The Polyphony guys hooked up 4 PS3s to display a quarter of a screen each to run Gran Turismo 5: Prologue at a resolution of 3840×2160 compared to its normal 1920 x 1080 display. They also had other units running the game 4 times as fast with a refresh rate of 240fps!

full write up can be found here;

http://www.gran-turismo.com/en/sp/d2788.html/ found via Kotaku

Tags: Gran Turismo, PS3

My apologies for the on-again/off-again ‘End of day’ thoughts. I have been so busy due to the holiday season, and I’m trying to do final preparations for the live-stream charity event as well (this Saturday, 8 AM to 8 PM EST)! Once that event is over, I should be back to my normal ‘End of day’ routine. Thanks to sticking with me through this busy time! If I am going to keep up, I have to get some rest! I’ll see you guys in a few, short hours. Hope you have a great morning!

I actually squeeze in some time to play Sonic Unleashed during the wee hours of the morning. It was just over an hour’s worth of gameplay, and I’ve been left with some fresh impressions in my mind. We’ve been fed trailer after trailer, screen after screen of Unleashed for a long time now. Remember when all of this started with a rumored leak containing a batch of screens? Well, we finally made it to launch day…for Wii and PS2 that is. Is this the Sonic game that finally brings the hedgehog back to his once high standing? I don’t know that yet…but I do know that Unleashed feels like two games in one.

The good part…the Sonic levels are actually fun. I think it has a lot to do with the amount of control you have. Sonic’s 3d games have been pretty lame, due to the amount of time you play instead of watching the action. It’s just not fun watching Sonic perform awesome moves unless you are doing them. I want to run, slide, dodge, and drift! Well, in Sonic Unleashed you can do all of that. You feel like you’re really in control of the action…which would seem like the most basic point of any game. Somewhere down the road, Sonic lost that. So far, with my time in Unleashed, I feel like Sonic has finally gotten some of that missing element back.

(more…)

The XNA Creators' Club is being touted as a way for semi-pro and amateur developers to bring their designs to the masses via XNA Community Games, which launch alongside the New Xbox Experience today.

At its recent San Francisco XNA Community Games event, however, it became clear that a lot of the developers who have created the most polished and ready-for-market games on the service actually do have professional backgrounds.

At the event, we had a chance to speak with Nathan Fouts, founder and president of Mommy's Best Games (as well as its only full-time employee.) His game, Weapon of Choice, is a neo-retro throwback that brings to mind classics like Contra while embracing contemporary design choices.

Despite its hardest-of-hardcore looks and (nearly) one-man creation, it sprang not from the mind of an enthusiastic amateur, but a seasoned professional.

Though Fouts left Insomniac Games to found his own company, Insomniac CEO Ted Price, when recently asked, called him "an instrumental part of Resistance: Fall of Man... one of the most creative programmers I've ever met."

What is it that drove Fouts to leave his job at one of the most successful independent developers in the country and strike out on his own, and why through XNA Community Games? The answers may surprise you.

Did you have any sort of professional background in development before you started this project?

Nathan Fouts: I've been in the industry for over a decade now -- I guess I'm getting old! I've worked at Running with Scissors, I've worked at N-Space, I've worked at Insomniac Games.

I actually designed and programmed the weapons on Resistance: Fall of Man, the launch title. And I did the bosses on Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction.

So you actually have extensive experience on high-budget, next-gen projects. You decided to give that up and make your own project?

NF: Yeah. It's kind of crazy. We were making good coin at Insomniac Games.

They still are, without you. (laughs)

NF: Oh, yeah. Everybody there. That place... it's a great place to work. Basically, though, we had a child -- I don't know if you guys are interested in this from a developer standpoint, but because we're getting older, a lot of people, a lot of the professionals I'm friends with have had kids.

We had a baby and we decided to move back to the Midwest to be closer to my parents, so they could be with their grandson. This wasn't going to work, working at a big place. So a couple of years ago I started to think about forming my own place. And we didn't know how, and we knew that we couldn't pull it off until the whole downloadable thing started, with the new systems, basically.

Once Live Arcade started moving, I thought, "Wow, if we can get our money together, this might be possible." When XNA came through, and when Community Games announced that you could make money through it, that's when I knew we could do it.

How many people did you have working on the title?

NF: Me.

Really?

NF: Okay, that's extreme. But basically, I did original concept, design, art, programming, animation, sound effects, and then I had a really talented musician out of Tucson who did the music. I wrote the skeleton for the story, and then I had a science fiction writer friend write the story and the dialogue. So, basically, 95% of the game.

Wow. How long have you been in development?

