Pandemic Studios has been always been something of a stepchild at EA, so when the company announced plans to cut 1,500 jobs last week the rumors started swirling. Today, they were sadly confirmed.

EA is essentially shuttering the development house – laying off 200 people and shifting the remainder to its Los Angeles studio. The Pandemic Studios brand will continue to be used, however.

Pandemic came on board at the same time as Bioware, after Elevation Partners merged those two companies together in 2005. John Riccitiello, at the time a managing director at the VC firm and currently CEO of EA, ran the holding company – so it was no surprise when EA bought the merged company two years later – though the $860 million price tag did raise some eyebrows. .

They’ve put out some good games – including “Mercenaries,” “Star Wars: Battlefront” and the upcoming “The Saboteur” – but have never had a true blockbuster hit, which probably sealed their fate.

It’s a sad fate for a really talented group of game-makers. 

Electronic Arts’ “Dante’s Inferno” game – already on track to be a motion picture – has added another slice of Hollywood to the mix. Will Rokos, a 2001 Academy Award Best Original Screenplay nominee for “Monster’s Ball,” is writing the story line for the video game adaptation of the epic poem.

Rokos is collaborating with the development team to put together a story that adapts the classic tale, but makes the necessary changes to make it more palatable to gamers. (Because, let’s face it, a stroll through hell might be compelling reading, but would be a pretty dull game.)

“Taking such a naturally rich and deep universe and adapting for the video game has been one of the most interesting and challenging projects I’ve worked on,” said Rokos in a statement. “I really got into re-imagining Dante as a flawed hero with a dark past, and his determination to save the love of his life from a terrible fate. It was a truly unique experience to re-create one man’s hell, one circle at a time.”

Rokos is one of a growing number of Hollywood screenwriters who are exploring the world of writing for video games. Chris Morgan (“Wanted,” “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift”) recently signed on with Red Eagle Games as story director for a series of upcoming games based on Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” books.

Additionally, James Wan, executive producer of the “Saw” series and the screenwriter of its’ first and third installments, is penning the videogame adaptation of the slasher films. And David McKenna (“American History X,” “Get Carter” and “Blow”) wrote the script for Vivendi’s “Scarface: The World is Yours”.

“Spore” might not have turned out to be the game some people were expecting it to be, but Electronic Arts definitely learned one big marketing lesson from it. Releasing a character creator well in advance of a title is a great way to build buzz.

Hoping to see lightning strike twice, the company plans to do the same thing for Bioware’s upcoming action-RPG “Dragon Age: Origin”. The PC exclusive character creator will be out Oct. 13. It will allow fans of the company and those curious about the game to put together a character they can use in the game once its launches in November.

It will, if nothing else, let players get straight into “Dragon Age”. (Too many RPGs lose player’s interests by the sometimes-long set-up process of creating a character when they’re ready to start playing.)

“The Dragon Age: Origins Character Creator will allow you to create numerous different characters before launch and experiment with the different classes, races, and create multiple faces for the 6 Origin stories and save them to your hard drive for safe keeping until the game is released,” said community coordinator Chris Priestly in the game’s official forums.

Launching simultaneously with the character creator will be a social community site for the game, which will let people show off their in-game avatars.

A similar approach with “Spore” resulted in over 1 million critters generated before the game launched. No one’s expecting near that sort of reaction with “Dragon Age”. The game has a much narrower target audience – but it might be a good way for EA to get a sense on how accurate its estimates for the game will be. 

A quick note for those of you who don’t read the daily edition of Variety cover to cover. My colleague Marc Graser breaks work that Twentieth Century Fox has teamed with Electronic Arts to turn “Spore” into a computer-animated film. “Ice Age’s” Chris Wedge will direct.

EA Entertainment's Patrick O'Brien and Lucy Bradshaw, VP of Maxis Studios, will serve as executive producers. Will Wright’s name is nowhere to be seen, though.

Read more about it here.

The economy is taking a toll on video game developers once again. Both Raven Software and Maxis have trimmed their employee roster today.

EA has confirmed that it reduced the number of people on the team at “Spore” creator Maxis “in response to business conditions”. It declined to confirm a Joystiq report that “a couple dozen employees” were affected by the layoffs.

Meanwhile, Kotaku reports that Raven Software, makers of the recently released “Wolfenstein” and upcoming “Singularity,” has cut between 30 and 35 employees. Activision confirmed the layoffs, but like EA, declined to confirm the number.

“Wolfenstein” sales have been lackluster, according to retail checks, which may be behind the move at Raven Software, but the Maxis layoffs might indicate some weakness in the “Spore” franchise. EA plans to fully support the game and its offshoots, but any hopes that it might engage a player-base similar in size to “The Sims” audience seem to be dwindling.

Were you one of the people hit by today’s moves? Drop me at line at the address in the upper right corner of the page.

Electronic Arts kicked off the Gamescon 2009 flow of news with a press conference this morning giving details into a few of its upcoming titles. While no new games were unveiled, the company did a good job of ramping up excitement over previously announced ones.

“Brutal Legend,” due out Oct. 13, will have a demo out to help build interest in the game. Double Fine’s Tim Schafer announced the demo will hit the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on Sept. 17.

The game features Jack Black as Eddie Riggs, a legendary roadie summoned to a heavy metal world. As with any Schafer title, the game is as funny as it is fun. (I’ve played an extensive demo and can testify that even if you aren’t a fan of heavy metal, it’s still worth your time.)

The demo’s a smart move, as “Brutal Legend” could easily fall into a niche category and fail to set the charts ablaze. Realistically, it will quite likely fall into that trap anyway – but at least EA is making a real effort for it to succeed.

The company also announced that “Battlefield: Bad Company 2” will hit U.S. shelves on March 2. The game should have a more heavy emphasis on vehicles and EA claims it "will redefine online multiplayer."

Meanwhile, “Dante’s Inferno” will be released on Feb. 12. Developer by Visceral Games, the studio behind horror shooter "Dead Space," the game is a loose adaptation of the literary classic. Universal has picked up the film rights to the game.

Both “Dante’s Inferno” and “Bad Company 2” will face fierce competition when they launch. The first quarter of 2010 has quickly turned into one of the most crowded non-holiday quarters in the industry’s history, as more and more titles slip out of 2009.

Hollywood screenwriter Chris Morgan has signed on with Red Eagle Games as story director for the upcoming video games based on Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” books.

Morgan, whose credits include “Cellular,” “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” “Wanted” and “Fast and Furious,” is a 10-year Hollywood veteran. He’s currently working on the cinematic adaptation of “Gears of War” and his films have grossed nearly $1 billion at the worldwide box office.

Morgan will also join the advisory board Red Eagle has formed to help it ensure the quality of the games.

Others on the board include Tom Frisina (VP and General Manager of EA Partners); entertainment lawyer Barry Hirsch; Peter Dang, a specialist in entertainment consumer products marketing and branding; Keith Boesky, founder and principal of video game consultancy Boesky & Company; and IBM Serious Games program manager Phaedra Boinodiris.

Electronic Arts will publish the games on all major gaming platforms (including PC). Red Eagle also plans to create a massively multiplayer online game set in the world of “The Wheel of Time” series.

Executives at Red Eagle are also producing a feature film of the books, which will be separate from the games. Universal won the rights in a seven-figure deal last year.

Don’t look for any more “Godfather” or “Grand Theft Auto” games in China.

The Chinese Ministry of Culture has forbidden websites from featuring or publicizing games that heavily feature gangs, obscenity or gambling -- and says it will severely punish sites that try to skirt the law.

“These games encourage people to deceive, loot and kill, and glorify gangsters’ lives. It has a bad influence on youngsters,” said a report from the Culture Ministry carried on the Xinhua news agency.

My colleague Clifford Coonan has more on the ban itself, but the implications for the gaming industry are notable.

Gang games are still a big part of the industry these days. Beyond the examples above, there’s also THQ’s “Saint’s Row,” Take Two’s “Mafia II” and the upcoming “APB” – a massively multiplayer online game for the PC, which are the most popular types of games in China.

And, depending on how broad a definition of the word ‘gangs’ the Ministry of Culture decides to take, the “World of Warcraft” juggernaut could even find itself at risk. While Blizzard Software banned casinos in the game four years ago, zealots could label Horde guilds as a gang – particularly in the PvP zones (where players are permitted to kill each other’s characters).

There are implications beyond big, traditional publishers as well. Facebook’s most popular game is “Mafia Wars” – which could give the government further reason to continue blocking the social networking site. (After the riots in Xinjiang earlier this month, China blocked access to Facebook and Twitter. It’s unknown if that ban will be permanent or not.)

Like it or not, the ‘gang’ subgenre of gaming is not going away anytime soon. And China is a growing market for the industry, as developers and publishers finally begin to get a handle on ways to combat the country’s significant piracy problem. This move by the government could eventually have notable effects on the industry as a whole. 

Electronic Arts unveiled its latest multi-platform franchise at Comic-Con Thursday with the 14th century epic poem-turned video game/animated film/comic book, "Dante's Inferno." Breaking dramatically from the philosophical depths of Dante Alighieri's seminal work, the game reimagines the protagonist as a sword-wielding medieval knight who ventures violently through the nine circles of hell.

The Comic-Con panel featured executive producer Jonathan Knight, art director Ash Huang and writer Christos Gage, who showed slides depicting game play as well as the artistic process that went into the geographical development of hell's nine distinct circles. Knight emphasized EA's desire to build on the established narrative by creating a more thorough and engaging plot that would translate into a videogame format.

At the end of the discussion, a trailer for Universal Pictures'upcoming "Dante's Inferno" animated feature received its world premiere. Though screen time for the anticipated 2010 release was limited, the footage appeared to be highly stylized, bearing heavy influence from Japanese anime. -- Matt Kivel

Neither Electronic Arts nor THQ have particularly enjoyed the past year. EA has seen share prices plummet and several new game franchises either flounder or walk into a wall of controversy. THQ, meanwhile, was pretty much off the radar entirely until the recent release of “Red Faction: Guerrilla”.

Both companies took some dramatic steps today in an attempt to get back on track.

EA merged developers BioWare and Mythic into a single team, which will focus on role playing games and massively multiplayer online titles. Mythic is responsible for the company’s “Warhammer Online,” while BioWare has developed “Mass Effect” and the upcoming “Star Wars: The Old Republic”.

The move is a big show of confidence in BioWare’s leadership. Ray Muzyka, formerly joint CEO of the company, will oversee the merged division, while BioWare co-founder and joint CEO Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer. (Mythic founder Mark Jacobs has left the company.)

Buried in today's Elecrtonic Arts earnings call (which I won't have time to fully report on for reasons that will be apparent soon; I recommend the Gamasutra write-up) was this amazing revelation from COO John Pleasants: Revenue for music/rhythm games was down 36% during the first quarter of the year and 42% in March, per NPD. As a result, EA has cut the gross sales revenue it expects from its EA Partner division, which distributes "Rock Band" for Viacom.

That's a huge decline. And keep in mind that there weren't any major music game releases during the first quarter of last year, while 2009 saw "Guitar Hero: Metallica" (albeit at the very end of March). As we started to see in late 2008, sales of "Rock Band 2" and "Guitar Hero: World Tour" must be down massively from the original "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero III."

And while EA CEO John Riccitiello said he feels "really bullish" about "Rock Band: Beatles Edition," the fact that the company is expecting $400 million less in sales indicates just how big an impact continued sales of "Rock Band" through last year mattered, and how far "Rock Band 2" is lagging.

No wonder Viacom blamed a "challenging comparison to the particularly strong initial sales of the music video game Rock Band in the first quarter 2008," to put it mildly, for the 37% drop in its ancillary revenues (mainly "Rock Band") in its earnings for last quarter. And this comes after the revelation that even when it was selling well, "Rock Band" lost money for Viacom due to hardware manufacturing costs.

And no wonder Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick recently brought in a heavy hitter, former Yahoo COO Dan Rosensweig, to oversee its critical "Guitar Hero" business.

