Monthly Archives: May 2009

If this image of the latest issue of Edge is to be believed, Eidos Montreal is to announce its second game on May 11.

Yes, it’s Thief. Honestly, it is. Not long to wait now, then.

id’s Marty Stratton’s detailed a sizeable content update for free-to-play shooter Quake Live, saying new maps and modes are on the way this month.

You’re going to get:

• A Practice section
• New maps
• Use of private matches and servers
• Tweaked skill-matching

And plenty more. Get it all through the link. Thanks, BigDownload.

Some new footage of Pandemic’s The Saboteur’s popped up on GTTV, showing off the Will to Fight system of the landscape changing from black and white to colour as you progress through the game.

The WWII title’s set in Paris, with the streets dropping monotone as you fight back against the Nazi occupation.

The video’s interspersed with an interview with dev lead Tom French. Take a look. There’s no date on it as yet.

Just so you all know, today is a public holiday in the UK, so don’t expect oodles of updates from the British sites until tomorrow.

We’ll be here all day, obviously. Why? Because we love you. Just joking. But seriously, we do.

Wolvering dev lead Dan Vondrak has told UGO that he’s keen on making a Deadpool game. This is probably pretty cool.

“That’s very easy, that’d be Deadpool,” he said when asked which comic character he’d like to tackle next.

“We’re huge fans of Deadpool. When we made X-Men 2, we made sure to put Deadpool in there and give him plenty of little Easter eggs and conversations.

“We love the character. His smartass attitude. So that’d be the guy we’d probably go after.”

Neat. Thanks, Joystiq.

Gameshell’s got a ton of new Fat Princess shots, showing the PSN team-play thing in fun form.

Each team, up to 16 players strong, must rescue its princess from an opposing dungeon. Cakes are involved.

More detail through the link. No date yet.

Welcome once again to your weekly MMO news round-up.

Loads going as usual what with PlayXpert releasing a new Widget for online games, Conan players getting to go to level 50, and Shadowbane getting a small reprieve from the death ax.

Wanna know the rest? Of course you do, and it’s all after the break.
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Michael Pachter has said that the next generation of consoles will not launch until 2013, if at all.

In a recent industry newsletter he sent to our in-boxes, Pachter reiterated what he told us at GDC that this current console generation is that last, and if not – it’s going to be a while.

“We do not expect a “new” console in 2010 (other than the long-rumored high definition Wii, which is likely to upgrade the Wii to current console technology),” he wrote. “We do not expect the ‘next’ generation to begin before 2013, if at all.

“We remain convinced that the publishers will resist the introduction of any video game hardware technology that requires a refresh of software, as the publishers have as yet to capitalize on the immense investments made in being competitive in the current cycle.

“We therefore think it is likely that the ‘next’ generation will begin after 2013, meaning that software sales are likely to grow by a compounded annual rate of 6–10 percent for another five years.

“Because R&D costs are likely to flatten out with the benefits of a learning curve, we expect earnings leverage as the publishers are able to exploit R&D investments. In brief, we think that investors have it wrong so far this cycle, and think that investment in video game publishers will bear fruit for many years.”

Place your bets now.

GameStop controls 21 percent of the US games market on new gaming titles and console sales.

Gamasutra compiled this information from NPD reports containing game and console sales figures, and it found that 60 percent of GameStop revenue came from the aforementioned sales.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone – GameStop has 1.4 stores for every 100,000 people in the United States.

Wrap your head around that.

More though the link, along with loads of charts.

Final Fantasy IV: The After Years might be hitting WiiWare June 1, according to GoNinendo sources with the latest issue of Nintendo Power.

We don’t know because we don’t have a subcription.

If you have been looking forward to the game, now’s the time to get excited about it.

It’s apparently based on Japanese mobile phone title, Final Fantasy IV: The After.

Hit the link for more.

Oh you durty, durty cheaters! You can cheat no more now that the patch for Call of Duty 4 has gone live on Xbox 360.

Infinity Ward comms boss Rob Bowling tweeted the news earlier saying that the game is “once again mod & hacks free.”

You were warned it was going to happen earlier in the week, now it’s time to pay the piper.

Durty cheaters.

Atomic Games’ Peter Tamte told attendees during his keynote at the Triangle Game Conference that he hopes Six Days in Fallujah will “change expectations of what a video game can be” and that this sort of documentary style gaming is an immersive story-telling tool.

“Every form of media has grown by producing content about current events, content that’s powerful because it’s relevant. Movies, music and TV have helped people make sense of the complex issues of our times.

“Are we really just high-tech toymakers, or are we media companies capable of producing content that is as relevant as movies, music and television?” he asked the audience.

“This is what brought us close to many of the Marines who fought in Fallujah. After they got back from Fallujah, these Marines asked us to tell their story. They asked us to tell their story through the most relevant medium of the day — a medium they use the most — and that is the video game.

“‘Six Days in Fallujah’ is not about whether the U.S. and its allies should have invaded Iraq. It’s an opportunity for the world to experience the true stories of the people who fought in one of the world’s largest urban battles of the past half-century.”

We went on to say that the documentary film-style of the game gives you a different perspective than any other form of gaming, and he hopes Six Days in Fallujah gets the opportunity to prove it.

“It is the dilemmas you face, and the choices you make, that give you insight into the events that are shaping our world in a way that no passive form of media can,We hope that ‘Six Days in Fallujah’ will have the opportunity to change expectations of what a video game can be.”

Via GamePolitics and Raleigh News Observer)

Mass Effect fans should be happy to know that Commander Shepard may not be dead after all. Joy!

Casey Hudson, Mass Effect 2′s executive producer, hinted around in the latest BioWare developer blog that if Shepard is dead, it will mess things up a bit.

