simoniker writes "How do you make a game that will stand apart from countless similar titles? Harmonix designer Chris Canfield (Guitar Hero II) thinks he knows, and is talking about it in a new editorial, 'Establishing A Beachhead In A Crowded Genre'. He comments that one of the key things you can do is to 'Gut key elements of the design': "Examples of this in your genre might include: sniper rifles in an FPS, powerslides in a racing game, minigames in a Wii title, healing crates, bosses, rocket jumps, or any other big or small element. Of course, the really good features shouldn't be the only ones on the chopping block. Not only will this free up time in the schedule that would otherwise be occupied by been-done features, but it creates space for genuinely new solutions and makes producers very, very happy.""

id Software has announced that, powered by the 'magic' of a new Carmack-crafted engine, an entirely new franchise is on the way. GamesIndustry.biz reports that the venerable FPS development house is hard at work on a completely original game. Without ties to Doom or Quake, the company hopes to begin moving in some new and interesting directions. "Id's last major internally developed title was 2004's Doom 3, which utilized new technology created by Carmack. In the interim, id's technical director has been heavily involved in bringing games onto mobile, including Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves. 'Our first task at id is as a single studio developer,' [Todd] Hollenshead continued. 'That's really where everything spawns from. Because John Carmack is a programming genius, who in my opinion is unequalled in video games today, he makes a great technology that we can use across a wide range of applications and different games within our suite of franchises. The new stuff that we're working on does have a brand new engine that John has been working on, actually is still working on today. We can't really talk any details about it; we'll see about when the timing is right for an announcement. We like to be able to talk about stuff that we can show at the same time and it's not really ready to show yet.'"

coondoggie writes "Did you know you could lose as much as 66 pounds by sweating on your PC? Well using the Mayo Clinic's vertical workstation, that just might be the weight loss wave of the future. The vertical workstation is basically a desk mounted over a treadmill that lets office workers to kill two birds with one stone — send emails, check invoices and write reports and burn calories at the same time, say Professors James Levine and Jennifer Miller of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who came up with the machine/desk. There are other things you can try as well. For example, the FPGamerunner, a USB full-size treadmill that works with any first-person shooter (FPS) game, has you covered. Walking on the treadmill moves your character through the game. Handlebars and buttons at the front of the $1,299 treadmill control your direction and fire your weapons." This seems like a lot better idea than me trying to collect Pokemon on an elliptical trainer which will no doubt one day lead to a very embarrassing obituary.

Game|Life is posting about a new agreement between Valve and an outfit called Tournament.com that will allow for an official Counter-Strike/Half-Life 2 Multiplayer game competition service. It sounds a lot like online poker tournaments, where players ante into a pot and the winner walks away with the results. "Another option is a perpetual, ongoing game that players can drop into at any time. If you get killed, you lose $1. If you kill another player, you get $1. When your virtual 'wallet' is out of money, you're done playing. Until you add some more funds with a credit card or PayPal, that is. For now, Tournament.com is strictly small stakes. Entry fees for the example tournaments were $3.60 for each of six players, with an $18 pot split between first, second, and third place. Company representatives said they're considering high-roller tournaments, but want to make sure the service has been fully field-tested, and potential cheating methods blocked off, before big money starts getting thrown around." One of the findings of the SOE White Paper was that some people are perfectly happy making money off of their gaming hobby. How long before we see similar livelihoods via this service?

Thilo2 writes "As most of you probably know, id software released the Quake3 engine in summer 2005 under the terms of the GPL, nearly two years ago. Ever wonder what came out of it? Even though the engine is eight years old, just recently two independent projects have released fully featured multiplayers games, weighing in with downloads of about 550 megabytes each. Urban Terror and World of Padman, formerly modifications that required you to have the original Quake III Arena game, can now be played independently as stand-alone versions. Urban Terror combines realistic environments and weaponry with movement similar to Quake3. World of Padman on the other hand is a colorful shooter in comic style giving you fun weapons like water balloons and water pistols to shoot with. Last but not least there is Tremulous, a first person shooter with added real time strategy elements which has been out for quite some time now. Interesting to note, its game data is licensed under a CC license. All three games use an improved Quake3 engine from ioquake3, which has cleaned up the Quake3 source code since its release and made many improvements like OpenAL, Vorbis and SDL support, and thus are available for Windows, Linux and MacOSX. If you are willing to compile the engine yourself you can get support for even more platforms like Solaris or *BSD."

1up has a piece looking at the impact that commercial support of WoW Arena teams might have on the game. There are already two teams backed with corporate money, both pulled from prominent PvP guilds in the Bloodlust battlegroup. "It's a challenge to pick teams to sponsor in WoW's PvP: 'The same team that may be ranked #2 or #3 in one Battlegroup may be ranked #1 in another," said Stephen Schoder of Check Six. "this makes the proposition of scouting out the right team more difficult than most other competitive eSports. The arena system in World of Warcraft is much more complicated than the simplistic FPS and RTS games in terms of being able to immediately pick up on what is going on.'"

anthemaniac writes "Playing video games that involve firing guns (Gears of War, Halo, take your pick) can improve eyesight, according to a new study. From the article: 'People who started out as non-gamers and then received 30 hours of training on first-person action video games showed a substantial increase in their ability to see objects accurately in a cluttered space, compared to non-gamers given the same test.' The games push the brain to the limit, the thinking goes, and it adapts by developing better spatial resolution. The effect was not duplicated in more sedate games like Tetris."

