Iron Man 2 was one of the top-grossing movies of the 2010 summer blockbuster season. If it's good for movies, why can't it work for games?

It’s just past Memorial Day weekend in the United States, the traditional harbinger of summertime. In recent years, it’s also brought in the beginning of the summer movie season, where studios push their big-budget releases and all sorts of associated goods and tie-ins. You can’t swing a major tent-pole movie without hitting Movie:  The Action Figure, Movie: The Fast-Food Deal, Movie: The Sports Advertising Tie-In, and, yes, Movie: The Video Game. It’s marketing gone mad, sure, but it creates a ton of money for all involved.

However, it begs the question: where’s the summer blockbuster period for gaming? If it’s proved such a big hit with movie crowds, why not with gamers?

It’s an interesting thought.

Game companies have spread releases out more evenly throughout the calendar in recent years. Just last year, Mass Effect 2 and Red Dead Redemption proved that a hit can come at any time of the year, and they’re hardly the only examples. Microsoft has run a Summer of Arcade program publicizing Xbox Live Arcade for the last few years. And in the United States, there have regularly been a pair of major summertime releases in the form of EA Sports’ two football games, NCAA Football and Madden NFL, which come out in July and August, respectively.

There may not be an actual NFL season this fall, but EA Sports' annual Madden NFL series always sells well in August.

But let’s turn the question on its head. Gaming has its own blockbuster period: the holiday season. Much how film producers try to crowd big summertime weekends with blockbuster flicks, so do game companies center around the “Black Friday” day-after-Thanksgiving shop-a-palooza. And just as some companies have bent the definition of “summer blockbuster” to include movies released in mid April (Iron Man 2 itself, our cover image, was released in early May 2010), so does the holiday gaming crunch now spread from mid-September until the so-called “Second Christmas” in early January.

If gaming does have its own blockbuster period, why does it need the summertime? The easiest arguments involve free time: beyond kids, teens and college-aged adults being out of school, it’s also a time when adults traditionally take more time off (presumably to spend time with their children). God abhors a vacuum, as the turn of phrase goes, so naturally gaming should play a part. And as the games industry grows year on year that should be reflected by more of the marquee games coming out during the summertime. Right?

Well, again, some are. Plus, the way the industry’s hype-cycle works, there needs to be some buffer time between gaming’s biggest annual show (E3) and when those games are advertised and go on sale (the fall and early winter). Unlike when, say, Apple announces something new and it hits stores a week later, gaming doesn’t work that way; game companies don’t control the entire retail channel, for one (Apple does with its stores for the hardware and its App Stores for software), and the last time somebody tried to launch a surprise like that right at E3 it became the Sega Saturn. So, in many ways, the status quo works.

BioShock was definitely a great game, but would it have captured gamers' attention as well had it launched in the late-fall games blitz?

That doesn’t mean the present model is perfect, though. Many games would be well-served to delay their release until the following spring or to push up a release to the summer to avoid getting lost in the holiday trample. Games like GTA IV, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Gran Turismo, BioShock and more have proved you can be successful avoiding the holiday period. But the mindset of gaming — that it’s an industry equitable to toys and board games, only able to be pushed and sold as presents for the month of December — needs to change, and soon. Moving away from the “TOO MANY GAMES” holiday crush gives gamers a choice, and helps otherwise ordinary games some breathing room away from the AAA games that dominate. Would BioShock have gotten as much press if it had been released the same week as Call of Duty and Halo? Maybe; it’s a great game. But it damn well dominated August, when it had none of the competition. Gamers get time to play these games, and the games get more of the spotlight.

Gaming might not need its own summer blockbuster period, but it can certainly stand for more summer releases.

Shadow of the Colossus' simple, spare storyline has been repeatedly acclaimed as a high-water mark in video game storytelling.

