Wanted: Female gamer, must take no prisoners

Seeking female gamer fluent in first-person shooters, role-playing and combat adventure games. Must be graceful under pressure, deadly with a controller and have hair-trigger reflex. Knowledge of DOT spells a plus. Pay ranges from $15,000 to $30,000 a year. Part-time job comes with lots of perks, including free games, travel to major U.S. cities and invites to killer LAN parties.

Sound like a dream job? That's the life of Alex Hebert and Morgan Romine, who jet-set around the country playing games and kicking butt. The two are members of the Frag Dolls, a team of 9 competitive female gamers sponsored by Ubisoft Entertainment, the French video game company.

Hebert is among the world's best players of Halo 3. For fun, she plays World of Warcraft. Romine also plays World of Warcraft and Rainbow Six Vegas 2. At competitions, they're often the only female players out of hundreds of contestants.

We caught up with the dynamic duo this week in Los Angeles at E3, a video game industry convention that ended Thursday. Read more after the jump to see what they have to say about their jobs ....

Sega and Sonic are back in the game

Oops! In an earlier version of this post, we said Sega discontinued its Dreamcast console in 2000. In fact, it cut the cord in January 2001.

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Sega, the publisher of Super Monkey Ball and Sonic the Hedgehog, is making a comeback.

The game company, once the king of the video game hill, dropped into near oblivion after it dropped out of the console business in 2001. Its Dreamcast console suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Sony's PlayStation juggernaut, and it looked as if it was game over for Sonic.

But the blue hedgehog (pictured at right) lives on. Its publisher, Sega of America, has clawed its way back. As of May 31, Sega had snagged 4.6% of the video game software unit sales in the U.S., according to NPD Group, a market research firm. It has risen through the ranks of game publishers, from No. 9 in 2006 to No. 7 last year. Now it's No. 6 and closing in fast on THQ, which has 5.2% of the market, according to NPD.

Sega got a boost this month from Super Monkey Ball (pictured at left), a franchise that landed on the iPhone last week. It quickly became the No. 1 most downloaded application on Apple's App Store for iPhone software.

Up next: Sonic Chronicles, in September. Developed by BioWare, the title will mark the first time Sonic, who mostly confines himself to the action-adventure genre, appears in a role-playing game.

For those who have fond memories of the Dreamcast, Sega will be bringing back Samba De Amigo for the Wii console in September. The rhythm music game won a large and loyal following when it first came out in 1999 for the Dreamcast.

Said Sega's new marketing chief, Sean Ratcliffe: "Sega is going through a renaissance."

-- Alex Pham

Game designer John Carmack talks about Wolfenstein and iPhone

Id Software, the developer of the Doom and Quake games, has worked up a version of its beloved Wolfenstein franchise for mobile phones. John Carmack, an Id founder and the company's lead programmer, has cranked out an all new rendering engine to give the game a three-dimensional feel.

Old-school gamers will remember that the first version -- Wolfenstein 3D, which came out in 1992 for the PC -- is considered by some to be the original first-person shooter game.

When Wolfenstein RPG, which will be published by Electronic Arts, arrives on cellphones this holiday, players old and new can once again take on the role of BJ Blazkowitz, an American soldier trying to blast his way out of a Nazi prison. Whereas most cellphone games confine players to a two-dimensional horizontal plane, Carmack came up with a way to let players angle shots up and down. Hello, 3D! The game packs nine levels, 17 weapons and about eight hours of game play in about 2.5 megabytes, thanks in part to Carmack's hyper-efficient code.

"We could have just made a couple of games on the old technology," Carmack said, referring to the engine he wrote for the Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves mobile games, which collectively sold 2 million copies. "But we wanted to make a game we were really proud of."

What Carmack really wanted to do, but couldn't, was make a game for the iPhone. "I'm sad we didn't have anything at launch for the App Store," Carmack said, referring to last week's launch of the Apple App Store for iPhone applications. "I'm super excited about the iPhone."

By the time Apple released its software tools for iPhone developers, Carmack and Id were already overcommitted. Although Id has a big reputation, it has a relatively small team of 60 people, six of whom work on games for cellphones and the Nintendo DS hand-held console.

Wolfenstein 3D will be ported to the iPhone eventually, but Carmack said he wanted to make a game that's specifically designed for the Apple device. We already know consumers are gaga over the large screen and, to some extent, the touch screen. Why does it appeal to a hard-core programmer such as Carmack?

One answer: Its processing speed. "The iPhone is far more powerful than the DS," he said.

Also, instead of being limited to a few megabytes, iPhone games can be far larger because they can be downloaded via computer or streamed via Wi-Fi.

Carmack promised an original iPhone game in the not-too-distant future. He said he has a game in mind but wouldn't divulge details.

