UK studio is preparing to release its first iPhone music game, armed with major label tracks

UK startup 8linQ is hoping to spearhead a new wave of music games for smartphones and tablets, with its first game Say What?! due to be released on 20 July for iPhone armed with a licensing deal with major label Sony Music Entertainment.

The company is a joint venture between three partners: Music In Colour, Reactify and Metropolis Group. The first of those is a music production company formed by former staff from FreestyleGames, which developed the DJ Hero console games, while the latter is one of the most prestigious recording studios in the world.

Based at the studio complex in London, 8linQ has been working on Say What?! for several months, culminating in its launch next week with playable tracks from artists including Calvin Harris, Scouting for Girls, the Zutons and The Nolans.

“The music business needs to capture a new audience,” says joint managing director Chris Lee. “Rather than make a game then license the music, this is much more of a partnership. We think there is a great opportunity to leverage the mobile platform to build something that reaches a wider audience, and monetises music.”

Say What?! takes a different approach to DJ Hero and other console music games like Guitar Hero. Lee says that 8linQ’s key aim was to avoid any assumption that the game’s players will be experienced gamers.

The game uses a scrolling collection of icons, which relate to individual highlighted words within the lyrics to the current song, which are displayed above. If the word ‘I’ is highlighted, the player might have to tap on an eye icon, for example, while ‘down’ might be the cue to tap on a downward-facing arrow.

At higher difficulty levels, the clues get more cryptic. “There will be puns left, right and centre that take you a good five seconds to crack what the icon is representing,” explains Yuli Levtov, the game’s designer, and founder of the third partner in the joint venture: generative music studio Reactify Music.

“It’s almost a Generation Game mechanic: a simple layer that lives over the music,” says Lee. “We’re not trying to be cleverer than that. This is about something that appeals in its simplicity, and we’re trying not to niche it. It should appeal as much to 8-13 year-old girls as it does to 30-40 year-old males.”

Lee adds that Say What?! was inspired by iOS games like Cut the Rope and Trainyard. “They’re cute, you’re allowed to fail and it doesn’t matter,” he says. “Far too many games can fall into the trap of having a game mechanic based on failure, and the fear of failure driving you to do stuff. We don’t think that’s what the mobile audience wants.”

Say What?! will be free to download with four included tracks: one from a big Sony Music artist, and three from emerging acts signed to Music In Colour. Tracks from Sony – and ultimately other labels too – will be sold via in-app payments of £1.19 per song.

It’s the second example this month of a major label selling music within this kind of game, following EMI’s deal with Facebook games publisher MXP4. Downloads within Say What will be chart-eligible too.

“It will be a great story if you can take a catalogue title – a single that was released 20 or 30 years ago – and see it get into the top 10 with 100,000 downloads because it’s in a game,” says Ian Brenchley, joint managing director of 8linQ and managing director at Metropolis Group. “This is the merging of music and software in a really nice evolutionary form, that monetises music in a different way.”

Lee says that making games for iOS has been a fresh challenge for the team members who cut their teeth on DJ Hero and other console games.

“I love the immediacy of being able to create content,” he says. “Development cycles are so much shorter, and you get that immediacy of feedback too, where you can watch how your consumer is playing, react and develop new features. We have designed this game so that if we get a song at 9am, we can have it for sale by 9am the next day.”

Say What?! will also be the first game to be promoted using the Future Games Network, a service that is being launched by another UK developer, Future Games of London. The idea behind the network is to promote other developers’ iOS games to FGOL’s existing community of 18 million players.

It’s a good example of the promotional networks that are springing up around apps and games, just as 8linQ is an example of the kind of partnerships that are emerging as companies from different creative industries target the apps market.

Apps

iPhone

Games

Mobile

Mobile phones

Smartphones

Technology startups

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Calvin Harris

Scouting for Girls

The Zutons

Stuart Dredge

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Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is pure 21st century action cinema, a cacophonous opera of destruction and gunfire in intricately recreated cityscapes around the world

Earlier this week, at a studio complex somewhere in Kentish Town, Activision previewed what will certainly be one of the biggest entertainment events of the year. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, the latest in the long-running series of first-person shooters, is likely to make more money than any blockbuster movie release, and through subsequent downloadable content, it will continue to generate millions of dollars throughout 2012.

