Gamasutra's Best Of 2009: Top 10 Indie Games

There's so much more out there than you realize.

The death of a watchdog

From the Associated Press:

David Walsh said when he was assembling his first report card on video game violence 13 years ago, children were attacking on-screen monsters or aliens with imaginary chain saws and guns.

'When I saw kids as young as 8, 9 years old literally doing facial contortions as they killed and dismembered people, it was pretty shocking. And I think what happened is a lot of other people got shocked as well,' Walsh recalls. 'I don't think we want our kids' culture defined by killing, mayhem and dismemberment as entertainment.'

That first report card, which singled out bloody first-person shooter games "Doom" and "Duke Nukem," made an instant splash on Capitol Hill in 1996 and made the annual reports issued each holiday season by  Walsh's National Institute on Media and the Family a news fixture.

But there was no video game report card this year, and there won't be any more. The institute is closing its doors, a victim of the poor economy. Walsh, the group's founder and president, is packing his books as his staff of eight full-time employees prepares to shut down Dec. 23.

Dismemberment is now acceptable

We reported a while back that the forthcoming inter-species murder-fest, Aliens vs. Predator, had been effectively banned in Australia, being denied even the courtesy of a rating. Well, the publisher appealed - as publisher's are often forced to do in Oz - and to the utter shock of all, they won.

Not only did they win, but the game was approved for release with no edits whatsoever. The "classification board" - so horrified at the intense depictions of violence - apparently decided upon further review that it was all in good fun.

The words "arbitrary" and "capricious" come to mind, especially since Australian gamers have been forced to play a sanitized version of L4D2 as the result of the same farcical rating process. One hopes that some form of bribery was involved in AvP's case, as that would at least make sense.

Mass Effect 2 preview

Oddly enough, the intel is on a site called MM( )RPG, but it's a good yarn nonetheless. It seems BioWare has been running the upgrade machine night and day; none of that "add a few new weapons and characters and call it a sequel" nonsense that permeates the industry.

If you still haven't played the original Mass Effect - and you can tolerate the third-person viewpoint - you can pick up the game for a mere $20 these days. That's a hell of a deal for 30 to 40 hours of AAA gameplay.

Titillating tessellation

Tessellation is a method for increasing the geometric detail represented in a game through real-time shading, as opposed to increasing the polygon count of a pre-rendered object. Where most recently released games use normal mapping to create lighting and shadowing effects on flat surfaces, tessellation creates true geometric detail by amplifying the resolution of a "superprimitive" mesh, and then displacing the added vertices. For example:

Using tessellation produces high-resolution graphics without the need store a ton of vertex data on a disk, or in system and video memory.  Installations will thus be smaller, and graphics rendering will require less bandwidth, because only a limited amount of vertex data for (what will become) a hi-res mesh needs to be transferred over the PCI-E bus to the GPU. The tessellator generates all the new data without storing it in memory.

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A note on RSS

The RSS feeds for this site redirect through feedburner, so they update a bit slowly. Once a post or comment is submitted, it will take about a half-hour to update. If you find a comment is missing when you click on it in the "Recent Comments" links on the sidebar, it's because the comment has been deleted.

Transforming people into pixels

The image below shows the real-life humans that served as body models for the characters in both Left 4 Dead games. It's pretty remarkable to see how close the character renderings are to the real thing.

Thanks to IT( )E Karnage for the tip.

The Soldier wins!

The final tally: 6,327,979 Soldiers martyred ... 6,406,065 Demomen massacred. To the victor go the spoils, and the spoils are actually pretty nice.

The War Update is now live, but since the Steam servers are slammed at the moment, you'll probably have to wait.

Even more BC2 footage

I finally got my wish: a Bad Company 2 vid on a map other than Arica Harbor. The setting this time around is the Panama Canal, but unfortunately, the color palate hasn't changed much from the last map. Still, as a showcase for the various vehicles - and some very impressive particle effects - the eye candy is enough to hold your attention for a minute and 52 seconds.

The video also drives home two obvious points: games like this are best played with lots of people, and console controllers make no sense whatsoever in this kind of environment.

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The Ring of Honor

Most of the new toys for the Soldier and the Demoman are up on the TF2 blog. The mysterious secret weapon for the winner of the class war has yet to be announced, and the kill-count for each side has drawn closer than expected.  The last official tally returned 5,727,928 dead Soldiers, and 5,743,720 dead Demos, putting the murder margin just under 16,000 units.

I didn't win ... yet

Valve have picked the first, second, and third prize winners in their penultimate propaganda contest, and I'm not one of them (avast!).  The winning entries are all good, but not one of them depicts tea-bagging in any form whatsoever.  Horseshit, I say.

Apparently, though, there will be additional winners selected in the coming days. Keep your dirty little fingers crossed.

More work on the blog

The template we've been using was too much of a hack job, and has created a number of problems, most particularly with the site analytics. What you're seeing right now is a temporary fix.

UPDATE: after several hours of work, I'm more or less done - aside from missing a few links I know were on the previous layout, but that I can't remember right now.  Once again your feedback would be appreciated (although your pitiless indifference would not).

UPDATE (2): the template doesn't look quite as a should in IE8, but I have no idea how to fix it, and I'm not going to try.

Tactical L4D2

I found this over on the Steam forums. It's brilliant:

Introduction:

Hello! MattL here, and today I'm going to share with you my guide to being a pro in L4D2. Make sure to read every one of my tips and guidelines, and always make sure to follow each and everyone of them! Suggestions are also welcome; I am always adding new things and observations to the guide!

First, make sure you always use the auto shotgun. Every other gun in the game is just a waste of space.

Second, make sure you never stick with your team mates. Hold your personal safety in higher regard.

Third, never, and I repeat, never give anything to your team mates. See two molotovs? Throw one, grab the other! Find extra pills? Use one, grab the other. See your friend bleeding out in the corner? F♥♥♥ him!

Fourth, remember, exploiting glitches isn't cheating. It's tactical.

Fifth, always walk up to the Witch. Make sure to dance around her and yell out internet memes, which will eventually cheer her up, and you guys can be friends.

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Monday Music XII - gone edgy

This week: Dave Matthews Band, Thin Lizzy, Joy Division.

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First Left 4 Dead 2 DLC announced

From Steam News:

Dubbed "The Passing," the first game add-on for L4D2 brings the original Left 4 Dead (L4D1) Survivors down south for a meeting with the L4D2 cast, while delivering new single-player, multiplayer and co-operative gameplay for the PC and Xbox 360.

Targeted for release in early spring, "The Passing" takes place just after the Dead Center campaign of L4D2. Set in a small town in rural Georgia, players assume the role of the L4D2 Survivors as they meet with the L4D1 characters.

In addition to the new co-operative campaign and associated narrative, "The Passing" will include new arenas for Survival, Versus and Scavenge mode and introduce a new co-operative challenge mode of play. The Passing will also include a new "uncommon common" zombie class, melee weapon, and firearm.

It doesn't sound like we're going to get to play as the old survivors in the new campaign, but it's not entirely clear.

Medal of Honor: first footage

It's all pre-rendered, and it still doesn't look as good as Call of Duty 4.  Which is odd, because MoH uses the same engine as Bad Company 2.

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