A friend just shot me a link to an article at GameStooge regarding the allegedly “broken” gameplay in “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.”

The article’s author, Jonah Falcon, says that Pacifism — the very mode I just praised a day ago as the best part of the new Xbox Live Arcade game — is broken. He writes:

The problem is pretty simple: the odds are too stacked against you. For one, the gates themselves are somewhat deadly - the orange ends will kill you. Right there, the game fails. In a survival arcade game, your benefactors cannot be partly deadly. When you’re rushing towards a group of gates - which rotate, by the way - it’s actually a bad tactic because sure as shootin’, you’re going to die. Not good when there’s a wall of enemies bearing down on you. In a fast-paced arcade game, being forced to think rather than react obliterates the entire experience. I think on my feet, but when you continually get punished for being clever because one idle spinning gate just happens to zonk you, you become frustrated and worry more about your allies rather than your enemies, which by any definition is counterproductive.

I am frustrated by the same things the GameStooge writer is, but I don’t know if that makes the mode broken. What do the rest of you “GWRE2″ players think? (Just a wild guess but I don’t think the person who posted this insane clip on YouTube would agree.)

Read the full complaint at GameStooge: FEATURE: Broken Gameplay in Geometry Wars 2

If I was able to be one of 36 members of the gaming media to nominate the best games of E3, surely someone will allow me, today, to nominate my pick for best Xbox Achievement of 2008?

Who cares if the year is barely halfway finished? How can there be a better Xbox 360 Achievement than “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2“’s Wax Off?

Let’s back up for a second. In my last diary entryI wrote about my Tuesday morning session with “GWRE2.” I liked the twin-stick shooter but didn’t feel yet that it was the best game in the series.

I hadn’t unlocked all of the game’s six modes yet. On Tuesday night I did, and the game became my favorite “Geometry Wars,” after all. Credit the new game’s Pacifism mode, which ensnared me with the best let-me-try-one-more allure of a good bag of potato chips. Pacifism Mode also contains what I think is the best and most smartly designed Achievement of the year: Wax Off.
Let me make my case.. Read more…

What I thought would be a dry 24 hours of not playing games was enriched in the final minutes, early this morning, with the pleasant discovery that the new twin-stick shooter “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2” was available for download over Xbox Live Arcade.

This was great news for me not just because the first “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved” was my favorite game of the Xbox 360’s launch, but because the unheralded “Geometry Wars: Galaxies” on the Wii (classic controller is a must!) was one of my top 10 games of last year.

The new game offers six modes of play, each unlocked after investing putting time in the previous one. I only played three this morning: 1) the three-minute-timed Deadline, 2) a mode called King in which you can only shoot from safety zones that appear and disappear anywhere on the game board — echoes of dark-world safe zones in “Metroid Prime 2: Echoes” — and 3) Evolved, which plays similarly to the main mode of “GWRE.”

I often start playing sequels in a skeptical and grumpy mood. “GWRE2″ suffered from that. Read more…

Now that Jonathan Blow’s time-manipulating side-scroller “Braid” has a release date for Xbox Live Arcade — August 6 — I’d like to refresh readers’ thoughts about the game with a look back to a post from last August. It was on August 8 of last year that I ran an interview with Blow in which the designer openly and artfully challenged many accepted game design conventions while explaining his philosophy for the design of “Braid.”

The interview proved to be one of the most widely-cited pieces we’ve run on the blog. You can read it all at this link: “A Higher Standard” — Game Designer Jonathan Blow Challenges Super Mario’s Gold Coins, “Unethical” MMO Design And Everything Else You May Hold Dear About Video Games [UPDATE: link is now fixed!]

In our interview, Blow opened up to me like few designers had before. For example, when I asked him about his views about life affect his thoughts on game design, he said:

… I feel like unearned rewards are false and meaningless, yet so many people spend their lives chasing easy/unearned rewards. So there is a very conscious decision that you only get collectibles in “Braid” when you solve a puzzle, and you only get one per puzzle. Some of the puzzles are easy, some are hard; but you did something very explicit to get the reward. It’s not like “Mario” and every other game since then, when there are gold coins sprinkled everywhere, and you get them just by walking along a path or jumping up to some blocks, and that satisfies your reward-seeking reflex for now and pacifies you into continuing to play the game.

I’ve played enough “Braid” to highly recommend that everyone should try it when it is released. I also recommend you brush up by checking out our interview. If you care about personal expression and how it can be made manifest in a game coming to the Xbox 360 then Blow and “Braid” should be on your radar sometime between now and August 6.

“Braid” visuals by David Hellman and character by Edmund McMillen.

I recently interviewed the two Capcom developers overseeing the new “Mega Man 9” game, the throwback game coming to all three consoles’ downloadable gaming services this fall. This new “Mega Man” game is 8-bit and designed to look and play like the original ones on the Nintendo Entertainment System. So we talked about the look, the gameplay, which of the “Mega Man” games players should play before playing “MM9,” and other stuff.

And I asked Inafune if — maybe — there have been too many “Mega Man” games?

Hit the jump for all the answers and a good trashing of the priorities of modern game developers. Read more…

Two months ago, I played a preview build of the Xbox 360’s “Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts” and was left scratching my head. It was the first “Banjo” game I had played since the two Nintendo 64 versions. I had skipped the Game Boy Advance edition. The 360 game left me and several other reporters who tried it a bit perplexed. It’s a platformer designed to be traversed with player-engineered vehicles driven by Banjo the bear and Kazooie the breegull.