NF: Like I said, we saved our money for a couple of years, and then I quit my job at Insomniac, and then I started full time in November last year. So it's almost been a year now.

I can imagine that's been like perpetual crunch.

NF: You know what's funny? Just, again, for the other developers' standpoint, working at home, it's been perpetual crunch that has been doable because I get these, like, mini-breaks.

You have dinner, there's your wife, your kid, and then you keep working. It's not as bad as a real place. I've done plenty of crunch before, and it drains your soul. But this hasn't been as bad. Anyway -- it's just different, working at home.

It's something, as you said, that people are facing. People want to start families. Everyone comes coastal to work in development. You don't really have a lot of choice in the matter.

NF: We didn't love Los Angeles, honestly. We lived there a couple of years. The only reason we were there was to work on games. There are a ton of places there. It's easy to move around. It isn't nice, but...

The interesting thing is, with the internet, it was possible to do our game in the boonies. We live out in the country, in Indiana, actually. And so it was actually possible to keep in touch with people, share files, and actually share the game itself, so that actually made it possible.

And your wife worked on it, too, right?

NF: Well, I did the development side, and she's like business, and producer -- well, quasi-producer. She does marketing, and helps with the press and that kind of stuff.

She's actually a fundraiser grant writer by trade, so she's really good at talking with people and working with them and everything. It's kind of like the Frank Zappa scenario. His wife managed him and did the marketing, and he did the music.

We actually have a couple of guys, very freelance, who helped me with the art, off and on. So I wouldn't mind expanding, but it's a really touchy kind of thing -- you have to be really careful about it.

I heard this story from Kathleen from Microsoft -- she said it's based on a concept that you had when you were 17, and then your wife found the designs, and it kind of grew from there. Can you tell me about that?

NF: Sure. I don't want this to turn into a... what's that Silicon Knights game?

Too Human.

NF: It's not a Too Human.

(laughter)

NF: I've always been playing games, and as a kid, as a middle-schooler, I'd do game design. And then I would send in game designs to, like, Electronic Arts, and get refused. And then I'd send them to Tecmo, and Sega, and places like that.

Now, with my wife, we're actually living with my parents, and she was digging through these old boxes, and found my old drawings.

And the funny thing is, they look similar to the new stuff that I've been working on -- but the game design is totally different in this. It's just the fact that I was doing this old style...

Well, the game is very reminiscent of a 16-bit aesthetic. It was a semi-credible story.

NF: No, it's true. It's fine that they say that, but it's a conscious thing -- I wanted to make a new 16-bit kind of game, that looks better, that plays better, that's more fluid, but it plays like that.

In the game there are a lot of elements that make it more playable, nowadays. It's an instant-kill game, but there's an element called "death brushing." Everything slows down, and you have this brush with death. It can happen as often as it needs to, and it's infinite, and it makes it a lot more possible to not die. It's an old-style game with new influences.

It's such a small thing, but the title screen really looks like a TurboGrafx or Genesis game to me, aesthetically.

NF: Exactly! That was a conscious decision. Another comparison that Steve Wik, of Postal, the game designer there -- he said, "I'd expect it to be on a marquee for an arcade machine from, like, '87." Yes!

I love that kind of art. I just love that you can see the pencil drawing in it, and you can just imagine the guy laboring over it, and I wanted to bring that through -- and I labored over it.

And the other thing is, and this isn't a negative on Resistance: Fall of Man, but when you go from one thing to another, that game is, the color palette is really kind of... low-key.

Brown.

NF: Okay, it's brown. It's Brown World. It just gets to you. Ratchet was very full and colorful, but that did not cure me. From working on Resistance, I was like, "Man, I want insane aliens, and I want crazy colors!" I've been seeing forum posts that have been saying it looks like an acid trip, and I've been like, "Thanks!" You know? Cool!

It reminds me a lot of 16-bit games, but more so. Based on what I've just seen.

NF: That's the idea. A lot of the weapons -- the other design idea behind the weapons is that each character has a weapon. It's his weapon of choice. But each character has a weapon, but when you play him, he's a life.

So when you play him, you're stuck with that guy. And even though you think you may not enjoy that weapon, you get to explore it more, and every weapon has a lot of depth to it. So it's easy to use at first, but then there's a lot more things you can do with it, and hopefully you'll grow to like all of the different weapons.

So it sounds like you've definitely put a lot of thought into how to evolve the design of a 16-bit game and make it compelling for a contemporary audience. I mean, we all have a lot of nostalgia for old games, but Mega Man 9 notwithstanding, it's a bit hard to approach them.