Given the high price of music games, of course, it's hard to know how much of the decline is recession-driven. But with declines that dramatic, there's clearly something bigger going on. Consumers are getting tired of the slew of new music games. And/or they're happy with the ones they already have. And/or everybody who wants "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero" has it. The market may not expand as broadly as many in the industry have been better.

Over seven months ago, EA Redwood Shores chief Glenn Schofield told the Cut Scene that he was in the process of renaming his development studio to give it a unique identity beyond the city where the publisher's corporate headquarters is also located.

"[W]e're looking to brand the studio," he said. "That's what I'm doing right now. It's going through legal."

Legal sure takes a long time. Finally, EA announced the new name today: Visceral Games. Personally I'm much more a fan of esoteric nouns like Valve and Pandemic than dynamic adjectives like Radical and Visceral (it's like they're trying too hard), but it's still better than EA Redwood Shores for sure. And a cool logo.

But if Visceral is actually the name Schofield had in mind back in September, EA should really get its legal department moving a little faster.

Visceral is currently working on "Dante's Inferno," Wii spin-off "Dead Space: Extraction," a proper "Dead Space" sequel for 360, PS3 and PC, and one other unannounced title.

When you're playing a video game based on a movie, you have to make comparisons. Not in the "Is one better than the other?" sense, of course, since they're fundamentally incomparable media.

But I do believe that a video game should be thematically and narratively consistent with the film on which it's based; it should extend (or at least retell) the movie's fiction in a way that naturally fits; and, most of all, it should be respectful of its source material. You know how when you go camping you're supposed to leave your campground cleaner than when you left it? I think that's a good idea for video games based on movies as well.

By that standard, "Godfather II" is an abysmal failure. To be sure, the film sets a high bar: It's one of the all-time greats of American cinema, dealing with family, loyalty, betrayal, morality, and, of course, the American Dream (kind of like "Grand Theft Auto IV," except better).

But the game? As I wrote in my recently posted review, it's pretty much all downhill from the start when the developers at EA Redwood Shores decide to try and follow the plot of the film while shoehorning in a new Corleone family don controlled by the player:

Achieving this requires an almost epic rewrite, however. At the beginning of the game, Michael decides to lay low for awhile and make the player’s character, Dominic, don (perhaps just as well, since EA doesn’t have the rights to Al Pacino’s voice or likeness). With the flashbacks to Robert DeNiro’s young Vito entirely erased, “Godfather II” works its way through some of the highlights of Michael’s story, such as the attempted murder of Frankie Pentangeli and Sen. Pat Geary’s rude awakening in a brothel, with Dominic awkwardly grafted onto events.

The plot increasingly strays from the movie, culminating in a ridiculous sequence where Dominic tries to single-handedly assassinate Fidel Castro and fight his way out of Havana. By that point, it’s clear EA isn’t paying homage to a great American film so much as abusing its legacy for a game that could and should stand on its own.

To EA, apparently, "The Godfather Part II" is not a great American film that deserves respect. It's a brand that can be slapped onto a half-finished mafia game.

"Godfather II's" flaws are many, and mostly of the type that scream the publisher simply ran out of interest (or marketing research) to fund it to completion: Sub-par graphics, repetitive missions, a nearly empty "open world" (there's literally nobody in the airport; apparently all 20 people who live in this version of New York City are afraid to fly).

 But there's one key feature of the game that almost makes up for all those problems:

[T]he sequel adds what it calls the “Don’s View,” a three-dimensional map on which Dominic can send Corleone goons to take over rackets or defend their own from attacks. The “Don’s View” is a truly impressive interface, allowing players to manage the family, call in favors and scan sizable maps without ever feeling overwhelmed. It accomplishes this not only through clear visuals and well-laid-out controls, but also aural cues. Soft moans and the cocking of a pistol, for instance, help to indicate whether one is looking at a business involved in adult entertainment or gun running.

"The Don's View" should have been the core innovation behind a great mafia game. Instead, it's the only impressive feature in what's otherwise an interactive middle finger to Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo.

Five months ago in a New York Times Magazine interview, Will Wright listed Stupid Fun Club as something he does while "Moonlighting":

Now that diversion is his full time job. Wright, the designer behind "SimCity," "The Sim" and "Spore" is leaving Electronic Arts, his employer for the past 12 years (after it bought "SimCity" publisher Maxis), and the company that we can presume has made him quite rich.

As part of Wright's departure, EA is making is making an equity investment in Stupid Fun Club and getting a first look deal on its project. The announcement describes the organization as "Will Wright's new adventure," without giving any background.

But there's actually a long history. Stupid Fun Club is almost a decade old and is all about robots. Founded in 2001, it at one point had, according to this fan site, two full time employees, a filmmaker and "conceptual design consultant" who Wright met on the RobotWars British TV show, and was something between a think tank focused on robots and a place for Wright to work on robot-related ideas for his first look television deal with Fox (none of which turned into series).

So what is it now? It's tough to tell from EA"s vague description of Stupid Fun Club as "an entertainment think tank developing new Intellectual Properties to be deployed across multiple fronts including video games, movies, television, the internet, and toys." Given that Wright would have had no trouble raising money from EA and others to start a new organization, however, it seems like a reasonable assumption that robots will continue to be a big part of it.

The $64,000 question is, "Why?" To what extent was Wright ready to leave and to what extend did EA want him to leave and help make the move agreeable by investing in what had been his side venture? There's no escaping the fact that Wright's deal is remarkably similar to what happens when most studio executives get the axe: the studio funds a production company and gives the executive a first look deal, allowing him to ride into the sunset with a bit of dignity intact.

One thing that is evident is that EA has been preparing for Wright's departure PR-wise for a while. It makes a lot more sense now why the publisher has been putting Maxis general manager and "Spore" executive producer Lucy Bradshaw front and center, along with or even ahead of Wright, in interviews for the past year.

In part two of my interview with Bioware CEO Ray Muzyka and VP, entertainment Greg Zeschuk, we talk about why movies are a key part of the development of the studio's fictional worlds, how they can ensure those movies are good, and how the recession and success of Nintendo is impacting their business plans.

For background on my interviewees, see the introduction to part one.

(the screenshots are from Bioware's upcoming game "Dragon Age: Origins")

Ben Fritz: In terms of the different media connected to these worlds, you obviously developed the games and you’re very involved in the novels… But I know Avi Arad has optioned “Mass Effect” as a movie. What’s your approach to working with a producer like that on one of your properties?

Ray Muzyka: We’re not going into detail on that front right now. I don’t if we’ve explicitly confirmed any of that stuff [they haven’t]. But if we were…

The one thing that’s true, regardless of how our ideas are manifested, is quality is the key. They’ve all got to be awesome and equally satisfying to different audiences in different ways. That’s something we’re unrelenting and uncompromising about. We want to work with the best people in the world on something that’s actually going to be seen as a landmark event. So people can feel it’s a good value for their money, entertaining, and emotionally engaging.

Greg Zeschuk: Another way to see it too is we work with folks who get the properties. Not just get how much the potential return is. That’s one of the important factors. People we build relationships with have to have that same feeling we have. It’s tough finding folks like that.

RM: We’ve been very lucky all the people we have worked with and are working with, past and future, are in that mold. They get it. They’re passionate. I love that. I love the passion.

GZ: I think we’ve reached a transition point media-wise where there’s an understanding that the right games can transition well to other media. There’s some, like light shooters with no story, probably not so much. It’s going to be hard to make something great in other media off a property that’s not founded in a strong world.

Our stuff would probably translate well. What’s interesting is we talk to folks from all over, Hollywood and elsewhere, it’s always amazing to find folks who have played our games. It’s like, “Wow. We love your movies and you love our games.”

RM: Translating our games to cinema is an active goal for us. It’s something we’re actively pursuing. We haven’t necessarily confirmed all the stories. But, having said that, a lot of the stories that have come out have been pretty much on spot.

BF: Still speaking theoretically, of course… If you guys are world builders, as more and more of the same tools are being used to make special effects and animation in movies, is it an active goal for you to be involved in producing those other media?

For a blog about the the business and culture of video games and their intersection with Hollywood, the guys in charge of Bioware are really well situated. They run a hugely successful RPG [role playing games] developer that was acquired by Electronic Arts in 2006, along with Pandemic, for $860 million. They've worked on one of the most successful licensed games of all time, "Knights of the Old Republic" (with an MMO sequel in the works) and created several hit original properties, one of which, "Mass Effect," is currently in development as a film. And they've got a huge original property, "Dragon Age: Origins," in production that's one of the few bets the newly slimmed EA is taking. (All the screenshots in this post are from "Dragon Age" because, hey, they're new)

In other words, they're at the forefront of the storytelling in video games, cooperation with old media, and the business of developing for the mass market. That's why I was really pleased to get to interview Ray Muzyka [left], the CEO, and Greg Zeschuk, VP of entertainment, for half an hour at the Game Developers Conference.

I think our discussion turned out to be really interesting, so I've transcribed most of it and broken it up into two posts. Today: Our discussion of storytelling in video games, in which I ask them about the relative importance of character development vs. mechanics and they shoot back that it's all about world-building.

Tomorrow: We talk about the process of making movies out of Bioware games and how modern economic realities effect their development process.

Ben Fritz: What I’ve noticed in playing your games and what’s obvious in “Dragon Age” [I saw a demo just before the interview] is their scope. When you’re trying to make a game so massive, do you cut back on the size if you feel like you don’t have the quality? Or is the quantity so important that you first need to get it to the size it needs to be? How do you balance those two things?

 Ray Muzyka: We try and define possibility space want player to engage in and what’s the scope that accommodates that.  We have to make that commercially successful at the same time, so we have to balance the commercial and artistic goals. But, we don’t want to compromise the artistic goals. We aim pretty big. Our ambitions are pretty crazy sometimes. The size of this game is kinda crazy in some ways, because there are a number of permutations and the replayability of it all.

It’s a good endeavor because in the end we trust our fans for supporting us. We’re building a platform more than anything. We’re trying to launch a landmark fantasy event. It’s dark heroic fantasy. It’s a platform for future engagement with our fans: Downloadable content; achievements surfaced on the community site; creation of user-generated content with the toolset we’re releasing. It’s a long multi-year plan.

Greg Zeschuk: There’s another dimension that’s interesting in that honestly we don’t know how big it’s going to be. Because the actual act of discovery is a big part of the development process for any first iteration of a game. Anything big especially, you have to make the tools and all the stuff that allows you to create everything. Then at the end you build it and go, “Hmmmm, how big did it end up being?”

We do set goals, but we tend to overshoot them because everyone’s really ambitious and then we trim a bit. That’s the place where we can really nail the quality. Over the years, what we’ve done is tried and establish an overall quality bar. If something dips below, we used to try and build it up. Now we tend to just excise it.

It isn’t dissimilar from a film where you’re editing. The last sequence of our development process involves editing the game content into the best mix in a sense.

BF: Where do you start, I’m curious? I spoke Monday night to some developers from Ubisoft ["Prince of Persia" producer Ben De Mattes, "Far Cry 2" creative director Clint Hocking] and they said it’s mechanics, you start with mechanics and build a character on top of that. To me that means, no surprise, the character often isn’t as compelling.

On the other hand, if you do character first before you know if he or she works as a mechanic, maybe you’re in the wrong medium. Which do you guys start with and then how do you balance when there’s a conflict between the creation of a compelling character vs. what would make the best player mechanic?

RM: First we build the world. Then we get everything situated. The character and mechanics are elements that need to be consistent with that world. I don’t think we build them separately. It’s all an integrated whole.

Back in November I reported that EA's "Boom Blox" sequel (now known as "Boom Blox Bash Party") was the first title developed under the publisher's distributed Blueprint model, which builds a team out of freelance employees in different locations. As it turned out, it might be the last, at least with the Blueprint name, since the label (division?) was shut down in the fall.