Last year, the Cold War-based Call of Duty: Black Ops shifted something in the region of 18m copies and became America’s biggest-selling game ever. But fans consider the spin-off Modern Warfare titles – developed by the original Call of Duty studio, Infinity Ward – to be the standard bearers for the series.

Of course, Modern Warfare 3 was always an inevitability, but nothing about its development has been predictable. Last year, several months after the release of the smash hit Modern Warfare 2, Activision sacked Infinity Ward co-founders Jason West and Vince Zampella for, “breaches of contract and insubordination”.

The duo sued Activision, Activision counter-sued and in the meantime dozens more Infinity Ward staff left, many joining their previous bosses at new development start-up, Respawn Entertainment, now working on an undisclosed project for EA. Very quickly, Activision revealed that it had also formed a new studio, Sledgehammer Games, with Glen Schofield and Michael Condrey previously of EA’s Visceral Games at its head, and a remit to work on the Call of Duty brand.

Indeed, the team was already being paired up with a restructured Infinity Ward to start work on Modern Warfare 3. The two companies have shared development duties – an increasingly common set-up in the modern industry, where projects can require teams of up to 200 people.

“We’re taking it to an entirely new level,” says Infinity Ward creative strategist Robert Bowling, displaying the customary games industry hyperbole. “We’re taking players into the heart of major cities all around the world, delivering urban combat in places like Manhattan and London. We’re also going throughout Europe, to Russia, parts of Africa, and the Himalayas – you will travel the world.” Yes you will, and judging by the two missions Activision revealed to us at the press event, you will blow most of it up in the process.

The story, apparently, picks up immediately after the close of Modern Warfare 2, in which Russia launched an invasion of the US, while the elite counter-terrorist squad Task Force 141, attempted to gather evidence against Russian ultranationalist leader Vladimir Makarov. “Washington DC is burning, ” explains Schofield. “Task Force 141 is either dead or on the run and battles rage along the eastern seaboard of the United States. You must now join with your delta team in Manhattan to help turn the tide against the Russians who have occupied New York City…”

Titled Black Tuesday, the first mission we’re shown picks up at the opening of the New York campaign. The player starts aboard a Black Hawk helicopter that’s just crash-landed in the city’s financial district. The objective is to get to the stock exchange, but there is a full-scale battle raging. Missiles cut through the sky, taking out vast chunks of Manhattan real estate. A front line of obliterated roads, burned-out police cars and crawling APCs is populated by groups of soldiers cowering behind great chunks of fallen masonry. It is, in short, what we expect from a Call of Duty set-piece – a cacophonous opera of destruction and gunfire, through which the player is closely guided by a computer-controlled superior (in this case, someone called Sandman).

From here, we burst into an office block riddled with bullet holes. An enemy chopper hovers outside, spraying everything with machine-gun fire. Then we’re out into an alley between tenements and fire escapes, before bursting into a jewellery store and engaging in another gun fight amid dozens of glass display cases exploding into shards.

The key moment is when we finally reach the stock exchange and indulge in a lengthy shoot-out on the trading floor, which has been intricately replicated – and then destroyed. Then we’re up a series of scaffolding platforms onto the roof where a thermite charge takes out a satellite dish, blocking enemy communications. From here, we get the grandstanding conclusion.

A comms link is established with a drone craft, and as in Modern Warfare 2, the player is able to remote-guide Reaper missiles at enemy positions, finally taking out a Hind and watching it spin to fiery oblivion in the streets below. But this isn’t quite the end. There’s still time to leap into a Black Hawk, laying down mini-gun fire, and duelling with another Hind between the skyscrapers – the final audacious moments see the two craft firing at each other through the superstructure of an unfinished building. It is every Michael Bay movie condensed into one roaring aerial showdown.

“The campaign is all about that cinematic intensity,” says Bowling, somewhat needlessly after what we’ve just experienced. “We are locked into delivering 60 frames per second; that’s what allows us to combine the high-speed gameplay and tight gun control. But the single player is just one aspect of a much, much larger experience.” Along with the main campaign, we’re promised the now customary Spec-Ops missions, and a two-player co-op option that will be apparently be massively built upon since its Modern Warfare 2 introduction. As for online multiplayer – well, something big is planned and an announcement is due next week.

