Brian Crecente | The Verge

Beat up Obama, Romney in ‘Infinity Blade’ creator’s new political game

2012-08-22T14:02:54-04:00

Gallery Photo: Vote!!! gallery

The next game from the creators of Infinity Blade will allow players to assume the role of a cartoon Barack Obama or Mitt Romney and beat up their opponent in a political debate using weapons, not words.

The iOS game Vote!!! awards players with a score that can be converted into votes which can be applied to either presidential candidate in a worldwide run for virtual presidency.

Developers Chair Entertainment teamed up with Rock the Vote and the Video Game Voters Network to release the game for free on Thursday. While a bulk of the title is about running through three-stage battles between presidential candidates, the game also provides access to real-world voter resources and can even walk gamers through the process to vote.

“Vote!!! is everything a great game should be — challenging, rewarding, superfun — and players will find themselves laughing the entire time,” said Donald Mustard, creative director of developer Chair. “We’re excited to join forces with Rock the Vote to help emphasize the importance of voter registration and encourage gamers to become more involved in the political process.”

The idea for the game bubbled up during one of the developer’s “Epic Fridays,” Mustard said. On Fridays, the studio lets everyone work on side projects.

“We had an Epic Friday at Chair a little while ago and we decided to work on this Vote game,” he said. “We got in really early on a Friday and worked like crazy and by the end of the day we had this hilarious prototype.”

Several of the developers showed the prototype off to people at parent company Epic Games and they loved it to, he said.

“We had a little time between finishing Infinity Blade 2 and the next big project and we thought, ‘Lets finish this thing and make it awesome,'” he said.

It took the team another couple of months to wrap up the title, polishing its gameplay and bringing in voice actors to add Obama and Romney soundbites to the action. While the game is built on the engine that drives Chair’s Infinity Blade games, Mustard says it was designed to be far more casual and easier to play.

“It’s a blend of Infinity Blade, Bejeweled Blitz and an endless runner,” he said.

To play the game, players first select a candidate and then outfit him with a weapon, an outfit and boosts. Weapons include an ice cream cone, a foam hand, and the Constitution. Outfits allow players to dress up Romney or Obama in things like baseball caps, a top hat, or a clown nose. And the boosts, with names like Health Care, Good Press, and Super PAC, add things like health, bonus points or power to a candidate.

Once set up, players fight their way through three stages: A debate stage, the White House lawn, and the Oval Office. While the game’s vernacular describes the engagements as “debates,” players are fighting to knock down an opponent or avoid being knocked down by dodging, blocking, parrying and hitting with screen taps and swipes.

The object is to go as long as you can during the 60 second rounds without being hit, the longer you go without take a hit the more points you accrue. At the end of the match the points are tallied and players are awarded votes.

Players who earn 10,000 points get one vote, 75,000 scores two and 250,000 or more scores three. A player who tops their high score gets four votes. Players then cast their votes for whichever candidate they want. An in-app score board shows which candidate has the most votes of all players worldwide.

Despite the overt politics of dressing up and beating up presidential candidates, Mustard said the developers went out of their way to make sure the game was bipartisan and silly.

“I don’t think it’s a political game,” he told Polygon. “Our goal was to keep it fun and light. We didn’t want to be political.

“However, I do feel it’s important to be aware of what’s going on in our country and it is important to vote.”

Mustard said the developers avoided politicizing the game one way or the other by stripping away any stats in the game’s two well-known characters. Instead, he said, the game is entirely skill-based.

“We didn’t want their to be any attempt at parity (with real world politics),” he said. “We wanted to be 100 percent neutral.”

When asked if he thinks people might take offense to a game that allows you to beat up a standing president or presidential candidate, Mustard says he hopes people see the game as light-hearted.

“We know American politics can get pretty mean-spirited,” he said. “We’re trying not to do that at all.”

Unfinished Swan Gamescom gallery

2012-08-15T06:02:10-04:00

3DS XL

2012-06-22T01:08:23-04:00

Quantum Conundrum

2012-06-14T08:35:02-04:00

New Super Mario Bros. U features flying raccoon suit, 5 player gaming

2012-06-05T13:05:49-04:00

new super mario bros. u

New Super Mario Bros. U is a five player game that lets Mario transform into a flying raccoon and grants players the ability to help and harass with the GamePad’s touch screen.

While the first Mario game for the Wii U looks a lot like a much more beautiful New Super Marios Bros. Wii, up to four players control characters with a Wii Remote as they traverse a 2D platform-laden world, the game does have some new tricks as well.