Nonetheless, the model is a fascinating one. The biggest cost for publishers is maintaining personnel and overhead at development studios without feeling rushed to greenlight projects. EA's solution that it has tested with "Bash Party" is to not build a team, at least not in one location.

Instead, as the game's senior producer Amir Rahimi explained to me at GDC, there were developers working all over the world: four folks in Texas, an art director in San Francisco, an engineer in Germany, and so on. All led by a small, core team in Los Angeles. "We pushed the limits of video conferencing technology," he said of the development process on the sequel to last spring's casual Wii game developed with Steven Spielberg.

The first "Boom Blox" sold 450,000 units as of last summer (so it's probably north of 500,000 by now), making it a so-so performer for a Wii exclusive, but hardly a smash hit. One of the ways EA was comfortable in committing to a sequel so quickly was surely the knowledge that development costs would be lower under this distributed Blueprint model. For games that don't require huge teams and aren't identified with a certain studio (like, say, "Mass Effect" with Bioware), the benefits of this model are obvious. And if "Boom Blox Bash Party" is well received, I'm sure we'll see more of it, especially as publishers are trying to cut costs.

Will "Bash Party" be well received? Based on what I saw I'm optimistic. Regular readers know I was a huge fan of the first "Boom Blox" (here's my review). In fact it was my favorite game of 2008. "Bash Party" is, to a large extent, more of the same. Twice as many multi-player modes, about 450 levels, new game types and settings.

But the biggest upgrade, as I've previously written, will be online. EA has added a "LittleBigPlanet" like community to "Bash Party." In the first "Boom Blox," players could make levels, but sharing them with the world was virtually impossible. In "Bash Party," users will be able to upload, rate, tag, and browse levels made by other users, as well as new ones from the developers. That means my favorite title of 2008 is transforming from a game to a platform. So yeah, I'm excited.

The Interwebs are abuzz today over Double Fine honcho Tim Schafer's rather cryptic comment when asked by 1UP about the rumor that there will be a Wii version of his upcoming heavy metal action game "Brutal Legend." "We are making an Xbox 360 and a PS3 version of Brutal Legend," he said.

He's telling the truth. Just not the whole truth. Double Fine is making "Brutal Legend" for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. And Electronic Arts is engaging another developer to make a version of the game for the Wii (most likely with Double Fine consulting). I'm not sure who that developer is, but several good sources have confirmed for me that it's in the works.

I also don't know when "Brutal Legend" for Wii will be released, but I'd be surprised it's it's this fall along with PS3 and 360, given that I understand development started fairly recently. But I wouldn't be surprised if it follows the model of the upcoming "Dead Space: Extraction" and comes out a year or so after the original PS3/360 version

Strategically, this is a no-brainer. EA has said its turnaround plan involves fewer, bigger franchises and a focus on the no. 1 console in the market: Wii. If "Brutal Legend" is one of those franchises (don't tell Activision!), it makes total sense EA wants to get it on Nintendo's platform. Especially since the game's main character carries a big-ass axe that it could be fun to swing with the Wii-mote.

An EA rep declined to comment.

Electronic Arts seems to have a plan for its new M-rated properties: launch a direct-to-DVD animated movie with the game and develop a big budget feature film to expand the franchise in the long run.

"Dead Space," of course, had its animated DVD movie "Downfall" (below left) that came out along with the game in October. A feature film is being developed by Temple Hill Productions, the company behind "Gears of War" and "Twilight."

"Dante's Inferno" (above right) is further ahead on the theatrical feature path. It has already been set up at Universal Pictures and has a writer penning a script. Today comes news that Film Roman, the Starz Entertainment unit behind "Dead Space: Downfall" is also doing a direct-to-DVD version of "Dante's" that will come out with the game next winter.

 The only details about the "Dante's" project to come out are that separate anime studios are being tapped to create the nine different levels of hell.

News was revealed today as Starz is apparently looking to sell both animated movies to international TV buyers at the MIP market this week.

It appears that Frodo is coming home. Not to the Shire, but to Warner Bros.

Though neither company said anything about it, New Line's licensing deal with Electronic Arts for "Lord of the Rings" games expired at the end of last year. Originally set to end in 2007, the two companies agreed on an extension that March until the end of 2008 (the pact also included literary rights holder Tolkien Enterprises).

The last game released under the deal was January's poorly received, soft selling "Lord of the Rings: Conquest" (one of the reasons the game turned out so badly may have been that developer Pandemic had to get it done before EA's rights expired at the end of 2008, though apparently the publisher got a two-week reprieve to release it in early January).

Since EA first got its hands on the "Lord of the Rings" license back in 2001, New Line has transitioned from an independent studio under the Time Warner corporate umbrella to a label for Warner Bros., which now handles most of its business operations. Warner, of course, has its own videogame unit, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, that has grown from a licensing unit to a full-fledged publisher with its own slate of AAA titles.

So, you own a major publisher... you just got back the interactive rights to one of the top entertainment properties in the world... Can you guess where I'm going? It's a safe bet that Warner Bros. won't be licensing out "Lord of the Rings" again. Instead, based on logic and what some sources have told me, expect Warner Bros. to start producing "Lord of the Rings" games itself soon (whether they're based solely on its films, or also stuff from the books, will depend whether it makes a deal with Tolkien Enterprises).

What, oh what, kind of games might Warner do with the "Lord of the Rings" license? Well, there are two "Hobbit" movies that New Line is producing with MGM for 2011 and 2012. Not only is there an obvious movie tie-in or two, but that could also help revive interest in any games set in Middle Earth.

A Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment rep declined to comment.

As movie studios increasingly handle their own videogame publishing, this will continue be the trend. Why keep licensing out your best stuff if you can make the games yourself? Disney, for instance, is in the process of taking back the Pixar license from THQ, which has the rights to make games based on "Up" and one more film, most likely 2011's "Newt" (Disney is doing 2010's "Toy Story 3").

Of course, while "Lord of the Rings" is big, Warner Bros. has another videogame license currently in the hands of EA that it's no doubt salivating to bring back home: Harry Potter. That won't happen for a while, though. EA's deal extends through Warner Bros.' last film, which will be part 2 of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" in 2011. (Although, according to reports, WB may already have its studio Traveller's Tales working on "Lego Harry Potter," perhaps in some kind of co-publishing deal with EA.)

Update: Joystiq picked up this post and added a good additional point I forgot about: Warner Bros. is a major equity holder in Turbine, developer of "Lord of the Rings Online,"  and published the most recent expansion "Mines of Moria." That means it has the "LOTR" console and MMO videogame rights all wrapped up internally. How precious.

Update 2: Another bit of evidence confirming this report comes from GamesIndustry, which reports that an animator at developer Traveller's Tales revealed on a resume that her company had pitched Peter Jackson on a "Lego Lord of the Rings" game. Traveller's Tales is owned by Warner Bros.

Back in December when it cut guidance and announced bigger layoffs, Electronic Arts said that weak catalog sales were one of the primary reasons. "Key catalog titles continue to underperform" was listed as one of the main reasons for the earning shortfall.

Last month, when Activision Blizzard announced earnings, the company didn't specifically discuss a decline in catalog sales, but CEO Bobby Kotick did tell me that "titles in the top 10" are what's "capturing the interest of consumers."

It seemed like that's the trend in the games industry during the recession. But maybe it's just the trend at certain publishers. Because Take-Two today has had the exact opposite experience.

"We have been seeing growth in our catalog sales year-over-year," CEO Ben Feder told analysts on a conference call, "including this most recent quarter when catalog sales grew 30%."

"The current phase of this hardware cycle places a greater emphasis on catalog titles," he added.

Everybody agrees that there has been a greater concentration of sales in the top titles. But while everything else is plunging for EA, it seems Take-Two has found the market is more of what Feder called "a barbell... with AAA titles at one end and value at the other."

One other way in which Take-Two is bucking some trends: While most third party publishers struggle to figure out Nintendo's platforms, particularly the Wii, its "Carnival Games" franchise for the two consoles is doing boffo sales. As of Jan. 31, the publisher has shipped four million units of the Wii version, which launched in August of 2007, the DS version which launched last July, and "Carnival Games: Mini-Golf" for the Wii, which sent on sale in October. Two million of those have come since August 1, indicating the games were pretty big holiday sellers.

But despite those positive signs, Take-Two is still struggling like so many publishers. While revenue rose 7% to $256.8 million from the same quarter last year, net loss ballooned by 33% to $50.4 million on higher costs. And although Take-Two healthily beat its guidance for the current quarter, its maintained its overall guidance for the fiscal year, due in part to some unannounced titles being pushed back and in part, no doubt to the economy. Guidance for the current quarter, which calls for revenue between $200 million and $220 million and  continuing, albeit smaller, losses, seemed to come in lower than investors expected.

As a result, Take-Two stock had a schizophrenic day, surging 14% to $6.85 before the markets closed and earnings were announced in anticipation of good news, then falling back 7% in after-hours trading.

It lost $50.4 million in the quarter

When Kathy Vrabeck ankled (one of my favorite Variety “slanguage” terms – meaning that fuzzy grey area between quitting and getting fired) Electronic Arts late last year, it was a shocker. The Activision veteran had only been at the videogame giant a little over a year and was heading its fastest growing and arguably most important division – casual. But she left for “personal reasons” (the oldest excuse in the book when you’re being pushed out) and Sims label head Rod Humble added casual to his internal empire.

It’s perhaps even more of a shocker, however, to see where she’s ending up: Legendary Pictures, the private equity financier behind movies like “The Dark Knight,” “300” and “Watchmen.” According to several sources, Vrabeck is in final negotiations to take a post at Legendary. I’m not sure exactly that her title will be, but it will apparently entail overseeing new business in videogames and broader digital entertainment.

Vrabeck is one of the best known executives in the videogame world, having worked her way up to president of publishing in the brutally competitive corporate culture at Activision before taking her job as a label president at EA. She’s also one of, if not the, most successful women in the videogames business.

Regular Cut Scene readers know one initiative that will certainly be part of Vrabeck’s purview in her new job: As I reported in October, Legendary has been in talks to acquire “Gears of War” developer and Unreal Engine creator Epic Games. My understanding is that those talks have continued, and gotten deeper, though it’s not clear if it will be a full purchase or some kind of partial acquisition and/or partnership. (Legendary is already co-financing the “Gears of War” movie)

It’s well known that Legendary’s chairman Thomas Tull is extremely interested in video games. He was a co-founder of the ill-fated Brash and resigned from the board in the early fall over concerns about the company’s direction and the quality of its products. Despite the Brash debacle, I’ve heard that Tull remains very interested in videogames and wants to give it another try, this time with more control and better partners.

Nonetheless, it’s not exactly clear what Vrabeck’s hiring means. Will she head up some kind of big digital division, including stuff like online content, or focus primarily on games? Will Legendary become a publisher? Or perhaps fund some games and then partner with other publishers? Will Epic be making games for Legendary or operating completely independently? (As one astute reader pointed out, it could include working on projects like "Lost Patrol," which Legendary acquired last summer with the intention of developing for feature film, the Web, and video games simultaneously)

One interesting angle is that Legendary, like most licensors, probably got back the rights to the games in development at Brash based on its properties (or films it is co-financing with Warner Bros.), like “300” and “Clash of the Titans.” Those titles could potentially continue under Vrabeck’s watch.

So yea, still plenty of questions. But hiring a high powered executive like Vrabeck is an undeniable sign that Legendary intends to be a major player in the videogames space.

Think the drama over "Brutal Legend" is over? Think again.

It turns out that Activision Blizzard is under the impression it still has publishing rights to the game. And it’s threatening to sue developer Double Fine and new publisher Electronic Arts as a result.

