.

Others however, are not. Wolfenstein 3D is often looked upon as the first true first-person shooter, a title it justly earned thanks to its unique concept and innovative design. That was 1992 though; despite how much it has in common with modern shooters, Wolfenstein 3D hasn’t exactly aged gracefully. Its maze-like levels are still fun to play through, but even a title like Doom, which was only released about a year later, has more to offer than the genre’s grandfather.

Now, I doubt anyone would seriously suggest ignoring the beginning of one of the largest genres currently in existence, but it does bring up a question: What makes a game worth preserving and playing? Is it the availability and price of the title? Perhaps it’s more dependent on how well the mechanics and user interface have aged. Or could it be that there’s something deeper?

For me, a gaming enthusiast bordering on obsessive-compulsive, it doesn’t take much to see value in a game. Take Techland’s Chrome, for example; it has almost no unique features or importance to the evolution of video games and was released around the same time as far better games (Max Payne 2, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and Call of Duty). This is, by all indications, a very generic shooter from a small developer.

But upon closer inspection, Chrome takes on a whole new appearance. Ignoring that Techland would later go on to make Call of Juarez, Dead Island, and the upcoming Dead Island: Riptide, Chrome is one of the first Polish-developed action games to be well-received outside its country of origin. An interesting tidbit, considering it’s a heritage I share, but it’s not the only reason I found my time to be well spent.

I have no doubt that Deus Ex did it better, but Techland crafted an impressive combination of large environments, light role-playing game elements, and intense firefights while developing Chrome. Even now, just shy of 10 years after its initial release, the title holds up fairly well; however, “fairly well” doesn’t sound quite as enticing when BioShock Infinite and Injustice: Gods Among Us’ release dates are right around the corner. What reason is there for playing a decade-old, barely remembered game?

This is a conundrum that baffles me, because there really isn’t much to say in reply. The only retort that comes to mind is: “Then why should we remember any old games?” But that leads down a dangerous road. There are plenty of games that are worth remembering and passing on, but the line between gaming classic and bargain-bin filler has become blurred in recent years.

I firmly believe that video games are moving in a positive direction despite some bumps and relapses, but there are still too many issues that remain unresolved. What titles have had a lasting effect on the gaming industry, and what games are only useful as template for designers? It’s easy to see that Ninjabread Man has no worth except as an example of poor game design, but what about all of the excellent — though highly flawed — indie games coming out now? Braid and Minecraft will no doubt survive, but Thomas Was Alone, Zeno Clash, and Waking Mars have a much smaller chance of staying in the public’s mind.

What games do you think will live on? Which ones deserve to but may not?

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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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Don’t say unions don’t have a place in the video game industry because it looks like the zombie games are starting to work together.

Publisher Capcom and developer Valve are teaming up to mix together their two popular zombie franchises in a promotion called the Resident Evil 6 x Left 4 Dead 2 crossover project. This campaign will see content from each game pop up in the other this spring.

“We’re huge Resident Evil fans, so when the opportunity arose to work directly with Capcom to combine L4D2 and RE6, we jumped at it,” Valve writer Chet Faliszek said in a statement.

RE6xL4D2 (which is the convenient shorthand) will bring the four survivors from Left 4 Dead 2 into the PC version of Resident Evil 6. In addition to those survivors, a pair of the special infected L4D2 monsters will transition into Capcom’s action game.

Going the other way, several Resident Evil 6 zombies will start stalking players in Left 4 Dead 2.

“The Resident Evil 6 team really enjoyed working on this crossover, and we’re confident that our fans will have a great time with it, too,” Capcom producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi said. ”We hope you enjoy this unique content.”

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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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Splinter Cell: Blacklist publisher Ubisoft recently announced a $170 special edition of the game that includes a remote-control plane. This package continues the game industry’s bizarre race to see who can release the biggest, most elaborate boxed set that people will still buy.

Blacklist’s Pint-Sized Paladin Edition (not its real name) isn’t the most opulent big-box around, and it’s far from the most expensive. Here are some of the most ridiculously expensive special editions ever released, in roughly ascending order.

Note: For comparative purposes, I’ve used sites like Exchange Rates and Currency UK to convert foreign currencies to the U.S. dollar. I calculated these values from the exchange rate on the day the game came out. Converted amounts for unreleased titles come from current rates, so these values are approximate.

Steins;Gate’s Double Pack Limited Edition

Cost: ¥18,690 (app. $202)

Steins;Gate is a Japan-exclusive visual novel about a group of teenagers who discover a way to send history-altering text messages back in time. It came out for the Xbox 360 in 2009, and a port for the PlayStation Vita comes out next month. Superfans can buy the “Double Pack” for the portable system, which includes the game, a disc of bonus content, an advance ticket to the upcoming Steins;Gate film, a metal hairpin, a ribbon choker, and the outfit you see in the above picture.

Are they real, human-sized clothes? I couldn’t really tell from my research, but I hope so, considering the price. You might wonder why anyone would pay so much for a game just to have an authentic version of a fictional character’s clothes. Keep that question in mind — we will revisit it later.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′s Prestige Edition (UK)

Cost: £119.99 ($217)

One of the things we’re going to see repeatedly in this article is that things tend to cost more in the United Kingdom and Australia. That’s why the U.S. release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2′s Prestige Edition, which cost $149.99, is not on this list, but the UK version, which was almost 70 dollars more, is.

The two sets are exactly the same. They both include the game, a download for the original Call of Duty on Xbox Live Arcade or the PlayStation Network, an art book, those infamous night-vision goggles, and a mannequin head based on main character “Soap” MacTavish to store the specs on when you’re not re-enacting the end of The Silence of the Lambs.

That’s actually the least creepy way I can imagine someone using those things.

Resident Evil’s 5th Anniversary Special Package

Cost: ¥28,000 (app. $230)

Say hello to one of the other trends we’re going to see again and again: elaborate special editions for the Resident Evil series (also known as Biohazard). This Japan-exclusive set came out back in 2001 to commemorate the original game’s fifth birthday, and it’s full of items of varying usefulness.

The Special Package included Resident Evils 1, 2, 3, and Resident Evil: Code: Veronica (which itself included a demo for developer Capcom’s other scary-shit-in-a-house game Devil May Cry), a DVD copy of the backstory-providing compilation “Wesker’s Report,” a pen, a key ring, a regular ring, some dog tags; a commemorative coin, and a locking briefcase to hold it all. So I guess you got plenty for your money.

Capcom only made 10,000 of these, which is probably why if you want one now, you’ll buy it at a high price.

Gran Turismo 5′s Signature Edition

Cost: €179.99 ($241)

While we’re talking about cramming a bunch of things into a box: That up there is the Europe-only Signature Edition of developer Polyphony Digital’s fifth Gran Turismo game. While the polished metal box in this set isn’t as espionage-ready as the briefcase in the Special Package, it’s still pretty cool in a “staring into the abyss” sort of way. And what’s in the box? Well, the game, obviously, along with a wallet, a key ring, a 1:43 scale Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG, a USB key containing a trailer for GT5, five in-game cars, and two books. One shows off the game’s cars and locations, and the other has 200 pages of tips and essays.

Oh, and do you see that little card up there on the wallet? That granted you entry into a contest to win a full-sized version of that little Mercedes up there. The competition included both in-game and real-life driving events, and Marco Calvo of Spain ended up winning. Mercedes values the car €180,000, so for Mr. Calvo, this bundle is actually the best value of any game ever.

Even if he lived in Australia, where this thing cost $299.99 (about $294 US).

Duke Nukem Forever’s Fully Loaded Package

Cost: $244.99

Duke Nukem Forever had several games’ shares of awkwardly named limited versions. You had the Balls of Steel Edition, the King Edition (it came with bubblegum because references to John Carpenter’s 1988 alien-invasion film They Live are still totally cool), and the boring old Steelbook Edition. But the PC-only FLP (I will not type it again, and you can’t make me) was the most expensive Duke experience available.

The FLP included the game, an art book, a mousepad, a wearable belt buckle, and an EVGA GeForce GTX 560 graphics card. I assume the new hardware allows you to play Duke Nukem Forever at maximum graphics settings — because we all know how notoriously taxing Duke Nukem games are.

Tekken 6′s Wireless Arcade Stick Bundle (UK)

Cost: £149.99 ($248)

Special editions aren’t always about keychains and snazzy cases. Sometimes, developers try to give their fans something useful. Take this Tekken 6 bundle that came out in the UK for almost $100 more than its U.S. counterpart. It comes with the game, an art book, and a wireless fight stick by peripheral maker Hori.

OK, so you could probably take or leave the book, but hey, that controller is alright, I guess. I’m sure they would have thrown in a keychain if we’d asked nicely.

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Some careful reconsideration by Resident Evil producer Masachika Kawata may put the horror back in Capcom’s survival-horror series. Kawata says he wants to place more focus on “horror and fear.”

In an interview with website VideoGamer, Kawata said that “user feedback from the last couple of games” has caused him to “revise” his opinion of the series. This was in regard to comments he made in a March 2012 interview with Gamasutra. Back then, he said, “Especially for the North American market, I think the series needs to head in that [action-oriented] direction.” He added that games in the main series “need to be an extension of the changes made in Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5.”

Over the years, the series has gone from focusing on eerie set pieces and slow progression to adopting a more action-oriented, shoot-the-hell-out-of-anything-that-comes-your-way approach.

Kawata still believes that Resident Evil: Revelations, which released for Nintendo’s 3DS in February 2012, was a nice balance that “contains classic Resident Evil elements, but it also has features that modern gamers expect in a game. Hopefully, it can appeal to both camps.”

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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 designer Cliff Bleszinski always speaks his mind — except for this one time. A few years ago, when I asked the creator of Gears of War and Unreal Tournament to give his thoughts on his competition — other shooters like Halo or Call of Duty — he declined.

It was a business decision. His former employer, Epic, makes the Unreal Engine software toolset that developers use to make games, so some of his competitors in retail might also be potential clients on the development side. It’s not a good idea to talk shit about them.

Bleszinski recently left Epic after a 20-year stint, however, which now frees him up to say what he really thinks of other shooters. I took advantage and got a full download in the final part of our exclusive interview. Enjoy this blast of Bleszinski. Who knows if we’ll ever get him to open up this much in the future.

• Part one: Bleszinski’s past
• Part two: Bleszinski’s present and future

GamesBeat: A long time ago, I wanted to have this frank talk with you about all the shooters on the market. At the time, you were wary about that because some of these developers were potential or active clients with your company’s Unreal engine. Maybe …

Bleszinski: It’s possible to say anything about any franchise that you don’t like as long as you mention what you do like because then it comes from an honest place. It’s the same thing as, “Oh, hey, I like your hair, but I’m not so big on the boots,” and then she’s like, “Oh, man, he doesn’t like my boots, but he likes my hair.” It’s just basic communication, right? As opposed to just saying, “Your guns are shit!” and then people are like, “Wow, you’re an asshole.”

GamesBeat: Let’s do that, then. Let’s run through a few shooters and get your thoughts about what you liked and didn’t like. Not from Cliff Bleszinski the gamer but Cliff Bleszinski the game designer. Let’s start with any recent Call of Duty.

Bleszinski: I’ve always said that shooting your friends in the face at 60 frames per second through iron sights will always be fun, no matter what. One of the things that franchise has always nailed is the smoothness.

