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MumboJumbo has announced they will be bringing Braid to retail stores nation wide. Braid is a unique platform game for the PC. Players have to manipulate the flow of time to solve puzzles. Braid was initially released as a downloadable game for the PC and on Xbox Live Arcade. The game has won multiple awards [...] Continue reading

As the new year wanders along its merry path, it's time to go through the top full-length features of the past week on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus our GameCareerGuide features for the week.

Some of the notable pieces include our mammoth reader Top Games Of The Decade, with both honorable mentions and a Top 12, plus a postmortem of neat WiiWare title Swords & Soldiers, a really smart interview with game magazine pioneer Arnie Katz, and rather more besides.

Ha ha ha:

Postmortem: Ronimo Games' Swords & Soldiers
"In this in-depth postmortem, the Dutch independent developer Ronimo Games discusses what went right -- and wrong -- in creating critically acclaimed WiiWare side-scrolling console RTS Swords & Soldiers."

Gamasutra's Top 12 Games of the Decade
"After yesterday's honorable mentions for Gamasutra's 'Game Of The Decade', as voted and commented on by hundreds of our readers, we're counting down your Top 12 games of the last ten years, from Wii Sports through The Sims all the way to the top-voted title."

Sponsored Feature: Restless Entities Never Sleep -- The Back End of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
"In this Intel-sponsored feature, part of the Visual Computing section, the technical experts behind Mythic and EA's Warhammer Online discuss the mechanics of keeping the MMO running across multiple servers and data centers."

Gamasutra's Games of the Decade: Honorable Mentions
"Ahead of tomorrow's list of Gamasutra's 'Game Of The Decade', as voted and commented on by hundreds of our readers, we're publishing some of the most-voted on titles that didn't quite make the Top 12 list, from Katamari Damacy to Vagrant Story and beyond."

Electronic Games: The Arnie Katz Interview
"In this in-depth interview, Gamasutra sits down with Arnie Katz, the co-creator in 1981 of Electronic Games magazine, the first ever magazine dedicated entirely to video games, to discuss his history in the biz and the state of game journalism today."

GCG: Crossing Ships
"In this feature, developer Alan Abram recalls the difficulties he faced in crossing over from university life to a full-time work placement year in the games industry."

GCG: Game Design Foundations: Game Concepts and Ideas
"Here, GameCareerGuide presents an extract from Game Design Foundations by Roger Pedersen, entitled Game Concepts and Ideas, which is designed to help you with kickstarting your own project."

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I finally got around to obtaining a copy of Japanese entertainment (including video games) magazine Otona-Fami when I was in Chicago, so I thought I'd look into it in depth a bit -- especially because it's the sort of mag that we were aiming for with PiQ, although I wasn't aware of it at the time.

The name "Otona-Fami" is a blending of otona (Japanese for "adult") and "Famitsu," and that about sums it up, really. In contrast to Weekly Famitsu -- whose pages are still mainly devoted to previews and strategy features, although the amount of hard-nosed industry news has slowly expanded over the years -- Otona-Fami is almost entirely features, and even what straight-on previews/reviews they deal with are mixed up with the regular columns in the back sections.

Here is a very basic rundown of Otona-Fami's content for the issue I have:

- A large roundup of entertainment-industry rumors and the truth behind them, in fields ranging from movies to American TV dramas to anime and games
- A multi-page nostalgic look back at the history of Shogakukan's grade-divided educational kids' magazines -- the equivalent of a US mag doing a history of Boys' Life
- A long preview of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth with a long sidebar that traces the history of the rest of the series
- A history of Kappa Ebisen and the Home Run Bar, two long-running Japanese snack foods that are celebrating their Nth birthday this year
- A generic sort of summer movie preview feature, covering stuff like Angels & Demons and Star Trek. Otona-Fami got interview access to all kinds of big-name folks for this feature, from Jackie Chan and Ewan MacGregor to Danny Boyle and Clint Eastwood
- A multi-page history of portable game systems

I haven't seen the latest August issue yet, but looking at the website, they have a feature which strikes me as a really neat idea: a list of top manga that's complete and under 10 volumes, suitable for buying up and plowing through over a spare weekend.

Running columns include:

- "Magic Factory Tour," basically a "How It's Made" for some food product
- A look at some uniquely Japanese shop that you can visit. This month they cover a store that sells nothing but book lights, metal bookmarks and other book accessories (and not books themselves)
- A good 20-page-long list of upcoming movies, games, DVDs and manga

Throughout the magazine are small one-page interviews with idols, movie directors, whatever, covering a product they're either shilling or otherwise really interested in.

What's all this content targeted toward? Well, looking at the list above, it doesn't take a sociologist to see: It's aimed mainly at men and women in their late 20s or 30s, people who grew up surrounded by '80s/'90s culture and still enjoy games and action flicks but have run out of time to follow any of their old hobbies in depth.

Otona-Fami does a great job at what it sets out to do, and it really is just like PiQ, assuming that PiQ had a dozen editors and that many contributors on top. But does this product really have an audience? That's the question. Enterbrain, the publisher, has run the magazine since 2004 and claims a printed circulation of 100,000, but like all Japanese circ figures, the relationship this numeral shares with reality is anyone's guess. (Weekly Famitsu has a claimed circ of half a million.)

While I'm not sure anybody is going to use Otona-Fami as a primary source of information, it does succeed in being interesting to read in many spots -- which is over half the battle these days, if you're going to ask people to pay for your content.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]