-- Alex Pham

Microsoft explains Halo's no-show at E3 game conference

Halo Nation has been abuzz since Bungie, the developer of the blockbuster video game franchise Halo, put out a cryptic letter on its website Tuesday apologizing for not making an appearance at E3, the game industry conference taking place this week in downtown Los Angeles.

"For the last several months, we've been building toward a reveal of something exciting that Bungie is working on," studio President Harold Ryan wrote. "We were looking forward to sharing that with our fan community during the week of E3. However, those plans were changed by our publisher."

"We realize that many of our fans are disappointed by this turn of events" Ryan said. He added a note of the spurned partner: "Members of the Bungie team share that disappointment."

This morning drew an explanation from the publisher not named in Bungie's note -- Microsoft.

Turns out that Bungie's latest Halo project was originally part of the program for Microsoft's press conference on Monday, but it was taken out of the lineup at the last minute. Don Mattrick, senior vice president of Microsoft's Xbox games business, said the company decided to pull Halo ...

Activision's Quantum of Solace and Guitar Hero games due this fall

Activision announced tonight that its first game based on the James Bond license, a franchise that once belonged to rival game publisher Electronic Arts, will hit stores Nov. 7, the same date as the release of the new Bond movie "Quantum of Solace." The movie features the return of actor Daniel Craig, who played Bond in "Casino Royale."

The Santa Monica-based game publisher also showed off a new version of its Guitar Hero franchise. Scheduled for release in the fall, Guitar Hero World Tour adds a drum kit and microphone, as well as a new guitar that has an accelerometer and a touch-sensitive slider bar.

Activision's newest entry in the music game genre also adds a recording mode that lets players create songs from scratch, using a library of beats, sounds and samples. Players who record their own tunes can upload their tracks to a website and let other players download, play and rate the songs.

Some analysts question whether some of the added features will make the game too complex for the mainstream players who bought Guitar Hero because it was easy to learn.

"I was blown away by some of the features," said Billy Pidgeon, analyst with IDC. "But I'm concerned that the game is losing some of its accessibility. One of the reasons why Guitar Hero is so successful is because anybody could play it."

-- Alex Pham

Image courtesy of Activision

Ubisoft shakes up E3 with post-apocalyptic survival game

Ubisoft at E3 today demonstrated its knack for creating visually lush games with a slate of titles that included Tom Clancy's EndWar, Farcry 2, Prince of Persia and I Am Alive.

The Paris-based company earned its place in recent years as the world's third-largest game company with franchises such as Tom Clancy, which has sold more than 55 million copies worldwide over the last 10 years, and Rayman Raving Rabbids, with 22 million units sold since launching the offbeat title in 1995. Tom Clancy's Endwar, its latest installment of the combat franchise set for release this fall, can be controlled entirely by voice commands. "Your voice is the ultimate weapon," said Laurent Detoc, president of Ubisoft's operations in the U.S. Players can tell the game to "open fire," "drop in more troops" or "send in the fighters."

Farcry 2, a first-person shooter set for release in the fall on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, incorporates the open game-play style pioneered by the Grand Theft Auto franchise. "We set out to reinvent the shooter genre," said Clint Hocking, the game's creative director. Players can either choose to go through the game with guns blazing or in a quieter stealth mode within 50 kilometers of an African jungle.

Ubisoft, which tends to build and nurture original intellectual property rather than license existing ones, also announced at the E3 Media & Business Summit a new franchise called "I Am Alive." Set in post-apocalyptic Chicago, the survival game is set for release in 2009. The company has a teaser trailer that you can check out above.

-- Alex Pham

Ubisoft demonstrates girl power at E3

For those who still think videogames are just shooters for hormonally charged boys, Ubisoft has news for you.

The French game publisher behind Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia has slowly built a sizable business by going after an underserved market -- girls 15 years and younger. Its Imagine games, which lets girls play at being a rock star, veterinarian, fashion designer, figure skater, chef or babysitter, have sold 4 million copies since they were launched in November.

Today, Ubisoft unveiled a new suite of games dedicated for 'tween girls. Called Ener-G, the titles revolve around sports. Rather than dress up Madden Football in pink, Ubisoft developed the lineup around dancing, gymnastics and horseback riding. "In 1972, one out of 27 girls played organized sports," said Tony Key, Ubisoft's senior vice president of sales and marketing. "Today, half play sports."

Like the Imagine line, these games will be available for the Nintendo DS, a hand-held console. Key estimates that about 80 million people own DS consoles and that a quarter of them are girls, adding up to roughly 20 million potential buyers for Ubisoft. "It's the fastest growing customer segment of DS owners," he said.

They're also turning out to be just as obsessive as their male counterparts at playing games -- provided that the games speak to them. Girls tended to buy multiple games in the Imagine series, and they often played the games all the way through, Key said. "They're hardly casual gamers," Key said. "They're just non-traditional."

