1. THE...hits just keep on coming for Sony
2. WW2...Generator of Name: Modern Help
3. S&M...Is this crowd the last frontier for DS?
4. SIK..."Game God" phrase makes Denis Dyack ill
5. EEE...Complaints about E3 2007 slowly mount
6. ARR...rrgh! Pro Game News, pirate blog?
7. RND...Russell Simmons, live and remixed

Playstation Eye

What was the philosophy behind the PlayStation Eye? How did you and Sony decide on its feature set?

This is the LONG version.... :)

The basic idea for Playstation Eye was to create a device for interactive gaming and enhanced communication. It was designed specifically to be used with PS3.

We learned a lot of things from our experience with EyeToy. The initial design meeting for what would become Playstation Eye was called by Phil Harrison. It included myself and key designers and engineers from the EyeToy game teams of SCEE [Sony Computer Entertainment Europe.] We sought to address some of the issues of EyeToy, but also add some new capabilities as well, keeping in mind all along the PS3 as the intended platform.

For designing the camera portion, there were many, many, agonizing trade-offs. Resolution vs. light sensitivity vs. framerate vs. dynamic range. There are also field of view and bandwidth and compression issues. To guide us through this, we created several usage scenarios and scored the importance of each design criteria for that scenario. For the final design, the interactive gameplay and communication scenarios were weighted as the most important for PS3.

As I mentioned already, our previous experience with EyeToy was invaluable. Low-light performance was viewed as a key issue. Also, we felt a big factor of EyeToy's success was the responsiveness imparted by its 60 frames per second framerate, so we made that a minimum requirement. The compression block artifacts of EyeToy are visually unappealing, and they also limit some of our algorithms, so we pushed for uncompressed video. And finally, the many game ideas put forth by the designers suggested the need for two different fields of view.

What about the microphone?

For the microphone portion, we knew that to truly make a useful communication device, we needed a very good voice input solution. Also, speech recognition is a technology more and more games are incorporating, and this requires clean voice input. Following the EyeToy tradition, our primary consideration was ease of use; it should just work. My U.S. R&D colleague, Crusoe Mao, had already been working on research for voice input using microphone arrays, so his work was merged into the design. The hands-free voice input this enables may be the single most important feature of Playstation Eye.

But throughout all this, we universally agreed on one underlying design criterion: cost. Just as with EyeToy, we wanted to create an affordable device that could be accessible to all players and gain widespread popularity. We understood this was the key to allowing people to enjoy the many new experiences we were planning to create.

This Sunday, the Xbox 360 Elite makes its official debut in stores. We were critical of the Elite's value at its introductory price of $479 in our recent Vs. Mode exchange with San Jose Mercury News technology columnist Dean Takahashi. Yet the folks at Microsoft, every gracious, still sent one of the brawny black boxes our way. The unboxing, alas, will have to wait for another day, as other real-life obligations prevent us from getting to it right now. In its place, we have an email Q&A with Albert Penello, Xbox 360 Group Marketing Manager about how the Elite works; what consumers can expect from the data transfer process; and why people who switch from an existing Xbox 360 to an Elite will have to be online connected to access the downloadable content they've already purchased.

The majority of gamers have purchased an Xbox 360 Premium. If they buy the 120 gigabyte hard drive, what is the process for moving the games, TV shows and movies stored on their 20 gigabyte hard drive over to the 120 gigabyte hard drive?

It is a one time process and is very easy. We will provide a Hard Drive Migration Kit with each standalone 120 gigabyte hard drive, whereby customers can use a migration cable to transfer data from their old hard drive to their new one. Each standalone 120 gigabyte hard drive will include step-by-step directions for this process, which is pretty straightforward. First, you will need to disconnect all accessories from the controller ports and turn off your console with your existing hard drive attached. Then you will simply connect one end of the transfer cable to your 120 gigabyte hard drive, connecting the other end of the transfer cable to a USB port on your console. Finally, after turning on your console, you will connect and turn on a controller, insert the Hard Drive Transfer Disc, and follow the on-screen instructions. When done with this process a user will have all their information, game save data, Marketplace content, etc on the 120 gigabyte hard drive, while their 20 gigabyte hard drive will be wiped clean and free for use on another console, or to be sold or traded-in.

