Four out of five gamers play Mass Effect 2 as a man, says BioWare. And that’s a huge mistake.

BioWare executive producer Casey Hudson shared a wide array of Mass Effect 2 gameplay statistics with IGN.com on Monday. The data the company collects tells it all kinds of things about the way people play their games.

But one data point in particular says to me that most gamers aren’t getting the most out of Mass Effect 2.

Mass Effect is a science-fiction role-playing game for the Xbox 360 and PC. The series puts players in the shoes of a galaxy-tripping agent who is trying to halt an extra-dimensional invasion that could enslave all known life. Players can play as a male or female, customize the look of their character and control conversations on the fly.

According to BioWare, a whopping 80% of Mass Effect 2 players rolled a male character. As a consequence, they are totally missing out on Jennifer Hale’s stellar performance as the female version of protagonist Commander Shepard.

Hale is lively, funny and all kinds of awesome. If you’re playing Mass Effect with the boring dude voiced by Mark Meer, you’re doing it wrong.

Gamasutra writer James Bishop recently said all that needs to be said about “FemShep.” He argues that BioWare has created, if somewhat inadvertently, one of gaming’s most interesting and underappreciated female protagonists.

Image courtesy Electronic Arts

See Also:

• Geek Culture's 26 Most Awesome Female Ass-Kickers
• Review: Spin Your Own Space Opera in Mass Effect 2

The man who made Katamari Damacy and Noby Noby Boy no longer works for Namco Bandai, according to reports this week.

A Namco Bandai spokesperson told Play.tm that Keita Takahashi has parted ways with the company.

Takahashi has long expressed dissatisfaction with the videogame industry. He regularly threatens to abandon games for quirky gigs like playground design.

It could be that such gripes are part of the game maker’s creative process. But this move means that the designer is without a boss, regular paycheck and a publisher. For the short term, at least, Keita Takahashi is now an indie game designer.

Maybe this is where the guy should have been all along.

Image: jontintinjordan /flickr

See Also:

• Katamari Creator Gets Weird, Wormy With Noby Noby Boy
• Katamari Creator Designing Playground

Randy Pitchford, CEO of Gearbox Software, bought the rights to the troubled Duke Nukem videogame franchise.
Image courtesy Gearbox

SEATTLE — Think you’re excited about the return of cigar-chomping space marine Duke Nukem? You’ve got nothing on Randy Pitchford.

A year ago, it looked like Duke Nukem Forever was finally dead. The perennial Wired.com Vaporware Awards winner, in the works since April 1997, couldn’t be completed since Dallas-based developer 3D Realms shut its doors and laid off its entire staff. Publisher Take-Two Interactive responded by suing 3D Realms parent company, Apogee Software.

See also:

Hands On: Duke Nukem Forever Lives Again at PAX

Enter Pitchford, co-founder and president of Gearbox Software, another Dallas videogame company. As an alumnus of 3D Realms, he wanted nothing more than to see the over-the-top shooter starring the misogynist Duke finally come to fruition. And his studio’s slick hybrid game Borderlands was a feather in Take-Two’s cap.

“I didn’t want the dream to die,” Pitchford says. So he bought the rights to Duke for an undisclosed amount, then proposed to the publisher that the lawsuits be dropped and Gearbox be allowed to finish the game.

Pitchford appears to have succeeded. At videogame convention Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle last weekend, 2K Games and Gearbox took the wraps off a resurrected Duke Nukem Forever, with Pitchford personally pitching the game to a group of incredulous gamers every half-hour.

In a tucked-away section of the Duke booth Saturday afternoon, Pitchford answered Wired.com’s burning questions about the game that almost never was.

Wired.com: What happened between the closure of 3D Realms and today?

Randy Pitchford: Well, the story goes back further than that. What a lot of people don’t know is that I got started as a professional gamemaker when I moved out to Texas to join George Broussard and Scott Miller and Allen Blum who created Duke Nukem, to join those guys and become part of the Duke Nukem 3D. I owe my career to Duke.