(Some background for anyone who hasn’t followed this whole drama for the past year: Double Fine, developer of the critically acclaimed but underperforming “Psychonauts,” set up “Brutal Legend,” an action game set in the world of heavy metal that stars Jack Black, at Vivendi Games. Then last year Vivendi Games merged with Activision to form Activision Blizzard. The newly merged company, led by Activision execs, declined to pick up a number of Vivendi’s projects, including, it appeared, “Brutal Legend.” Then in December, Electronic Arts announced that it had reached a deal with Double Fine and would release the game next fall.)

Now Activision Blizzard has written a letter to EA (and possibly Double Fine) informing them of its legal concerns. According to two sources familiar with ActiBlizzard’s position, the publisher believes that it was still in negotiations with Double Fine and that the EA deal is invalid.

Does that mean ActiBlizzard wants “Brutal Legend” for itself? Nope. I’ve been told it doesn’t think the game has the potential to be the kind of mega-profitable, “Call of Duty”-size franchise that it looks for these days.

So what does it want? A good guess would be money in exchange for giving up its publishing rights. That is what it received from Atari for “Ghostbusters” and “The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Athena,” for instance.

Double Fine’s position, however, appears to be that it owns the rights to “Brutal Legend” and that somehow in the merger process, whether because there’s no longer a Vivendi Games or because the original fall 2008 publishing date passed and Activision didn’t express interest in finding a new one, it's allowed to find a new publisher.

An Activision Blizzard rep declined to comment. But EA has responded with its claws bared, giving me this rather pointed response:

Me-ow.

Yesterday Electronic Arts reported terrible earnings with an enormous loss. Today THQ reported terrible earnings with an enormous loss.

But EA stock rose 11% today. THQ shares, meanwhile, have plummeted 15% in after-hours trading.

That means investors are actually more optimistic about EA's future than they were yesterday morning, but significantly less optimistic about the future of THQ than when they woke up today.

Why the disparity? In part it's because EA warned investors that it would be missing guidance back in December. THQ didn't provide any update since its last earnings report, in November. So the fact that revenue came in over 10% lower than expected and net loss was $192 million when THQ had said it would make a small profit came with no preparation (even if savvy investors must have sensed it was likely).

The fundamental difference between the two companies, however, is that EA's problem is really one of cost. It's spending too much and launching too many titles. Its revenue was actually up 10% in the December quarter from a year ago. As I wrote yesterday, EA has to recognize it's not the powerhouse it once was and cut costs in a smart way that maintains the products with the most market potential, supported with smarter marketing, made as often as possible for Nintendo's Wii.

At THQ, meanwhile, revenue was down 30%. It didn't just get too big for its britches. Its britches are rapidly shrinking. That's why EA CEO John Riccitiello can justifiably claim "Our expense base is geared to a business that assumes much more revenue." THQ's CEO Brian Farrell couldn't get away with that, since his company can't reliably assume what its revenue is. You know it's a bad sign when a company says the environment is so bad it's can't provide revenue guidance for the current quarter. But that's what THQ did.

Which is probably why investors don't have a lot of confidence THQ's cuts will do the trick, even though it's slashing a jaw dropping 24% of its workforce, compared to EA's 11%. Fundamentally, the two companies' plans are the same: cut back on the number of titles, support the few high end AAA releases aggressively, and develop more for the Wii. As Farrell summarized it: "Focus, focus, focus."

But there's more reason to think that will work for EA. It still has a reliably best selling suite of sports titles, most notably "Madden" and "Fifa." It has sequels to huge franchises like "The Sims" and "Need for Speed." It has a major license, "Harry Potter," that lends itself easily to gameplay. And it has some well respected developers like Bioware bringing out new properties.

THQ, by and large, is a big pile of question marks, beyond its solid annual seller "WWE Smackdown vs Raw." From its new UFC license to core gamer properties "Red Faction: Guerilla" and "Darksiders" to its new "Warhammer 40,000" MMO (we've seen how EA's "Warhammer Online" has struggled), there are no sure sellers. Its' only new positives in recent years have been "Saint's Row" and some decent Wii performers like "De Blob" and "Big Beach Sports."

It used to be that THQ's kids' licensed properties provided a reliable base. But it's about to lose the Pixar license and this year's movie, "Up," looks even tougher to adapt than "Wall-E" and "Ratatouille," both of which had disappointing sales. Nickelodeon properties haven't been performing that well (Farrell diplomatically told me last year "we'd love to see a new hit property from them"). And what it has to replace them are Marvel's new "Super Hero Squad" and a single movie from DreamWorks, "Master Mind." All this at a time when, as Farrell said on today's earnings call, "units for kids' titles are down across the board."

EA, fundamentally, is a company that needs to shrink and regroup. THQ has to stop its freefall and, quite frankly, justify its continuing existence. Nobody doubts that EA will still be around in five years, unless its gets acquired. THQ? As the market is proving, one can't be so sure. And it may not even make for much of an acquisition, since once you lose the licenses, all you're left with are a handful of solid studios, "Saint's Row," and "Warhammer 40,000." How much would you pay for that?

I started off writing a rather thorough examination of Electronic Arts' earnings, but then I realized it all boils down to one thing: EA is not the powerhouse it used to be. (If you don't yet know the basics of today's EA earnings report, you can get it here.)

The plain truth is clear in the numbers for fiscal 2010 (which starts April 1): EA cutting its planned operating expenses by $500 million, from $2.6 billion to $2.1 billion. And it's reducing the number of SKUs (one game released for three consoles counts as three SKUs) by 14% from fiscal 2009. If not for the delay of "Godfather Part II," "Sims 3" and "Dragon's Age: Origins" -- all of which are essentially done but EA says need a longer lead time for marketing -- that reduction would be about 20%.

EA, in other words, is 80% of the company it used to be.

Speaking in very carefully coded terms, CEO John Riccitiello essentially admitted this is the case on today's earnings call: "Our expense base is geared to a business that assumes much more revenue."

In the current economy, of couse, almost nobody is the absolute powerhouse they used to be. But EA has lost ground comparatively speaking. It's no longer even a clear no. 1 amongst the third parties in North America. EA's $1.65 billion in revenue last quarter was virtually even with Activision Blizzard's guidance of $1.6 billion (assuming that it actually meets its guidance, which it hasn't warned it won't). In terms of market capitalization, Activision Blizzard is now worth more than twice as much as EA ($12 billion compared to $5 billion).

And it's no longer much of a presence on the sales charts. "Madden NFL '09" for the 360 was EA's only game in the U.S. top 10 for 2008 or (ignoring "Left 4 Dead" which it distributed for Valve) the top 20 for the crucial December holiday sales month. "Clear and simple, our titles, did not perform to our expectations," Riccitiello stated flatly. EA just can't sell 'em like it used to.

Going forward, the company isn't expecting more revenue at all. It's revenue guidance for next fiscal year is identical to the current fiscal year: $4.2 billion. In other words: no growth.

Given all that, it's perhaps remarkable that EA is "only" laying off 11% of its staff, or 1,100 people. Then again, the figure was 6% in October and 10% in December, so who knows if it will rise again.

The plan now is to produce fewer titles, start marketing them earlier, and focus more on the Wii (EA's failure to prioritize the Wii has turned out to be an outright disaster, one that JR says they're trying to change).

An EA that produces fewer games with fewer people is simply not the industry force it was a few years ago. So who is? Activision, as I noted, is gaining, though that's in large part due to its merger with Blizzard. The real winner is Nintendo, which made $7.8 billion last quarter. A lot of that is hardware sales, but as the NPD charts demonstrate, it's also dominating on the software front. If anybody has become a videogame powerhouse at EA's expense, it's Nintendo.

Cutting the number of releases and overall costs, marketing smarter, and focusing more on the best selling consoles makes good sense. but the larger context is undeniable. The era of dominance for Electronic Arts has ended.

(The market, it should be noted, expected today's bad news from EA and responded positively to it plans to reflect reality by shrinking. Its stock is up 4% in after-hours trading)

The picture above is the Roman Empire. Get it?

Much more coming on EA's financial results from today's earnings. But right off the bat, I figured you'd all want to know what games are coming in the next year and when, along with how some titles performed in the past year.

Here's what to expect that we didn't previously know:

-The one new game announced (or more like surprisingly disclosed in response to a question) for the fiscal year starting April 1 was "Dead Space" for Wii. CEO John Riccitiello promised it's "absolutely going to be the same quality and fear factor you got on 360, PS3 and PC." The game definitely won't look as good, but I could see both the monster bashing and zero-G navigation working real nicely with the Wii controls.

-"Godfather Part II" was moved from February to the April-June quarter

-"The Sims 3 delayed from this quarter to June 2

-"Dragon Age: Origins" for PC was pushed back from this quarter to the holidays to coincide with the console version

-A "Battlefield: Bad Company" sequel is coming next winter

-So is "Dante's Inferno"

-And the long awaited "Mass Effect 2"

 -One "yet to be announced" movie tie-in is on the slate for this year, which I'm willing to bet is "G.I. Joe." I reported about a year ago that EA had the game in the works. The only question is whether EA will release it when the movie hits theaters in August, or later in the year with the DVD. Either way, it's surprising that EA still won't publicly confirm it's doing the game.

And the sales data from some of last year's big games:

-"Fifa '09" sold 7.8 million units worldwide. According to CEO John Riccitiello, it was the company's only "blockbuster"

-"Need for Speed: Undercover" sold 5.2 million copies. That's a big number, but its down from last year and below EA's expectations, which is why the company totally changed its plans for the franchise for this year (details here)

-MTV's "Rock Band 2" sold 1.9 million units through EA Partners. By comparison, last year the first "Rock Band" sold 1.5 million units, even though it launched two months later and only in North America.

-"Littlest Pet Shop" sold 2.8 million units, making it a very successful kids' franchise

-Valve's "Left 4 Dead" sold 1.8 million units through EAP.

-"Warhammer Online" has over 300,000 paying subscribers four-plus months after launching. That can't be too heartening for EA, especially considering that "World of Warcraft" added 500,000 subscribers from October through December.

-"Dead Space" and "Mirror's Edge," both of which have been somewhat disappointing for EA (the latter was actually very disappointing), did both sell more than 1 million units worldwide

Three years ago, Electronic Arts had the James Bond License, while Vivendi Games was starting work on its first Jason Bourne game after buying the Robert Ludlum estate license. In 2006, Activision bought the Bond license away from EA. Then last year, Activision merged with Vivendi and dropped the Ludlum license since it was competitive with Bond and the first release, "The Bourne Conspiracy," didn't sell too well.

Today, the circle is complete, EA has bought videogame rights to the Robert Ludlum estate in a new ten year deal. And it's starting work on its first Bourne game, which I'm told is targeted for release in summer 2010 (not too coincidentally when Universal is planning to release its fourth Jason Bourne movie).

Back when the Activision-Vivendi merger happened in late July and Bourne got dropped, I reported that the Ludlum estate was considering options including finding a new publisher or self funding its own games.

Today I spoke to Ludlum estate CEO Jeffrey Weiner, who told me that talks with EA started soon after and that the basic principles of the deal were concluded by October, with the last three months being taken up with lawyers and paperwork. He said that while Ludlum spoke to several different publishers, EA was the first choice and always in the lead because its CEO John Riccitiello almost bought the license in 2005 before it went to Vivendi.

"John was at [VC firm] Elevation [Partners, former owner of Bioware/Pandemic] at the time and was a real serious bidder," Weiner explained. "So when Activision decided to terminate the license we reached out to him because we like John and it's a great company. We feel we're in a much better position now."

Keith Boesky, the independent agent who reps the Ludlum estate, echoed, the sentiment and added that while Vivendi made a very strong bid for the property initially, it didn't handle the property too well, as evidenced in the rather lackluster launch for "The Bourne Conspiracy."

"EA came in the strongest, had the best take on the property, and they know how to grow the IP and have unquestioned worldwide market reach," he said. "We're dealing with grown ups now."