I have this little game design trick I’m going to give you. I only learned this in the last year. Fire up any shooter — a twin-stick shooter. Start turning and looking up and down. If you can easily control the shape of the parabolas that you’re doing — if you can say, “OK, I want to make a really tight parabola” or “I want to make a really wide one” — that’s basically balancing the “patting your head and rubbing your belly” of twin-stick shooters. You can do a very good job of that, always, in Call of Duty and in Halo as well.

The single-player [in Call of Duty: Black Ops II] … I started getting into it, and I heard that they made a lot of effort to get rid of the linearity, but I just couldn’t get past it. It still felt like there’s an infinite amount of enemies spawning at me, and I’m just trying to race to a checkpoint as opposed to clearing out the room. It’s not my thing. I can’t do those campaigns, especially when I have a campaign like Far Cry 3′s, where it’s really open and so many crazy emergent things happen.

The multiplayer in Call of Duty — it’s that great grind of unlocking all the perks and gizmos. I found a lot of multiplayer maps this time around to be extra small in the first batch. The one on the aircraft carrier, the one on the boat. Anytime you’re on something that’s on the water, most of the time it’s going to be too confined.

There are these kids who have an infinite amount of time to play, and if one or two bullets take you out, it comes down to who shoots first. When you introduce latency, a lot of the times it’s a roll of the dice in regards to who wins.

If I want to play a game that has a more back-and-forth cadence, that’s when I want to play Halo. When I play Halo multiplayer, I don’t feel that whoever acquires the other guy first is going to win. In Call of Duty, the guy who acquires the other guy first wins. In Halo, you have your shields. The guy may miss with the grenades. You may jump. You may have a chance to recharge. Your friends may show up. It feels like there’s a lot more trading paint back and forth.

It’s like boxing. You get two boxers who are trading back and forth, [and] it winds up being an entertaining match as opposed to when Mike Tyson used to box, and he’d knock a guy out with one shot. Halo feels like the former. Call of Duty feels like the latter. I guess it’s a matter of what you want as far as lethality and twitch gameplay.

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Once again, we tap our team of video game characters for lessons in good taste and proper etiquette!

We established long ago that video game special-edition packages are only any good if they include a mutilated corpse statue. So naturally, publisher Deep Silver planned to include one (see below) for the UK/Australia Zombie Bait Edition of Dead Island: Riptide, the upcoming sequel to its surprise zombies-in-paradise hit. Shockingly, some people objected to a headless woman in a D-cup Union Jack bikini. Deep Silver tweeted out a heartfelt apology mere hours after announcing the product, citing its complete shock that anyone would find it even slightly offensive despite a badge on the box that reads “WARNING: Includes content that may cause offense.”

It’s unclear as of yet whether Deep Silver plans to keep Chesty McHeadless in the package. Should it? And what could the publisher possibly replace it with? What say you, panel of experts?

Launch the gallery for wisdom!

Dead Island: Riptide is due out in the US on April 23 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

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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 my shelf.

When I got my first job out of college and realized that I could afford to buy any game I wanted to play, I filled up all the empty space on my shelf with titles and even a PlayStation Vita. However, that newfound fortune came with a catch: spending time at work instead of with a controller. This resulted in a backlog of fantastic games that goes as far back as August. I’ve been making steady progress, but the video game industry discovered it could sell me games every month of the year and not just during the holidays. Because of this, my backlog has continued to grow at a near-unmanageable rate despite my efforts to stop it. Even from here, I can tell that March’s buffet of gaming goodness is going to be a bloodbath at retail and for my shelves.

Most casual players are probably pickier with their selection and don’t buy nearly everything that costs less than $10 during a Steam sale. Those players usually don’t run into this issue. I’m not those players. To make matters worse, I’m one of those people that has to finish every game I start. This means I’ve wasted countless hours playing bad games just because I didn’t have the foresight to avoid pressing the Start button, which takes time away from the good games in my backlog.

I want to play Sleeping Dogs. I want to play Persona 4: Golden. Before my brain will let me, though, I need to finish Resident Evil 6 — a game with a ridiculous logo that I think is kinda bad. I’ve started watching Netflix on my laptop while playing just so I can mindlessly shoot my way through. It’s actively boring, but I can’t fight the system. My backlog is my burden to bear.

I have a problem, but I’m looking for a solution. I’m going to try going back to my old ways of waiting for reviews and making tough decisions about what games I want to play. Just because I can buy any game that I want to does not mean that I should. With time more precious than it’s ever been before, maybe I can’t really afford every game I want to play after all.

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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 programmers have been hiding secret messages, inside jokes, and general wackiness in their titles for decades. Finding these “Easter eggs” keeps gamers busy, and it shows that you can’t take yourself too seriously even when facing certain death in the midst of a zombie outbreak, alien invasion, or demonic possession.

Check out the gallery below to see 15 of the coolest, funniest, and kookiest Easter eggs of games released in 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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Hello, and a merry end of 2012 to you all. It’s been a grand year for video games and for those of us who choose to wile away our time playing them. Many of us have already celebrated the finest games of the last 12 months, so now it’s time to dig a little deeper into 2012′s catalog of hits and misses. Here’s where we champion things like dancing, sex, boss machinations, terrible assassins, and great use of taxpayer money in video games.

Onward with haste.

(Polite heads up: I’ve done my best to avoid major spoilers, but as this is a retrospective look at the year gone by, some minor spoilers have tiptoed in. Use the shield of common sense. The final award should not be read by anyone who hasn’t finished Dishonored.)

Worst dancer

Winner: Commander Shepherd (Mass Effect 3)

Video game animation has come a long way in a short time, but we’re still unable to put the sexy into dancing. Despite that, 2012 played host to its fair share of gyrating twits. The gang from Far Cry 3, Marcelo from Max Payne 3, and the dancers from Hitman: Absolution all put forward solid cases, but Commander Shepherd had this one wrapped up way back in March.

Shepherd not only displayed the dance-floor swagger of a beached humpback whale, he also chose to do his dancing while the entire galaxy slipped into the inky abyss. Nice one, S-dog. Your embarrassing dad dance moves almost cost mankind and its best friends everything.

Best (or worst) line of dialogue

Winner: Chap in strip bar (Hitman: Absolution)

I swear to you — this is something I heard. I was playing the strip bar level in Hitman: Absolution, prowling through the drooling masses, when I heard a man cry out from the swarm:

“I’m going to wear your ass like a hat!”

I just don’t have it in me to make that up.

Best use of taxpayer money

Winner: The Chicago Police Department (Hitman: Absolution)

Back in 2010, the Seacrest County Police Department bagged this award for using taxpayer money to fund the manufacture of Lamborghini patrol cars — a crime made worse by the fact that the SCPD didn’t just use them to chase down crooks but also to create roadblocks, which the crooks naturally plowed through at 250 mph.

In 2011, the Steelport Police Department won for what was the equivalent of nuking Steelport from orbit each time the player did a little dance in front of an officer.

So it’s only right that this year’s prize goes to another incompetent police department. Hitman: Absolution’s Chicago PD proved nothing if not dedicated to cleaning up the streets of Chicago. At one point midway through the game, roughly a dozen of Chicago’s finest open fire on Agent 47. It’s a perfectly executed maneuver bar one minor hiccup: the 84 civilians sprawled face down in the wet as a result of misplaced bullets. Oops.

Worst game

Winner: Ninja Gaiden 3

There aren’t many developers who can say they’ve had easier jobs than Team Ninja. Under the guidance of Tomonobu Itagaki, the Japanese developer perfected its fighting formula with the first 3D Ninja Gaiden. For Ninja Gaiden 3, an Itagaki-less Team Ninja took the old formula round the back of the shed and gave it the 12-gauge treatment. In its place arrived a crude and unsatisfying combat system coupled with a grueling cinematic camera that ducked and dived like an 8-year-old recording a distant ship with a handycam while on a dinghy in a monsoon. Oh, and there was a bit where a little girl asked Ryu Hayabusa to be her daddy. Good grief.

How Team Ninja bungled Ninja Gaiden 3 is beyond my comprehension, but it was far and away the worst game I played in 2012.

Best (or worst) scene of a sexual nature

Winner: Lucius (game)

Six-year-old Lucius wanders unsuspecting into a bedroom to catch his uncle playing hide the sausage with the maid. Rather than stop and explain what happens when a man and a woman love each other very much, the two continue at it in full view of Lucius. It’s game over for the player, but not before Lucius gets a good view of his uncle’s throbbing joystick.

Most inane boss machination

Winner: Richard Attenborough (Ninja Gaiden 3)

Ninja Gaiden 3 was an inordinately stupid game with an inordinately stupid antagonist. Gaiden’s mastermind villain had cloned dinosaurs on a jungle island, but unlike Richard Attenborough, Gaiden’s baddie planned to deploy his dinos in a bid to end the world. Fair enough. On the scale of bad ideas, using dinosaurs to destroy Earth falls somewhere between using tissue paper as toilet roll and bringing a blow-up hammer to a knife fight. But by the Gaiden yardstick, it was a relatively spiceless scheme — at least, until the antagonist told Ryu Hayabusa he was also going to sell the dinosaurs to children as pets. Just take that in for a moment.

They say if you put a monkey in a room for all eternity, eventually it will write the complete works of Shakespeare. I say, if you put a monkey in a room for 15 minutes, you’ll get the script to Ninja Gaiden 3 with 82 percent fewer MacGuffins.

Failed assassin

Winner: Agent 47 (Hitman: Absolution)
Runner-up: Ada Wong (Resident Evil 6)

With disguises no longer foolproof and levels roughly the size of a grass snake’s anus, Agent 47 needed a new trick to help him skulk by his enemies. The answer? Taking cues from the Naughty Bear School of Stealth, Agent 47 placed his hand over his face. No, really. Probably the most remarkable thing about 47′s newfangled trick was it worked every time (so long as 47′s magic bar was full). Chicago’s finest, hired goons, and even SWAT patrols were hoodwinked the moment Agent 47 — a bald numpty with an enormous scar etched into the back of his head — raised a hand over his face.

A special mention also goes to Resident Evil 6′s Ada Wong. Ada’s first mission saw her infiltrate a submarine and engage in some light stealth against Killzone’s Helghan soldiers. One of the mission objectives was simply, “Don’t draw attention to yourself.” Thing is, with Ada’s low-cut top and skin-tight leather trousers, not drawing attention proved incredibly tough.

Worst dogs

Winner: Hotline Miami
Runner-up: Mark of the Ninja

I lovingly dubbed Hotline Miami “Disco-Mordor” (for obvious reasons) when I reviewed it back in October. Cutthroat, ungenerous, and bloody excellent, Dennaton’s top-down action hit was one of my favorites of the year. But its pooches … dear lord, its pooches. Miami’s mutts had a lust for human flesh and a knack for rocketing out from just offscreen, making them the most bastard-annoying bastards of the year. Sure, you could don a mask and transform them into abiding canines, but then the pendulum swung the other way, and they were suddenly the victims of your callous hate. You couldn’t win with Hotline Miami’s dogs.

Best couple

Winner: Juliet & Nick (Lollipop Chainsaw)

Lollipop Chainsaw was as unloved as Goichi Suda’s other recent (and probably better) game Shadows of the Damned. While the blow-by-blow bedlam was enjoyable enough on its own, the lead characters were what gave Lollipop Chainsaw its soul. The chitchat between Juliet and her bodiless boyfriend Nick was sharp as they bickered, flirted, and sliced through the carnage with humorous quips. The result? You got the sense you were watching the drama of a genuine relationship amidst all the soaring limbs and gore geysers. Aww.