We were on the outside like everyone else, watching Duke as fans, not as developers. Wired gave Duke Nukem Forever the first Vaporware Award, and then the next year it won No. 1 vaporware again, and then again and again until Wired decided, you know what? Duke Nukem is just going to get the lifetime achievement award for vaporware. And that was like five years ago. So it’s become legendary. And Duke Nukem, I think he is the most iconic videogame character in the industry. I think Lara Croft is the female and Duke Nukem is the male. Between them, they’re the most iconic figures in videogames.

So all of us on the outside went through the full range of emotions: “Sweet, we want the sequel!” “Man, it’s taking them a while.” “Man, that trailer looks awesome, I’m totally ready!” “Seriously, guys, what’s wrong?” And we’d been through this loop so many times. And then we all got the bad news last year. The story was, 3D Realms was shutting down, closing the doors. The rumor was the development team was laid off. The story was there were lawsuits — drama, drama, drama. The story was that the Duke was dead and the dream was over. And this thing that so many of us were still wishing was going to find a way to break through this vaporware curse, it was over.

And here we are today now, playing the game. So what happened between those things, that’s your question. The reality is, that day when everybody lost their jobs, there were some people, Allen Blum being one of them, the core of what Duke is all about, they couldn’t let the dream die. A lot of the newer guys, they scattered to the winds, they all got jobs in the industry. But Allen and a handful of guys couldn’t let the dream die. Besides Duke, they didn’t even know what else to do. And so they started working out of their houses, just trying to keep the dream alive. George and Scott did the best they could to support them and help them. George, he’s been with this the whole time, this has been a labor of love and also it’s consumed him, to make Duke Nukem Forever the best game it could possibly be.

For my part, when I heard that news, I didn’t want to see the Duke die. I called up George, and he said to me, “This is the worst day of my life.” I found out about Allen and those guys keeping it going. And I knew that my studio could be in a position to help, for a couple reasons.

First of all, I feel like I owe my career to Duke, and I’m not alone. A lot of the guys at Gearbox had worked on Duke Nukem 3D, and a lot of the guys worked on Duke Nukem Forever. We felt like Duke was a part of us, too. And we were in a position where we knew that we could help. And I believed that George and Scott could trust me, because I knew that they knew that I knew what the brand was all about. Take-Two, because we were working on Borderlands together, they could trust us. We were in this weird, unique position where we could help everybody come together in Duke’s time of need.

It was risky. I had to put myself in the middle of it, I had to put my studio in the middle of it, and we had to take a bet. We had to spend money, we had to put resources on things. We had to take a big risk. It’s funny, they say you should always bet on Duke, and we did. And it paid off. We helped the lawsuit go away and settled that for everyone.

Wired.com: Take-Two was trying to get the rights to the underlying game code?

Pitchford: Take-Two wanted the game to get to customers. Take-Two had the publishing rights, and they wanted to publish a game. I can’t speak on behalf of Take-Two, but the moment that bad news happened, if I’m Take-Two, I’m thinking, “Shit! That thing that I want to have happen, that’s broken now. I have to intervene, I can’t fix this.”

Wired.com: But this was not them coming to you saying, “We need somebody to finish this game.”

Pitchford: No, I worked this out with George and Scott, and I bought the brand. I bought Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem Forever, and they gave it to me because they trusted that we would do the right thing with it. And I started funding the guys like Allen, and brought them in. About a third of the Duke Nukem Forever team, including what I consider the full core.

These guys went to war together. They’ve banded together, they are called Triptych [Games], and they’re on our 10th floor. Their world got shattered, and the best thing that I could do was fund them, show them the support, help them and give them the opportunity to play the role they must play in seeing this through.

You’re going to become Duke Nukem and you’re going to save the motherfuckin’ world! But you also want to get online and beat up your friends and shoot each other and step on each other, live the full fantasy with today’s modern gameplay. So there was a big investment to make there, too.

In augmented-reality games like Start the Party, the PlayStation Move brings videogames one step closer to true immersion.
Image courtesy Sony

Forget about 3-D graphics: With technology like Sony’s PlayStation Move, your whole living room might become a videogame.

At first blush, Sony’s new motion controller for PlayStation 3 seems like a straight-up rip-off of Nintendo’s Wii remote. It’s a one-handed controller with an accelerometer and a gyroscope that you can point and click at your TV screen or wave around like a tennis racket.

