Monthly Archives: June 2009

Realtime Worlds’ Dave Jones is a happy man. MMO APB, five years in the making, is finally coming to market, and he’s confident it’s going to be a winner.

“We’re very, very happy with it,” Jones told GI ahead of his GamesHorizon keynote.

“We’re looking at a launch date of early 2010 – we’ve got the partnership with EA Partners cemented, because we knew we’d need to start building presence at retail, marketing-wise. And we’ve signed a deal with a company on the hosting side – so everything’s going really well.”

Jones said the firm’s confident of a hit.

“We’re playing the game every day now, hosted internally – obviously it’s a company first, we’ve never done anything like this before, but overall I think everybody’s pretty confident that we’ll have a successful launch,” he said.

GameInfoWire’s run nearly 40 new screens of Champions Online, which is looking pretty much awesome, assuming you like MMOs and superheroes.

The PC version’s out in September, and the 360 SKU, barring some kind of horror, should release this year.

Microsoft’s confirmed that Xbox Live is now back up following a day-log period of maintenance.

Looks pretty much the same as it did yesterday, but it’s probably more awesomer behind the scenes.

Go teabag a Spartan, or something.

PAIN will release on Blu-ray for PS3 “on Wednesday 24 June in Europe, 25 June in Australia and New Zealand, and the UK and Ireland on Friday 26 June for €24.99/£19.99.”

We know, because it says so on the EU PS Blog.

That’s it. Amazing. Buy it. For fun, and shit.

Gamespot’s got some apparently new shots of Diablo III. Waiting for this is turning out to be a genuinely unpleasant process.

No date. No idea of a date. Spectacularly slow and steady drip-feeding of assets. It’s like an expert wank.

God willing, there’ll be more from Blizzcon at the end of August.

After the break. The DS RPG’s long-awaited Japanese version releases in Japan next month, an event likely to close all school and grind the country’s economy to a halt.

Little men on little screens for the win. No date for a western ship yet.

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Marvelous is to release a PS3-only Grasshopper game, according to this Siliconera report, and it’s against its better judgement, from the sound of it.

“If we do that [game] we might go bankrupt,” Yasuhiro Wada, Marvelous president joked.

“We are making it, but if we make everything then it’s a little too risky.”

Has to be awesome, innit. No details on what it actually is. Hit the link for more.

Ghostbusters writer and general superstar Harold Ramis has told explained to GamesRadar why writing funny games is so difficult. Basically, it’s a stupid amount of work.

“To make a game so funny with so many comic alternatives, that would be like writing three hit movies,” he said.

“The scripts are impossibly long. That would be a considerable investment. And I was thinking if you wrote that much comedy, chances are you would put it in a feature film.”

It’s repetition in comic films that keeps people coming back, said Ramis, but the same process doesn’t necessarily translate to games.

“It seems like the attraction of playing any videogame is that it gives you control over a world that you have no other access to,” he added. “Once you’ve mastered a game, you kind of lose interest.”

Full interview through there. Via GoNintendo and Kotaku.

Like Verizon, AT&T has plans to offer games via a digital download service.

The company’s executive director of gaming, Glenn Broderick, has said that with cloud computing expected to “take off in the next 5-10 years”, AT&T wants to offer the same sort of streaming game service that OnLive is planning.

“The way we look at it is we have between everything almost 100 million customers, and we are evenly distributed demographically, so there will be lots of people who just want to play Bejeweled but there will be others who want to download Call of Duty,”  he told IndustryGamers. “We need to accommodate them all.

“The customization work we’re doing combined with our customer relationships will enable us to put together a service that is relevant to the customer, so that if I’m a mom of two who plays Bejeweled, when I go to the [portal] I’m not going to see an ad for the next Call of Duty or something.

“We’re putting a ton of money into back-end systems for both mobile and the broadband site… We’re making serious investments in the games space because it’s now seen as a huge strategic initiative for AT&T. And before it just wasn’t; it wasn’t on the executive agenda.”

When asked how much the company plans to spend on the service, Broderick said that it was “more than a million and less than a billion.”

Fair enough.

Thanks, BigDownload.

Steam has put more Bethesda games up on the site and at 20 percent off.

The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GoY Edition with Knights of the Nine and the Shivering Isles expansions, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind GoY Edition with the Bloodmoon and Tribunal expansions, and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.

Prices range from $11.19 – $19.99.

Rogue Warrior will land on the service in September, with a price point to be decided.

The information that these titles would be released leaked out on Friday, but apparently it wasn’t too much of a blunder.

Midway Newcastle may be on the verge of closing it’s doors, but that has not stopped the team from working on its open-world detective drama, Necessary Force.

Studio head Craig Duncan had a chat with Develop regarding the title, which after three months of work is playable, and says the team is not giving up just yet.

“The idea of a detective who sets his own rules is the sort of story that’s been around in movies for a while, but we don’t think anyone’s managed to capture the essence of those choices and consequences in games,” said Duncan. “That unprecedented level of open world influence and troubled morality is something we’re really keen to explore.

“It’s really important that people know that this is a team that wants to stick together – sometimes when you look at buying a studio you can worry that the real talent, the people, will just flee the ship, leaving you with some IP, kit and an empty building; the pieces of the puzzle that aren’t really worth anything,” he added.

“But everyone here as worked together for at least two years, with the original core team still together after about ten years. We’ve been through the ups and downs and all want to stay working together.

“Despite all that’s been going on, we’ve only had three people leave this year – it just goes to show that everyone wants to stay together, how galvanized they are as a team. They don’t know if they’re going to have a job in a month’s time, but they’re still putting in a huge amount of effort now; staying until nine in the evening working on this – and that’s because they’re all so motivated by the great project we’re working on.”

