At Comic-Con, Cliff Bleszinski revealed that Gears of War 2 would feature linked Achievements, or special content that is unlocked only if you’ve earned a specific achievement in the original Gears of War. For example, if you’ve completed Act One in Gears Of War, you will unlock a playable Anthony Carmine in Gears of War 2. This is similar to what Peter Molyneux is doing with Fable on XBLA, i.e. enabling you to win currency that can then be spent within the world of Fable 2.

I suspect that this sort of thing will become increasingly popular with developers, some of whom will do it simply because it’s cool, and some of whom will do it because it can be useful for promotional purposes. (Use the earlier release of “Game A” to help drive interest in “Game B.” Or alternatively, take “Game A,” which isn’t expected to be a huge hit, and link it to “Game B,” which is expected to be a huge hit, in hopes that “Game A” benefits — a potentially more subtle or interesting version of the “bundle Game A with a demo or beta of Game B” strategy.)

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Kzero compares the traffic rankings of various virtual worlds.

Activision is launching an online music platform, based on the Guitar Hero franchise, that will compete with iTunes. Great idea. I’d love to know how they intend to handle portability between devices and between games.

For those of you looking for an extremely quick recap of the console makers’ E3 highlights:

• Nintendo announced Wii Motion Plus (a hardware add-on that makes Wiimotes more precise), Ubisoft’s Shaun White Snowboarding, which uses the Wii Fit board, the long-expected Wii Music, and the even longer-expected Star Wars lightsaber game. Nintendo also unveiled the WiiSpeak microphone, which allows a room full of players to converse with one another.
• Sony showed Resistance 2, unveiled a movie download service for the PS3 and PSP, and announced an original Ratchet & Clank game for PSN. There was also mention of a “massive action game” that would accommodate 256 players simultaneously. And of course, additional glimpses of Little Big Planet were a big hit.
• Microsoft unveiled an avatar system for LIVE, an updated dashboard, a party system (that enables friends to jump from game to game together), and integration with Netflix. On the retail games front: the next Viva Pinata, and a movie-making game that uses the Vision Camera called You’re in the Movies, and a karaoke game, Lips, which uses music on your Zune or iPod and ships with motion-sensitive microphones. Finally, the news that Final Fantasy is, well, finally coming to Xbox. On the LIVE games front: Primetime interactive game shows like 1 vs 100, the true sequel to Geo Wars, an all-new Galaga, and an original game in partnership with South Park.

Speaking of E3: You may agree or disagree with them, but the guys at Penny Arcade really know how to poke fun at the platforms. :-)

Gamasutra has posted an article sharing ten lessons for designing games that appeal to “older gamers” — which they also call “silver gamers.” Most of the lessons seem obvious, but it’s worth being reminded of them.

I would have liked it if some of the lessons were expanded upon. For example, lesson #1 emphasizes the importance of repeatable tutorials, but tutorials are simply one means of addressing a larger issue: that of teaching people what they can do in a game, and then helping them to remember those lessons later on. (Lesson #2 was “better printed manuals, reiterating the importance of this issue.) Given the tremendous length of some games, and the fact that busy adults may spread that gameplay over weeks or even months, it’s easy to forget the lessons taught in a tutorial.

This problem is exaggerated in games, such as Assassin’s Creed or MGS4, that pack large amounts of functionality into disparate objects and/or context-sensitive situations. (Though MGS4 does some things nicely, like automatically displaying all the ways to use an item when you select that item from the menu.) The request for meatier printed manuals, like repeatable tutorials, is ultimately a symptom of this larger problem.

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Raph calls out the McDonald’s Line Rider commercial, which I hadn’t seen yet. It’s a neat idea for an advertisement, and Raph draws on a few numbers to make the interesting point that Line Rider might be better known than the TV shows that host this advertisement.

Also from Raph, word that Habbo has reached 100m registered users worldwide. Quite a milestone.

Soren’s been on a bit of a “Spore creature watch” since the free creature creator was released. These particular creations will make any fan of Star Wars smile. (Take one guess as to the identity of the creatures before clicking the link. You probably won’t guess correctly.) Soren also points out that 500k creatures were created in two days. An auspicious beginning for a product that I really hope does tremendously well, commercially-speaking!

An account of the first meeting of CCP’s Council of Stellar Management, a democratically-elected group of players who meet with CCP twice a year to inform the future development of Eve Online.

An interview with Neil Young, who left EA to found an iPhone game publisher called Ngmoco. This quote caught my eye: “The iPhone, from a performance standpoint, is pretty close to a PSP, but unlike the PSP, it’s got a touchscreen, accelerometers, a camera, it’s location-aware, it’s got all of your media on it, it’s awake with you, it’s always on, and it’s always connected to the network. So if you think about the types of games and entertainment experiences that you can build on a platform like that, it’s got to get pretty exciting pretty quickly.”

The guys who made Duels.com (a mind-numbingly tedious — but very popular — web game) have taken their simple, asynchronous multiplayer design philosophy and applied it to baseball. The new game is called Baseball Boss. It’s in closed beta, so I haven’t had the chance to play, but something tells me Baseball Boss will be very successful. Accessible, short-session, asynch multiplayer gameplay and baseball (with its wide audience) seem like a good match to me.

Lots of people made fun of Activision for porting Guitar Hero to the DS. Looks like Activision got the last laugh: it sold 300k units, in North America only, in the first week.