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You may or may not have heard of the original Rainblood RPG. A Chinese release with no English translation available, it was released back in 2007 through a Chinese RPG Maker community and went on to receive over half a million downloads.

Creator Soulframe plans to release the sequel Rainblood 2 - City of Flame with an English translation available. The above trailer features scenes and combat demonstrations from the game. Make sure you give the video a little time to load.

(English translation of the YouKu page) Continue reading

Dutch developer Catnip Games announced that it's developing a sequel to classic action-puzzle game Boulder Dash for Xbox Live Arcade, releasing in the third quarter of 2010. The studio revealed little about the title,s ave that it will once again have players collecting diamonds, dropping rocks on enemies, and avoiding traps but will be presented in "a modern and incomparable style."

While the Boulder Dash series hasn't enjoyed high profile video game resurrections like Space Invaders or Pac-Man, it's received a few releases this millenium, including the odd Boulder Dash: Treasure Pleasure for PC, the forgettable Boulder Dash: Rocks! for DS/PSP, and most recently a remake of the original game with new graphics/features/etc. on iPhone.

I hope this image of a robot that Catnip sent over is for the game's new hero or some sort of friendly NPC; I would have trouble smashing something so cute to bits with a well-timed boulder drop. Also, the robot has the same pose as the developer's cat logo.

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at Heavy Rain, video game auteurs, and a swifter than normal Passage.]

First up this week, Michael Clarkson makes a case for the open-world Santa Destroy as a valuable and necessary part of the original No More Heroes, and it’s omission from the sequel is all the more regrettable.

Zeke Virant is a new blogger who wrote in to let us know about a piece on ‘Expanding Sound in Videogame Narratives’ which sounds a lot like the sort of thing I was into with my undergrad thesis from 2008.

Elsewhere, Justin Keverne writes about Mass Effect 2 this week in ‘Living With Your Mistakes’; Radek Koncewicz also writes about the game, describing it as ‘A few steps forward and a few steps back’.

In a longer-form piece, Kotaku goes in search of the Videogame Auteurs -- a set of people whose existence is apparently still hotly debated.

Brendan Keogh, a Brisbane based blogger writes about the old whipping-horse that is the ludology/narratology debate (or stalemate, as Keogh describes it). He suggests, ‘don't ask what narrative can do for games, but what games can do for narrative.’

In a new piece on his Psychology Of Games blog, Jamie Madigan takes inspiration from Penny Arcade and asks, ‘Why do we love genres so much?’, musing: "Why are we so obsessed with cramming games into genres and slapping labels on them? Most game reviews will remark on what genre a game fits in if not declare it outright, and if a game refuses to fit properly they’ll create a new genre just for it."

Joana Caldas, writing for The Border House on Local vs Online multiplayer, has some of the best use of captioning I’ve ever seen - lots of sarcastic fun.

I’m sure by now most have heard about or watched the DICE talk given by Jesse Schell but David Sirlin had a response, wondering whether external rewards are as unanimously positive as Schell proposes. Following on from both, Dan Lawrence thinks a bit about the psychology of game design, inspired by both Schell and Sirlin's comments, in a post titled ‘behaviourist game design’.

UK-based doctoral researcher Mitu Khandaker also has something to add to the commentary/responses to Schell’s talk, extrapolating some of the previous ideas into a series of possible futures for games. Lastly for this particular discussion, Jesper Juul has some thoughts on Schells’ talk with some excellent concrete examples that problematise a future where every action is tied to some kind of external reward. Juul notes:“A famous 1973 experiment (“Undermining children’s intrinsic interest with extrinsic reward“) showed that when nursery school children consistently received external rewards for drawing, they lost interest in drawing and started drawing less.”

Also from the recent DICE conference is this piece by Brandon Sheffield covering a panel on racial diversity in games, a talk that will also be given in amended form at GDC in a few days. It’s a talk that I plan to attend.

UK newspaper The Independent has a take on Heavy Rain, comparing it to previous similar efforts in games, such as Facade, and Anthony Burch at Destructoid suggests that, in Heavy Rain’s case at least, Ebert was right.

This week Chris Dahlen made explicit the connections that Leigh Alexander has made previously, namely that games are perhaps more like music than they are like film.

In another neat piece, Kirk Hamilton wrote about open world games in ‘When the world changes’: "When it comes down to it, I guess it's pretty simple: I love it when a great game begins, and I hate it when it ends. So, I want to feel like I'm in the middle for as long as possible."