For the most part, Tuesday offered insights into independent games, and their growing influence in the games industry. Tuesday was also, for at least part of the day, a chance to get caught up on upcoming offerings from Microsoft Game Studios. Though MGS doesn't have a keynote at this year's Game Developer's Conference, representatives from several of the company's first and third party studios were on hand to demonstrate the future of Microsoft gaming. I had the chance to sit in on demos for Mass Effect and Shadowrun. Additionally, Peter Molyneux was there to offer up a very unusual slice of gameplay from Fable 2: an adventurer and his dog. Read on for my impressions of these anticipated titles.

The Game Career Guide site has up a story that tries to lay down some rules for a good First Person Shooter. The article advocates in favour of player choices, fast action, and rich environments; keep the boring cutscenes and make sure the players are getting a great bang for their buck. From the article: "Don't allow the player to play the game half-heartedly, which is a dangerous stumbling block at any point of the game. Example: Half-Life 2. While the introduction presenting the environment of City 17 was much more effective than the tram sequence of Black Mesa from the game's predecessor, the sheer length of time between point insertion and getting the crowbar would never have worked in any other game."

Gamasutra is running a follow-up to their annotated contract piece from last month. As you may recall, the contract became public knowledge because of a court case between Spark unlimited and Activision regarding the title Call of Duty : Finest Hour. The article also covers a legal dispute between Spark/Activision and EA during the formation of the troubled development house. Now, the site is running an in-depth look at their legal dispute. The article explores some of the problems that can face any developer/publisher relationship, and how the legal case has affected that already strained situation. "A constant source of friction was Activision's desire to see a fully functioning game early in the development process. 'At Electronic Arts', he wrote, 'the level vision was able to be constructed without the constraints of frame rate, or memory to get the body of the game in and working,' a process which left polish until the end of the development cycle. 'However, under the more risk-averse Activision system, polish happens through the entirety of the process and there is a consistent desire to have the game playable on disc and running at 30 fps.'"

PetManimal writes "Computerworld is reporting that gamers who have installed Vista are reporting problems with first person-shooter titles such as CounterStrike, Half-Life 2, Doom 3. and F.E.A.R. (Users have compiled lists of games with Vista issues.) The complaints, which have turned up on gamers' forums, cite crashes and low frame rates. Not surprisingly, the problems relate to graphics hardware and software: 'Experts blame still-flaky software drivers, Vista's complexity, and a dearth of new video cards optimized for Vista's new rendering technology, DirectX 10. That's despite promises from Microsoft that Vista is backwards-compatible with XP's graphic engine, DirectX 9, and that it will support existing games. Meanwhile, games written to take advantage of DirectX 10 have been slow to emerge. And one Nvidia executive predicts that gamers may not routinely see games optimized for DirectX 10 until mid-2008.'"

Eurogamer is reporting on comments from the Bungie website. A feature for the upcoming Halo 3, that they've just announced, will be most welcomed by aging FPS players tired of hearing high-pitched squeals through their headsets. When playing an online match, players will be able to hit a button and then choose one of the gamertags playing the game. The result: a total mute on that player for the remainder of the game. They don't mention it on the site, but one would hope the Xbox Live servers are taking metrics on this activity, to be used in calculating the player's reputation. The more you mouth off, the worse you look to future players. Anyone have some other feature they think might make online gaming better?

Mark Rein, speaking with Chris Kohler and Game|Life, has stated that Epic's next-gen Unreal engine will never make it to the Wii. Touting the virtues of high-definition gaming, the 360, and the PS3, Rein said that their engine is simply not designed for Nintendo's hardware. He also quickly mentioned the upcoming deal between Epic and Square Enix: "It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll gradually crack that nut. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. " Update: 02/06 04:19 GMT by Z : Accidentally misattributed the interview to CVG when it was a Game|Life piece. Fixed. Also, Chris made sure to point out that a partner of Epic's is trying to get UE3 onto the Wii, so ... maybe someday?

Though it would be hard to judge by past reviews, I really do like simple games. The straightforward nature of Burnout Revenge is, in my mind, one of the best ways you can present a game. It's with a decided note of frustration, then, that I have to report my distaste for Capcom's latest offering - Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. Demos for this title have been downloaded endlessly since last year's E3, and in the format of a one-level demo there's a lot to like. How can you go wrong with the formula of a devastated Earth, giant bugs, and mechs? By fronting the game with an unlikable protagonist and following up with AI that alternates between mindless and cheap, Capcom fails to deliver on the promise of any of those concepts. Read on for my impressions of another simple game that I really wanted to like ... and don't.

