Did we know that film director Uwe Boll kinda sorta almost got involved with making movies based on “World of Warcraft” and “Metal Gear Solid“?

Yeah, we knew.

But these are the kinds of stories that don’t get old. The ever-excellent MTV Movies blog reminds us of both, with fresh quotes from the famous filmmaker on his near misses with some sure hits.

• On getting snookered by Frenchmen who claimed to have an official “Metal Gear” movie script, Boll says: “This is how it is sometimes.”

• On getting shut down by Blizzard when he inquired about making a “World of Warcraft” movie: “Maybe a bad movie would destroy that ongoing income.”

Best quote from this two-part series is about how Boll doesn’t feel the need to please hardcore gamers: “And to be honest, the real gamers are the typical download guys, right? They don’t pay anything for movies, because they illegally download the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the normal audience.”

San Francisco — Dave Jones, head of Scottish game development studio Real Time Worlds, had a new MMO — his first MMO — to show off at one of the most packed sessions of all of this year’s Game Developers Conference. He was showing “APB” a cops and robbers MMO in the works for, I assume for PC (Jones didn’t confirm for sure; and, after the session, Phil Harrison told me he was only in attendance out of curiosity).

So who needs an MMO from the makers of “Crackdown“?

Anyone who is interested in an MMO without a grind and who wants to play one set in something like the real world. Those are two of the priorities Jones highlighted at the beginning of his 45-minute presentation.

“I want to replace geek with chic,” he said, though later admitting he had multiple level-70 “World of Warcraft” characters. In his MMO, experience points, do not belong. In his game, there is no leveling up. There’s just a lot of character customization and lots of shooting.

Jones’ talk really was about eye candy, though. The designer’s voice became background sound to a series of impressive videos that left the crowd awed. Several of the videos features “APB”’s character-creation tool, which is designed to ensure that every player can create a unique character. The proofs of that concept were a scarred Asian gangster and then a geek squad of star game designers Richard Garriott, Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, and Warren Spector.

The famous designers were just samples. “We will not create any of the characters in the game,” Jones said. “The players will create the characters.”

All images in this post were taken by camera, off of Jones’ presentation screen. The images looked sharper in real life.
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San Francisco — If you’re an MMO gamer who buys his/her virtual in-game goods on the black market, your days of shady dealings may be numbered.

A panel I attended earlier this week at the Game Developers Conference’s “World in Motions” series suggests that player-to-player item selling is going to be increasingly legit — whether many MMO players like it or not.

The session was called “Learning to Love Virtual Item Sales.” The half-hour presentation was led by Andy Schneider, president and co-founder of Live Gamer, “a legitimate market for virtual trading,” and Steve Goldstein, co-founder and president of Ping0, a Live Gamer partner and distributor of Flagship Studios‘ “Hellgate: London.”

Legitimate virtual item sales are common, particularly in free-to-play games, and especially in Korea, where micro-transactions — the buying and selling of in-game assets and content — are rampant. But for games that don’t offer real-money transactions, like “World of Warcraft” for example, websites like IGE and ItemBay have transformed illicit virtual item sales into a billion-dollar business — over $1.8 billion according to analysts’ estimates given in the session — and game publishers aren’t getting a cent.

Schneider and Goldstein want to change that.

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(Below is the beginning of a report filed at MTVNews.com.)

LAS VEGAS — Late last week, employees of the Red Rock Casino Resort Spa were taking down the signs and stands from the three-day DICE video game summit. They were packing up the framed art from the Into the Pixel exhibition. They were dismantling the show.

But sitting in one of the hallways amid this activity, Frank Pearce, co-founder of Blizzard Entertainment, was revealing hopes and plans for things his company might build. One of those plans would, in a manner of speaking, put “World of Warcraft” on cell phones. There were other bold notions too.

Pearce has a deep voice, shaved head and goatee, a video game developer not unlike “Stone Cold” Steve Austin in look, if not in as surly a demeanor. He’s the executive vice president of product development at Blizzard, where work has begun on some major things, such as a “World of Warcraft” expansion; “StarCraft II,” a sequel to a game that has become a national pastime in South Korea; and some new massively multiplayer games, which the world first learned about when a job post for work on a next-gen MMO was posted on Blizzard’s Web site last year. About that job post: “That was not by accident,” Pearce told MTV News. “We have to figure out what’s next for Blizzard after ‘World of Warcraft,’ and we have to get the best people in the industry that we can get helping us figure that out.”

In the biggest surprise of his conversation with MTV News, mentioned right before the banging and clanging of the conference’s tear-down overwhelmed the interview and forced a relocation outside, Pearce confirmed that a very small team in Blizzard just might be creating a slice of “World of Warcraft” for cell phones.

Read the rest of this story at MTVNews.com

Last week at the DICE summit in Las Vegas I interviewed Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce about many things going on in his company. Most of our conversation will appear on MTVNews.com.

But here’s a notable extra for you blog-readers out there.

Did you hear about that list of canceled games Pearce, Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, and company lead designer Rob Pardo presented at DICE? A list of games they said they started making but never finished?

This list, snapped as a photo by Kotaku.

I had some questions for Pearce about it, including why “StarCraft Ghost” wasn’t on it. But first, I asked, which of the game on the list came closest to release?

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Why the Marvel MMO didn’t make sense anymore. When “Banjo” is coming out. Whether “Mass Effect” is still a 360 trilogy. What will be the best-looking game on Xbox 360….

Last Thursday at the DICE gaming summit I met with Shane Kim, head of Microsoft Games Studios, in a conference room across the hall from where he had sat for a public interview with the New York Times’ Seth Schiesel. We discussed his publishing philosophy and reviewed the status of Microsoft’s major first-party gaming franchises one by one.

