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In a quick-and-dirty Q&A session with Develop, Q-Games’ Dylan Cuthbert voiced his concern with the often quite vocal Internet whining that takes place when the topic of download-only games pops up. A whole ten dollars for a quality title that I’ll likely get a ton of enjoyment out of? Nonsense. Too expensive.

When asked what disappointed him about the videogame industry, Cuthbert responded with “gamers complaining about our games being too expensive at 10 dollars. I’m not sure this is an industry problem, but it seems ridiculous that people complain about that price point.”

He goes on to give his real answer, “the top-down relationship most publishers have with their devs,” but that’s a topic for another day. I’ll take this one step further and say that people who are willing to drop $10 on a downloadable game but not $15 merely on principle are just as bad.

The great part about that is I find myself in this exact group of habitual complainers from time to time. What’s wrong with us?

FAQ: Dylan Cuthbert [Develop via Joystiq]

When the PSP Minis prices were finally revealed, I was amazed. This service, intended to do for the PSP what Apps did for the iPhone, was idiotic. Games started at $4.99 and went as high as ten bucks. Tetris was $9.99, twice as much as its iPhone counterpart. Sony, however, has denied responsibility for the stupid prices, claiming that it’s up to the developer.

"As far as pricing goes, the publisher of the title sets the pricing," explains Sony’s Eric Lempel. He then went on to confirm that if a developer wanted to charge $1.99 for a game, they would be absolutely free to do so. If this is the case, then it’s not Sony’s fault that Fieldrunners costs $2.99 on the iPhone while PSP users are expected to stump up $5.99. 

This is retarded, but hey, at least it’s not Sony’s fault this time. We can actually blame one of the PSP’s many problems on somebody else for once.

That said, however, there is no way that PSP Minis will be able to compete with the iPhone or anything else if the games cost twice as much. Sony needs to come up with a way to encourage cheaper games or develop some themselves because it’s retarded that Minis aren’t pricing themselves competitively. Until they’re reasonably priced, there is simply no reason to even open the Minis section of the PlayStation Store. Not when the App Store is selling the same games at half the price.

id Software has been in New Orleans for SIGGRAPH 2009, discussing graphics and all the technical stuff that you and I like to ignore because we prefer to assume that videogames just magically happen inside our television sets. id’s senior programmer J.M.P. van Waveren was talking about "Virtual Texturing," and included some hot RAGE screens to punctuate his point.

The pictures are mostly environmental shots, meant to demonstrate how id Tech 5 technology can create "unique, very large textures." As you can see from the screenshots, there are some very large textures indeed.  

If you’re technically minded and fascinated by these things, you can access id’s Tech 5 demonstration materials in this handy PDF. The rest of you can go back to believing in the magic graphic faeries that make videogames appear out of pixie dust.

Our "Indie Nation" series highlights kickass independent games.

Here is everything you need to know about Research and Development:

- You can download it here 

- Despite being a mod, it is better than the entirety of Half-Life: Episode One and most of Half-Life 2.

A puzzle-based mod where your character is never allowed to wield a gun, Research and Development has better level design and more imaginative situations than most first-person games I’ve ever played. You know those moments in really well-designed puzzle games like Braid or Portal where a solution reveals itself and you think, "wow — how clever"? Research and Development has about a dozen of those. It also combines action and puzzle-solving with remarkable dexterity, and is seldom frustrating throughout its 2-3 hour running time.

I know we’re only halfway through 2009, but I would be extremely surprised if another mod came out this year that trumped Research and Development in terms of imaginative puzzles and exhilarating level design. I mean, don’t get me wrong — the Radiator series is truly fantastic if you’re in the mood for introspective examinations of the human condition, but Research and Development provides clever fun in a way very few games — nevermind how many modifications — are capable of. 

Even if you don’t like the kind of games I normally suggest, I find it hard to believe you won’t enjoy Research and Development. Get it here, or hit the jump for more theories on why this mod is so goddamned good.

I have to admit: with very few exceptions (the Antlion siege in Episode Two foremost amongst them), I really don’t care for the gunplay in the Half-Life games. In this respect, R&D immediately endeared itself to me in refusing to give the player a gun. It’s not that there’s no combat; it’s that the game focuses primarily on setting up terribly imaginative puzzles that just happen to revolve around killing large amounts of people.

At one point, for instance, you’ll come across a group of Combine fighting a bunch of zombies in a flooded generator room. Rather than taking them on with a gravity gun (since you don’t have one, at this point) or running past them (since the game will automatically kill you), you might notice a loose power cable connected to a generator, its other end caught on one of the generator’s many metal protrusions. Grabbing the loose end of the cable, you lower it into the water. Running back into another room, you hit a power switch — and celebrate as everyone in the room, zombies and Combine alike, are fried by your violent ingenuity. 

It’d spoil the  R&D’s charm to explain too many more of its puzzles (even writing the previous paragraph made me feel a bit guilty), but suffice to say that if the dude behind this mod doesn’t get a job at Valve, I’ll be incredibly surprised. The mod’s creator managed to take all the base mechanics found in Half-Life 2 and push them further and harder than I would have ever thought possible. Just when you think you’ve seen everything the game has to show you, it’ll throw out something entirely different that will almost make you wonder if you’re still playing the same mod. 

Some unfortunate game-ending bugs aside (typically doing with scripted events not going off when they ought to), I honestly haven’t seen this level of polish and ingenuity in a mod since God knows how long. Considering how long it lasts (my first runthrough took me about two hours) and how much variety the creator packs into every stage, I almost feel guilty playing this game for free. Every subsequent level somehow manages to top the one preceding it (save for a single, fucking irritating level near the game’s end involving a suspended bridge and a rotating  cargo container), until the spectacular final levels. 

Seriously, I dunno why you’re still reading this. Get Research and Development here.

The studio behind the recently uncovered game Duke Begins is Gearbox Software.

Earlier this afternoon, Shacknews uncovered more court papers from the ongoing Take-Two versus 3D Realms legal proceedings. The fresh filings are from the Duke Nukem Forever publisher in response to 3D Realms countersuit. On the eighth page of counter-counter-claims (viewable at Shacknews) Take-Two writes:

"Under the 2007 Agreement, any modification to the development schedule for the Duke Begins game, following Final Concept Approval (as defined in the 2007 Agreement), is permitted without Apogee’s consent provided that both 2K Games and Gearbox (as defined in the 2007 Agreement) consent to the change."

Before this document — and even leading up to page seven in it — the developer of Duke Begins has always been referred to as a “third-party developer” or a “well-known videogame developer.” Consider this great mystery solved.

Interestingly, it appears as though Duke Begins hasn’t been canned. In the filings, Take-Two claims it has merely been put on hold. We look forward to seeing it in action at some point in 2040.

[via Shacknews]