Opposable Thumbs

As a PS3 trilogy, the Uncharted series has primarily been about three things: traversing lush jungle environments by hanging from a highly unlikely series of outcroppings and ledges; shooting at gun-toting enemies that pop out en masse from behind beautiful ruins; and listening to some impeccably acted and animated witty banter. Uncharted: Golden Abyss, the first portable entry in the series, is definitely about all those things, but it's also about awkwardly showing off the Vita's unique control functions in ways that annoy more than they enlighten.

Another Valentine's Day, another study hating on gaming habits. A new paper released by researchers at Brigham Young University today concludes that online role-playing games have a negative effect on marital satisfaction. However, the authors didn't prove that gaming has a particularly negative effect on relationships, only that it's just like any other leisure activity: doing too much of it without your spouse will make him or her feel angry and isolated.

In the study, 349 married couples who had one gaming member or two gaming members who logged unequal amounts of time filled out surveys about their relationships, with questions ranging from hours of gaming time logged to how often they fought. The study concluded that "for independent-gamer couples, the effects were clearly negative, resulting in frequent quarrelling over gaming." In couples where both people gamed, though in unequal amounts of time, 52 percent of the less-involved participants and 57 percent of the more-involved ones reported "often" or "always" speaking positively about gaming. Seventy-four percent of gaming couples even reported that gaming had a positive effect on their relationship.

However, blaming relationship problems on online gaming, while topical, is too narrow a description of the problem. The study explains in its intro that marital satisfaction is "lower for those [couples] with high concentrations of individual leisure activities." That is, doing fun stuff in general without your spouse will lead to fights and unrest. 

This study doesn't prove that gaming, specifically, is to blame for your relationship problems. Couples where one member spends too much time fishing, shopping, drinking, or even volunteering at soup kitchens and building houses for the homeless on his or her own have been shown to experience marital difficulty, just like couples where one person games and the other doesn't. Since the study doesn't compare gaming to other leisure activities, it only confirms that gaming makes your spouse angry, like everything else you might do and enjoy alone.

There is one ray of light: while the study found that a married person's "satisfaction with online gaming" was a predictor of a discontent, the amount of time spent playing games was not. Therefore, if you aren't blessed with a gamer-to-gamer relationship, spend all the time playing you want—just don't grin like an idiot while you do it, and maybe even throw in a few complaints about what a slog it is to slay all those dragons.

When major entertainment industries host their annual awards, it's usually a major cultural milestone, with highly rated telecasts and breathless pre- and post-show coverage from the press. When gaming's Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences hosted its Interactive Achievement Awards last Thursday, the event warranted cursory coverage from most of the press and ignorance or indifference from most gamers.

Kingdoms of Amalur: A great action game in an empty, forgettable world: Kingdoms of Amalur is the rare Action RPG that doesn't skimp on either the action or the RPG. The game provides satisfying fantasy combat, but is unfortunately set in a dull, forgettable world.

Minecraft developer makes "serious" offer to fund Psychonauts sequel: In response to an interview in which Psychonauts creator Tim Schafer said it would take "a few million dollars" to make a sequel happen, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson has made an apparently serious offer to provide that funding.

Last year's Resident Evil: The Mercenaries 3D always felt like a proof of concept that the series could function on the 3DS, and Capcom has admitted as much in interviews. Though it stood out with impressive visuals and online co-op action, its decision to hack together a collection of existing side modes from previous series entries made it another uninspired option on a platform struggling to pin down an identity.

Resident Evil: Revelations finally breaks free of the series's portable history, which is filled with false starts and half-measures alike. It's an original, full-fledged adventure that looks and feels like it could have debuted on a console—at times, it even tops 2009's Resident Evil 5 for sheer thrills and entertainment.

Every graphical and technical advance the game industry has seen from Pong to Crysis has been a small step toward the end goal of a real-time, photorealistic 3D world that is truly indistinguishable from a real-world scene. Speaking at the DICE Summit Thursday, Epic Games founder and programmer Tim Sweeney examined the speed and direction of computing improvements and determined that we "might expect, over the course of our lifetime, we'd get to amounts of computing power that come very close to simulating reality."

You'd think that Tomonobu Itagaki, the rock star developer of successful game franchises like Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden series, wouldn't have much to be sad about. But, in a surprisingly personal DICE presentation today, Itagaki shared how a crucial mistake in the game development process sent him into a spiraling depression—and how the movie Armageddon helped bring him out of it.

For decades now, large parts of the game industry have been striving to create games that are more meaningful—games that can speak to the human condition and tell an impactful story that's deeper than "remember when I shot that guy?" At a DICE Summit presentation today, Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe made an impassioned argument that such efforts have been misguided, and a huge waste of the industry's time and resources.

If there's anyone who can make sense of the recent, meteoric rise of mobile and social games, it's probably the people behind the golden age of arcade gaming in the early '80s. Just such a group drew a lot of parallels between the two gaming eras at a DICE session today, while also offering some cautionary warnings about following in the arcade's footsteps.

There's an undisguised nostalgia about Cell: Emergence, though it's not quite as bold or overt as other recent blocky 3D games like 3D Dot Game Heroes or Minecraft. Still, the effort from indie developer New Life Interactive uses the mechanics and still-screen storytelling of an aged arcade shooter to deliver a short, cerebral package. And despite its humility, Cell: Emergence's new, understated package recalls a refreshingly old-school way to play 3D shooters.

