Monthly Archives: April 2009

THQ has announced that the European PS3 and Xbox 360 release date for Red Faction: Guerrilla been moved up a week to June 5.

Good news then.

Game’s still hitting North America on June 2.

Within the first four days of launch, Aion pulled in one million players who happily paid for at least one hour of gameplay, reports GI.biz.

Shanda Interactive Entertainment began charging users an hourly rate for the MMORPG’s “Yao Sai Pan Long” scenario, but despite the success, Deutsche Bank has told investors to hold off on purchasing stock in Shanda. This was due to player concerns over the cost, high hardware requirements and the current lack of in-game content.

“We are very pleased with our users’ overwhelming response to and the popularity of Aion during this short period,” said Shanda CEO Diana Li. “We believe [this] further validates the success of our multi-channel strategy to source content for our games portfolio.”

Shanda secured the rights to distribute Aion in China, after the company bought a 30 percent stake in NCsoft back in 2007.

Aion: The Tower of Eternity is slated for a autumn release in Europe and North America.

According to the latest Famitsu, Bethesda has taken over as publisher for A2M shootfest WET.

Originally to be published by Sierra, WET was dropped during the Activision Vivendi merger.

No word on how close to finish the shooter is, or when in October we can expect it.

We’ve put a call in to Bethesda, so hopefully we will have more information for you soon.

Via Siliconera.

Atari said in London today that Cryptic MMO Champions Online is to release in mid-July this year.

That’s the date for the PC version – the 360 SKU’s MIA, from the look of it – and it’s going to be a simultaneous US and Europe ship.

Thanks, DarkZero.

In an essay on why now’s an exciting time to be involved in the games industry, VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi’s stuck his leg in the sand on Cloud gaming – he reckons it’s pretty much a done deal.

“OnLive doesn’t have to kill the console makers to succeed,” said the journo.

“It will become a wildly successful company if it can simply establish video games on demand as a viable channel. And even if OnLive itself doesn’t make it, it is almost inevitable that game cloud computing will thrive.”

OnLive “expects to launch a games on demand service in the fall that is very much like Xbox Live,” Takahashi added.

“You will be able to play high-end games on low-end computers. That’s unbelievable. Many people have reacted to this by saying it is impossible. But it is no more impossible than 2D-Boy creating The World of Goo and getting a bestseller out of it.”

OnLive was announced at GDC this year to general disbelief that the service can work.

You want to drive around South Central in a DB9. Who doesn’t? Luckily for all people, then, Rockstar’s released the second Midnight Club LA DLC pack featuring the Aston, a Ducati 1098, the Lancer Evolution X and some other stuff.

There’s a trailer to prove it. Hit the link. Live the dream. It’s out now for 240 MS points, or $2.99 for the PS3 massive.

More »

Sega put out a new Let’s Tap! video today, featuring ostensibly the happiest people in the entire world.

The movie features tapping and smiling, and not necessarily in that order.

Hit the link to feel the joy. It’s out for Wii in June.

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Free-to-play NCsoft MMO Guild Wars has passed the 6 million sales mark.

The title released on April 28. 2005.

“We are humbled by how gamers have responded to Guild Wars over the past four years, and we are proud that the game and its community have helped to continually shape, define, and expand the genre,” said ArenaNet studio head Mike O’Brien.

“Our subscription-free business model has proven to be a big hit with gamers, bringing an enormous and diverse online community to the game.”

Thanks, Kotaku.

The first movie and From’s PSP version of Armored Core’s up on Game Watch – hit this.

There’s some screens there too. Looks cool. Hopefully we’ll get some detail on a western release soon.

Prototype may have been delayed out of 2008, but there’s a silver lining: Alex punching enemies to death on the game’s sidewalks has now been polished to the level of “quadruple-awesome,” up from a mere “double-awesome” last year.

“I just checked with our animation team downstairs and after seeing the latest treatment for the Infected ‘sidewalk smasher’ move, I can now officially confirm to VG247 that Prototype is already ‘quadruple-awesome’,” said dev lead Tim Bennison.

“Wait till you see what happens when you consume someone using the ‘muscle-mass’ ability – it’s a guaranteed jaw-dropper.”

The open-world superhero game looks completely splendid at this point. It’s out on June 12.

Acti put out a new video this morning. Watch and see why we’re excited.

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Pandemic’s The Saboteur isn’t coming out any time soon. Just in case you thought it might be.

“There’s still definitely a lot of work to do,” dev boss Tom French told VG247 in London this week.

“We’re not even alpha yet. There’s little quirks and kinks, but we still have plenty of time to work that kind of crap out.”

This year? Recent mag articles had pegged it for a 2009 ship. Doesn’t sound like it.

“We haven’t said an exact date yet,” said French. “We are getting closer, and we are getting closer to locking down that date. We want to make sure we hit the right window. We don’t want to get lost, and hopefully we’ll find the right window and the right place in time to get this game out.

“It’s a pretty ambitious project and there’s a lot of content there to explore and we’re really proud of it. We just want to make it come out at the right time and give it the level of polish we want to deliver it at too.”

French admitted that Pandemic’s April 2007 announcement of the game – a sprawling open world action story set in wartime Paris – was too early considering what had been accomplished at that point.

“We definitely started talking about it a bit too soon,” French said.

