News: Fable III has no experience, health bar

“Experience seemed 1990s” – Molyneux. Presenting at Fable III at X10 in San Francisco, Peter Molyneux has revealed that the RPG – if you can still call it that – has no experience points or health bar. Health is represented by the screen-colouring effects common in action and FPS games – Fable III has no HUD most of the time – while your character grows in power according to how many followers he or she has in the game’s world of Albion. Levelling up is also represented by your weapons, which grow and change appearance according to how much and how you use them. “It’s an RPG without a health bar or experience,” Molyneux said in a demonstration. “Because we put the levelling up into the world, with followers, you don’t need experience.” Read more…

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News: Fable III has no experience, health bar

Fable III’s Three Big Innovations: Touch, Weapons And Kingly Responsibility [X10]

Three major shifts in gameplay mechanics will make Fable III the most innovative entry in the popular role-playing game franchise, developer Peter Molyneux told a gathering of journalists today at Microsoft’s X10 event. Fable III will present three key changes in play: In-game touching, highly-customized weapon morphing and the challenge of ruling a kingdom. Molyneux demonstrated the game for Kotaku and other reporters at Microsoft’s big X10 showcase in San Francisco. The event highlighted the Xbox 360’s biggest 2010 games. “You will start out the game as the 18-year old [child] of your Fable II character,” Molyneux said. “You’ll find that Albion is being ruled by a tyrant. You are going to storm the castle with all of the people who follow you you’re going to take him down and then people are going to come to you and say, ‘You promised you would eradicate slavery.You promised turn factories into orphanages. You promised to stop childhood labor’. “We are going to make your time as a ruler a little bit tough.” Fable III will also include a major overhaul of the on-screen user interface. Molyneux said that he looked at first-person shooters for inspiration, admiring the way they can give information without numbers or graphs. The look of Fable III we were given featured a screen entirely devoid of icons, maps or bars. Fable III won’t display experience points, Molyneux said. Instead your experience is shown by the number of followers you have, something dictated by your skill as a hero, a combatant, a ruler and a promise keeper. Forget about a health bar, too. “We made the health bar one pixel and we thought, ‘What are we doing man? No one is going to do that. Let’s do what shooters do so well and make the world your health bar,’” Molyneux said. Breakthrough One: Touching The importance of context will also play a role in how you interact with the game’s other characters as well, Molyneux said. Players will guide Fable III’s hero, perhaps with wife, children and, yes, a dog, through the game, using a new context-heavy system that focuses on the player’s character grabbing hold of non-player characters to interact with them. The play mechanic is in part inspired by Ico’s hand holding, Molyneux said as he pointed to the screen at an image of a young man running through a cobble-stoned street to a house. “I live here with my wife,” he said. “We allow you to get married again. You can have children again and a dog. The dog is much more dog-like… make sure your dog never sees a rabbit. The dog in Fable III hates rabbits.” The scene on the big screen television then shifts as the character runs through the town, following his dog as he “is scenting” your daughter. Molynuex explains that his in-game wife is worried that their daughter has been kidnapped and has asked him to go get her. In the live presentation, Molynuex’s character finds her playing with other children in another part of town. You can still use the directional pad to choose facial expressions to decide how to interact, in this case deciding whether to praise or scold your daughter. “You tell her off and now we can take her home,” Molyneux said. “In Fable II you press the A button. In III you use a trigger. When you press the trigger the most appropriate thing happens. This time you comfort her because she is upset. You pull the trigger again and you take her hand and guide her.” On the television the hero, holding his young daughter by the hand, gently leads her through the street. “This is using all of our AI because it is highly context-sensitive,” he said. On TV, the hero tries to lead his daughter to a pub, but she pulls back, pointing out that her mom, your wife, had asked you to stop going to the pub. “In creating this system I thought, how can I use touch to increase the drama. of a moment, especially if someone pissed me off,” he said. That could be done, Molyneux says, by allowing you to grab someone by the scruff of the neck and drag them down into your dungeon and throw them in. Molyneux’s character then walks up to a homeless man and takes him by the hand. The man follows, saying that he thinks he’s taking him home for a dinner. Then the man stops in his tracks as they turn a corner and a factory looms ahead. “We’re going to sell him to the factory,” Molyneux says. The man, visibly frightened, begins to pull away, but the character continues to drag him to the factory. The homeless man begins to beg, “Don’t sell me to those fiends. You might as well put a bullet in my head.” Molyneux says all of the contextual touching will also work in cooperative modes, allowing you to interact with other players in the same way. The co-op will also allow you to separate in game, he said. “You could go off earning money, while I go off to kill people,” Molyneux said. “It’s a true co-op experience.” Breakthrough Two: Weapon-Morphing Another major new feature of the game is a tweak to morphing. While a character’s look will still morph to suit the gamer’s play style, the way it happens has been completely overhauled. The game will also apply morphing to your weapon. “Weapons morph from boring things when you first pick them up to really interesting things depending on the way you use them,” he said. The color, texture and what’s written on them is controlled by what you kill with them. The size and length, sharpness and curvature is dictated by how often you fight and the duration of those battles. Whether a weapon drips blood or glow depends on if you kill innocent or evil people. Finally, all of that is blended with your actual Gamerscore to create your weapon. “So your weapon is completely unique to you,” he said. “You can trade your weapon if you like. There will be thousands of totally unique weapons in the game. On screen, characters fight in caverns, the dungeons of Fable III. One begins to glow, sprouting fiery red wings and horns as he swings a sword into people. Another character sprouts glowing blue wings. Another character hoists an axe straight up in the air above his head, spinning around twice before leveling the axe and tearing into an enemy. Breakthrough Three: Kingdom-Ruling While the ability to rule kingdom and act on your impulses, for the good or the bad, is an important part of Fable III, it only comes into play about halfway through the game, Molyneux said. And don’t worry, he added, it won’t make the game a real-time strategy title. “I love the idea of the map in an RTS,” he said. “But I don’t want the mechanic of an RTS, all I want is its sense of power.” One way Fable III does that is by allowing players to pass judgments as law, changing the fabric of the kingdom. “Conventionally, a game is all about a hero’s journey,” he said. “You start weak and build up your power, take on the bad guy and then the credits roll. “We decided why stop there.” Key to the second half of the game is carefully balancing your need to attract followers with promises, and the followers insistence that you keep your promises. “On the journey to becoming king… the temptation is to promise everything,” he said. “Then you become king and you realize, ‘Oh shit baby, this is not so simple. “Look at Obama. He came into power and promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay. It should have been easy, pick up the phone and close it, but it isn’t.”

