Kyle Orland

A little over 20 years ago, Nintendo sent a free, glossy, full-color, magazine-sized Nintendo advertisement to the 3.6 million members of its Nintendo Fun Club. In the years that followed, legions of Nintendo fans made Nintendo Power one of the most popular magazines in the United States, despite the fact that its content resembled propaganda more than journalism. The magazine’s popularity has fallen off somewhat since those heady days, but the content has become much more respectable under the new management of Future Publishing and veteran game journalist Chris Slate. I talked with Slate about the magazine’s history, its current challenges and its future.

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Say the word “hacking” and it conjures up images of soldering irons, complicated computer configurations and Keanu Reeves from The Matrix. Fortunately, you don’t need any of those things to run cool homebrew software that will play old-school games or MP3s on your Wii.

Armed with an SD card, a computer with an SD card slot (or adapter), a copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, it’s just a matter of following these four simple steps to turn your plain old Wii system into something more Wii-tastic.

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Huh? Who’s there? Oh, sorry…I was just taking a quick, 10-day nap to recover from the whirlwind of game-filled days and sleepless nights that was this year’s E3 Media & Business Summit. While the developers and publishers are the ones ostensibly driving the show with their “games” and “announcements,” I maintain that it’s us sleep-deprived journalists that are really the core of the event. After all, we’re the gatekeepers who have to condense the whirlwind of news into something somewhat interesting and digestible to the gaming public. With so many disparate journalists in one place, consensus on a game or company’s performance can coalesce quickly.

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The game development website used my notes for its coverage ofthe Games for Health Conference:

• Games For Health Conference Kicks Off In Baltimore
• Neils Clark On Moving Beyond ‘Game Addiction’
• Noah Falstein On Exergaming History
• PopCap Games’ Effects on Mood and Stress
• Why You Should Care About Virtual Worlds
• XRtainment’s Medina Says Gaming Gyms Can’t Be Glorified Arcades
• Developers, Researchers On Weighing Science Versus Fun
• The Real Life Lessons Of WoW’s Corrupted Blood
• The ‘Overheated’ State Of DS Learning Games In Japan 
• Healthcare Giants Talk Games For Health Initiatives
• What Rex Ronan Teaches Us About Health Education
  
• Analysis: Making DDR For Seniors With Touchtown’s Dancetown
  

Since licensed gaming seems bigger than ever these days, Gamasutra’s editors felt - somewhat flippantly - that publishers might need some help picking through the pop culture landscape for un-optioned properties that have the potential to become great games (as well as a few existing game franchises in desperate need of a comeback).

Our criteria for putting together this article - with input from all Gamasutra staffers - was a mixture of gut feeling and impassioned argument; unscientific, to be sure, but rather than functioning as a guide to the 20 and only 20 licenses that could or should be explored, it’s much more of a thought experiment into avenues many might not have considered.

Sure, judging by the history of licensed games, many of these ideas would probably be awful if they were actually made. On the other hand, there’s nothing that suggests that given the right amount of time and budget that these games couldn’t sing: just think about it.

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I list the best re-interpretations of the iconic level, from other games to artistic cakes.

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The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) may be the go-to event for event for upcoming games, but some of us oldsters prefer the simple bleeps and bloops of the past. So we decided to make the ultimate list of old-school gaming hot spots — here’s a sampling of the best retro roadside attractions and classic gaming conventions going on ’round the country.

(See Electronic Gaming Monthly #227 for full article)

(And Three Reasons it Still Sucks)

It’s hard to forget the original Nokia N-Gage, the taco-shaped smartphone slash game system that challenged the Game Boy Advance in 2003. In short, it flopped. Nintendo’s handheld system continued to outsell it by 100-to-1 and retailers offered $100 rebates to get the N-Gage out of their stockrooms.

So imagine our surprise when Nokia announced that the N-Gage would live again as a piece of software that can be downloaded onto your phone. We put a beta version of the new gaming platform through its paces to see whether you should trade in your cell phone and Nintendo DS for this all-in-one entertainment package.

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Ever since Nintendo’s Game & Watch handheld electronic games (1980-1991), playing games no longer meant being tethered to a TV. Gaming sans TV often means being far from the electricity-granting power cord that can deliver unlimited play time. As a result, on-the-go gamers have to obsessively watch the clock — and the battery power indicator — to see how many more precious gaming minutes they have left. Here are nine easy ways tips keeping that Nintendo DS or PSP chugging as long as possible.

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Traditional, point-based motion capture (the kind brought to you by guys in black suits with reflective balls) has been great for developers that want to capture basic skeletal motion for their in-game characters. But for realistic facial work, even setups with hundreds of reflective dots leave developers with rough, blocky data that requires a lot of post-production work to even start approaching the uncanny valley.

Enter motion capture company Mova, whose Contour Reality Capture system uses an array of cameras to create 100,000 polygon facial models that are accurate to within a tenth of a millimeter — no special reflective balls required. At this year’s GDC, the company is trying to attract the game industry’s attention by unveiling examples of their facial modeling running in real-time on the popular Unreal Engine 3.

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