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Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?

March 7, 2010 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games | 9 comments

With the recent release of Heavy Rain, I’ve had interactive storytelling on my mind again. I was excited about the game, and for months it was one of the justifications I had for buying a PS3 in the first place (second place to The Last Guardian). But after playing the demo and hearing many detailed reports from friends I trust, I’m left a little stumped with David Cage’s latest attempt at making storytelling a truly interactive experience. After all, David Cage’s personal blog makes the following goals central to the player’s experience of Heavy Rain:

An evolving thriller in which you shape the story
Mature content, reflecting a realistic world setting that explores powerful themes
Stunning graphics, animation and technology support an emotionally driven experience
Accessible gameplay via intuitive, contextual controls and interface

In this article I don’t want to harp on David Cage or Quantic Dream. The kinds of goals he has for his games are right up my alley, and if the games fails to satisfy those goals, it would be rather asinine of me to point fingers at him or his studio. Instead, I’d like to think about what we mean by an “interactive narrative” and why we are being led further and further away from a truly interactive storytelling experience, especially in games that attempt to simulate one. So let me be clear: this isn’t a review or a critique of Heavy Rain, but of the general kind of problems we face today in making interactive stories.

As a foil to Heavy Rain, I take a very simple and effective “edutainment” title from my back-catalogue of 1990s edutainment titles, and show that Stephen Biesty’s Incredible Cross-Sections: Stowaway! (whew) manages to produce a far more immersive and interactive narrative experience using a gameplay approach that is simpler and totally straightforward. (And I’ll make it spoiler-free if that matters for you, I hope.)

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Policenauts Review & Interview with Marc Laidlaw

November 20, 2009 in Game Industry, Game Writing, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 2 comments

I’ve been dying to review Policenauts for months, but wanted to try something slightly different since it was an unpaid, unofficial, translation team that took on the job of translating this Japanese cult classic into English. I managed to track down Marc Laidlaw, the lead translator on the project, who was generous in answering some questions I had about the game and the localization process.

The editors and writers of 4colorrebellion were gracious in offering me a space for such a wonderful interview. Specifically, I wish to thank my friend Jamie Love for his hard work in setting me up over at 4CR, and putting together the entire article in its final form. Head over to my 4colorrebellion article to read the entire inter-review.

Eric Chahi & Jordan Mechner in Conversation

October 19, 2009 in Game History, Game Industry, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

Lurking quietly in the background of almost all side-scrolling adventure/puzzle games today, are the two giants of my childhood: Jordan Mechner and Éric Chahi (and I would add a third: David Crane, and a fourth: Paul Cuisset!). Mechner, the auteur of Karateka, Prince of Persia, and The Last Express among others. Chahi, the creator of Another World (Out of this World) and Heart of Darkness. Although it is easy to come up with visual or gameplay similarities between both developers, Dieubussy of the CoreGaming network puts it just right: Jordan Mechner and Eric Chahi’s games are part of the same spiritual nexus that cannot be reduced to a single game element. Anyone who plays the aforementioned games, whether they like them or not, has to be astounded at the highly focussed and concentrated design efforts involved. Rather than depicting (or representing) the narrative and environments through photorealistic visual styles, both authors refined subtler and more suggestive/evocative visual styles. The best adjective that I could use to describe their games is “strong”.

A developer himself, Eric Viennot has interviewed Chahi and Mechner, each answering the same question. It is an interesting opportunity to see how two authors who may share a spiritual style, living on opposite sides of the ocean, come up with different answers. I firmly believe that a game can (and must!) be understood and enjoyed without referring to the life of the artist or their opinion, but for those who have already played their games and admire their artistic styles, the interview is a goldmine. This is part of a series of interviews that Viennot has done of the giants of gaming… a prior interview between Frédérick Raynal (Alone in the Dark) and Paul Cuisset (Flashback: The Quest for Identity) is just as fascinating. I hope that you can read French – if not, try out one of the various translators (Google translate seems to do an okay job)… otherwise, Gamasutra is in the midst of translating the latest interview into english.