The problem in May was that the vehicle-creation editor was confusing. The game didn’t play much like the old Banjo games and seemed an odd use of the franchise. I left my May session of the game highly skeptical that development studio Rare was producing a sequel worthy of its original efforts.

Then I played it at E3 and was impressed — not just because it’s the first Xbox 360 game that includes a Nintendo 64 in it — but because, well…
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“Watchmen” The Video Game. I saw it at E3. It’s downloadable. It’s a prequel. It’s written by the editor of the comic. Collectible sugar cubes not confirmed.

Read more in my “Watchmen” Video Game Preview at MTVNews.com.

There isn’t much in the way of “Adults Only” content on consoles. Games dealing with sex and drugs are most often left to the indies on PC.

That doesn’t look to be changing too much, even with Microsoft’s new Community Games initiative. Microsoft told me they aren’t setting rules, but the ESRB’s guidelines are a good rule of thumb.

“It’s not exact, but a way to think about it is anything that would have been M-rated I think we’re fine with,” said Chris Satchell, Microsoft’s new chief technology officer for Xbox. “Things that would have been AO…that’s probably not what we want from the service. That’s just not what our platform is about.”

He didn’t rule out games with edgy themes, though. “There’s an awful lot of breadth there, and it’s really just about accurately describing what’s in your game more than saying we can’t do it,” said Satchell.

What Community Games titles definitely won’t have access to, however, is achievements. “Achievements is currently not available to the Community Games,” said new XNA head Boyd Multerer, before teasing possible future plans. “We’ll always be looking at ways to improve the service.”

Do you think the Wii sex game that Stephen talked about yesterday would fly on Community Games?

Do you like to make games? Do you want to make money? Microsoft wants to help you.

Microsoft has revealed their business model for Community Games, the YouTube-influenced service for games made on Microsoft’s free toolset, XNA Game Studio.

The company has teased this step in “democratizing” games for almost a year now. MTV Multiplayer spoke with former XNA head (now chief technology officer) Chris Satchell and new XNA leader Boyd Multerer about the announcement.

The basics: users can charge between 200, 400 or 800 points for their games. They cannot be free. Microsoft takes 30% of the profits, but if you make a popular title, they may help promote it. You can’t opt out of marketing assistance and Microsoft charges a fee, but the idea is increased sales balances that out.

For more on the reasoning behind each of these decisions, keep reading.

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At the Xbox 360 Community Roundtable at E3 on Monday, I learned a few more small but potentially significant details about the upcoming revised Xbox 360 dashboard (aka the New Xbox Experience).

• Players will be able to rip any Xbox 360 game past, present or future from their discs to their hard drive. This may speed load times, but more importantly for those of us who can’t hear our vacuum and lawnmower over our 360, this means we can play games without a noisy disc-drive spinning.

• The full Xbox Live Marketplace will be browse-able via the Web, enabling system owners to purchase or rent games and movie content via a web browser. And if you have your Xbox 360 on at the time of a purchase, the content will immediately begin to stream to the system. This is good for people who decide at work what movie they want to download at night — as long as you’re the kind of person who keeps their 360 on when they leave the house. Hmmm. Maybe Microsoft needs to borrow the remote-access idea from Sony, which allows a PSP to turn on and off a PS3.

• Even though I can still use new versions of Microsoft Outlook while keeping the program looking like an older version, I won’t be able to keep the current blade-based Xbox 360 dashboard layout when the fall update is activated. We’ll all have to be happy with the new look of the new dashboard.

• Lag times are being reduced. Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten told reporters at the roundtable that he has more than 140 Xbox Live Arcade games and doesn’t like that when he goes to the XBLA blade he has to wait several seconds for the icons representing each game to load. The new dashboard will just about do away with that kind of lag. When one blogger at the roundtable asked if he’d confirm that all dashboard stuttering and lag would be eliminated, he declined. But he did say that’s the goal.

• The new Xbox 360 dashboard will do everything the old one did. Zero functionality has been removed.

So, Xbox 360 owners, are you sold on the new dashboard? Well, too bad if you’re not. There’s no choice in the matter. It will be available for all 360s some time this fall.

From E3, I filed this comprehensive report about Microsoft’s line-up earlier today — full story at MTVNews.com.

LOS ANGELES — Declaring victory over the PlayStation 3, if not the Wii, Microsoft kicked off E3 week with a slew of announcements designed to take at least a small bite out of Nintendo’s success while also going for Sony’s jugular.

“We will sell more consoles worldwide this generation than PlayStation 3,” Don Mattrick, senior vice president of interactive entertainment business, said halfway through an often loud, high-energy and confident presentation. To cap off a 90-minute presentation full of shots at the PS3, Mattrick brought out Yoichi Wada, president of Square-Enix, to announce that “Final Fantasy XIII,” long thought to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive, would also be released on the Xbox 360 when the game launches (no timeframe was given)

Tons more details at: Microsoft Unveils E3 Lineup, Claims Victory Over PlayStation 3

As I may have mentioned in the past, I play dodgeball. It’s a schoolyard “sport” that I have carried with me into my mid-twenties and will hopefully carry on beyond that.

There’s something about the competitiveness, coupled with the frantic nature of the game that make it truly enjoyable no matter what age you are. It’s those same aspects of the game that publisher YUKES is hoping to capture in their upcoming Xbox Live Arcade release “Double D Dodgeball.”

Developed at YUKES’ Yokohama studio as a break from their standard fare of THQ wrestling titles, “Double D Dodgeball” is set to offer gamers a slightly different take on the video game version of the sport.

Read more…