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Like many people I had to wait until Monday to play the BioShock demo that went up on Xbox LIVE Marketplace on Sunday, but when I finally got it booted up, the demo delivered in spades. The demo clearly starts at the opening of the game and it’s clearly the most logical place to start both from a story perspective, a gameplay perspective and so you can enjoy the water porn in full effect as you are dumped into the ocean. It only gets better from there.

While the area shown in the demo feels fairly closed and linear with seemingly only one direction to go next, the experience is absolutely immersive and there were a few jump in your seat moments. It was all just enough to get the heart pounding ready to push forward until it was all over after an incredibly suspenseful interlude. The end of the demo was followed by a short attract-style video that showed the different plasmid abilities and how to use them creatively in a game that just capped off how amazing BioShock had played throughout the demo.The demo and ending video perfectly served to increase my own anticipation for the release of the game next week. I wasn’t the only one as stories of the street date being broken by a retailer sent NeoGAF into a frenzy with folks calling stores and cooking up wonderful schemes to get other stores to break the street date so they could get their copy. Of course the story made the internet rounds, hitting up a number of blogs, before retailers got wise and they stopped sales. I didn’t manage to get a copy after calling all of one store. I can wait though.

Another cause for all the excitement was the art direction in BioShock. There have been many quality games released since the last holiday season and while I can’t say I’ve played them all, like The Darkness for example, there haven’t been many I feel that have the deliberate thought and creativity that Gears of War brought to the table. BioShock is indeed one of these rarified games, art deco objectivist roots and all. This is my impression mostly just from the demo. I think 2K Boston/Australia (née Irrational Games, if you haven’t been following current news) knows this quite well and despite the fact that they couldn’t put together an art book for the collectors edition of the game, they did a great service to their fans and put an electronic version of the art book up on their Bioshock site, The Cult of Rapture.

Can I also say that I’m totally in love with the design of that site? No idea why, but I am… it’s hot.

While I’m well aware that the developers in charge of World of Warcraft over at Blizzard have too much time on their hands — as this list of pop culture references woven into the MMO prove — some people clearly have even more time on their hands.

One particular individual, animpinabox, took the time to research and match up the dancing emotes for each individual World of Warcraft character and race to the originals it took inspiration from. They say they grabbed all the clips used for the comparison from YouTube, which is quite a feat in itself. The attention to detail by Blizzard is just… ridiculously astounding. And just plain ridiculous too.

Via Kotaku

This past week marked the official launch of The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar. It’s not easy going up against the juggernaut that is World of Warcraft but I think LOTRO makes quite the valiant effort on many levels, the least of which is by adopting a similar UI and quest/play style. Of course, it helps to have a strong mythos already developed and, so far, it’s been fitting quite well for me — even repeating them multiple times since the public stress test, I’m actually reading the quests and trying to follow the story. For now at least.

Michael over at MMOG Nation took a couple looks at LOTRO both at launch and a week later and provided his impressions from the point of view of the seasoned MMO gamer (or so I presume). I originally caught his Launch Day impressions last week and based on his “What I Love/Like/Hate about LOTRO” lists I ended up writing Michael purely because of this comment:

The Classes. Sorry dr00ds. I just have never gotten behind classes that screw up the four legs of the D&D table. If I can’t look at a class in a fantasy MMOG and know whether it’s a Tank, Nuke, Healer, or Skills-monkey, I probably won’t play it. My primary character in WoW was a Paladin, and look where that got me.

I’ve always felt that I could understand the MMOs whose classes more closely aligned with those in AD&D than those who didn’t. Or maybe I’m just a huge nerd. This was something that made Final Fantasy XI easy for me to pick up as my first MMO, because the starting job classes — and even some of the advanced classes — still fell neatly into the base classes I first grew to learn during my pen and paper days. I still have a hard time equating these to the LOTRO classes and World of Warcraft. Both seem a bit more of a stretch than I’d like at times, but there’s not much I can do about that — and, no, I’m not playing DDO. I think the familiarity of the locales and storyline as Michael mentions at the end of his follow-up post a week later help overcome a lot of that “I’m lost” feeling I initially got when playing WoW — although thankfully that’s no longer an issue.

