For those of you interested in getting into the game industry, I have some good and bad news: The good news is that positions are opening up left and right. The bad news is that they’re going to be filled by someone more qualified than you, sorry.

According to Develop’s Salary Survey, nearly 30% of industry workers will be changing jobs in 2010. If you look 2-3 years into the future, over 70% of employees will have changed jobs at least once.

Why the shakeup? The biggest reasons are that employees are looking for a new challenge (26%), or they’re looking for a bigger paycheque (20%).

The focus on recruiting for big studios is obvious: Ubisoft hired someone to hype their new Toronto studio opportunities, even though everyone in Toronto already emailed their resumes the day it was announced.

Check out Develop’s survey here.

I’ve played through Assassin’s Creed I and II with my fiancée Ashley, and we both agree that the second is (pun intended) hundreds of years ahead of the first.

The first thing to mention is the characters: In Assassin’s Creed II, Ezio (the player character) grows and meets many characters, some of which we became very attached to. A missed QuickTime event prompt caused Ezio to decline a hug from a very let-down Leonardo Da Vinci. It’s interesting that we felt terrible about that for the rest of the evening, yet we didn’t care about stabbing some minstrel that was in our way.

As developed as the characters are, Assassin’s Creed II’s best character is Renaissance Italy. The world is so strong and believable that one feels right inside a condensed version of Venice or Florence. Even if Assassin’s Creed II doesn’t have the graphics of Uncharted 2, we still had a wow moment the first time we climbed a tower and saw how huge the city was. Free running over the rooftops is a blast; especially if you have guards trailing you.

When free running, we would sometimes expect a platform where there was none, and we would have a long fall from the rooftops. My fiancée plays games a lot and never feels motion sickness or any such experience but, when she falls off the roofs in ACII, she feels like she’s on a roller coaster.

Another thing we really liked besides the world was how dissimilar in pace and structure ACII was to ACI. The first outing in the series places the player in an assembly line of killing; the objectives became tedious and repetitive soon into the game. Assassin’s Creed II has a huge amount of variation to keep things fresh. Side quests, armor and weapon upgrades, collectibles, cryptic messages to decode, assassin’s tombs (all-platforming sections), and refurbishing Ezio’s uncle’s villa kept us busy when we needed a break from knife-facing. The problem was deciding when to take a break.

Due to the open-world nature of Assassin’s Creed II, it’s difficult to assign turns and decide what  the next move will be. It’s not a strike against the design or execution by any means, it’s simply that a game with so many directions to go doesn’t lend itself to a group playthrough.

Assassin’s Creed II is a solid game and I would recommend it to couples for controller-passing playthroughs. If you do play it, I would advise you play it during the day because you may miss some of the complex storyline if you happen to fall asleep while your significant other is still playing.

I played through all of Uncharted 2: Among Thieves with my fiancée Ashley, and we had a blast. Uncharted 2 was also the first competitive online multiplayer game that has ever caught her attention, so if you’re the only online multiplayer gamer in the relationship, this game may be your gateway drug.

As you all probably know, playing through single player games as a couple can be tricky. Having to take turns, and deciding when or where to pass the controller, usually takes away from the experience but, in Uncharted 2, it worked out perfectly.

Uncharted 2 is divided up into two major gameplay types: platforming and combat. Lucky for us, Ashley much prefers the platforming, and I like the combat and platforming equally. Going through the first half of the game, we were working in complete sync: Gunshot? Controller passed. Combat music over? Controller passed. Neither of us felt that the other was getting a larger share of play time until the second half of the game. Avoiding spoilers, the game becomes quite action-oriented, and platforming takes a serious back seat (read: the trunk). Even if the Designated Platformer in your relationship has nothing to do in the second half of the game, they won’t be overly upset because the presentation in Uncharted 2 is absolutely amazing.