An Expedition into the Lost World of Exploration: ToeJam & Earl

September 23, 2009 in Artful Games, Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

The extremely thoughtful and critical comments in response to my previous post got me thinking about the role of exploration in games. In this post I’ll try to do some justice to how gamers can still hang on to a sense of exploration for its own sake, and enjoying games as a form of pure entertainment.

Last night I was sitting with a friend of mine talking about our experiences playing games as kids. We were surprised to learn that we had both owned the cult classic (yet poorly marketed) ToeJam & Earl for the Sega Genesis/Mega-Drive in the 1990’s and brought back some fond memories for each of us.

Its re-appearance on the Wii Virtual Console was a welcome gesture, but I was disappointed with reviewer responses who felt that characters move “lethargically slow”, the gameplay was “unfair”, the funky visual style too “dated” to be enjoyable, and that its 16-bit synth music was too crippled for contemporary gamers. At the same time, most of these reviewers begrudgingly admit that it’s likely a “classic” and enjoys some nostalgic street cred, especially for its two player co-op mode.

After reading those reviews, I realized that ToeJam & Earl - a cult staple of the average SEGA generation child’s household – has become just another brief glint in the endless library of emulated games available for casual play. This is where I want to part ways with the average reviewer out there, and try to show why ToeJam & Earl is still an important game today, and offers something wonderful to the kind of curious, exploration-driven, non-competitive, fun-loving, and non-violent child (or adult!) gamer that we talked about previously. It’s a game that you should be playing with your partner, your child, or a close friend, right now. Nostalgia for its own sake is a very real, and I think very dangerous, part of reflecting on older video games. I think that re-vitalizing them and finding value in them for a new generation is a noble, and difficult task. I’ll do my best.

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Re-thinking Interface “Design”

April 16, 2009 in Game Psychology, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 18 comments

notools Matthew Gallant posted an interesting commentary that confronts video game interfaces with Donald Norman’s ubiquitous book on design, The Design of Everyday Things. There is some sense in the three design principles that Norman distils from his analyses of well-designed everyday objects, and Matthew has done a wonderful job of translating them for game designers.

In this article I try to plead a case against ”good” interface design. Rather, I would like to see interfaces that frustrate the gamer and encourage them to explore the game’s world creatively, rather than instrumentally.

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A Trip to id Software, circa 1993

April 6, 2009 in Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 1 comment

On Christmas eve of 1993, I crowded around my uncle’s 17″ monitor as his friend Jeff played a new 3D shooter game on his brand new Pentium PC.

As the game loaded, Jeff said, “This is gonna be the biggest game of the year.”

He cranked up the speakers and blared metal synth midi music; the rest of the family in the other room yelled at us to keep it down. KABOOM! The first panicked shot from the shotgun exploded snargling imps into giblets.

“Over to your right! It’s coming! SHOOT!” we shrieked as another imp advanced on Jeff.

We had never played anything so fast before… all of us broke into a nervous sweat as the man in the hotseat explored the rest of the level. For the first time in our collected lives, we experienced terror playing a computer game.

My uncle picked up the phone and dialed the 1-800 number listed on the exit screen to purchase us a registered copy of the game. We had to have it.

Fast-forward over 16 years.

Yesterday, John Romero edited and posted a video of a trip that Dan Linton (sysop of The Software Creations BBS) took to id Software way back in 1993. The video features composer Bobby Prince giving a demo of some of his work (ie. Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3-D, etc), and John Romero playing an early version of Doom.

What I like the most about the video is that the folks over at id show so much passion and energy for their work. They love what they do, and they’re having fun doing it. There is something very familiar about watch Romero play Doom, as his friends and co-workers crowd around the monitor and express their enthusiasm. That kind of excitement and communal gawking is something I sorely miss now that games have become a much more individualized form of entertainment.

I highly recommend checking out the video for a blast to the past, even if you weren’t a Doom fan.

New Games Journalism is Dead. Long live New New Games Journalism.

