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We love the smell of Natal in the morning.

After a bunch of (mostly) expected games, Microsoft's E3 press conference finally revealed something of greater interest and scope: Project Natal, the code name for the company's well-rumored motion-sensing bar.

Taking a direct shot at Wii users who "sit on the sofa using some kind of preset waggle commands," Natal is controller-free, using what looks like a TV-mounted camera/microphone bar to sense motion, sound, and even 3D movement, suggesting that the technology involved is far beyond that of products like Sony's PlayStation Eye.

Project Natal is going to work with all current, past, and future versions of the Xbox 360, according to the press event. While the wide-open excitement of the initiative was refreshing, the fact that Natal has no official name, price, or release date was disappointing. In fact, it was called a concept for the future.

As if the legitimacy of Microsoft's move had not been validated yet, on came Steven Spielberg to rave about this future direction for game technology, claiming that "people are too intimidated to pick up game controllers." This makes sense, but it's already been proven with the Nintendo Wii and the iPhone. Microsoft is a latecomer to this party, but Spielberg did announce that he's currently working on games for this platform, although no more details were given.

Demoed at the press event were a Breakout-like game called Ricochet, which involved hitting a ball across a room to destroy bricks, and a paint program called Paint Party. Paint Party's gestural vocabulary seemed to be stuck in Jackson Pollack-land, but the simple splash-to-paint commands seemed to be relatively responsive.

Accuracy, however, remains a big question mark. ... Read more

(Credit: EA)

Boom Blox is the first game to result in the collaboration between filmmaker Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts. When we first got a look at the title back in February, we were impressed with the game's accurate rendering of real-time physics and unique gameplay. Now that we've had a few days to explore the final retail version of the game, we're proud to say that we're officially hooked.

The game has you use your Wii remote in a variety of game modes that involve everything from careful blox removal (essentially virtual Jenga), to smashing blox with a variety of different projectiles. Each mode has an "adventure" campaign you can play through, each level more challenging than the last. The game presents a list of goals in which you are awarded gold, silver, or bronze depending on your efficiency. All the levels vary and are quite satisfying and addictive--you'll even find yourself retrying them to reach a gold medal. There are close to 400 puzzles, so forget about blowing through the game in a weekend.

Boom Blox is certainly a technical achievement as its physics, while somewhat floaty, are dead on. Much effort has gone into the realism-factor, guaranteeing you'll never see a level play out the same way twice. But perhaps what is most attractive about Boom Blox is ... Read more

'Boom Blox,' Electronic Arts' first game under its partnership with Steven Spielberg, launched Tuesday. It is a casual, level-based puzzle game.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

The box cover for 'Boom Blox.'

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Electronic Arts on Tuesday officially launched Boom Blox, the long-awaited first game under its partnership with Steven Spielberg. It is now available in North America, and EA plans to have it on shelves in Europe on May 8, in Asia on May 13, and in Japan on May 22.

The first details about the game, which is from EA's casual games unit, were released in February. Now, the game, which will be available only on Nintendo's Wii and on major carriers' mobile phones, is out and the world can finally see what happens when you put someone like Spielberg together with top-level game designers at a company like EA.

Boom Blox will task players with navigating nearly 400 levels of "strategic destruction."

In addition, players will be able to use the game's editor to craft their own levels. The best part of this sounds like it will be the way the editor lets players take existing levels and elements from the game--props, characters, blocks, etc.--and incorporate them into all-new levels.

On Steven Spielberg's rumored social network, maybe you can discuss whether that ghost was really a ghost or just the creepy old caretaker from the abandoned amusement park.

(Credit: Hanna-Barbera)

Who wants to believe? TechCrunch reported Monday night that Steven Spielberg is developing a new social network where people can talk about their encounters with the paranormal and extraterrestrial.

Spielberg, creator of sci-fi classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T., Men in Black, and the War of the Worlds remake a few years ago, is reportedly himself a believer in paranormal phenomena. In creating a social network for fellow enthusiasts as well as people who claim to have encountered the otherworldly, Spielberg is tapping into a lifelong passion.

But its exact ties to tech and entertainment are unclear. "The project may have originally been associated with Yahoo but the project was killed off before launch," TechCrunch's Michael Arrington wrote. "But if our sources are right, the idea has lived on and a team in Los Angeles is working to launch it in the next few months."

Here's another theory: What if this is in conjunction with some kind of upcoming Spielberg project, a sort of uber-viral meta-campaign along the lines of the HBO Voyeur Project? (Whatever happened to that, anyway?)

(Credit: EA)

EA was showing off its slate of upcoming releases to NY-based press last night. In addition to a peek at Spore, we were treated to a one on one with the Steven Spielberg and EA collaboration known as Boom Blox.