To close the event, Bowling and Schofield show us another level, this time following the Bravo Six team on a covert mission in London’s docklands. An enemy weapons shipment is being unloaded, and we’re here to gather valuable intel (guided from the air by a voice actor who sounds uncannily like series regular, Craig Fairbrass).

There’s no indication of how this all links in with the Russian invasion of the US, but the air support is picking up heat signatures in a nearby warehouse and our job is, naturally, to take out the bad guys. The player is in control of a character named Burns who’s using a silenced P90 to pick off soldiers. Then we’re out into the dock and a full-on assault, with car alarms going off everywhere and Canary Wharf towering in the background, just visible through the night-time drizzle.

Whatever was offloaded from the ship has now seemingly been spirited off, and we’re giving chase in a truck, which thunders onto railway tracks and down into the tube system, where enemies fire from a hurtling train. We zig-zag between oncoming trains, taking constant fire. At one point, the whole cavalcade whips through a packed station, and we see commuters running in panic. We’re told to watch our fire – and for a second it looks like the infamous No Russian scene from Modern Warfare 2, where the player has to take part in a terrorist raid on a Russian airport filled with civilians. Eventually, the tube train jumps the track and spins through the tunnel in a fury of debris. And we’re out.

It is, as Call of Duty has always been, breathless stuff – a total sensory assault, this time lent an extra dramatic charge by those intricately detailed representations of familiar cityscapes. I wonder if the developers have considered how the use of such imagery will remind some of real-life atrocities in New York and London – and indeed, the trailer has already evoked the hysterical wrath of the Daily Mail, which has claimed that the tube train sections essentially simulate the July 7 bombings. It is an attention-grabbing connection, but it is also spurious; players will understand that the use of recognisable landmarks ramps up both the intensity and the stakes, and these hugely familiar cities have been destroyed countless times over the years in monster and sci-fi flicks.

With the tumultuous demo over, plenty of intriguing questions remain. We’re not sure if any favourite characters from previous Modern Warfare titles are returning, and there’s much to discover about the reworked multiplayer. In gameplay terms, amid the state-of-the art special effects and sheer graphical detail, the corridor-like structure is hugely familiar, a single route plotted through the chaos.

A question mark looms over whether the Modern Warfare 3 single-player mode can innovate beyond the restrictive formula of its predecessors. But then, do its millions of fans want it to?

This is a series based on bombast and bullets, and while last year’s Black Ops made a few interesting narrative sojourns into the territory of the 1970s conspiracy thriller, it looks like Modern Warfare 3 will be pure 21st century action cinema – a gigantic paean to the art of computer-generated destruction.

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 will be released on 8 November for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC

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Keith Stuart

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Details of the as-yet-unannounced Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 have been leaked online, and include an in-depth plot summary, images, multiplayer mode details and even a release date.

The follow up to the astronomically successful Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 hasn’t even been officially confirmed by publisher Activision, but gaming site Kotaku has spilled the beans on almost every aspect of the upcoming shooter, in what is probably the biggest gaming leak since the Nintendo 3DS was exposed early last year, months ahead of its E3 announcement.

Modern Warfare 3 is in development across studios Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games and Raven Software, and will probably get an official reveal at the upcoming E3 conference in Los Angeles. Any of the details in the leak are obviously subject to change before the final product hits the shelves, but the info that’s been released is incredibly detailed.

The game is bound to be one of the biggest titles of the year, so Activision will surely be tearing its hair out at this security breach. 

We wouldn’t want to fill any unwilling eyes with poisonous spoilers, so if you fancy finding out what happens in the game for yourself then stop reading now.

Okay, we’re good?

Sure?

Okay. So now we know that Modern Warfare 3 will kick off where the previous game left off, with the US under siege from Russian forces, crazy bad guy Vladimir Marakov still at large, and Captains ‘Soap’ MacTavish and Price wounded and on the run.

The game will take place across a wide variety of locations, including London, New York, Paris and Dubai, where the final showdown takes place.

The game will be released on 8 November, and the multiplayer is said to feature 20 different maps, including a battle in Brooklyn and closer to home in Lambeth — just down the road from CNET UK’s office. We hope the imposing Imperial War Museum is part of the map.

If you’re keen to see the complete plot (it involves frequent changes of location and lots of shooting), and a tonne more spoilers, pictures and audio clips, head on over to the original story. And let us know what you think about the whole debacle in the comments, or on our Facebook page.

