The US Army will invest around $57 million to design a virtual reality training system for its soldiers, according to a recent report by 1UP. Their goal is to make it a recruiting tool similar to the currently running America’s Army perhaps?

According to the 1UP report; “The system will be built on CryEngine 3 from Crytek, the same engine used to power Crysis 2. The goal is to create an incredibly realistic simulator for up to four soldiers to train in simultaneously, with each getting a 10-by-10-foot area to move around in while wearing a backpack with a high-end gaming laptop in it. They’ll also wear a display on their helmets that leaves them still able to see to the sides. Soldiers and trainers can participate either as soldiers or other roles, like civilians or enemy combatants.”

By early next year, the system will become operational.

via 1UP

It’s bound to happen. One the best (if not, THE best) zombie series on TV, The Walking Dead, will soon be available as a video game.

The game is currently being developed by Telltale Games (creators of Sam & Max). Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman said via an interview at IGN that the game will be ”multi-year, multi-platform, multi-title” (whatever that means) and is scheduled to be released late 2011 for “PC, Mac, consoles, handhelds, mobile and social gaming media.”

Ok, I have to admit, I was home sick when I wrote this. Frankly, had minor “writer’s block” and couldn’t think of a blog topic to write about. So I chose to do think about the weirdest subject and how to integrate it to the blog.

With a little help from my best friend, Google, I googled Justin Bieber and Video Games and came up with a surprising discovery – there a LOT of flash and online games about JB. OMG! Now there’s a cool blog topic.

Onwards to Justin Bieber games….

Justin Bieber Video Games

1. Justin Bieber Hair Defense

This one is a Tower-style defense. Don’t let the enemy get to JB and ruin his hair. There are a lot of options and choices on your towers. Pretty fun. haha!

2. Justin Bieber in Concert

The most common form (with many variations) of Justin Bieber games is the “dress up” genre. Choose your teen idol and experiment with a lot of clothes, wigs, accessories and more. Targeted for young girls, of course. This one, Justin Bieber in Concert, is a typical example of that.

3. Justin Bieber Magazine

Another typical doll-dress-me game… in magazine style. ’nuff said.

4. Kiss Justin Bieber

The premise for this game is rather original. Sneak kisses with JB’s date while fishing on board his yatch. Watch out for the paparazzi. LOL!

In fact, there are MANY OTHER Justin Bieber video games out there. In case you want to know, there’s even a website dedicated for it

http://www.justinbiebergames.org/

Cool, ain’t it?

Don’t forget to share and be my fan at Facebook if you still aren’t one. Join the GM Tristan community now.

This is a guest post by Alexis Bonari. Thanks for your time and talent, Alexis!

Designing Video Games is a tough cookie to crack. It’s no joke. Alexis shares with us her own ideas and opinions about this topic.

Designing Video Games by Alexis Bonari

Ever wonder how your favorite games came alive? There’s a lot of action that goes on behind the scenes, and much of it is carried out by game designers who have their degrees in fields like Game Design Animation, Game Art & Design, Game Design Development, and Game Design Programming. Of course, there are many more, but these are the top program choices in the gaming industry and reflect the importance of design. You might be surprised at the amount of time, effort, and human resources required to crank out a single video game, so check out the following facts about the design process. The next time you play, you might find yourself paying attention to those inanimate characters in the background that make the scene come alive.

Studying to Become a Game Designer

Many designers graduate from technical or art institutes, having gone through a two- to four-year program. Degrees are often BAs or BFAs, and there’s always the option to get a master’s if those years of school just didn’t last long enough. Design students study topics like 3-D modeling and animation, scene and set design, color theory, digital compositing, storyboarding, and even filmmaking and cinematography. Because design is so much more than using a program to create unnatural features on warlocks, students have to learn how to weave an intriguing story that will engage gamers and motivate them to keep playing. So if you’re thinking about getting invested in a design program, you might want to get prepared for some drama and theatre courses that could enhance your storyboarding skills.

The Game Design Process

Depending on which company designers are working for, the process varies with branding and industry identities. Textbooks can’t offer experience, so designers are often learning game philosophies and formal procedures when they first join a company. These elements have a significant impact on what they design and how they go about executing and presenting a game. In general, a game design document is drafted based on a fairly detailed new concept, a previous game design, or a combination of both. This document is essentially a map of the game and should grow as the design process progresses, getting more detailed and changing as decisions are made. It’s often transferred from paper to a level design program as the volume of material expands, and while designers often work with programmers, they have to know their scripting languages in case a programmer isn’t immediately available.

A significant amount of research and writing goes into developing the game’s design, and everything from drafting asset lists to overseeing usability testing can be part of a designer’s job. Collaboration with other departments is also essential for commercial approval, so designers need good communication skills. Before a game can be released, it’s the designer’s responsibility to make sure that all gameplay meets the same standards for consistency, so any inferior design elements have to be redone. Video game designers go through a lot of detailed planning, creation, and editing before they can even think about putting a game into your hands, so the next time you play, take a few seconds to appreciate your machine gun before you fire.

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Bio: Alexis Bonari is a freelance writer and blog junkie. She is currently a resident blogger at First in Education and performs research surrounding online degrees. In her spare time, she enjoys square-foot gardening, swimming, and avoiding her laptop.

You can get in touch with her via alexisbonari@gmail.com

Image Credits source

Sharing with you a good article by business site Forbes.com

The story tells a tale about two top executives who started out as gamers. Among them is Elliot Noss, chief executive of domain name provider Tucows, and 20-something Stephen Gillett, a gamer who became chief information officer of Starbucks. Both have applied leadership principles acquired through their own video game experiences.

