Vancouver video-game developers Hothead Games and Klei Entertainment have signed agreements with EA Partners, it was announced this morning.

Jamil Moledina is outreach director of business development for EA Partners. On the phone from his office in San Francisco, he explained that EAP is the division of Electronic Arts responsible for publishing “the original game designs and ideas of independent publishers”.

It’s a return to what used to be a core component of EA’s business. Developers can focus on the job of making a good game without having to worry about things like manufacturing and distribution or marketing and promotion.

“At the end of the day,” Moledina said, “the core idea is partnering with talent.”

The aspect of EAP that makes it different, though, is that studios who become partners can pick and choose from a suite of services. Those developers that have a marketing and promotional vehicle in place don’t have to avail themselves of that particular offering.

“We’re absolutely flexible and interested in doing what’s best for the game,” Moledina said.

The deal with Hothead Games is for DeathSpank, being designed by industry veteran Ron Gilbert for release this year. An adventure role-playing game with a slightly absurd story and witty dialogue, the animation is, just like the tone of the game, a bit off-kilter.

Ian Wilkinson, CEO of Hothead, told me in a phone interview that EA’s “reach and marketing” were appealing.

“Our experience is that we’re very good at making games, not necessarily good and marketing and selling them. It really requires both pieces to have a successful product and we believe with EA we can do that,” he said.

On its own, Hothead released two episodes of Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, and Wilkinson said that while those games were critically successful, “they didn’t sell as well as either Penny Arcade or Hothead would have liked”.

Moledina characterized the Hothead deal as more of a co-publishing deal, and said DeathSpank “fits quite well into our portfolio…. It’s got this great combination of Diablo-style looting and with Monkey Island humour. It’s extraordinary.”

Shank, from Klei Entertainment, is scheduled for release this summer. It’s a side-scrolling action game with an incredible art style that fuses old western and ’70s-era martial arts films.

Jamie Cheng, Klei’s CEO, said it is important that EA is hands off when it comes to the game’s development.

“The reason we’re partnering with EA is because they really let us execute on our vision…. The main thing is allowing us to create the game that we wanted to create, that we envisioned creating.”

Said Moledina: “Their creative vision is the reason why we’re doing the deal in the first place. The partnership is operating in very much of an allocation of talent and resources. We do our thing best and they do their thing best.”

EAP has, until now, been partnering with developers to release games that are packaged for retail, but both DeathSpank and Shank are games being developed for the digital services Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. (Shank is also being released for PC.)

“We look at this space as an opportunity,” said Moledina, “to provide our services to developers … that are experimenting and demonstrating a high-degree of creativity that is afforded in this space.”

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

I was in Los Angeles last week to attend a Sony Computer Entertainment launch for the upcoming PS3 game God of War III, which hits shelves on March 16.

In introducing the video game to the assembled international media, game director Stig Asmussen said that the cinematics for the third-person action game are rendered with the same graphics engine used to create the interactive experiences in order to “keep the experience as real as possible.”

At the event at Siren Studios on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, I played the first 30 to 45 minutes of the game, and was struck by not only how visually stunning the game is, but by how much the camera, the view of the player, moves. It swoops into the action from establishing shots, and moves around the action itself, in much the same way as modern action films.

Edmonton’s John Palamarchuk, lead cinematic artist for God of War III, told me that the moving camera was added to give the game more of an emotional punch. The developers at SCEA Santa Monica used a new technique to capture the movement of a real Steadicam operator – in the same way an actor’s movement would be captured – to ensure that the camera motion was authentic.

In an interview, Asmussen said that at times he struggled with his role in the development of the game.

“I’ve always considered myself a good listener,” he said, “and I think to a certain extent on God of War III maybe I listened a bit too much. And it caused me to be a little indecisive sometimes – when I should have just stuck to my gut feeling on things.”

Asmussen has been working on the God of War franchise since the beginning, when he was a lead environment artist. That gave him an opportunity to get very specific and deep with the 30 percent of the game he worked on.

For the second game, Asmussen became art director, which gave him a broader vision of how the game was developed.

As game director for God of War III, Asmussen said he had to understand “how it fits together. Now how do you make the thing fun?”

As development on the game proceeded, Asmussen learned that as director, he needed to make the decisions.

“I want it to be a collection of everybody’s ideas. I want to filter those ideas, and as the quarterback I want to call the plays,” he explained. “I think that sometimes in calling the plays I was taking too many outside opinions in trying to formulate what the plays were. But you get better at that stuff as you go on. It was an important learning step.”

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

Even though the big-budget console debut of the Matt Hazard character, in 2009’s Eat Lead, was a critical and sales flop, nothing, it seems, could prevent Matt Hazard from returning.

In fact, the witty writing that opens Blood Bath and Beyond explicitly refers to the drubbing the first game received. But where Hazard’s debut was a first-person shooter, Blood Bath and Beyond is a side-scrolling shoot ’em up.