Normally, reading a list of known bugs for any given game would probably make flip out and complain on message boards and blogs until the developer patched the game for a bug that shouldn’t have been there in the first place with proper QA. At least that is what it seems like these days. Or everybody is exploiting some glitch or bug to gain unfair advantages in the online games. Hardly, if ever, are they actually so amusing to read that you are captivated into reading — and laughing — about nearly every single one, reminiscing about some by-gone yet warm and familiar moments of gaming.

This is what Graeme Cree’s Zork I bugs list turns out to be. Yes, that Zork I… the one about The Great Underground Empire that had you starting off the game standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door, and worrying about grues eating you in the dark.

The bugs detailed in the list nearly all produce hilarious results, such as “the command HIT MIRROR WITH SWORD will generate combat responses, such as ‘The mirror parries’…” If you remember those days of text-based adventures, go lose yourself for half an hour or more reading about the bugs. You won’t regret it.

Via Cathode Tan

The “bullet holocaust” of a 2D scrolling shooter that’s been called Last Alarm has released a demo. It is well worth picking up. Ghost and m0dus from NeoGAF have put together an impressive looking — to say the least about the graphics — and fun to play game that is not without it’s fair share of in-jokes.

Also ranking among the several impressive details is that Last Alarm has been developed entirely with XNA Game Studio Express and Torque X.

One thing to note: although you can play with the keyboard, I highly highly recommend you use a gamepad instead.

The system requirements aren’t too bad.

Minimum system requirements:
1.0GHz processor
512 MB RAM
Windows XP Service Pack 2
Video card supporting DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 2.0

Recommended system:
2.0 GHz processor
1 GB RAM
nVidia or ATI accelerated 3D video card

Download the demo to Last Alarm: The A.R.G.U.S. Complex.

Be sure to leave Josh any bugs and feedback on the Last Alarm blog!

Josh — When’s my Xbox 360 executable due?

Wow, I’m a little late with writing about GDC 2007, don’t you think? Either way, here goes one of the better highlights from that week…

I didn’t get much time to walk around the Game Developers Conference expo halls on my last day in San Francisco before my flight took off that evening. However I did check out the games exhibited as part of the Independent Games Festival in the North Hall.

There were a few familiar sights, like Band of Bugs and Castle Crashers — both titles that are due out on Xbox Live Arcade in the future — and there were a bunch that I’ve never heard of, mostly because they were small indie studios or student entries. In the very last aisle of the booth space something caught my eye and I just had to try it even though I, quite certifiably, suck at rhythm or music games. Yes, it was Opera Slinger a one level game created by ten students at the Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy. Even though I probably looked like the most shameful nerd sitting in front of the computer trying to sing while stay quiet enough to not draw attention, I got completely wrapped up in the game and I ended up talking about it to anybody who would listen for the full week afterwards. Those folks probably don’t like me anymore.

Still, go check it out. It’s only one level but it’s got a bunch of songs. They’re all classical music with rock opera lyrics all based on the game’s narrative and you’re judged on your ability to hit the right general notes for each song. Kind of like Karaoke Revolution meets rock opera with a plot… or something. Sure the core gameplay isn’t terribly original, but it’s wrapped up pretty nicely, has a good tongue in cheek feel to it and it’s even a free download!

When XNA Game Studio Express was announced a while ago, I was interested in trying it out and seeing for myself what it’s about. I didn’t bother installing it until the full XNA GSE 1.0 release come out recently, along with the “open beta” of Torque X, which is GarageGames XNA tool to help you build games easier. All I did was stare are the programming screen and just think that I have no clue what the hell I could do. So I just kept it on there to try out other people’s source code while I maybe find the time to figure out rudimentary programming in Visual C# and/or find out what Torque X can do. I really believe XNA GSE is going to result in some amazingly good things once people get used to it.

The guys (and girls, because what do I know?) at NeoGAF have been discussing concepts for a game to be developed using XNA GSE — there needs to be a better acronym somehow — and Ghost posted a game he has been working on titled Last Alarm. It’s a simple top down space shooter and would probably work better if I wasn’t using the keyboard for controls, especially since Ghost didn’t map any keys to switch weapons. You can check out Ghost’s game and play it on your PC (XNA GSE required) or your Xbox 360 (if you paid the XNA Creators Club subscription fee) by downloading it from his blog.