NF: And I'm playing Mega Man 9! And it kicks my butt. And it's a wake up, man. When you start those old games -- I still play a lot of those old games -- but when you start them, they smack you in the face! And in this one I wanted it to be a little bit more of an ease-in.

Again, I studied all of those old games really carefully. This is a game where you restart from the beginning -- which not everybody's psyched about -- but you do restart it from the beginning, I wanted to make it interesting every time you play.

So say you only play 10 minutes, and you fail. Then, you restart from the beginning. But when you restart, there's a lot of different paths to take. And within the levels themselves, you can actually branch and go a whole different way, and the story changes.

So if you keep trying this one path, and it starts to get boring, you can say, "I'm going to try this other path," but as you go, you're also picking up new operatives, so you're picking up new people with new weapons.

So say that one path you didn't get too far in -- it was too tough for you. You manage to save a new guy, you restart the game, and you have four guys -- four extra lives -- and now you are able to get further down the path. And that's how we make it playable for everybody. We've focused a lot on that.

To talk about something a bit different -- you said that your original inspiration was that you thought you could go on a traditional download service -- you made it sound like you were going for Xbox Live Arcade, when you initially had this idea to do it yourself as an independent developer.

NF: Absolutely.

But you ended up moving into the Community Games space. That has the benefit that you don't have to wend your way through getting picked, and everything, but obviously you don't have the same level of support.

NF: Right.

Can you talk about that decision-making process, and your expectations?

NF: It's a hard thing to talk about, but I'll just tell you, we got refused from Live Arcade. The initial game didn't look as good as this one.

Basically what happened -- and this is for everybody else who's thinking about it -- we went in, we pushed the game through to them, and they thought it was really interesting and fun.

But they thought the art style just wasn't enough, so we actually took that and spent a month and a half redoing just about every single thing in the game, and it was just horrible.

What I did, initially, was really static, and since then I've re-animated everything -- all the trees, all the grass, everything moves. I've had Xbox people say it's even stronger now, and because they want to bump up Community Games, they want to keep it on Community Games!

I'm cool with that, because I like Community Games. But it's been tough. I wanted it on Live Arcade -- or I thought I wanted it on there. But this whole thing's been a blessing too, so it's really come out great. And the [Dream Build Play] contest was pretty amazing, so I'm really excited about the whole thing.

I was on the phone with my ISP for over half an hour analyzing the issue. They were monitoring me while I was surfing and when I was playing and said my modem was acting normally. I connected directly from my modem instead of going through my router and nothing changed.

The… game… is… just… unplayable.

Everything else works great.

What kind of lag/freeze am I talking about? The kind where you fire off a Plink and your ability cast bar fills up and doesn’t disappear from your screen. You don’t take the shot yet when you run around, it keeps telling you you are interrupted. Everything else is going on in the game around you including people fighting each other and banging on your frozen skull. About 5-15 seconds later the plink goes through and so do have the other commands you spammed while in a panic. Then everything is good for about 20 seconds and then the same thing happens all over again. It happens with my abilities (plink, poison arrer, mount summon etc.), morales, and mob/object interaction (clicking a flag, trying to turn in a quest, or trying to chat with a merchant/trainer).

I even ran to an undefended flag only to see my health bar start to drop. Ten seconds later three tanks materialized on my screen from the Ether hacking away at me.

I can’t play like this guys, wtf is up? I’m not the only person either. There are several threads on WHA about the issue and we haven’t heard anything from anyone official. People have submitted support tickets and they are responded to with generic “download the latest drivers, kill all your other processes, are you sure your modem is plugged in?”

I have done a “netstat -b” in the command window with WAR.exe running and I am met with “host57.ea.com:10622″ as the server name instead of an IP that I can run a tracert/ping on. That’s helpful, ain’t it?

I asked my ISP if they were throttling or shaping my connection to the game and I can only take them on their word that they aren’t.

My guess is that I’m hitting a problem server on the dozen or so hops it takes for me to connect to the game. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out where it is. Does anyone know the IP address for Ostermark? I really want to tracert it.

Anyway, I barely managed to complete my PQ for the daily event (due to lag and frustration), which was actually pretty easy because I just ran back to chapter 1 and pwnt the hero within a few seconds. Unfortunately, this means I have been unable to record any kind of decent video footage lately. I’m probably sure no-one wants to watch the kind of BS that makes me want to rip my own hair out.

Then again, maybe I should record it as evidence, upload it to YouTube and try causing a PR stir… Hmmm. Evil thoughts.