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Fable III’s Three Big Innovations: Touch, Weapons And Kingly Responsibility [X10]

On the Obligations of Video Games [Weekend Reader]

Steve Gaynor, a designer at 2K Marin , understands that he works in an entertainment field, and provides a product nonessential to basic human needs. That doesn’t mean video games – and their makers - have no obligation to the public. News reports frequently mention studies that indicate some benefit to playing video games, whether in cognition or critical thinking skills, or physical benefits like hand eye coordination or therapy. Gaynor incorporates some of those examples into his manifesto, which is that games must make the player think. It’s a bedrock design principle that will keep gamers from being an underserved constituency. All media and genres of art have their schlock; Hollywood is a great example, so are commercialized works of fiction, paintings, you can come up with an example of high art and yard-sale garbage in all cases. But games seem to face a higher barrier to acceptance and legitimacy, both due to their origins and their nature. So it would seem to me that the obligations Gaynor describes for games are not only to gamers, but also to the medium as a whole. An Obligtion [Fullbright, blog of Steve Gaynor, Jan. 23] Video games by their nature rely on the input of the player to mean anything. The fact that you can fail at your entertainment is in some ways a barrier to entry for video games. But it’s also the medium’s defining characteristic, and our one inherent hook for engaging the player and making them important. It’s our opportunity to make the player think. Not to encourage or invite players to in the way that challenging music, art or film might, but to absolutely require demonstrable logical reasoning from our audience. To immerse them in a world and motivate their progress through it with the promise of constantly evolving core interactions and intriguing fiction, then require them to engage their powers of visualization, abstract thinking and mental mapping to proceed. It’s good for the health of the player’s brain. I think of that as being meaningful and enriching entertainment. This kind of on-the-fly problem solving is accomplished by activity in the player’s prefrontal cortex, employing fluid intelligence and working memory. One’s fluid intelligence decreases over their lifespan, making them less able to formulate new ways of thinking. However, some scientific and military studies have shown that engaging in interactive mental exercises that require us to make these kinds of connections can slow the decline of fluid intelligence, essentially keeping our brains younger and healthier as we age. They’re the kinds of mental challenges that video games can ably provide— creating and maintaining logical connections between new and abstract concepts and spaces to overcome obstacles— that might confer this benefit to players, along with their escapist fun. Not all games work this way, certainly. As blockbuster, spectacle-focused rollercoaster games rise in popularity, we seem to see less of these sorts of challenge structures in gaming’s mainstream. When the game I’m playing doesn’t need me— when I can sleepwalk through it, when I can tune out and let it wash over me, when it doesn’t make me think— an opportunity has been wasted. Our work can be more than an empty waste of time for our players. We can entertain them while engaging their minds in ways beneficial to their cognitive wellbeing. I think that there is practically an obligation to do so, if we’re going to dedicate ourselves to creating interactive entertainment at all. – Steve Gaynor Weekend Reader is Kotaku’s look at the critical thinking in, and of video games. It appears Sundays at noon. Please take the time to read the full article cited before getting involved in the debate here.

