By Simon Carless
 Along with its gamer modeling services for events, motion capturing, voice acting, and more, Charisma+2 produces a magazine targeting female gamers. The online publication, which has already published a dozen issues, offers reviews, profiles on women working in the game industry (e.g. Brenda Brathwaite), and articles helping girls break into the business.
The latest issue of C+2 magazine includes a piece you won't see in traditional gaming magazines like Edge or Gamepro: a step-by-step guide for a make-up look inspired by Mass Effect 2's Miranda Lawson (pictured). The tutorial suggests products you can use and presents this "gamette make-up" as an
everyday look for girls wanting a "simple and sexy go-between".
I've included the video guide recorded by C+2 model Leigh Ann, an aspiring 3D game artist, after the break. She's also contributed an article in this month's issue discussing her first steps toward developing skills she'll need for that career. I've no idea where she finds time for these articles in between raising and maintaining seven World of Warcraft characters (leveled around 60-80).     
By Simon Carless
 Blizzard's Authenticator, a device offering an extra layer of security to World of Warcraft players by generating a random code to enter when logging in, is the target of a new Windows trojan virus designed to allow hackers to access WoW accounts and steal items/gold.
The trojan finds its way onto players' computers after they install a fake version of WowMatrix AddOn Manager downloaded through sites like Cursea.com and Deadlybossmodss.com (typos of legit sites Curse.com and Deadlybossmods.com). Google advertised at least one of these sites in its sponsored link section at the top of search results for "WoWMatrix".
Once the fake add-on manager is installed, it drops a file named emcor.dll onto the user's system, which then waits for them to log into World of Warcraft. When players enters a password and authentication code, the trojan sends incorrect information to Blizzard (preventing players from logging in), and send the stolen pass/code to a hacker.
World of Warcraft players who use the authenticator can check if they're infected by running a search for the "emcor.dll" on their system -- of course, if they find this file on their computer, their account has probably been compromised for some time already. Some anti-virus software, such as Malwarebytes, already detect the trojan.
[Via Wow.com]  
By costik
Games produce fanatical geeks. Not all games, of course, but games of very diverse sorts: You'll find people who practically live for Counter-Strike or World of Warcraft and people who spend a big part of their waking life painting miniatures, and on and on. Railroad games are a case in point; people who love rail games will often play something else, but their eyes light up when you start talking about trains.
Rail games are good for game publishers, too, because typically you can sell people who love a game supplements or new titles; since railroad construction involves, in a sense, a conversation with geography, they're often interested in playing on a different board, even if the rules are fundamentally unchanged. Thus, there's a natural route for follow-on product, and a way to suck more money out of a gamer's wallet than with a one-time purchase.
The most successful rail game in the last decade was Martin Wallace's Age of Steam. Like the 18XX games, i'ts fairly complicated and unforgiving of mistakes, but unlike those games it's playable in a reasonable amount of time. It doesn't quite have the thematic color of the 18XX games, perhaps, but it has other virtues.
Steam is Wallace's evolution of the system. The main change in gameplay is to address Age of Steam's main flaw, as I see it: It is a game that provides a huge first-mover advantage. To compensate, it has an auction system, with players bidding each turn to determine player order. This does indeed balance the game -- but it also means that a novice player in particular, with less of a gut feel for the game and less ability to do the math in his head, can easily get into trouble, either by overbidding or by not recognizing the value of a position in player order.
Steam (unlike the earlier Age of Steam) has both a basic and an advanced game; the advanced game retains an auction system. The basic game instead redresses the problem of first-mover advantage by tying the next turn's player order to action selection. That is, there are seven chits, each of which represents a special action; during your turn, in addition to the normal actions of laying track and delivering goods, you select one of the special actions, taking the appropriate chit. Special actions include things like placing new cities on the board, adding goods to existing cities, laying one extra segment of track, and so on. But in addition, each special action chit is printed with a number from one to seven; player order for the next turn is determined by this number. Thus, the chit that provides the most valuable special action is "7" and the one that provides the least valuable is "1" -- forcing players to make a tradeoff, forgoing a player order advantage for the benefits of an action or vice versa.
The dependence on an auction mechanic to redress a first-mover advantage in Age of Steam always struck me as a workable but somewhat artificial patch for a gameplay problem; I like the way Steam treats the issue a good deal better.