In Boost Play a player can tap the gamepad to drop platforms into the game. The platforms, players can drop up to four at a time, shrink away once a character lands on them. Double tapping the screen drops a smaller platform that spews out coins when a character lands on it.

The game can be also be played traditionally with the GamePad using either the TV or the GamePad’s screen.

The three levels we played looked like classic Super Mario Bros. gameplay. When we played, we had a chance to control a Mii dressed up as Mario. Other players took on Mario and Luigi.

The game, we were told, will feature new power ups and new transformations, though we only saw one of each.

A super acorn transforms gives your character a new flying squirrel suit. Once donned, the suit grants the wearer the ability to soar up into the air and then glide across the sky with a shake of the controller.

We also saw a new use for Kirby. If you find him in the game, you can grab him and by shaking the controller shake him to inflate him and use the critter as a balloon.

The game is also certainly the prettiest Super Mario Bros. created to date.

Nintendo Land could be Wii U’s system selling new game

2012-06-05T13:02:16-04:00

Nintendo Land

Nintendo knows the value of turning a tutorial into something more game than instruction. Wii Sports, a collection of mini-games created to essentially familiarize new Wii owners with motion gaming, became a system seller.

While Nintendo reps declined to tell Polygon if Nintendo Land will be a game included with the Wii U, time spent with the game made it clear that it too artfully familiarizes gamers with a new way to game, and does so in a way that could convert new fans.

Nintendo Land is a virtual Nintendo theme park for your Mii, Nintendo reps told Polygon during a recent demo of the game.

The virtual theme park has a dozen attractions, each based on a particular Nintedo game.

While the concept behind Nintendo Land is to introduce gamers to the functions of the GamePad, like Wii Sports, the experience feels much more robust than a simple tutorial or training title.

During our time with the game we were able to play three of the theme park’s “settings”.

The first was based on Mysterious Murasame Castle, a title released on the Famicom Disk System in 1986.

The game takes place on the grounds of a colorful Japanese feudal castle. Players hold the Wii U GamePad sideways and quickly slide their finger toward the television to shoot throwing stars at colorful ninja that look as if they’re made of paper.

The longer the stroke the harder you throw the star. Tilting the GamePad changes the angle of the star you throw, making it easier to throw at Ninja blocked by objects.

In the level we played through, the ninja attacked in waves. Blue ninja required one star to kill. Pink ninja required two hits. Yellow ninja attacked with bombs and the level wrapped up with a boss fight against a ninja in black who attacked with a sword.

The second setting we played was a level based on the Legend of Zelda. In this game, players use the Wii remote to control Mii armed with swords as they fight their way along an on-the-rails trip through a Zelda setting. The player using the GamePad controls a Mii in the back of the group armed with a bow and arrow. Players can use the GamePad’s screen to look around the area as they travel through the game, aiming at enemies and then pulling back on the right thumbstick and releasing to fire shots. Holding the thumbstick back charges a shot. Once a player runs out of arrows they need to hold the GamePad level with the ground to reload their quiver.

The game’s enemies and setting looks as if they’re made of stitched fabric. The object of the game is for the archer to survive the level with the game’s six hearts by protecting the swordsmen and yourself.

The final of the three settings was based on Donkey Kong.

Donkey Kong’s Crash Course has players guiding a rickety wooden cart along a massive multi-screen roller coaster.

When the game kicks off, the television pans around the maze-like course showing the looping intricacies of the track, the bananas you need to collect and the end of the maze which features Donkey Kong and Pauline.

At first glance the course has an almost Rube Goldberg machine quality.

To play, gamers watch the GamePad’s screen, which offers a zoomed in view of the massive map, and tilt the controller left or right to move along the track. Moving too quickly or too slowly can cause the rickety cart to flip and break. As they travel along the track, players have to push shoulder buttons to flip, raise and lower sections of the track. Other parts of the track have to be rotated with the thumbstick.

The challenge is getting through the track and quickly as possible without crashing. Crash too many times and the game ends. There are a number of checkpoints spread throughout the track as well.

We managed to race our way through four of the track’s ten checkpoints before ending the game.

All three of the settings we tried felt very replayable, they also seemed like the sorts of games that would be almost as fun to watch as they were to play.

Nintendo declined to say if the games would have more than one level each, but it looked like they would.

This real world ‘Aliens: Colonial Marine’ built his own Smartgun

2012-04-08T16:29:00-04:00

Colonial Marine

Star Wars has the 501st Legion, a super-fan group of screen-accurate Imperial Stormtroopers and Imperial officers. Aliens has the United States Colonial Marines.

Over the years, Sean Maio and other Aliens fans have meticulously, faithfully recreated not just the garb and guns of the Alien universe’s colonial marines, but the xenomorphs they fight, the bug hunts they go on and even their ranked hierarchy.