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On the Obligations of Video Games [Weekend Reader]

I Will Now Attempt To Explain A Battle System [Battle Systems]

Ladies and gentlemen of Kotaku, children of all ages. I will now attempt to explain to you the battle system in Sega and Tri-Ace’s upcoming role-playing game Resonance of Fate . Drumroll please. (And let me know if I lose you.) Resonance of Fate, fine people, is a role-playing game set in a fantasy future. Imagine a mile-high beanstalk of a tower, with leaves of terrain sprouting from the stalk. This terrain represents the neighborhoods of this world, The Machine. Each leaf is a neighborhood of hexagons full of towns and battle zones. These are the places where you may have an adventure. The higher you go, the richer the society you will find. Observe the day and night cycle. Observe the realistic outfits. No cloaks here. Just jeans. Leather coats. The Sega man says, there are no spoiled-teenager stories being told. This is political intrigue and the adventure of some people who find that they cannot die. Across this terrain you will fight, and you will fight only with gun. Your party of three has no swords, no magic and no beasts to summon. It has pistols, machine guns and grenades. Your fights will be random battles. They will occur in confined battle instances, three of your party against some enemies. You will take turns in combat, as you do any classic Japanese RPG. You will use guns that you’ve modified, having bolted on larger clips and special scopes. Your combat turns will be on a timer, kind of like, the Sega man says, Valkyria Chronicles. The further you walk toward the enemy, the more your move meter will be drained. Once you stop moving and begin the attack, the rest of the meter will drain. As it drains, your targeting reticule over the enemy will sort of spin. With each rotation it will gain more potential power. As you press a button, you will unleash your gunshots. During this time the enemy may be shooting back. But, wait! You will be able to do special Resonance Attacks. These will involve aiming a beaded line across the floor toward the enemy and then starting the assault. Your character will run along that line and you will be able to press a button to make him shoot as he runs. Each Resonance Attack will cost a jewel from the meter at the bottom of your screen. You will want to intersect the path of the other members of your party. This will earn you Resonance Points. Strategy twist: With enough Resonance Points, you will be able to do special Resonance Attacks called Tri Attacks. These will allow you to aim one character at the enemy and have all three of your characters commence the attack. Pressing the action button will fire shots during the attack rush. Pay attention, because you can do and take two kinds of damage: Scratch Damage. Direct Damage. Machine guns do Scratch Damage. It knocks an enemy health bar down a lot but leaves behind blue on that bar. This damage is temporary and will be healed over time during the battle. Only pistols do Direct Damage, which knocks the blue away and hurts the enemy. Early in the battle, the damage you take will all be Scratch Damage. When you lose a full health bar of it, you lose a jewel from your jewel meter. Your health bar will be full again. When you are down to your final jewel, your character will die. Except! You will only die in the context of battle. The battle will re-start. In the context of the story, your character cannot die. This is how a JRPG does turn based battles with guns. It is, fine Kotaku readers, hard to explain. You would even miss some of it were you to see it with the naked idea, as I was worried I did when I watched a Sega rep play the game in New York City early this week. But it does seem daring, complex and the Sega man was having fun. For my next trick, I will stick my head in the mouth of a lion. Look for Resonance of Fate on the Xbox 360 and PS3 in late March. It’s out already in Japan. Maybe someone there can explain the parts of the battle system that you didn’t understand here.

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I Will Now Attempt To Explain A Battle System [Battle Systems]

Yale-Developed Game Teaches Young Children To Avoid HIV [Edutainment]

The National Institute of Health is granting Yale associate professor Dr. Lynn Fielin $3.9 million over five years to develop a game aimed at helping children aged 9 through 14 say no to sex, drugs, and other HIV-transmitting behaviors. In my day, topics like sex and drug abuse were generally relegated to high school health classes, but today’s children are growing up faster than ever before. That’s why The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is shelling out nearly $4 million, in the hopes that Dr. Fielin’s game can make a difference. It’s a bit shocking that the game, Retro-Warriors, which puts children into dangerous situations involving sex, drugs, and alcohol using virtual avatars, is being tested by children from 9-14. According to Peggy McCardle, chief of the NICHD’s Child Development and Behavior Branch, the young test subjects are necessary to determine the game’s effectiveness. “According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance Survey: 7.1 percent of high school students say they have had sexual intercourse before the age of 13. That figure is higher for certain groups, with 26.2 percent of black males and 11.9 percent of Hispanic male students reporting having had intercourse before age 13. Similarly, rates for other risky behaviors are also high, with 23.8 percent of high school students saying they had drunk alcohol and 8.3 percent saying they had tried marijuana before age 13. The rationale for the current project is to teach younger children the negotiation and refusal skills that they will need to resist pressures for risky behaviors, before those behaviors become established, or before they even begin.” The statistics are frightening, really, but do they justify exposing young children who otherwise might have avoided such subjects altogether to the sort of testing procedure outlined in the abstract for the government grant? “Subjects will play two sessions/week of their assigned game for four weeks. The primary outcome will be initiation of sexual activity, defined as the initiation of either vaginal or anal intercourse. Secondary outcomes include HIV risk behavior knowledge, social competency, self-efficacy, drug/alcohol use behaviors and overall risk-taking behaviors. We hypothesize that the experimental group will have lower rates of initiation of sexual activity and have higher knowledge scores at 1, 6, 12, and 24 months compared with the control group.” You can read all about the testing and development of Retro-Warriors at CNSNews.com, where they’ve posted a lengthy article dealing with the development and implementation of the game. Remember back when all we needed was kids in colorful costumes dancing around, telling us not to do drugs? Now we are warning children about the dangers of anal sex. I’m not sure I like the direction the world is heading in. Can we rewind a little please? Yale Gets $3.9-Million Federal Grant to Develop ‘Avatar’ Video Game to Teach ‘Sex, Drug and Alcohol Negotiation and Refusal Skills’ to 9-to-14 Year Olds [CNSNews.com]

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Yale-Developed Game Teaches Young Children To Avoid HIV [Edutainment]

Dead To Rights: Retribution Preorder Noir [Preorder Bonus]

What’s black, white, and red all over and can’t live in apartments where pets aren’t allowed? It’s noir mode in the Amazon-exclusive Shadow Pack preorder bonus for Dead to Rights: Retribution . Does Amazon’s pack top GameStop’s? It’s a tough call. Folks who preorder Namco Bandai ’s Dead to Rights: Retribution at Amazon.com score the Shadow Pack. It allows the game’s canine companion to use camouflage, while adding the visually striking noir mode, painting the game in black and white with splashes of red. GameStop’s preorder bonus might not be as pretty to look at, but it’s much more functional. The Jack Pack gives our human protagonist a suit of armor, adding to his health and durability. It also adds action mode, where your bullets are replaced with explosive rounds, giving players a much bigger bang for their buck. See? Tough call. I really love the look of the noir mode, but I really hate ordering games from Amazon, at least new releases. I’m more of an instant gratification kind of guy. Which would you choose?