“We’re finding that the younger people coming into the teams who have had experience playing online games are the highest-level performers because they are constantly motivated to seek out the next challenge and grab on to performance metrics,” says John Hagel III, co-chairman of a tech-oriented strategy center for Deloitte. Hagel has been studying the effect that playing videogames has on the performance of young professionals in the workplace.

Furthermore, here’s a summary of the top 10 ways games can help boost your career;

1. Leadership – Without a leader, raids or group quests cannot succeed
2. At First You Don’t Succeed – Try again. Go back to the last save point
3. It’s About Teamwork – There’s no “I” in team
4. Developing Talent – discover new skills, train newbies
5. Learning to Improvise – Faced with a new situation, learn to discover another way around it
6. Performance Driven – Awards and recognition let gamers see where they stand vs. others
7. Living For Challenges – Gamers are performance driven. Professionals who are also gamers seek this unconsciously
8. Competition – scores and rankings keep you on your toes
9. Becoming an Entrepreneur – business, buy and sell and ways to make money for your character translates to good economic sense in the real world.
10. Managing Information – Games are not easy. You have to do your homework and always seek out to improve on knowledge

For more information and details about the top 10 list, you can find it here.

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Leave to the Japanese to come up with off-beat and innovative marketing solutions for gaming.

More pics follow…

JAPANESE UPSKIRT MARKETING

[ source ]

There are several common beliefs that I thought were true. About video games, that is…

With a little bit of Googling, surf-jacking and some online research, I found some nifty stuff that disputes these supposed “Myths”…

MYTHS ABOUT VIDEO GAMES

1. Pong was the first graphical video game – Not! Pong was released in 1972. But in 1958, a little known game called Tennis For Two was already being played in an oscilloscope.
2. Violence in Video Games increases violent behavior – Wrong! A lot of studies have proved this otherwise. To quote Games Radar, “for every study which reports that violence in videogames leads to self-reported aggression or scary-looking brain scans, another study is done which concludes that there is no direct link between videogame violence and real violence.” For example, “no real conclusions about games and their connection or non-connection to real violence have been drawn yet.”
3. Game publishers often influence reviewers with shady practices – And so are scores of other industries. Yeah, right. While not entirely true, publishers will get the short end of the stick when their game comes out as a lemon once it hits beta.
4. All Casual Games are bad. – Have you heard of Zynga, Playfish, Facebook and Plants Vs. Zombies??? Thought so.
5. All Koreans are good at StarCraft – This one’s true. Hehe.

Source

When it comes to gaming, it’s very easy to play a game that’s familiar to you.

More often than not, if I spot a new game, I’ll be comparing the gameplay to game X or the graphics to game A and the other features to game B. It’s very easy to adapt if you’re familiar with the content.

So, are game developers and designers reluctant to offer something drastically DIFFERENT to consumers for the fear that adapting to change is a definite gamble? But there are some experiments that turned out to be huge hits.

Let’s examine this paradigm shift in gaming after the break…

Is Change a Good Thing?

When RTS games such as Red Alert and StarCraft led to so-called “industry standards’, all other developers did the normal thing – design a game as close to the 2 games as possible. Most of them failed…. just by being clones or cookie-cutter builds.

But when new ideas sprung up from such RTS games as Battle Realms and even Dawn of War where they introduced new features for RTS games then all of a sudden, “change” seemed like a good thing. It wasn’t a “gamble” after all (which much of the business planners from the industry thought it would be).

Other genres where New Innovation Gambles paid off are games such as Guitar Hero, Plants vs. Zombies and the various Facebook games to name a few.

Is The Market Ready

To balance out this elusive equation on risk versus rewards, one has to look at the market closely.

Is your market ready for change? Will they go out of their limb and stray away from their comfort levels? How will you be guiding them? Will you send them off to walk on a narrow plank? or will you take them by the arm and show how fun (and satisfying) CHANGE really is?

These are just some of the million questions that will make you decide if introducing or marketing a new game is really worth your while. Sometimes change can GROW and EXPAND the market. Sometimes it WILL NOT.

Again, you’re betting on it. The more information one has, the more likely you’ll make the right choice.

What about you guys?

Are you open to new stuff in games? Do like innovation? or would you rather try and play games that you are already familiar with?

I’d be more than happy to hear your thoughts. Please comment below.

Thanks!

Get some creativity, game designers (or writers). You always (almost) use the same chessy words over and over and over again.

Here’s a cool list of the most overused words for videogame names. Check ‘em out and tell me what you think!

Whether for titles, places, things, or NPCs…

Here are the 20 Overused Words for Game Names

1. Age
2. Blade
3. Command
4. Darkness
5. Dawn
6. Dead
7. Eternal
8. Hero
9. Legend
10. Mario
11. Origin
12. Party
13. Red
14. Shadow
15. Space
16. Star
17. Super
18. Unleashed
19. War
20. World

Via Geekzkrieg

Here’s the Top 10 list for video games for the month of March 2009. This list is based on actual sales.

Leading the pack, of course, is new release Resident Evil 5. It’s got to be the great gameplay, the awesome graphics or the cool marketing ploys… whatever the reason, it’s a must play for every gamer.

Check out the full top 10 list coming up next…

TOP 10 Games (Overall)

It’s clear that Nintendo dominates the pack when it comes to game companies… having 4 out of the top 10 titles (or 40%)

Meanwhile, the top 3 consoles are even-steven with 3 games each with the Nintendo DS still growing strong with the Mario Kart franchise.

To check out platform specific top 10 sales, head on over here.

Special thanks to Kotaku for the data.

Peace!