Bleakest game world

Winner: I Am Alive
Runner-ups: Day Z and Nintendo Land

I Am Alive is an early 2012 Xbox Live Arcade title that severed opinion in spectacular fashion. It may not have been the most polished game of the year, but Ubisoft sure did bleak with panache.

Haverton was a spiteful and uncaring place, painted in stark greys and home only to those robbed of their humanity. During one particularly memorable scene, two men hunched over a fire offered you a hunk of meat. It was an alarmingly selfless gesture from characters caught in a world that had, until that point, offered only sadists, a child, and the dead. If you snooped around a little, though, you soon found cages with human skulls inside them. Haverton was powerful in its wickedness and did a good job of papering over some of I Am Alive’s more prominent flaws.

Wiliest assassin

Winner: Corvo Attano (Dishonored)
Runner-up: Mark (Mark of the Ninja)

It’s been a bumper year for wily bastards in video games, such as Far Cry 3′s Jason Something, Dishonored’s Corvo Attano, and Mark from, err, Mark of the Ninja — not to mention characters from the likes of Lone Survivor and Hotline Miami.

But it’s Dishonored’s disgraced bodyguard and murderer extraordinaire Corvo who scoops the award for King of the Wilies (mind the lone “l” there). Corvo’s knack for teleporting gave him the upper hand over his peers, but even without that advantage, his deep well of tricks and murdering abilities (conjuring rats and slowing time to a standstill were two of the best) meant Corvo was well out in front of the pack. He was presumably loitering in the shadows somewhere like a steampunk Gary Glitter.

Best ego massage

Winner: Dishonored

(SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER)

(YOU HAVE BEEN SPOILER-WARNED)

Games are mostly about empowerment. In Dishonored, Corvo’s cache of party tricks did a sensational job of conferring on the player a gross sense of power. But it was a moment of silence — a transient scene at the end of a level that featured almost no killing — that triggered that feeling better than any other.

(LAST WARNING)

It came after Corvo had weaseled his way into a fancy dress party disguised as himself (in what was basically the best Hitman level all year). Having hidden in plain sight and satisfied the mission objectives, Corvo left the party, but not before scrawling his name in the guest book.

It was a sensational “screw you” to all the guards who had made your getting there awkward. Your wits, not your trigger finger, had got the better of Dunwall’s finest. A real moment of class.

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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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Remember all the way back in January, when we looked at all the games that were coming out in 2012 and thought, “Holy crap! This is going to be the Best Year Ever (for gaming)™!” Well, this is December, and some of us are looking back to those wide-eyed, optimistic past versions of ourselves and wondering why they ever looked forward to some of the stuff we got in 2012. Sure, some of those anticipated titles lived up to our expectations, but in a lot of cases, that optimism was just the first step on a journey of regret and nonstop head shaking.

Here are some of our picks for the most disappointing games and events of 2012.

Assassin’s Creed III

Contributor Rus McLaughlin

Occasionally, a little time and distance softens the heart, and you remember things more fondly than what you actually felt at the time. I, on the other hand, despise Assassin’s Creed III more now than when I gave it a midrange score back in October. Oh, my man-love for its naval missions continues unabated, but I indulge in those behind the back of the main game and its sloppy mechanics, frustrating chases, and worthless side missions. I’m gratified that it doesn’t whitewash our nation’s origins as some altruistic crusade for peace and freedom (often spoken of in earshot of working slaves), but Creed “concludes” its overarching, modern-day plot with a firm middle finger to its most loyal fans. At least it finally settled one lingering question: Desmond is indeed as pointless and useless a diversion as we always suspected.

The delays

Contributing editor Stephanie Carmichael

Most of the games I was looking forward to all year are now coming out in 2013. Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Tomb Raider, Bioshock Infinite, Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (or whatever we’re calling it now) are the handful I’ve been most itching to play. Other titles like South Park: The Stick of Truth, Devil May Cry, and Aliens: Colonial Marines have experienced delays as well. I guess I can’t complain too much. More time in development means a better chance of getting these games right, but it also means I’ll be burning a big hole in my wallet come spring.

Capcom continues to lock content in game discs

Contributor Samir Torres

F*** you, Capcom!

Twisted Metal’s online multiplayer

Intern Giancarlo Valdes

As a huge fan of the Twisted Metal games since the original PlayStation days, I was ecstatic when I finally got my hands on the PS3 reboot earlier this year. The folks at developer Eat Sleep Play did a fantastic job of bringing its unique brand of vehicular combat to a new generation of consoles with its campaign mode, and playing these levels with a friend in local multiplayer was fun, too. But going online was a different story: Starting from launch day and lasting for weeks, a host of problems made it almost impossible (for me at least) to stay connected to a match. The developers deployed various updates to fix these problems, but I had already moved on.

Disney Epic Mickey 2

Contributor Rob LeFebvre

After hearing, yet again, legendary designer Warren Spector’s “big picture” idea of games needing to be open-ended, with multiple paths, as well as not judging players for their “playstyle,” I really think this game was a huge disappointment. It changed very little from the first installment and was just another mess of control, camera, and barely comprehensible storyline. As with most things disappointing in life, the real problem was going into it with such a high set of expectations.

Endless Space

Copy editor Jason Wilson

We saw a couple of space-themed 4X (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) strategy titles this year (Genesis Wars, Legacy of Pegasus, the final “all clear” for Sword of the Stars II). But the one that many space strategy fans were looking forward to was Endless Space, a game that turned out to be style over substance. Endless Space sports a good-looking user interface and some kick-ass ship designs, but it commits one of the biggest errors that any single-player strategy game can make: The A.I. isn’t good at its game. Your foes don’t do a good job of using its systems — like combat — against you, ultimately providing a limited challenged against a skilled player. And for the demanding fans of strategy games, this is a tactic that just doesn’t work.

Mass Effect 3′s ending

Intern Jason Lomberg

From an artistic standpoint, my biggest disappointment was that developer BioWare pulled a George Lucas and “fixed” the ending. That’s not how it should work — you don’t “fix” art.

A piece of art represents the succinct vision of its creator. It’s also a product of its time and, therefore, a cultural artifact. The best films – like Star Wars – engender a certain timeless quality, but even so, it’s not hard to discern that Lucas’s masterpiece reflects the norms and attitudes of the ’70s. By mucking with his own creations to “update” the special effects or modify story elements, Lucas is destroying a piece of history. This is why fans reacted so negatively to Star Wars: Special Edition (and the innumerable “updates” before and since), and it’s why BioWare should not have changed the Mass Effect 3 ending. For gaming to take its rightful place among other artistic media, it shouldn’t be so malleable and subject to “revision.” Numerous gamers took issue with the game’s ending – and I’d be hard-pressed to disagree – but we should criticize ME3 as a piece of art, not a software program that its makers can patch. We should analyze the creator’s vision and not treat it like a technical glitch.

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation

Intern Mike Minotti

I was excited to have a real Assassin’s Creed experience on a portable system, and I was hoping that such a game could be a great showcase for the PlayStation Vita. Sadly, Liberation was a boring, uninspired slog through the bog hampered by technical problems and an empty open world.

Professor Layton and the Miracle Mask

Intern Evan Killham

Developer Level-5′s series of puzzle-driven adventure games sold me both a Nintendo DS and a 3DS. I love everything about them: the full-on animated cutscenes, the stories, and even the bizarre idea of a universe in which brain-teasers work as a sort of social currency. But I’m not sure what happened with the franchise’s fifth installment. The plot and style are as good as ever, but the riddles in this one are inexplicably obtuse at times (I’m convinced that one challenge’s “clever” solution is not a valid answer to the setup) and blatantly not puzzles at others. A maze, for example, is not a puzzle by my definition, and this Professor Layton contains several of them.

Miracle Mask is the first Layton game that has felt like a chore.

XCOM’s lack of longevity

Contributing editor Rob Savillo

A game about saving the world from an alien invasion is probably beyond cliché at this point. You’d think that such a premise would doom the entire experience to a single playthrough, never to be touched again. But this wasn’t the case with the original X-Com strategy games, where I felt like anything could happen at any time. My first encounter could be the extraterrestrial menace terrorizing an urban populace or a dogfight with high-flying UFO that segues into a ground assault or even a struggle for survival within the supposedly safe confines of my only operational headquarters! Add in a healthy dose of pseudo-randomization, and X-Com felt fresh over and over no matter how many campaigns I played.

But Developer Firaxis’ recent reboot, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, unfortunately starts to feel all too similar all too quickly. Even during your first game, you’ll see the same premade maps again and again. Some missions feel scripted (even featuring monster closets!) and like long, narrow hallways (I don’t ever want to play the final stage again because it’s such a boring slog). I’m convinced that Firaxis doesn’t really want me to play another campaign, which is crystal clear because the game forces me to listen to the same unskippable explanatory voiceovers with every new start.

After well over 100 hours, I’m just about done with XCOM. And it shouldn’t have been this way.

Zynga’s belly-flop

Editor-in-chief Dan “Shoe” Hsu

Zynga was supposed to be the next big thing in gaming, but then it flopped … hard. Its stock became the joke of the industry (currently: $2.39, down from $9.50 at the initial public offering and a peak of $14.69 back in March, and rather than make a bunch of new Silicon Valley millionaires, it had to lay people off. Not many people are rooting for the company that regularly spams Facebook walls. But when the guys leading the charge for social gaming fails that badly, it’s a very bad sign for the health of the business as a whole.

Nearly everything Resident Evil

Intern Jasmine Rea

This year, I found myself sympathizing with legions of Sonic the Hedgehog fans because at our core, we are far too loyal for our own good. Like them, I go into every Resident Evil game with the same naive hope that the series isn’t spiraling the drain. Operation Raccoon City and Resident Evil 6 were nearly enough to make me give up on playing any console-based entries in the series. Poor execution, tedious gameplay, and wretched quick-time events have finally broken me. I’ll go into 2013 with a dull ache for another Resident Evil: Revelations, but I doubt I’ll get that.

Will I buy the inevitable Resident Evil 7? Of course I will, and that’s why gin exists.

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

This week, the voice of GLaDOS from the Portal series shows up in the trailer for the movie Pacific Rim, Disney buys South Korean game developer Studio Ex, and Call of Duty: Black Ops II gets more zombies, now on the Nuketown map.

You’ll also find reviews for Uncharted: Fight for Fortune and Guardians of Middle-Earth.