As I previously reported, Vivendi actually had a second Ludlum game in the works, "Treadstone," based on Bourne's super spy program, in development at Radical Entertainment (which is now part of the Activision family and working on "Prototype"). "Treadstone" is officially scrapped, however. Starbreeze is starting from scratch on its project. No info yet on what's in the works, but given the expertise the Sweden-based developer showed in first person combat and storytelling on "The Chronicles of Riddick" and "The Darkness," it's a pretty exciting choice.

With a full ten years on the deal, it's interesting to consider that EA could, and surely wants to, develop the Ludlum brand beyond "Bourne." The deal includes everything Ludlum wrote, including the "Covert One" spy series, which Vivendi was originally planning to adapt when it bought the rights.

The big question yet to be answered: Will EA fix Vivendi's failure and get Matt Damon to give his likeness and do voice work for Bourne this time around? Especially if the game comes out along with the next movie? Or will Jason Bourne once again be a generic white guy?

 Back in November I reported that Electronic Arts was working on a sequel to last year's critical hailed and so-so seller "Boom Blox," co-created by Steven Spielberg as part of his deal with the publisher. Today EA is confirming that the name is "Boom Blox Bash Party" and the release date is very soon: this spring, just a year after the original.

Regular readers of this blog can guess I'm really happy. "Boom Blox" was my favorite games of 2008. I'm pretty sure I was the only critic out there to put it at number one on their top ten list. So to the extent that it's just more of the same, I'm looking forward to it. EA is promising 400 new levels, new block shapes, new weapons, new multi-player challenges, and team-based challenges.

The quote from senior producer Amir Rahimi in the press release is, "In the original 'Boom Blox,' we really focused on perfecting the game's physics so now we can push the boundaries of physics, offering exciting new challenges and completely new ways to play."

Translated out of PR-ese, that means it's pretty much the same underlying game, but with tweaks and new content.

That's an especially useful approach since, as I also wrote in November, "Boom Blox Bash Party" is being made with the distributed development approach EA pioneered in its now defunct Blueprint division. This isn't something EA is bragging about in its press release, but the development team is made up, in part at least, of programmers, artists and other freelancers around the world who are working together online. "Everybody is integrated, regardless of whether they're in the same physical location," my former Blueprint source told me at the time. "It's truly the spirit of what Blueprint was going to be."

Though this sequel appears to be mostly more of the same, there's one major change that I'm really excited about. It is, in fact, a solution to the only singificant critique I had of the game in my review last year: A fully functional online community for user-created levels. The original "Boom Blox" had a great level creator, but the only way to share creations was to send them to a specific person with a Wii friend code. In other words, it was a major pain in the ass and nobody did it.

This time, EA wised up and gave "Boom Blox Bash Party" the full "LittleBigPlanet" treatment. Meaning an online community where users can share, download and rate new levels.

I'm sure this statement will only endear me further to the "LittleBIgPlanet" lovers already mad at me because my review of the game wasn't good enough, but based on my experience with that game and with the original "Boom Blox," I think the latter is much more appealing and intuitive as a tool for the masses to create content. As I've argued, creating compelling platformer levels is damned tough, no matter how good the tools in "LBP" are. But building a single structure or puzzle for "Boom Blox" isn't nearly as daunting an affair. And the Wii is a much better platform for level building than the PS3 (or 360), for the obvious reason that it's much easier to manipulate items in a 3-D environment (though the PC is still the ideal). Not to mention that "Boom Blox" was, and it looks like its sequel well be, a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying experience even if you don't touch the creation tools and never go online

Last year there were rumors about a "Dark Knight" game from EA that might have come out with the blockbuster film's DVD, and then further rumors that the game had been killed, which it obviously was.

Kotaku Australia has a good story of how things went wrong. Why Kotaku Australia? The game was in development at EA subsidiary Pandemic Studios' Brisbane office (which has recently gotten the axe amongst EA layoffs). The basic story is the oldest one in the book when it comes to licensed games: Not enough time to make the game (only 18 months) so then, when the studio encountered technology problems (as happens so often with videogame development) it couldn't possibly hit its date in time with the movie, not even the DVD date. 

With all the talk about quality and making sure games, especially licensed ones, have the necessary development time from both EA and Warner Bros., it's pretty sad that it's the same old story here.

It's a shame for numerous obvious reasons, not the least of which is that a game based on the biggest movie of the year could have made a lot of money, even if it wasn't all that good.

Of course it won't be too long until we get a new Batman game, since Eidos is working on "Arkham Asylum," based on its license of the comic book IP in 2006.

 There are plenty of surface problems with EA's new "Lord of the Rings: Conquest" that make it a badly executed game: the visuals are mediocre; characters spawn out of thin air right in front of you; gameplay is repetitive and sometimes tedious; on-screen directions are sometimes unclear; and so on and so on.

But the real problem with the game is a conceptual one. "Lord of the Rings," whether in book form or movie, is an epic fantasy. That's really it's defining trait. It's three books that are 600,000 words long in total taking place in an entire land with numerous regions, species, and landmarks. The characters are big (some physically, some just personality wise), the themes are big, the story is huge, the battles are massive.

And then you have "Lord of the Rings: Conquest." Choose one of four different character types and relive the books/films' greatest battles via small missions that feature as many as several dozen enemies on screen at a time (or up to 16 in multi-player) and no sense of what's going on around you. Notice a problem? Here's what I wrote in my review:

There are some cool moments, like the first time you control an ent (giant trees) or balrog (big stone monster) and the beginning of the "evil" campaign when you have to stop Frodo from throwing the one ring into Mount Doom (that's one of the very few levels in which you actually understand the larger point of your goals). But they're fleeting.

Other allegedly exciting moments, like controlling the "Rings" heroes like Aragorn and Gandalf, aren't, since they are simply new models of the same characters you've played before (Gandalf's a really powerful mage, Legolas is a really powerful archer, etc.), with not very good sound alike actors imitating the film stars.

So yes, it's not a very well executed game. But more importantly, it's not a misguided approach to a really great property.

Full review: Lord of the Rings: Conquest

Call me cynical, but when a Hollywood production company with no history in the space announces it's getting into the videogames business, I don't take it all too seroiusly. After all (shocking news!), a lot of people in the entertainment industry say they're going to do a lot of things and many of them don't really happen.

But Red Eagle Entertainment, a company formed solely to produce media based on the "The Wheel of Time" fantasy novels (I've never heard of them, but they're apparently a big deal, having sold 44 million copies worldwide) apparently has its act together enough to sign up an impressive partner: Electronic Arts, which will distribute the "Wheel of Time" game (or games) worldwide through its EA Partners program.

The plan is to develop a series of games for "all major platforms," as well as an MMORPG, which EA will distribute at retail.

At a minimum, this means Red Eagle Games (the company's videogame division, natch) really has the money to finance these titles and impressed EA enough to show they know what they're doing when it comes to making them.

Don't expect the games anytime soon, however. There's no release date announced and a source I spoke to said that Red Eagle doesn't yet have a developer working on production. So it's going to be a couple of years, at least.

Meanwhile, as Variety reported last summer, Universal has the rights to develop a "Wheel of Time" movie, or movies.

A recent story in weekly Variety by my colleague Jill Goldsmith, our very experienced and astute Wall Street reporter, was musing on what 2009 held in store for the major media conglomerates and included this fascinating bit of speculation based on interviews Jill did with various financial professionals who follow these companies closely:

That would be quite an event, huh? When you think about it, it makes some sense. Disney has been investing heavily in videogames these past few years. And while its stock is down (31% off its 52-week high), EA stock is way down (67% from its 52-week high), which means buying EA could be a potent way for Disney to jumpstart itself to a lead position in this still relatively fast growing space.

And when you think about it, Disney might not be the only media conglomerate considering such a move. Most of the conglomerates are interested in videogames and have started dipping their toes in the water, some (Disney, Time Warner), Viacom aggressively and others (NBC U, News Corp.) more conservatively. but right now, they're in an interesting position. DVD sales, long the studios' cash cow, have flattened and there's no sign Blu-ray or digital downloads/streaming will pick up the slack (for more details, read this story). So big media is looking for new ways to ignite growth.

The videogame business has been having problems, with growth slowing of late, but it's still red hot compared to movies, TV, and music. And many videogame publishers, not just EA, have seen their stocks take major hits in the past six months, much more than the declines for big media shares. That means videogame publishers are more affordable for the conglomerates than they were a year ago. Which means we could just see a Disney-EA acquisition, or others like it, in 2009

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Drumroll, please, as we present our picks for the #1 best game released in 2008. A first-person shooter, an RPG, a casual family game and a stealth actioner with 30 minute-plus cutscenes. An original, a "2," a "3," and a "4." Two American games, a French Canadian game and a Japanese game. A PS3 exclusive, a Wii exclusive, and two multi-platformers. Two unqualified hits and two moderate sellers. I'd say this is a pretty diverse and interesting set of choices...

Tom Chick

Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft / Ubisoft Montreal)

Of all the places I went this year without leaving my house, "Far Cry 2's" lush African countryside was my favorite, and not just because these are currently the best graphics I've ever seen. Here is a game that breathes without breathing down my neck. It's not afraid to let me roam without making the gameplay equivalent of idle chit-chat. With its emphasis on an interface-free interface, it does a tremendous job getting out of my way (in this respect, it is the anti-"Fallout 3") and letting me just be here. If Terence Malick were to make a videogame, it would be "Far Cry 2." And when things happen, they happen dramatically and dynamically. There's a glorious sense of spontaneity in the way the shooting erupts, unfolds, progresses. I almost never feel that these firefights were built by the developers. In fact, I almost never feel that about any of the moments in "Far Cry 2." These moments are mine. Some games unfold. Others are revealed. Some are like thrill rides. Others are like  playgrounds. But "Far Cry 2" is a beautiful place where amazing things simply happen. 

Chris Dahlen

Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks / Bethesda)

I could go on about each of the core elements the game got right – that it was so much more than "Oblivion" with shotguns, that even the escort missions were fun, and that the sight of the Chinese army invading a ‘50s "Leave it to Beaver" cul-de-sac will stay with me for years to come. But the single reason I loved "Fallout 3" was that I never knew what was around the next corner.

Ben Fritz

Boom Blox (EA / EA Casual)

The first great game for the Wii that would only work for the Wii is also the most surprisingly deep, universally accessible, and  unyieldingly enjoyable videogame of 2008. Using the Wii-mote to play with blocks seems like the most obvious concept in the world (no offense, Mr. Spielberg), but the development team at EALA crafted an experience so rich that I’ve enjoyed it with non-gamers, with hardcore gamer friends, with kids, and by myself late into the night. The diverse array of challenges and huge number of levels stands as proof that “casual” and “core” are not mutually exclusive. “Boom Blox” is the videogame that demonstrates, truly, we all can play together.

Leigh Alexander

Metal Gear Solid 4 (Konami / Kojima Prods.)

Simultaneously one of the highest-rated and most controversial titles of the year, it polarized its audience. Sure, there were those who loved the game's uncontested technical polish and the most sophisticated implementation yet seen of the franchise's stealth mechanics -- but much of the discussion revolved around the merit (or lack thereof) of Hideo Kojima's self-indulgent directorial style and the game's long periods of non-interactivity badly in need of an editor.
 
But a brilliant director who's overambitious is essential to a medium long constrained by narrative status quo, risk aversion and repetition. Look closely at the subtleties of "Metal Gear Solid 4's" brilliant postmodernism -- underneath the overt sprawl lies an exercise in stunning elegance whose largest failing was that it imposed itself on an audience that prefers a different format.

And that's a wrap. I'll provide a convenient summary of all four of our top ten lists in a post later today. Don't forget to cast your votes for the top games of the year here.

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Ben Fritz

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

For those of us who thought Epic, Bungie and Insomniac had taken multi-player action as far as it could go, Valve delivered a genuine paradigm shift. Every single element of “Left 4 Dead,” from the level design to the resource distribution to the menus to the integration of zombie movie tropes to the dynamic A.I. not only encourages, but compels cooperative gameplay. They also make it the most genuinely scary interactive experience of 2008, because you never know what's coming next and whether your team has the guts to survive.

