Monthly Archives: April 2008

EA is to close down MMO wierdy thing EA-Land, after moving all The Sims Online inhabitants over to it in late February.

According to an official blog post, “It is with mixed emotions that today we are announcing the EA-Land experiment will soon draw to a close.

“Since 2002, EA-Land / TSO has attracted a very special group of players (of which you are one) and we certainly appreciate your participation in the EA-Land community. The lifetime of the game has drawn to an end, and now we will be focusing on new ideas and other innovative concepts in the games arena.

“We’d like to thank everyone who has taken part in this online community as a unique experience in the virtual world.”

Subscribers are going to get $15 off an EA game as compensation, apparently. Other stuff:

• On August 1, 2008, the game EA-Land / TSO will no longer be in service and EA will focus these resources on future games
• Your subscription billing will end now, so that at least 60 days of your EA-Land experience will be at no cost to you
• You may cancel your account and subscription at any time by contacting customer service or by managing your EA account online. To do this, you must log on to EA-Land / TSO to cancel within the game
• Starting immediately PayPal cash-in will not be available anymore

EA-Land, despite not really knowing what you are, we salute you.

Epic boss Mark rein reckons there are distant plans to create another single-player Unreal. Remember them?

“I’m sure that at some point in our future we will make another Unreal, single-player, story-driven game. I’m sure at some point there will be one,” he told Eurogamer. However, “There are no plans to do one today.”

Rein added, by way of explanation as to why another story-based Unreal had been so long coming: “We make good money on Unreal Tournament, and it’s a good game that we love to make, and it’s not a five-year-long production and it’s a great test-bed for lots of cool things that we want to do. We like making this type of game, and we have Gears of War as our kind of vanguard, single-player graphic showcase type of game.”

More through the link.

Speaking to GameDaily, EA Sports supremo Peter Moore has admitted that he knows how painful his decision to can Madden on PC this year will have been to some, but that the platform has simply “waned” for the publisher’s sports arm.

“I know I pissed off a lot of people, but I made a business decision, and the team’s made a business decision that we need to reset what we’re thinking about the PC right now, and maybe come back to market with a very different idea and approach next year, but we have do what’s right for our dev teams,” he said.

“It’s been very challenging for us over the past few years. People took some of what I said out of context – ‘serious business challenges on the PC.’ Well, the sentence actually [says] ‘for the sports category on the PC.’ And – rightly or wrongly – we’ve built sports games to take advantage of the plasma televisions, and the new hi-def experiences that people are having in their homes. We’ve also built them to be very social. So whether it’s playing online, or equally likely, two or four of you in the room together, the PC business has just… waned.”

The full interview’s here.

According to this Gamasutra report, THQ has laid off staff at two of its wholly-owned developers, Phoenix, Arizona-based Rainbow Studios and Kirkland, Washington-based Sandblast Games.

The Rainbow staffers were let go in mid-April, with the bad news hitting Sandblast this week, apparently.

From the piece:

The Rainbow layoffs occurred in mid-April, comprising about 30 team members from an unannounced game. According to sources, the production on the project will continue with the reduced staff – and the staff were a minority of the developer’s multi-team setup.

Similarly, an unspecified number of layoffs at Sandblast were conducted this week – though it appears that the company will continue work on its current project, Destroy All Humans! Path of the Furon for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

SurferGirl posted this morning that the majority of the redundancies are to come from Sandblast, which is likely to close. Rainbow will continue to operate on a skeleton crew.

Sega’s put out new screens for the amazingly titled, Beijing 2008 – the Official Video Game of the Olympic Games. It’s out on July 31 in Japan – no date for Europe yet apart from “summer” – and is being developed by Eurocom fr PC, 360 and PS3. Take a look.

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It’s after the link. Forgive our cynicism, but it looks exactly like Madden 08. Did Madden 08 have snow? We forget. Take a look, anyway.

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According to a job posting on SCEA’s site, the God of War team is looking for an “Online Gameplay Programmer”. Not unreasonably, this has led the internet to speculate that God of War III will have online play. Two and two, and all that.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Director Michael Bay clearly isn’t used to fighting on the internet. He’s posted on a forum in response to game-film director Uwe Boll’s offer of a boxing match, a message that might just provoke yet another video from the German by calling him a “fucking idiot”.

Can we stop talking about this guy! I never even heard his name till last week when he made threats and rants. The guy is a fucking idiot, making threats to me, Clooney, Eli Roth, says he has a doctorate – but uses the word “retard” in his vocabulary, come on. When you look at his videos, what is interesting are the backgrounds. I guess his low rent offices, with 15 year old 3/4 machines, archaic computers, this is just some dumb chump trying to get some fame when he has none, so he has to make Youtube lame quality anger rants. Guy just want attention because he can’t get any for the so called movies he makes. Nothing sadder when he had his screening in LA to an over half empty movie house.