The schtick behind the franchise is that Matt Hazard is an old-school video-game character who’s come out of retirement in order to star in next-gen games. Like the first game, this is a parody of action and shooter games, but not even the halfway clever scripting can elevate it from being a pretty basic experience. And it’s plagued with some serious control issues.

Having the same control stick used for both movement and aiming, for example, causes some difficulty when players need to shoot with precision, because they often find themselves walking to their death while trying to aim. Maybe Hazard should just be given another gold watch and sent off into the sunset.

Matt Hazard: Blood Bath and Beyond (D3Publisher; PlayStation 3, Xbox 360; rated mature)

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight

In today’s Georgia Straight is my feature review of BioShock 2. Rapture is a great place to return to.

The multiplayer component of the game, developed by London, Ontario’s Digital Extremes, is significant because it continues telling the story.

There’s something about the young girls in BioShock. With yellow, glowing eyes and weirdly distorted voices, they are creepier and more disturbing than any monster. The same girl with normal eyes and a sweet demeanour, however, brings out the parent in all of us. BioShock’s Little Sisters can exhibit both qualities, and they’re a big reason the two games in the franchise have been so successful.

At a press event in San Francisco last week, I got a taste of things to come for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video-game platform.

On display were the upcoming games Alan Wake, Crackdown 2, Dead Rising 2, Fable III, Halo: Reach, Left 4 Dead 2: The Passing, Lost Planet 2, and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Conviction, and — coming to Xbox Live — Perfect Dark, the Game Room, and Scrap Metal (from Vancouver’s Slick Entertainment).

Capcom’s Dead Rising 2, being developed by Vancouver’s Blue Castle Games, is a follow-up to the raucous survival horror game released in 2006. In the demo, the main character, Chuck, was not only slaughtering zombies, but was combining objects to create new weapons. The pinnacle was attaching two chainsaws to the handlebars of a motorcycle, and creating mayhem while driving down the strip of a Vegas-like city.

It is very Evil Dead, although producer Shinsaku Ohara, with Capcom Japan, said, “We watch a lot of zombie movies,” but said any similarity between the Sam Raimi films and Dead Rising was coincidental.

Set for release on August 31, Dead Rising 2 will be prefaced with a playable prologue entitled Dead Rising: Case Zero, which acts as a story bridge between the two main games. Ohara described it as, “a taste of Dead Rising 2. It’ll have all the game mechanics, but it won’t be a demo; it’s a complete game of its own.”

Rob Barrett, president of Blue Castle, said that the time mechanic is back. “We think that was integral to the first game. It’s part of what made it unique. The world doesn’t pause, waiting for the hero to arrive. There’s consequences to being late or to missing certain events.”

But the saved game system that so many gamers became frustrated with — the first game would only allow games to be saved at specific locations — is being reconsidered, said Barrett. “We’re going to improve the save system but also try to keep a sense of dread.”

Peter Molyneux, who heads up Lionhead Studios and is the designer of the Fable series, told the assembled that he believes games should make players feel powerful. His next game in the franchise attempts to do this by making you the ruler of Albion, and by giving you the ability to touch.

“It makes you feel different about every single relationship,” said Molyneux, as he demonstrated how a character could pick up and embrace their daughter, and drag a beggar by the hand to be sold to a factory.

Fable III is set 60-odd years after the events of the second game, and the country of Albion — modelled after Molyneux’s England — is entering the industrial revolution. Molyneux said that Albion in the new game is inspired by Charles Dickens and the London of Oliver Twist.

Crackdown 2 executive producer Peter Connelly told me that coming up with a sequel to the wild run-and-gun action game was nerve wracking, but that the development team had “stayed true to the spirit of the first game”.

During the demo of the game, which included the kind of action that made the first Crackdown so much fun to play, lead tester John Noonan had to scramble to match his description of events with what we were seeing on the monitors. Said Noonan: “Anything can happen in Crackdown. It is not a scripted place.”

Halo: Reach is likely to be the final Halo game developed by Bungie, the studio that created the series. When Microsoft acquired Bungie in 2000, the rights to the Halo franchise were included. In 2007, Bungie split from Microsoft to again become independent and Microsoft has set up an internal division, 343 Industries, to control the Halo property.

Reach is a stand-alone prequel to the trilogy that stars Master Chief. Marcus Lehto, creative director for the game, said that it takes place just prior to the events of 2001’s Halo: Combat Evolved. The characters in this game are Noble Team, a group of Spartan III marines (Master Chief, who does not appear in the game, is a Spartan II).

Bungie, said Lehto, redesigned the animation engine for the game, so the environments are more expansive, the detail finer, the visual fidelity beyond anything we’ve seen before on the Xbox 360.

In a promotional video screened at the event, executive producer Joe Tung said that one priority was to make the creatures that are part of the enemy Covenant, to whom gamers have become very familiar over the years, seem more threatening, more “alien”. So they won’t be communicating in English, and they will be behaving differently than fans have come to expect.

Community director Brian Jarrard said that he thinks Reach is the most ambitious title Bungie has ever developed. Given the studio’s track record, that’s quite an accomplishment.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight