The Sadness, a Wii game that we were talking about (the one that lost his development team, and we guess, any publisher for that reason) said they found a new publisher (?)

“We would like to apologize for rumors and doubts that might have arisen. We want to assure that Nibris makes great effort to make our projects completely innovative and meeting highest quality standards”

And people still thinks this is happening, good for them. I don’t want to keep being a pessimist so I will wish everyone good luck; but we all know that when this kind of things happens the results are too obvious: 1) the game won’t be anything close to what they said in the first place 2) the game won’t be happening. Choose your poison; we just expect to see the people of NIBRIS launching their game and have a good amount of success. Keep it up people!

This blog post claims that, The Sadness (Wii) has no longer it’s developer team and we aren’t going to see anything from NIBRIS team in a long, long time after this. I’m the last surprised person after reading this, I knew this kind of thing will happen with this game because it had the usual “Prey/DukeNukem 3D-2″ signs all over it.

Hi FRONTLINE Studios; NIBRIS claims that you are programming the game called Sadness for the Nintendo Wii. […] I was just wondering if you can confirm that you
are programming the game Sadness for NIBRIS and can for a fact say that the game is not fake.

And, what the good people of FRONTLINE studios answered to this question? Well, here it is:

Hello Ryan, I can confirm that FRONTLINE is no longer interested in developing Sadness game based on Nibris’ concept, and also Nibris is not authorized to claim
anything on behalf of FRONTLINE.

Best regards,
Marcin Machel

Now, this is true sadness. People, start learning that you don’t disclosure your game idea until you have at least, 90% of the development completed; then you can come out and scream your idea to the world, but if you just have some concepts to show, people like our friend Ryan here that emailed FRONTLINE Studios will get angry and make too many questions; questions that could damage your reputation as developers and your future as a company. And Ryan is right, he is right to ask all the questions he wants, because he wants to know if the game is going out for true or he will end up, like many others, waiting for something that a) won’t be close to his expectations or b) won’t come out at all. Now, they will have a hard time getting something published again after this (that’s my point of view, I hope they get more of their games published! but it might become hard!)

Gamers are the only people developers should satisfy, not publishers. Games, need to be made FOR gamers; not for publishers or for the press. Hey, keep the spirit up, everyone; everybody! new games are still about to come!

Nintendo made the Wiimote with accessories capabilities, but there are just a few companies out there taking advantage of the great world of accessories, the reason; you need to keep developing games for specific accessories, and if the game you developed isn’t a success story then your accessory won’t make any sells either… But the good news is that there is still companies with big cojones, like Taito; the old mother of games has a great accessory for the Wiimote; a train control panel (yup, and it looks excellent). Here, have a look at this video showing it!:

There are some rumors that Capcom Entertainment is about to come up with a Soccer accessory, it may happen sooner than we expected! stay tunned!

I just read from Cubed3 that at the Nibris forums the people behind The Sadness is answering some questions from time to time about this “when-it’s-coming” game. We all know the dangers of announcing a game when it’s not even completed at %1; this can result into a lost of interest by most of the gamers or high expectations.

If you don’t believe me, just read this comments people left at Cubed3 site:

“This is sounding brilliant. I can tell it’ll probably mess up my mind when I play it but heck, I don’t care. It sounds great.”

“Orchestrated music?!?! HUZZA!! Do we know who’s composing??”

“Very nice news! I can’t wait for that trailer now!”

And the list goes on and on… people is taking this game too seriously and, the seem to expect being blowed up of their chairs. Cubed3d said “Graphics wise - the game will incorporate plenty of fog effects during gameplay, and when asked how close the concept screenshots would look to in-game, the company’s response, pleasingly, was, near. Very near.”. It sounds like someone may be doing promises they won’t be able to keep! but let’s wait and see what will happen. We already saw a lots of “prey” and “duke nukem 3D’s” during our past gamer’s years to be excited about some weird announcement someone did on the air.

Best case? well, if you ask me, I would say they are running like crazy to have at least a functional bug-free demo where they can meet 10% of the player’s expectations, then they will throw it to some cool editor who is going to make the trailer look like if it were going to be the last game for Wii. After that, we will wait another year and hopefully, we will have the game and then, it won’t be as super as everyone expected, it will be just another game but with a minor features that by then, everyone else will be having too.

But, that’s old gammer talking. Let’s the new generation learn from their own history! In the meanwhile, here is some new artowrk for the Wii Game, The Sadness.

Update: it appears that Nibris said to Cubed3 web site they will be releasing a trailer much more sooner they expected and they will be handling it to them (the Cubed3 people). The trailer will be sent this year and the game will be set to launch no later than 2008; that means November-December people, if not first months of 2008.

