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Gaming n n n n Roush acknowledges the Bit.Trip saga’s look is an homage to the he old joke is: In LA, everyone has a screenplay to pitch. Here’s the new joke: Everyone with a game to pitch goes to LA. The City of Angels is not just home to Hollywood, but also home to E3, the annual expo where game developers, game publishers, console makers, and their fans come together and willingly endure sensory overload. Last year at the exposition, Alex Neuse and Mike Roush from the independent studio Gaijin Games did something many industry insiders would consider ill-advised. They pitched their game con- cept for Laserlife (a mix of music, rhythm, motion-triggered action, and adventure) to Nintendo, even though they knew it wouldn’t work on the Wii, Nintendo’s star console. Perhaps because of the list of projects the pair had worked on at LucasArts and Santa Cruz Games, they felt they could get away with it. Perhaps the fellowship of game developers in- fluenced someone at Nintendo to give them an audience. Whatever the reason, Nintendo decided to hear them out. Afterward, instead of shutting the doors on them, Nintendo opened a new door. The console maker sug- gested they should pitch their Bit.Trip game series, already available on the Wii, for the Nintendo 3DS, the company’s new handheld device with a glasses-free stereo 3D display. Here’s another sea change. In the past, tal- ented game developers looked to Hollywood visual effects as the next step in their career. Today, when a successful game company needs a spruced-up cinematic, they come knocking on the doors of top Hollywood talent. Vernon Wilbert Jr.’s CG and VFX have appeared in XXX and I, Robot, to name but two films. In March, he got a call from Guerilla Games to direct the opening sequence of Killzone 3, featuring a futuristic world under a Third Reich-style dictatorship. Killzone 3 marks Guerilla Games’ first as- sault on Sony’s stereo 3D-enabled PS3 console. Roush and Wilbert are among the first wave of digital artists play- ing in another dimension, unlocked by a new generation of hand- helds and consoles. Along the way, they’ll figure out what works well and what hampers storytelling and gameplay when their target audience is literally seeing double at all times—two simulated views of the same scene. Tomorrow’s Tech, Yesterday’s Aesthetics Between March 2009 and December 2010, Gaijin Games released six games—Bit.Trip Beat, Bit.Trip Core, Bit.Trip Void, Bit.Trip Runner, Bit.Trip Fate, and Bit.Trip Flux—for the Nintendo Wii. (Two of the games, Beat and Runner, are now also available for the PC and Mac.) Deliberately designed to resemble classic arcade games, the Bit.Trip saga (as the collection is now called) leads play- ers into a psychedelic-colored landscape populated with Atari-style geometric shapes. Adam Rosenberg, a contributor to the Web site Digital Trends, summed up the Bit.Trip gameplay in a single word: “hypnotic.” One of the games, Runner, claimed the Excellence in Visual Art award at the 13th Independent Games Festival (run by those who oversee the annual Game Developers Conference). type of games he and many others grew up playing in their youth (a bit-trip down memory lane, so to speak). “We’re using the same kind of state-of-the-art hardware used to make movies like Star Wars,” notes Roush with a chuckle. “But we’re trying to emulate the type of Atari games from 1979.” When developing for the Wii, the simplicity of the arcade style— primarily driven by geometric blocks and bright backgrounds— allowed them to keep their games within Wii’s stringent file-size limit. “WiiWare has a 40mb limit per game,” recalls Roush. “Our music took up 35mb, so there wasn’t a lot left for textures.” After getting their cues—and a development kit—from Ninten- EA has embraced stereo 3D gaming with its recent releases (on opposite page) American McGee’s action-adventure title and (above) Crytek’s son shooter, which supports stereo 3D on all platforms—the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. do, Gaijin Games set to work on transforming the Bit.Trip games into stereo 3D titles. Roush found out that the simplistic style that served them well on the development for user-downloadable Wii- Ware titles also works well for Nintendo 3DS: Big blocks of floating geometry set against colored backgrounds emphasize the simulated depth of field. Gaijin Games relied primarily on Autodesk Maya and Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create the game assets for these games. To prototype and test stereo effects, the team employed Nintendo’s 3DS developer kit. “We usually like to save our stuff out, compile it, and view it in the dev kit,” says Roush. “We can change the 3D level in real time in the kit. So, essentially, we can tune the depth of field.” In the case of the Bit. Trip games, Gaijin Games was porting titles previously developed for the Wii to a new hardware platform. If they were developing a game specifically for stereo 3D from the ground up, Roush notes, there are certain things the group might have done differently. Since 3DS’s basic character is slightly different from the heavily motion-driven Wii, certain gameplay strategies have to be recon- figured. “We will use the stylus controls for Beat, Fate, and Flux,” explains Roush. “We tested the motion controls and opted for stylus control. This choice was made because of the fragility of 3D on the device; at a certain angle you just loose the 3D.” At the present time, the debate over glasses-free stereo 3D ver- sus glasses-enabled stereo 3D remains unsettled. Ken Tidwell, HP’s worldwide graphics product manager in the workstation global busi- ness unit, explains the downside with glasses-free stereo, sometimes called auto-stereoscopy: “There’s the sweet-spot issue. You need to be at a certain location or angle to get the effect. If you leave the sweet June/July 2011 23 first-per- Crysis 2 Alice: Madness R eturns