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Dead To Rights: Retribution Preorder Noir [Preorder Bonus]

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond Micro-Review: A Bloody Fun Hazard-Time [Review]

Matt Hazard , the guns-blazing game-hero parody with a “legendary” status that’s never quite been explained, goes searching for his backstory again in Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond . Vicious Cycle may have overreached with the predecessor, Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, a 3D action game panned for derivative level design and rote gameplay. Can they do justice to their prefab hero with a 2D-side scroller, as he goes off to rescue his 8-bit self from the past? Loved 2D-Plus: Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond throws a nice twist into the side-scrolling platform genre. Holding the left trigger allows Matt to aim into the background and take out enemies either rushing into the scene or sniping at him from there. It’s a nifty way to take the game beyond its linear constraints. Also, holding the right bumper fixes Matt’s position and allows you to aim in a 180-degree head-to-toe path. The level design shrewdly requires use of both mechanics and I found them to be a strong extension of very familiar genre. Clever Levels: Vicious Cycle deserves some applause for eight themed levels replete with colorful design, changing physics and challenging and in many cases humorous foes. The pirate ship level I thought showed the greatest mix of design and visuals. You’ll go from below decks where loose cannons slide to and fro to knock you out, to topside of a ship tossing back and forth on massive swells. Another level in which Matt pursues his target into a satirical take on Pokémon and ninjas was a delight, ditto the construction-site chase that devolved into a Super Mario Bros. sendup. For what is really a big goof on the games development biz, Matt Hazard’s best moments come without expository dialogue. Making this another tour of aborted or failed video game projects really does set the perfect tone of mayhem and irony, adding a little purpose to what would otherwise be a mindless shootout. Hated I’m a Little Tender, or It’s a Little Tough: This is a minor quibble because, as a platformer, this game is supposed to be hard. It’s a legitimate throwback to the teeth-gnashing difficulty of games like Contra or Battletoads, and it’s definitely made for the hardcore set who want a challenge. But if you’re chugging through it for laughs or to see the conclusion, you’ll have to do it on “Wussy.” The “Damn This is Hard” mode only gives you three continues and your health bar doesn’t last as long. “Fuck This Shit” absolutely lives up to its name, as everything’s a one-hit kill and you get zero continues. Anyone who beats this game on this mode deserves a giant belt buckle commemorating the feat. This isn’t a complaint as much as it is an explanation of what you’ll be up against, and a lamentation of the fact that, yes, I am a wussy. Vicious Cycle made numerous references to the bad reviews given to Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, so it probably expects nose-in-the-air critics to hate this game. And I fully expected to loathe it. But Blood Bath and Beyond is a very good title. It’s not an exceptional game overall, but it is in certain qualities and production values. Its predecessor was ripped pretty good, but it was a full retail disc game. This is a much better environment for this character concept, a downloadable title returning Matt to his implied home turf, an old school platformer. I’d look forward to sequel. The game is simply what it is: a great diversion, a playful poke at the industry, and a challenge that earns its hardcore platform bonafides. Yeah, you can put it on Wussy mode and just chew through it, but if that’s all you intend to do with the game, then you’re spending $15 for a couple hours at best. But fans of old-school platform challenges will easily find this to be a justifiable purchase. Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond was developed by Vicious Cycle and published by D3 Publisher for Xbox Live Arcade on Jan. 6 and PlayStation Network on Jan. 7. Retails for $14.99 USD (PSN) or 1200 Microsoft Points. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Completed the game on “Wussy” difficulty. Played “Fuck This Shit” and got my shit fucked after about half a level. Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ .

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Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond Micro-Review: A Bloody Fun Hazard-Time [Review]

BioShock 2 Director Explains Vita-Chamber Changes, Backtracking Prohibition [Design]

