Latest Posts in Game Room

First Look: Fusion Fall multiplayer online game

Cartoon Network is getting into the massively multiplayer online game business. And Mac users can join in on the fun.

Resisting the lure many developers feel to make their games as risqué as possible, Cartoon Network’s Fusion Fall is instead a PG-rated MMOG that features the iconic characters of Dexter (from Dexter’s Laboratory; not this Dexter), Samurai Jack, and the Powerpuff Girls in their battle to save the cartoon planet from an evil alien force.

I sat down for a demo of Fusion Fall with executive producer Chris Waldron to get a first look at this new MMOG. Due to the success of the games on Cartoon Network’s Web site, the television network is working with Korean developers Grigon to produce a browser-based MMOG. The kid-focused game will be subscription-based, but a good chunk of it will also be free to the public. Equipped with numerous safety features to ensure a healthy environment for kids of all ages, the game is one of the first kid-centric MMOGs out there. Cartoon Network offers a refreshing alternative to the brutal violence of many MMOGs by creating a silly world where gumball cannons, imaginary friends, and annoying ballerina sisters can co-exist.

Review: Spore Origins for iPod

Electronic Arts is quickly building a new franchise out of SimCity creator Will Wright’s newest game, Spore. Even before the game was available for the Mac and PC, Spore Origins debuted for the iPod. Is the iPod up to the challenge of evolving life? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

Spore Origins essentially distills down the first part of the full game to portable play. In Spore Origins, you control a microscopic critter that’s swimming around in a pool of muck. The Click Wheel lets you control the creature’s motion, up, down, left and right, as it searches for food—to wit, creatures smaller than itself. The Spore can also attach to “symbiotes,” free-swimming little power-up blobbies that imbue the Spore with special abilities, such as extra speed, poison which will make other creatures reluctant to eat you, and so on. It’s pretty basic—eat or be eaten.

There are three separate gameplay modes. The biggest and most entertaining one is Evolution mode, where you step through the creation of building a bigger and better Spore. In between each of the three levels of chasing around food and symbiotes and avoiding bigger critters, you can make adjustments to your Spore—determining how it will move, what sort of offensive and defensive capabilities it has, and what it looks like. This includes occasional access to “super parts” like a lure that attracts food to you, a shell that makes you invulnerable, a part that can electrocute other creatures, and an air jet to get away from everyone. As you can image, the super parts only work for a short time.

Spore springs to life

If you wandered into Thursday night's launch party for Electronic Arts' new Spore game, you would have found yourself inside a planetarium listening to a lecture by an astrophysicist. Or you might have joined other members of the press at a black-tie event, where attendees accessorized their clothing not just with ties and handbags, but feathers, spikes, and faux-carapaces.

Held in Golden Gate Park's California Academy of Sciences, this was clearly not your typical launch event. Then again, Spore is not exactly a typical game.

Spore comes from a shining star of video game developers, Will Wright, the man behind such famous games as Sim City, Sim Copter, and The Sims. Anticipation for his latest project was naturally stellar, and the sheer ambition of the project makes it a true hallmark of gaming. Wright wasn’t just shooting for the stars with this one, but trying to encapsulate entire galaxies. How’s that for scale?

Chalkboard Sports Baseball for iPod released

D2C Games today released Chalkboard Sports Baseball, a single-player arcade baseball game for the iPod. The game is available through the iTunes Store for $5.

The main game mode features a batter and five fielders (pitcher, catcher, and three outfielders); fielding is done automatically. To pitch, you swipe your finger around the clickwheel; to hit, you press the Select button. Games are three innings long, and can be paused and resumed.

Chalkboard Sports Baseball doesn't have a Major League Baseball license. Instead, the game uses customizable SPOGs (Sports Player Object Gyros) to represent player avatars. A SPOG is a disc that resembles a Pog (discs that were used in a game that was popular in the 1990s). You can import your own images to be used in the SPOG.

E3: Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

Last week the E3 Media and Business Summit took place, but you probably wouldn’t have known it unless you’re in the video game business, or make it a point to check video game news sites regularly. This is in stark contrast to past years—well, 2006 on back.

In fact, there was precious little news from this year’s event. Most of what was shown off had already been announced, and there weren’t any earth-shattering announcements. No major game announcements. No inkling of major new hardware. Nothing of real significance or import.

2006 was the final year of the “old” E3, or Electronic Entertainment Expo. It was a grand event put together by the Entertainment Software Association, or ESA, that assembled as many major video game publishers, developers and hardware makers as could fit under the massive eaves of the Los Angeles Convention Center. Every nook and cranny of that center was filled, and tens of thousands of people—many who had nothing to do with the industry, professionally—flooded hotels throughout L.A. to attend the event. Shuttle buses carted game executives, buyers, retailers, and game enthusiasts by the coachload from Century City, downtown hotels and elsewhere.