More through the link.

Thanks, Johnny.

Looks like you can still play games on PSP Go when it’s in shuttered mode.

When asked if Sony had any titles in development that would focus on using just the L and R shoulder buttons, a rep told Joystiq that new titles for that specific function have not been announced just yet, but sure.

“Users will be able to access content and applications on the XMB such as videos, music and Skype when the panel is closed — but users will need to launch the application first before closing the panel, said the rep.

Games that use the L/R buttons will allow “users will be able to play those games with the PSP Go in closed mode” while “original applications” like the clock and calendar will also be accessible when shuttered.

Good to know we guess.

More through the link.

Midway’s Newcastle and San Diego studios may have to close up shop in two weeks if a buyer or investor is not found for the open-world game currently in the works.

“100 percent of my efforts and focus are on finding a solution to keep the studio going forward, making it viable and securing jobs in the team,” Newcastle boss Craig Duncan told the Guardian. “It may sound like a football cliché but this studio is too good a team to have to shut down – it would be a travesty.

“I met with a number of interested parties [during E3]. When we presented the new game everyone loved it and was really impressed with our proposition. What counts against us is the timeframe and the fact the market is tough currently for both investors and games companies.

“If I had £100k for every time someone said, ‘a year ago we would have bought you’, I could buy the studio personally.”

The two studios were not included in the bid $33 million bid Warner Bros made for Midway back in May.

Via CVG.

Microsoft has said that it’s still working on ways for gamers to express their sexual orientation without it being taken “overboard”.

While speaking with Kotaku, VP of Xbox Live, John Schappert, told the site that while GTA IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony was okay to use in its sexual context, gay gamer tags are still an issue being sorted.

“I think the two are very separate issues,” said Schappert. “That said, [Xbox Live head of standards enforcement] Stephen [Toulouse] continues to work with our team and we continue to look for ways for people to personally express themselves and you can look for more features coming to Xbox Live, but nothing to announce right now. They’re working on some of that stuff and the community has been very involved.

“We try to walk the fine line where we do the right thing to allow people to express themselves but not have it be taken overboard.

“I can say that we are working on that issue.”

More through the link.

In the video posted after the break, Capcom Unity’s Shawn Baxter (Snow) talks about four-player co-op in Lost Planet 2.

Apparently, anyone can be a medic, use support fire, buff team-members ‘weapons and health, etc.

“Lost Planet 2 is a bigger, better version of Lost Planet, it’s not just a simple expansion,” Baxter told GameTrailers.

“We’re going all out and making it the best that we could and we took a lot of feedback from the community to make sure of that.”

Watch for yourself.

And yes, it’s Shawn, not Sean.

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EverQuest II’s Monument and Might game update goes live today.

Now players can take full advantage of Research Assistants, 80 new quests in the Rise of Kunark overland zones, player-written books, and new Charasis West Wing group quests.

The full press release is after the break.

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Nintendo has sent over a list of its downloads for the week, and it includes a butt-kicking toaster and Mario being obsessed with numbers.

WiiWare gets three games this week and Virtual Console gets Space Harrier.  DSiWare gets apps in the form of Mario  Clock and Mario Calculator.

Here’s the list:

• Eduardo the Samurai Toaster – WiiWare (800 points)
• Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure – WiiWare (800 points)
• Let’s Catch – WiiWare (1,000 points)
• Mario Clock – DSiWare (200 points)
• Mario Calculator – DSiWare (200 points)
• Space Harrier – Virtual Console (800 points)

Descriptions for each are posted after the break.

More »

Will Wright sat down and had a chat with the New York Times regarding hiring team members, and what he looks for when deciding on who welcome into the fold.

One of the things he tries to focus on is diversity, whether it be a recent college graduate, or “veteran” with many years of experience in the industry.

“When you are building a team, there is a balance issue,” he told the paper. “There are seasoned veterans I’ve worked with 10 or 15 years. And then you have these young kids coming out of graduate courses who are very motivated and they’re not set in their ways. And they actually work very well together. And we’ll have another third that is kind of an eclectic mixture.

“I think there is a lot of value in diversity. Some of the early games we did tended to appeal a little bit more to women than most other games. So we started getting the highest-qualified women in the game industry coming to us first. So there’s a gender diversity and there’s an age diversity.

“If you look at a lot of game companies, it’s primarily 25-year-old guys working in them.”

He also chats about how he filters prospective hires and how he learned a lot more from failures than successes.

Via Kotaku.

Verizon Games on Demand has launched in parts of the US and services start at $4.99 and go up to $14.99 a month.

Currently available in Massachusetts, New York and Rhode Island, the service currently has 1,400 games featuring games from Microsoft, PopCap, Take-Two, Ubisoft, Konami and others.

The service is only available to Verizon customers who pay for the fiber optic Internet service.

A full list of price packages and details are on the official website.

Can you play it now? Good.

Okay. Lame joke.

Via Kotaku.

SCEE has extended its sponsorship of the UEFA Champions League until 2012 which includes the main tournament for three more years and the UEFA Super Cup through 2011.

UEFA general secretary David Taylor is pleased with the renewal and looks forward to what Sony will do with the brand.

“We are very pleased that such a global player has chosen to renew its agreement with [us],” he said.

“We are sure that the UEFA Champions League sponsorship platform will provide PlayStation with excellent opportunities to develop their prestigious and well-known brand, and that it will also foster the link between the UEFA Champions League and the fan base of the PlayStation products.”

SCEE has sponsored the UEFA for the past nine years.

More over at MCV.