The game is primarily a puzzle-based physics simulator in which you partake in a variety of "blox" maneuvering modes. We learned how to play the game in a stage where you throw a baseball at different pieces, relying on real-world physics to knock over and blow up blox while accomplishing goals. While most of our time was spent understanding the basic fundamentals of the game, we learned that the original concept spawned mostly from Spielberg.

His idea was centered on the fact that children love to use building blocks to construct large structures, only destroy them. Boom Blox is essentially this but without the mess. The game is definitely the most physics-intense experience we've seen on the Wii. It looks a lot more accurate and complex than games that have tried to tackle physics simulation before, such as Elebits. Boom Blox may have a cartoony style, but its effects are much more in the vein of technical achievements, such as Crysis.

In the different gameplay modes in Boom Blox, we were able to try out a Jenga-like mission in which we had to carefully remove a number of pieces from a large construction, making certain not to harm the little cow creatures balancing at the top. ... Read more

It's been a long time coming, but we finally have some actual details about the first game to emerge from the partnership between Steven Spielberg and Electronic Arts.

Known as Boom Blox, the game, which will be available in May only on the Wii, is from EA's casual games unit.

It will have more than 300 levels, "a cast of over thirty wacky characters" and seems to be built around letting players take on "Blox-laying chickens or...baseball-throwing monkeys" or cartoonlike grim reapers in tiki, medieval, frontier, or haunted themed settings.

'Boom Blox' is the first game to emerge from the collaboration between Electronic Arts and Steven Spielberg.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

EA has never said a lot about the Spielberg partnership beyond the fact that the director would be spending occasional time at the company's Los Angeles studio. It's also never been entirely clear exactly how involved Spielberg has been in the creation of the games, or how much involvement he'll have going forward. EA has said there would be at least three games under the terms of a deal first made public in 2005.

Last summer, Newsweek published a story describing the game that is now known as Boom Blox as blending "the creativity of the building-blocks game 'Jenga' with the charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon."

Based on what EA said Wednesday, that seems about right.

Newsweek also wrote at the time that the second game in the EA/Spielberg partnership was code-named "LMNO" and would be released for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles. The magazine said at the time the game would be "North by Northwest meets E.T.--if E.T. were female, grown up and, um, hot."

Nothing is yet known about the third game planned for the partnership.

One thing that hasn't been discussed is how EA will market these games. For instance, will their retail boxes mention Spielberg directly, and if so, how prominently?

It does seem like putting the first game out for the Wii is a good idea, what with the runaway success of that console and EA's need for big new hits.

Another smart move is switching consoles for the second game, because Spielberg brings unparalleled name recognition and even if Boom Blox flops, the audience for the second game will likely be quite different and unaffected by what happens with the first.

But if Boom Blox is a hit, it can only help everyone involved.

Still, because little is known about how much influence Spielberg has had on these games, it's very hard to know if he's a full partner in the initiative or if he's just lending his name to the titles. It is hard to imagine the latter, since Spielberg probably isn't in dire need of the money he's likely to get out of the deal. More likely, he felt like he had some story-telling expertise to lend EA and a love of video games, a medium that he hasn't dabbled much in before.

Update: It does occur to me, however, that everyone involved in the Spielberg/EA project, let alone anyone who cares about Spielberg's legacy, would probably like to see Boom Blox and its successors do a whole lot better than one video game project he was--at least tangentially--involved in previously.

For those that don't remember, the 1982 Atari 2600 game, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, based, obviously on Spielberg's smash-hit film of the same name, didn't quite do as well as the movie.

In fact, according to Wikipedia, the game was a flop of universal proportions, known by many as one of the biggest "commercial failures in video game history."

Of course, this was a very different situation. For one, the E.T. game was based on an existing franchise. For two, it seems as though Spielberg wasn't hands-on with the 1982 game in the way he is with the EA titles.

Still, it's something to think about. And let's hope history doesn't repeat itself.

Some of the very first details have emerged about Steven Spielberg's video game partnership with Electronic Arts.

According to Newsweek, the famed film director is working on a game code-named PQRS--note the sequential letters--that "neatly blends the creativity of the building-blocks game Jenga with the charm of a Saturday-morning cartoon."

Newsweek said the game, which will run on Nintendo's hit Wii console, has a physics engine designed to allow players to move blocks around with the Wii controller.

The second game, code-named LMNO--also sequential letters, hmmm--is for Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 and the magazine pegged it as "North by Northwest meets E.T.--if E.T. were female, grown up and, um, hot."

The game is a secret agent game, and Spielberg told Newsweek, "The challenge is, can the game have an emotional impact on players while they are actively manipulating the world?"

There's also a third game in the works, but nothing is yet known about that one.

All three games are being created in EA's Los Angeles studio, and the titles could go a long way towards addressing a criticism that has been leveled at the company by some that it focuses too much on putting out franchise games and not enough on original titles. Whether that is fair is another question, but if the Spielberg games are a hit, it might be some time before anyone mentions that again.