News:

• The DeanBeat: The accelerated change of the game industry
• Black Ops II keeps players engaged with the start of League Play and more
• Endgame: Syria — a game that explores the nation’s civil war
• Journey composer is fine with winning a VGA on the red carpet
• This week in the Nintendo Download: Crimson Shroud, Batman, and Adventure Time
• How Gears of War toys are being marketed to children
• Contrary to popular belief, Call of Duty multiplayer engagement is still healthy (exclusive)
• Fight monsters, collect loot, and build a castle in Gree’s new role-playing game
• Miniclip and Univision target Spanish speakers with U.S. online game site (exclusive)
• Portal’s GLaDOS is a movie star — we’re not joking
• Funcom removes subscription requirement for The Secret World
• Everyone’s a winner: Zynga’s new Elite Slots Facebook game
• Call of Duty: Black Ops II developer Treyarch unleashes Zombies on its popular Nuketown map
• McDonald’s includes toys of Moshi Monsters’ virtual pets in Happy Meals
• Historic epic makes history: Assassin’s Creed III hits 7M sold in a month
• It’s dangerous for developers to go alone. Scopely offers help
• Angry Birds animated film to debut in 2016
• How a game design student in California brought Portal to a graphing calculator
• GameLaunched is the new gaming-only crowdfunding platform
• THQ giving away Metro 2033 to promote upcoming Metro: Last Light
• Nokia engineer hacks Windows 8 to get free games (and provides full instructions)
• Xbox 360 to get 40 new entertainment apps on Xbox Live
• The Humble THQ Bundle gets less humble with Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
• Disney pushes into Asia with purchase of South Korea’s Studio Ex
• PopRox Entertainment’s social game might let you pay off your mortgage
• Games Workshop to release video game adaptation of Space Hulk
• Backers successfully fund Sportsfriends — the bundle of JS Joust and other odd multiplayer games
• Meteor Entertainment taps Live Gamer to power virtual economy and payments for Hawken (exclusive)
• Prepare your controller-throwing hands: Dark Souls II is coming

Mobile News: 

• Apple names top free and paid apps of 2012
• Fit Brains expands its mind-training brand to mobile devices
• Corona Labs acquires cloud service provider Game Minion
• Fiksu introduces real-time bidding tracking to its user-acquisition tool
• Flurry says communication and news mobile apps hold our attention the longest
• After five No. 1 hits, Disney Mobile to launch three new holiday games and four big updates
• Test your knowledge: The first fully synchronous multiplayer trivia game for mobile devices
• OpenKit to release open-source social mobile gaming services with no lock-in for developers
• Block-builder Roblox goes mobile in time for the holidays
• Applifier raises $4M to for expansion into mobile game replays
• Jibe raises $8.3M to build rich, real-time communications for games and apps
• Nintendo releases official Pokédex for iOS — and it costs $5.99 apiece for each region
• A company other than Nintendo is launching its own ‘GamePad’ tablet

Previews:

• Dead Space 3 ain’t a walk in the park (hands-on preview)
• Insomniac’s Fuse promises some intense multiplayer co-op battles (hands-on preview)
• With Company of Heroes 2 multiplayer, ‘every battle tells a story’ (preview)
• Resident Evil 6′s new modes put an undead spin on competitive multiplayer (preview)

Interviews:

• Sony Online Entertainment chief says PlanetSide 2 online frag game is a smashing success (interview)
• Insomniac’s Ted Price says the industry’s malaise mandated drastic changes to Fuse sci-fi game (interview)
• How Journey’s composer ended up working on Leisure Suit Larry (exclusive interview)
• Why Company of Heroes 2 could warm the frozen real-time strategy market (interview)

Reviews:

• Uncharted: Fight for Fortune plays its cards right (review)
• Guardians of Middle-earth dispels the difficulty of online battle arenas (review)

Pieces of flair:

• 10 gorgeous custom game covers (gallery)
• BioShock Infinite’s generic protagonist fits into every game (gallery)
• Here are just the trailers from Spike’s Video Game Awards (you’re welcome)
• How a family of four remade the first Grand Theft Auto V trailer with Lego

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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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Irrational Games (formerly 2K Boston) released the official cover art for the highly anticipated (and often delayed) BioShock Infinite earlier this month, and fans were mostly disappointed with the final look.

While previous games in the series proudly display the creepy and iconic Big Daddy and Little Sister characters, Infinite shows the star, Booker DeWitt, in a generic “hero” pose. For a game set in a steampunk flying city full of mechanical menaces and sorcery, you’d expect a more inspired box art.

DeWitt’s boring pose and general design are so banal that you could stick him in any action game and he wouldn’t seem out of place — something you could not do with a Big Daddy. Check out the gallery below and see for yourself.

What other games would Booker DeWitt fit in?

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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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Competitive online multiplayer isn’t something that the Resident Evil franchise is known for. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City tried to change that earlier this year, but that didn’t turn out so well. And the recent release of Resident Evil 6 only flirted with the idea in its Agent Hunt mode, where you can “invade” someone else’s playthrough of the story by taking control of either the zombies or the mutating J’avo creatures.

On Dec. 18, Capcom is expanding Resident Evil 6′s multiplayer options on the Xbox 360 — with the PlayStation 3 to follow after an unspecified amount of time– with three new modes: Survivors, Predator, and Onslaught. Priced at 320 Microsoft Points ($4) apiece, or 720 points ($9) for a bundle that includes all three, these new downloadable content packs aren’t exactly an impulse buy. So let’s breakdown what each mode offers to see if it’s right for you.

Survivors

What is it?
Survivors is Resident Evil’s version of the tried-and-true deathmatch rules found in most multiplayer games, where up to six people can re-create their favorite character matchups from the campaign. The difference here is that when you die, you don’t just wait for a respawn timer — you come back either as a zombie or a J’avo (depending on the map) to fight again. And if you manage to kill any of the leftover humans, you return as your chosen character. If you fail to do so, you just keep playing as a member of the undead. The match ends when no other agents are left on the battlefield.

Impressions
The main appeal of this mode is the same with Agent Hunt: You get to join the enemies’ ranks and wreak havoc with their own special attacks. It was fun for a few rounds, but it didn’t hold my attention for very long.

Predator

What is it?
Also playable with up to six people, Predator picks one player to control Ustanak, the disfigured behemoth that chased you down during Jake’s and Sherry’s chapter in the single-player story, while the others fight with their characters as a team. After a round is over, the mode cycles through all the players to choose the next Ustanak, so everyone will get a chance to play him.

The goal isn’t so much as to kill Ustanak (though you still get points for shooting him) as it is to just survive. The best way to earn points is by helping your team, like reviving them when they’re down. The winner of the match is whoever earns the most points by the end.

Impressions
Ustanak is incredibly fast, and it was entertaining to grab another player from a distance with his mechanical arm and use them as a human club against their teammates. But no matter how strong or big Ustanak is, the control scheme seriously limits his potential. It’s kind of silly that a three-feet tall platform in the train station is strong enough to stop Ustanak dead in his tracks unless you press A to hoist him up. Why can’t he just run through it automatically?

Onslaught

What is it?
Onslaught is a 1-on-1 matchup where you don’t actually get to shoot, or even see, the other player. Instead, you’re both competing for a high score by chaining as many consecutive kills of zombies or J’avo as you can — it’s somewhat similar to Resident Evil 6′s Mercenaries mode. But here’s the twist: These combos not only affect your score, but it also increases the number of enemies that your opponent will have to face. If you suddenly kill 15 creatures in a row, 15 of them will literally drop on top of the other player, and vice versa. You’ll know someone sent them because of a thick green slime that covers their skin (pictured above).

At any time, you can cash in on your existing combo by pressing the taunt button. Otherwise, the enemies are automatically sent if you wait too long to extend the chain (usually a matter of seconds between kills). If you’re lucky and max out your combo at 30 kills, however, the angry mob descending on your opponent will also include a few of the tougher creatures found in the game.

Impressions
It was by far my favorite of the three simply because of how quick the tables can turn during a match. It almost felt like a race as I frantically tried to rack up the highest combo I could make without any mistakes. At one point, 20 J’avo landed in front of me when I was looking for more herbs to heal myself. I was ready to give up until I saw a shiny red barrel hidden among the new arrivals — all it took was one shot and boom! The body count at the top of the screen jumped from zero to 20, and I immediately sent them back for my adversary to deal with. A few seconds later, the game declared me the winner.

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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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Long lines at the mall, cold weather, Christmas music sapping your will to live, and the unbridled terror of visiting family … the holiday season can be extremely stressful.

But I also have plenty to be thankful for that doesn’t include the words “happy New Year” or “welcome to the official start of summer.”

In honor of this most American of holidays – in which we cherish what we have by camping out for doorbuster sales – I’d like to share what I’m thankful for this Thanksgiving.

A bonanza of new games

Once I’m done cramming my mouth with turkey, stuffing, pumpkin bread, pie, and several other plates that will increase my pants size, I’m in no mood for small talk or listening to Uncle Joe’s ramblings about globalization while I slip into a food coma.

Not pictured: Tony Romo and the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders

This is the perfect time to escape the assembled masses and play some honest-to-goodness video games. Luckily, this season has been good to us: Halo 4, Call of Duty: Black Ops II, Hitman: Absolution, Assassin’s Creed III, ZombieU, Resident Evil 6, Epic Mickey: Power of Illusion … not to mention my huge backlog of shame.

The industry has provided even the most persnickety among us an alibi to excuse ourselves from our dinner tables.

Wreck-it Ralph

It’s not based on a real video game, but that doesn’t matter. Hollywood has fumbled every game-based film attempted since the infamous Super Mario Bros. (and the dancing goombas that, to this day, give me nightmares), and some creative folks are finally getting the message.

It turns out that the best way to do a video game movie is to pay tribute to the burgeoning medium instead of fighting a losing battle trying to adapt something with a paper-thin story. Think: The Wizard and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World.

Wreck-it Ralph is born from a love of all things video games yet still recognizes the limitations of the source material. It’s at once funny, engaging, and extremely nostalgic. Everyone should see it and thank Disney for bestowing this gift upon our industry.

The Consumer Electronics Show

Held each year at the beginning of January, CES is the premier stage for the latest emerging technologies, consumer gadgets, and gee-wiz entertainment devices. While Apple never shows up and Microsoft bowed out last year, nearly every leading electronics manufacturer makes an appearance, and you can usually see the bread crumbs of cool gaming technologies (the 3DS’s autostereoscopy or glasses-free 3D, for instance) at CES before anywhere else.

And the show is in Las Vegas, where Insert Coin(s) (a gaming-themed bar/nightclub) just opened last year. Most people go to Vegas to play video games, right?

The Wii U

Hear me out. Nintendo’s latest console has been highly divisive even amongst the GamesBeat staff. Some fans – enamored with the big N’s first-party properties and the opportunity for an HD Nintendo console – sucked it up immediately. Others decry its relative dearth of original ideas, new games (that aren’t rereleases), and odd controller design.

Either way, the Wii U is an extremely important piece of hardware for the industry. It’ll either crash and burn or perform averagely (which, for Nintendo, will feel like crashing and burning), and the ensuing shakeup will cause the Japanese gaming giant to rethink its strategic vision. And let’s face it: After the cultural zeitgeist that was the Wii, anything short of earth-shattering will reverberate far and wide.

Or the system will find its footing, reconnect with hardcore gamers, and recapture a bit of the ‘80s and ‘90s Nintendo charm we all fell in love with. It’s win-win for all.

Family, friends, good cheer … peace on earth and goodwill toward men

Just kidding. That stuff sucks.

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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 official — the video game industry isn’t just about sequels. Publisher Bethesda Softworks’ new property Dishonored was the fourth best-selling game in the month of October.

This information comes from the monthly sales data provided to GamesBeat by The NPD Group financial analysis firm. NPD tracks software and hardware sales at brick-and-mortar retailers around the country. The analyst firm does not include any digital sales (like Steam or the PlayStation NetworkI ) in its data, nor does it track the sales of mobile games. The industry continued its recent trend of under-performing compared to 2011. These numbers reek of a market that can’t wait for some new blood, and that’s exactly what we’ll get the next time we cover these numbers: This is the last NPD report before the Wii U.

