[Game Developer magazine EIC Brandon Sheffield recently caught up with Grasshopper Manufacture boss Suda51, who has a little of the buzz about him recently, thanks to his new projects - here’s a fun interview about No More Heroes and targeting the Western market, among other things.]
Grasshopper Manufacture’s always interesting CEO Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) has a lot on his plate, what with No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle slated for 2010 and an untitled EA Partners project in the works with Q Entertainment (Lumines) and eminent designer Shinji Mikami.
His company’s visually unique titles like Killer7 and the original No More Heroes have kept Suda and Grasshopper in high demand.
In particular, Marvelous Entertainment noted the studio’s growing popularity and published a Nintendo DS remake of Flower, Sun, & Rain, one of its older PS2 games, earlier this year in Japan. Marvelous’ U.S. branch plans to bring the game stateside next month.
In [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

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[As we wander into the holiday season, our buddies at GDC just announced a lot more interesting lectures for the March event. We’ll be covering this more track by track soon, but in the meantime, here’s a basic, delicious overview.]
Game Developers Conference organizer Think Services announced several speakers and sessions for next year’s GDC event, to be held in San Francisco’s Moscone Center from March 23 to 27, 2009.
As part of the Game Design track, Lionhead Studios CEO Peter Molyneux will present ‘Lionhead Experiments Revealed’, a lecture on a range of experimental ideas and technologies at his company, and how they might might be incorporated into new Lionhead projects.
Other highlighted design sessions include “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band” with Harmonix senior designer Dan Teasdale, and “Player’s Expression: The Level Design Structure Behind Far Cry 2 and Beyond?” with Ubisoft’s Jonathan Morin.
Other notable speakers in [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

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[’Chewing Pixels’ is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column written by British games journalist and producer, Simon Parkin.]
“Wow. This is excellent wine.”
She is exactly right. This is excellent wine.
In fact, that’s not the half of it. This is an excellent restaurant. The excellent food we are about to order will have been cooked from excellent ingredients by an excellent chef and we’ll eat it to the soundtrack of an excellent jazz trio (whose standards we’ll pretend to know by name).
The waiters, perfectly poised between attentiveness and professional detachment will provide us with excellent service. The loud bits of conversation that float over from our neighbours’ tables will be spoken by an excellent clientele, one that brims with that cozy warmth that comes from relaxing in excellent surroundings.
Outside it is cold and slush, a city returning home from a day’s Christmas shopping, shivering and spent in service to capitalism. [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Parkin)

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The weekend is upon us, and in between watching slightly dodgy CG whales play volleyball on the reliably chilled Mixmasters DVDs, we’re whacking through the latest RSS-impelled GameSetLinks for your reading pleasure.
Some of the notable ones in here - Tuna Technologies on the appeal of Peggle, Matthew Wasteland on the PS3’s odd journey, Mark Cooke on Linger In Shadows, a cute Atlus production diary, and other things that seem to fit into our ’smart games writing you maybe didn’t see’ remit nowadays.
Space invaders smoking:
Serial Missteps on the Parallel Road (Magical Wasteland)
Game Developer mag columnist Matthew Wasteland wanders thigh-deep into the history of the PS3: 'One day, deep in crunch, I finally realized that PlayStation 3 games would be about as good as Xbox 360 games, in the grand scheme of things– that there were more similarities than differences in the two consoles’ relative power for typical video game software.'
g-mixer [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

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[Continuing big sister site Gamasutra’s year-end retrospective, Editor At Large Chris Remo looks back on 2008’s top five developers demonstrating outstanding achievement this year, from Bethesda Game Studios to Media Molecule and beyond — also including ten honorable mentions along the way.]
Throughout December, Gamasutra will be presenting a year-end retrospective, discussing notable games, events, developers, and industry figures of 2008, from the perspective of our position covering the art, science, and business of games.
Previously: 2008’s top disappointments, downloadable titles, overlooked games, gameplay mechanics, indie games, surprises, PC games, trends, and handheld games.
Next, we’ll look at this year’s top five development studios and ten honorable mentions. Included developers released at least one title during the 2008 calendar year.
They also demonstrated uncommon achievement with that release and/or exhibiting significant dedication to community, innovative business models, frequently-unheralded genres, or other noteworthy areas. Only specific development teams, offices, or divisions were eligible; entire publishers [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