Our recent previews about BioShock 2 have raised some questions among fans and skeptics of the series. How has the series’ resurrection system been tweaked? And why can’t players backtrack to earlier levels in the new game? We got answers. Yesterday, BioShock 2 creative director Jordan Thomas walked me through how the Vita-Chambers will work in the new game. These devices would resurrect players when they died in the first game. But many players discovered that, upon resurrection, the damage they inflicted on enemies remained, making it easy to die, resurrect repeatedly to win a hard fight. Downloadable content for the first game enabled players to shut the Chambers off. The system was further modified for the sequel. “You can turn them off if you wish, making the game much more traditional.” Thomas said. “Within that, you can adjust your difficulty to make it more or less of a challenge to get through an encounter. [For example,] you could turn off the vita-chambers and still play it on easy…. But the main criticism that we derived from the first game was the Vita-thrashing exploit, which was — because there were ammo-less weapons in the game and because there were consensual boss fights in the game — the idea of just using an ammo-less weapon and playing Lemmings over and over again until the cliff just disappears. [It was] was degenerate in many many ways… It was fun for no one. So now the Little Sisters will heal the Big Daddys a percentage of their health if you don’t take them out. So you do have to invest in their demise.” The other design decision Thomas detailed for Kotaku was the recent discovery — in the preview build I reported on yesterday — that players won’t be able to backtrack and visit any of the game’s large levels once they leave them. While I suspected a narrative reason for this, Thomas said the decision was more of a technical one. “A lot of people don’t know this, but the amount of backtracking most players physically did in BioShock was minimal. The amount of effort that went into supporting it was immense. We came down to having to choose between supporting backtracking and much more interesting, readable features …and decided to invest in things we thought people would actually notice. We also got some knock-on benefits like shorter loading times because of the way the memory was structured once backtracking was no longer an issue.” Thomas said that the game will adapt to make the prohibition on backtracking not as punitive to players as they might think. While the player might miss out on some collectibles in the levels they leave behind, they won’t miss out on accessing any Little Sisters and the character-enhancing Adam that they provide access to. As with the first game, Bioshock 2’s levels contain Big Daddy – Little Sister tandems that the player can interact with, killing the Big Daddy and then either rescuing or harvesting the Little Sister for energy. If you don’t get to all the Little Sisters in a given level in this sequel, you won’t miss out. “When you leave an area, your number of available Little Sisters travels with you,” Thomas said. The game will just put more Little Sisters in subsequent levels, and while this could lead to a case of there being lots of them in a late level — should the player not go after many of them early in the game — he doesn’t think most people will play the game that way. With less then a month from its February 9 release, BioShock 2 is coming soon. Coming even sooner on Kotaku will be more from Thomas about the ideas and ambitions behind this major sequel.

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BioShock 2 Director Explains Vita-Chamber Changes, Backtracking Prohibition [Design]

Borderlands Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot Preview: Eyond Underdome [Preview]