He is a troubled soul – let’s just waste time on talking about him please.

M

Yeah. Michael, maybe don’t do that. We await Boll’s next “move” with bated breath.

Ubi’s put out two new Far Cry 2 screens on its blog. The shooter’s looking very swish, as you’d expect, but we can’t help thinking this is going to need some kind of meta-PC to get anything out of it. Take a look. It’s out this autumn.

According to this MTV piece, Koei will release Fatal Inertia EX as a PSN exclusive in late May.

It’s going to cost $30 in the US and will never be sold on disc.

“After the launch of the Xbox 360 version, we had a unique situation that allowed us to reflect on what could be done with the PlayStation 3 version,” said lead producer Mike Bond. “But having watched the growth of the PlayStation Network’s user base and the game’s multiplayer component, we felt the strength of this game would be in its online community.”

More through the link.

According to this Variety piece, an animated movie of Spyro the Dragon’s in the works. Blimey.

Velvet Octopus has a five-pic deal with producer Ash Shah, which includes two more 3-D projects, both CGI animated — “Outback,” the story of a white koala bear, and “The Legend of Spyro,” a spin-off from the best-selling video game.

No further details. And that’s that.

A chap posting on the US PlayStation blog has unearthed what looks to be the first proper details of the SCEE May 6 event in London.

As you can see here, it would appear that Secret Agent Clank, SingStar Vol.2, Resistance 2 and Crisis Core Final Fantasy VII will be shown.

The forum post reckons that SCEE President David Reeves and – the man himself – SCEI President Kaz Hirai will both be speaking.

We’ll know soon enough.

Xbox360Fanboy’s posted the first GTA IV launch photos from Canada, right here. The shots are from Mississauga, Ontario and show men in queues near large buildings, a running theme, seemingly. We’ve added them to the list.

There’s a post over on the G4 forums translating the Joypad scans of the new Prince of Persia game will linked to earlier. Taste:

• Corrupted world needs to be healed.
• Story is much more “1001 Nights”-like, more fantasy, less grounded in reality but instead more magical yet still credible, more poetic.
• Player must unleash light-wells to heal the corrupted world, which shoots light into the sky, reminiscent of SotC and Okami.
• The transformation of the world is in real-time, with plants growing back to life as the world heals back and as the player can still move, instead of a mere cutscene, sky changes back to its normal color, etc., to give a strong sense of control and success to the player.
• No more time rewind and such.

Looking very nice so far, and it’s out this year which is always a bonus. More soon.

Crytek president Cevat Yerli has revealed in an interview with PC Play that Crytek will no longer make PC-exclusive titles.

“We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis,” he said. “We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a [situation] that is not desirable.”

He added: “I believe that’s the core problem of PC gaming: piracy… PC gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive any more.”

Mike Bowden

Gamespot’s given GTA IV a 10, only the fifth in its history. According to this Digg story, the others were Chrono Cross, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Soul Calibur and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3.

They should have given it a six. That would have been hilarious.

EA’s put out a press release making first mention of BattleForge, a card-based, online-only RTS from Germany studio EA Phenomic.

“BattleForge is the next step in compelling RTS gameplay by taking the battles completely online,” said dev boss Richard Leinfellner. “With co-op play, challenging tournaments, Guilds, chat rooms and a robust marketplace for trading and buying your cards, BattleForge is the first RTS to add integral social and community components to an exciting fantasy RTS.”

Sounds fun. You’re going to hear a lot more about this in the next few weeks, so keep your ears open. Full press release after the link.

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Ubisoft’s confirmed that Ukrainian capital Kiev will be the home of its next studio, and that the publisher plans to employ 800 people in eastern Europe by the end of this year.

“We have had a very positive experience in Eastern Europe, as the quality of the upcoming Tom Clancy’s HAWX developed by our Bucharest studio can attest,” said Christine Burgess-Quémard, executive director, worldwide studios at Ubisoft. “Having seen the potential demonstrated by the Sofia studio’s first projects, it was only natural for us to pursue our expansion in this region and attract a new pool of highly-skilled talents to the group.”

Press release after the link.

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We don’t care what anyone says. CVG’s got a new trailer of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand is the stuff of legend. We’re so playing it. There’s some new screens over there as well. Fiddy’s so hard and manly, and his chopper-based minigun skills are hard to beat. The game releases for PS3 and 360 in the third quarter.

CVG’s got it. As ever, it shows Bourne knocking the shit out of everything in his way, and that’s fine. It’s out on June 27 for both 360 and PS3.