Coleen Hannon at Gamers With Jobs writes of being ‘Thumbless in Seattle’, which unfortunately involves less Tom Hanks and more disabling injuries.

Lastly, here’s a cool thing and some creative criticism for you – it’s totally possible to use more than just essays to critique games. As ‘Passage in 10 seconds’ shows, you can even use other games.

[Is Apple's stringent governance of its "explicit" apps unforgivable censorship, or an overreaction to a legitimate problem? Editor Danny Cowan of iPhone-focused sister site FingerGaming checks out all of the "boobs and butts" on offer in the App Store and suggests that maybe it's good riddance to many of the apps the company pulled.]

Every day, I spend a few minutes catching up with the newest applications released for the iPhone and iPod Touch, at the occasional expense of my sanity.

My daily process usually involves glazing over dozens of bland match-three puzzlers, checking out a few titles that sound halfway decent, and then — at least once a day — finding something that makes me stop and stare in slack-jawed disbelief. I may frown. I might also put my hands over my face and mutter something like “Why?”

Once, it was an app simply titled “Amazing Butts.”

“Amazing Butts features a slideshow and wallpaper of hot bottoms in a variety of outfits and poses,” its description reads.

That’s all it is. It’s a slideshow. Of butts. Don’t think that there was any sort of thought or effort put into this thing — Amazing Butts contains only a handful of non-nude, butt-centric images taken from the Internet. And it’s priced at 99 cents.

Amazing Butts’ developer has contributed over 100 applications to Apple’s crowded app catalog. The company’s lineup includes enduring classics like Amazing Redheads, Alluring Asians, Brunette Beauties, and the anticipated sequel Awesome Butts.

And Amazing Butts is not alone. Thousands of similar apps offering the exact same functionality and purpose have been submitted to the App Store, with dozens more flooding in daily over the past several months.

Thanks to Apple’s recent decision to remove all sexually suggestive content from the App Store, however, Amazing Butts is no more. If Apple has its way, you’ll never see another butt or boob in any iPhone application ever again.

But is this really such a bad thing?

According to application aggregate site AppShopper, Apple recently deleted over 5,000 apps that are exactly like Amazing Butts. After browsing the App Store’s latest updates daily for over a year, I can assure you that the majority of these deleted applications were simple slideshows of non-nude pinup images stolen from the Internet. These apps commonly fit into the “Entertainment” category.

Occasionally, a developer will get the bright idea to take a barely-clothed bottom and turn it into a sliding puzzle, so that it can sneak into the “Games” category. Gambling themes are also popular. Poker, blackjack, roulette — everything’s better with boobs and butts.

These games aren’t good for anyone. They take minimal effort to develop, contain no original content, and make an already crowded app catalog much more difficult to navigate.

Ultimately, they drag down the value of every application in the iTunes App Store. If some guy can charge 99 cents for a “game” featuring stolen butt and boob pictures from the Internet, what does that say about a brilliant indie offering available at the same price?

I will not miss Amazing Butts or its thousands of clones. Unfortunately, though, Apple’s zeal to enforce its new policy — which targets everything from bikinis to innuendo to suggestive silhouettes — has resulted in the deletion of many legitimate games and apps.

Smule’s parody action game Attack of the Zombie Bikini Babes from Outer Space was cut. So was Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet — a twin-stick shooter that featured no nudity and only trace amounts of sexually suggestive content.

In the case of Daisy Mae’s Alien Buffet, all it took was a quick appeal on the part of developer IUGO to set things right again. The original game reappeared in the App Store a day after its deletion, unmodified. Apple currently honors the title in two different categories on the front page of the App Store, in what seems to be an implied apology.

Other developers haven’t been as lucky. Apps with more blatant instances of exposed flesh are required to resubmit to Apple following a content cleansing. This is unfortunate — Apple’s content guidelines were notoriously strict to begin with, and these new rules greatly limit the creative potential of App Store developers.

There needs to be a middle ground. Sex sells. Sex is great. Most people like sex, a lot. By all means, developers should have a right to feature exposed flesh as their games dictate.

At the same time, the existence of thousands of identical slideshow apps was insulting for everyone. Apple received a number of complaints about them, then sought to keep its customers happy in a way that many would consider an overreaction.

With any luck, Apple will recognize that sex has its place in games, and will relax its new content standards. Cult of Mac reports that Apple is considering an “explicit” category for submitted apps, presumably to serve as a content filter for adult-oriented content. Hopefully, this will resolve customer complaints, and restore the creative freedom that developers lost this week.