February 9, 2009 in Game History, Game Writing, Irritating Rants, Mainstream Games, Philosophy | 30 comments

In this article I confront the New Games Journalism movement, and take a look at where it went. As a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek article over at Hardcasual.net parodies, it is becoming obvious that we produced a dysfunctional and narcissistic child. While I cannot pretend to have the “answer” or “fix” for our current crisis, I do offer what I think is a credible alternative. We need to open a dialogue on this issue, I think, instead of diagnosing and treating it like an out-patient. This involves our very identity as gamers, and without a hard look at ourselves we are at risk of repeating a long, uninteresting, history.

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Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part II

January 9, 2009 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games | 1 comment

p21_magicalarts Hi again folks. What were meant to be a handful of articles posted over a couple of weeks became a couple of articles posted over a few months! Due to teaching responsibilities last year I had to take an unscheduled hiatus from writing.

I’m excited to get back to our regularly scheduled programming, and I’m proud to launch into the new year with the second article in our Origin Museum series. In this part of the series, Joe Garrity (curator of the Origin Museum) shares his story of giving Richard Garriott a very special gift during the University of Texas Video Game Archive Fundraiser at Britannia Manor in 2007. The degree of craftsmanship that went into the gift is reminiscent of Infocom and Ultima ”feelies” – the expression of an artist’s love for their work, and I believe demonstrates how games not only entertain and surprise us – but how they can lead to new works of art and relationships with those around us.

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Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part I

October 14, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 8 comments

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be posting a three-part series of articles based on several conversations I’ve had with Mr. Joe Garrity, curator of the The Origin Museum. You might remember Joe as the mastermind behind the scenes of a massive video game archival operation that took place earlier this summer at Mythic Studios, where 1 Terabyte of artifacts, source code, artwork, FMV, and design documents were salvaged from Electronic Arts’ archives of the defunct Origin Systems Inc. In this series of articles Joe tells us some of the stories behind artifacts recovered from Origin Systems (the creators of the Ultima and Wing Commander series). In our first part of the series, Joe reveals some (until now) unseen artwork by Dan Bourbonnais – an artist that worked during Origin’s “Age of Enlightenment”, and shows us some of the painstaking artistic work that goes into game production.

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Ultima VII: The Black Gate & Serpent Isle, now working on the PSP Slim!

September 9, 2008 in Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | No comments

This is one of those projects that I love to keep up with, because like many fan-based projects it’s kept running purely by the collective steam of its dedicated crew and fans. Last year “The Food Sucks” team managed to get the impressive Ultima VII: The Black Gate running on the older PSP ‘phat’ using the Exult game engine.

A week ago, the team announced that both The Black Gate and its sequel Serpent Isle are now both playable on the PSP Slim! According to the comments section of their page, load times have improved and the game runs solidly on the Slim. It looks like there will be a patch coming soon because Phat owners have been experiencing some random crashes with the new release, but that shouldn’t stop you from giving it a go. Given that Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and Ultima VII: Serpent Isle are renown high points of RPG history, I highly suggest giving it a go. If you don’t have a PSP, you can always head over to the Exult game engine page and download a package for one of many operating systems.

The Lost Art of Game Packaging, and the Digital-only Turning Point

September 2, 2008 in Artful Games, Game History, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 13 comments

Michael’s post over at The Brainy Gamer looks at how digital download services have begun to carry serious momentum and surely can only pick up even more as Microsoft’s XBLA and Sony’s PSN release more content. Many folks over at the Brainy Gamer are just as excited as Michael with the prospect of ‘no more plastic’, but I found myself less excited about the prospect of a future without physical packaging.

Part of those feelings can be chalked up to old fashioned nostalgia – it’s hard to give up fond memories of gingerly tearing the plastic off of a brand new game as a kid, reveling in the pungent odor of freshly printed manuals and carefully unfurling cloth maps of lands a’far. Closely linked to that is another aspect of physical packaging that I think is really important, and we’ve forgotten it in our unquestioned haste to deliver games cheaper and faster. That is, we’ve lost our appreciation of the game packaging as a craft and an art unto itself that provides a tactile engagement with games we otherwise lack.