The PlayStation Move points to the immersive possibilities in videogames’ future.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The major games that will launch with the peripheral later this month would seem to support that conclusion: Sony is bundling the $100 add-on with Sports Champions, a shameless riff on Wii Sports Resort.

Several other games just use the Move as a virtual firearm — you know, like half the games you’ve played on Wii for the last four years.

But the PlayStation Move does boast a distinctive feature that could be a serious game-changer. The controller is tracked by a camera, called PlayStation Eye, that sits atop your television set. The Eye tracks the position of the glowing sphere at the business end of the Move, and it does this so accurately that it can know the exact position of the controller in 3-D space.

This allows Move to do augmented reality, adding virtual upgrades to real-world images of you and whatever’s in your living room. It also makes possible games that rely on players being able to precisely manipulate the 3-D space in front of them, something the Wii remote can’t do with nearly enough accuracy.

Some of the Move games Wired.com has tried so far provide a brief glimpse at how pairing cameras with controllers could lead to compelling new ways to play — if designers can harness the power of the complementary technologies.

“When you look at the relationship between the controller and the PlayStation Eye camera, and how intrinsic that is to precision and to placing you in one-to-one movement with the character in the game, there’s really nothing else like that,” says PlayStation director of hardware marketing John Koller.

Inexpensive Virtual Reality

Virtual reality on the cheap isn’t just a dream of Sony’s. Earlier this year, during a visit to the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, I saw an impressive graduate project — a fully functioning virtual hand that used an off-the-shelf webcam and a specially colored Lycra glove.

As technical director at GAMBIT, Andrew Grant tried to find ways that the tech could be used to play games. He didn’t come away especially impressed.

“It would be awesome to reach into a 3-D world and place things exactly where I want,” he says, but even playing a virtual version of simple block-stacking game Jenga would require far more precision than current technology can provide.

“In Jenga, exactly where you put your hand matters to within millimeters,” Grant says. “With the technologies we have now, inches would be the accuracy to what you’re looking at.”

These hurdles could be overcome, Grant says, with good software. With PlayStation Move likely to end up in millions of homes over the next few years, game developers probably will give it the old college try.

Motion control has been the watchword of the console game business ever since the launch of Wii in 2006. After the unassuming white console’s surprise upset of its more powerful rivals, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox, it took Nintendo’s competitors time to devise their own solutions. Both launch this fall: Move arrives Sept. 19 and Microsoft’s hands-free camera controller Kinect follows Nov. 4.

Retailers across the country will open at midnight to sell copies of Halo: Reach for the Xbox 360 when Microsoft launches the game on Tuesday.

According to a Microsoft press release, the company has two major late-night launch parties planned. East coast Halo fans can visit Best Buy in Times Square for a major blowout that will include hands-on time with the game, prizes and a surprise musical performance.

A second launch party is planned for Seattle. Those visiting the event at the Experience Music Project will get to rub elbows with game designers from Bungie and 343 Industries.

Everyone else can expect at least one of their local retailers to open late Monday night to sell copies of the game. Check your preferred retailer’s website for details, and be sure to call ahead — if you don’t have a pre-ordered copy you might get turned away.

Halo: Reach is the fifth game in a long-running series of science fiction shooters for the Xbox platform.

Image courtesy Microsoft

See Also:

• What to Expect From Halo: Reach Beta
• Halo: Reach Swiped From Microsoft, Leaked to BitTorrent

Flash game hub Newgrounds launched a retro-styled game inspired by the cult movie The Room on Friday.

The game, created by Newgrounds founder Tom Fulp and artist Jeff Bandelin, allows players to experience the mundane madness of Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 film as an 8-bit, point-and-click adventure game.

The Room is an indie drama that cost Wiseau $7 million of his own money. It was released to terrible reviews, but gained notoriety and a rabid fan base after a series of Rocky Horror-style midnight screenings in Los Angeles.

Visit Newgrounds to play The Room, but be warned: Those who have already seen the movie will get much more out the experience.