Even before Mario trekked through the Mushroom Kingdom to rescue the Princess and Pac-Man was pursued by a quartet of ghosts, video games have been a storytelling medium. As games matured from simple sprites to a multi-billion dollar industry, so the scope of video games increased —in terms of graphical fidelity, size and scope of game worlds, and the potential for storytelling.

The problem, though, is that only two of those three aspects have seen real growth to this point. While our favored medium is still maturing, it’s encountered some growing pains in finding the right way to tell a story — and the right kind of stories to tell.

Warning: Spoilers for Grand Theft Auto IV, Bioshock, Metal Gear Solid, Fallout 3, Fable II, and Shadow of the Colossus follow.

The deep, gritty urban environment of Liberty City created by Rockstar for Grand Theft Auto IV opens up to gamers in a way that both advances the storyline as well as the needs of the player.

While storytelling techniques from books, comics, TV and movies may be applicable to games, the nature of the video game medium means not all of these techniques make best use of the gaming experience. A major difference is that video games are an experiential medium: gamers expect to learn new tricks or techniques, or gain access to new worlds throughout the course of a game. While this may not be as true in sports or racing games, for example, players of single-player-focused games of all genres expect a sort of ramp — both in terms of what skills your character has as well as in difficulty. A game like Ninja Gaiden or God of War would feel stale if your character started the game with the abilities, weapons and skills he or she ended with. In order to increase the difficulty of the game (generally from simple to complex as the game nears its close), those skills are needed to introduce new challenges.

Movies and books do not expect you to make such strides throughout the story— however, the convention of unlocking more and more powerful weapons or abilities throughout a single-player role playing game or action game is a video game standby. An issue games have, then, is telling a powerful story within a framework that also makes sense from a gameplay perspective. Done in a banal or uninspired way, a game feels cliché or trite; but when executed well, games marry storytelling and advancement in a flowing, natural way.

A great example is the post-GTA III Grand Theft Auto games. The game world in Rockstar’s flagship series opens up as missions unlock; the key is that it feels natural. An attempt on the life of GTA IV protagonist Nico Bellic and his cousin early in the game forces them from the first opening area of the game to the next one; while it’s still shepherding the player from one area to another, it makes sense in the context of both gameplay (moving from one level to another) and storytelling.

Another challenge to story is in level structure for many games. While movies and novels go through crests and valleys of action and story progression, games take it to another level and build levels around specific action scenes as well as new mechanics. Take a game like Gears of War 2 as an example. Most every level in the two Gears of War games introduces a new technique or experience — whether that’s riding on a giant excavator and firing from mounted turrets, or working your way through a giant worm, the story is oftentimes molded in such a way as to naturally introduce new scenarios for gamers.

Many aspects of Gears of War and Gears of War 2's storyline rotate around the game's level design, crafting the story around what the designers want the gamer to experience. The chainsaw duel, however, is just badass.

The problem that arises from this is that parts of the story can be cut due to difficulty with getting a level functioning properly. If the game’s engine just flat-out can’t handle a level, or the developers lack the time to finish a scene to their desired quality, it gets cut. Compare this to movies, novels and TV shows, where content is cut in the interest of brevity or relevance — scenes are deleted or pages are cut because they’re excess, not because the director or writer doesn’t know how to shoot them or put them into words.

It’s not the case with games because many story-focused games hone in on gameplay first, with the story built to fit. The Gears of War series is guilty of this, with story built to explain away gameplay concepts, but it’s certainly not the only one out there.

Regardless, the medium is still blossoming in terms of finding new and inventive ways to tell stories. There have been advances in taking the best of post-modern storytelling and combining that with the interactivity of gaming to create something that can only be told through the medium of the video game.

