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In a video answering fan questions, Splinter Cell Conviction Creative Director Maxime Béland revealed the existence of a demo for the highly anticipated sneaking-guy game. “Yes, there will be one. I can’t tell you what map or when it’s going to be released yet. My lips are sealed.” Warning us in advance of the demo’s release date would run counter to the whole ’stealth’ theme, we suppose.

We first heard of a demo for Conviction from an Ubi employee known only as “Adam,” and before that had only a guess that there would be one based on the common-sense fact that it’s a really popular game. Splinter Cell: Conviction is currently due for release April 13.

Continue reading Ubisoft confirms demo for Splinter Cell Conviction

Ubisoft confirms demo for Splinter Cell Conviction originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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There is one drawback to seeing Uncharted 2’s co-lead designer, Richard Lemarchand, unfurl the development process behind the most successful and most ambitious game in the studio’s history. A post-mortem panel, held on Thursday afternoon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, delved into developer Naughty Dog’s pre-production process, its production pipeline and the climactic rush to a spectacular end. It also highlighted some of the studio’s misjudgments, which resulted in a difficult crunch time toward the end of development.

And now, every time I play that incredible train level — “an evil monster of a level,” Lemarchand said — for my personal enjoyment, I’ll pull back the curtain and see programmers hunching over keyboards and nodding off into icy cups of coffee. Thankfully, Lemarchand painted a warmer picture, firm in his belief that the development team’s intrinsic motivation to produce a character-driven blockbuster helped it overcome the final hurdles.

An important pre-production phase dominated the first six months of Uncharted 2’s 22-month creation. “Messing it up often means messing up the whole project,” Lemarchand noted. There were no deadlines or deliverables during this period, and the team was free to seek inspiration and consider the individual moments they wanted to explore in Drake’s second outing. A single image would portend much of the game’s direction: A photograph of the Tiger’s Nest Monastery in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

Continue reading GDC: ‘Among Friends: An Uncharted 2 Post-mortem’

GDC: ‘Among Friends: An Uncharted 2 Post-mortem’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Having printed and shipped more than 3 million copies of BioShock 2 across the seas, publisher Take-Two is clearly leaning on its sequel to provide a strong sale wind to push the company through another successful quarter. Following its February 9 release, the Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 cruised up the US sales charts, anchoring in the peak position, according to the NPD’s monthly report. For the PS3 version, the journey was not such a breeze, as it appeared to have come up against some bad weather.

Despite the Xbox 360 edition’s #1 ranking in US February game sales, the PS3 version of BioShock 2 was curiously absent from the top ten listing. An NPD representative told Joystiq that the PS3 game recorded roughly 190.5k units sold last month, “just outside the top 10 at #11.” If anything’s to blame for this somewhat modest debut month, it’s Heavy Rain. In just one week of retail availability, the PS3-exclusive “Western Interactive Novel” had enough of an impact, with 219.3k units sold, to seemingly alter the sales course of BioShock 2 for PS3.

Now, just imagine how much trouble a rampaging “murder carousel” could stir up for BioShock 2 PS3 sales this month!

NPD: BioShock 2 Feb. PS3 sales just shy of 200k mark originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 11:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Following last night’s NPD report for February, Nintendo has issued a press release lauding the amazing selling power of its own products. In typical fashion, the gaming giant that got your grandma into gaming has managed to sell a ridiculous amount of DS and Wii systems in the U.S. — 1.9 million in the first two months of 2010, to be exact.

As impressive as that 1.9 million figure is, Nintendo’s ability to break its own records is even more impressive. In selling 613,000 DS units throughout February 2010, Nintendo has managed to set a new monthly record, besting the previous top-selling month of February 2009’s figure of 597,000 units. It would seem that two things are certain in this life: we’re all going to die one day and before that day comes, each of us is going to own nine DS systems.

With March 28 fast approaching — that’s the release date for the DSi XL — Nintendo is hoping to further build on the success of its now six-year-old handheld. And, to think, even after all that time, the gif still hasn’t gotten old.

Nintendo sells 1.9 million DS and Wiis through Feb. 2010 originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The title of Silent Hill composer Akira Yamaoka’s GDC panel was “As long as the audio is fun, the game will be too.” Kind of a perplexing title, especially if you’ve enjoyed Yamaoka’s work in horror genre. Don’t get us wrong, it’s good, we’re just not sure fun is the word for it. Yamaoka used the panel to explain precisely why his music and sound effects are so disturbing, and it’s more technical than you might think.

“Sound is very close to stimulating emotions in your brain,” said Yamaoka via an interpreter. “What do humans fear?” He asked. In the case of audio, he noted that gaps between visual cues and accompanying audio. Specifically, if a sound precedes a visual cue, it can cause anxiety, while a sound that arrives too late is comforting. As an example, he noted the sounds of footsteps being made slightly before the onscreen action in a game. He noted that this effect can be felt even if the sync between sound and visual is off by a few frames of animation. Yamaoka said later in the panel that he used this technique in Silent Hill 3.