Join me as I strap on my weapons and take a trip deep into Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot , the second dose of downloadable content for Gearbox Software’s Borderlands. The second installment of Borderlands DLC ditches the exploration found in The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned in favor of strengthening the ties between the game and the Mad Max series of post-apocalyptic action movies. Stealing a premise from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot sees players fighting for fame and fortune in a series of new Riot Mode arenas, facing wave after wave of enemies in either single player or co-op battles. It sounds intriguing, but it’s got to be more than three new arenas to warrant a $9.99 price tag, right? Read on. What Is It? Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is the second set of downloadable content for Borderlands. Rather than a new area to play in, which we got in the first downloadable content, The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned , Mad Moxxi delivers a new gameplay mode, Riot, which is almost like a game show version of Gears of War’s Horde Mode. The titular Mad Moxxi, a widow several times over seeking to relieve her boredom with carnage, entertains a cheering crowd as you and your teams take on five different waves of enemies in three new arenas – Hell-burbia, the Angelic Ruins, and The Gully. These aren’t simply pits that fill with enemies – they are relatively sprawling yet contained battlegrounds, ready to be soaked with the vital fluids of your prey. What We Saw I played through each of the three new arenas multiple times, using a pre-made level 30 soldier graciously supplied by the folks at Gearbox. Okay, I attempted to play through all three arenas several different times, dying frequently. I unfortunately only got to play single player, but it’s easy to imagine having a blast with a couple of close total strangers on Xbox Live. How Far Along Is It? The new DLC releases next week on the Xbox 360 , so the build I was playing is damn near close to the finished product. What Needs Improvement? No Experience Necessary: You don’t gain experience while battling through wave after wave of enemies in the Underdome, which quite frankly feels odd. I understand the draw here is new weapons and the glory of triumphing over seemingly impossible odds, but when I spend an entire game on a steady climb towards max level, spending several hours tooling around a plateau just feels like a slight waste of time. What Should Stay The Same? Riding The Waves: The enemies in Mad Moxxi’s Underdome come at you in different waves, each consisting of different types of enemies. One visit to an arena might start you off with an Easy Wave, with powered-down enemies that are easier to dispatch, before moving on to a Gun Wave, in which all enemies have guns (duh), or a Horde Wave, where swarms of melee enemies come at you mindlessly. There’s a variety, but it’s not so much that you can’t anticipate what’s coming next after you’re done scrambling for the health and ammo Moxxi tosses into the stadium between rounds. Moxxi’s Got Talent: Black widow Mad Moxxi is a constant presence in the DLC, shouting out taunts to you as you struggle to survive, egging on the crowd, and just basically being the consummate showman, adding to the feeling that you are a contestant in some sort of twisted game show birthed in the mind of a violent husband-killer. Good times. The Penalty Box: If you die during a wave, you’re warped into the penalty box, an area overlooking the arena where you can shoot from, but cannot leave. Once again, I only played single player, where its mission failed if you wind up in the box, but I can easily imagine the fun that will come of having 2-3 other players in the box, urging the survivors on while desperately searching for targets to take out long range. Final Thoughts Gearbox’s Randy Pitchford has said that Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot is “like Smash TV in coop FPS, but in the Borderlands.” I’d have to say he hit the nail on the head. There might not be piles of cash spawning at the end of every round, and the enemies aren’t quite as numerous, but once you step into the Underdome you’re the star of a game show where your life is on the line. I’d like to think that if the world had body replicating technology, this is the sort of thing we’d find on every street corner. And if they can take the “Th” out of Thunderdome, I can take the “B” out of Beyond.

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Borderlands Mad Moxxi’s Underdome Riot Preview: Eyond Underdome [Preview]

Microsoft Patents the Exercise Guilt Trip [Avatars]

Microsoft’s filed a patent that would make avatars more realistic and less idealized, with the point of getting your husky ass out to exercise if what you’re seeing in the dashboard is a more realistic presentation of yourself. “Avatar Individualized By Physical Characteristic,” is what Microsoft is claiming. “Linking the avatar to a physical characteristic of a user provides leverage to provide incentives or constraints that can encourage good behavior (e.g., healthy behaviors, virtuous behaviors, etc.),” says the patent. So therefore, if you’re fat, your avatar will be fat – or vice versa. And so Microsoft proposes that your avatar’s conditioning would be reflected in its capabilities within a game, or unlocking a budgeted amount of time to play, or just making the little guy look all buff and hawt. As a parental control, its use is quite clear. For the individual gamer, it sounds to me like an opt-in thing, whereby if you’ve been feeling bad about all the Hot Pockets and three-hour gaming sessions, you turn on this feature. Sort of like fridge locks, noise reminders and other (in my opinion, abusive) gadgets from the dieting craze. How is it going to know what the real you looks like? The patent offers that Microsoft would get the info through a “third-party health data collection repository,” I guess to which the player belongs and links to his or her Xbox Live account. Or, says the filing “a real-time physiological sensor (e.g., blood pressure, heart rate, blood glucose, peak flow, pedometer, etc.)” Yay! Sounds like more peripherals. 1Up, which spotted the filing, points out that Nintendo’s already explored this to some extent in Wii Fit, where your Mii gets porky if the game decides you’re overweight. In this case, Microsoft wants to link some sort of tangible benefit to a healthy, balanced lifestyle. Those are honorable intentions, but given the butthurt that went up when Wii Fit started calling kids fat, I can’t see this ending well. Just last night I screwed around with my avatar – which I always set to large size because, hey, I have a beer gut – and was appalled when I tried on the Vault 101 suit, which is not slimming at all. (My avatar normally wears an untucked golf shirt.) And that’s with the existing body type templates. Before they do this Xbox Live should implement a “suck your gut in” button, like, click and hold the right thumbstick or something. Microsoft Patents “Avatar Individualized By Physical Characteristic” System [1Up via HBG ]

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Microsoft Patents the Exercise Guilt Trip [Avatars]

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