Hardware and software sales were both down year-over-year, but accessory sales ticked up slightly. We’ll take a deeper look at the wider market after we list the month’s best-sellers:

1. NBA 2K13: Take Two Interactive (360, PS3, Wii, PSP, PC)
2. Resident Evil 6: Capcom (360, PS3)
3. Pokémon Black Version 2: Nintendo (NDS)
4. Dishonored: Bethesda Softworks (360, PS3, PC)
5. Pokémon White Version 2: Nintendo (NDS)
6. Madden NFL 13: Electronic Arts (360, PS3, Wii, Vita)
7. FIFA Soccer 13: Electronic Arts (360, PS3, Wii, Vita, 3DS, PSP)
8. Medal of Honor: Warfighter: Eletronic Arts (360, PS3 PC)
9. Borderlands 2: Take Two Interactive (360, PS3, PC)
10. Skylanders Giants: Activision (Wii, 360, PS3, 3DS)

“The top title was NBA 2K13 from Take Two Interactive. This game outsold last year’s 2K12 by over 60 percent in both dollars and units,” said NPD analyst Liam Callahan. “This favorable comparison may have partly been due to the NBA lockout at the start of last year’s basketball season, likely tempering consumers’ interest in 2K12 initially.”

I say we forget about video games and start covering sports, because that’s where the money is. Madden topped last month’s list, and NBA 2K13 dribbled in to take its place this time around. The other ball-based titles did well with EA’s football and soccer simulators dropping to the middle of the chart after holding two of the top three spots in the previous 30 days.

With the second spot on the chart, the anticipated Resident Evil 6 didn’t seem to suffer the effects of a cold reception from critics, but that high placement is a bit misleading.

“Sequels new to market this month did not perform as well compared to prior iterations,” said Callahan. “This, combined with poor comparisons against the launch of hits like Battlefield 3 and Batman: Arkham City in October 2011, led to the decline in software sales.”

Sequels new to the market mean only Medal of Honor and Resident Evil. Those two games sold OK, but they represent a disappointment compared to their franchise predecessors. Skylanders Giants, another sequel new to the market, sold over 160 percent more units than Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure.

In terms of hardware, Xbox 360 topped the charts for the 22nd month in a row. Customers purchased another 270,000 units and spent a total of $315 million on the platform. That streak will likely come to an end as Nintendo launches the Wii U on Nov. 18.

In the industry at large, sales were down 25 percent from $1 billion to $755.5 million. The primary culprit is hardware sales, which dropped 37 percent. The market is saturated and few people remain to purchase new consoles.

Software dropped from $576.8 million to $432.6 million. Again, this is largely due to Resident Evil 6 and Medal of Honor: Warfighter not performing as well as last year’s big sequels. Also: Assassin’s Creed III came out Oct. 30 and was not part of the tracking period.

NPD notes that used games and rentals earned the industry $101 million, while digital sales piled on another $359 million.

“We would estimate the total consumer spend in September to be just under $1.2B,” said Callahan. “While October was another month of steep declines in retail sales, we are looking forward to November 2012 with the results of Assassin’s Creed III, and Halo 4, which were positively reviewed, as well as the results of Call of Duty: Black Ops II.  These software titles, along with the Wii U launch on November 18, will provide a much needed boost to retail sales.”

The biggest game not to chart this month is probably XCOM: Enemy Unknown from developer Firaxis. Publisher Take Two did mention that the game was a success especially in terms of digital sales, which NPD does not directly track.

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

This week, Zynga lays off 5 percent of its employees even though the company’s stock price rose, game developers think the iPad mini is promising, and German studio Bigpoint lets 120 people go.

You’ll also find a review for Just Dance 4 and an in-depth interview the developers behind one of the season’s most intriguing indie games, The Unfinished Swan.

News:

• The DeanBeat: The iPad mini brings out the imagination of game developers
• HTML5 developer Softgames looking to expand after first round of funding
• Tim Schafer to host Rock Band charity night
• 80M people play arcade bubble shooter games on Facebook
• Nintendo’s weekly download report features giant presidential robots, Professor Layton, and New Super Mario Bros. 2 DLC
• Assassin’s Creed III is the most preordered Ubisoft game ever
• Dishonored developer announces three add-on packs
• 2K Games enlists Lineage developer to design Civilization Online
• Utherverse nabs a patent on scalable virtual worlds that can host unlimited users
• Wing Commander creator’s Kickstarter reaches goal in less than a week
• Gree acquires developer Pokelabo for $173 million
• THQ releases newest Darksiders II downloadable content on October 30
• Resident Evil 6 to get improved in-game camera in mid-December patch
• Halo 4 to get 3 multiplayer map packs through April
• DICE Summit shakes up its format for game creator talks and renames industry awards
• Game ratings board creates a no-cost service for putting content labels on digital games
• Borderlands Legends is an isometric strategy game due October 31
• Final Fantasy publisher signs deal to use Gears of War developer’s latest graphics technology
• Aiming to head off Apple, Microsoft shows off Xbox SmartGlass mobile app and Xbox dashboard update
• AMD launches new set of 8-core processors for gamers
• Here’s the first Wii U commercial from Nintendo
• Fight Club, Daredevil studio to help produce Assassin’s Creed film
• GameStop to get exclusive The Walking Dead: Collector’s Edition from Telltale Games
• Shigeru Miyamoto is Nintendo’s other original intellectual property

Earnings:

• Analysts pore through Zynga’s numbers as the stock price rises
• Zynga stock surges as it slightly beats analysts’ reduced targets for third quarter
• Facebook’s Zuckerberg unhappy with Zynga’s 20% decline in payments

Mobile News:

• Founders leave DeNA’s Ngmoco mobile gaming division
• Majesco expands into mobile games with Legends of Loot
• Mobile is now 20 percent of Zynga’s business

Layoffs:

• German games maker Bigpoint lets go 120 employees
• Zynga CEO’s letter to employees: We’ve laid off 5 percent of our workforce
• Zynga lays off almost entire Austin studio

Interviews:

• The story behind the emotional center of The Unfinished Swan (in-depth interview)
• The explanation behind the ending of the Unfinished Swan (interview part 2)
• Playboy’s Miss October talks about gamer stereotypes and breaking into the game business
• Here’s how you become an app store millionaire (interview)

Tablet wars:

• Game developers say iPad mini will be good for gaming
• This week could determine the fate of the digital economy

Reviews:

• Just Dance 4 revels in absurdity even as it loses some of its mojo (review)

Pieces of flair:

• Exclusive images from The Art of Assassin’s Creed III
• GamesBeat’s massive Street Fighter tournament: The semifinals

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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’ve ever magically combined herb plants into pills in Resident Evil 6 or wondered how Max Payne could survive shoving a ton of painkillers down his throat, then you realize that video games aren’t known for their sound representation of science. But for most of them, that’s fine! Like books, movies, and TV shows, they require some suspension of disbelief.

But those that do base their fictions off of real-world research could use some improvement. That’s where the group of scientists working at Thwacke come in. In addition to posting articles that explore topics like nanotechnology in Metal Gear Solid or genetic modification in BioShock, its staff provides consultation for developers looking to incorporate science into their games.

Among its handful of clients is InXile Entertainment, who hired Thwacke to help “shape the science fiction“ of Wasteland 2, the sequel to the beloved 1988 post-apocalyptic role-playing game (which later inspired another end-of-the-world RPG, Fallout).

“I find it’s just great to have another set of really smart eyes looking at everything we do,” said Brian Fargo, the chief executive of InXile and one of the co-creators of the original Wasteland, in a phone call with GamesBeat. “So for me, it goes beyond their science background on things … . They’ve really been great [at] throwing out all sorts of ideas. And all of my writers have used pieces of what they’ve thrown out. It really has helped make the product better.”

GamesBeat reached out to Thwacke co-founder Sebastian Alvarado, a Ph.D candidate in pharmacology at the Montreal-based McGill University, to find out just what the firm can contribute to the development process.

GamesBeat: What’s the founding story behind Thwacke? Was it because of something you and your colleagues noticed was lacking in the video game industry?

Sebastian Alvarado: I was midway into graduate studies at McGill and had the opportunity to visit the studio of a developer here in Montreal. As I walked through their studio, I saw a member of their team Wikipedia-ing “DNA.” Having dedicated my career to studying DNA, I realized that the knowledge that we take for granted in academia could be very useful for the entertainment business. To me, that incident emphasized the huge gap between legitimate research and public knowledge.

I decided that something had to be done, and it had to be done by highly qualified and creative scientists who played video games.

GamesBeat: What role can Thwacke’s consulting play in game development? Do you work specifically with writers and designers? Is it better if you’re involved in the process early on?

Alvarado: Although we can provide input at almost any stage of development, we mostly work early on the conception of a project with writers and with designers. We work with writers to craft plausible narrative — world building — and with designers to align a scientific concept with a design mechanic.

We do this with an extensive network of academics covering every discipline. For example, in Wasteland 2 we were asked which animals that would survive a nuclear fallout and why. In this case we found specialists in environmental biology, medicine, and evolutionary biology to craft science into ideas that can be used in game design. This saves researching time for writers and allows them to focus on gameplay. This out-of-the-box approach has been able to spark new directions for narrative and gameplay that wouldn’t have otherwise been explored.

In later stages of development, we usually work on easy-to-implement text-based assets. In Wasteland 2, we will be doing this for a side mission that involves pages in a wastelander’s logbook. This information is optional but adds depth to narrative and immersion for those willing to read it.

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Critics of Resident Evil 6 point out numerous problems with the game, but developer Capcom is addressing at least one of these gripes in an update to the game due in December.

The patch draws out the placement of the in-game camera to give you a wider field of view. This new setting is optional, and those who like the original up-on-the-butt perspective can still play that way.

Resident Evil 6 is a third-person zombie-killing action game with three intertwining story campaigns. It’s available on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 for $59.99. Be sure to check out our review.

Here is a gallery that compares the two camera settings:

Other improvements in the update include English-language subtitles even when the spoken language is something other than English. You know, in case you were planning to use Resident Evil 6 to help practice your French.

The patch also unlocks the alternative Ada Wong character campaign from the start. Previously, you had to finish all of the three standard campaigns to unlock this content. Capcom also added a playable co-op partner to Ada’s story.

Finally, the patch includes a new No Hope difficulty mode that’s even more difficult than the Resident Evil 6′s current most difficult setting.

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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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I don’t want to bum anyone out, but this might be our saddest Threeview yet. Resident Evil 6 recently hit store shelves for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, with a PC version due out soon, but the longtime “horror” (in quotes for a reason — see below) series seems to be flailing about like a no-legged zombie. Reviewers and fans have been quite vocal about their displeasure with this latest edition.

Our GamesBeat critic, an industry analyst, and a game teacher break down what exactly went wrong with publisher/developer Capcom’s latest Resident Evil.

Resident Evil 6: The critic’s review

• By Giancarlo Valdes, GamesBeat staff writer

Everything in Resident Evil 6 is bigger, louder, and prettier than its predecessors, but that does not necessarily make it a better game. While it finally embraces the adrenaline-fueled action the series has slowly moved toward for so long, the rest is a schizophrenic mess. Capcom can’t seem to decide whether Resident Evil is a campy blockbuster film (undoubtedly its greatest strength) or a serious reflection on the human condition. For all of our sakes, let’s hope it chooses the former for future editions.

Click here for the full GamesBeat review.

Final critic’s score: 70/100

Resident Evil 6: The analyst’s review

• By Michael Pachter, managing director, Wedbush Securities
• Twitter: @michaelpachter

Let’s face it: Bad reviews kill, and Resident Evil 6 received a slew of bad reviews.  A “normal” RE game should be counted on to deliver solid review scores (that is, above 80 out of 100), with RE4 receiving an average Metacritic score of 96 and RE5 getting an 84. The game’s history has been mixed, with some versions of the game scoring in the 70s, but solid scores have been the norm for the series.

