In the next stage of what can only be Google’s rise to Shadowrun-style megacorporate extraterritoriality, the internet giant is getting into games, or more accurately game development kits. According to Kevin Hanna, Google plans to allow game developers to access Google Lively.

For those unfamiliar, Lively is presently a sort of glorified chat room that falls somewhere between AOL Instant Messenger and The Sims. Users can customize avatars and construct the graphical rooms these characters will inhabit.

If Google’s plans see fruition, Lively’s graphical chat interface will be expanded into a game programming software package. Hanna hopes that the availability of the package will capture startup developers who lack the distribution and development resources of established companies.

Unfortunately, this story isn’t about some forgotten gem that Molyneux never quite got around to wrapping up. Instead, Giant Bomb is reporting that Fable II will be releasing before it’s done. Apparently the game will be shipping without online cooperative play, though the promised feature has been promised again within a week of the release.

While computer games have been dealing with this problem for a long time, the relatively indelible nature of console game printing has generally forced developers to release games once they were finished. It seems like digital distribution is gradually leaking lazy development practice to consoles as well.

WoW widows should get ready to become real widows, because Bejeweled is coming to the World of Warcraft and your raid-obsessed sweetheart will never have a reason to stand up from the computer again.

The breakout casual game from PopCap will be arriving in the form of a mod–user-installable code that adds layers to the Warcraft core. Bejewelled will be a more professional version of the Besharded mod, a clone created by Michael Fromwiller. In a pleasant deviation from cease-and-desist as usual, PopCap actually hired Fromwiller to further polish his mod and add PopCap branding after noticing that it existed.

With Namco jealously guarding the patent on minigames during load screens, it’s nice to see that developers are making headway where they can to fight sandwich gaming.

It looks like the cowardly purple eating machine has gnawed its way into PAX attendees hearts, because Gamasutra is reporting that Twisted Pixel took home the PAX 10 Audience Choice Award. The Maw is a third-person action adventure that tracks the exploits of its eponymous blob and his partner/keeper Frank (check here for more details), but this news also comes coupled with a tentative release frame: Q1 2009.

All the entries to the PAX 10 were unique and difficult to compare, but our congratulations go out to Twisted Pixel undiminished.

The gaming press has lavished no shortage of love upon Harmonix’s Rock Band. When the acclaimed 4-instrument rhythm game debuted in Guitar Hero’s wake, it was lauded in the media, at PAX, and on message boards as something truly special.

However, recent reports from Kotaku make it look like Activision’s Guitar hero is in a crushing 6:1 lead. The source is Activision’s Bobby Kotick, so perhaps a grain of salt would be prudent. Kotaku’s report makes no mention of net profits or the expected ratio given that Rock Band supports twice as many players as Guitar Hero.

Kotick attributes Guitar Hero’s lead to Activision’s music access through Universal, though it seems equally plausible that the triply expensive Rock Band might be a bit forbidding to casual buyers. There’s also the issue of the peripheral kiss of death, where consumers are loathe to fill 30 cubic feet of living room space with a drum set, 2 guitars, and stands for everything.

This lead has nothing to do with Rock Band’s profitability–there are still enough gamers playing it to merit a sequel. However, it does comment on the larger scope of consumer buying behavior. People seem willing to accept a pared-down experience in exchanged for reduced price and less wasted space.

In what is apparently an effort to put the point back into point and click adventure games, the first season of episodes from the Sam and Max games will be hitting the Wii on October 7. The series has been available on the PC for some time now and it’s a bit more expensive on [...]

When VentureBeat reported on the failure rate among XBox 360 consoles, they interviewed a temp game tester, Robert Delaware, who consented to having his name revealed. In what Evil Avatar is already calling the wrongful firing of a whistleblower, Delaware has been terminated for violation of NDA. The firing occurred within a week of the [...]

Sushi Bar Samurai is a unique entry among the innovative games in the PAX 10. There is no platforming, no physics, and no combat. Instead there’s a chef (you), his trusty stock of sushi ingredients, and a pile of spirits who are owed a last meal.

Sushi isn’t made a la Cooking Mama. Instead, the eponymous bar of sushi ingredients scrolls across the top of the screen, and you simply click to queue your stock to make combinations that will result in palatable sushi. The game is perhaps a distant relative of Tetris, but because you can see the ingredients in advance, the emphasis shifts from tactical to strategic. In a nutshell, Sushi Bar Samurai is about mastering the arcane intricacies of sushi, and using them to plan an optimal path through a stream of ingredients.

We make a great deal of fuss about accessibility around here, and transparency is a part of that. You might predict that we’d be critical of a game that revolves around secret codes written in meat and rice, but hit the jump to discover sole developer Casey Muratori’s intriguing counterpoints about transparency’s place in puzzle games. We also chat about the language of sushi and reasons to make a game aside from cash. There’s not presently a public demo, but stop by his website to read more about his development philosophy and check out some media.

Strange Attractors 2 is a top-down game about navigating an avatar from place to place using attraction and repulsion mechanics. It wasn’t the only game in the PAX 10 to use the environment to pull and push the player around, but it was the only one to use gravity to model those forces. So instead of using specially designated objects, everything in the environment pulls and pushes everything else. Controlling the game is like controlling the gravitational constant. It defaults to 0, but you can turn it up high, or flip it into negative numbers using the two mouse buttons.

We talked to Christoper McGarry of Ominous Development about how Strange Attractors 2 grew out of the first game, their distribution model, and the charmingly tortured cries of the game’s enemies. Hit the jump for all that and then check out the demo.

Longtime readers may recall a post bemoaning that cooperative multiplayer is hard to come by and harder to do right. Schizoid disagrees. It’s a top-down two-player game where each player controls either a red or a blue avatar. Enemies are color-coded too, and colliding with like-colored baddies destroys them while other colors destroy you instead. You arguably could control both avatars (and there’s a game mode called Überschizoid that lets you try just that: one analog stick per avatar), but it’s not recommended unless your corpus callosum has been severed.

Schizoid is presently available on XBox Live, though the XBLA strictures on demos don’t allow multiplayer. Still, you can fake it by grabbing a significant other and snuggling together to share one controller on Überschizoid, so give it a shot anyway.

We talked to Schizoid’s Richard Garfield about the game’s roots, cooperative gaming in general, and digital distribution. Hit the jump for the details.