Just two days after we did the Wii/PS3 comparsion that nobody could ever read, because we just opened the doors and people isn’t yet reading this blog; Ken Kutaragi, the Playstation creator announced his retirement from Sony. I think it was obvious this would have to happen; Nintendo not just burst into the market by surprise, but also made Ken so sad he retired from Sony; and if you ask me, I would say “good for you Ken, that’s a very honorable gesture.” We need more people like Ken, when you didn’t made it work properly, step down and leave another guy have it’s chance; you can always come back later ALA Steve Jobs and make a hit; but you need to recognize your errors and step down. Good for him, really.

Here’s the whole Press release (via Destructoid)

TOKYO, JAPAN, April 26, 2007 – Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. (SCEI) and Sony Corporation (Sony) have jointly announced today that Ken Kutaragi, Representative Director, Chairman and Group CEO, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc., will retire from his executive position at SCEI effective June 19, 2007, when SCEI’s annual shareholders’ meeting will take place. Mr. Kutaragi will pass on the torch to the next generation, stepping back from his executive management responsibility of the company to serve as Honorary Chairman of SCEI. With his deep and instinctive insight into future technology, Mr. Kutaragi will also continue to support Sir Howard Stringer, Chairman and CEO, Sony Corporation, as senior technology advisor.
(Keep Reading the rest!)

Renegade Kid is an indie developer company that has made it’s debut with what appears to be the first Survival Horror game for the Nintendo DS. The screens are totally hot and the trailer online will make you drop your socks; it’s lovely to see how coders play with 3D so well on the DS. We expect more 3D games for the DS to come up soon!

You can appreciate the extremely worked textures and polygons on the screenshot, it is almost good as any PC game!, also, the light is something that they must be working on; I’m sure of that. It looks fascinating what you can create on the Nintendo DS! Here’s the official trailer:

We hope the people from Renegade Kid (for what I know, they are old school professionals, so good for them!) finish The Ward quickly so we can buy it from Wallmart!

Nintendo DS and the new Nintendo Wii are the most affordable consoles on the market; they graphics aren’t “Next-Gen” or they games being specially developed by a team of 900 developers by six years, and yet, they are selling more consoles in short time than any of their competitors; it’s the end of the Next-Gen consoles?

Currently, the big boss is the Nintendo DS with 508,000 sales only in america; and the Nintendo Wii is on third place with almost 260,000 consoles sold in March 2007. The Nintendo DS, a system with a poor 3D capability (let’s face it, isn’t the greatest 3D you will see in your life) and a full 2D engine with 2 screens, one of them touch sensitive has replaced Playstation 2 leaving it at second place with 280,000 sales that month. In economy, numbers are the king, they tell economists and business owners what is happening and predict what is going to happen; there is no “sure” prediction of course, but you can get a fair idea of what is going to happen in the next two years.

Everyone less the Electronic Arts Boss who recentyle decraled at the gamesindustry.biz online magazine the following:

Look at the price in two years’ time, and then you can say whether it’s too high”

said Gerhard Florin. He also said “I wouldn’t make any judgements within the next two years” (I’m sure he won’t!) .

Next Generaton Games are being developed in every Game Studio across the world; some people will try to burn me for what I’m going to say, but I think next-gen games aren’t about how many poligons a console can handle, or how big the textures can be, gosh! it isn’t even about the lights or physics you can add to it; it’s about the gameplay. But let’s go back to the facts and see how well the Wii is going, and why is going that well.
(Keep Reading the rest!)

No more Beautiful Katamari? after being announced it was called off?

Katamari Damacy (We love Katamari!) is one of the greatest game for the Playstation 2 console. The game’s plot concerns a tiny prince on a mission to rebuild the stars, constellations and Moon, which his father has accidentally destroyed. This is achieved by rolling a magical, highly adhesive ball called a katamari around various locations, collecting increasingly larger objects, ranging from thumbtacks to schoolchildren to mountains, until the ball has grown large enough to become a star. The game falls under both the puzzle and action game genres, since strategy as well as dexterity are needed to complete a mission. Everyone by know knows the Katamari Damacy line of video games; I’m sure of that.

It was announced for the NDS by the Nintendo Power magazine a while ago, but months and months have passed and still, we don’t see the prince rolling his Katamari anywhere close…

The director of Beautiful Katamari, Jun Moriwaki made an interesting comment recently and from that comment we can think they are expecting to come up with Katamari for the Nintendo Wii (basically, he express his willing to be challenged by the Nintendo Wiimote).

So we can sit tight and wait for Katamari to come up on the Nintendo Wii, but the future isn’t that bright for the DS system… it might be too much 3D for the little fellow. We hope we can see Katamari Damacy on the DS.