The chronology of game packaging that Ryan Scott and Scott Sharkey present in their article Shrink Wrapped: A history of PC game packaging trends, from awesome to awful, is a good taste of how packaging progressed from the early years to the present. Unfortunately, a chronology is just that – it doesn’t bring to the forefront why packaging matters might matter so much to us. In this article I do my best to highlight one game with interesting game packaging – feelies, artwork, manuals, etc – and try to show how (for some people) physical interaction with the packaging can transform the nature of the game. I should note that some of the things I say later in the article could be construed as spoilers, so ye have been warned!

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Origin Systems Treasures Unearthed

August 11, 2008 in Game History, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 8 comments

I’ve been keeping my eye on this project for a while now, and I’m excited to pass along the news that a team of dedicated Wing Commander fans and Origin Museum curator Joe Garrity, recently completed their 7-day archiving grind of almost 1 Terabyte of data at Mythic Studios. If you’re not familiar with Origin Systems, it’s the studio that produced the Ultima and Wing Commander games of the 80’s and 90’s, which was purchased by EA and went defunct in the early 2000’s.

Thankfully, EA did not toss out decades worth of artifacts, source code, artwork, design documents, and other archivists treasures that the folks at Origin produced. Months ago, the people over at the Wing Commander News site discovered that several boxes of Origin artifacts were shipped to EA Mythic, and quickly got to work on getting permission to archive all of the materials. All of that work paid off, when the team of dedicated archivists spent a week at Mythic photographing, digitizing, and copying, the tons of materials left from the Origin days.

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Treasures from the Tickle Trunk: Day of the Tentacle

May 24, 2008 in Artful Games, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

This article is part of a new series of articles that I call “Treasures from the Tickle Trunk” where I pull a game from my basement game library and take a deeper look at what it achieves. This style of article is deeply influenced by Corvus’s Narrative of the Moment series.

As I played through the demo of Penny Arcade Adventures this morning, I kept reminding myself that writing comedy is difficult – and writing interactive comedy well is nigh impossible. Not only is quick wit, rich satire, and goofy slapstick necessary, but it has to be reflected in gameplay in such a way as to play funny. With so few adventure games, and even fewer games with a sense of humor, I thought I would take a fresh look at one of the bright highlights of gaming humor in the 90s – Day of the Tentacle.

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Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Look From the Inside

April 18, 2008 in Game History, Game Industry, Game Research, Game Writing, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 3 comments

It has been a long time since I had something worth posting here, so I hope I don’t disappoint with what I think is an utterly fascinating story. Yesterday, Andy Baio of Waxy.org posted a story reminiscent of a game archaeologist’s dream that he pieced together from internal e-mails, design docs, and prototype builds all culled from a network drive image of Infocom’s shared network hard drive. Yes, someone made an image of the “Infocom Drive” before splitting from the company in 1989 and has kept it safe for all these years. Revealed on the hard drive are (quoting Andy):

design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

So why does this matter? Because he went through the drive and weaved together the tale of why Milliway’s: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe was never completed nor released. If you have not played the excellent Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy IF game (designed and created by Steve Meretzky and Douglas Adams) you’re missing out on a crucial piece of computer game history and a damned fun (difficult!) game. I’ll let Andy tell the story, except for two points:

It tells the story of a venerable game company in decline; crisis even. Being 1989, Infocom had already merged with Activision and Milliway’s had been languishing since its inception in ‘85. The company closes with not a bang…
It comes with a playable prototype of Milliway’s (!!)

Comments from the ex-Infocom folks on the story seem to agree with some of Andy’s story, however it is quite clear that there is more to this than meets the eye. It will be interesting to see what comes of this in the following weeks, as it quite clearly has ruffled a few feathers – and for good reasons.

Thankfully Jason Scott’s new documentary, Get Lamp, is scheduled for release some time this year. I suspect that his own exploration into the world of interactive fiction, complete with interviews of major designers and programmers, should be just as utterly fascinating just as his epic BBS: The Documentary was.