This version’s Metacritic average of 66 on Xbox 360 is all but certain to guarantee disappointing sales. The relatively weak review score is compounded by the fact that the game launched in the same window as highly regarded Dishonored (high of 92 average) and XCOM (89) and followed the immensely successful Borderlands 2 (91). In my view, gamers have a lot of solid choices to spend their hard-earned dollars on, and the sixth (or seventh) edition in a series that is already getting long in the tooth is not going to command a lot of attention with middling review scores.

RE6 is a symptom of a greater problem in the video game industry:  a low tolerance for risk by publishers leads to “safe” choices (meaning sequels) that don’t provide sufficient opportunity for innovation. It’s easy to see that RE6 was a safe choice, given the phenomenal success of most of the game’s earlier iterations; this time, we think that the safe bet wasn’t so wise.

Although some of my other comments may suggest otherwise, I really don’t think gamers are stupid.  Most gamers want a good value for their money, and a game with an average Metacritic score of 66 is not going to provide much value, particularly when the game is on the shelves next to significantly better games.  Of the 59 reviews of Resident Evil 6 on Metacritic, 25 were above 75 and 34 were below, with a high of 95 and low of 20.  My personal favorite reviewer, Jim Sterling from Destructoid, gave the game a 30.

I have to go with the critics: Resident Evil 6 is a bust.

Final analyst’s score: 60/100

Resident Evil 6: The academic’s review

• By Devin Monnens, assistant course director for game history, Full Sail University
• Blog: Desert Hat

A hunched zombie rips apart a hapless victim, flesh stretching string-like from wet, peeled-back lips. He turns. He shambles towards the camera, moaning. Leon Kennedy raises his gun. “Mister President! Don’t make me do this!” Not bad for the first 20 seconds.

However, this is as horrific as Resident Evil 6 gets. The rest is mostly punching and shooting. And more punching. You rarely conserve ammo. You rarely feel uneasy. It’s not horror, let alone survival-horror. It’s as horrific as Castlevania — an action game with zombies in it. The designers call that “horror entertainment.”

Horror stems from one’s confrontation with mortality, primarily through fear, shock, and disgust. Fear comes from confrontation with impending death and anticipation of pain … shock from how sudden or violent it is. Disgust is abhorrence of the human body’s decay or destruction — a rotting corpse, severed limbs, oozing entrails. If fear, surprise, and disgust are spices that make good horror, what does that make RE6?

In Resident Evil 1, a single zombie can — and will — easily kill you. They’re also rotting and grin hideously as they do it. Your shorts turn brown as they advance because you know that a.) they’re going to eat you and b.) it’ll be extremely messy. And you’ll have to watch.

In contrast, RE6 zombies flail around, and you can shake them off easily. Unless there’s a mob, you’re in little danger of even being severely maimed. If you die, you don’t actually get to see the zombies feeding. You’re never afraid for your life.

Apparently, fewer people want to buy terrifying and gory games. That’s what worried the game’s producers, who have shareholders to please. That balance between inclusion and horror they realize is “hard.” So what they came up with is popcorn horror: salt and butter to go with the explosions, but ultimately very little depth.

Horror also comes from what we imagine will happen, from anticipation. That’s why timing is so important — like when Leon enters a large, silent room, and lightning suddenly flashes. That’s why the xenomorph pounces from the shadows in Alien. That’s why in “The Raven,” the narrator opens the door to reveal … nothing.

Perhaps that’s what’s most frightening about RE6: the anticipation of what horror lurks within and what you actually confront. It’s the aftertaste from when you finally realize the king of survival horror wants to be something else.

Final academic’s score: 75/100

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

This week, Cliff Bleszinski leaves Epic Games, online developer Kixeye comes under fire after a former employee blogs about alleged racism in the workplace, and Zynga pre-announces weak third quarter earnings.

You’ll also find reviews for Resident Evil 6, FIFA 13, and Bad Piggies, as well was previews for Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, Skylanders Giants, and Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

News:

• The DeanBeat: Raptr’s gamer data shows that building real communities pays off in profits (it’s the community, stupid)
• Words With Friends co-creators leave Zynga
• Rovio teases Star Wars-themed Angry Birds
• Loot Drop reveals RPG storyline on Kickstarter
• Photo gallery of Skylanders creator Toys for Bob studio
• Activision gives Skylanders Giants the mega-investment treatment
• Zynga ‘pre-announces’ weak earnings again for third quarter
• Full Mario, Zelda, and Star Fox retail titles headed to 3DS eShop
• The 3DS eShop’s best game, Pushmo, gets a sequel in Crashmo
• AppFlood is one of the fastest growing developer-to-developer ad networks
• Kixeye fires four after investigation into allegations of racism
• Dishonored isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure game, but this trailer is
• Artillery aims to make web browsers into game consoles (exclusive)
• Cliff Bleszinski leaves Epic Games
• Bethesda hires former Star Wars: The Old Republic executive producer to run new Austin studio
• George Washington stars as the villain in Assassin’s Creed III extra content
• Patch notes: Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition update includes Creative Mode, strongholds, and dozens more
• Game veterans launch a two-fer ‘old-school RPG’ game on Kickstarter
• Kixeye takes ‘substantial corrective action’ after black contractor calls out alleged racist behavior at social gaming firm
• Notch to Callaham: ‘Thanks for the personal attack’ (UPDATED)
• Ubisoft continues support for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier with new multiplayer maps
• Resident Evil 6′s science is not just for ‘old men in tweed suits’
• Buy certain games on the 3DS eShop, get Donkey Kong: Original Edition free
• Possible box art appears for the unconfirmed Star Wars: First Assault Xbox Live Arcade game
• Mass Effect trilogy on Xbox 360 won’t include any of the paid DLC
• Aaargh! KingsIsle Entertainment’s Pirate101 online game world to launch as early as Oct. 8
• Maingear launches a 17-inch gaming laptop with free custom paint jobs
• What were the cheapest and most expensive consoles in gaming history? (infographic)

Mobile news:

• Angry Birds maker Rovio plans to reveal its mobile book app
• Battlefield 3 graphics for mobile? EA has developer DICE on the job
• Directly record your iPhone games with Kamcord

MMO news:

• Mists of Pandaria sales fall short of previous two World of Warcraft expansions

Interviews:

• How animators bring Skylanders Giants to life (video interview)
• How Toys for Bob turned Activision into a giant toy company with Skylanders (interview)

Reviews:

• FIFA Soccer 13 strives for perfection through gameplay imperfection (review)
• Bad Piggies is a painfully challenging departure from Angry Birds (review)
• Resident Evil 6 thrives on its silliness but stumbles when things get serious (review)
• Pokémon Black and White Versions 2 take few risks but still offer classic thrills (review)

Previews:

• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance may need to rise above its surprisingly conventional design (hands-on preview)
• How animators bring Skylanders to life (video interview)
• Medal of Honor: Warfighter wants to be ‘Saving Private Ryan meets Hurt Locker,’ but its gameplay is in the way (hands-on preview)
• Activision gives Skylanders Giants the all-in, mega-investment treatment (hands-on preview)
• Giant robots with frickin’ laser beams: MechWarrior Online closed beta (hands-on preview)
• Will Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified lure gamers to the PlayStation Vita? (hands-on preview)
• Beef up your NBA 2K13 career with Facebook and mobile apps (preview)

Pitch us in one Tweet:

• The top 10 games of ‘Pitch us in one Tweet’ (#2: Colour Bind)
• The top 10 games of ‘Pitch us in one Tweet’ (#3: Hackycat)
• The top 10 games of ‘Pitch us in one Tweet’ (#4: Ring Run Circus)
• The top 10 games of ‘Pitch us in one Tweet’ (#5: Dunk Dreams)

Pieces of flair:

• Gaming art for your Twitter header (Part 4: It came from Japan)
• A insider’s photo tour of the Toys for Bob game studio, where Skylanders are born (photo gallery)
• Gaming art for your Twitter header (Part 3: PC)
• Steampunk NES’s creator spent 20 hours on the coolest gift a nephew ever got (gallery)z
• Gaming art for your Twitter header (Part 2: Popular franchises)
• Gaming art for your Twitter header (Part 1: The modern era)
• Mmm…10 video game cakes and other sweets (gallery)
• 15 bizarre Street Fighter Alpha mysteries

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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 Resident Evil franchise has a lot of tropes. Most of them, such as locked doors and puzzle-solving, have been around since the very first game hit the PlayStation nearly two decades ago. But over the years, and to the dismay of die-hard fans, the series has traded in its survival-horror badge for a more Army of Two-esque, action-oriented, co-op experience. So why, for the love of Cthulhu, can Leon still not overcome a simple locked gate?! He is literally armed to the teeth with weapons and explosives — if this were The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, he would be overburdened and slowly trudging his way toward a town 5 miles in the distance just so he doesn’t have to drop anything.

Alongside his partner, Helena, Leon is often seen kicking down locked gates with relative ease and frequency. But whenever the developers want you to go search for a key (or three) or solve some Myst-like puzzle that makes no freaking sense, doors and gates in Resident Evil 6 become imbued with some magical, impenetrable property that prevents you from jumping over it. Some of these barriers are so demure and unsuspecting that one could probably lean on it to catch their breath and fall over it.

But here I am, trying to make sense of Resident Evil 6. While Destructoid’s several-thousand word review effectively and exhaustively nails down the game’s many flaws, the above image, by Daily Drawing artist Angela Song, pretty much sums it all up.

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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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Gamers aren’t the only ones interested in the new Resident Evil 6 from Capcom — academics are dissecting its secrets, too.

Last weekend, London’s famous Smithfield Market opened a fake human butchery called “Wesker and Son” to the public, but the festivities didn’t end there. St. Bartholomew’s Pathology Museum (@BartsPathology on Twitter) held special lectures in honor of the game, which releases worldwide today. But as always with Resident Evil, the agenda is bigger than you think.

“The point of this aspect of the Resident Evil 6 launch was to give the general public more of an understanding of the science behind the game,” Carla Connolly (pictured above), the technician at the museum, told GamesBeat. “It was a way to demystify ‘difficult’ topics that some people may not delve into by choice for fear of them being too complicated.”

Those topics included Virology and Parasitology, among others. “Andrew Voak — a Queen Mary, University of London PhD candidate — gave the first lecture about Parasitology and tied this into the concept of Resident Evil 6 perfectly. He’s been a fan since the first game was released. He was able to make people aware of the link between fact and fiction and also tell interesting anecdotes about parasites many people never knew actually [existed].”

Another speaker was John Oxford, a professor of Virology at Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry, who has lended his expertise to subjects such as the film 28 Days Later. He’s “always happy to be involved in new and exciting projects that discuss science from a totally different perspective,” said Connolly.

She said, “We’re hoping that the general public will see science as a more accessible topic and understand that it permeates many aspects of popular culture. It’s not just for old men in tweed suits or ‘Big Bang Theory’ geeks!”

Connolly is personally a fan of the survival horror series, as well as Silent Hill and Fatal Frame (known as Project Zero in Europe). “[Resident Evil] has such a cult following now that it’s impossible to find someone who doesn’t know what it is, at the very least,” she said.

Well, maybe not impossible. One of the other speakers at St. Bart’s, food futurologist Dr. Morgaine Gaye, admitted to us by phone, “I don’t know one thing about Resident Evil 6.” Her lecture wasn’t about the game itself but rather about one of its real-life contexts: meat.