Let's say a gamer who buys the 120 gigabyte hard drive wants even more capacity. In the above scenario, can that gamer choose to transfer some content onto the 120 gigabyte hard drive (e.g. movies) while leaving other content (e.g. games) on their existing 20 gigabyte hard drive, and swap the two hard drives depending on whether they want to watch a movie or play a game?

1. SUE...Another day, another Jack Thompson lawsuit
2. PvP... GameSetWatch vs. Game Informer --fight!
3. AvD...Like Pokemon, two versions of Transformers DS
4. BIG... Scope does matter , says technical director
5. RND...Why satire should be left to Jon Stewart

Sometimes the lack of originality in the videogame industry is so stunning, so shameless, it must be held up for ridicule. Case in point: Activision's confirmation to the U.K. Web site Computer & Videogames that the next installment in its Call of Duty series of first-person shooter games would be called Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. Now, that's a perfectly fine name for a game...were it not for the fact that in 2005, Electronic Arts released the decidedly non-obscure Battlefield 2: Modern Combat.

We wish that we could say that this comes as surprise, but our expletive-laden initial shock stems solely from the sheer brazenness of Activision's rip-off. After all, we were at the presentation in Santa Monica when, after showing footage from a number of recent World War II movies and television shows—"Saving Private Ryan," and "Band of Brothers," among them—developer Infinity Ward unveiled its entry into the WWII game space, Call of Duty. A cynical bunch, several of us journalists snickered as to that title's proximity to Electronic Arts' then-category leading Medal of Honor. But since what little of the game we saw looked spectacular, we let it slide.

In hindsight, perhaps we would have done better to try and nip this thievery in the bud. For what followed were such games as Day of Defeat (Activision, 2003) and Men of Valor (Vivendi, 2004.) Ubisoft briefly bucked the trend, boldly replacing the near-mandatory "of" with "in" for its 2005 release "Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30," but soon fell right in line with the rest of its industry brethren with the 2006 real-time strategy game Faces of War. Ditto for THQ's 2006 RTS game Company of Heroes. Later this year, retail shelves will be graced with THQ's Frontlines: Fuel of War and Midway's Hour of Victory. (That's why for the last couple of years, we and a number of our peers have jokingly created our own World War II game titles, Mad Libs-style, like Call of Honor, Men of Duty, Company of Brothers, etc.)

Given that our staff has declared that gameplay innovation isn't our number one criterion for what makes a game, it might seem hypocritical of us to berate Activision for its lazy nomenclature. But look at it this way: if we're not asking you for originality in your game mechanics, would it be too much to ask for you to show some originality in your game's name?

1. HMM...What do seniors, women, blacks and latinos want?
2. PvP...Game|Life calls out Joystiq, Joystiq claps back
3. BvB...Blu-Ray dominates Q1, HD-DVD claps back Q4
4. RND...Does George Lucas know about this guy?

At this point in his career, it's difficult to tell whether Sony Santa Monica creative director David Jaffe is better known for his great games or his brash behavior. The Twisted Metal series of car combat games would have been sufficient to secure Jaffe a place in the console pantheon. But upon the 2005 release of God of War , the side of Jaffe that many only saw privately--fiery, profane and uncompromising--burst into public view and never retreated into the shadows. It was as if the dark odyssey he'd survived to make his magnum opus had transformed him into his own title character; a comparison Jaffe encouraged when he drew parallels between Kratos' raging at the Gods over the Ares-induced murder of his family to the anger Jaffe himself harbored for having embarked on an insanely long and difficult development process that was keeping him away from his wife and child.

The Jaffe of 2007 continues to be outspoken and inflammatory, but he's a workaholic no more. While game director Cory Barlog, executive producer Shannon Studstill and others handle day-to-day development for the God of War series, with Jaffe in an creative oversight role, he has chosen to focus his own game directing efforts on smaller games ("pop songs," as he described them to us last year ) rather than the big-budget epics ("operas") that he's previously been identified with. As he and his team of developers at Incognito were winding down work on Jaffe's first ditty, the party game Calling All Cars, he took some time out of his schedule to answer our Team Assault questions about the extent of his involvement in God of War PSP and God of War III for PS3; why he cancelled the sure-to-have-been controversial PSP game Heartland; and the ongoing tension between his own desires as an artist to spread his wings and those of his fans who want him to keep making large-scale action games.