Our sweeping conversation covered “Halo,” “Gears of War,” “Alan Wake, ” and the host of other big Microsoft-backed games under his watch. Kim acknowledged that his studios’ line-up is more slender than the in-house offerings of Sony and Nintendo, adding that he hoped MGS’ reputation is one of “high-quality premium experiences.”

No, MGS won’t be set up to produce a lot of games, certainly not one a month, a rate I threw at Kim. “I know for us it’s been very fruitful to focus and to really get our attention and resources focused on key things,” he said. “I’m actually very comfortable with the volume of titles we have.”

Kim was a good sport, even gamely answering my question about whether the view that “Call of Duty 4” — not an MGS title — was the best-looking game on the Xbox 360 last year would drive Kim to ensure his label has the best-looking 360 title in 2008. He said: “I hope ‘Fable 2‘ is going to be really beautiful and that it will be considered the best-looking game.”

What follows is a game-by-game breakdown of my chat with Shane Kim.

Let’s start with the Marvel MMO and his explanation of why it’s not being made anymore…

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Last week I asked, “What’s the best age for someone to start playing video games?”

Some say seven is the right age, while others don’t think kids should play video games at all. Recently I interviewed two mothers about video games and their children; they each had different opinions. One mom didn’t allow consoles in her house, the other said games had a positive impact on her family.

This week, I spoke with two fathers on the subject. See why a gamer dad is uncomfortable with letting his kids see the pain inflicted in “Pain” and how “World of Warcraft” finally made another father put his foot down…

Carlo, 30 year-old creative director at an ad agency from Edison, NJ
Children: Two sons, ages 3 and 5
Systems Owned: VTech, Leapfrog Leapster, PC, DS, PSP, Wii, Xbox 360, PS3
Age OK for Kids to Play Games: Let kids play VTech at ages 2 and 4
Games Allowed to Play: E-rated games
Time Allowed: Up to 3 hours per weekday; more on weekends
Would Never Let Kids Play: “Shooting games with guns, explosions, limbs, blood;” “cartoony” violence

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A horse is a horse, of course, of course…

But not these horses.

Two weeks ago, we announced our year-long quest to find the Greatest Animal In Video Game History. First, we proposed a list of the best virtual horses and asked you, the readers, to tell us if we missed any. Then comes phase two today: the official vote.

Now this is serious business, folks. For our Blue Ribbon Panel, we went to straight to the top:

• A pretty good game creator – Ken Levine, President and Creative Director of 2K Boston and chief creative force behind the 2007 GOTGOTY

• A pretty good artist — Mike “Gabe” Krahulik, illustrator of the “Penny Arcade” webcomic

• A pretty good writer — Leigh Alexander, editor of Worlds in Motion, writer at Gamasutra and her blog Sexy Videogameland

• A pretty knowledgeable person about animals –Tofuburger, co-founder of cultural phenomenon/funny animal picture blog I Can Has Cheezburger

After weighting each judge’s top three choices — many of which, were, uh, shocking — the winner turned out to be…

Epona from the “Legend of Zelda” series. Pokemon’s Rapidash came in at a close second. The horses from “World of Warcraft” tied with Hannah the Horse from “Zoo Race” for third place.

And the Readers’ Choice winner: Agro from “Shadow of the Colossus.” (Epona was a distant second.)

Are the judges out of touch? Or do they know something the rest of us don’t? They are pros, after all. You’ve got to see what they picked and their justifications (provided in words and pictures). So read on.

Take it away, Ken Levine… Read more…

The new “World of Warcraft” comic debuted last November, and we learned that writing it isn’t so easy.

But for the comic’s penciller Ludo Lullabi, drawing “World of Warcraft” was a dream come true. The 29 year-old French artist (”Eternal Midnight,” “Kookaburra Universe,” “Lilian Cortez,” “Lanfeust Quest”) was such a huge fan of the game, he submitted original “Warcraft”-inspired illustrations to Blizzard, who eventually offered him the project. Here’s an excerpt from my e-mail exchange with Lullabi, translated from French:

“The fact that I am really familiar with ‘WoW’ helped me capture the essence of the universe so I could translate it to the comic. Often, I am even doing in-game location reconnaissance. I am riding my sabertooth tiger or I am traveling in Azeroth to do some screen captures or I am simply sitting down in a quiet spot to draw.”

Read on to see how Lullabi works with Blizzard and if he’s worried at all about appeasing the millions of players. (You can also check out his work firsthand in our previews of Issue #0, Issue #1, Issue #2 and most recently Issue #3.)

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Today is a special day for about nine million people.

January 16 marks the one-year anniversary of the release of “The Burning Crusade,” the long-awaited expansion to “The World of Warcraft.” I started playing “WoW” in January 2006 after witnessing my boyfriend sit at his laptop for hours and hours, and I’d make fun of him for it… Then one day I tried it, and I was hooked (it’s similar to Corpsegrinder’s story — only I’m not the singer of a death metal band).

So during the summer of 2006, I spent much of my time (much more than I’d like to admit), playing a Night Elf Druid. But after nine months of spending all of my free time playing my Druid and a slew of other characters, I decided to stop. Why? I chose life — “life” meaning other games that I was neglecting.

In 2007, they got me back. When “The Burning Crusade” came out on January 16 of last year, I couldn’t resist. A whole new continent? Flying mounts? New races? I had to experience all of this stuff firsthand. So what follows is my year in Outland, as seen through a few randomly taken screenshots I captured while playing throughout the year (I wasn’t planning on writing this feature back then).

JANUARY

I was at Level 55 when I took a hiatus from “WoW,” so I needed to make my way to Level 58 in order to enter Outland through the Dark Portal (seen above). That meant finally finishing old quests and killing everything in sight. I think this particular screen is of my character clapping for joy because my boyfriend’s character leveled to 58.

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