A game like Bioshock is a step in this right direction. It takes a rather ordinary story idea, with a relatively simple plot progression throughout, but throws the player for a loop by manipulating the story within the context of gaming. Bioshock doesn’t succeed because its dystopian, Ayn Rand-inspired story is groundbreaking, but because it takes certain video game tropes — that gamers have a choice, have control, and that a person giving them instructions can be trusted — and uses them to bring meaning to the player. It takes the idea that the narrator and guiding voice in a game can be taken for gospel and stands it on its head. While it’s a simple concept (and one explored in books like The Catcher in the Rye or Catch-22), it’s one that has not been explored in detail in videogames.

Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima utilized many interesting technical tricks with the PlayStation, including reading from the memory card for other Konami games in the form of Psycho Mantis reading Solid Snake's mind.

You think you have the game figured out, then it turns out you’ve been a pawn all along. Metal Gear Solid did this, too — along with other mind-tricks that took advantage of the medium. This is best exemplified in the battle with Psycho Mantis, a specially trained super-soldier who could read the protagonist’s – and the player’s – mind. How was that achieved? Psycho Mantis could “read your mind” and counter all of your actions if you left the PlayStation controller in the first control port; this boss also read the PlayStation memory cards to see if there was any save data for other games by Metal Gear Solid’s publisher, Konami. Players had to learn to either adapt to the fight…or just move the controller to the second port.

Fortunately, more games are playing with the structure of the narrative for dramatic effect. PlayStation 2 classic Shadow of the Colossus uses bare minimalism to create an emotionally meaningful experience. It’s gaming structure at its simplest — the protagonist must go defeat a series of bosses to save his beloved princess — but the sparseness of the world that the player rides and hunts in creates a stillness, a narrative white space that contrasts with the brutal climbing and killing of the gentle yet gigantic colossi the player must slay. It’s powerful and moving in ways few other games are.

Bioware’s RPGs, including the Baldur’s Gate series, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, all seek to evoke emotion through a different method: choice. Knights of the Old Republic popularized a trend towards good/evil choice in games — actions and dialogue in KOTOR affected your character’s development and standing within the game’s community, as well as storyline options that were available. Some characters’ quests were only available if you were good or evil enough, and the theory was that gamers would go for one path or another but must live with their decisions.

Fallout 3's Broken Steel downloadable content retroactively changes the ending to the game from a hard, final conclusion, to a jumping-off point for more end-game content.

Other games, like the Fallout series and the Fable series, have highlighted this as well, but the concept of choice and decisions making last affects on characters hasn’t been executed as well as possible. Why? Gamers right now do not want these choices to be permanent. Downloadable content for Fable II allowed gamers the opportunity to shortcut around the game’s end-of-storyline decisions; everything from weight (gained or lost by diet) to the story’s final impossible choice are reversible now, albeit for a price. A similar effect is achieved in Fallout 3’s Broken Steel downloadable content, which ret-cons the game’s ending, adds new storyline content, and allows the player to continue playing with their character. In Fallout 3, enough good (or evil) karma will balance the other side out; some choices are permanent, but many aren’t. The emotional impact choice and living with decisions can have is washed a bit when it lacks permanence.

One of the highest achievements for all art — including television, music, movies, and, yes, video games — is to convey a strong emotion. Whether that’s happiness, sadness, fear, joy, or whatever the case may be, if a song moves you to tears or a movie makes you laugh for days, that piece of art has succeeded. With gaming, there is a unique opportunity to provide an even stronger emotional connection with a medium because of the interactive nature of video games. While games have not had that watershed storytelling event — there hasn’t been “a Citizen Kane of gaming” as of yet — watch how developers continue to find new ways to tell powerful stories that utilize interactivity and personal choice.

Unless this is the greatest prank Hideo Kojima has pulled in his life, it looks like the konami.jp teaser site that's been counting down for over a week is working toward a Metal Gear announcement next week at E3.

The big pieces of news have come from Kojima Productions and Rockstar, respectively. Starting with the Japanese developer, its teaser site – which has seen multiple countdown clocks on top of ever-changing imagery, all the while focused on a field during a thunderstorm – has now left little question as to what Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima will be working on next. Today, the image of a young Big Boss – replete with eye patch – joined the flashing numbers and letters that have been on the site for well over a week, seeming to imply that a new Metal Gear game of some sort is due to be announced soon.