“We only had a small section of the world even built at that point. We had all these big ideas and aspirations, and it was time to prove it, really. We just went quiet.

“Then the EA acquisition happened, and that gave us a little bit more time to keep massaging and refining the game… All the core concepts are still there – the climbing, the fighting, the shooting, the sneaking mechanics, the racing, the story, the character – but it’s gotten so much better than it did back then. It was more like a tech demo at that point.”

French assured us, however, that the project was ramping up.

“The team has grown,” he said. “We inherit people from Mercenaries and other games, so we’ve definitely got a lot more people working on the project, helping refine all those little details that we’ve been talking about but nobody had time to touch.”

Get screens and more info from the game’s official site.

Gamespot’s upped some shots of some of the “evil” character creation elements in Cryptic MMO Champions Online. Feel the fury of Despicable Blue Bunny Woman through the link.

There’s a move of it, including some gameplay, after the break.

There’s still no solid date on the game as yet, but you’ll be playing it this year. God willing.

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Stephen Totilo’s told CrispyGamer that his move from MTV to Kotaku will put him in front of a new type of reader.

“What Kotaku allows me to do is reach another audience, a massive and passionate crowd of hardcore gamers and developers who, I think, already do respect the kind of reporting I and some of the Kotaku guys do, and will be happy to get even more of it,” he said.

“It’s exciting for me to get more consistently in front of that audience, although, you know, they’ve already gotten a lot of me because my Kotaku pals loved to link to Multiplayer a lot.”

Totilo confirmed last week that he was to leave MTV to become Kotaku’s deputy managing editor.

There’s a full interview through there.

Fucking handbags. 7 Studios – read “Activision” – has counter-sued Genius over Scratch: The Ultimate DJ, claiming the developer has engaged in a “textbook case of unlawful and unsavory business practices.” It wants $1 million in damages.

Genius has already sued Acti and 7 Studios over Scratch, claiming they conspired to delay the game in to benefit DJ Hero’s release.

No so, says Activision. Not only was Genius forced to delay Scratch because it didn’t approval for the title from Microsoft and Sony, but it had only included 25 percent of the game’s tracks three months before it was supposed to be completed. Allegedly.

Get many hundreds of words on the matter from Variety.

The first gameplay video of the Wii, PSP and PS2 version of Madden NFL 10 lies after the break.

It’s all very cartoony, unlike the 360 and PS3 versions which focus on realism.

There’s nothing else to say. It’s American football. See for yourself.

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There’s a video after the break of someone from IGN playing the iPhone version of Silent Scope.

If you expected it to be any different from what it actually is, we’d say you were mentally deficient. But that’s just us.

Take a look.

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There’s a video from the PS Blog after the break of Noby Noby Boy’s multiplayer in action. It’s completely baffling. Don’t believe us?

Said Namco’s Keita Takahashi:

I’d like to share a little bit more about Multiplayer. In Single player, the game allows BOY to eat another BOY as well as people and animals, etc. In Multiplayer though, eating everything has some funny consequences. For example, if the head of a 1P BOY eats the rear of a 2P BOY, the two players end up with a combined BOY.

Head: Player 1
Rear: Player 2

This could be very confusing because one BOY is controlled by two players. Moreover, the fact that the game is compatible for up to four players could bring even more chaotic situations. Doesn’t that sound fun?

“Confusing”. That’s the word you probably want to latch on to. More through there. Hit the link for the video.

More »

According to the ESRB, Platinum’s Bayonetta features bouncing waps and nudity. How could anyone, anywhere, not buy it now?

Said the US ratings board:

During the course of the game, some female characters perform suggestive taunts and poses, including opening their legs or gyrating their hips. Some of the more provocative outfits are shed during battle, resulting in brief depictions of buttocks and breasts. The camera occasionally pans close-up on breasts as they are jiggling.

The mental actioner’s out this autumn for PS3 and 360.

Thanks, Kotaku.

Media Create hardware figures for the week ending April 19 have shown a huge surge in PS3 sales thanks to the release of the Final Fantasy XIII demo.

God help us all when the real thing launches later this year. Last week’s data here.

• PS3 – 62,527
• PSP – 40,065
• DSi – 38,287
• Wii – 13,221
• Xbox 360 – 8,652
• DS Lite – 6,438
• PS2 – 4,230

Last night’s MCV Awards saw a broad range of winners, including Fallout 3 for the Sales Triumph gong and Rockstar North for the UK Development Team award.

Here’s the lot:

Retail

• Star Store: Gamestation – Birmingham New Street
• Retail Innovation: HMV Gamerbase
• Store Manager: Mike Barnes & Pearl Robinson (GAME Oxford Street)
• Online Retailer: Play.com
• High Street Retailer: GAME

PR and marketing

• PR Team: Nintendo
• Games Campaign: Wii Fit
• New Games Brand: Little Big Planet
• Marketing Team: Nintendo
• Marketing Innovation: New Xbox Live Experience

People and industry

• UK Development Team: Rockstar North
• Distribution Team: Centresoft
• Sales Triumph: Fallout 3 – Bethesda
• Sales Team: Sega
• Games Publisher: Activision Blizzard

Special awards

• MCV Retail Advisory Board – Special Recognition: Andy Yates (Nintendo)
• Grand Prix: EA Sports