[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/b8MhLvjoBTs ]

People love buying unfinished Mojang games -- so how about a game that hasn't even started yet? That's the premise of the Humble Bundle Mojam, the new Humble Indie Bundle going up tomorrow at 10AM CET (which is 4AM EST!) You'll find it on humblebundle.com when it's live.

Minecraft creator Mojang is planning on making a game live over the course of 60 hours --streamed live on the Humble Bundle site -- and everyone who donates will get the resulting game. So what's this game going to be? That's at the mercy of the fans. Mojang is letting people vote on the genre and theme, and both the highest and lowest-scored of each will become the game. So the team could be at work on a "Peter Molyneux Racing Game in a Fantasy World War II setting."

Incentives will also be offered for certain amounts. For example, in the video above, Notch promises to let Jakob Porser shave his beard for a million dollars. "With my fists," Porser added. There'll probably be some real ones too.

The old adage that "Macs can't play games" has had less traction as of late, what with Steam's Steam Play capabilities expanding a large portion of the service's offerings to Apple's operating system. OS X's next evolutionary form may unintentionally undo some of the good work that developers and publishers have accomplished, however.

Apple OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, which just started its "Developer Preview" period and will be released to the populous sometime this year, features a new security protocol called Gatekeeper, which prevents certain applications from running, depending on user preferences. Gamasutra reports Gatekeeper is set to only allow applications from the Mac App Store and developers who've enlisted in Apple's new Developer ID program by default.

This means that, out of the box, your Mountain Lion-sporting Mac won't run games purchased on Steam or any other digital distribution service, save for the Mac App Store, until you've adjusted your system preferences to allow those games to run.

Now, Gatekeeper's restrictions apply to all applications, not just games, and its preferences can be set to allow content from unidentified/non-App Store sources, so it doesn't seem like the system itself is inherently malicious or anti-gaming. It is, however, prohibitive, and whether Gatekeeper is implemented in an obvious/user-friendly way or buried under a mountain of tangential system preferences will be the deciding factor in its overall effect on the OS X gaming ecosystem.

This is a weekly column focusing on "Western" role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity.

---

"Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet," - Rudyard Kipling

Conventional wisdom holds that role-playing games are easily divided into two categories: Japanese and Western, or, before the technical lines got blurred a decade ago, console and computer games. We can name the stereotypes easily. JRPGs are story-based, WRPGs are system-based. JRPGs are action-based, fast, and simple, whereas WRPGs are strategic, slow, and complex. JRPGs have bright, cartoonish graphics and catchy music, WRPGs have realistic graphics and darker music. JRPGs linear, WRPGs open. In JRPGs, your characters are given to you, in WRPGS you create your characters. And so on.

It's not true, though. What's more, it never was.

Continue Reading

Xbox users may have noticed a mandatory patch preempting their power-up procedures today, the effects of which were either immediately apparent or completely unnoticeable, depending on whether a certain color display issue had reared its head. The patch doesn't apply to apps, however, so developers will have to implement the fix independently; a process that will take place "over the coming months," according to Major Nelson.

Technically speaking, "over the coming months" could mean any time between now and the heat death of the universe, but the fact that Microsoft has corrected its own services is a promising start.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 players will have a little more afro in their lives come February 28, when Square Enix releases its latest episodic DLC event, "Sazh: Heads or Tails?" Players take on the role of Sazh Katzroy in an adventure that takes place concurrently with FFXIII-2's main story. Once completed, players will be able to add Sazh into their party, as is the way with these things.

The 400 MSP/$4.99 episode also includes two new card games for Serendipity: Chronobind and Serendipity Poker. Noel's "Spacetime Guardian" outfit and Serah's "Beachware" regalia will also be available that day, bundled together for 240 MSP/$2.99 and a silent confession to yourself that it's okay to play dress-up with your JRPG people.

---

There was a time when I would have thought Shinobido 2: Revenge of Zen was the greatest game ever made -- a very specific time, as a matter of fact. The year was 1998, back when Shinobido 2 was released for the original PlayStation. Of course, back then it was called Tenchu.

That's a bit of snark, but it's also accurate. Developed by Acquire, the same studio behind the Tenchu series, Shinobido 2 bears a strong resemblance to its ninja granddaddy, albeit with a few new wrinkles.