Logitech ClearChat PC Wireless headset

For massive multiplayer online games like the popular World of Warcraft (), it’s helpful to have a headset if you’re trying to coordinate efforts with other members of a team or guild. Rather than tangle up your desk with messy wires, a wireless headset is a nice option. For $100, Logitech sells the ClearChat PC Wireless, a headset that’s lightweight, comfortable, and sounds good.

The ClearChat PC Wireless headset works with Mac OS X and Windows. It has a USB dongle about the size of a flash thumb drive as a transmitter, and communicates using the 2.4GHz radio frequency, similar to band used by a cordless phone.

The headset features a plush, padded headband and ear pads that are comfortable to wear for hours at a stretch. The right headphone integrates audio controls; you can adjust volume up and down and also mute the microphone by tapping the outside of the headphone.

First Look: Spore Creature Creator

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: Electronic Arts’ (EA’s) Spore Creature Creator is not a game. It’s a software toy. Having said that, it’s loads of fun and very addictive, especially for whole families. It’s also a clever bit of marketing.

Will Wright is arguably one of the most important game designers ever. The products he’s created include SimCity and The Sims. They belong to a genre of gaming loosely called “god games” because you’re an omniscient presence in a world that goes about its business blithely unaware of your existence, but one that keenly reacts to everything that you do.

With SimCity, Wright tackled the concept of urban planning, enabling you to plot out industrial, commercial, and residential sectors of a modern metropolis, complete with transportation, utilities, parks and recreational facilities. Gradually, Wright increased the complexity of the world through sequels. Later he’d turn his focus inward in The Sims, focusing on the trials and tribulations of individual people—Sims—in a virtual world where you can adjust your Sim’s interactions with others, responding to their likes and dislikes, even decorating their homes.

Fable: The Lost Chapters

Software development can be unpredictable; it’s as much art as it is science, which is why release dates are so often missed in this business. Even still, Feral Interactive took too long to get Fable: The Lost Chapters out on the Mac-they first announced it in mid-2005. It’s a fun action/role-playing game romp, though it is showing its age.

Fable was originally developed for the Xbox and PC by Lionhead Entertainment, home of famed game designer Peter Molyneux, the brains behind legendary “god games” like Populous and Black and White, as well as previous Feral releases like The Movies (). Molyneux’s games often deal with the balance between good and evil, and the choices that we make that take us down one path or the other. Fable is no different in that regard: In this RPG, the choices you make directly affect your character.

The plot, in a nutshell, is that you’re a young lad who has been spared from his village’s destruction at the hands of brigands. You’re cast into a reluctant student at an academy where you learn the art and trade of becoming a hero. You’re faced with key decisions along the way-do you steal from people? If so, you’ll develop a reputation as a thief. Do you help a mother with her sick child? If so, you’ll earn the respect and love of the townspeople. Those decisions will have a cumulative effect both on your character’s appearance and abilities, though the game’s designers don’t seek to punish you or reward you one way or the other.

Analysis: Will iPhone games lead to more on the Mac?

The banners hanging in the lobby of San Francisco’s Moscone West conference hall for this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference tell you all you need to know about the event’s agenda. One banner reads “OS X Leopard” and the other says “OS X iPhone.” With both platforms—the Mac and the iPhone—so closely tied to each other, could the burgeoning game market on the phone side of things lead to an upswing of Mac games?

Developing for the iPhone requires both a Mac and a working knowledge of Cocoa, the Application Programming Interface (API) that Apple uses for Mac OS X, and a Macintosh to develop on. So intuitively, it seems to make sense that developers creating iPhone games might eventually make Mac games too.

“That might be what happens,” said Glenda Adams, director of development for Aspyr Media, the veteran Mac game publisher behind such hits as The Sims 2 and Guitar Hero 3. “It’s possible that iPhone games might lead to a new crop of little games for the Mac.”

Getting in on the ground floor of iPhone games

Independent Mac software developers Freeverse Software, Aspyr Media and Pangea Software are focusing on what many companies attending this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference have in their sights—staking a homesteading claim in the burgeoning iPhone application market.

Freeverse producer Bruce Morrison thinks that planting a stake early is going to be vital to Freeverse’s success on the iPhone.

Freeverse, which develops and publishes games and other software for the Mac, is starting out its iPhone efforts in an area it’s already comfortable with: games. First up is a 3-D racing game called Wingnuts Moto Racer. A series of sports games, branded under the Flick Sports moniker, will follow.