Uncharted 2 is graphically beautiful. We hadn’t had such a big “wow” factor since we first upgraded to this console generation. The environments are gorgeous; sometimes you’ll be climbing up a mountain and take half a minute just to look at the expansive horizon that Naughty Dog created. On the topic of production values: the soundtrack, script, and voice acting are just as great as the graphics, and the game has an impressive lead. Nathan Drake is funny, charming and, unlike most game characters, believably human.

It’s very possible for players to generally feel a sort of kinship with Drake, because he is not the untouchable superhero that most game characters are made out to be. Nathan Drake gets beaten up so much throughout the progress of the game, it could have been retitled Uncharted 2: Nathan Drake Has a Series of Bad Days. We can relate to Drake; it makes him so much more human knowing he might just lose. We also liked how Drake would often jeer at enemies and shout PG-13 profanities when grenades would land near him, which were good for a laugh in tense situations.

Uncharted 2 has a great (online) multiplayer mode that we both agree is 1) lots of fun 2) boils down to grenade kills and punching people in the face. Although most of the weapons made it into the multiplayer mode, the game can be played fairly effectively via melee combat or 1-shot sneak kills. It may not please the hardcore crowd, but the multiplayer is definitely fun.

Both multiplayer and single player  modes have a “cash” incentive that allow you to purchase concept art, behind the scenes movies, game tweaks, multiplayer bonuses, and player reskins for both modes. The cash incentive is great, since there are some pretty awesome top-level skins for both multiplayer and single player.

Uncharted 2 is not without flaws, and the lack of local co-op is a huge one. Throughout most of single player, you’re paired with an AI ally who will assist you up ladders, help solve puzzles, or engage in combat. The game would have been great had it featured jump in/out split-screen co-op for single player. Ashley and I had a great time playing through Resident Evil 5, frantically yelling at each other to watch a door or pass an herb or ohmygodlookouttheresachainsawguybehindyou. Having this kind of experience in the world of Uncharted would have been beyond amazing.

Outside of the lack of local multiplayer, other qualms we’ve had withUncharted 2 are largely around its length. Uncharted 2’s single player campaign falls a bit on the short side, clocking in at about 10-11 hours for us. Most games we prefer to be over and done with in about 15 hours, but the fact we’re taking issue with the length is a testament to how fun the game is and how well everything was presented.

As far as controller-passing single player games go, Uncharted 2 is probably the best we’ve experienced, despite the lack of local multiplayer. We would absolutely recommend it to anyone looking for a fantastic PS3 game to play solo or with their significant other.

You may remember the big EA Spouse shakeup that happened back in 2004, but evidently Rockstar games didn’t hear about it, or didn’t care. For those of you who are foggy on the topic, EA Spouse was a user on Livejournal who wrote a short essay about the poor working conditions and unpaid overtime at EA. After the media got a hold of it, EA found themselves at the business end of a class action lawsuit that lost them about $15 million.

A similar situation is unfolding now with Rockstar. A post on Gamasutra by a user named “Rockstar Spouse” called for working conditions to improve, for overtime to be paid, for benefits to be reinstated, and for crunch times to be only a sometimes food. The post has over 140 comments and over 300 direct retweets from their website. The blogs picked up the story and ran with it, while the rest of the industry held their breath for the next move whether it be Rockstar or the employees or their significant others.

Rockstar responded, and in true Rockstar fashion. The company posted a series of desktop wallpapers on their website titled “The Eye”, as a reference to a comment made by a former employee comparing Rockstar New York to “The Eye of Sauron”:

The source went on to compare Rockstar NYC to the Eye of Sauron when dealing with their studios. Teams would apparently work on a title for close to two years, but because of other priorities, like a major “GTA” release, for example, upper management wouldn’t focus on other titles until the major project was done.