Dramatic Genius: LucasArts and iMUSE

January 31, 2008 in Artful Games, Game Research, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 5 comments

secret of monkey island When I was 12 years old I received $25 for my birthday from my aunt. With the $5 I had saved from the previous weeks worth of allowance, I had a whopping $30 to blow on something frivolous. I convinced my mother to drive my sister and I to the largest computer store in the city (40 miles away) so I could buy myself a new computer game. After searching through the racks for almost an hour, I gave up – the games I really wanted were over $60, and the games selling for $30 or less looked unappetizing. I had given up and was ready to leave when my sister grabbed a copy of Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge off of the shelf and handed it to me: “Buy this one! It has monkeys!” At first glance I wasn’t interested, but the screenshots on the back of the box reminded me a little of my other adventure games like King’s Quest IV and Police Quest II. I reluctantly agreed to allow my sister to chip-in $20 to buy it, and pouted the hour-long ride home as my sister opened the box and pawed through the ‘feelies’ inside. Sitting in the den in front of our 286 I unenthusiastically installed the game, and loaded it up. Within minutes my sister and I were transfixed upon the monitor and practically rolling on the floor laughing at the ridiculous conversations and character expressions. Monkey Island 2 quickly became one of our favorite PC games and was the gateway to a larger world of cinematic adventure games. Within weeks, I convinced my parents to buy me an AdLib sound card for christmas so I could hear the glorious midi music. In this article I look at LucasArts’s seminal iMUSE system – the Interactive Musical Scoring Engine that was used in every LucasArts adventure game from 1991-2000.
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Electronic Arts, the Destroyer of Worlds, sets its eye on BioWare

November 10, 2007 in Game Industry, Mainstream Games | 7 comments

Pictured above: ‘The Destroyer of Worlds’ holding the Avatar in the palm of his hand, in Ultima VIII: Pagan. It is no coincidence that Origin’s tagline was “We Create Worlds”.

In the excellent Escapist article The Conquest of Origin, writer Allen Varney paints a picture of the rise and fall of Origin Systems Inc., the creative masters behind series such as Ultima and Wing Commander. Throughout the article we are shown how Origin gradually loses its managerial and creative control as (in)famous publisher Electronic Arts asserts its corporate dominance.In the light of that story, I was concerned when I heard the news that local developer BioWare Corp. was purchased wholesale along with co-conspirator Pandemic Studios in an $855 million-dollar sale. The question resting on everyone’s lips was, of course, what does the purchase mean? Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk seem to be claiming outwardly that the sale is the best thing for their company and that they “believe in [EA CEO] John [Riccitiello]’s vision”. Others are more concerned about the purchase; there is no shortage of doomsaying, fear-mongering, and other generalized anxieties of EA.

The question is of course, how can we make some sense of the purchase? What might the purchase mean for the future of BioWare/Pandemic, the future of role-playing games, and PC gaming in general? In this article I try to make sense of the purchase by looking at some of EA’s corporate history, their modus operandi with the companies they’ve owned, and the vision that CEO Riccitiello has for the monstrous game publisher. Read the rest of this entry »

Previews of Dragon’s Lair DS

November 1, 2007 in Indie Games, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 2 comments

Dragon’s Lair DS screenshot I don’t usually post news, but I thought this was a nice little surprise. One of the artists and developers for the DS port of Dragon’s Lair has posted some insider sneak peeks (videos and screenshots) of an alpha release of the game. The game is being developed by United Coders and published by Conspiracy Entertainment. According to Gamespot, Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp, and Space Ace will both also be ported to the DS at a later date.

Dragon’s Lair has always drawn serious polarities from gamers – some people (like me) have fond memories of dumping $20 worth of quarters into it at the local arcade; others find the game unforgiving or simply unrewarding. According to the source of this news clip, the game has both a “classic” 1983 mode that is identical to the original game, and a new mode that makes use of the DS’s stylus and microphone.

Blogs worth reading: The Brainy Gamer

October 12, 2007 in Artful Games, Blogroll, Indie Games, Mainstream Games | 3 comments

‘Brains’ from Thunderbirds Last week I got an e-mail from Michael over at The Brainy Gamer, and I was thrilled to find another author interested in both the arts and video games. He started writing in August, and he already has a fairly large collection of articles available for your perusal. The articles themselves are absolutely worth your time, and go far beyond mere opinion pieces or news items – something I immediately look for when I read an article,

Why don’t mainstream media outlets like Time and the NYTimes get video games? Why do they so regularly and predictably fail to get beyond the worn out Pong / Pac-Man / Mario reference points?