“I write about trends,” she said, when asked what a food futurologist does. “I look at the future of food … at geopolitics, economics, and ecology — what we’re going to be doing in the future in relation to our lives, really, and that always involves food.”

While Dr. Gaye didn’t talk about zombie apocalypses, she did share a few details about abattoirs (or slaughterhouses) and cannibalism in her lecture last Friday.

“It was supposed to give Resident Evil some academic underpinning and kudos, rather than it being, ‘Hey, this is just a game,’” she said. “It’s about looking at … the truth of science. And I found that most people were very disturbed by my lecture, as I would imagine that a lot of people playing Resident Evil probably are disturbed by Resident Evil. They play because they think, ‘Oh my god, oh my god.’ And I think what I talked about left people with that feeling because there’s nothing more weird than the truth. And when I talked about cannibalism, and I said, ‘You know, we think that we’re human. We would never do that. Oh my goodness, we would never do that.’”

Dr. Gaye showed her audience pictures of an excited group of people drawing and quartering a live pig and people in China dissecting a human torso with a scythe — to which she asked, “How far away are we?

“We’re the most overpopulated country in Europe, with the smallest land mass per person. We’re very populated. And people are never left in the ground for more than 100 years here. They’re actually dug up, and the next body’s put in the ground because we just don’t have the space. So maybe we can cure that by eating people. And I just left that as a question.”

That kind of horror isn’t far from the apocalyptic nature of Resident Evil. As Dr. Gaye said, what’s considered “normal is [only] what we’re doing right now.”

(Photos courtesy of Carla Connolly)

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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 would suck to live in the world of Resident Evil. After 16 years of constant bio-terrorist threats, zombies, megalomaniacs, and viruses with names slowly using up the entire alphabet, it’s surprising to see any real survivors left. But rather than give us hope for humankind’s triumphant victory, developer Capcom is content to keep chipping away at its numbers with Resident Evil 6 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC (due out on Tuesday, Oct. 2).

The current and familiar protagonist crew of Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield, Sherry Birkin, and Ada Wong team up with newcomers Helena Harper, Piers Nivans, and Jake Muller for the largest ensemble cast in this zombie-shootin’ franchise to date. You follow their adventures across the globe as the threat of the new Chrysalid virus spreads.

They’re kind of like The Avengers, except with fewer superpowers and better hairstyles.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Unpredictable foes
Half the fun of playing a Resident Evil game is seeing how many more viruses and grotesque monsters Capcom can come up with. In Resident Evil 6, the new bio-organic creatures on the block are the C-virus-powered J’avo, a formidable threat thanks to the multiple ways they can instantly mutate and evolve. They can sprout large, bony arms to shield themselves or long legs to jump great distances. Your tactics in battle constantly change to counter their attacks.

The enemy transformations look fantastic, too. Entrails pour out of the J’avo like goodies from a blood-soaked piñata as their limbs twist and break at bone-crunching angles. Others spontaneously combust into flames, and their melted skin forms a golden cocoon that quickly gives birth to even larger creatures. And some of the more gargantuan bosses look like they belong in the next Godzilla flick than a survival-horror game.

With these zombies, who come in their own shapes and sizes (my favorite being the “whopper,” a large rotund creature who looks like he’s about to pop), Resident Evil 6 is challenging, even by series’ standards. I even found myself struggling with limited ammo and healing herbs while playing on normal.

A ton of content
With 20 chapters to play through in the campaign, either solo or in cooperative mode, Resident Evil 6 is a really long experience. On average, each chapter took 60 minutes or more to complete, with my total run time being 23 hours. If you want to see absolutely everything and hunt for hidden items, you can tack on another couple of hours to that total. The tally also includes exploring alternative routes in each level since characters often separate and take different paths to help each other out. Unless you’re playing co-op with a friend, the only way to see it all is to replay certain sequences.

All of that’s not even counting the “extra content” section of the title. This is where you’ll find The Mercenaries, a recurring minigame (since Resident Evil 3: Nemesis) where you blast enemies to earn a high score. It’s a fun little diversion if you need to get your Resident Evil fix in small bursts. You can also check out Agent Hunt, an online co-op option that allows you to invade other players’ campaigns by controlling specific types of zombies and J’avo, but it only works if they set their Agent Hunt setting to allow anyone to jump in. Unfortunately, even though I unlocked this mode, I was unable to play it during my review period.

“Crossover” scenarios allow for more co-op moments where four characters team up during key sections of the narrative to fight a boss. As with Agent Hunt, this only happens if everyone has their online settings open, and, if so, you’re automatically matched with others who are playing within the same eligible chapters. Since I played the campaign offline, I wasn’t able to experience these portions either, but it seems like a neat way to work multiplayer action into the game without being too intrusive.

In spite of this, however, I still got a lot of mileage out of Resident Evil 6. For those who like to measure the value of their entertainment in terms of dollars per hour, the game doesn’t disappoint.

Campy vibe
A certain level of cringe-worthy dialogue and events have been in every major iteration of the franchise, but with Resident Evil 6, Capcom kicks it up to a whole new level. You’ll realize this once you see that almost every character is really a professional wrestler: Helena has a devastating elbow drop, Leon jumps from behind to grab zombies into a skull-crushing headlock, and Jake loves to suplex the J’avo into submission. These context-sensitive melee attacks are just the beginning.

In addition to a generous helping of slow-motion cutscenes, timed button prompts are back in full force for dramatic face-to-face encounters with your enemies. Quick shots, dodge rolls, and stylish butt-sliding are all part of your new arsenal of acrobatics, and they work rather well here as zombies and J’avo alike will remind you to keep moving (a huge change from the series’ stop-and-shoot mechanics). As the action ramps up, so do the verbal wisecracks coming from the protagonists that only fans of previous games will understand.

RE6 pays homage to traditional survival-horror elements with Leon’s and Jake’s chapters, but Capcom is finally embracing the action-heavy direction it hinted at in Resident Evil 4 and took a half step toward in Resident Evil 5.

Subtle visual changes
While Resident Evil 6 is a great-looking game, the graphics and visual effects aren’t what make it so impressive. I loved the little details like the way Sherry’s winter coat flapped in the wind or the mud that slowly accumulated on Leon during a rain-soaked adventure in a graveyard.

Another neat touch is the revamped inventory and health system, as shown on the bottom right or left of the screen. The system’s look changes depending on which character you play as. Chris’ has a green-tinged glow, as if emanating from a laptop. Leon’s has a clinical feel with its white octagonal compartments. Ada’s consists of blue cubes with an aquatic theme, and you can actually see bubbles rise to the top of the screen as you look through your items and weapons. These visual motifs extend to the settings menu as well where large but simple icons take the place of the usual text descriptors.

These aesthetic choices are interesting, and they don’t affect the gameplay at all. But they help reinforce the idea that you’re playing with characters who have distinct personalities and motives.

Partner A.I.
Your computer-controlled partners are actually competent … perhaps even a little too good. They can’t die, at least on normal difficulty, and you don’t have to worry about them spending any of your ammo like Sheva Alomar did in Resident Evil 5. They’ll have no trouble killing groups of zombies or J’avo on their own, and they’ll do their best to revive you when you’re down. So if you don’t have a friend to play with, don’t worry. You can play the game perfectly fine without the A.I. getting in the way.

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Capcom took gaming publicity stunts to a new level this weekend, opening a human butcher shop in London’s historic Smithfield Market to promote its action/horror game Resident Evil 6, due for release Oct. 2.

The “Wesker and Son” store opened to the public on Friday and Saturday, selling human hands, feet, thigh steaks, and lemon-flavored sausages. At least that’s what it said on the shop board, placed carefully to intrigue and attract passers-by.

In reality, the store contained a mixture of stage props and animal meat alongside meat sculptures created by artist Sharon Baker. Baker created a full-size organic sculpture of herself for the event, but it was dismembered and disposed of in black trash bags after it began to smell rancid. The human hands and feet — made from a mixture of sausage meat and prosciutto — fared better and were actually being sold with all proceeds going to the Limbless Association.

I visited Wesker and Son on Saturday morning and grabbed some photographs of the horrors on display, which are in the gallery below. While some images could prove upsetting, and are possibly NSFW, please rest assured that no real human body parts are actually on display.

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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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I hope you’re not tired of killing zombies just yet. With Resident Evil 6, Zombies mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops II, and Telltale Games’ The Walking Dead, fans of the flesh-eating corpses have plenty of games to play this year. But developer Hammerpoint Interactive is hoping you still have room for one more with The War Z. It’s not just another zombie game: It’s an entire toolset for players to play the game the way they want to play.

“From our perspective, it’s not just a game — it’s more like [a set of tools] for players to help create their own emergent gameplay,” said Sergey Titov, the executive producer of The War Z, in an interview with GamesBeat. “For example, just two hours before our meeting, we went all guns blazing into the city … it was more like a Left 4 Dead experience than anything else. In other plays, we’ve actually taken a really cautious exploration route, [and] it was a completely different gameplay style. We think not in terms of what gameplay will look like, but more like what stages of gameplay will be [right] for you.”

Set for release this fall sometime after the beta launches in October, The War Z is a massively multiplayer online game (without a subscription fee) in which you fight against both zombies and other survivors in huge, open-world maps. It’s already a proven formula thanks to the success of DayZ, the zombie-survival mod for military simulator ArmA II that took the PC world by storm earlier this year.

However, the name and premise for both games might be too similar. Since The War Z announcement in July, some people accused Hammerpoint of simply riding on DayZ’s success, no matter what the developer said otherwise. It’s hard not to see why: With its challenging gameplay and thrilling accounts of personal experiences, over 1 million  players lived and died on the zombie-infested nation of Chernarus. DayZ creator Dean “Rocket” Hall recently revealed that a stand-alone version of the mod will be out in a few months’ time

Here’s a look at 14 of the most dramatic departures from DayZ:

You can re-create Farmville

It sounds absurd, but it’s true: Since private servers (available for a small monthly fee) enable you to tweak a large number of options in the game, one creative tester decided to use a small map of a farm to plant hundreds of vegetables. He looked for water, planted the crops, harvested them, and tried to barter and sell them for equipment.

The reason he did this? He wanted his wife, a big Farmville player, to play with him. “He was like, ‘I basically built this farm in War Z for her to play. So she switched,’” said Titov. “We hope that, from our standpoint, it will be cool if players … work on rebuilding society in this zombie apocalypse. So whatever happens there, and [how] crazy this society becomes, we’ll see.”

Timed day-and-night cycle

DayZ multiplayer servers adjusts its day and night cycles in real time, so depending on its time zone, you might end up playing in the dark if you load up the mod at 7 p.m. in California; the other option is to look for international servers to see if it’s still daylight. For The War Z’s current testing period, from sunrise to sunset, the process takes four hours — for the final release, Hammerpoint wants to keep it between four to six hours.

Multiple characters

With five character slots, The War Z encourages you to experiment with different playstyles, builds, and appearances (six to eight different character skins are available at launch). If you don’t like the way a particular character is progressing, you can delete them from that slot. The DayZ mod limits you to one character at a time.

Skill trees

As you kill zombies and look for loot while running across Colorado (the first map for The War Z), you earn experience points. You can spend these points to unlock additional character skins or increase various attributes in your individual skill trees. In DayZ, characters do not level up; the only way to get “stronger” is to find better weapons and supplies.