After completing the first God of War, you assumed the role of creative director for the entire Santa Monica studio. What does that entail? Does that cover the studio's games for Playstation Network like Blast Factor and flOw?

With our first Team Assault series of Q&As behind us, the Level Up staff can now turn its attention to other news. We first considered weighing in on the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday, before any link whatsoever to videogames had been made--Florida attorney and notorious videogame opponent Jack Thompson's rush for the cameras on Fox News notwithstanding--with a piece about the industry battening down its hatches and bracing for the inevitable "He played [Insert Game Here]" stories that would be sure to emerge. After all, a man of Cho Seung-***'s age is far more likely than not to play videogames; it would be like saying that he watched TV or listened to music, but that wouldn't prevent hordes of pundits, many of whom don't play games, from opining that [Insert Game Here] caused Cho to murder his fellow students and instructors.

Then the Washington Post, NEWSWEEK's sister company, put up an online story and blog post reporting that "several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung *** from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike [sic], a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns." Our editors were now interested the reactions of developer and publisher of Counter-Strike, so we reached out to them for comment. Once again, the news overtook our reporting speed. A publicist at Microsoft, which published the Xbox version of Counter-Strike, informed us that the Washington Post had removed the reference to Counter-Strike from the print and online versions of the piece. We consulted with our editors once more, and were told to stand down on this angle unless we had confirmation that Cho played the game.

In hindsight, we're glad that we didn't weigh in on the Virginia Tech massacre sooner because we're not convinced that we had anything particularly interesting to say. Instead, we turned to some people who did. NEWSWEEK senior writer Peg Tyre, whose book "The Trouble With Boys," will be published by Crown in September 2008, wrote:

Some experts say when we push that kind of zero tolerance for violence on children we are getting it exactly wrong. Children, and particularly boys, are acutely sensitive to the violence around them. They play out violent themes to help relieve themselves of the natural fear and confusion they feel. Jane Katch, a longtime kindergarten teacher and author of "Under Dead Men's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play" (Beacon Press), says these outlets are vital. "Thinking about violence and playing about violence is not the same thing as being violent. When we tell them not to pretend to shoot things, we don't teach them not to do it, we teach them to lie." Fed up, one teacher recently told me that she'd develop her own, post-post- Columbine code: as long as everyone is laughing, then pretend shooting is OK.

You can read her piece here.

1. BOO... Jack Thompson , Dr. Phil attack videogames...
2. NOD...Joystiq responds rather eloquently
3. RnC...Insomniac adds paralyzed boy as game character
4. HUM... Adaptive music , defined and explored
5. RND...This sounds like a Mexican standoff to us

At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling, who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted here earlier this month about the experience of briefly abandoning his Xbox 360 for the pleasures and pains of God of War II on the PlayStation 2. Today, he meditates on the compatibility of videogaming with his imminent fatherhood.

Two weeks of packing, moving and unpacking five years worth of belongings into a new apartment have left little time for me to sink into the couch for a night of virtual combat. In sitting down to write my latest dispatch from the (mostly) Xbox 360 front, my intent was to humorously detail the horrors of not being able to school legions of anonymous teenagers in multiplayer beatdowns. Instead, my two weeks of online abstinence have left me pensive--and admittedly, a bit apprehensive about my gaming future.

You see, in three weeks I'm due to become a father. That isolated fact gives me pause enough, but what have sometimes shaken me are the casual comments and jibes by friends, family and coworkers with children. If I make the mistake of mentioning some new band I've seen, finally getting a decent night's sleep, or--as was the case recently--that I was planning on a late night session to write about and play games, the response is, well, buddy, when the baby comes, you can pretty much forget about all of that.

In Part I of our Team Assault Q&A with God of War II lead programmer and Sony Santa Monica director of technology Tim Moss, he took us inside the technical approaches that have made the franchise stand out from its competitors. In the second and final part of our email interview with him, he explains what he admires about the programmers at Epic Games, Capcom and Insomniac Games; reveals that the God of War engine is already up and running on the Playstation 3; and explains the nature of the relationships among Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog (makers of the upcoming Uncharted: Drake's Fortune) and Ninja Theory (the studio behind the much-anticipated Heavenly Sword.)

When you cast your professional eye upon other games, what do you look for from a programmer's perspective? Which games--both Sony first party and from outside developers and rivals--stand out to you as having been especially well-programmed, and why?

