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A weekly summary of what is being talked about quite a bit in the gaming community.

• Gears of War commercial with Mad World soundtrack
• David Jaffe speaks to Newsweek about EDI and XBLA
• Electronic Arts worries gamers with The Godfather downloadable content

Gears of War commercial with Mad World soundtrack released
Since I saw this Gears of War video a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been silently waiting for it to be released publicly. It was torture. Sitting in a darkened office at Microsoft, the first two viewings of this video gave me the chills. And it still does every time I watch it from the Xbox Live Marketplace download — and it’s been multiple times already. While I was already looking forward to Epic and CliffyB’s opus this holiday, the video officially got me to the point where I couldn’t wait for the game to be released — a sentiment that Brian at Kotaku echoes as well. That’s a hard thing to do since the last time I saw and touched Gears of War was back at E³.

ArsTechnica’s Opposable Thumbs blog opines why the trailer might be so moving, noting that it’s “good to see people who are actually excited about their game try a different feel for their ads and put more thought into sharing that enthusiasm.” The same sentiment which crossed my mind during my first viewing, and I was glad to see such a different and evocative approach taken instead of the usual “lots of guns and explosions” hard sell.

Always a good source of different viewpoints on the same thing (and often beaten to death), NeoGAF’s thread dedicated to the Gears of War commerical is quite the read with a not-insubstantial 35,000+ views. The posters in the thread discussed the merits of everything from the soundtrack choice, the rain, the glass refraction effects, to the in-engine graphical details (nevermind all the Halo talk… for now). If you’re one of the unfortunate few who have been living under a rock in the past week, you can watch the standard or high-definition versions at the links below. Do it. Now.

• Gears of War commercial - standard resolution version
• Gears of War commercial - high-definition version

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David Jaffe speaks to Newsweek about EDI and XBLA
Earlier this week, N’Gai Croal of Newsweek posted an interview with David Jaffe, designer of the Twisted Metal series, God of War and Criminal Crackdown as an upcoming PS3 downloadable title. While I’ve known of David, I’ve never seen him or met him until he appeared as one of the more outspoken of the four heralded game designers on MTV’s “Gods of Gaming” segment. It should come as no surprise then that his interview style is a big more free-wheeling than others and that was definitely present in N’Gai Croal’s piece. In it, Jaffe took a few jabs at the current game offering on Xbox Live Arcade service by calling it more of an oldies radio station based on all the classic game available. I can see how this quote can be taken incorrectly in a written article since there is not much information to contextualize it and provide the tone Jaffe had.

No doubt that is what happened to Joystiq when they summarized the interview with David Jaffe. Chris Kohler at Game|Life somewhat concurs with Joystiq’s analysis while mentioning Jaffe’s move away from epic games to the shorter, quicker release downloadable market. Brian Crecente over at Kotaku took a more rigorous approach to analyzing down the interview, mentioning that while he didn’t agree with Jaffe’s take on Xbox Live Arcade, he welcomes the competition from Sony so both platforms push each other to excel. Even industry business site Next Generation picked up on Jaffe’s comparison between the PS3 and Xbox 360’s downloadable offerings through a music analogy.

A user on NeoGAF posted the Joystiq story and the board heavily debated the merits of the quote and Jaffe’s intent. After some time, David himself popped into NeoGAF and both explained what he meant in the interview and posted a link to his blog, where he responds to the Joystiq post and again explains that he was only being lighthearted by reiterating that he was only “cracking a joke and not realizing how shitty and petty it sounded until I saw it in print.” It just shows how rather difficult it is to not be wholly serious in a print interview, because things can easily be taken in either direction. Something which interviews such as the MTV segment, showing both video and audio, help avoid.

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Electronic Arts worries gamers with The Godfather downloadable content
Following up on Tiger Woods 07 downloadable content, which included things you could unlock while playing the game through, a sizable amount of in-game content for The Godfather was released this week on Xbox Live Marketplace. The downloadable content included several new missions, in-game items such as weapons and in-game currency. It is the latter which made gamers take notice at the downloadable content, even if many did not own the title itself. These are precisely the type of downloadable content that the gaming community feared — ones that could possibly give some sort of advantage of those less fortunate than others. In this case, it only affects a single player title. Gamers hope that this release doesn’t indicate that this type content will accelerate and turn into content which could imbalance multi-player games, similar to how MMOs have been affected.