“It’s not like superpowers with plus-10 damage, plus-100 health or something,” said Titov. “It’s more like physical training, so you can run for longer periods of time … [other skills] make you reload faster [or] carry more weight.”

Normal and Hardcore modes

Part of the appeal of DayZ is when you die, you permanently lose all the equipment you found; if you want to play again, you’ll have to start over with almost nothing in your backpack. In The War Z, the stakes are higher in what Hammerpoint is calling Hardcore mode: Not only do you lose your items when you die, but anything you learned from your skill tree, any experience points collected, and your position on the leaderboard (separate for each mode) disappear. But if you do choose to play this way, you’ll have access to Hardcore-only servers, where you’re more likely to find rare items than when playing on the regular servers.

Normal mode is for players not willing to risk everything they’ve earned each time they play. Instead of erasing your progress when you die, it locks your character from the game for a set amount of time, ranging somewhere between 24 hours to 48 hours. So you can either wait until that time is up, or just use one of your other characters.

Customizable weapon attachments

Some, such as flashlights and silencers, come pre-equipped with guns in the DayZ mod, but it’s not possible to remove and add them as you see fit. This is doable in The War Z, where a number of attachments can be found in the world; but Titov warned that, next to guns and ammo, these parts are “super rare.”

You can construct buildings and barricades

Titov told another quirky story to come out of The War Z’s testers: One guy built a gladiatorial arena on a private server, forcing players to fight to the death. Though you won’t be able to build such large structures on public servers, you can still fortify existing buildings with over a dozen different objects, such as a wooden barricade.

You can find these as is, so you don’t need to look for supplies or tools to make them. You can also dismantle them if you have to.

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Capcom, publisher of such long-running franchises as Mega Man and Resident Evil, has recently released its annual report, and it contains some interesting information on how the Japanese company intends to alter its game-development cycle going forward. Basically, it’s hoping you’re a big fan of such long-running franchises as Mega Man and Resident Evil…because it plans on releasing more games in these series.

As described in the annual report (and analyzed by GamesIndustry International), Capcom outlined its plan to release 15 games over the next 10 years. To accomplish this, it’s shortening the time between sequels from an average of three to four years to only two and a half, with multiple DLC offerings in the intervening years. This means you’ll most likely be picking up a copy of Resident Evil 7 in March of 2015, so you might as well preorder it today.

Another facet of this shortened cycle is smaller development teams. Capcom is limiting the number of in-house developers working on a major title to 100, which frees up more staff to work on more sequels. The idea is that smaller teams mean better teams that make better titles. Of course, if that doesn’t work, another game will be coming out in a few months…and it will probably be a sequel to something.

But it’s not all about sequels, as Capcom has also decided to allocate 20 percent of its development funds on new games. Obviously wanting to avoid turning into nothing more than a company that makes constant sequels, this decision enables Capcom to leave the door open for original titles (like this year’s Dragon’s Dogma, which should have a sequel coming in November 2014) to come in and build a fan base of their own. Except that Capcom explicitly states in the report that it’s doing this to make more sequels: “The reason is because popular games have a solid fan base, and when they become a series, there is a high probability that users and retailers will purchase and stock the sequel based on past game content and sales performance, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of a string of hits.”

Sequels for everyone!

You can read Capcom’s report here, but there will probably be a sequel soon anyway.

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

This week, Zynga loses more executives, Microsoft announces that its surface tablets will run Unreal Engine 3, and Double Fine reveals its first iOS game, Middle Manager of Justice, that’s all about managing superhero careers.

You’ll also find reviews for Transformers: Fall of Cybertron and the Origin PC Eon11-S gaming laptop as well as previews for Resident Evil 6 and Adventure Time.

News

• The DeanBeat: Being a tortoise isn’t so bad, but the water is choppy, EA’s top game studio boss says
• Zynga hires a real-money gambling chief
• Microsoft unveils first wave of Xbox Live games on Windows 8
• Game streaming lives on as Big Fish launches 100 cloud games on Android devices
• HitPoint Studios unveils Adera game for Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface tablets
• Techland wants gamers’ help shaping the brutal, dark fantasy world of Project Hell
• The ‘King of Kong’ star is out to set a new record in a Donkey Kong-inspired game
• Fans enjoy partial success in mission to bring Japanese role-playing games to U.S.
• Would EA venture into real-money online gambling?
• Embracing the crowd, Valve puts indie games up for vote with Steam Greenlight’s launch
• Location, location, location: Red Robot Labs unveils Life is Magic game, where you fight for territory
• Goodbye, OnLive. Hello, Square Enix. Core Online service brings high-def games to browsers
• Game Roulette is the app for when you have too many apps
• FAA seeks to ease rules on in-flight electronics
• KickAssist will bring attention and dollars to small Kickstarter game projects
• Hearthfire blends The Sims with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• Microsoft and Red Bull team up on Kinect ‘crashed ice’ game for Xbox Live Arcade (exclusive)
• From Japanese history to Thief: The inspiration behind Mark of the Ninja
• LG opens its Game World for SmartTV players

Mobile news

• Double Fine reveals Middle Manager of Justice, a superhero office-management sim for iOS
• Game streaming lives on as Big Fish launches 100 cloud games on Android devices
• Mobile game studios and big publishers talk strategy
• Chartboost’s Kiosk program creates new revenue opportunities for mobile game developers
• W3i triples growth for its mobile monetization business (exclusive)
• Pocket Gems launches Tap Campus Life mobile sorority game
• Square Enix slaps release date on $29 (!) mobile game

MMO news

• PointMMO launches massively multiplayer online game portal (exclusive)
• Blizzard counterprograms its latest World of Warcraft patch against Guild Wars 2′s debut

Interviews

• After big hit on iPhone, only 30 percent of Kabam’s revenue comes from Facebook (interview)

Reviews

• Review: The Origin PC Eon11-S gamer laptop exploits intelligent graphics processing
• In Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, you either change or die (review)

Previews

• Satisfy your lust for loot in Adventure Time’s comical take on fantasy roleplaying (preview)
• Resident Evil 6 brings back the zombies, but not in a way that you’d expect (hands-on preview)

OnLive

• OnLive’s Steve Perlman bids farewell, says other projects will ‘blow your mind’
• OnLive founder and CEO Steve Perlman ousted [updated]
• Timeline: A chronology of the life of OnLive
• Steve Perlman donates $50K to ex-OnLive employee health fund
• Microsoft to OnLive employees: We won’t buy ya, but we’ll hire ya

House of Zynga

• Another day, another Zynga double departure
• In latest departure, Zynga loses its chief creative officer
• Zynga hires a real-money gambling chief

Windows 8 and Surface tablets

• Microsoft unveils first wave of Xbox Live games on Windows 8
• HitPoint Studios unveils Adera game for Windows 8 and Microsoft Surface tablets
• Unreal Engine 3 will work on Windows RT tablets

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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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Developed by Capcom and set for release on October 2 for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 6 sees the return of the zombies from its past, at least in one of the game’s three storyline campaigns (each of which feature online and offline cooperative modes) — the adventure of Leon S. Kennedy and his new partner, Helena. But within the first few minutes of playing Leon’s and Helena’s story, you find out that something is quite different with this undead horde.

And they’re not alone. Joining them is the J’avo, putrid creatures with gaping scars that can evolve into a variety of new forms, each more horrifying than the next. Due to the introduction of the C-virus, these bio-organic weapons are spreading around the world, and one of your main objectives in the game is to put a stop to it.

Here’s a look at what you can expect to see from both camps:

The zombies

These are essentially the same sort of zombies infesting the Resident Evil games for the original PlayStation. But these hold one crucial (and frightening) twist: Some now lunge from several feet away. Nothing is more scary, or annoying, than seeing flying hunks of rotten flesh grab you from midair, forcing a timed button-prompt sequence to appear onscreen. In one scene set in a graveyard, the emaciated corpses resembled a gang of rotting children playing a game of leap frog. I could barely take two steps after shaking one off before another hurtled toward me, its jaws wide open.

Meanwhile, other standard zombies carry weapons. Zombies that were once policemen have guns, and they fire these off erratically from time to time; firefighters wield an ax, and they’re more than happy to show you how it works. Others have tools, like shovels, torches, and broken bottles with which to attack you. But you can use these weapons against them — thanks to RE6′s refined melee combat, you can counter their attacks by grabbing whatever weapon the zombie is carrying and use it to deliver a devastating one-hit kill.

Next we have our two specialized varieties of zombies. One of them has a shiny white exoskeleton, and you must subdue it with a few well-placed shots in order to expose its beating heart; it will not die unless you shoot its vital organ. The other has a huge sack of necrotic flesh under its chin that swells up (much like a frog) as it inhales — and then it shouts, attempting to knock you down with sheer sonic force.

Individually, they are not much of a threat. The real challenge is when all of the different zombie variations converge in one area, which happened a lot during the first two chapters of Leon’s and Helena’s campaign.

The J’avo

The Transformers of Resident Evil’s bestiary, the J’avo can mutate into so many different forms that I gave up trying to count them all. You first encounter the vanilla-flavored J’avo who, aside from their grotesque set of eyes and scars, look like normal human beings; these can fire guns as well as, if not better, than anyone else on your team. They even take cover and attempt to flank you — Resident Evil 6 kind of plays like a standard third-person shooter when fighting against them.

A step above those mercenaries are the mutations. Sometimes, after taking damage, A J’avo can sprout a new arm or two, which are flexible enough to stretch and grab from long distances. From there, it gets crazy: The troops can develop armored legs, and they do their best to kick you to death; others have arms that turn into a giant shield; some look like bugs with long, beetle-like pincers from the torso up, and others sprout spider-like legs and crawl on ceilings. And one mutation is basically a human-sized version of Jurassic Park’s interpretation of the Dilophosaurus.

The J’avo can also transform into golden cocoons from which more monstrosities are born. The handsome fellow pictured above is just one variation you can expect; another includes what I can only describe as a huge, bloated fly.

The most terrifying of all is the Ustanak, a recurring enemy that seems almost impossible to kill. It isn’t his massive size or his incredible feats of strength that you’ll fear: It’s his right arm, which contains a wide assortment of blades and drills. You’ll want to run, not fight, whenever the Ustanak comes to visit.

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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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Capcom at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, officially announced a companion website to the company’s upcoming zombie survival shooter Resident Evil 6. The website, which is only a placeholder site now, will act as a hub of information and gameplay sessions for Resident Evil 6 owners when the game releases this October.

ResidentEvil.net will host a number of features that are generally available for other games, such as Halo: Reach and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, including online game statistics and news from the developer. Along with traditional leaderboards and a friends list, ResidentEvil.net will feature social media notifications for your friends’ in-game achievements, social events for all players, and a secondary out-of-game currency that will unlock in-game items like costumes and digital figurines. And for the single-player campaign, the website will store any in-game documents found so that players can read them from a browser instead of directly in the game.

Events will showcase specific missions (as Epic did a few months ago with Infinity Blade II), where individual players can contribute to a collective mission and earn more points. The top earner will earn a championship badge, which then adds the player to a special leaderboard. Each event will enforce a time limit on the community, and all players contributing to the score will earn points to spend in the store.

Capcom is also developing a ResidentEvil.net app for smartphones and tablets, which will include all of the same features as the website. While the website and app will both be free, users must own Resident Evil 6 and connect their game console to the Internet. For social media functions through Twitter and Facebook, players can select when and how notifications appear: on all devices, phones/tablets, social feeds, and/or in the game.

Resident Evil 6, along with ResidentEvil.net, will release on October 2 on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

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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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