After dozens of successful online campaigns, however, "Left 4 Dead's" most lasting impact on me is its demonstration that great videogame design can overcome even that most intractable of foes: the Xbox Live asshole.

Leigh Alexander

Persona 4 (Atlus / Atlus)

This was the year that the industry seemed increasingly willing to back-shelve traditional Japanese mechanics and genres -- but as it did last year, the "Persona" series proves it's way too early to call the Japanese RPG a relic. "Persona 4" adapts to modern, fashionable visual and music just as deftly as it updates staid, conventional game mechanics. But it's most broadly impressive for its poignant cultural subtext and commentary on interpersonal relations -- markedly adult, even while it's all wrapped in a widely-accessible high school hipster story.

Tom Chick

Saints Row 2 (THQ / Volition)

This is the paragon of open-world city-havoc sandboxes. It's a pitch-perfect example of a game that accomplishes exactly what it intends to accomplish. It's crass and generous and spectacular, stuffed with stuff to do, usually involving the liberal application of chaos. Like the first "Saints Row," it out-"Grand Theft Autos" the best of them: "Mercenaries," "The Godfather," "Scarface," "Bully," "Grand Theft Auto" itself, and even "Crackdown." If there is a better realized vision of a city as a massive free-wheeling incendiary playground, I haven't seen it. And the fact that I can play almost every corner of "Saints Row 2" cooperatively is almost obscene. Really, Volition? You're going to go that far above the competition? That's just showboating.

Chris Dahlen

Braid (Number None)

Jonathan Blow's long-awaited debut had a nice window in late August to get critics’ and fans’ attention - most famously, Soulja Boy. It has passionate advocates, myself included, yet I wonder if we’re outweighed by the players who made fun of the writing or grew frustrated with the platforming. Blow has objected to people who criticize the game for what it's not, rather than taking it for what it is - and in my experience, "Braid" is an elegant, brilliantly-designed puzzle game where each problem has an exquisite "ah-ha" solution, and the story that started out so sweetly turns troubling and confusing by the epilogue. Is Blow ultimately full of shit, as his detractors (and blogosphere sparring partners) claim? A prize goes to the critic who can get far enough ahead of him to prove it.

Coming Friday: The most overrated videogames of 2008.

Coming Monday: The best videogame(s) of 2008

Coming tomorrow: Most of you will have too much of a hangover to read this blog anyway

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

Tom Chick

Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks / Bethesda)

I didn't do this intentionally, but once I'd arranged my list I realized that my top four games of 2008 are all powerfully imagined and skillfully created open worlds, with rock-solid infrastructures of good gameplay and an unwavering emphasis on freedom. Here are almost unprecedented juxtapositions of developer creativity and player freedom ("Grand Theft Auto IV" would have belonged among this rare company if Rockstar had either written a better story or designed a better game). "Fallout 3" is the most contrived of the four, proceeding apace along the usual RPG trappings like dialogue trees, fussy interface muckery, and occasionally clunky world building. But it's an unforgettably bleak and epic experience, brave enough to be barren and gray, but crammed with stories, vignettes, characters, and sights. Some fans of the "Fallout" series were worried that it would be "Oblivion" with guns. "Oblivion" should be so lucky.

Chris Dahlen

Left 4 Dead (Valve and EA / Valve)

The brilliance of "Left 4 Dead’s" co-operative play lies in the way that even strangers learn to work as a team, knowing their survival is at stake.  And if you play with friends, you get a rare chance to see their true character come through. I never get sick of reading about people's experiences in the game – Daniel Purvis’ tale of cowardice under pressure is my favorite - because the same few elements can afflict you in so many ways. Sort of like browsing old chess games, with a much, much scarier queen. 

Ben Fritz

Braid (Number None)

If nothing else, “Braid” entranced me with a quality I never knew videogames could possess: relaxation. Spending hours pondering, experimenting, and rewinding time while figuring out brain-bending puzzles to the tune of a wistful cello solo and the sight of swirling watercolors was a wholly unique and utterly invigorating experience. Themes of loss, regret, and forgiveness are subtly woven and then masterfully brought home, even if the epilogue is unbearably pretentious.

Leigh Alexander

No More Heroes (Marvelous and Ubisoft / Grasshopper Manufacture)

It's shamelessly bizarre, heavy-handed, clunky and incisively brilliant from beginning to end, a loving send-up of the very gamer culture that eats up the deprecating self-references with glee. Little moments of genius abound: the actually joyous use of the Wii's controls, the necessity of playing an entire stage hanging upside down from one's couch, and the population of villains who, given only brief cameos, seem more exciting and fully-realized than all of the grave animated robots we've been fed all year.

Coming tomorrow morning: The third best videogame(s) of 2008.

(Part of our series counting down the top ten videogames of 2008 -- with interruptions for the most disappointing and most overrated -- according to Variety critics Leigh Alexander, Tom Chick, Chris Dahlen and Ben Fritz. Full details are here. To check out the rest of the list, click here. Most importantly, vote for your favorite games of 2008 in the Cut Scene reader awards here.)

"Most disappointing" does not necessarily mean the worst (after all, we don't want to shower Brash with too many prizes). Rather, these are the games that Variety's critics believe fell the furthest short of our expectations and their potential.

Ben Fritz

Wii Music (Nintendo / Nintendo)

Finally, an accessible social videogame that uses peripherals to let anyone play music. Oh wait, I’m thinking of “Guitar Hero. And “Rock Band.” And even “Ultimate Band.” "Wii Music" is an unnecessary, cacophonous mess of a game (if it even is one, not that it matters) in which most attempts at making music sound worse than an elementary school orchestra. Though I can’t say I’ll ever forget the David Lynch-esque experience of watching a cheerleader, a sitar player, and a man in a dog suit performing “Daydream Believer.”

Wall-E (THQ / Heavy Iron)

To a certain extent, this choice is a stand-in for the many lame licensed titles (“Lost: Via Domus,” “Iron Man,” everything from Brash, and on and on) that show Hollywood and game publishers still don’t really have their act together. But “Wall-E” was the most disappointing of them all because it took source material overflowing with romantic spirit and devolved it into a product so unimaginative and formulaic (Wall-E shooting a gun? Really?) it could have come straight from the film’s corporate overlords at Buy n Large.

Spore (EA / Maxis)

Perhaps I didn’t read the marketing materials right, but wasn’t "Spore" supposed to be about evolution? Nothing in this awkward mash-up of “flow,” “Civilization,” and a space rpg resembles real physical or cultural evolution, in which inherited traits and competition inescapably define a species’ fate. The irony is that the “creature creator,” which EA released for free a few months early to whet gamers’ appetite, is far and away the best part of this disappointing package.

Leigh Alexander

Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft / Ubisoft Montreal)

So gorgeous, so technically excellent, so intriguing at first -- which makes it especially crushing that under all that richly-realized Africa is yet another first-person shooter, and endless litanies of the same ambush mission over and over.

Grand Theft Auto IV (Rockstar / Rockstar North)

In many ways, it's the wildest and most poignant video game ever made -- but in most ways, it's over-weighted, illogical and emotionally manipulative, so that its ploddingly earnest storyline, its precious character tropes and its over-pretension nearly suffocate its fun and sharp cleverness

Tom Chick

Too Human (Microsoft / Silicon Knights)

Although it's an action RPG that misses the point of action RPGs, it's one of the year's only games about cyber-Vikings.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (LucasArts / LucasArts)

Great story. Shame about the game. 

Haze (Ubisoft / Free Radical)

The guys who made "Goldeneye" and "Timesplitters" have come to this?

Chris Dahlen

Spore (EA / Maxis)

Like everybody, I read all the advance hype for the game. And I don’t think my disappointment in the final release stems from backlash, so much as confusion: playing through one full campaign and a couple restarts, I never felt like I saw the point, never had an intuitive understanding of any of the decisions I was making, never felt the urge to go back and try a different path, and never believed that the three key parts of the game - play, create, and share - worked together in any but the most simplistic ways. Instead of revolutionizing user generated content, it trivialized it: Yes, your hermaphrodite alligator man has very spiky eyebrows, but if they don’t impact gameplay, who cares?

Mirror's Edge (EA / Dice)

" Mirror’s Edge" frustrated and annoyed a lot of players. Its soothing aesthetic didn’t match its difficulty: imagine trying to play a game of "Rock Band," except the song stops cold every time you miss a note. Combat should’ve been truly optional, and the cheapest deaths should’ve been caught in playtesting. And yet in spite of it all, I keep coming back to it – for the almost sensual pleasures of sliding down a sheer glass wall or riding the top of a subway train, or feeling the “oomph” as Faith slings herself over yet another ledge. 

Fracture (LucasArts / Day 1 Studios)

...and a dozen other shooters with high production values, elaborate cinematics, ample headshots, and nothing else to offer. I slogged through a lot of these this year, but "Fracture" saw the biggest boost from LucasArts and the most hype for its supposedly innovative “make a pile of dirt almost anywhere you want” mechanic. So I’ll honor it as one of the year’s highest-profile duds.

Coming Monday morning: The fifth best videogame(s) of 2008

Well that took long enough.

I've got a story in today's Daily Variety reporting that "Brutal Legend," the heavy metal action game starring Jack Black, finally has a home: Electronic Arts. EA Partners, to be precise.

The last major game from Sierra left homeless by Activision Blizzard that hadn't found a home will be released by EA next fall. As Cut Scene readers know, developer Double Fine and its reps at CAA have been very close to a deal in the past six months, most notably with MTV late in the summer (details here and here). Once that fell apart, finding a new home took a long time, with previous rights holder Activision Blizzard apparently not making a new deal easy.

But developer Double Fine apparently found a way to extricate itself from Activision Blizzard and retain the full IP rights to "Brutal Legend." EA Partners will be funding development going forward (but isn't reimbursing Activision Blizzard for the money Vivendi previously spent) and handling worldwide distribution and marketing.

And even though CEO John Riccitiello said just on Tuesday that the company is cutting back its slate and being very careful about what it invests in, and even though he said in October that "Brutal Legend" is a "significant creative risk," EA feels "Brutal Legend" is a bet work making, at least with the limited exposure it has through EA Partners (as opposed to just buying and owning it outright).

But rather than me keep explaining it, here's my full interview with EA Partners chief David DeMartini:

Me: EA Partners usually acts as a distributor and marketer for others, like MTV with "Rock Band." Are you putting any money into "Brutal Legend?"

David DeMartini: It's a development and publishing deal. We are funding development... Brutal legend is an IP owned by Double Fine and we're doing publishing and distribution

EA Partner's specific charter is to be the venture organization of EA. We're out there seeking to strike a variety of types of deals with the bet third party developers in the industry.

Out there seeking to strike a variety of types of deals with best third party devs in industry. Harmonix, id, Valve, Epic, Crytek, Grasshopper, and so on. In some cases we fund the entire thing. Some cases partially. Some we just distribute.

Me: That would be like "Rock Band" for MTV?

DD: Yes. The other end of the extreme would be Starbreeze, where we are fully finding those games and publishign and distributing them as well. The other end is pure distribution. Something in the middle might be co-publishing. This is more of a development and publishing deal.

Me: "Brutal Legend" has been "on the market," so to speak, since at least the summer. Have you been interested and in talks the whole time? Or only more recently? How did this come about?

DD:We have a very close relationship with CAA and [games department head] Seamus [Blackley]. He worked with us on some deals like the one with Grasshopper Manufacture and others not yet announced. Since we have that good relationship with them and they represent Double Fine, when the opportunity presented itself, CAA involved us in the discussions.

We're obviously familiar with Double Fine as well as [its president] Tim Schafer. We had the opportunity to look at the property and it took us about 37 seconds to realize what a huge opportunity it was.

Me: A lot of people in the industry liked the game, but were concerned because past Double Fine games that were acclaimed, like "Psychonauts," didn't sell well. EA CEO John Riccitiello even called it a "significant creative risk." Do you think you can do a better job than other publishers have? 