Won $499 USD executing the Linux operating system on a Wii

This must be the craziest contest I ever seen! The group of developers behind WiiLi (Wii Linux) challenges any developer to create a LiveCD of linux to be executed on a Nintendo Wii console without breaking the original system security on the Wii; they even made a first draft of the rules to be followed on their website; which includes:

• Boot Linux on the Nintendo Wii without voiding the warranty.
• Using attached hardware on USB, etc, is fine, as long it is documented what it does and where to obtain/build it.
• Wiimote, keyboard, mouse, dvd drive, sd-card and network support.
• Youtube video and how-to.

The WiiLi could be used to browse the web, send emails, write docs and maybe play games that aren’t made for the Wii; but if you ask me I think they are just making it for fun :_)

Let’s hope someone come with that soon!

F.E.A.R was a different game in many categories; they didn’t just made a new resident evil, they went further that. Yesterday I posted at the GameDev community (highly recommended community for any developer!) about what was the “WOW!” factor on some game they played; maybe can be the first time you jumped out a chair when a level at Doom turned off all lights and a door behind you opened with a big, fat Cacodemon spiting fire balls or when you suddenly realized at the first level of Condemned Criminals Origins that you just were thrown out of the window and landed on the roof of a car.

That’s the WOW! Factor to me; when you see something different happen; when you realize this will be a totally new experience from now on and you just don’t need to go killing everything that moves: it creates expectative, it makes you wonder what’s next.

Monolith fully integrated this system with the enemy’s dialogue and game environments in an effort to create the illusion that the AI was smarter than it actually is. F.E.A.R. was […]

Some people at the GameDev community posted on the thread I opened about that little moment during a game, some of them talked about Resident Evil, Zelda, Ned for Speed; but one of them (KulSeran) talked about F.E.A.R, a very recent game and how the AI (Artificial Intelligence) made his WOW! moment. Now the best part; someone (skittleo) posted a link to a GameSpy article written by William Harms; Monolith gave away some of their secrets on how they coded the AI on the F.E.A.R game; and it’s truly something clever that any level designer or game designer should read. He wrote:
(Keep Reading the rest!)

Thanks for all the people who supported WOW! Factor since it’s beginning (just 2, thanks guys).

The Team

Javier Cabrera: web designer with + than 5 years of experience; gamer since NES and still having fun with Megaman.

Carlos Cabrera: currently working for a successful Argentinean company that sells loads of games in the world, Carlos has made games his entire career. He is what some people call “a magician of colors” or illustrator, concept and sketch artist. Here Carlos will post from time to time some tutorials for game developers.

Why the blog is called WOW! Factor?

WOW! Factor is what games used to be once, when the industry wasn’t desperate to show zillion of poligons in one screen, when the developers built games for fun in a weekend, when people used to play games just for fun and to end up with a good story instead of playing to see the lastest next-generation graphics or to justify a $700 USD console they bought. No ofense, we just wanted to say it as clearly as possible; games need that WOW! Factor again, so that’s what this blog is all about. We aren’t developers, we are just people who enjoy playing games and want to communicate their ideas to the development community. We aren’t here to demand, we are here to suggest, like you!

Why the URL is called pdpanic.com?

It was called like that for a project Javier had on a web application, it didn’t worked out so he moved to another cool idea for the web, called 15tags; the dot come was already paid so here we are!

Why you don’t find another URL?

We lack of the will of making the effort. It’s a common decease.

Can I see more work from Carlos?

Sure thing! Just go over carloscabrera.com.ar and have a look! it’s a very well designed web site by the way… Some people think Carlos uses a special equipment to make an illustration; the truth is he can do the same illustrations or concepts by just spiting on a wall or a sheet of paper; he started with the mouse and then moved to a Wacon digital tablet (the cheapest and smallest one…)

It isn’t the hammer but how strong you hit with it you know!

We got a DS no more than a month ago and one of the first games we tried was Chaos Theory for the DS. Having played the Splinter Cell Double Agent for the PlayStation 2 I have to say; man, what a lack of creativity. Porting a game like that to the DS was just one of the worst thing they could ever do. You can’t use the same effects the PS2 have on the DS, so it looks like a bad attempt to do a 3D game. It run very, very slow and the bugs make it even worst; I’m sure they did the best possible job and that’s something to admire, but man, it didn’t needed to end up like that. They could stop the development without hurting the Splinter Cell saga like this… it is really a shame.

What went right

The game has been ported entirelly, of course, with shorter levels for the DS. The graphics aren’t the same, the effects aren’t the same and the weapons menu isn’t the same but the general idea is there, you can play the same gameplay you play on the PC, PS2 or any other console; that’s really something. Let’s think about it for a minute, SC isn’t a easy game to develop, even for plataforms with less limitations it becomes hard because it’s a game that depends a lot of the AI and the 3D graphics, what they did was actually great; they “port” it (sort of speaking) almost entirelly the same.
(Keep Reading the rest!)