The most recent volley came from Rockstar in the form of a paragraph buried in a post on their corporate blog – the Newswire:

As for the stories spreading around the internet, yes we have noticed them.  Unfortunately, this is a case of people taking the opinions of a few anonymous posters on message boards as fact. No business is ever perfect, but Rockstar Games is a tight knit team made up of around 900 supremely talented and motivated professionals, many of whom have worked here for a very long time.  We’re saddened if any former members of any studio did not find their time here enjoyable or creatively fulfilling and wish them well with finding an environment more suitable to their temperaments and needs, but the vast majority of our company are focused solely on delivering cutting edge interactive entertainment.  We’ve always cared passionately about the people working here, and have always tried to maintain a supportive creative environment.  There is simply no way Rockstar could continue to produce such large scale, high quality games without this.  That being said, making great games is very challenging, which is why we have and will continue to try to keep hold of some of the best talent in the industry and support them in every way we can.

While the last sentence seems to be a bit on the humble or apologetic side, it’s certain that this will be eventually settled in a way quantifiable by dollar signs.

There is an old saying, “Better the Devil you know than the Devil you don’t”. Many people will complain about EA and their yearly Madden installments, or about Ubisoft and their imagine gamez, or about Activision’s Bobby Kotick being, well, himself. Although we do have our beef(s) with all the big name publishers out there, they’re our big name publishers, and they’re better than what might be coming.

According to a report by Screen Digest, the big name players in the games industry are set to change in the next few years. GamesIndustry.biz has summed up the article, noting that Disney, Time Warner, Viacom, News Corp and NBC Universal are moving in on the games industry. They’ve spent over $3 billion in gaming over the past 5 years, and by 2013 they will have a significant portion of the market in their control.

Here’s a list of what each of these companies own right now:

• Viacom
  • MTV New Media (Rock Band, Harmonix)
  • GameTrailers
  • Neopets
  • Any licensed game to come from: Comedy Central, any Nickelodeon Network or any Paramount Pictures film
• Disney
  • Marvel
  • Pixar
  • ESPN
  • Studios: Avalanche Software, Black Rock Studios (PURE, Split/Second), Fall Line Studios, Junction Point Studios (Epic Mickey), Propaganda Games
• Time Warner
  • GameTap
  • Studios: Monolith Productions (F.E.A.R., F.E.A.R. 2), Snowblind studios, Surreal Software, TT Games (Lego Rock Band, Lego Indiana Jones 2), WB Games, WB Games Chicago (Formerly known as Midway)
  • Any licensed game to come from: Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, Adult Swim, or Cartoon Network
• News Corp
  • IGN
  • GameSpy

The gaming internet loves having a good target to funnel its hate and Bobby Kotick, CEO of Activision has been at the barrel of the gun for some time. Kotick has taken the chance to speak about himself and Activision in his DICE 2010 keynote and he showed us his geeky gamer inside that has been locked away in the cold shell of a very expensive suit for years. Please take this with a grain of salt as it is coming from the man himself, but you should know that his gaming cred runs deep.

Kotick used to love games; he played a huge amount in the early ’80s and it is his high risk of addiction to the medium that keeps him away from games these days. Not only did he play games, but he made them as well: he had created Apple II games for Electronic Arts. In business, Kotick paid $400,000 for 25% of what was to be Activision because he loved Activision’s catalogue of games and he wanted to restore the company to it’s former glory.

As for his past comments that the blogs ran with, Gamasutra recaps:

Aware of recent criticism of some of his remarks to investors — remarks about taking the fun out of making video games and working in an environment of skepticism, pessimism and fear, to name a few — Kotick says that too much brashness means “you can come across as being like a dick.”
He particularly addressed his ‘taking the fun out of video games’ comment: “I wanted to somehow come across in a humorous way that… it wasn’t some Wild West lack of process exercise.” Nonetheless, he says, he regrets how it was misconstrued.

Finally, Kotick revealed the creation of the 2010 Activision Independent Game Competition (PDF) granting $100,000 to the winner.

Take from this what you will, but you can’t deny that there is more to ‘ol Bobby than just an expensive suit.

McMaster World Congress (2009)

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