Continue Reading

Monumental Games is no more, selling off all its intellectual property, office supplies and tech. Develop reports the Nottingham UK studio, developer of the MotoGP series, currently has "several parties interested in buying" the remains of the studio. It will be fully dissolved by the end of the year.

Monumental's final operating business was its Prime engine, which apparently didn't gain traction. Last month the company fired its remaining staff, after attempts to restructure since December 2010. Back then it committed massive cuts to the staff when an unannounced project for a major publisher didn't work out.

We're of the firm opinion that your time is too precious, too valuable to be spent reading a full review for a game that was already reviewed many, many years ago. What's the point of applying a score to a game that's old enough to be enrolled in the sixth grade? That's why we invented Deja Review: A quick look at the new features and relative agelessness of remade, revived and re-released games.

---

Alan Wake's development tale was almost as troubled as the ordeal faced by the game's titular character. After a long creation process, which included ditching a PC version that was always planned, Remedy's first original title since 2003 failed to light up sales charts (despite critical praise).

For fans of Wake's story, its inability to reach 'best-seller' status raised fears of an end to his fiction. Developer Remedy Entertainment defied that notion, announcing Alan Wake's American Nightmare, which is set to hit Xbox Live Arcade later this month. Retaining rights from Microsoft -- its original partner in Wake's release -- Remedy finally made good on its promise to bring Wake to the PC, and Alan Wake's second-printing does little to disappoint.

Continue Reading

Razer is releasing a series of Mass Effect 3-branded peripherals, and you'd better believe every single thing in the product line comes with DLC codes. The wares include N7-themed versions of the BlackWidow Ultimate keyboard, the Imperator mouse, the Onza Tournament Edition 360 controller, the Chimera 360 headset and the Vespula mousepad. There's also an iPhone 4(S) case and messenger bag available to "protect and safeguard peripherals and gadgets from the intensity of the intergalactic warfare in Mass Effect 3."

Available for pre-order now and shipping sometime in March, each piece of kit comes with a code for a "Collector Assault Rifle" and "multiplayer content packs," although the contents of those content packs remain a mystery. We don't know about you guys, but playing a video game has never caused our cell phone to spontaneously suffer extensive physical abuse.

Continue Reading

You guys know about Mass Effect 3, right? EA really wants you to know that Mass Effect 3 exists. Like, so bad. The publisher's fervor for raising awareness about ME3 is so great that it's strapping six copies of the game to six high-altitude weather balloons spread across the globe, and launching them into the literal stratosphere, which is effectively space when spoken in the same sentence as "balloons" and "video games."

Paris, London, Berlin, New York, San Francisco and Las Vegas will all play host to one of these advertising airships, which are set to launch next week. Eventually though, these puppies are coming back down.

Each copy of the game is equipped with a GPS tracking device, and crazy people will be able to monitor the games' positions on the official Mass Effect website. Once they land, whoever scrambles to a crash site first will get to keep the copy and play the game a week early, assuming the damn thing is still somehow intact. Here's hoping that the balloons are just as involved in the descent as they are in the flight, but just to be safe we're going to calculate the terminal velocity of a 360 case and call our insurance company.

The Max Payne series, originally created by Alan Wake's Remedy Entertainment, follows a few traditions -- no driving, no brawling, and an emphasis on blazing noir-style gunplay. None of this is going to change in Max Payne 3, Rockstar said in this week's Asked & Answered session.

"As we've stated in the past, we're working very hard to ensure that we're being faithful and true to the heritage of Max Payne -- and the heart and soul of Max Payne gameplay has always been as a pure shooter," Rockstar said. Max will have melee opportunities in close-quarter combat, but otherwise Rockstar has "no intention of betraying that to introduce driving/racing or brawling elements."

Rockstar also provided a brief update on its mobile installment of the original Max Payne, saying it should see an official launch in the next couple months, with a release date to be announced soon.

Rockstar fields more questions about Remedy and Max Payne 3 on its Asked & Answered page.

Did you know the weekend technically starts now? According to Steam it does, anyway. Don't even bother showing up to work tomorrow.

