This fall, Sony Online Entertainment will release Star Wars Clone Wars Adventures, a free-to-play, browser-based virtual world based on the popular animated series. Based on SOE’s Free Realms engine, the game will allow players to create a character and then enter a world where they’ll have immediate access to a host of mini-games, with an emphasis on action, competition, and socializing.

The game, like the show, is clearly aimed at a younger audience. But after a short time with an early build of the game — from pick-up-and-play speeder bike racing to a typing mini-game, to a super-addictive tower defense game — there may be a bit of something for everyone in Star Wars Clone Wars Adventures.

Details and first impressions after the jump.

Learning lessons from Free Realms, the folks working have done everything they can to make navigation in Clone Wars Adventures as simple as possible. Instead of moving around a wide open world, players hop into smaller HUB-stages with “activity centers” attached. Each with its own theme based in the iconic Star Wars universe, here is where you’ll be able to launch into the world’s plethora of free-to-play games.

Moving around the HUB worlds was a snap, with either the click of the mouse or with classic WASD movement. As the game manages the camera for you, it’ll point out interesting things to interact with, like recognizable to chat with; I had a quick, mini-conversation with Jedi Master Kit Fisto in my demo. The developers have also thrown in a handful of random objects to interact with (for the kids!); with some experimentation you might find that you can use Jedi powers to levitate boxes, for instance.

Moving into the games, there were about 16 in the build I played; I’m told more than 20 should make the cut when the game launches. Half a dozen of those 20 titles are said to be fleshed out 3D titles, with 15 to 20 stages a piece; many games will be simpler, Flash-based games.

I played a handful of games, including a simple-but-fun 3D speeder bike racing game. No breaking, no fancying turning, just movement left and right, hitting boost pads to gain speed; hit up to four for a super boost. While I played the game against AI, the final game will feature matchmaking, allowing you to compete with friends.

I also went hands on with a 3D starfighter game, flying iconic ships from the series that even Star Wars noobies would recognize. Using the WASD keys, I barrel rolled through space, firing at enemy ships in a recognizable Star Wars space-fighter environment. While it’s possible to “die,” simply completing the levels isn’t the goal; instead, players are encouraged to earn multipliers by killing enemies in certain patterns, topping out their scores in the process. Like most of the games, it will feature a leaderboard to compare scores with friends; you’ll even be alerted when your score has been beaten.

Of the simple Flash games, there was a typing tutorial style game. On the easiest level, Padawan, I used the home keys on the keyboard to tap out single letters to destroy ships. On Jedi Master, the stakes were a bit higher, the game more difficult, using all of the keys; there’s even a “boss” ship that will have you typing out full words associated with the Star Wars universe.

But of all the games I played, it was the tower defense title that had me thinking I may be firing up my browser to get my Clone Wars Adventures on. This is a full-on 3D tower defense title, where you create turrets and other defensive weapons on top of silos to stop incoming waves of droids, tanks, and other enemy units. The game also features an active, action-oriented element in its use of special items. I received “Tank Mines” that, in order to use, you’d simply click on the screen to place them; you have five seconds to place up to five, so it’s possible to spam this item with clicks all over the board.

For a free, browser-based title, the tower defense game looked excellent. In full 3D, I was able to zoom in and out with the mouse wheel to get a closer look at the action, gritting my teeth as an army of droids broke through my defenses. If tower defense is your thing, look to get addicted; I had to be pulled away from the demo PC, otherwise I might have played for hours.

While the game will be completely free to sign up for and play, you’ll be able to purchase a number of “epic items” via microtransactions. There’s even an optional monthly membership to unlock further content, as well.

Star Wars Clone Wars Adventures will launch online along with the upcoming season of the Star Wars Clone Wars animated series on Cartoon Network, which is slated for this fall.

New details on the officially confirmed upcoming LittleBigPlanet 2 have been leaked onto the web from the latest issue of Game Informer, and damn, this ain’t your younger-self-from-just-over-a-year-ago’s game. From what was relayed onto NeoGAF LBP 2 isn’t just a platformer with a very, very robust level editor, but a simplistic basis to design almost any type of game ever. Game Informer was demoed an RTS style game made with LBP 2 to prove it, but Media Molecule says you can make anything from racing games to first-person shooters.

It’s a little crazy all the advancements that are purported to be made in the sequel. Not only will you be able to assign controls far better, but you’ll be able to design your own responses with a tool called the direct control seat. Level designers won’t be constrained to using the signature gameplay mechanics of LBP. For instance, if you were remaking a classic Mario level you could even make the Sackboys jump exactly like Mario.