1up has a look at Arkane Studios' extremely ambitious new project. Called The Crossing, the FPS title looks to combine single and multi-player modes in a new way. From the article: "In the simplest sense, story missions are single-player shooting with an exception: Naturally intelligent human opponents take the place of A.I. There are two types of players: Elites and skirmishers. Elites are gamers playing the game in story mode. They're beefed up, heavily armored, and heavily armed. They have to be able to hold their own against a swarm of skirmish players. Skirmishers are gamers who typically play on multiplayer maps: well-trained, rank-and-file soldiers playing primarily to have some quick fun and increase their rank through defeating the occasional Elite. Skirmish players can also invade story maps and 'possess' A.I.s ala Agent Smith in The Matrix." So even if you're playing through the story, you'll still be challenged by the 'NPCs', all of whom will be played by a real-life human. Sounds like it could either be awesome or a total flop. Which side are you leaning on?

Not everyone who works on Slashdot plays games. Enough of us do, though, that I thought it would be interesting to tap my co-workers to see what folks would call their 'game of the year'. Below are comments on the best gaming of 2006 from Chris Nandor, CmdrTaco, Chris Brown, Scuttlemonkey, and myself. Then, once you've read that, we need your help in the comments. What was the game you couldn't put down? Perhaps it was over quickly, but you know you'll be thinking about it in the future? Was it a next-gen title, or something for the good old PlayStation 2? In your opinion, what was the best game of the year?

Neverwinter Nights was like an arrow of Zonk-slaying aimed directly at my gamer heart. I've been a table-top player since grade school, and a CRPG version of Dungeons and Dragons with the (at the time) new 3.0 rule set was tremendously exciting. Some four years later, and the sequel had me equally excited. Neverwinter Nights 2 was developed by Obsidian (of Planescape: Torment fame), using a fairly faithful version of the newer 3.5 rules. The result is a game that oozes D&D from every pore. You've got tons of spells, prestige classes, quirky-weird races (tieflings? anybody?), and a polished, functional story that gets you from point A to point B with a minimum of pain. A recipe for a nerdgasm if there ever was one. The game itself, regrettably, suffers from a fairly big problem: they rolled a 1 on their Craft(Videogame) roll. Read on to find out why they should have taken 10 in my impressions of Neverwinter Nights 2.

Reaching for perfection is a funny thing. By aiming for a high mark of quality, you ensure that your end product is as good as you can possibly make it. The reality is, of course, that perfection is unattainable. Every work of art, be it book, painting, movie, or videogame, is going to be flawed in some way; this is the reality of being human, after all. Gears of War, on that note, is far from perfect. The much-hyped and highly anticipated Xbox 360 shooter from Epic suffers from some truly terrible AI, a brief single-player campaign, and some unfortunately rough storytelling. Just the same, the flaws in this particular gem make the whole gleam that much brighter. Gears may just be the best game to be released on the 360 this year, and deserves the attention of anyone who enjoys holding a controller. Read on for my impressions of CliffyB's masterpiece, spots and all.

Eurogamer wants to remind us that, before Microsoft's next-gen console, they had this large black box which was sold in stores. A few games were even made for it. They've come up with two lists, one detailing the twelve finest exclusives to grace the system and another to highlight poorly-selling but highly-entertaining 'cult classics' you may have missed the first time around. From the 'best of' list: "Halo made the Xbox - without it, Microsoft would have had a much tougher struggle in the console market, and it's really telling that five years on, almost everyone would still rate the first game as one of its top titles. Unsurprisingly, Halo spawned countless imitators, and the market is awash with the corpses of space-marine-shoots-aliens games which simply didn't resonate with the gaming audience in the same way. The reason is clear; Halo wasn't just a success because people want to be a space marine and shoot aliens. The game was the complete package; it had stirring narrative, great characters, epic, sweeping scale, and absolutely fantastic, haunting music. It may not have brought much to the table in terms of gameplay innovation, and many PC FPS fans turned their noses up at it for that reason - but the production values and the understanding of how to create an involving, cinematic experience which Bungie brought to bear were unmatched."

GameDaily has up a piece looking at the history of Gears of War , which was released this past Tuesday. The game's history is also the tale of developer Epic Games, which grew from a garage group to one of the biggest names in FPS titles. Beyond that, though, "'Gears has a sordid history,' said [Epic Founder Tim] Sweeney. 'Initially, we planned to take the Unreal franchise in a more large-scale combat direction, more like Battlefield 1942. So we began this project called Unreal Warfare and spent a few years developing that. We realized we wanted the real focus to be on a single-player game with realistic combat. Around the same time, we were developing Unreal Tournament 2003 with Digital Extremes. We took the efforts from Unreal Warfare — it had a lot of the early ideas of Gears of War — and merged that into the Unreal 2003 project. From that you saw the Unreal game take on the large-scale combat — the Onslaught style of game.'"