In a lengthy interview with GameDaily BIZ, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos offered his thoughts on air drumming – the preferred form of percussive input in Nintendo's Wii Music, skillfully demonstrated above by a professional – and explained why Harmonix felt the need for an actual drum peripheral on the Wii. After considering using the Wiimote in an air drumming capacity, Rigopulos says, "We backed away from it because we found that the tactile element of actually hitting a surface when you're drumming is a fairly critical part to the visceral feel of actually playing drums." So, with air drumming, you're missing "a critical element ... in the experience."

Not much of a surprise coming from the head of a company currently shipping a giant, plastic drum kit, sure, but we were surprised to learn air drumming was ever even under consideration at Chez Harmonix.

GameDaily BIZ got some details on the revenue sharing structure of the recently detailed Xbox Live Community Games. While we reported that developers could receive "up to 70%" of sales, Microsoft's Chris Satchell clarified the structure this way: "The better you're doing, the more we'll take." Sure, this sounds pretty cutthroat (newsflash: Microsoft is a business!) but the relationship here isn't dissimilar to traditional retail arrangements.

If your Community Game performs well, it will be plucked from the crowd and placed in the "storefront" where it should enjoy a great deal of promotion and, in turn, sales. Satchell says, "The game will spend most of its time at 70%, but if we're promoting you and you're getting more traffic, there will be a 10% to 30% marketing fee." Once it's out of the storefront – bam! – "you're back to 70% again." In other words, if you want more of your hard-earned ... uh, Microsoft Points to go to Bobby Developer and not Johnny Microsoft, wait until things have settled down a bit and the game has left the storefront for the relative anonymity of the crowd. Then, swoop in, make your purchase, and consider The Man stuck.

We'll level with you: the game industry confuses us. For example: you'd think with games like Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Clone Wars, not to mention the recently announced Sonic and the Black Knight, coming to the Wii that Nintendo would have been eager to get the MotionPlus into dev's hands as quickly as possible. Not so, as Game Informer learned when they asked several third-party developers about the peripheral.

Turns out the site uncovered a "general feeling ... of annoyance and betrayal" after Nintendo shared the existence of the device with third parties at the exact same time they shared it with us. Game Informer estimates it would take some six to nine months to incorporate MotionPlus functionality into games and that it's probably too late for games "deep in development." With Wii Sports Resort not due until Spring 2009, that might be just enough time to build some support into upcoming titles. So, let's recap: at Nintendo's E3 showing, the company managed to not only piss off every "core" gamer in existence but a good number of its third-party developers as well. Impressive?

[Via NWF]

Nintendo of Japan has just introduced a new Wii channel that offers the best reason yet for the Wii to have any sort of photo functionality built-in: the Digicam Print Channel. In short, through a collaboration with Fujifilm, Japanese Wii users can order up prints of their digital photos – accessed via the console's SD slot, of course – along with special photo books for ¥1,575 ($14.71), super deluxe Mario-flavored photo books for ¥2,480 ($23.16), or meishi (think Japanese business cards) sporting the user's very own Mii, available at ¥500 per 30 cards. Watch the video tour of the service above (don't mind the Japanese), or sit tight for the service to launch in the West ... any day now ... just a little bit longer ... keep waiting ... almost there ...

[Via Nintendo Wii Fanboy]

[Update: Now with video (thanks, VVP)! Watch Gary Oldman spill the beans after the break. And hey, G4 – you guys totally got that story fair and square, so why pull the video?]

Far be it from us to tell Electronic Arts how to run its business, but one would think that announcing a long-since-leaked game based on a hugely anticipated movie which just so happened to premier the very same week of the industry's largest press event would be – what we in the video game blogging business call – "a no-brainer." But, then again, we're not Electronic Arts so, despite being first rumored and then leaked by IGN over a year ago, Pandemic's totally secret adaptation of The Dark Knight did not make its debut during the serendipitous collision of E3 and Batman-mania last week.

As if EA's counter-intuitive marketing plan wasn't funny enough, an interview on G4 with Commissioner Gordon himself, Gary Oldman, revealed – surprise! – that a game was indeed in development. Oldman stopped short of naming developer Pandemic or EA, but we all know the score; in response, G4 had the video removed from YouTube as well as their own site. Our favorite part from the interview teaser reel? When Oldman says, "It's hard to make a movie like this under the radar." You know what, we were just thinking the same thing about games ...

Source – IGN forums
Source – YouTube video (since pulled by g4 Media, Inc.)