[Sequels often get penalized if they don't change enough, but Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander examines BioShock 2 to find an interesting challenge -- and opportunity -- in keeping some things the same.]

The main reservation critics and fans seem to have about the largely-acclaimed BioShock 2 is that it doesn't bring much new to the table, a conservative sequel to a game that didn't really need a sequel.

Wired's Chris Kohler said the game was "stamping on well-trod ground," and Game Informer's Andrew Reiner said the dystopia of Rapture had developed "the familiarity of a local shopping mall." The innovation of Rapture as a setting was part of what made the original BioShock so exciting, and now that players are used to it, the game loses something, some say.

Another recent release, No More Heroes 2, was also said to have been unnecessary -- director Suda51 himself has said he hadn't planned on tacking a sequel on to the story of Travis Touchdown.

Why do games that "don't need sequels" get them? The answer's obvious: the game industry's more hit-driven than ever, and it's no longer enough to make a successful game -- publishers need successful franchises. This leaves two options: conceive every game as open-ended, always setting up for a sequel, or attach sequels to games that "don't need them."

Neither sounds very appealing at first blush. But the major rush to sequelize even those titles that make solid self-contained experiences could create, by necessity, a promising shift in the way developers build worlds and innovate in them.

Although fans were quick to note that that BioShock 2 didn't feel much different from its predecessor, 2K was wise with it. The original title was so strongly received that to significantly change much about it could have been disastrous. Fans loved BioShock for its unique and deeply-realized world and the signatures that populated it: Madness, decay, philosophical frenzy, and the strange energy system governed by the eerie Little Sisters and their hulking protectors.

There's even very little room to improve on the game mechanics. They can be iterated upon, as with the welcome tweak to the hacking minigame, but BioShock's gameplay is well-established and part of its appeal. So much about the game identifies it distinctly that there isn't much that can be changed in a sequel -- there are too many elements without which it wouldn't be itself. But that's not a problem: That's a success and an opportunity.

BioShock is not just a stand-alone narrative. It's a framework. Rapture isn't the story, it's the story's housing. The lamp-eyed Little Sisters and lumbering Big Daddies aren't characters, they're elements of the visual language. Thinking about a sequel for a game with such a strong signature, it becomes clear that its key elements are signposts for the experience, and not the entirety of the experience itself.

And with the framework so distinctive and so firmly-established, there's a unique chance to evolve the expectations of gamers. Where BioShock presented one character of an only loosely-known identity with an objectivist despot as adversary, BioShock 2 presents the same sort of character and an enemy adherent to a different philosophy.

What can BioShock 3 do? It can't change Rapture's look, its citizenry, its rules or even meaningfully change the experience of interacting with the world. But it can present a new quest for self and a new philosophy to test within Rapture's mad power vacuum. In other words, it has no choice but to iterate on story and theme, and this fashion of approaching game franchises will only make gaming richer as developers get better and better at it.

It will be interesting if games start to become franchises by building a strong universe and desirable mechanics first, and then yield sequels that don't overhaul those things, rewrite the design mechanics or tack on new features where none are really needed just so gamers won't complain there's nothing new.

The result will be a new kind of sequelization. BioShock 2 returned us to Rapture in the best way possible: By simply creating a new adventure therein and a new way to look at familiar things. It's perplexing to see critics penalize a game for declining to change what they best loved about it.

Sneaky Andy Schatz steals the IGF trophy from Team Meat in Monaco!

Ska Studios is working on a sequel to their XBLA game The Dishwasher. The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile will be done “when it’s done”.

(Source: Michael Rose, via IndieGames.com)

I had the fortune of bumping into this video mere hours after it launched. Shoot 1UP is a shoot ‘em up from Mommy’s Best Games that was just launched on Xbox Live Indie Games for 80 points. The game features a option-like 1up mechanic, branching paths, and the inimitable art style of MBG.

(Source: the2bears)

Finally, here’s a video about some French indie games from my favorite French-fried game reviewer, Benzaie (after the jump):

The three games he mentions are Lethal Judgment, Streets of Fury, and a remake of Toki that has really nice graphics. Continue reading

Ska Studios, the devs behind gory XBLA release 'The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai' today announced a sequel is in the works. Coming "when it's done", The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile will apparently be "bigger, better, and more badass". One to watch out for, sez I. Continue reading