It seems industry analysts aren't the only ones questioning the traditional game publishing model these days, as Tim Schafer's Double Fine (Brutal Legend, Costume Quest) has launched a Kickstarter project to crowdsource funding for "a brand-new, downloadable 'Point-and-Click' graphic adventure game for the modern age."

When people talk about the importance of actually spending money on games, rather than resorting to a used purchase or piracy, the importance of "supporting the developers" is never far from the argument. Yet for a lot of classic titles being repackaged and sold these days, money from new purchases isn't going to the developers at all, but solely to the publishers that own the long-term rights to the titles.

Freelance developer Simon Roth decided to see just how deep this problem goes. He started digging around on Google and talking to his colleagues to determine which developers, if any, were actually receiving a cut of the continuing profits on their work. Last week, he published the results of his research, a list of over 200 classic titles that are currently being sold by publishers without any of the new income going to the actual developers that made the game.

If you ask people what a game developer does, most of them would give a simple answer—they make games. But if you ask someone what a game publisher does, most casual observers would have a much harder time giving you an answer. And these days, a lot of people in the game industry might have some questions about that, too.

The DICE Summit on Wednesday hosted an interesting discussion of whether the traditional publisher role—which primarily involves supporting developers and marketing their titles—really has a place in a gaming world that's rapidly discarding old ideas and business models.

Kotaku is reporting that Sony will not be bringing its Japanese UMD Passport program to North America, removing the only method for PlayStation Vita owners to play their collection of PlayStation Portable universal media discs (UMDs) on the new handheld (PSP games downloaded from the PlayStation Network will still work on the Vita, however). While this is obviously bad news for anyone who wants to play their battered old copy of Lumines on a slightly larger screen, it made us wonder how important backward compatibility really is to a system's retail success.

We were perfectly ready to speculate wildly on that very topic, but it turns out there's no need. Someone has actually crunched the numbers and tried to develop a statistical model to show just how valuable backward compatibility is for a portable system's overall market share. And the results show that Sony just might pay a price for its decision to ignore all the UMD owners out there.

The Darkness II is one of the most unabashedly and gleefully gory games of this generation, reveling in its own torrents of blood and shredded viscera. While bullets, exploding heads, and tearing through flesh aren’t anything new in the video game world, the brutal Darkness executions take the virtual carnage to a whole new level. Bodies are regularly torn in half (both crosswise and lengthwise), skulls and spinal columns are torn out through mouths, bodies are impaled with thrown objects, and entire digestive tracts are forcibly removed through enemies' nether regions.

Given that, it surprisingly never makes the player feel like they’re in need of a shower when the bloodshed is over. Games like Rogue Warrior and Soldier of Fortune were just as brutally violent, yet their uber-serious undercurrents simply made them feel like exercises in virtual sadism. Last year’s Bulletstorm, on the other hand, was so over-the-top and silly that the blood and guts really didn’t make any impact at all. The Darkness II manages to strike the right balance between the two extremes, not only making it a better game than the ones mentioned above, but also making it superior to its predecessor in many ways.

In the annals of video gaming, 2005's mind-bending platformer Psychonauts is right up there with Earthbound and Beyond Good and Evil in the ranks of games that have a devoted cadre of fans eagerly demanding sequels. Now, those Psychonauts fans might have a decent chance of getting their wish, thanks to an odd, indirect Internet back-and-forth involving Psychonauts creator Tim Shafer and Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson.

The ubiquity of the action RPG, as an idea, is a little weird when you think about it. It's hard to think of two more disparate genres to try to combine, and usually the attempt ends up leaning too heavily toward one side of the coin or the other. Action RPGs often feel like roleplaying games that replace turn-based combat with overly simple button mashing, or like action games with some cursory, stat-building “RPG elements” thrown in toward the end of development.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning manages a surprising trick, then, in creating an action RPG that feels like a full-fledged action game and a full-fledged RPG. Unfortunately, only one of those two component parts manages to stand on its own in a satisfying way.

The idea of copying a successful game concept and profiting off of your own version is practically as old as the game industry itself—just look at the countless Pong clones released in the wake of the Atari original (which itself may have been copied from another source... but that's another story). The idea of game copying has gained added attention in recent weeks, though, as some high-profile social game companies have released games some say are a little too similar to their existing inspirations.

Tiny Tower maker NimbleBit and Bingo Blitz maker Buffalo Studios both took issue with overly familiar titles recently released by Zynga, making their complaints known through large infographics that show near-identical side-by-side screenshots. But Triple Town developer Spry Fox went a step further, actually filing a lawsuit (PDF) against Yeti Town developer 6waves Lolapps, saying the latter company "unabashedly" cloned its popular social game. The lawsuit takes the matter away from the nebulous moral and ethical questions of what constitutes an "original" game idea to the codified legal realm of guilt and innocence. Yet the nature of copyright law as it applies to games, and the existing case law in the area, suggests Spry Fox has an uphill battle in protecting Triple Town in court.

Digital forms of Solitaire have been included with Windows since it reached version 3.0, and they may well represent the most widely played video game series this side of Angry Birds, enjoyed by bored cubicle workers and bored, procrastinating students alike. While most serious gamers probably wouldn't put these games top ten picks of all time, you'd be hard-pressed to find a single PC owner that hasn't put in at least a few hours on a machine that has nothing else available.

Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle maker Popcap is targeting this familiar genre with its latest Facebook time-waster, Solitaire Blitz, a supremely addictive and well-crafted offering that adds just the right amount of tension to the zen autonomy of mindlessly clicking cards.