Image courtesy Newgrounds

See Also:

• Super Mario Crossover a Surprisingly Thoughtful 8-Bit Mashup
• Browser Game: Fight the Powers With Newgrounds Rumble

Amazon’s gaming related job postings are starting to bear exotic fruit having just nabbed Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy, Andre Vrignaud. Vrignaud started with Microsoft in 2002 as Director of Xbox Live Platform Strategy and more recently helped manage Microsoft’s overall gaming platform strategy with a hand in figuring out how to roll out Xbox Live on Windows Phone 7. Obviously, this leads to speculation that Amazon is looking to expand further into digital games as it’s already done with music, video, and digital books. And with Amazon working on non-Kindle hardware with ambitions for dual-screen readers, well, we’d say the question isn’t what, but when?

Amazon steals Microsoft’s Director of Game Platform Strategy for some reason originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 06:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Triumvir will re-release its handsome Street Fighter World Warrior line of T-shirts at a gamer-friendly price, the clothier tells Wired.com.

The line was originally launched in 2009 and has since gone out of print at Triumvir’s web store. The company says the original cut and design of the shirts will be maintained, but that only the character tees (designs featuring Akuma, Balrog, Cammy, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Fei Long, Ken, Ryu, Sagat and Vega) will be reissued.

In late 2009, Triumvir unveiled a pricey line of cut-and-sew apparel inspired by Street Fighter’s Shadaloo Brigade. A Triumvir line that dropped this April used designs from original Street Fighter II concept art.

Visit Triumvir’s web store starting Sept. 7 to nab the discounted tees.

Image courtesy Triumvir

See Also:

• Triumvir Unveils Street Fighter Attire
• New Super Street Fighter IV Shirts Draw on Original Concept Art

Brookyln rappers Das Racist released a new videogame to promote their single “Who’s That Brown” Thursday.

The retro-styled game finds the hipster rappers on a quest to find their hype man “Dap” when Justin Bieber and Jay-Z are waylayed by a limo accident and the duo are asked to fill in onstage.

Their journey takes the pair through myriad videogame genres. They beat up yuppies on the subway a la Double Dragon, ride Back to the Future hoverboards through the streets of New York in a sequence that looks straight out of Narc, and cross the East River, Frogger-style.

And yeah, they also bump into Sarah Palin (pictured above).

Das Racist is best known for its 2008 viral hit, “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell.” Visit the blog Your Music Today to see the non-interactive, music video version of Das Racist’s new Who’s That Brown game.

Image courtesy Das Racist

See Also:

• 8-Bit Imagery Invades Music Videos
• Video: 8-Bit-Styled Scott Pilgrim Game Launches Today

A gamer, a rabbity-thing, a heavy-weapons expert and a Mexican wrestler walk into a casino …

Telltale Games will release an all-star poker game built around just such an unlikely mix of videogame characters, the publisher said Thursday.

Poker Night at the Inventory will seat Tycho from Penny Arcade, Sam of Sam & Max fame, internet celebrity Strong Bad and The Heavy from Valve’s multiplayer shooter Team Fortress 2 at the same poker table, and will deal players in as the verbal sparks fly.

Wired.com spoke to Telltale Games CEO Dan Connors by e-mail to get the scoop on the new game.

He said Poker Night at the Inventory would play like the ultimate videogamer fan fiction. “We really thought about the sorts of things these characters would say and the different dynamics they would have with each other: Who would like who, who everyone would just loathe, etc.,” Connors said. The fully voiced characters will trash-talk, display unique tells and react dynamically to the game — promising to create a new experience every time.

Connors confirmed to Wired.com that Poker Night at the Inventory is a single-player game. “Our goal is to make the player feel like there are hanging out with their virtual buddies, shooting the breeze and playing a good game of poker,” he said. “Of course, if your buddies are sociopaths and professional killers, anything can happen.”

The $5 game comes to Steam this fall for the PC and Mac and is being released as part of Telltale Games’ Pilot Program — an effort to give new, risky game concepts a chance to shine. According to Connors, the game will have to sell between 100,000 to 200,000 units to be worth reviving as a franchise. “If this version with these game characters work, we will likely follow it up with new game characters or maybe other celebrities, rock stars and the like.”

Image courtesy Telltale Games

See Also:

• Homestar Runner Game Coming to WiiWare
• Christopher Lloyd Plays Doc Brown in Back to the Future Game …