knockknock.biz luggage tags. Photo courtesy of justinph.

I guess it's finally time for me to level up.

It was the summer of '99 when I convinced my then editor to send me on a tour of the U.S. videogame industry. When I finally returned three weeks later, my head was still spinning. I felt as though I'd seen the future of entertainment. It was then that I made it my mission to put NEWSWEEK's coverage of this growing medium on the map. I did that in print, with cover stories on the Japanese launch of the PlayStation 2 and the spread of online gaming. I did it online, with the debut of the blog N'Gai Croal's Level Up. I did it on television, with appearances on MSNBC and CNN. You all watched me push, prod, praise, scold, discuss and debate videogames across multiple media, both mainstream and enthusiast. That's because my editors were prescient enough to let me apply my talents and establish my reach beyond the magazine, from co-blogging with MTV News to writing a monthly column for Edge and more. For this, I say to them all, thank you.

Having achieved all of this, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that I've accomplished what I set out to do ten years ago. And now it's time for me to take that decade’s worth of accumulated knowledge and do something else with it. After Friday March 6th, my passions will take me beyond the world of journalism. I’ll be wearing many hats on this new journey: videogame design consultant, media strategist, consumer technology reporter, columnist, blogger and, as always, provocateur. You’ll be able to keep track of my various adventures at ngaicroal.com, and feel free to reach out to me via email at ncroalbiz@gmail.com. It’s been a pleasure conversing with all of you, and I look forward to continuing our dialogue in the years to come.

Cheers,

 Rockstar promotional party for Grand Theft Auto IV at Cielo in New York City 

In the run-up to the Launch of Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar Games hosted a series of intimate parties at a variety of New York City hot spots. Dubbed "Rockstar Games Presents Music From Grand Theft Auto IV," the events were pitched to us via email by Rockstar PR director Darlan Monterisi as "a rare series of intimate events representing the eclectic musical soundtrack for the upcoming epic crime drama. Each event (listed below) provides an authentic, engaging experience for you to not only experience the sounds of GTA IV first-hand in their organic format, but also an opportunity for one-on-one face time with the artists themselves and select members of the Rockstar Games team." Following a hands-on session with the game's multiplayer back in March (lovingly described in an April post by Kotaku head honcho Brian Crecente), we were given a copy of this flyer...

To read the rest of this installment of Page 110, click on the link below. 

 Echochrome, developed by Japan Studio and published by Sony Computer Entertainment

We're longstanding fans of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. We've gone hands-on with Grand Theft Auto IV--both single-player and multiplayer--and we desperately want to bring it home. And we can't wait to see how Cliffyb will put Unreal Engine 3's meat material simulator to use in Gears of War 2. But as of last E3, the 2008 game we've been looking forward to the most is Echochrome. Is it the austere art direction: black line art against a white backdrop that trails off into infinity? (Blame our clumsy resizing for the jaggies in the screenshot above; the game's image quality is pristine.) Is it the string-and-vocals melancholia of the game's classical music score? The hollow clip-clop sound of our marionette protagonist's footsteps? The deceptively simple puzzle-meets-platforming gameplay? Whatever it is, we were hooked instantly, and its appeal only increased after a limited hands-on session last fall.

We've had a near-final build in our possession since Friday and it's prompted some interesting observations, primarily around the following point: where will Echochrome fit into our videogame menu? Consider the following:

  Burnout Paradise, by Criterion Studios and Electronic Arts

We respect Gran Turismo. We've enjoyed Ridge Racer, Midnight Club and Need For Speed. But when it comes to racing franchises, there's only one that's ever seeped into our dreams, and that's Burnout. If Burnout 3: Takedown was, as one writer aptly described it, "Tekken with cars," then based on our ongoing experiences with near-final code, Burnout Paradise would have to be the Grand Theft Auto of driving, so carefully has Criterion Studios built the game to become the first game to truly get open world racing right. Need to repair your car or get a new paint job? Just drive through the appropriate building. Looking to add a new car to your collection? Spot it on the open road, hunt it down, take it out, then swing by a junkyard to pick it up. Ready to jump into a racing or stunt event? Pull up to an intersection and hit both the gas and the brake to get your competition on. This is truly open world racing done right, running at a blistering 60 frames per second and spit polished within an inch of its life to boot.

As excited as we are about the game, we suspect that the Burnout Paradise will nevertheless be somewhat polarizing. Traditionalists may find it difficult to to accept the go-anywhere, do-anything freedom which has replaced the event-by-event structure that typifies the majority of racing games; it certainly took us a good half-hour or so before we could finally let go of what had been and open ourselves up to what could be. Nowhere is this more true than Paradise's Showtime Mode, which has taken the place of the much-loved Crash Mode from previous Burnouts. Rather than being a separate mode as it had been in the past, Criterion has integrated it right into the open world of Paradise City; at any time, you just hit R1 + L1 on the PS3 (for Xbox 360, it's the two bumpers) to trigger Showtime, where as long as you have boost, you can detonate your vehicle and propel it into other cars. Each car you hit adds a dollar value to your damage total and boost to your meter, while buses serve as damage multipliers. Your mission is to keep the chain of collisions going for as long as you possibly can.

The Sycamore, one of several enemy types in Q-Games' PixelJunk Monsters for PS3

This generation it seems that publishers and developers are determined to make real-time strategy games a success on consoles. The past two years have already seen such games as Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-Earth II and Command & Conquer 3, both from Electronic Arts' Los Angeles studio, while next year is expected to bring with it both Halo Wars, from Ensemble Studios and Microsoft, and Tom Clancy's EndWar, from Ubisoft. And as any one of these developers will tell you, the challenge of successfully bringing an RTS game to consoles is largely one of interface. There's something about using an analog stick to move a cursor around that's vaguely but noticeably unsatisfying; almost no matter how good a job the developer does with the controls, it always manages to feel both slow and perceptibly imprecise, as though it's slightly out of your control

Q-Games' PixelJunk Monsters (see here for screenshots), for which we were granted an exclusive hands-on preview, gets around this problem in a couple of ways. First, its design inspiration is drawn primarily not from games like Command & Conquer or Warcraft, but rather from the RTS-lite browser-based games like Flash Element TD and Desktop Tower Defense, which are themselves stripped-down, simplified versions of the tower defense modes in "proper" RTS titles. Second, like its forebears, PixelJunk Monsters fits on a single screen, so players can take in the entire battlefield at once without being disoriented by having to scroll around a larger field of combat. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, players make their way around the battlefield not with a cursor, but with a forest defender who serves as their on-screen avatar, its short legs pumping furiously as it scrambles from one part of the screen to the next. It's a subtly elegant choice that both solves the nagging control issues and projects the player into the game world, like the third-person games with which consoles have long been identified.

To read the rest of our exclusive hands-on preview, click on the link below.