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The duo will be pole-vaulting onto Wii and 3DS, with new events and features for their successful multi-sport adventures.

Sega has announced Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games, the latest in the hugely successful series of multi-sport tie-ins starring the two legendary gaming mascots. The first title in the series to name a specific Olympic location is being developed for the Wii and 3DS at Sega Japan and a release date is expected to be revealed later in the year.

On the Nintendo Wii, the London title is set to boast new sporting tasks such as football and equestrian events, as well as favourites like athletics and table tennis. The 3DS outing is apparently set to feature 50 ‘original Olympic-themed’ challenges, which makes it sound a little like a WarioWare title, which should be fun. Both versions will offer single- and multiplayer modes.

Mario and Sonic were bitter enemies during the 90s when the Super Mario Bros titles went moustache-to-spike against Sega’s Sonic the Hedgehog series. However, the intense rivalry was put aside several years ago when the duo discovered a mutual love of Olympian sporting events. So far, their previous co-projects, Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games and the fiendishly named Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games, have sold over 19 million copies.

To celebrate the announcement, Sonic and Mario have spent the afternoon travelling around London on a double-decker bus, having their photos taken in front of various landmarks. I’m hoping they were also pictured having a snog outside the John Snow pub in Soho, although I fear this is unlikely.

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Keith Stuart

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Take a look at some of the best moments from the Star Wars, Harry Potter and Indiana Jones movies, recreated in hilarious LEGO fashion on PlayStation.

As the release of LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game on PlayStation 3 and PSP sails into view for a May 2011 release, we recollect eight of the most memorable scenes across the range of LEGO videogames to date.

LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game (PlayStation 2) – “We’ll handle this” No Star Wars fan can forget the first time they saw deadly Sith lord Darth Maul reveal his double bladed lightsaber. An epic battle ensues, with Maul taking on the fierce Jedi Qui-Gon Jin and his youthful apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi. While Qui-Gon loses his life, he is avenged by Obi-Wan slicing Maul in two – perfectly recreated in LEGO Star Wars.

LEGO Star Wars: The Video Game (PS2) – “Only a Sith deals in absolutes”A lifelong friendship brought to a violent end, the duel between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-Wan is adapted into a platforming romp before lightsabers are drawn over a lava ravaged cavern. The end result is the creation of Darth Vader, who is an imposing individual even as a minifigure.

LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (PlayStation 3, PSP, PS2) – “Sorry about the mess”Forget When Harry Met Sally – when space scoundrel Han Solo met bounty hunter Greedo the results were nothing short of explosive. In both the movie and game, Han shoots Greedo dead before the little green alien can claim the bounty on Han’s head. In true LEGO style, Greedo’s fate is a little less grisly, as Han’s laser blast turns his foe into a harmless pile of green bricks.

LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (PS3, PSP, PS2) – “No… I am your father” In one of the most iconic scenes in movie history, the villainous Darth Vader duels with trainee Jedi, Luke Skywalker, before cutting off Luke’s hand and uttering his devastating revelation. The rousing emotion of the film’s moment is brilliantly turned on its head in classic, tongue-in-cheek LEGO, style, as Vader pulls out an old family photo as proof of Luke’s parentage.

LEGO Harry Potter Years 1 – 4 (PS3, PSP) – “Welcome, Harry, to Diagon Alley”Harry Potter has an incredible introduction to the world of witches and wizards when he arrives at Diagon Alley. Hidden from the eyes of non-magical folk (Muggles), this London street is full of treasures and the game captures this sense of wonder with magical objects and hilariously recreated places such as The Leaky Cauldron pub and Gringotts Wizarding Bank.

LEGO Harry Potter Years 1 – 4 (PS3, PSP) – “Troll in the dungeon!”When the cowardly Professor Quirrell finds a brutish troll in Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, guess who runs into it? Harry and Ron are the poor students who have to deal with the dangerous monster in the school bathrooms, with the game turning the incident into a boss fight. It takes more than a club on the head to put this troll down…

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (PS3, PSP) – “Throw me the idol, I’ll throw you the whip!”It’s been spoofed many times, yet only LEGO can make Dr Jones’ escape from a giant boulder look as cute as it is menacing. Indy is eventually caught by the rolling rock and fired out of the booby trapped temple, only to be forced into giving up the precious idol he risked his life for in the first place.