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I have to tell you guys this. Target Toss Pro: Bags is an awesome game…when you have a bunch of people to play. I kid you not, we played the game for an hour and a half last night. The crew was hanging out, and we all had a go at the game…every man for himself, and then teams. It was an absolute blast! If you have the cash and some friends, you should definitely check it out.

Alright gang, I am outta here for my evening off. I will see you back on the site around 11 PM EST. Until then, the lovely and talented Bethany will be here to fulfill all of your Nintendo news needs. Drop her a tips email, and help her out! I’m sure she’ll do a fantastic job.

Until tonight, my friends…have a great time with Bethany!

Have you heard about the Ustream/GoNintendo charity event to benefit Child’s Play? Click here for more details. Also, please click here to bump our DIGG! We really need your support to make this happen!

1) Need a couple more screenies for my new Squig Herder diary post

2) Need to record some video of Reikland Factory and take some screenshots to show off its awesomeness!

3) In-game audio was missing from my recent Sorceress video captures… Tres annoying! Now I have to recapture some video or just narrate over complete silence.

I’ll get some or all of these out to you by tomorrow.

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• Guitar Hero: World Tour Deluxe Edition pricing and release details

An hour later, I was convinced that “Lips” is the most nuanced, well-crafted karaoke game that isn’t “SingStar” – it blows “Karaoke Revolution” out of the water — but despite my positive impressions, a question lingered: is karaoke enough anymore?

Maybe it’s just me, but since “Rock Band” came out, I’ve never felt compelled to just sing and not involve other people in the room.

But “Lips” has an ace card up its sleep. The problem: it’s not something Microsoft is promoting well and it’s the single biggest reason “Lips” is a revolution.

Microsoft has casually revealed “Lips” would include support for all of the DRM-free songs that are on your iPod, Zune, ripped to your Xbox 360’s hard drive, burned onto a CD or shared through a network. You don’t have access to lyrics or music video backgrounds, but they work in the game just fine.

Yano showed this off at the end of our “Lips” demo, which struck me as odd. Above the refined gameplay, fun accelerometer-based microphones and in-song mini-games, the ability to incorporate all of your own music into “Lips” is the most important, differentiating feature this game has going for it.

But it all goes back to the argument of who “Lips” is made for. For my friends, we’re not going to have situations where we just want to sing. Someone will want to rock out on guitar, bass or drums. That’s just the way “Rock Band” changed our taste in games, something “Guitar Hero” recognized very quickly.

At least in Europe, Sony has proved with “SingStar” that a vocal-only music game can succeed. “SingStar” hasn’t taken off in the same way here, though. “Lips” could do that, unless the “Rock Band” and “Guitar Hero” games have already permanently changed the expectations of the music game landscape.

No other music game can brag about giving you access to your already-existing music, though. Everything else requires you to pay for your music all over again. “Lips” doesn’t, and if Microsoft’s smart, they’ll start shouting that from the rooftops. The other issue, however, is that Microsoft will also be releasing downloadable songs for “Lips.” They want you to pay for more music, too.

I don’t want to play “Lips” because it lets me strike cool poses, I want to play “Lips” because it’ll let me sing every song in my Weezer collection right now.

Are you guys interested in a karaoke-only music game, even if it’s excellent?

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When we last looked at “Guitar Hero: World Tour”’s music maker service, GHTunes, we saw all sorts of video game music populating the charts.

That’s not happening so much anymore. When we booted up “Guitar Hero” this week, the only game-related tunes we found were made this week.

It seems Activision Blizzard and Neversoft are cracking down harder than before, and people are resorting to little tricks to get around them.

In the first 100 songs listed in “Guitar Hero”’s all-time best list, there are only four video game songs that I came across, and all but one of them had been labeled as “hot this week” in a separate section of GHTunes, indicating these are all new tracks.

#8 — Banjo Kazooie
#13 — Zelda Lost Woods
#56 — Portal Wombat [aka the "Mortal Kombat" theme]
#68 — Ghosts ‘n Goblins

You might have noticed my annotation on #56, which the author attempted to hide from the censors with a modified name. It is most definitely the electronica-infused “Mortal Kombat” theme produced in the 1990s. It’s pretty fun to play, too, but I may have just spoiled the fun by publishing this story. If you jump on soon, however, you can still download and save the file to your hard drive.

Outside of a Blink 182 track, we didn’t notice any other copyrighted material, but if people are catching on to some of Neversoft’s tactics, it’s possible we’ll start seeing more hiding their copyright infringements behind name rearrangements and other visual tricks, hoping to avoid the censors just a little while longer.

What else are you guys noticing on GHTunes? Are you even using it?

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