Different things stand out to me from different games. I got my start in the demo scene 20 odd years ago, so a really well written fast piece of code impresses the geek in me. The engine written by Naughty Dog that was used in Jak and Daxter and Ratchet & Clank is a good example. It's pretty much unrivalled in its performance on the PS2 and has a number of pretty cool bits of tech in it mostly geared around very cool, fast level of detail solutions for rendering.

Then there are games like Gears of War, which I admire for the well balanced set of decisions they took on the technology. The Unreal 3 engine has a lot of bell and whistles, but if you try and use them all it will make for a slow game on a console. So Gears is a good example of picking your battles well, they have a simple lighting model that allows them to spend a lot of time and resources on the characters. This is important because the characters are front and center and if you don't make them appealing the whole game will just not work. The art style is consistent and polished and the game has some really nice innovations to the shooter genre.

I am also very impressed with the engine that Capcom have used on Dead Rising and Lost Planet. They have published a couple of articles on the details of it and it has some very cool features including motion blur and depth of field. They have already made two standout games using that engine, in fact Dead Rising was probably my favorite game of last year. The proof of any good tech is in the game you make with it, I am long past the point of being impressed by cool tech demos. I am always thinking, "Yeah, that's very nice, now show it to me working in a real game."

I like things that someone has obviously spent a lot of time and effort fine tuning. Attention to detail is the thing that impresses me the most. You can tell the games that have had the time spent on them to remove the rough edges, where nothing is too annoying. Geometry Wars is a good example, it's pretty much as perfect an arcade game as anyone has ever made. The menus flow well, the game is fluid and fun but never cheap.

From the very first moment we picked up a Dual Shock 2 controller to play an early build of the original God of War, we were spellbound. The visuals were stunning, to be sure, but it was the interplay between the highly responsive controls and the impressively detailed animations that made us feel as though we were Kratos. To get the lowdown on the technology that enabled the first and second games, we conducted an email interview with lead programmer Tim Moss, who also serves as Sony Santa Monica's director of technology.

Moss has spent most of the last 20 years making videogames, from demo scene games for the Atari ST to licensed titles at the late Argonaut Games, where he worked before joining Sony. In this final installment of Team Assault, Moss discusses how he and his band of coders pulled off the original God of War; details the changes they made for its sequel; and takes a shot at the haters who doubted his team's Island of Rhodes Easter egg.

The original God of War was a considerable technical achievement: 480p resolution; 60 frames per second visuals; terrific lighting; crisp textures; strong animations; and, in what was the first aspect I noted when I saw the game at Sony Computer Entertainment America's (SCEA) Foster City HQ ahead of its E3 2004 debut, combat and controls that were so fluid and responsive, their quality could only be described as Japanese. From start to finish, summarize how did you and your team of programmers pull this off?

Initially we spent a lot of time looking at the action game genre and neighboring genres. Many of the members of programming team, including me, are pretty hardcore gamers. I am a big fan of platform games (Jak and Daxter, Ratchet & Clank, etc.) so I knew that I wanted it to feel like those games do, in other words, very arcadey and responsive. We decided that this could be best explained by the gameplay controlling the animations rather than the animations controlling the gameplay.

Initially I got a simple sphere moving around in the world, jumping, wall hanging, climbing, making fast turns and then tuned it to feel good--the right speed. We then placed a character inside that sphere and played its animations, walking and running etc, at the speed that the sphere was moving. We also do a lot of animation blending, things like making the character lean into turns, play a land animation while continuing running so as to not break up the game flow. These are subtle, but make the character feel less wooden.

1. 366...Xbox 360 controller + Sixaxis = shooter heaven?
2. CON...Professor parallels Bungie's Halo, Virgil's "Aeneid"
3. JOG...and game at same time? Yes, says MTV News
4. DX1...Alex St. John recalls early days of Direct X
5. ESL...Inside the world of videogame localization
6. Eh!...Canada lures game development from U.K.
7. RND...Should colleges boycott U.S. News' rankings?