LEGO Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures (PS3, PSP) – “Look out!”The fight on the Flying Wing is one of the most intense scenes from Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, and it’s captured brilliantly in the game. Indy’s battle with a hulking Nazi mechanic is given a twist with comedy anvils and a startling finale which thankfully isn’t quite as gruesome as the original.

Why not experience these and many more classic moments for yourself? Build some colourful memories with the LEGO titles on PlayStation and get ready for LEGO Pirates of the Caribbean on PlayStation 3 and PSP in May 2011.

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The veteran games designer and Lionhead chief says he wants to prove himself after being awarded a fellowship

Peter Molyneux has admitted to having moments of doubts about his future as a games designer. After accepting his Bafta fellowship to a standing ovation at the Bafta video game awards on Wednesday, the industry veteran told the Guardian that some disappointing reviews of Fable III had led to him questioning his abilities.

“The Fable III the reviews were, justifiably, not what I’d hoped for,” he said. “We just weren’t good enough with the craft of what we did. That always makes you reflect. And I said to myself late one night, ‘Have I already created the greatest game I’m ever going to create? Is the rest just a downhill struggle?’ And the next day a letter came through the post telling me I’d been nominated for a Bafta fellowship. And I just thought, ‘I am going to prove that I haven’t done my best.’ Everything I’ve done up to this point is just training for what I should do.”

Molyneux also admitted to being overwhelmed by emotion when accepting his award. “I feel unbelievably humbled. As I walked up on stage I almost fainted. There was this sea of faces, and lots of people I’ve worked with before, and everyone stood. I was choking up. It was an incredible feeling, and I do immediately want to go home and start proving that I’m really, truly worthy of this.”

The industry veteran also took the opportunity to praise games in general and spoke about an “energy in the air” right now for developers. “Tens of millions of people are choosing games as a medium of entertainment. Over my career I’ve gone from selling games on trestle tables at royal horticultural halls in London to a night like tonight. I remember standing in front of the press in 1991 arguing that computer games are art by any definition, they have cultural influence! But what should worry people in film and TV is we’ve only just started. Only now, when you see social gaming, mobile gaming and Kinect coming on, you think, Jesus, where is this all going to go? That’s what’s exciting.”

In his acceptance speech Molyneux humorously touched on his reputation of over-promising on his games, but denied it was a PR tactic. “I’m not over-promising, I’m over-believing. I always truly believe that this is going to be the greatest game of all time – I wouldn’t try to do it any other way. But now I’ve come to realise that, you know what? It’s all about the execution. You can be super-passionate, but you need to execute on it.”

When asked how his current game projects will be affected by the Bafta acknowledgment he said: “At Lionhead, we always have a meeting on Fridays and I think I will stand up and say, ‘This award is for everyone.’

But I’ll also say to them, ‘Let’s ensure our next game is nominated next year!’”

Games

Keith Stuart

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All the good stuff that people talked about in our Chatterbox forum a couple of weeks ago.

This could be a first, even for Best of Chatterbox: a week’s worth of compiled discussion arriving a week after the following week’s edition. Yes, we’ve already reminisced over the week of January 17-21, so now, let’s head back, prequel-style, to the seven days that immediately proceeded it. Perhaps that way we can work out how and why the chat developed as it did. Though I seriously doubt that.

So let’s forget continuity; let’s embrace the concept of a quantum universe in which causality and linearity are mere illusions, rebounding along the planes of the multiverse.

Edited by Lazybones, this week’s Best Of may contain boasting, a Doom boardgame and a Chatterbox text adventure.

Monday

People have conducted studies and found the second Monday of January to be the most depressing day of the year. Some will have you think it’s the first Monday, or even the third. But they are wrong. The most depressing day of 2011 was Monday the 10th of January.

Misery loves company, however, and what better way to spend it than with a miserable bunch of borderline sociopaths, on the internet.

A day like this might read as follows:

People boasted. They boasted about their weekends. They boasted about how much they could drink. They boasted about how big and expensive their houses were, their cars were, their gardens were. People boasted about what games they’d played, completed, bagged platinum on, then traded away (at a profit). They boasted about how fast they could fall asleep in public. They boasted about what music they liked, what bands they had been in, how many millions of records they’d sold. People boasted about how their dreams were better than everyone else’s.