Steam users will have access to Modern Warfare 3's full multiplayer suite of modes starting right now. All you have to do is install the game and you can play as much multiplayer as you want until Monday -- unless you want to buy the game, of course.

Since its introduction to iOS 4.1 back in 2010, Game Center hasn't evolved much. Other than dumping Game Center onto iPad later that same year, Apple has been content to just let it linger there. Now almost two years later, Game Center will finally be on every Apple product you own. There is no escaping it.

Our sister site Engadget got some hands-on time with the upcoming OS X update, OS X Mountain Lion, dissecting it down to the molecule. Of particular note to gamers is the availability of the Game Center app on the OS X platform, including all of its major features: voice chat, leaderboards and online multiplayer. The iOS service has over 100 million registered users.

Adam Saltsman, the mastermind behind Canabalt, Gravity Hook and Capsule, has rallied an indie dream team to make an original iOS title based on The Hunger Games movie. The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire is Saltsman's brainchild, backed by production company Lionsgate, and in collaboration with designers/programmers Mark Johns (Tap Tap Dance) and Kevin Coulton (Hot Throttle), lead artist and animator Paul Veer (Super Crate Box), and composer Daniel Baranowsky (Super Meat Boy, Canabalt).

Saltsman says he was skeptical about taking on the adaptation, as most companies who approach him want to re-skin Canabalt and call it a day. Not Lionsgate though. "I pitched them on an original touch-based action game instead," Saltsman said. "It does feature a running character, but the focus of the game is more on marksmanship and strategy... but we'll have more to say and show about that later! It's a small idea, but a tight one too."

The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire will launch for iOS devices "timed to the theatrical release," which is March 23.

In the expensive, devious world of advertising, a successful word of mouth campaign is worth its weight in gold. Building something into your product that's fun to show off and talk about makes the purchase feel justified to the buyer, and instills a sense of "Dude, I want this" in the buyer's friends. You've got to give them something to talk about, though, which is why Sony is making the Vita's Cross Play functionality easier to jump into via free DLC for two of its titles.

Well, free with purchase, we should say. Anyone who buys Hustle Kings for the Vita will be able to download the PS3 version of the game for free, and vice versa. Wipeout 2048 pilots that already own Wipeout HD and its "HD Fury" pack will receive the Vita DLC versions of both at no charge when they're released this spring. Sony describes this as "promotional" pricing, so we doubt free cross-platform transference will always be the norm. For now though, it's a good step towards establishing Cross Play as more than a gimmick in the minds of Vita owners and their friends.

The Metal Gear Solid 3D demo arrives today, accompanied by relatively big news on the Virtual Console! The first NES Ambassador game for 3DS is now available for purchase by non-Ambassadors! Super Mario Bros. is on the eShop now for five bucks. And if you already have it through the Ambassador Program, you can get a free update to add multiplayer and save states!

There's also news for the Wii's Virtual Console: the Genesis version of Strider can be purchased today. We hadn't heard about a Genesis VC game in a while, so we looked into it. As far as we can tell, this is the first Genesis game on Wii in North America since Sonic & Knuckles, on February 15, 2010. It's been two years and a day since the last Genesis VC release.

In fact, this appears to be the first Wii Virtual Console release of any kind since The Ignition Factor six months ago. Enjoy it! This doesn't happen very often.

Continue Reading

When is thatgamecompany's Journey coming out? March 13, as it turns out. But what's next, you ask? Man, you're so impatient! Anyway, it sounds like the next project from TGC is just as online focused (or more so) than Journey, as a job listing for the indie studio's next game reveals. "With our last game, Journey, we began incorporating online interactions into our projects, and we'd like to take it a step further on our next game," the listing reads.

"While we're pretty experienced making games, we've never built a full scale online service available to hundreds of thousands of users. We're looking for someone to help us plan and build our online infrastructure in a way that scales," it continues, demanding direct experience "building a scalable online service." More ambiguously, the listing also requires applicants have a "desire to see the medium of games mature and increase in relevancy for people around the world." That sounds more like TGC to us!

Also of note, applicants are "more likely to enjoy this job" should they have a "desire to create something not just for core gamers but everyone you respect in your life." So, uh, if you don't respect anyone in your life, probably not an ideal job for you.