The other piece of news related to the teaser site and Kojima’s next project comes from scans of a leaked copy of the newest issue of Japan’s Famitsu Magazine, the TIME of Japanese gaming. There’s a feature story with lots of self-editing by Kojima, and accompanied by another image from the countdown that hasn’t been seen yet: Raiden, circa MGS4. It’s good news for Metal Gear fans and, with a bit of elementary math, it looks like the timer will run to zero early next week.

Oh my. The logo for the next piece of GTA IV DLC, "The Ballad of Gay Tony," looks appropriately fabulous.

A week ahead of E3, Rockstar made the other big news of the day by announcing the first details for the second piece of DLC for last year’s Grand Theft Auto IV. “The Ballad of Gay Tony” will release this fall both on Xbox Live and in a disc-based compilation along with “The Lost and Damned,” and puts players in the shoes of Luiz Lopez, who works under Liberty City night-club owner Tony Prince.

After Rockstar has cast players as both Baltic badasses and leaders of a motorcycle gang, it’ll be interesting to see what sorts of situations the club owner’s assistant gets into. It’s likely that more details will be revealed next week at E3, possibly as soon as Monday at Microsoft’s keynote press conference, so stay tuned.

Bioshock 2, the anticipated shooter set in Ayn Rand’s (very) wet dream land, has received a release date – and count it as a win for the old country. In a change from the usual conventions, Bioshock 2 will debut first in Europe. The game will be released on Friday, October 30 in Europe; it will hit stores in the United States on the following Tuesday, November 3. Curiously, publisher Take Two still lists the game as “to be determined” regarding which platforms the sequel will appear on; the original arrived on the Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3. Perhaps that situation will be cleared up by next week.

Some more news briefs to close the day’s recap:

• 1up editor James Mielke has an interview with former members of Team Ninja, including Ninja Gaiden creator Tomonobu Itagaki, marking the first time they’ve really broken radio silence since splitting off from Tecmo last July.
• Two more pieces of Sony-specific PS3 news: Joystiq reports that signs suggest there may be a new “value-added” bundle of the 80 gig PS3 at Best Buy after E3 (keeping the price the same but adding two Greatest Hits games), and safari photography game Afrika is finally due to be released in the United States on the PS3. Pokemon Snap and Toto fans, rejoice!
• Lastly, and quite possibly most awesome-ly, Tim Schafer will be conducting an E3 interview for Brütal Legend over Twitter next week. Submit questions at 6 p.m. PDT on June 2 to @BrutalLegend, and read at 7 p.m. to see Schafer’s answers — #E3BL tag optional, but helpful.

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On the one hand, Guitar Hero: Smash Hits is reviving some of the best songs with full-band bravado from the earlier, better days of Guitar Hero. Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon is getting its due. So is Killer Queen, and Free Bird, and Carry On Wayward Son…which was already in Rock Band 2, and…Through the Fire and Flames?

Yep. It’s Neversoft.

Bioshock 2 footage emerged from the depths. While it’s far too early to make any judgment calls on the game, it’s safe to say the sequel perfectly retains the look and feel of the landmark original game. Whether that’ll ultimately be to its detriment or benefit is, at this point, anyone’s guess.

Meet Ezio Auditore de Firenze, Desmond's next nightmare-bed buddy

The slow trickle of Assassin’s Creed 2 details has accelerated. Just earlier this week, Ubisoft launched a teaser site for Assassin’s Creed 2, complete with a clever webcam metagame that revealed images of the game’s new protagonist. Ezio Auditore de Firenze, a Florentine nobleman in the year 1476, is another one of Desmond’s ancestors and presumably the next persona he’ll pull a Being John Malkovich on in the sequel.