Following the official unveiling of the Xbox Live Community Games channel, we had the opportunity to speak with Boyd Multerer, general manager of XNA at Microsoft, about the initiative. We've assembled our questions and his answers into the eminently readable Q&A format, below, where we cover everything from cost to availability of trials to file size limitations to release scheduling to delisting to achievements and more. Read on!

How many games will be available on the service at launch?
It's "a different type of game in a different channel," Multerer told us. Since "nobody has ever done this before ... there's very little data to go on." In the first few weeks of the beta, over 100 games were submitted and over 60 games were passed through the peer certification, if that's any indication. In other words: You'll just have to wait for any kind of specific number, but you can probably assume several dozen games would be in the service on day one.

Will games still be able to graduate from Xbox Live Community Game to full-blown Xbox Live Arcade title?
"Yes," Multerer told us. "In fact, I hope to see more of it. Community Games is like the minor leaugues in baseball" where young talents can show off what they've got before making the jump to the majors. This wasn't the last time Multerer used the baseball metaphor.

How much will Xbox Live Community Games cost? How large will the files be?
Either 200, 400, or 800 Microsoft Points (that breaks down to roughly $2.50 to $10). The 200 point games will be limited to 50MB downloads, while the 400 or 800 point games will be limited to 150MB.

Will there be any free Xbox Live Community Games?
Nope. Multerer said that if a creator wanted to share his game for free with friends and family, he can send it to their Windows machine for free, "no problem." However, in "opening up that platform to a new market, [Microsoft] needs to prove that [they] can sell things on it." He did want to point out, though, that because they're not offering free games now, that "doesn't mean [they] won't ever look at making that happen."

At its GamesFest event in Redmond today, Microsoft shared the first details of DirectX 11 – the numerically superior successor to DirectX 10.1 – which will feature full support for Windows Vista, as well as future versions of the popular operating system. Worried about hardware? DirectX 11 won't just ignore your fancy DirectX 10 or 10.1 cards – nope, it offers support for both of those standards, as well as for new DirectX 11 hardware.

But what's new and exciting about DirectX 11, you ask incredulously. How about a "new compute shader technology" that gets your GPU ready to do more than just boring old 3D graphics – instead "developers can take advantage of the graphics card as a parallel processor"? Not doing it for you? How about "multi-threaded resource handling that will allow games to better take advantage of multi-core machines" since, y'know, most every computer nowadays has multiple cores? Or "support for tessellation" which allows "developers to refine models to be smoother and more attractive when seen up close"? Something in there has to tickle your fancy.

What it probably means for most of you is this: as hardware manufacturers develop new chipsets to take advantage of DirectX 11's new features, you should be able to snag some of that older 10.1 gear for a song.

Despite being a total no-show at E3 last week – and teased in a not-so-recent Vista promotion – Microsoft Game Studios' Alan Wake may not be coming up for air at the 2008 Tokyo Game Show this October. A spokesperson for developer Remedy Entertainment said, "The Microsoft Vista promotion referring to TGS took place in 2007, and is old news – we've had the winner over for taking the pictures already." He continued dashing our dreams, bluntly stating that "this was not an announcement that Wake would be shown at TGS 2008."

Note, Remedy isn't saying that Alan Wake won't make it to TGS, just that we shouldn't plan our schedule around it just yet. In fact, considering the game was first shown to press at E3 2005 (that's thirty-eight months ago, folks!) we're not planning much of anything around the game, short of our retirement.

[Thanks, Pete]

Curious what Dragon Age – BioWare's PC-bound fantasy RPG – looks like? Well, here it is, in both screenshot and gameplay format (two great tastes ...). The more astute amongst you will notice a curious and absolute lack of spaceships, sexually ambiguous blue aliens, killer robots, and an uncontrollable tank (no word on how controllable dragons will be).

Not content to sit idly by while we party in their headquarters, the crew of Mahalo Daily was busy filming an episode of their daily video podcast while the Blueberry Muffintops rocked out in the background.

But, as luck would have it, another video game event was happening just down the street in Santa Monica, where would-be King of Kong Steve Wiebe was attempting to reclaim the high-scoring King Kong title. Mahalo Daily checked in on favorite arcade games at both events; keep your eyes peeled for totally super celebrity guest sightings like Wiebe, Walter Day, and Rosco "Totally Joking About Q*Bert" Miller.

Sonic continues his storybook adventures with Sonic and the Black Knight, a Wii-exclusive Arthurian sequel to the Arabian Nights-infused Sonic and the Secret Rings. In this installment, Sonic picks up a sword "to aid in his effort to save the day," causing us to wonder aloud (stop staring at us!) if Black Knight could be one of the first third-party games to utilize the Wii MotionPlus.