A slew of bloggers reported on this latest series of downloadable content with the same concerns. Joystiq points out how the downloadable content “charges” a gamer twice “when you realize you don’t have enough virtual money, you turn around and use more real money to buy more virtual money, so you can re-buy the gun you already bought with real money.” On Game|Life, Chris Kohler points out how he feels that gamers are being charged by content which was not created after the game was released, but rather that the game content was already included and gamers were only paying to unlock it. On ArsTechnica’s Opposable Thumbs blog, Ben Kuchera echos the worry of the gaming community by warning that “EA tends to take these kinds of ideas way too far, so let’s see how they’ll make this a bad idea in the next year or so.”

Several message boards voiced their displeasure with this type of paid downloadable content, nearly all referenced these as a continuation of the Tiger Woods 07 downloadables. Over at Quarter to Three the original poster summed up the sentiment by stating “I don’t know which is worse… selling money, or selling this: [The Level 4 Weapon Bundle].” NeoGAF was likely among the most outspoken of message boards getting over 200 replies and 7,000 views in a mere 16 hours — the posters were visably not thrilled about this downloadable content.
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There are a few new screenshots of the first next-gen Colin McRae title floating around courtesy of CVG. I’ve always liked the Colin McRae series of games, both as racing games and because I like FIA World Rally Championship. Rallisport Challenge and Rallisport Chellenge 2 on the Xbox was also excellent, but beyond those two series I haven’t really tried any others, nor did I really stick with, say, the rally stages in the Gran Turismo series for some reason. I’m not going to worry too much that it seems Codemasters has some changes in store for DiRT: Colin McRae Off-Road that will apparently make it more accessible to the casual player. It’s going to be far too long before this comes out sometime in 2007. Unsurprisingly, it will be on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, so no one will be left out.

Gamasutra published a string of articles covering the sessions in the PR for Games Conference held in San Francisco nearly two weeks ago. One of those sessions Gamasutra wrote about was a panel on blogging called “New Avenues for Reaching your Audience” and it was one that I would have liked to go see if I had time, since I talk to a lot of bloggers pretty often and obviously, in a way, I am one. This is more about blogging more in the professional sense anyhow.

The article is pretty good, as I think blogging and bloggers are still at a point where people don’t know what to think or do with them in some cases, which is something that the article goes into detail. I think the important point and key differentiator — and one of the reasons I do like them in addition to more traditional media — is that blogs serve both as news aggregators and original content generators all while having unique, opionated perspectives. As Chris Kholer points out near the end of the article, sometimes this, along with wanting to post things with as much celerity as possible, can backfire a little. Be sure to check the article out.

Somehow I missed this Portal gameplay video (embedded below) coming out of the Games Convention in Leipzig last month. Although I have to see how much the game is going to keep me busy, especially as part of the Half-Life 2 plus Episodes 1 and 2 AND Team Fortress pack. I am really liking the fact that it’s this incredibly involved puzzle game. I think the only thing that will shorten how long I play it is how “impossible” the more difficult puzzles get, but I still like a challenge and I’ll likely keep trying it for a while anyway. Valve definitely has a compelling title pack coming out though, there is just something about Portal that amazes me.

Maybe I was just too busy focusing on that little event called E³ or something, but GAZERK launching somehow slipped past me around May of this year. I found it courtesy of the ever obsessed watchful eyes of posters at NeoGAF and it seems at least some refinements have been made since then. This seems like a pretty good idea and the underlying search engine technology, Kosmix, has an excellent pedigree counting among it’s staff folks who have worked for big names like Amazon.com, Yahoo and Yahoo/Overture, a paid placement firm. This last part is what stands out. Well, that and how Kosmix pledges to let sites that use it tap into the paid-placement market. I like how GAZERK — they really need to explain where that came from — provides categories to further drill down the results of your search. This almost directory-like option is really a good hook in my opinion for a topic specific search engine like this. I’m going to keep using this and keeping an eye on the results — and possible addition of paid-placement content, which seems like it should be a key hook — and see how robust the results get over time.