Gearbox Software was so impressed by their detailed recreations of the movements, look and gear of the series’ protagonists that they’ve taken to hiring them to help promote the upcoming video game shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Maio’s meticulous Smartgun recreation is so precise that they even flew him to their Texas studio to capture his movements and face to place in the game’s multiplayer.

Maio walks us through why he does what he does and gives us a little tour of that wonderful gun of his in this video from PAX East.

Ghost Recon Commander

2012-04-04T12:43:07-04:00

Chrome Xbox 360 controller hit in May.

2012-04-02T15:33:37-04:00

The Philosophy of Playing With Your Food

2012-01-16T12:04:00-05:00

ipad pigs

It started out as a way to stop pigs awaiting slaughter from chewing on each other. But video game design initiative Playing with Pigs quickly evolved to become something more than a simple video game that gets humans to play with their future pork meals.

A team of game designers, a philosopher and an animal welfare scientist hope to create something that also spurs people to reexamine the way they think about animals destined for the dinner table.

The idea for creating a video game that gets people to play with farm pigs through a computer tablet and a wall-sized projection screen came out of a study into the ethics of pig farming in the Netherlands by Clemens Driessen, an applied philosopher at Wageningen University.

Driessen was looking into the issue of tail biting among farmed pigs. Some pigs become so frustrated and bored with their captivity that they start chewing on other pigs’ tails. The issue has become such a problem that farmed pigs in the European Union are required to have access to “enrichment materials” to reduce pig boredom and tail biting.

One farmer asked Driessen if pigs would enjoy the sorts of video games her kids play on their Nintendo Wii. The suggestion drove the philosopher to contact Utrecht School of Arts to suggest collaboration on a video game for pigs.

“Later, we decided to broaden the scope of the project to include the question of how we relate to pigs and how we might change that through a game,” said Kars Alfrink, designer and researcher at Utrecht School of the Arts. “We therefore decided it would be more interesting to create a game that people could play with pigs. This also provided us with the opportunity to use humans to entertain pigs, which we thought would be an interesting twist.”

Pig Chase is played with an iPad or other tablet device. Players will see a live video feed from a pig barn on their screen. By touching the screen, players move a ball of light around one of the walls of the enclosure of the barn. The goal is to attract a pig to the light and, with the help of the pig’s snout, move the ball to a target shown on both the barn wall and the player’s iPad. Early on, game designers discovered that pigs respond strongly to lights and will follow them.

The team is currently building a playable prototype using a “modest budget.” Their ultimate goal is to create a system that farmers can integrate into their barns, but Alfrink says they still have a long way to go.

A panel of experts on enrichment materials for pigs were shown the game and weren’t that impressed with it, said Marc Bracke, the team’s animal welfare scientist from Wageningen University.

“They were only moderately positive about the game as such,” he said. “Perhaps it is not immediately clear how useful this can be in practice.”

But early tests show that pigs seem to enjoy this new type of play. Players, currently just the design team and some students, also seem to enjoy the game. Alfrink adds that over time the game has “changed the way we think about” the pigs.

It may seem macabre to be designing a game to entertain pigs destined for slaughter. Alfrink says his work on the project has made him even more consciously about the issues surrounding livestock farming. But he still eats meat.

Philosopher Driessen says he doesn’t expect the game to turn people into vegetarians. But, he says, he hopes it will get people to think more about the issues surrounding farmed animals.

What starts out as an innocent invitation to play with a pig, Driessen suspects, could raise some mixed, unsettling emotions.

“I have a sort of dual hypothesis on what could happen,” he said. “On the one hand this could be a playful and high-tech way to restore the proximity and perhaps bond that humans and pigs have had since the very dawn of civilization up until one or two generations ago. On the other hand, playing a game with a pig might intensify our latent sense of inconsistency in the way we treat animals based on the sole fact of whether they are designated a pet or food.”

An outcome that leads to people spending more on pork to pay for better treatment of pigs, or people becoming vegetarians, is almost beside the point. It’s the discussion, the philosophical and intellectual journey that seems most important to Driessen.

“I don’t know what is best for pigs, whether to play a well-designed game with a prospective consumer, run around outside in the mud and then be slaughtered, or never having been born in the first place,” he said. “This project for me is a way not to discuss these questions in the solemn and abstract language of moral philosophy, but to make it into something that everyone can explore for themselves, and in a way that not completely silences the pigs but involves their active participation.”

Good Game is an internationally syndicated weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Brian Crecente is a founding editor News Editor of Vox Games.