The gameplay of Steam involves building rail lines on a hex grid with hexagonal tiles. Each tile is printed with a section of line -- straight, curving, doubling back, sometimes splitting. Indeed, just about any possible configuration of track is included, though the tilemix is a limit on play, so at the end-game it's possible that precisely the configuration you want is no longer available. "Goods" are represented by small colored cubes; the cities are also printed in color, and a good can only be delivered to a city of the same color. Money is a severe constraint; at game start, players begin with none, and raise it by "issuing shares," which result in permanent, ongoing negative income on subsequent turns (representing, I suppose, stock dividends and/or bond interest). When you deliver goods, you may either increase your income (eventually into the positive range), or score victory points -- another tradeoff.
In general, it is a tight, sometimes nerve-racking game played with the kind of serious thought of an abstract strategy game -- as indeed it is. That is, there is a connection to theme, in track configuration and the interplay with geography, but the actual business concerns of railroads are not exactly simulated (Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon does a better job in that regard). But you have to take games for what they are: Steam is not a simulation of the 19th century railroad boom, but a tight, somewhat abstracted strategy game with a thematic and topographic connection to rail.
And as such, it is polished, surprising deep, and very cerebral game, certainly one of the best hobby boardgames of 2009.
By Simon Carless
 In the beginning, I was perfectly OK with the Mafia Wars Facebook app. But by the middle of my six-month crime spree, I was utterly addicted, even going so far as to download iPhone software just so I could level up in line at the grocery. My infatuation with the game verged on illness.
By the end, however, I felt terrorized. My friends and loved ones had essentially turned into an online gaggle of 13-year old girls, constantly haranguing me with their gifts of shotguns, pestering me with their endless requests for billiard balls. It was with a heavy heart that I retired my character, Gina the Firecracker -- ah! that onetime Decapitator of Dons, that Destroyer of Delis -- sending her to forever sleep with the fishes.
I doubt I'll ever re-attempt Mafia Wars, nor am I likely to commit to anything (anything!) with that kind of grim, psychotic determination ever again. But if I were to -- and I don't mean that I would ever consider it, because I am so totally done, so this is purely hypothetical -- but if I were to, I would model my tactics on Sam Bardelson's own winning strategy, as described at BitMob.
Sam, who fancies himself as something of an MMO prodigy, fashioned an all-new, dummy Facebook account expressly for noodling with the Mafia Wars app. And eventually, several dummy accounts later, he cracked the code.
The real secret to the game, Sam discovered -- besides obnoxiously amassing 500 mafia members, which you would never, ever want to do with a real Facebook account -- is in making sure you select "Fearless" as your character type. The key, after all, is to find ways to level your character without expending any "energy," and on that count, Fearless characters have a secret advantage.
"I leveled past my new friends, who had been playing for months," Sam writes, "and I quickly completed all the available content. People flooded my inbox and my status updates with comments and questions every time I leveled up or completed another batch of jobs."
Sam's experience is proof positive that, with time, elbow grease, and a little ingenuity, any game can be broken -- even a really lame one. (Kidding! Kidding!)
Still. Emergent gameplay really is everywhere. It's weird.
[Breaking Mafia Wars: Casual Gaming Meets Hardcore Gamer]  
By Simon Carless
 The latest issue of GameSetWatch sister publication Game Developer magazine includes a postmortem of NCsoft's Aion, written by the game's Seoul-based internal development team.
Aion, a unique MMO heavily based around the mechanic of player flight, is the latest major MMO from the online-focused publisher. It was first released in South Korea in 2008, and was localized for the Western market for a release last September.
These excerpts from the January 2010 issue of Game Developer reveal various "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" highlights from throughout the creation of the game, revealing how the company used solid tools to overcome MMO comparisons and a difficult "pyramid" of user demographics.
Comparisons Were Inevitable, But Early Comparisons Were Toxic
World of Warcraft is a blessing and a curse to other MMOs: it's undoubtedly grown the market, and a rising tide lifts all boats, but it also saddles every other MMO maker with the curse of endless comparisons:
"The pressure on the developers wasn’t just internal. Almost as soon as it was announced, gamer media gave Aion the 'WoW-killer' tag. That inheritance was unwanted but probably inevitable, because there hadn’t been a truly global MMORPG success since World of Warcraft.
"Comparisons with both Western games (Hellgate: London, Warhammer Online) and Eastern games (Prius Online) soon followed. Even before launch -- even before we knew what we were going to launch -- we were in competition with a half-dozen great games.