On top of this is an enemy creator that is far more robust than the original, and has an AI editor, a robust sound creator, PlayStation Eye integration for loading levels using QR codes, the ability to string levels together, a crap ton of gadgets, the ability to make cutscenes, and an overhauled storyline mode that at the moment features the same platforming style gameplay as the original’s. The post at NeoGAF also has some level and plot spoilers if you’re really tempted.

Looks like Sackboy has really sacked up… I’m sorry. I had to.

Sack Lather: Sony exec confirms LBP2, supports Move [NeoGAF, via never know tech]

For very many years Electronic Arts were the biggest game publisher on earth. They have an income of billions every year and they employ thousands of people all around the globe. EA are very important indeed for the video games industry. But they are no longer undisputed number one. The marriage of Vivendi and Activision, fed by the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, with mega hits like Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero and very ably led by Bob Kotick are now probably established at the top of the heap, especially when it comes to profit. (Amazingly they were bankrupt in the early ’90s.)

So again, very unsurprisingly, Electronic Arts have issued more bad financial results. They lost $82 million in the quarter ended 31 December (the best time of year for video games!). Their stock price took another hit. They can’t blame the industry, big global publishers like the aforementioned Activision, and also Ubisoft have done very well indeed. Even Sega have managed to get themselves back into profit. I have written about EA’s problems on here before. Repeatedly.

So what is going wrong?:

• The market for all entertainment IP (including films, television and books) is polarising into blockbusters and niche. Everything else is a potential loss maker. The most successful publishers are those who have geared themselves to the new reality.
• This generation of HD home consoles have awful business models to develop for. Basically making a came costs far, far too much. Several times the cost of games for the previous generation. The root of this is that HD games need a massive amount of content which is still largely hand crafted. The next generation of platforms will have enough power to run lots and lots of middleware so development costs should drop back to sensible levels. In the meantime we are stuck with the PS3 and 360 and they are causing a lot of problems.
• The Wii has been a black hole for many third party publishers. Their fault. They mostly haven’t made the games that Wii owners want to buy. Just look at the Metacritic for Wii to see this. Electronic Arts on the Wii published NCAA Football 09 All-Play (Metacritic 49), Celebrity Sports Showdown (Metacritic 50), NBA Live 09 All-Play (Metacritic 51), G I Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Metacritic 51) and many other such gems that should never have seen the light of day.
• There is a trend on the more casual platforms for developers to self publish. This removes discipline from the market, especially on price. The job of a publisher is to provide editorial control, finance and marketing. Self publishers tend to use the price mechanism as their main marketing tool. Done competitively this rapidly collapses the viability of a platform. Electronic Arts have not taken the grip that they should have, thus allowing upstarts like PopCap to gain traction. Also they were late on the scene for emerging platforms, such as Facebook.
• Electronic Arts’ marketing still seems to be largely based on that of the 1960s detergent companies with expensive broadcast advertising. Their customers’ lifestyle habits have moved on and EA seemingly haven’t moved with them. Marketing now is far more about one on one, two way communication.
• Electronic Arts is very corporate. This is expensive and not necessarily the best way to run a large organisation, no matter how good the man at the top is. Far better to take a lesson from Alfred Sloan and break it up into semi autonomous profit centres with individual bosses who live and die by the sword and who are far more receptive to their customers.

It is not all doom and gloom. The losses are less than they were. The management are cutting out the non block buster games. EA moved away from licensed products so have built up the beginning of a portfolio of good IP that they actually own. There are huge economic advantages of scale in publishing, which positions EA very nicely indeed. The world’s consumers will spend more on games in the future than they are now. The next generation of home consoles will reward those with enough clout to invest heavily in middleware.  And EA do have some excellent employees.

So where does the future lie? I still think that EA are a prime M&A target. They would make a perfect acquisition for Microsoft to give them ammunition in their console wars against Sony and Nintendo. And they would also be a perfect fit for Apple, if and when Apple launch their own home gaming console. To both of these companies EA would be far more valuable than it is for its current stockholders. And both of them have the cash sitting in the bank to buy EA with ease.

Without specifying how (and explaining it to me would be like reading Siddhartha to a dog, in Klingon), George Hotz says he pulled it off after five weeks of work with “very simple hardware cleverly applied, and some not so simple software.”

I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.

3 years, 2 months, 11 days … that’s a pretty secure system

Hotz says he’s not revealing his exploit yet. While it “isn’t really patchable … they can make implementations much harder.” Wonder if this portends a fast firmware update to snap it shut. That is, if it really has been hacked. But Hotz’s cred in this realm is pretty solid. Interesting.