It couldn't have been easy for Irvin Kershner to assume the director's chair on "The Empire Strikes Back" after the success and acclaim for George Lucas' "Star Wars," but the result was what is universally regarded as the best movie in the series. Similarly, God of War game director David Jaffe is in more ways than one a tough act to follow (just look at the responses online to the outspoken Jaffe's recent statements on Geoff Keighley's show "Bonus Round"), and after Jaffe declared that he was passing the torch, many wondered whether the unproven Barlog could fill his shoes. But once the phenomenal reviews for God of War II started pouring in, all doubts evaporated as it became evident that the franchise had been placed in good hands.

Barlog, a former visual effects artist, worked on such colon-sporting titles as Backyard Wrestling: Don't Try This at Home and X-Men: Next Dimension before joining Sony's Santa Monica studio as the lead animator on the original God of War. During those rare moments when he's not working on God of War PSP and God of War III, Barlog maintains a blog of his own, where he's been known to touch off a controversy or two himself. In Part I of our two-part email interview with Barlog, he discusses how he graduated from lead animator to game director; why he, unlike Jaffe, hasn't lost his love for making epic games; and whether the original game may have had stronger emotional hooks than the sequel.

How did you go from being the lead animator on God of War to director of God of War II?

To be perfectly frank, I have no idea. When I came onto the original God of War, I was actually planning on taking it easy. I liked the game, but I was so used to working way too much on really terrible games that I was not motivated to push myself really hard anymore. I had reached a point where I wanted to have a life, since it seemed I could not catch a break and make a good game. So I decided that when I came to Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA), I would work normal hours and just have fun. If the game turned out good, well then that was a bonus. That lasted all of a day or so...then I got my hands on the Kratos model. I stayed all night working on a series of animations for how Kratos would attack with the Blades of Chaos and I was in heaven. I loved the character and my mind was just racing with all the crazy things we could do. For the first time in a long time, I felt "This could be something really cool. Something I won't be embarrassed to tell people about." From that moment on I worked like crazy and put everything I had into the game. I think that my tenacity and passion for making the game the best that it could be got the attention of those above me. Plus I was using the Jedi mind trick on Dave [Jaffe] every day--"These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along"--so I am sure that didn't hurt either.

After we finished the original God of War, producer Shannon Studstill came to me and asked how I would feel about directing the next game. To be honest, I thought she was kidding. The thought had never really crossed my mind. I took a day to think about it, but that was mostly to not make it look like I was too eager. You know, play it cool. The next day I said I was interested and few weeks later I was writing up story ideas and gameplay outlines. The rest, as they say, is history.

1. Yii...Nintendo donates 100 Wiis to YMCA
2. DOA...Sony discontinues 20 gigabyte PS3
3. $$$...Is " channel stuffing " haunting Microsoft ?
4. RND...Sopranos seasons 1-6 in 7 min, 36 sec

In Round 2 of our Vs. Mode discussion and debate about the Xbox 360 Elite, we said that Microsoft's overall pricing for the Elite and its various accessories could only be described as price-gouging, and that the company's three-SKUs-and-counting strategy was a recipe for consumer confusion. Our sparring partner, San Jose Mercury News technology columnist and blogger Dean Takahashi , argued that any consumer that can navigate mobile phone pricing plans could certainly choose which of the three Xbox 360s models best suited their needs and wallet. He also pointed out that while a $479 Xbox 360 Elite wasn't appealing, a $400 version would be, and that we should think more about where Microsoft is headed than where it is at this moment.

This being the Final Round, we attempt to quickly rebut Takahashi's partial defense of the Elite. But we've devoted the bulk of today's entru to the Playstation Portable, with an analysis we've unsurprisingly called "Tokyo, We Have A Problem, Part II, Or, What's Wrong With the PSP." Let's just say there's more than one problem, and we're not convinced that Sony is focused enough on the PSP--or has enough of the right pieces of the puzzle in place--to meaningfully resuscitate its handheld's unhealthy ecosystem. Takahashi, for his part, mixes up his combinations by splitting his time between his evaluation of the Xbox 360 Elite ("a 'play it safe' strategy with the Core, the Premium and the Elite as one of the costs of going first") and the PSP ("The $169 price helps. But if you're No. 2, you can't charge more.") Let us know what you think about the PSP's prospects in our message boards.

1. MKW...Check out this Mortal Kombat Wii video
2. PvP... Microsoft and Epic spar over Live on PCs
3. DSL...A makeup kit adventure game? Whoa.
4. WAH...Nintendo's flops and follies , listed
5. RND...Women Who Blog; The Men Who Hate Them