"We make games, so we know firsthand how competition can be healthy; it’s a virtue in and of itself. But those comparisons came so early that it was hard to ignore the other games and figure out what we wanted Aion to become. There may be a place for reactive game design, but it’s not at the beginning of the development process." Lush MMO Graphics: Working With A Third-Party Engine
Crytek's game engines, used to breathtaking effect in the company's own Far Cry and Crysis, haven't had as much pickup as, say, Unreal Engine or Source. But the Aion team wanted an engine that would do the team's assets right, and with some significant adjustments, it worked out:
"We used an engine optimized for first person shooters in an MMO because we really wanted Aion’s environment to “pop” off the screen. CryEngine handles landscape textures with ease, and it’s great at processing light effects, which is particularly important in a world where available light tells part of the game’s story (and Aion is based on the world of angels).
"That said, CryEngine isn’t an MMO engine per se. We had to rearrange about 90 percent of the engine to make it work for Aion. The building blocks were there; they just needed to be reassembled. The team has since worked hard to improve the graphical quality without switching graphics engines.
"Whereas before our artists might have simply designed something to be as gorgeous as possible, as we become even more familiar with the technology we are finding ways to improve quality without any major performance or polygon hits."
It's Hard To Serve Two Masters
Especially with an MMO, which thrives on a large, diverse user base, appealing to numerous demographics is key. Of course, as any designer knows, that can be a tall order:
"One of our early design goals was to make a game that would support a “pyramid” of users: a wide base of more casual players, narrowing upward to a minority of hardcore users that would play Aion with real fervor.
"That’s easier said than done, of course. What’s 'boring' to the hardcore player is 'impossibly frustrating' to the casual gamer. This problem was compounded by the high percentage of new or young developers on the team, who had less experience dealing with these sorts of design issues.
"In the end, we made a conscious effort to stay away from the large-scale endgame raiding that’s traditional in MMOs, opting instead for faction-based warfare in the PvPvE structure of a single mega-zone called the Abyss to keep the hardcore happy and the casual players engaged. Zone-based combat allowed us to concentrate some of these experiences in certain areas, which also helped manage the userbase."
Additional Info
The full postmortem of Aion explores more of "What Went Right" and "What Went Wrong" during the course of the game's development, and is now available in the January 2010 issue of Game Developer magazine.
The issue also includes a roundup of governmental game development incentives, Front Line Award finalists, a piece on the art of creating believably flawed characters, and our regular monthly columns on design, art, music, programming, and humor.
Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months' and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues and PDF downloads of all issues, all for a reduced price. There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of this edition as a single issue. 
By Simon Carless
 In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from 2K Marin, Koei Canada and more.
Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.
It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.
Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:
2K Marin: Multiplayer Systems Designer
"2K Marin is looking for a dedicated, passionate and personable Multiplayer Systems Designer to join us on an exciting unannounced project. As a Multiplayer Systems Designer, you'll be in charge of taking high level goals and translating them into game systems and moment-to-moment experiences."
Guerrilla Games: Lighting Artist
"Ready to set Guerrilla alight with your awesome lighting skills? As a member of the lighting team, you will collaborate with level designers and environment artists to literally light the way for gamers, so they can enjoy our games to their fullest. You will work with our cutting-edge deferred rendering engine, adding lighting to levels and cut scenes using both real-time and pre-rendered solutions. You will take concepts created by our visual design team and turn them into reality within our levels, working closely with the art director to ensure that our vision is achieved." Blizzard Entertainment: Dungeon Artist, World of Warcraft
"Blizzard Entertainment is seeking exceptionally talented dungeon artists for our World of Warcraft team. You should have extensive experience modeling and texturing diverse game environments across a broad visual range, applying a solid grasp of form, color, and light. Senior applicants must possess a variety of skills, including illustration, modeling, texturing, animation, and concept drawing. The ideal applicant will work well in an environment of peers, providing motivation and inspiration to others, while displaying a strong passion for making great games."
Edge of Reality: Systems Engineer
"Edge of Reality is a veteran cross platform console studio based in Austin, Texas. Most recently, we worked closely with BioWare to release Dragon Age PS3 & 360. We also work with The Sims Studio, a part of the EA Play label on various projects. We have been fortunate enough to be part of several hit titles. As a result of this success, the studio has a stable future. Edge of Reality is completely independent. As such, we are free to work with any publisher, on any platform."
Koei Canada: CG Animator
"As a CG Animator, you will be working primarily on character animation for our current project "Warriors: Legends of Troy" with our CG and Development staff. You are able to meet deadlines, be responsible for the work given to you, and as a result be involved to see the project through to completion. As it is an action game, you are interested in the action genre of games. The ability to communicate in both English and Japanese is required."
To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now. 
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