“A friend of a friend of mine is a professional footballer” said one.

Impressive.

A 90 minute break for lunch, and the inevitable sandwich boasting followed. People then began to moan about how things were so overrated. “The Day of Heresy”, they called it. Killzone 2, pensioners, Scott Pilgrim, Bob Dylan, fat people in mobility scooters. Star Wars. All rubbish. All cultural tat.

“A couple of choice efforts aside, The Beatles were a bit shit,” someone snivelled.

“**** off you ridiculously biased has-been”, came the reply.

Tuesday

Tuesday began, with several updates, from those with family affected by floods in Australia. No one had suffered any losses, thankfully, other than those of possessions and property. CountGinula offered his own balm to the Australian psyche: “Losing the Ashes in such a pathetic manner must burn deep.” Sensitive stuff.

The morning parade of gaming then began: AssBroHo, Blops, NFS, PES and BFBC2, followed by Blood Bowl chat as the Chatterbox Open League kicked off. This prompted the age-old quandary over which were the “cheatiest” Blood Bowl teams (Dwarves, Norse, or just anything CunningStunt picked.)

SerenVikity thwarted a James Bond wannabe attempting to inveigle her into a workplace fraud. Limni was particularly praising: “Well done dealing with James Bond. You should try and give him some work to do, then when he says ‘do you expect me to process all these invoices today?’ you can say ‘No Mr Bond, I expect you to die.’” You see, it is possible to have fun at work.

Wednesday

Were someone to picture the week as a typhoon – a whorling tempest of chat – then Wednesday would be the eye. The empty centre. Chat to not blow a house down.

1. Blood Bowl2. Football3. Marvel Pinball

Three ball-based games. The chat itself was like a ball, languidly chucked about.

The writing was on the wall but people would not format it. If this was graffiti, on the blank walls of the Guardian website, then it was penises and scrawled jokes. This was no cultural explosion. This was not the street …

EnglishRed was down on Gypsies.SerenVikity was down on London.SuperSmashin was up on London. A dunk in the net – a burst of positivity, but it was simply more boasting.

CunningStunt told SuperSmashin to “man up”.

People made their excuses and left.

Thursday

Ever since übergeek Umboros fled the safety of the gamesblog to live the dream of working for Games Workshop there has been space for a new pretender to the bejewelled geek throne. One of the newest bloggers, R042, came out blazing: “If people are interested, I have been working on recreating the actual map layouts from Doom 2 to play in the board game, complete with secrets, where they should be and so on.”

Devotion.

At lunch, thoughts turned to alcohol, and ended up at the British Film Institute bar. Accusations of poor service unless impeccably dressed were met with quick rebuttal by BeardOfBees: “the BFI is a serious place, for serious people to watch serious films. I’m guessing the bar is also serious.”

There then came grumbling. Things weren’t as good as they used to be, people said. The chat had become moribund. Someone pointed out that making double entendres out of pedestrian statements was just well … lazy: “a poor joke. It’s not funny!” Seconds later new kid on the block Fegbarr earned his spurs: “Talking about your sex life again?”

“BOOM! That one is outta the park!”

Friday

A burst of life and Amipal greeted the dawn …

“Hello residents of Gamesblog City. To the south, we have the beach-side condos, where on any sunny day a bronzed TonyHayers may be seen topping up his tan. The financial district to the east is home to many bloggers whose unfortunate jobs are in banking, such as myself. Over to the west, the poet’s district hosts those who have a way with words – enter a pub, and you’re sure to find HereComesTreble holding a crowd transfixed with his rambling. And to the north, we have the suburban area for everyone else. Of course, we don’t really talk about the shanty-town that has sprung up on the outskirts, home to the lurkers. A dirty place.”

There was talk of Blood Bowl, Black Ops and Bad Company 2, as usual, while the Chatterbox’s NaN Clan appeared to be going from strength to strength. Some regarded this as a betrayal of the Clan’s core values – namely to have fun whilst remaining useless. EnglishRed explained: “Being generally poor at games is what NaN is all about –if you’re too good it smacks of being a socially inept recluse.”

SteveST cruised into view, gristly thighs pumping. The stogy being chewed? Classic D-Day film – The Longest Day. “… Couldn’t help wondering how much it would cost to bring so many big stars together in one film nowadays, and indeed whether such a coming together could work at all let alone as well as it did in TLD.”