DD: Actually I think Tim might look at some of his creative work and say, "Wow it's hard to make 90-rated games, so why are my 90-rated games not getting out to as many people as I want?" That's part of the reasoning why Tim looked at EA as his publishing distribution partner. We have a long history of taking games that should be in the hands of millions of people and putting them there. Tim's work is at that level.

When we saw this particular IP and the opportunities this game represents based on the focus on open world gameplay, the rock background, the involvement of jack black, the fact that it's action/adventure... Everything associated with this game yells "mega hit" and "mass market."

That's what we look for in these titles. With Tim you always get quality. It's a tremendous confidence boost to have someone who can deliver the goods every time. Tim and his team deliver the goods every time.

The good news is that hard core gamers, who are traditionally the hardest to reach, they love Tim's games. Need to maek srue they recognize this as equally high quality game and get concept tout to mass market.

Me: John Riccitiello said Tuesday that EA is cutting back its slate and focusing only on games with the biggest profit potential. Is "Brutal Legend" being impacted by those changes at all?

DD: This game falls exactly into the words John was saying. The strongest will survive and the most creative mass market ideas. We feel like this falls right into the middle of that category.

Me: Originally "Brutal Legend" was going to come out this fall. Would the game not have been ready if it had stayed at Sierra, or are you using the extra year to add new features? Did you pick the fall release date because that's when teh game will be ready or you think it's the best opportunity?

DD: I believe Double Fine has a really storng reputation for shipping on time. If appropriately supported, Tim and the team would have hit the quality bar in a timely fashion. We evaluated this opportunity and saw it to be huge. So we asked when Tim will get to the greatest level of quality and how long it is going to take us to help make the world aware of the quality of the game.

Fall is the perfect window for a title as epic as this, with star power it has.

Me: And just to be clear, you're distributing it worldwide?

DD: Everythwhere that rocks.

(A few answers moved around and/or trimmed for clarity and brevity. And yes, that really was his reply to the last question.)

My Daily Variety story with full details on EA's guidance reduction and cuts is right here, if you want the big picture.

But here are a few key details of particular interest to gamers:

-EA Sports titles are expected to escape the planned cut in game releases for fiscal 2010, which starts next April. CEO John Riccitiello said the cuts will be roughly equally divided between casual and "core" games, which I interpret to mean the EA Games label and the casual/Sims label.

-Confirming what I reported yesterday, "Mirror's Edge" seems to be doing very poorly. Asked how new properties are performing, the best Riccitiello could say about DICE's parkour action game is "'Mirror's Edge' is one that was very strongly reviewed. It's going to go forward. We're going to look at some issues in the design to make sure a strong IP is married to a strong business."

The other game that seems to be particularly underperforming is "Rock Band 2," which, as I just wrote, Riccitiello basically asked investors to go out and buy this week.

-Other new franchises seem to be doing at least decently well. Riccitiollo said both "Spore" and "MySims" "established a strong base to be an ongoing franchise," while "Dead Space" "looks like a long-term big winner for us." He added that "Warhammer Online" "will continue to perform very, very well [with a] life measured in multiples of years, not multiples of months."

-Though EA is regularly #2 in Wii sales behind Nintendo, which dominates for its own console, it doesn't appear to be at the top on PC, PS3, or 360 (though, because Nintendo is such a strong #1 on Wii, EA titles on the other three still sell better). But he didn't cite any EA titles selling near the top of the charts on the 3 "core" platforms. Instead he said "Really strong titles from a few of our competitors are doing really well on 360, PS3 and PC."

-That's significant, because Riccitiello said one key trend hurting EA is an increasing concentration of sales going to the top 10 titles, while catalog is doing poorly. That's a bad sign for those of us who want more diversity and innovation in the industry -- at least from the big publishers -- since EA is responding by cutting back on titles "at the bottom of the profitability range," a.k.a games that are different from what we have seen and thus appear riskier in a sales projection. I'll probably post more on this soon, since combined with other trends we're seeing in the media industry, it's casts doubt on the "long tail" theory that hits are becoming less important, especially in the midst of a recession.

Full story: Economy takes its toll on EA

Much more on EA's guidance reduction and development cuts in the face of weak holiday sales. But I thought this was a really interesting quote from the conference call, which I'm just finishing up listening to. When asked how "Rock Band 2" is selling, this is what CEO John Riccitiello said:

One of the things we didn’t want to do on call is provide specific info on title performance. I would only highlight that "Rock Band" is one of the top franchises in the industry overall and one that I think consumers are finding themselves delighted with. I would encourage all of you to get out before the end of the weekend and pick up one for yourselves.

That's a really specific request. Sounds like EA really wants to move "Rock Band 2" units and move them soon.

It's probably not the best sign when the CEO of a major publisher feels the need to pimp a title to investors and analysts during a conference call.

As the first information about sales in November -- the most important month of the year for videogame sales -- starts to creep out ahead of Thursday's official report from NPD, it's looking like amidst recession, gamers are going for the familiar and the cheap.

To wit, Nintendo prexy Satoru Iwata told Reuters that his company sold 800,000 Wii units in the U.S. during Thanksgiving week, more than double last year's figure. The increase is helped in part by the fact that the supply is bigger, but still, the fact that there's still that much demand indicates consumers are still happy to buy the cheapest (or rather believed to be cheapest, sorry Xbox 360 Arcade) console.

Also selling very well,. it appears, is "Gears of War 2." Microsoft already announced it sold more than 2 million units worldwide and Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter predicts the game sold as many as 3 million units domestically last month (EEDAR analyst Jesse Divnich predicts a more conservative 2 million-plus). The other huge game, according to Pachter, was likely "Fallout 3." Bethesda already announced that it shipped 4.7 million units worldwide and the analyst predicts it sold around 1.5 million units in November, on top of the 510,000 from the end of October.

Not selling so well? It looks like the big music games could be in decline. "Guitar Hero: World Tour" sales were already down 61% in October from "Guitar Hero III" last year (as I detailed here) and Divnich predicts the November "III" to "World Tour" drop could be 50%. "Rock Band 2," meanwhile sold a so-so 238,000 units in October and Wii Music moved a dismal 81,000. Only the latter is a flop, but it seems that none are setting the world on fire they way they did last year and even in the first half of this year (when "Guitar Hero III" for Wii, in particular, was very hot).

Another sign: Prices for "World Tour" on eBay are significantly cheaper than retail, indicating that supply is no longer a problem.

It could be that "Rock Band" and "Guitar Hero: World Tour" are so expensive and these are obviously lean times when not many people are ready to spend $200 on a videogame ("Wii Music" is only $50 but has other problems, like the fact that it's not very good). Of course the bigger question that Activision and MTV have to worry about is whether this is a sign that the music videogame biz has peaked. Given the hundreds of millions MTV spent on Harmonix and the major investment it's making in a Beatles game, plus the fact that Activision plans to triple the number of "Guitar Hero" skus by 2010, that's a worrying thought.

Finally, it appears that EA's "Mirrors Edge" experiment may not be working out, at least off the bat. I am hearing industry sources that initial sales on the first person parkour game were quite soft.

Of course we'll get actual hard data on Thursday from NPD.

What impressed me most about "Left 4 Dead," which I reviewed in today's Daily Variety, isn't necessarily what it did so well, but what it didn't do. Too many games try to do everything. Thus we've got the mawkish, cliche-ridden, and utterly unnecessary story in "Gears of War 2." Or the tediously long campaign in "Halo 3" when most of us just want to get to the multi-player. Or the uninspired, tacked-on multi-player in "Fracture," a game without enough originality to even support 1/10 of its campaign.

In "Left 4 Dead," it's obvious that most of the work went into the co-op multiplayer. The result is brilliant, compelling, and virtually flawless, the biggest leap forward in multi-player since "Doom" or "Quake." From the menus to the interface to the enemy A.I. to the level design, the entire game makes strategic cooperation both simple and necessary and punishes selfishiness. I particularly love that you can see what fellow players are carrying, either in the HUD or on their persons. No hiding that first aid pack when I'm low on health, jerkface. (For a bit more on why the co-op works so great, check out my earlier post about why four people is the perfect number)

But what about the story? Doesn't "Left 4 Dead" need a single-player mode to set everything up? Hell no. That's not to say the game doesn't have a framework. Players don't just want to be dropped into a generic world with generic enemies to shoot.

"Left 4 Dead's" solution is to find a familiar genre that perfectly fits the co-op gameplay and embraces it. So it's a zombie movie, full of stock characters, settings, and visual/musical details. We all immediately get it. We know these characters, we know where they are, and we know what they want. As a result, "Left 4 Dead" doesn't waste its resources attempting to build an original plot or single-player experience that matches the quality of the co-op. It just drops us into the cliches and gets going with what it does best.

The formula is simple: Successfully innovate in a few key areas and simplify everything else in ways that compliment those features. Too many games try to do too much and the result is that while I'm imprssed by the attempt, the failures stand out and the overall game is hurt by the dissonance. It's no mistake that "Left 4 Dead" and "Boom Blox," two games with little in common, are my favorites of 2008 so far. They're not perfect in every way imaginable. Not even close. But the know what they do right, they know what's not important, and as overall works, they're both perfectly harmonious.

Full review: Left 4 Dead

I highly recommend reading this Guardian post about how videogame reviewers need to value originality a bit more and not focus so much on a checklist of familiar and more quantifiable criteria. I also recommend Leigh's SexyVideogameLand post that pointed me to it. I'm sure one of the reasons I like it is that it somewhat mirrors a recent argument I made here on this blog, though less succinctly and probably less persuasively.

That being said, I think the Guardian's Keith Stuart is dead wrong to use "Mirror's Edge" as his example. There's a game that has one innovative idea (first-person parkour), but it's a fundamentally bad idea that, no matter how well its implemented, just doesn't work very well. Furthermore, it doesn't take into account the many areas in which "Mirror's Edge" not only doesn't innovate, but takes steps backwards, like the generic story and repetitive, under-detailed visual design. But I've made this argument in my review of the game and besides, it doesn't invalidate Stuart's argument.

The bigger point is that I would welcome and love passionate debates about a game like "Mirror's Edge." It's new and exciting and has critics moving in wildly divergent directions and that's an awesome thing. So I think it's bad innovation and Stuart think it's great. Let's make our claims on our reviews, hash it out on our blogs, and invite readers to further the discussion in the comments or on their blogs. That's exactly what I said I wanted in my post from last month and get the feeling it's the kind of thing Stuart would welcome to.

What I think we both dislike is the cowardly critic, the one who focuses on the details and refuses to engage with the big picture ideas of the game. That can lead this kind of idiotic statement from IGN's review of the game, which Stuart highlighted:

The ideas are there for a very cool experience, and I truly hope that a sequel is spawned, but this first attempt falls just a bit short.

On the one hand, it's kind of a dismal acceptance of reality -- we all know there probably will be a sequel and EA/Dice probably will address specific issues. But that's hardly the most interesting thing about "Mirror's Edge," love it or hate it. This game made some very high level choices and those are what reviewers should be engaging.

Contrary to some of the hostile e-mails I got about my review of "LittleBigPlanet" (jeez, imagine if I had given that game an actually bad review), I think disagreement about innovative games is an awesome thing. I can't really recommend that people buy "Mirror's Edge," but based on the fact that some very smart people disagree with me about it, I'd definitely recommend reading more and thinking about it. And if you've played it and have an opinion, joining the discussion. There's probably a lot more to say about it than, ohhh, "Call of Duty: World at War" or "Rock Band 2."

Side note: Leigh also has an awesome piece on Kotaku today about the vast middle ground of people who play games, but dont engage with videogame "culture," such as it is. Perhaps they're Richard Nixon's "silent majority" in the videogame world. I don't actually have anything insightful to add to Leigh's comments (at least for now). I just advise that you read it.

