Monthly Archives: January 2008

You could probably do this. If you can speak English, German or French, can go to live in Germany and play lots of games, then maybe ths is the job for you. Codemasters is looking for GMs to work in its support site in Dusseldorf. Here’s the ad:

We’re looking for more GMs!

Do you want an exciting career working in online gaming? If you have bags of gaming experience with strong customer service skills then this could be the job for you! We’re expanding our GM team and are looking for good people to join our team.

We need people who:

- Have excellent customer service skills
- Have strong online gaming experience
- Are fluent in English, German or French (preferably a native speaker)
- Have the desire to join a fast-paced, exciting and highly dynamic team

Codemasters Online is currently recruiting English, French or German speaking Game Masters to work at our Germany-based support site in Dusseldorf.

Key responsibilities:

- Provide high quality online support for one or more of our leading MMO titles
- Resolve customer enquiries via the in-game ticket system or external support tools
- Respond to customer requests in a professional, polite and timely manner
- Moderate the community forums and provide assistance to players where necessary

If this sounds like the kind of thing you’d like to do then in the first instance please send us your CV along with a covering letter to our GM recruitment inbox at gmrecruitment@codemasters.com

We look forward to hearing from you!

See the full thing in English, German and French here.

See here. Atlus is to release Japanese all-girl fighter Arcana Heart for PS2 on April 8. The game looks the right side of awesome, and features 11 lady fighting types “battling to prevent a power-hungry woman from destroying the world”. Aren’t we all. There’s no detail on a European launch.

In EA’s third quarter financial statement, just released, the company said it expected Battlefield: Bad Company and Mercenaries 2: World in Flames to ship in fiscal 2009. EA’s financial year ends on March 31, meaning the games could hit anywhere between now at the end of March 2009.

The statement was the only forward-looking, specifically game-related point in the report aside from CEO John Riccitiello saying he was “looking forward” to the release of Army of Two and FIFA Street 3. No specific release dates were given.

No mention was made of Will Wright’s Spore, which has now almost certainly slipped into the back half of the year.

EA has issued financials for its third quarter – ending December 31 – showing a $33 million loss despite record revenues of $1.502 billion, up 17 percent on the same period last year. The loss related to 10 cents per share, compared to a 50 cents per share profit for the company’s third quarter in the previous year. Deferred revenue and restructuring charges were blamed for the loss.

Before charges, profits for the quarter were up 44 percent over the same period in fiscal 2007. Before exceptions, investors would have enjoyed 90 cents per share profit.

“This was a record revenue quarter for EA and the single biggest revenue quarter for any third party publisher in our industry,” said CEO John Riccitiello. “While we are disappointed that two titles slipped out of the March quarter, Burnout Paradise is off to a terrific start and we are looking forward to the upcoming launches of Army of Two and FIFA Street 3.”

UEFA Euro 2008, the tournament version of EA’s monster soccer franchise FIFA, will ship in the US on May 20 and in Europe on April 11. The real-life UEFA Cup begins in June in Austria and Switzerland.

The game will feature 50 teams and a new mode, apparently, called Captain Your Country. According to the announcement today, this allows “gamers to put themselves on the pitch, earn the captaincy of their team and truly inspire their country to glory”. No solid details on how this works were given.

Online play (Battle of the Nations mode) is also included.

This lot have painstakingly worked out how much you save if you buy all Virtual Console games through your Wii as opposed to buying the real things second hand on eBay. Everyone needs a hobby. Turns out if you buy everything from VC – all 196 games in the US – it’ll cost you $1,325, as opposed to the eBay price of $2,516.59: a saving of almost $1,200.

Which, as the article notes, is great, but you can’t resell VC games. And you can’t hold them in your hands. But to be honest, you’ve just saved $1,200, so who cares?

Those Americans given to voting are going to have to pick candidates for presidential elections very soon, and should obviously eschew fly-by-night issues like defence and welfare and concentrate on the heart of the matter when picking the right people to rule the world: where do they stand on gaming?

Luckily, this guide from Yahoo! should put you on the right path. We’d just vote for Clinton, to be honest, because she always looks as though she’s on ecstacy in photographs. As good a reason as any.

According to Media Create figures for January 21-26, Wii Fit is still flying in Japan, leading the all format chart and having now hit sales of 1,283,000. Wii Fit sold 90,000 for the charted period. Second place goes to the newly launched Pro Evo PSP title, World Soccer Winning Eleven: Ubiquitous Evolution, with sales of 77,000. Bring up the rear is some random PS2 thing called Lucky Star: Misasagi Sakura Gakuen Sakura Fuji Festival with sales of 72,000. Here’s the chart.

A slight departure from Saw and 2010, the rumoured Clash of the Titans game, but a movie tie-in from Brash nonetheless. The publisher said today it was making the game for the animated Space Chimps movie from Twentieth Century Fox, to release alongside the film on July 18.