Amipal referenced The Expendables as a modern-day equivalent. A spurious claim. Pdmalcolm mooted A Bridge Too Far and The Great Escape, boasting, as they do, similar all-star casts. EnglishRed posed The Thin Red Line. A good shout.

But the law of entropy soon took hold. The chat broke down into talk of “big ones”, implications and blood-stained pitches.

Another week gone. The cycle of chat, again, complete.

Quotes of the week

“Scadenfreude is a valid emotion. Stop oppressing me or I’ll bottle up everything and become a crazed gunman.”Sheep2 – many a true word is said in jest (and, just in case, we have informed the authorities)

“Most interview situations can be successfully resolved by the introduction of a signed picture of Dolph Lungren.”Loser flexes his life-coaching muscles

“I’m up to speak in 10 minutes. It’s been incredibly boring so far. Time to take it to the max. Or not. Whatever, I’m not really in the mood today. Probably all the James Blunt I’ve been listening to. Have you heard of him? Fantastically talented guy. Just listening to his lyrics, it’s like he can see into my heart or something. Powerful stuff.”Herecomestreble – man enough to listen

End game

Join the official Gamesblog spotify list and share your own favourite tunes. Last addition – ‘Sexy Music’ by the Meat Puppets [great choice, WeeCooper! – Keef]

Check the Gamesblog wiki for everyone’s game tags and more!

This week’s ‘Best of’ was written by Herecomestreble, Crispycrumb, Lazybones, RustyJames and Limni. It was edited by Lazybones

Keith Stuart

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Cory Archangel at The Barbican, plus a fascinating online study of gaming semiotics.

Once in a while we like to inform you of art events with a video gaming slant – and two have dropped into my inbox this week. First up, Brooklyn-based digital artist Cory Archangel has an exhibition at The Barbican’s Curve gallery from February 10 until May 22. Entitled Beat The Champ, the installation features a series of monitors showing various bowling games, from the earliest virtual version of the sport on the Atari 2600 to modern iterations on current consoles. The machines playing the games are also being exhibited, each of which has been hacked by Cory to endlessly play the games. I’ve written about Archangel’s work several times on the Gamesblog, and interviewed him while he was curating an exhbition in London. He’s best know for his hacked game installations, including Super Mario Clouds, which features the popular platformer with all the visuals removed apart from the clouds, and I Shot Andy Warhol, a version of the old lightgun game Hogan’s Alley, with famous icons replacing the standard targets. His work is often about changing the contexts and challenging the semiotics of game design and game meaning – but the visual impact of all these games flickering away along the Barbican’s walls will be worth catching in its own right.

Similarly, you can now also visit the online exhibition, The Semiotics of Video Games. The site collates various videos and digital images that analyse how games impart meaning through graphics and icons. There’s some fascinating stuff in here, including another interesting Super Mario work, this time showing one level from the point of view of two Gombas. Some of the prose is rather academic, but the ideas about the nature of empathy, assocation and immersion in video game worlds are worth thinking over and arguing with.

Games

Game culture

Keith Stuart

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World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm is coming, and with the end of the fantasy world nigh, WoW-maker Blizzard and our brave friends at GameSpot UK are going out in style together on the End of the World Tavern Crawl.

If the chance to win VIP tickets to the game’s launch party — where a special mystery guest will reward you with a collectors’ edition of the game — isn’t enough, the fact that they’ll be signed by all attending Blizzard team members should seal the deal. Simply turn up at the Slaughtered Lamb pub in Clerkenwell, London, on 3 December — this Friday — to begin your quest.

The crawl will lead you from tavern to tavern, where quest givers — hopefully with foil exclamation marks over their heads, we’ll have to see though — will impart hints and clues as to the whereabouts of the next watering hole. The first three people to make it through to the final location will win the grand prize, while close runners-up will be awarded various other Blizzard loot.

For all you exhibitionists who like to get your face on camera, GameSpot UK will be in attendance documenting the entire outing, so make sure you wash your best druid robes. The competition is for 18s and over only — for further information check out the details over at GSUK.

This blog is updated frequently each day with the latest Free PlayStation 3 news and reviews.

