Blog Posts by Gordon Cameron

Free Realms - Sony What do you do when your online world has 17 million
registered users?  You venture to
pastures new in search of more.

Consoles are still the great unconquered frontier for online
virtual worlds.  Despite the considerable
success of Square Enix's Final Fantasy XI, released for the PlayStation 2 in
2003, virtual worlds on consoles haven't seen anything like the explosion of
popularity they've attained on the PC, where a World of Warcraft or a Club
Penguin can attract in excess of ten million players.

Sony Online aims to change that. In January, they launched
DC Universe Online, a superhero-themed game released simultaneously for the PC
and the PlayStation 3.  Now, they've
ported Free Realms

"The Empire of Tamriel is on the edge.  The High King of Skyrim has been murdered...
Dragons, long lost to the passages of the Elder Scrolls, have returned to
Tamriel."

This all sounds like bad news, but is it really?  For gamers, at least, it means a couple
hundred hours of dungeon-crawling, sword-wielding, spell-slinging fun, set
against the backdrop of a sprawling open world. Bethesda Game Studios has just released the second video trailer for Skyrim, the fifth entry in its venerable Elder Scrolls series of fantasy role-playing epics.  Where the first video was just a tease, this one gives you plenty of gameplay footage to feast your eyes on, with narration by the formidable Max Von

THIS... IS... A VIDEOGAME!For those of you who aren't satisfied with quaffing one beer

too many and belting out "Tom Sawyer" in your best falsetto on 'Rock Band,'

Yoostar Entertainment offers a new way to humiliate yourself in front of

friends — and this time the results are guaranteed to be captured on video.

Yoostar 2 allows you to re-enact celebrated scenes from a

number of movies, covering decades of Hollywood history from Casablanca to The

Hangover. Your console -- via Xbox

Kinect or the Playstation "Eye" camera — videotapes your amateur theatrics and

places them directly inside the original video of the actual film. The first iteration of Yoostar was a somewhat

complex affair, requiring players to erect a

2011's going to be a banner year for Playstation 3 and PSP fans.

How do we know? Shortly before Christmas we had the pleasure of touring Sony's Santa Monica studios, where a bewildering variety of upcoming titles were in the process of being translated, cleaned up, and generally prepared for their North American releases. Games like Twisted Metal, Uncharted 3, Killzone 3, and The Last Guardian will be the ones grabbing the headlines, but there's more to Sony's slate.  Read on!

LittleBigPlanet 2

LittleBigPlanet 2 - Sony 2008's critically-acclaimed user-content-fest is back in a big way — as is its lovable hero, Sackboy.  The sequel features greatly enhanced level-creation tools, allowing would-be designers to craft

L.A. Noire - Rockstar

The quest to improve videogame
animation is never-ending. Twenty years
ago, Jordan Mechner created rotoscoped graphics for the original Prince of
Persia by studying films of his little brother running and jumping. Half a decade ago, Half-Life 2 wowed us with
facial animations that made use of research by behavioral scientist Dr. Paul Ekman.

Today, the bar's about to be raised again, thanks to the creation of MotionScan, a new system created by Sydney-based tech company Depth Analysis, and featured in Rockstar's upcoming period crime epic L.A. Noire.

The goal of MotionScan is to remove, as much as possible, the intermediary of a human animator between the motion-capture and the final

Stacking - Double Fine You know those little Russian dolls that decrease in size and nest inside one another? Fun fact: they're called "matryoshka dolls," which is a bit of a mouthful. What's arguably more important than knowing the dolls' official name, though, is knowing that THQ and Double Fine Productions are making a game about them.

Double Fine — the studio founded by former LucasArts adventure-game maestro Tim Schafer — is offering Stacking, an endearingly quirky puzzler centered around the premise that all of the characters in its world are Russian dolls. Some are larger, and some are smaller, and the smaller ones fit into the larger ones. You take control
of one such doll -- a lowly chimney sweep on a

Anomaly: Warzone Earth - 11 Bit By now you've probably seen your
share of tower-defense games — whether it be the classic Desktop Tower Defense,
or the iPhone's geoDefense, or our own free webgame Castle Defense, it's a
well-mined formula. But have you ever
wondered how the other half lives? Well,
the folks at Warsaw-based 11 Bit studios did just that, and came up with an innovative "tower attack" game — Anomaly: Warzone Earth.

The premise draws inspiration from last year's sci-fi hit District 9. As
with that film, a mysterious alien presence has suddenly appeared in the midst
of a major urban center. Only this time, the city is Baghdad — a locale that, as we know, had plenty to worry about before little green men