High School or Lower

An anonymous reader writes “Big news for Star Wars fans looking forward to BioWare’s upcoming Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG — space combat has been confirmed for the game. Players will be able to fly around the galaxy in their own personal starships, avoiding asteroid belts, landing in dangerous territory and battling other vessels. The initial news makes it sound like a cross between Mass Effect’s galaxy map and a traditional space fighting game, where players will have to find ‘hotspots’ on the galaxy map in order to enter a particular zone.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With the advent of the Wii and the upcoming motion control systems from Sony and Microsoft, console makers are expanding the gaming population to include vast numbers of casual players. Their problem now, according to this editorial at Eurogamer, is that there doesn’t exist a broad selection of games between the simple, introductory titles and the complex, hardcore ones, which tends to limit how deep new players will venture into the gaming ecosystem. Quoting: “… it needs software that spans the gap between the two camps of offerings which are emerging on Xbox 360 — games that encourage players of Dance Central or Your Shape to move upstream and explore. It’s unlikely, perhaps, that they’ll ever end up curb-stomping crinkle-faced nasties in Cliff Bleszinski’s latest, but we’re a long way past the point of the Xbox being all about shooting and driving, even if the public perception hasn’t quite moved with the software line-up. The long-term challenge for the games market must, ultimately, be to emulate the success which other mediums have had in creating markets where consumers routinely and happily move between genres, and where franchises which would be pigeonholed as ‘hardcore’ in the games world nestle comfortably in people’s DVD collections alongside those which would be dismissed as ‘casual.’” Read more of this story at Slashdot.