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[’Bell, Game, and Candle’ is a regular GameSetWatch-exclusive column by writer Alex Litel, discussing stuff that happens - or doesn’t happen - in the game business. This time, he is here with his own year-end round-up.]
Here is my contribution to the reflective canon, a look back at the best in things said in press releases in this fine year.
Over the past few days, I have scoured through more than 1,500 press releases, and I am certain that I have found the very best of the best.
Also, I should probably note I have excluded Mark Jacobs, as his contributions are so far and beyond anyone else that his inclusion would simply turn this into a countdown. In his absence, the top quote will be awarded an award with his namesake.
(Really, including statements like “We want any and all interested players to be able to join the ranks of Order and [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Alex Litel)

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[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days, as well as any notable features on his sister ’state of indie’ weblog.]
This week on ‘Best Of Indie Games’, we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.
The delights in this edition include a time-management game from Flashbang Studios, an original game with C64-style sprites and music, a remake of The Graveyard, a puzzle game inspired by Daniel Benmergui’s I Wish I Were the Moon, and a visual novel recommendation by colleague Brandon Sheffield.
Here are the picks:
Game Pick: ‘Devil Ronin‘ (Howard Kistler, freeware)
“An original C64-style game created for the Retro Remakes 2008 competition, where players assume control over a rebel oni who has sided with humanity and seeks to rid Japan of the demon scourge [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (timw)

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[Yep, we’re still going with big sister site Gamasutra’s year-end retrospective, and this time, our own Eric Caoili looks back on 2008’s best handheld games across all portable platforms — from The World Ends With You to Patapon — along with ten notable handheld titles that get honorable mentions.]
Throughout December, Gamasutra will be presenting a year-end retrospective, discussing notable games, events, developers, and industry figures of 2008, from the perspective of our position covering the art, science, and business of games.
Previously: 2008’s top disappointments, downloadable titles, overlooked games, gameplay mechanics, indie games, surprises, PC games, and trends.
Next, we’ll look at this year’s top five handheld games and ten honorable mentions, the portable titles that managed to overcome their small-screen limitations to steal a big chunk of our time. The games picked are the editor’s choice, and are chosen from the handheld titles released in North America during 2008’s calendar year [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Simon Carless)

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In this round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in sister site Gamasutra’s industry-leading game jobs section, including positions from Rockstar San Diego, Mind Control Software, Namco Networks America, ArenaNet, and more.
Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site’s daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.
It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, ’serious games’, independent games and more.
Some of the notable jobs posted in each market area this week include:
Gamasutra.com - Game Industry Jobs
Rockstar San Diego: Animation Programmer
“Rockstar San Diego is looking for an energetic programmer to help increase the features and capabilities of its animation technologies as a member of RAGE, Rockstar’s cross studio central technology team. RAGE develops the proprietary engine and shared technologies used across Rockstar for its [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (Eric Caoili)

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[’Pixel Journeys’ is a new GameSetWatch-exclusive monthly column by @Play creator John Harris, discussing games with unusual design attributes that have lessons to teach modern game designers.]
Subject: dnd, a.k.a. “The Game of Dungeons,” a remarkably devious game that also happens to be one of the first computer RPGs made.
Welcome class, if you’ll be seated….
Before we discuss the game of dnd, allow me to describe the old networked computer system known as PLATO. It’s strange, really, how little-known it is today*. While UNIX systems, buoyed by the strength of its foremost ambassadors Linux and FreeBSD, are, numerically-speaking, more popular than they’ve ever been, its early contemporary PLATO lies mostly forgotten except by those who used the system in the day.
PLATO systems did many things that most PC users didn’t get until 1993 or later. Online bulletin boards? Had them, in the form of notesfiles. Email? [...]

Original Post By Google News editors@gamesetwatch.com (John Harris)

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