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47 CommentsBrosie the Riveter's got guts: Pranking your CEO and pushing for gender equality
By Samit Sarkar on May 23, 2013 05.23.13
Adhesive Games' Hawken is a free-to-play shooter featuring mech combat, and one of its pieces of promotional artwork features a giant green robot suit. The mech, however, stands in the background, obscured by a shapely young brunette woman holding a welding torch and a flint spark lighter — and baring not just her torso, but the bottom half of her breasts. "You are free to fight," reads the tagline on the poster, for which artist Justin Hampton drew inspiration from World War II-era "Rosie the Riveter" propaganda.
Mark Long, the CEO of Hawken publisher Meteor Entertainment, is a partner at Roque La Rue, an alternative art gallery in Seattle, and an avowed fan and collector of what's sometimes known as "chick art," he told Polygon over email recently. Long loved the Hawken poster so...
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49 CommentsMicrosoft explains the design of the Xbox One
By Matt Leone on May 21, 2013 05.21.13
One of Microsoft's primary design goals for the new hardware was to create a "boldly understated" design that would appeal to both traditional game players and a wider audience interested in other types of entertainment, says Senior Principal Creative Director Carl Ledbetter. In practical terms, that means the company went with a 50/50 split matte gray/glossy black look for the console. Or "liquid black" as Microsoft calls it, to give it more of an entertainment industry feel and bring it in line with other Microsoft products like Surface.
According to Ledbetter, Microsoft's internal design hardware team for Xbox 360 was two people, while now that group has 27 people to work on details like creating a functional venting design on the right side of the console and creating consistency...
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116 CommentsHands-on with the Xbox One controller
By Matt Leone on May 21, 2013 05.21.13
First, a couple caveats: we didn't play a game with it, nor did we play anything interactive. Instead, Microsoft handed over the controller and ran three tech demos as a way to demonstrate the new rumble motors in the triggers, which give developers more options on where to make the controller shake and with what strength.
In the first of the three, a person's heartbeat moved across their body from left to right on screen, and the rumble in the triggers followed, initially being stronger on the left and then gradually moving to the right. In the second, a helicopter moved around on the screen and the rumble in the controller followed its placement. And in the third, a car revved up and the rumble took over the whole controller.
None of these were designed to be released to the...
Good Game
7 CommentsAdventures with Facebook's take on Plants Vs. Zombies
By Brian Crecente on May 20, 2013 05.20.13
In Plants vs. Zombies Adventures, players will still protect their home from an army of cartoonish zombies with defensive plants, but now they'll also take to the road, traveling in a beat-up RV to zombie hot spots where they'll have to defend their home on wheels from zombies that can attack from any direction. And those defensive plants now have to be grown ahead of time.
The game brings with it ten new zombie types, 11 new plants, and most importantly, a personalized neighborhood that players will work to customize, expand, and, yes, defend from roving bands on zombies.
Where the original Plants Vs. Zombies had the player defending from zombies that always marched across horizontal lanes of grass, this new Zombies game has the zombies attacking along cobblestone pathways that...
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8 CommentsNew Google Play services brings Google Plus-powered friends, leaderboards, achievements to Android, iOS and web
By Christopher Grant on May 15, 2013 05.15.13
The service uses the company's Google+ social network to power leaderboards, both social and public; an achievement system similar to the one on Apple's platform; the ability to save game states in the cloud; and real-time matchmaking. The entire suite of services also work across the Android, iOS, and "web" platforms, with the exception of the real-time matchmaking component with remains Android-only "for now."
While the most recent version of Android, dubbed Jellybean, shipped nearly a year ago, over 70 percent of all Android phones operate an earlier version of the operating system. Eager for developers to implement the service into their games, it was important that it work on as many Android devices as possible, a problem complicated by the platform's gradual upgrade cycle.
Greg...
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5 CommentsDiscussing where games are and where they're going at the Twofivesix conference
By Samit Sarkar on May 13, 2013 05.13.13
Recent years have seen an explosion in popularity for games among a much wider audience than ever before, and tied to that is their growing cultural relevance. As an interdisciplinary medium, games sit at the intersection of a wide variety of fields and have countless applications in all walks of life, argued the speakers at Saturday's Twofivesix conference.