“The Space Chimps movie introduces a loveable cast of characters that fans will be quite fond of,” explained Mitch Davis, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Brash Entertainment. “We’ve collaborated with Vanguard to create a game that incorporates the characters and world of the movie while building a unique storyline with new characters, giving fans the opportunity to be able live in the ‘Space Chimps’ world a little longer.”

Only Wii, Xbox 360, DS and PS2 SKUs apply. no Space Chimps for PS3, then.

So says this, taken from a Gamasutra interview.

“Then we have a second project that’s in development,” said Propaganda boss Josh Holmes. “We haven’t made any announcements about it, but I can say that it’s an action RPG.”

Turok’s out next week in both the US and Europe, published by Touchstone.

GamerTV boss Richard Wilcox is “delighted” that the Bravo show has acheived ratings of 220,000 in a single weekend and 1.25 million in December.

“We’re delighted,” he said. See. Told you he was. “When you combine these figures with our growing online audience it’s pretty clear we’ve become one of the most significant routes through to gamers in the UK.”

GamerTV is the only dedicated games show on British television, incredibly enough, which makes complete sense considering the UK market’s worth £1.72 billion per year. Really keeping up with the “kids” there, BBC, ITV, Channel 4…

In case you can’t work out how to make something as drop-dead simple as Skype work, this man from PSP marketing in the US is here to walk you through the entire process of attaching an earpiece to the PSP headphones, putting them into the console and making a call. It all looks very nice. Just make sure you’re in a “wireless environment” when you try it.

According to this, American gamers will be able to buy standalone wireless guitars for Guitar Hero III in March. Xbox 360 and PS3 versions will be $69, with the Wii “instrument” cost $10 less, for some reason, at $59. No idea if we’re getting these in Europe, but those addicted enough to pretending to be able to play the guitar can get import-happy, nonetheless.

Text here, shots here. Looks as though IGN got a good look at Lara’s latest, which has been tipped by UK journos as one of the best games on current gen hardware. Underworld, according to the game’s creative director, Eric Lindstrom, is about “the core elements of Tomb Raider” and translating “them into next-generation gameplay.”

This is going to be very cool. One to watch. Be sure to take a look at that preview.

A scientist asked to come up with a “dangerous idea” has hypothesised that the reason alien species haven’t managed to reach earth is because they’re all doing what we’re doing: wasting our lives achieving nothing.

“Basically, I think the aliens don’t blow themselves up,” said Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, in the annual The Best American Nonrequired Reading book. “They just get addicted to computer games. They forget to send radio signals or colonize space because they’re too busy with runaway consumerism and virtual-reality narcissism. They don’t need Sentinels to enslave them in a Matrix; they do it themselves, just as we are doing today.”

Read it all here. It’s awesome.

“When they finally achieve Contact, it will not be a meeting of novel-readers and game-players. It will be a meeting of dead-serious super-parents who congratulate each other on surviving not just the Bomb, but the Xbox. They will toast each other not in a soft-porn Holodeck, but in a sacred nursery.”

Spot of WoW, anyone?

Missed this the first time round. That Eurogamer chat with Valve shows that the recently released maps for the PC version of Team Fortress 2 will also be made available for the console versions, as well as confirming there’s more Portal on the way.

Proof. You’ve always wondered, right? Xbox 360′s best, Wii’s second best, PS3′s third best, or “worst”. Now we can sleep at night.

Games Critics Award has announced its first annual Game of the Year Award. “Considering games across all platforms, released commercially in North America between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2007, the judges have voted to decide on the best of the best for the year.”

We thought the best of the best went to Top Gun. Apparently they go to Rapture.

1 BioShock
2 The Orange Box
3 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
4 Rock Band
5 Super Mario Galaxy
6 Halo 3
7 Mass Effect
8 God of War II
9 Assassin’s Creed
10 Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

A list of judges can be found here. You can’t say fairer than that, really.

1C Company’s announced the third game in the “Of War” trilogy, Men of War, the first two titles being Soldiers: Heroes of World War II and Faces of War. It’s set in WWII – again – but this time features:

• Three evolving storylines in the Soviet, Allied and German armies, comprising 19 missions in total.
• More than 50 new units to use in multiplayer mode.
• Realistic models of armament and military equipment recreated in accordance with design drawings and historical documents.
• System of ratings and statistics for every participant in multiplayer mode.
• New nation in multiplayer mode – Japan.
• Revised controls interface – customizable and easier to use .
• New multiplayer maps and 2 new game modes Highly detailed WWII environments and characters faithfully recreated with a cutting-edge graphics engine.

More here. It’ll be out for PC this summer.

A stealthy third-person action game for PC and Xbox 360 in 2009. From Black Lion. Shots and details here.

“Shadow Harvest is a highly immersive 3rd-person tactical action game set in the year 2025 on various current and future points of conflict around the globe. The game is in development for PC and XBOX 360. Featuring dual character control, amazingly realistic graphics and a refreshingly different storyline, Shadow Harvest is a completely new interpretation of the tactical-action genre.”