Playing co-op with random strangers on Xbox Live is not only uncomfortably intimate, but awkward and fraught with danger. In a game like "Gears of War" (1 or 2) or "Fable 2," I just don't want to be forced to communicate with a single person I don't know, let alone risk letting him screw with my game (presuming I'm a host).

But last night I played some four person co-op in "Left 4 Dead" and it was an absolute joy. Obviously it has a lot to do with how expertly the game is designed to encourage four people to support each other, rather than f*ck each other over (more on that in my forthcoming review). But four also strikes me as the sweet spot in terms of that weird sense of intimacy you can experience when playing co-op with someone online. Two people is uncomfortably intimate, forcing you to communicate with and even get to know some random person. But four is enough that you don't feel awkward, but can still easily communicate.

That being said, if I were playing expert and had to plan strategy really carefully, I'm sure I'd rather have people I know and trust on my team. But on "normal," playing with strangers is totally fun. "Left 4 Dead" is the first online game where I completely don't mind having random Xbox Live people on my team. I even played as the Black guy for a while last night and nobody called me the N-word.

With the latest round of layoffs, EA has killed its mysterious, always undercover Blueprint division.

A former employee who worked on Blueprint confirmed to Variety that all the corporate employees who worked on the project have either quit, been laid off, or moved onto other projects.

Talking to this ex-employee, I also got a much better sense of what exactly Blueprint was up to. Some people called it a project, some a division, others just a collection of games, but whatever it was, EA never officially announced it. In fact, when I contacted EA to comment, corporate communication VP Jeff Brown declined on the grounds that the company has never acknowledged Blueprint's existence. (Not quite true, since PR person Tammy Schachter discussed it in this interview, but anyway...)

As Neil Young, who started Blueprint mid-2007 and led it for around a year before leaving this spring to head an iPhone gaming company, told me at GDC, Blueprint was intended to be a new way to develop fresh properties across multiple media. In fact, it was originally called Transmedia internally before adopting the name Blueprint.

In addition to its charter to work on new stuff, Blueprint also got ownership of several existing projects at EA, most notably the three games being developed by Steven Spielberg, which makes sense since Neil Young spearheaded that deal. ("Spore" was also under the Blueprint aegis for a short while) It was part of the EA Games label, with Young reporting to label president Frank Gibeau.

It seems there were around a dozen people working on Blueprint and their mission was to change the development process so that individuals or small teams could work together from disparate locations without necessarily being employed at an EA studio. "Using distributed people and leveraging technology in a significant way would allow us to break the high-priced model of game development where everybody is on sight, hired as a full-time regular employee," the former Blueprint staffer told me.

One of the few projects EA Blueprint was able to get going in its short existence was a deal with Armature, an Austin studio formed by several former Retro Studios employees (lots of details in this Gamasutra piece). EA took a minority investment in Armature, signed a first look deal, and also built an off-site location where all game development assets could be stored, but the developers would have near instantaneous access via the Net. The idea is that this would let Armature work at its own offices, outside an EA studio, but still let the publisher own the assets for games they did together.

The Blueprint model is also being used on a previously undisclosed, but none-too-surprising, project: "Boom Blox 2." (not the official title) Apparently work is already underway on a sequel to the spring's innovative Wii puzzle game, which got very good reviews (especially from me) and and sold decently, last we heard. But whie development is being led out of EALA, where the first "Boom Blox" was made, people are working on it together from all over the world. "Everybody is integrated, regardless of whether they're in the same physical location," explained the ex-Blueprinter. "It's truly the spirit of what Blueprint was going to be."

Because it was a start-up unit, Blueprint required lots of investment from EA for the technology it needed to make distributed development work. Apparently it couldn't get alot of those resources, which is one of the reasons it didn't do a lot beyond the Armature deal and "Boom Blox 2" (now part of EA's merged casual/Sims label). After Young left this fall and Louis Castle took over Blueprint, I'm told, more staffers departed and the unit lost further momentum. With the most recent round of layoffs, the last employees working for Blueprint were let go and Castle segued to a new role at EALA. The division was never officially killed. Its games are still ongoing. But with nobody working for Blueprint anymore, it simply doesn't exist.

As a reviewer, I really want to reward originality. But when it's as badly implemented as "Mirror's Edge," I just can't do it.

Let's cut to the chase: "Mirror's Edge" is fundamentally misconceived. As I wrote in my review in today's Daily Variety, a first-person Parkour game doesn't work, because when you're running and jumping at high speeds, you need perspective. Sure, there's a bit more visceral thrill from seeing the world as Faith would, but that's outweighed 100 times over by how hard it is to figure out the correct path to get to that next primary colored object that stands out against the oppressive white. Add in cops who shoot at you from every direction and getting through any area often requires dying over and over again until you've memorized the correct path. If I wasn't reviewing the game, I would have given up out of sheer annoyance within an hour.

"Mirror's Edge" is also a major bore visually. Which is a surprise, because at first glance, the almost blinding lighting effects are impressive. But cool effects don't make for good design. The fact is that whenever you get close to anything, or go inside, it's immediately apparent that "Mirror's Edge" is almost completely devoid of detail. Even the video screens allegedly showing the news just cycle through a handful of generic images. Assets like air conditioners, pipes, and vents that Faith crawls through or climbs are used over and over. I didn't expect something as vibrant as Liberty City, but I did think that the oppressive future in this game would have at least a little character.

The world of "Mirror's Edge" is also extremely constrained. It looks explorable, but the developers at Dice use everything from barbed wire fences to heigh differentials in buildings to stacks of boxes to make it impossible to diverge from the chosen path at all (save for a few minor detours). To a certain extent that makes sense, since "Mirror's Edge" is about speed and agility, not exploration. But as a dissident courier, you would always be looking for ways to avoid detection. It's just not believable that when Faith is being followed by a helicopter full of police with guns, her solution is to run faster to her final destination.

I have some other small concerns, like the generic story and bad voice acting, but I'd be willing to forgive those for a game that's clearly trying to do something different. And there still is some fun to be had: The time trials can become addictive, especially when you download some the "ghosts" of friends or the best players from around the world to compete against. It's then that you realize "Mirror's Edge" actually works best when it's boiled down to a simple racing game on foot.

Full review: Mirror's Edge

We already know things are starting to look a little less rosy for the videogame business after EA announced 6% layoffs last week. I think Wednesday will be the really telling day, however, as both Activision Blizzard and THQ will be reporting their earnings. Assuming Kotaku's reporting today is correct, THQ will be announcing major layoffs, including the closure of five of its 16 studios and layoffs at two more.THQ has been having its own problems for a while, but dramatic cutbacks of that scale suggest that the recession really is impacting the videogame biz.

On Wednesday, THQ reports earnings and we'll find out if things really are as bad as Kotaku is reporting. Even more importantly, on Wednesday we'll hear from Activision Blizzard. It's the financially healthiest of the videogame publishers and is going into the holidays in an incredibly strong position with a "World of Warcraft" expansion coming out, new versions of its uber-successful "Guitar Hero" and "Call of Duty" franchises, and licensed games based on "Madagascar: Back 2 Africa" and "Quantum of Solace," both of which are almost sure to be hits at the box office.

So if ActiBlizzard feels the need to lower its guidance and/or lay off staff, it will be undeniable that the videogame biz can't escape the recession. If it reaffirms guidance and keeps on with business as usual, then that will show that the only thing the recession is really doing to EA and THQ is exacerbating problems that would be slowing them down no matter what.

The movie rights to Electronic Arts' unannounced videogame "Dante's Inferno" have been bought by Universal. As Michael Fleming and I reported last week, it was a hot contest between U, Paramount, New Regency and MGM. It's a seven figure purchase price, assuming the movie actually goes forward. It's the second EA videogame Universal has bought in the past few weeks, along with "Army of Two."

For full details on the final deal at Universal, check out Fleming's story in tomorrow's Daily Variety.

And for full details on Dante's Inferno, check out this post from last week.

Variety  film reporter Michael Fleming and I are reporting in tomorrow's paper that four major studios -- Paramount, Universal, MGM and New Regency -- are bidding for the film rights to Electronic Arts' game "Dante's Inferno."

Never heard of "Dante's Inferno?" That's because EA hasn't announced it yet. But now that there's a bidding war going on, Michael got wind of the project and I helped him track down the details. Turns out that "Inferno" (the likely, but not yet definite title) is, as one would expect, a modern interpretation of the epic poem and will have players fighting their way through the depths of hell (maybe there will even be nine levels?). It's currently scheduled to be released late next year. (EA trademarked the name "Dante's Inferno" back in February for videogame, film and TV purposes)

We already know about a lot of the sequels coming up on EA's schedule ("Army of Too," "Dead Space 2," "Mercenaries 3," "Spore" expansions), but this is the first post-"Dead Space" and "Mirror's Edge" original property we've got details on, even though EA has been heavily touting its strategy of investing in new franchises.

The company has also been very aggressive this year in licensing its titles to Hollywood. "Army of Two" was just set up at Universal, "The Sims" is at Fox, producer Avi Arad optioned "Mass Effect," and there are even more in the works, if my sources are right.

As for "Inferno," hopefully I'll have further details soon when one of those studios wins the movie rights.

Update: A good source tells me the game is being developed at EA Redwood Shores.

Full story: Studios battle for EA game rights

You probably all know that EA just reported dismal earnings, announcing it will lay off six percent of its staff in the face of rising costs and the economic slowdown. CEO John Riccitiello cited a "slow down at retail in October" and CFO Eric Brown said "retail traffic is down in general." All signs are that while the videogame biz continues to grow strongly and is recession resistant, it's definitely not recession proof. Which is bad news for those who thought videogames are a totally safe place to ride out the economic storm.

For all the details on EA's disappointing earnings, which sent shares tumbling 14% in after-hours trading, check out my story here.

One interesting footnote came in the list of EA's rising expenses. Marketing costs were up 20% last quarter from a year ago and R&D shot up 44%. But there was also $21 million worth of spending in a category that didn't even exist last year: "Certain abandoned acquisition-related costs."

Translation: EA spent a bunch of money on lawyers and financial advisors in its failed pursuit of Take-Two Interactive. Remember when Riccitiello said that the seven month process of trying and failing and trying and failing to buy "Grand Theft Auto" publisher Take-Two was "a waste of ink?" Apparently it was a waste of something else too.

Army of Two is the latest videogame heading to the big screen.

As Variety reporter Michael Fleming and I are reporting in tomorrow's paper (read the story here), EA has licensed the rights to Universal, which has set Scott Z. Burns ("The Bourne Ultimatum") to write the script.

In an interesting twist, EA is actually attached as a producer on the film (along with Scott Stuber, who was previously attached to produce the "Halo" movie, amongst many other projects). As I was writing yesterday, EA is getting very active in film licensing recently and being attached as a producer gives it a whole higher level of involvement in how the end product turns out.

It was only last month that EA licensed "Mass Effect" to producer Avi Arad (it's not set up at a studio yet). And of course there's "The Sims" movie at Fox, the initial pitch for which got less than stellar reviews from gamers. I wouldn't be surprised to see more in the near future.

Universal has also been getting pretty active in adapting videogames. It's the studio that's doing the "Bioshock" movie and it was previously involved in the doomed "Halo" film.

My colleague Michael Fleming talked to Burns and got this interesting quote about his take on "Army of Two" as a movie:

The ambiguity of these private military corporations lends weight to an intelligent thriller with relevance to what's going on in the world right now. You have contractors with their own agendas, and two guys whose friendship supersedes all the politics. I told EA right off the bat I wasn't a gamer, and that appealed to them because they didn't want to simply replicate the game.'

Given how "Army of Two's" story was received, that's probably a good thing. On the other hand, as I just reported, "Army of Two 2" (working title, I'll assume) is in the works and it's a safe bet that whatever EA has got cooking for the follow-up will influence the movie and possibly vice-versa.

Personally, I just hope the main characters have at least as many awkwardly gay moments in the film as they did in the game. Preferrably in those awesome skeletor masks.