Latest game in Activision’s Call of Duty franchise poised to become biggest-selling title of all

As premieres go, it was unconventional. Held in a cavernous temporary structure in London’s Battersea Power Station, rather than the cosy confines of Leicester Square, the assembled celebrities – along with the likes of Sophie Ellis-Bextor, Alex Reid, Duncan James from Blue, Goldie, Calum Best, Gail Porter plus, ahem, the girls from The Only Way Is Essex – for once happily mixed with the non-VIPs.

But that was because rather than celebrating the launch of a film, they were participating in the video game industry’s annual moment in the pop-culture limelight – the launch of a new Call of Duty game, this time subtitled Black Ops.

It would be easy to scoff at the lack of mega-celebrities, but the attraction of the event was obvious – Call of Duty: Black Ops has a good chance of being crowned the most successful entertainment launch of all time. Its predecessor, last year’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, is the current holder of the Guinness World Record for most successful entertainment launch of all time, with day-one global sales of £242.4m, comfortably beating any previous movie, as well as previous game holders Grand Theft Auto IV and Halo 3.

But instead of posing, the celebrities got stuck into demonstrating their credentials as gamers – an online match-up between European celebs saw Manchester City and England footballer Wayne Bridge come a close second to his Dutch counterpart, beating the rest of Europe in the process.

George Lamb compered proceedings, which included a tantalising glimpse of the game’s early stages (games are too long to play in full at such an event) and culminated with a live set from Tinie Tempah.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 sold more than 20m copies worldwide, staggeringly grossing over $1bn (£618m), and Activision hopes that Black Ops will do even better than that. Few would accuse it of over-optimism. Analyst Nick Parker, director at Parker Consulting Ltd, says: “With a growing installed base of consoles in homes, especially after the recent price drops, Black Ops could very well become the best selling Call of Duty iteration.”

The glitzy premiere was backed up by the midnight opening of more than 400 stores around the UK – including 70 branches of HMV – at which fanatical gamers queued to be among the first to get their hands on the game, which casts players as various US military black operatives during the Cold War era, in locations such as Russia, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam.

Many retailers enticed gamers to their stores at midnight with discounts if they either bought or traded in games from the current charts. Cheekily, HMV, for example, is offering CoD: Black Ops for £7.99 if you trade in a copy of the recently released Medal Of Honor, published by Activision’s arch-rival Electronic Arts.

On paper, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that Black Ops would achieve the success enjoyed by Modern Warfare 2. Activision employs two developers, Infinity Ward and Treyarch, to ensure that a new version of Call of Duty arrives every year, and Black Ops is made by Treyarch, previously the less favoured of the two. But Treyarch has upped its game, concentrating solely on Black Ops and employing a massive team of more than 200 people, and previews of the game have been overwhelmingly positive.

The games industry could use the boost provided by Black Ops, as well as this week’s high-profile launch of Microsoft’s innovative body-sensing controller, Kinect. Retailers have reported games sales as being down on 2009 so far, although we have yet to move into the crucial Christmas sales period.

But Andy Payne, chairman of UKIE, the UK’s trade body for games publishers bullishly argues that games consoles have greater penetration in UK homes than last year. “Black Ops, Football Manager 2011, Fallout New Vegas, FIFA 11, Fable 3 and others have boosted the market for AAA boxed games releases, for sure, and Kinect and Sony’s Move will refresh everyone’s hardware,” he says.

“But, given the huge audiences for games on all formats, 2010 has been a year of unprecedented activity and focus. The industry has widened beyond all expectations and will continue to expand exponentially in 2011.”

If Black Ops does out-gross Modern Warfare 2, it will suggest that the argument that video games are relatively immune to recession holds up, because people still buy products which offer long periods of entertainment. In terms of quality, the games industry certainly isn’t slacking, with the titles Payne mentioned – plus the hotly anticipated Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, followed by the likes of Gran Turismo 5, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword and Dead Space 2 early next year – all deserving to sell well.

But Call of Duty: Black Ops looks nailed on for the coveted Christmas number one slot, which was snaffled so comfortably by Modern Warfare 2 last year that bookmaker Paddy Power paid out early.

Although the all-format FIFA 11, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit could well be worth each-way bets. Things, at least, are looking rosy for gamers this Christmas.

Games

Xbox

Microsoft

PS3

Steve Boxer

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