Oh, and far be it from us to tell Sega how to run its show but, despite the opportunity provided by a recent industry event, the first you'll see of Sonic and the Black Knight will be within the pages of next month's Nintendo Power before its release in Spring 2009.

We hope you used pencil when you marked up the August 26 quadrant of your Burly Men of Sera calendar with the following info: "Gears of War: The Pendulum Wars by Steven L. Kent today!" Turns out the preorder info on Amazon.ca – even the cover image! – was a tad premature; Epic and Del Ray Books announced that the Gears of War prequel trilogy of books will be written by sci-fi veteran Karen Traviss, and the first installment will be called Gears of War: The Battle of Aspho Fields (there's a joke here ... what's an Aspho?). No word on why Kent's out – an Epic representative tols us, "While we think very highly of Steven L. Kent's work, we are not working with him at this time."

Here's a snippet from the presser: "Marcus and Dom can take anything the Locust Horde throws at them – but will their friendship survive the truth about Dom's brother Carlos?" Well, will it? We just don't know, but you can find out when it roadie runs into your neighborhood bookstore on October 28, just in time for the sequel's November 7 Re-mergence Day.

Here are a couple interesting takeaways from our tour of the New Xbox Experience:

• "There's nothing to announce" right now regarding a keyword search for the Marketplace. Let's hope they either a) add one in or b) drastically improve how we find things
• Playing games from the hard drive will work fine for multi-disc games; in fact, you can pick which discs you want to rip (for example, we're superstitious and we'd only rip odd-numbered discs).
  
• As an example, we were told that Devil May Cry 4 is approximately a 4 or 5GB installation and took about ten minutes.
  
• You'll need to keep the disc in the drive the entire time. This is about speeding up load times (and hey, bonus tip: no more noisy DVD drive while you're playing!)
• The alerts look the same – actually, like the entire interface, they look sharper, cleaner. Oh, and the sound is the same.
  
• Yes, you can still use your gamertag pics and your themes (in fact, they look a lot better now!)

If you're curious just how much it costs to make a B-movie nowadays you could always risk a fat lip and call up Uwe Boll ... or just talk to the folks from Codemasters and Microsoft, who are releasing You're in the Movies this fall. According to a Microsoft representative, the game is being bundled with the Xbox Live Vision Cam for the not unreasonable price of $60 (remember, the camera is $40 alone). We've asked for information on the standalone SKU and we'll let you know when we hear back.

We got a chance to sit down with Keiichi Yano – chief creative officer of Lips developer iNiS – for a walkthrough of their upcoming Xbox 360 karaoke game. We'll get around to writing up some of our impressions later, but first we wanted to share some answers to our biggest questions about the game.

The microphone

• The wireless microphone will bind with the Xbox 360, no dongle required.
• It's unclear if it will work with other music games. When asked about Rock Band or Guitar Hero World Tour, Keiichi Yano told us, "That's a great idea. We would love to do that." Alas, it's up to those third-party devs to implement support for this peripheral.
• A second player can shake the microphone to instantly "jump in" to the song, no menus needed.
• They use 2 AA batteries, just like the Xbox 360 controller. Yanno said that, despite the motion-sensitivity and the lights, the battery life is pretty impressive already, on prototype hardware.
• Lips will be bundled with a black and a white controller

Your music

• Though they were only showing off the streaming functionality through a Zune, they assured us it would work just as simply through an iPod. When asked why they couldn't use one now, Yano responded, "Trust me. It works." We then crossed our arms and fell backwards into his waiting arms ...
• DRM'd songs can't be used, regardless of the DRM scheme used. So no Zune or iTunes songs.
• Lips will perform "vocal reduction" on your own songs, though they weren't showing the functionality off.
• You can be scored on your own songs.
• Audio from a Zune or iPod is streamed only, not downloaded, so you'll need to keep it nearby
  
• After telling us that they "actually don't know" if Lips will be able to read directly from your streaming media library (think iTunes) the way the Xbox 360 can, Yano said they'd like to implement the feature, which he followed up by saying "hint hint, wink wink, say no more." We asked him to repeat that in a British accent and he was all too happy to oblige.
• When asked if you would see your Avatar singing on the screen in the absence of a music video, they said they weren't talking about Avatars now.
• No word on how they'll implement lyrics or a beat chart for the songs, though Yanno promised it would be "very, very compelling."

Its music

• There are only three confirmed songs: "Mercy" by Duffy; "Young Folk" by Peter, Bjorn & John; and "Bust a Move" by Young MC
  
• All songs will be master tracks and will include the original music videos
• Rap songs work a little differently, it's not just about rhythm.