“I’ve heard some rumors that Commander Shepard is dead. Better not be,” he wrote.”We had a lot of big plans made, so if someone’s gone and killed Shepard then things are going to take an unexpected turn.”

Either he’s dead and we are being teased, or he is very much alive and just hiding somewhere.

Hopefully E3 will shed more light on things.

Thanks, Joystiq.

A group of protesters gathered together in Philadelphia this morning and marched down to the Franklin Mills Mall to a US Army Recruitment Center.

The purpose was to show its disdain for the Army’s use of videogames as a recruitment tool.

This particular recruitment branch uses PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles loaded with FPS titles to capture the attention of gaming enthusiasts there to buy a pair of dockers.

GamePolitics was on hand Tweeting the action, and it looks as though some got arrested. Go figure.

Check it out on Twitter.

Eric Nofsinger has stated that High Voltage will be showing crowds at E3 this year two new Wii exclusives.

Both, he said, are first-person shooters capable of hosting five dozen onscreen foes at minimum.

Speaking with Nintendo Master, Nofsinger told the French site that the firm wants to “do some things that are very, very rare, even on the 360 or PS3.”

“Our goal with The Conduit was to make a game that was the most graphically impressive for the Wii,” he said. Our goal with these upcoming games is to do some things that are very, very rare, even on the 360 or PS3. Some of the things we’re doing with sheer number of enemies onscreen and things like that are very impressive.

“We’ve got a demo that we’ll be showing, where the average number of enemies on the screen at a given time is 65. And it goes up. There’s areas where you go onto a vista and there’s an incredible number of enemies.”

Come on E3, hurry up already.

Via Cubed.

The list of attendees a this year’s E3 is continuing to grow. If you do not see your favorite on the list, just keep checking back because will we keep you up to date on all the comings and goings.

Without further ado, here is the list so far:

• 2K Sports
  The Bigs 2 (X360)

• Disney Interactive Studios
  Hannah Montana: Rock Out the Show (PSP)
  Spectrobes: Origins (Wii)
  Split/Second (PS3, X360)
  Toy Story Mania (Wii)
  Wizards of Waverly Place (DS)

• Electronic Arts
  Army of Two: The 40th Day (PS3, PSP, X360)
  Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PC, PS3, X360)
  Brütal Legend (PS3, X360)
  Madden NFL 10 (PS3, PSP, Wii, X360)
  Mass Effect 2 (PC, X360)
  NCAA Football 10 (PS3, PSP, Wii, X360)
  Need for Speed Nitro (Wii)
  Need for Speed Shift (PC, PS3, X360)
  Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (PS3, PSP, Wii, X360)

• Ignition Entertainment
  Muramasa: The Demon Blade (Wii)
  Nostalgia (DS)
  The King of Fighters XII (PS3, X360)

• KOEI
  Monster Racers (DS)
  Warriors Orochi 2 (PSP)

• Namco Bandai
  Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny (PSP)

• Perfect World Entertainment
  Ether Saga Online (PC)
  Perfect World (PC)

• SEGA
  Alpha Protocol (PC, PS3, X360)
  Bayonetta (PS3, X360)
  Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games (DS, Wii)
  Planet 51 (DS, PS3, Wii, X360)
  The Conduit (Wii)
  Vancouver 2010: The Official Videogame of the Winter Olympic Games (PC, PS3, X360)

• Sony Computer Entertainment
  Heavy Rain (PS3)
  MotorStorm: Arctic Edge (PS2, PSP)
  SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3 (PSP)
  Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3)
  White Knight Chronicles (PS3)

• THQ
  Darksiders: Wrath of War (PS3, X360)
  Red Faction: Guerrilla (PC, PS3, X360)

The PS3 has outsold Wii for the second month in a row in Japan.

Back in March, Sony beat out Nintendo for the first time in 16 months, and in April, numbers for the console soared to 108,360 units compared to 67,1176 Wiis.

The Xbox 360, by comparison, moved 27,381 units.

Sony attributes the strong sales to the Final Fantasy XIII demo that was released with Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete.

Rumor has it that the next Call of Duty game will take place in Cuba and Vietnam.

According to a source close to That VideoGame Blog, Activision has been looking at licensing tunes released during the Vietnam era (1959-1975), as well as African, Cuban, and Russian music.

Call of Duty: World at War senior producer Noah Heller is supposedly on board, which if it proves to be true, it’s a Treyarch game.

Activison’s response to these rumors was the usual: “Activision doesn’t comment on rumor and speculation.”

Thanks, D’toid.

Red Steel 2 details have surfaced, and there’s loads more to it than just making use of of Wii MotionPlus.

For starters, multiplayer is not included in the game. Ubisoft said that this has more to do with the developer’s focus on the single-player and hacking each other to death with swords. It does, however, think that mutliplayer through DLC would be a great idea.

“We would love to create a multiplayer engine, but not right now”, it said. “It’s single player because we want to really focus on the core mechanic and as much as we all want to kill each other with swords, it’s not going to happen this time.

“[Multiplayer] would be cool. The world has changed, and we can do that sort of thing. I certainly think that would be cool. I’d buy it. But we need to be careful bringing out something that people think should be in the main game.”

GoNintendo jotted down the other features included in the game into a nice list for you.

It’s after the break.

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AQ has released a video for Feel, director Takashi Shimiz’s first foray into videogames, and to say it’s a bit creepy is an understatement.

Looks as though your trusty flashlight will be your only companion through a decrepit building full of ghostly apparitions and doors with bloody hand prints.

Still no exact details on the Wii game, but we do know it is based on The Grudge.

Video’s below.
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