On the PlayStation 3 [George Hotz, via Gizmodo]

The game, sure to be one of the biggest of the year on the PlayStation 3, will be out in March.

What Is It?
Saw bridges the gap between the first two Saw movies, placing the player in the role of Danny Glover’s character, detective David Tapp. In the game, Tapp wasn’t killed when Zep shot him in the stomach, instead continuing his pursuit of Jigsaw until he winds up in the state he is at the beginning of the demo: with an explosive bear trap attached to his face.

What We Saw
The game can end as soon as it begins if you don’t follow the on-screen prompts, rotating the left stick to undo bolts and then hitting the two release switches using button presses. It gets your blood pumping and serves as an excellent introduction to this twisted game.

After that first harrowing sequence I guided Tapp through darkened corridors, solving puzzles and interacting with some of Jigsaw’s other victims, culminating in a fight and the revelation that after Tapp was shot, a key was sewn inside him that many of the other prisoners need to escape Jigsaw’s asylum. Shortly after that I entered a room filled with writhing bodies strapped to hospital beds, and the demo ended.

How Far Along Is It?
Much further along than it was when AJ saw it back in April, the graphics and textures have been vastly improved since Konami showed the title last. It’s still scheduled for October 2009, to coincide with the release of the next film.

What Needs Improvement?
A Few Tiny Glitches: I played through the PlayStation 3 demo, with missing textures and some missing sound clips. The Konami rep explained that the Xbox 360 version on the other side of the wall didn’t have the same problems, and they had run into a few snags with the PS3 version that were being worked on.

Unwieldy Combat: One would assume a police officer have a little more hand to hand combat training. The fight I was involved in was a clumsy affair with relatively unresponsive controls. Needs to be tightened up a bit.

Shock Therapy: While the first Saw movie subtly built towards a brilliant crescendo, the second seemed more occupied with providing shock after shock after shock. Unfortunately the game is more Saw II than Saw I. There needs to be a little more suspense built between gruesome events to keep the player from becoming used to it too quickly.

What Should Stay The Same?
Surprise!: While the shocks could benefit from better pacing, there are some generally creepy moments in the demo – moments that really make your stomach twist. Reaching into a toilet filled with syringes in order to find a fuse or walking on broken glass in bare feet…you can almost feel it, and it’s a hideous feeling.

Alone In The Dark: While it may seem too dark at times, wandering through such a well-rendered, disturbing environment using only a Zippo lighter to find your way adds an exquisite level of tension to the game play experience.

Reedulls And Poozles: While some of the mini-game puzzles take you out of the action, they were nicely balanced, relying on tension to enhance difficulty rather than having the player have to pull themselves too far out of the story to concentrate on picking a lock or finding a combination.

Final Thoughts
Saw is a genuinely creepy game, capturing the disturbing vibe of the film series, but is it too much? After finishing the demo I walked away feeling dirty, like I had done something wrong. It’s one thing to watch these events unfold passively on your television screen, but actively participating? It might just be more than my usually strong stomach can handle.

One of the most experimental concepts shown at E3 thus far, and yet another game quietly announced but not explicitly mentioned by Sony: a PSP followup to Jun Fujiki’s Echochome, the Escher-esque PS3/PSN downloadable in which wireframe artist models traversed impossible constructions using tricks of perspective to bridge gaps and open paths.

This time, as the name implies, the trick isn’t visual but temporal: like Braid and Yoshio Ishi’s Cursor*10 web games, players will have to — as seen above — use versions of previous rewound playthroughs to advance characters in later playthroughs.

One of the many exclusive PlayStation Network downloadables not specifically called out by Sony in its Tuesday conference: Gravity Crash, a new shooter from UK dev Just Add Water that mashes Geometry Wars-esque retro-vector style with twitchy dual stick shooting, and, more importantly, includes a full level editor to let players create and share their own twisted neon worlds.

David Cage’s collective output at Quantic Dream have always been nothing if not massively ambitious: from the wide open world of his PC/Dreamcast debut Omikron to the multi-camera cinematic perspective and directly user-controlled actions of PC/Xbox 360′s Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy, with both just undercut from being true masterworks by tiny details.

The jarring quick-time event sequences that undercut the latter will assuredly be returning to his PS3 exclusive latest detective thriller, Heavy Rain, but, from the trailer above, you can see how hard Quantic has worked to integrate them more tightly with the scene: notice the razor thin R1 floating just above the gun during that stand-off moment.

Either way, it’s still one of my most anticipated games for the console, and I’m very curious to continue to see how they’ll continue to walk that tightrope between player freedom and directed narrative.