I think it’s because most of them rely on a 19th century model of journalism that continues to define what the news looks like today. Journalists and editors tend to use three basic criteria when determining what they will deem “newsworthy” – conflict, novelty, and prominence. J-School 101 dictates that a story about a video game is worth writing only if it meets one or more of these standards. {more here}

And not to mention prolific! Somehow he manages to pump out an article every day. His articles cover the entire gamut of video game culture – from mainstream games, to indie games, design and production, artwork, storytelling, politics, and (you’ll find) … his loathing for Halo 3 (agreed!). And mostly importantly – it’s refreshing to find an academic who actually has a history of playing video games [and still plays regularly] and is not just a ‘ludological theoretician’!

Anyhoo, I’m not trying to up-sell you here – The Brainy Gamer speaks for itself and I’m enjoying the reading so far.

As for the Artful Gamer – I apologize for the large lag between posts. I’ve been recruited to serve as the Best Man at a wedding for a friend of mine, and those duties (aside from marking 10000 midterm exams) have obliterated my opportunities to write. Coming soon is my review of Ultima VIII: Pagan, an interview with the creator of now-defunct indie MMORPG “Omega Syndrome”, and a short article on pencil’n'paper roleplaying games.

Ultima creator Richard Garriott Preparing to go to Space, possibly to destroy Minax

October 1, 2007 in Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

Pictured above: Spaceflight in Ultima II: Revenge of the Enchantress.

This news has been covered by plenty of other news organizations, but I thought I’d mention it here for anyone that came by to read my interview with Stephen Emond. Furthermore, I am reviewing a copy of the book, Dungeons and Dreamers: The Rise of Computer Game Culture, from Geek to Chic – the book features Richard Garriott quite prominently throughout (the review should be posted in a week or two).

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Interview with Stephen Emond, author of Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide

September 25, 2007 in Artful Games, Books, Mainstream Games, Retro Gaming | 4 comments

On September 4th, the University of Texas Videogame Archive held a fundraising event to both raise money and promote the development of the new museum collection. An article over at GameSetWatch listed some of the memorabilia that were auctioned off at the fundraiser; one of those items was a pre-release copy of Emond’s book, “Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide”. A web search yielded few results, and I was compelled to contact Stephen regarding his soon-to-be-published book. He told me that not only was his book auctioned-off at the fundraiser, but he was an invited guest for the entire affair. I asked Stephen a few questions about his experiences at the fundraiser, his interests in the Ultima series, and (of course) his upcoming book.

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The Game Industry: Still Learning Nothing from World of Warcraft

September 17, 2007 in Indie Games, Irritating Rants, Mainstream Games | 8 comments

After reading psychochild’s critique of the industry’s failure to learn from WoW’s financial success, I keep asking myself: does this re-analysis tell us anything about how to advance the mainstream game industry?

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Mainstream Games

Interactive Storytelling: What Heavy Rain Didn’t Learn from Edutainment?

Policenauts Review & Interview with Marc Laidlaw

Eric Chahi & Jordan Mechner in Conversation

An Expedition into the Lost World of Exploration: ToeJam & Earl

Re-thinking Interface “Design”

A Trip to id Software, circa 1993

New Games Journalism is Dead. Long live New New Games Journalism.

Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part II

Ancient Artifacts of the Origin Museum, Part I

Ultima VII: The Black Gate & Serpent Isle, now working on the PSP Slim!

The Lost Art of Game Packaging, and the Digital-only Turning Point

Origin Systems Treasures Unearthed

Treasures from the Tickle Trunk: Day of the Tentacle

Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Look From the Inside

Dramatic Genius: LucasArts and iMUSE

Electronic Arts, the Destroyer of Worlds, sets its eye on BioWare

Previews of Dragon’s Lair DS

Ultima creator Richard Garriott Preparing to go to Space, possibly to destroy Minax

Interview with Stephen Emond, author of Ultima: The Ultimate Collector’s Guide

The Game Industry: Still Learning Nothing from World of Warcraft

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