The day-long event, put on by Kill Screen at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn, featured individuals from within the game industry and outside of it, but with games as a common ground. In talks moderated by Kill Screen founder and former Wall Street Journal reporter Jamin Warren, the panelists discussed the current state and future potential of the medium, as well as the ways in which their own work coincides with or...
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4 CommentsReviving and open-sourcing Sissyfight 2000, the psychological schoolyard web game
By Samit Sarkar on May 11, 2013 05.11.13
Sissyfight 2000's designers set their game against the backdrop of a quintessential crucible of social conflict: a school playground. The game's mechanical simplicity belied the depth of its social interactions, but the setting was what really made the experience, imbuing the proceedings with a deeper psychological meaning that was unique for each player.
In Sissyfight 2000, each player begins with 10 hearts signifying self-esteem points, and the objective is to use words and actions to take down other people's hearts until only two sissies (or sometimes one) remain. The players choose their moves in secret, and those choices are revealed at the same time on each turn.
Sissyfight 2000 was ahead of its time in a number of ways. Its design, which contained many elements that we would...
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74 CommentsWatch Dogs' voyeurism, moral choices and clever AI
By Tracey Lien on May 10, 2013 05.10.13
Ubisoft's upcoming open-world action-adventure game, Watch Dogs, plays on society's voyeuristic tendencies, the nuanced moral choices we make and our desire to affect game worlds, according to senior producer Dominic Guay.
In a recent demo of the game shown at a preview event in San Francisco, Guay and members of the Watch Dogs development team highlighted three areas that they believe players will find engaging. The first is voyeurism, which features heavily in the game. According to Guay, the theme of surveillance is particularly interesting to explore, especially when we consider the increasing number of security cameras that are being installed in cities and how everything — from traffic lights to power networks — is now connected and managed by computers.
"The question we...
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63 CommentsSilicon Knights unloads property, closes office, continues battle with Epic Games
By Brian Crecente on May 09, 2013 05.09.13
Too Human developer Silicon Knights, still battling a $4.45 million judgment that favored Epic Games, is down to just a few employees, has closed its office and has sold off office equipment and game assets, Polygon has learned.
Calls to the company went unanswered, as the phone number listed on Silicon Knights' website appears to have been disconnected. But the studio's chief financial officer, Mike Mays, tells Polygon that the few remaining Silicon Knights employees are "very busy" and the studio is "definitely alive."
The company laid off most of its employees last summer, a source tells Polygon. Around the same time, a core group of Silicon Knights employees, including founder Denis Dyack, created a new studio: Precursor Games.
Precursor Games, formed about 30 miles west of the...
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11 CommentsHow Evil Dead, Venture Bros. and Borderlands ended up at the poker table
By Griffin McElroy on May 07, 2013 05.07.13
Creating a game with a single licensed property comes with no small amount of baggage for a developer's creative and business teams. Telltale, the developers behind last year's episodic hit The Walking Dead, are no strangers to negotiating those issues, having tackled nearly a dozen franchises for licensed games throughout the lifetime of their company.
Even for them, Poker Night is almost unthinkably ambitious. The aforementioned baggage - securing the license, creating content around it, portraying characters in a faithful manner and working under licensor oversight - is present fivefold for Telltale's table gaming series. Even though they borrow limited inspiration from the source material (one or two characters from each franchise), the series' creators had to jump through the same...
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10 CommentsLoveshack's approach to interactive storytelling
Framed: putting context in the player's hands
By Tracey Lien on May 06, 2013 05.06.13
In most video games, players are entrusted with performing actions: run, jump, shoot, swing, slash, crouch and curb-stomp. The developer sets the scene, establishes the context and the player is released into the world with an arsenal of actions. In Loveshack Entertainment's Framed, things work the other way around.Framed is a narrative-based panel shifting game where players rearrange a series of panels to help tell a story. Set on a screen that resembles a comic book page, players push around blocks of minimalist animated paintings. Each panel is saturated in muted pastels, environments and surfaces are given a textured, painterly quality where colors are added in broad strokes, and as the game's character leaps from panel to panel, it feels like he's a character trapped inside a...
