Kyle Orland’s Workblog

NPR’s News & Notes 

The Electronics Entertainment Expo is underway, and gaming industry heavyweights are showing off some brand new technology and software.

Pro gamers and expo attendees Ralph Cooper and Kyle Orland are co-hosts of the NPR podcast, Press Start.

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Kevin, Rebecca Swanner and Kyle Orland talk about how this year’s E3 is different from years past.

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Kevin, Kyle Orland and Steve Butts juxtapose the finer points of single player and multiplayer games.

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Charles Bellfield is the Vice President of Marketing at Capcom, USA. In this Gamasutra interview, freelance journalist Kyle Orland sits down with Bellfield to discuss Capcom’s stance on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science’s ‘pay to play’ model, the success of downloadable console demos and the feedback loop it creates between developers and consumers, Eastern influences on Western games, Okami, Phoenix Wright, and more.

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For a gameplay movie to be flawless, it must be as fast as possible, it must not miss a shot, have no wasted efforts, and so on. Creating a such movie involves planning and carefulness.

The game is played at slow speed (the emulator slows the game down), doing small segments at time and optimizing then as well as possible, redoing until it goes well. The finished (and unfinished) product is reviewed many times, at full speed and at slow motion, to find things to improve and to invent new strategies and then played again.

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Colleen McGuinness is a Harvard-educated writer from Long Island, New York. Since graduating in 1999 she’s been a writer and director for a short film titled For Mature Audiences Only, a staff writer for NBC’s short-lived comedy Miss Match, and a story editor for the Fox series North Shore. She’s currently writing a screenplay for New Line Cinema called Baby Got Backhand.

So why are we interviewing her on a gaming site?

It turns out that Ms. McGuinness made her video-game-writing debut last month with Sprung, an odd little Nintendo DS game that simulates the world of dating. Players in Sprung have to navigate a maze of conversation paths to accomplish a variety of dating-related goals with their on-screen conversation partner.

GameSpot talked to Ms. McGuinness about writing, dating and, of course, video games.

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Brad King has burst onto the video game journalism in the past few years, jumping from a staff writer position at Wired to write Dungeons & Dreamers: Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic and an accompanying blog (both with co-author John Borland). More information about King, including links to some of his clips, can be found on his web site, BradKing.org.

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When he’s not working as Director of Content Development at CNN/Money, Chris Morris writes a regular news/commentary column on the video game industry for that same siter. As one of the only video game commentators for a major mainstream outlet, Morris has broken many stories in the industry, most recently exposing a link to a pornography site that accidentally showed up in Rainbow Six 3.

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