That meant Ubisoft had to find out what girls like to play. The company has invited hundreds of girls to its San Francisco office to ask why they play sports. Many say they like being part of a team, socializing and supporting their teammates. When asked whether winning was a motive, most said no. "So we designed our games, based on those nuggets of insight," Key said. "We're serving an underserved and growing market. That's a recipe for success."

Ubisoft: You play like a girl and that's a good thing!

-- Alex Pham

Screenshot of Ener-G courtesy of Ubisoft

Sony launching PlayStation 3 video download service tonight

Sony Corp. is finally launching its long-awaited video download service for the PlayStation 3 video game console.

The company said it would start selling and renting movies and TV shows through its PlayStation Network tonight. MGM, 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, Warner Bros., Disney, Paramount, Turner Entertainment and of course Sony Pictures are making titles available.

PlayStation 3 owners will be able to buy TV shows for $1.99 and up. They can also rent movies for $2.99 to $5.99 and buy them for $9.99 to $14.99. For example, “Cloverfield” can be purchased for $14.99 or rented for $3.99. A high-definition version rents for $5.99.

Videos purchased through the PS3 can be transferred to Sony’s PSP hand-held game console.

Studio executives told us in April that the online video service was coming as soon as this summer. We wrote then:

It would follow two other disappointing online ventures backed by Sony in recent years: Movielink, which attempted to become the online equivalent of the video store for mainstream Hollywood movies before being sold last year to Blockbuster Inc.; and Sony Connect, the company’s response to Apple’s iTunes download service. It shut down in March.

The latest service, provided through the online PlayStation Network, is Sony’s attempt to stage a comeback in digital entertainment distribution. The maker of the once-dominant Walkman portable music player is still smarting from its defeat by Apple in the online music revolution.

Sony’s service does have a leg up on the Apple TV set-top box, because ...

Nintendo unveils Wii Music game and Grand Theft Auto for DS

CORRECTION: The headline on an earlier version of this post incorrectly said Grand Theft Auto was coming to the Wii. Grand Theft Auto is actually coming to Nintendo's DS hand-held console.

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Nintendo today jumped into the rapidly growing genre of music-themed video games with its own title, Wii Music, designed by Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Wii Fit, Nintendogs and other hit titles.

Wii Music lets as many as four players at a time jam on virtual instruments, including violin, drums and guitar. Nintendo showed off the new game at a press event in Hollywood and put a video of the game on its website.

The Japanese company also gave hard-core game players a present: Take-Two Interactive Software is bringing its Grand Theft Auto franchise to the Nintendo DS hand-held console, which mostly features casual fare. Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars is expected to be available before Christmas.

Nintendo said it had sold 10 million Wii consoles and 20 million DS devices in the U.S., generating $5 billion in retail sales. The Japanese company said further that it had sold more than 70 million DS consoles worldwide and projected that it would sell 100 million by the end of March 2009.

Nintendo also announced Wii MotionPlus, an attachment to the Wii controller that will allow the remote to better capture wrist and arm movements. It will let players turn the Wii controller into virtual drums, Frisbees and saxophones.

Nintendo notably did not announce any new installments of its Zelda or Mario franchises, which are purchased mostly by serious gamers. "There's not a lot for core gamers here, but that's not what Nintendo is about anyway at this stage," said Geoff Keighley, editor of Gameslice.

-- Alex Pham

Photo: Wii Music image courtesy of Nintendo

Electronic Arts struts its stuff at E3: Spore and more

Electronic Arts showcased a broad suite of games at E3 today, demonstrating that one of the world's largest game developers has the breadth of titles to reach virtually any player on the planet, and the chops to bring on dozens of new games each year.

For sports fiends, there are new versions of Tiger Woods Golf and NBA Live. For music buffs, there's Rock Band 2, which will come with more than 100 songs. Boxing fanatics can feast on Facebreaker. And action addicts can take in Mirror's Edge, an original title being developed in EA's European studio.

For everyone else, there's Spore, a cosmic evolution game from Will Wright, whose prodigious yet quirky mind brought us The Sims. That game, which shipped a "creature creator" software a few weeks ago as a preamble to the actual game set for launch in September, has already garnered more than 2 million "creatures" from players who have uploaded their beasties onto the Spore website, Wright said at the press conference. Players have also uploaded 85,000 YouTube videos.

To see a sample of the titles EA unveiled at E3, watch the trailer.

The event reflects EA Chief Executive John Riccitiello's emphasis on innovation and new intellectual property to reinvigorate the storied game company. With a few exceptions, including The Sims 3 and NBA Live '09, most of the titles highlighted at the event were brand new franchises. And NBA Live had a fresh twist -- the ability to download NBA game statistics and individual player performances every day. The updates would affect the strengths, weakness of players and teams within the video game, depending on how these they did in real life games.

"I frankly believe it's the best lineup in EA's history," Riccitiello said at the conclusion of the event.

-- Alex Pham

Video courtesy of Electronic Arts