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4 CommentsTubs of blood, no computer effects and The Evil Within's gruesome live action trailer
By Michael McWhertor on May 04, 2013 05.04.13
Venice, Calif.-based Prologue, the creative agency founded by Cooper in 2003, is responsible for the title sequences of dozen of films (Iron Man, Argo, X-Men First Class) and television shows (The Walking Dead, American Horror Story), as well as a handful of video games, including Konami's Metal Gear Solid series. Cooper directed the title sequences for Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty while at Imaginary Forces and David Fincher's serial killer movie Se7en, perhaps his most groundbreaking, most recognized work.
It was Se7en and American Horror Story that came up in initial conversations between Bethesda, Tango and Prologue, the teaser film's creators tell Polygon. Bethesda wanted "something dark," Cooper said, and tapped Prologue to create "a conversation point."
The result was a...
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6 CommentsFrom New Zealand street art character to video game hero
By Jenna Pitcher on May 04, 2013 05.04.13
A prominent New Zealand artist, who has deep roots in graffiti and street art, is working with a band of indie game devs to bring to life one of her long running and most popular street art characters: the gothic Holly Melancholy and her monster-filled universe.
Holly Melancholy is a witchcraft-practicing "brave and courageous" goth girl, who is into reading books, "doing her own thing" — especially casting spells — and making potions.
"That will be sort of the main mechanics through the game, collecting these different ingredients to make herself these different potions," Holly Melancholy artist Tanja Jade told Polygon. "Which she can drink to give her super powers. This is the fun part developing the game as we go along, figuring out what is going to happen to her when she...
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0 CommentsAltered memories, trading hearts: Dishonored devs stretch creative muscles with fiction novels
By Alexa Ray Corriea on May 03, 2013 05.03.13
Both designers began crafting their fiction long before their dive into Dunwall. Smith, who is also Arkane's co-creative director, began writing his semi-autobiographical novel Big Jack is Dead in 2005 and worked on it in brief weekly or monthly stints over the following years.
"It was a process that required some care, because the longer I stayed with the book, the more I developed a kind of 'fuck the world' attitude, where I got sullen and more cynical about human experience," Smith told Polygon of his time writing. "I wasn't much fun to be around when I was working on the book; writing it required me to put myself into a specific frame of mind."
Big Jack is Dead follows Jack Hickman, an introverted software designer coping with the suicide of his estranged father. The storyline...
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14 CommentsTackling video games' diversity and inclusivity problems at the Different Games conference
By Samit Sarkar on Apr 30, 2013 04.30.13
That was the sentiment driving Different Games, a conference held this past weekend at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. Individuals involved in various aspects of the game industry — developers, critics, academics, journalists and more — gathered for a two-day summit from April 27-28 about diversity, difference and inclusivity in games and culture.
For a collection of discussions featuring such a diverse array of people, Different Games was remarkable in the level of agreement between them. Panelists often referenced previous presenters to build on their points, whether from a flashy slideshow presentation or a relatively dry research paper. A series of panels and workshops focused on what the organizers perceived to be rampant problems with the game...
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7 CommentsHow killer Christmas trees and 'Hobo with a Shotgun' influenced Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon
By Alexa Ray Corriea on Apr 30, 2013 04.30.13
Eisener's creative passion is at a measured, steady simmer, while Evans is a firecracker. One makes video games, the other horror films. One works with polygons, the other blood made with corn syrup. But both men are part of the same story: the birth of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.
At Montreal's Fantasia Film Festival in 2008, Evans' attended the premier of Eisener's Treevenge, a short film about sentient pines slaughtering an entire town in retaliation for chopping them down for Christmas.
"I had never been so amazed in my life at the cinema," Evans told Polygon. "The audience reaction to the film was incredible, and I thought, this guy is the shit."
Eisener's bloody action film Hobo with a Shotgun was released in 2011, with Rutger Hauer of Blade Runner fame as the gun-toting titular...