Another technique mentioned was the use of silence.”When there’s no sound, the brain fills in the gap,” said Yamaoka. He then played a special version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise” which had been injected with tiny, periodic gaps of silence. He then played the same piece, only this time injecting harsh noise instead of silence. Even packed in a fully lit lecture hall with hundreds of GDC attendees, it was unsettling. Unfortunately, Yamaoka wasn’t able to give us the sound samples used during the panel, so we’ve done our best to recreate them:

Thankfully, Yamaoka closed the session with a soothing guitar performance, which were able to capture for your enjoyment. Listen to it below and stay tuned for an interview with Mr. Yamoaka on Joystiq in the near future.

GDC: Akira Yamaoka on the disturbing power of audio originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Immediately following his well-attended GDC panel, Nintendo’s Yoshio Sakamoto talked with us about (what else?) Metroid: Other M. In addition to all sorts of questions on the unique Team Ninja collaboration, we asked Sakamoto about the long-rumored Metroid Dread project and, barring a confirmation of that product, when we’d see another 2D handheld Metroid.

Joystiq: Speaking of the core Metroid development team that last worked on the GBA, there have been rumors of a game known as ‘Metroid Dread’ – purportedly a 2D Metroid game for DS. First question: Was ‘Dread’ a real project? Second question: If not, where is a 2D Metroid on DS?

Yoshio Sakamoto: It seems we get a lot of questions about Metroid Dread, especially at interviews following E3 for example. But nothing’s ever been announced about this game; it’s all just been rumors so far. So we never know exactly how to respond to questions like this.

While there actually was a point where some teams were meeting to discuss if it was possible to create a 2D Metroid for DS using a relatively small team size, it’s not something that we ever really announced or thought of as “Metroid Dread.” But whenever people bring out that idea, we recognize that the basic concept is something that we can’t say never existed. But at the same time, we can’t of course, make any official comment about a Metroid Dread-like project coming out.

Our main goal [with Metroid: Other M] is to, as I said earlier, first raise knowledge about the Metroid universe and the Samus character before we start to introduce different elements like online or even going back to another handheld game for the next in the series. So there’s nothing coming immediately, we want to think about these new challenges first.

But, of course, we never say never.

Metroid Dread concept is something Sakamoto ‘can’t say never existed’ originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Fantasy author R.A. Salvatore took the stage at GDC 2010 today and, while he made it clear that his talk about how to create believable fantasy worlds wasn’t specifically about his work with 38 Studios’ Copernicus project, he did talk a little bit about what he wants from an MMO game and gave the first mention of what the world of Curt Schiller’s game is like. Salvatore talked for quite a while in his thick Massachusetts accent about his time in Everquest, which he said was “the best world in a game I’ve ever seen.” He also lauded the idea of a death penalty in an MMO, and said that during his formative MMO experiences the threat of death (he once lost a hard-earned level when he was killed by an NPC that he accidentally clicked to attack) made living that much better. “If you take the pain out of the world,” he said, “you lose the accomplishment of winning.”

And while he admitted that the Copernicus designers were fighting with him on whether or not to include a death penalty in the game, the company would at least make sure that a return from death was explained. His team has written over 10,000 years of history for the game’s world (all compiled on “a wiki with over hundreds of pages in it”), and one of the major features of the setting’s lore is a “device that’s perfected” called the “Well of Souls.” The Well, “when you die, will bring you back — if you meet the conditions.” He didn’t elaborate about what those conditions were, but he asked the audience what a worldwide death-prevention device would do to institutions like kings and religions. “What happens when you take power away from powerful people?” he asked rhetorically. “How would it play out?” And, he suggested, if there were people who “turned the Well on,” what if they threatened the rest of the world with turning it off?

Vague, but intriguing. Copernicus still seems like it has a long way to go (Salvatore didn’t show any slides or screenshots during his talk), but fans of the old EQ might find the game a return to the old ways if R.A. has his say.

GDC: R.A. Salvatore wants you to die originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t just go to GDC in search of hot scoops. We’re also constantly scanning our periphery for the next big movement in video game technology. This year, it came in the form of the VirtuSphere – a device we’ve heard about since 2006 but haven’t seen in person until today. No, it’s not a magical orb which infuses its user with moral excellence; it’s a virtual reality peripheral controlled by its enveloped user’s strut.

The technology was demoed on the show floor at GDC with a rudimentary first-person shooter. The player wears a visor (which changes the camera’s view as the player looks around in real time) and holds a light gun peripheral. They can walk around the rolling sphere, which moves the player’s in-game avatar around the level. Sounds too awesome to be true, doesn’t it? Hey, we’d never lie to you. Check out a video demonstration of the device after the jump.

What? Did we try it out? No, unfortunately, we’ve got a thing about dizzy-puking in public.

Continue reading Seen@GDC: The spherical future of video game interactivity

Seen@GDC: The spherical future of video game interactivity originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 06:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We like a pretty picture just as much as the next Tom, Dick or Monet, but the art featured in the Into The Pixel exhibit – which opened to the public last night at GDC – is some of our favorite. You can experience the aesthetic splendor second-hand by checking out the gallery posted below. See if you can identify the games each painting is based on! (Spoiler alert: You’ll never, ever guess some of them. Not in a billion, trillion years.)

GDC: Gaming gets framed for Into The Pixel exhibit originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 12 Mar 2010 04:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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