Monthly Archives: June 2009

A survey floating around the net suggests that Activision may be thinking of starting an online service for the Call of Duty franchise.

Apparently, this service would provide premium and timed exclusive content to the online multiplayer aspect of the game with early access to new content and online “support for competitive play.”

Of course this would cost players a fee, be it by month or some other form,  which might point at the “natural evolution” of a Call of Duty MMO Kotick mentioned once before.

Again, take all of this as rumor until something concrete is revealed.

Thanks, D’toid.

There’s a video posted after the break of Peter Molyneux discussing Project Natal.

“Just about everything you think is the Holy Grail in design, throw it away and start again”, he said.

The designer talks about how Natal will create new sets of genres. The ones we are used to now, RPGs, sports games, etc., are “compartments that were defined by a controller” and Natal will create whole new compartments.

Heavy stuff. Have a watch.

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Hello, K-K-K-Ken’s p-p-p-pets. This week the US PS movie store has a much better selection in HD movies than last week.

This week, the fantastic A Fish Called Wanda hits the service, with Clint’s Eastwood’s Gran Torino, Revenge of the Pink Panther, American History X and Dawn of the Dead – Unrated Director’s Cut.

The list of HD television shows is a bit thin, but at least Burn Notice made an appearance.

Full list of HD movies are listed after the break, while the rest can be found over on the US PS Blog.

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A group of UK politicians have banded together to form the All-Party Parliamentary Group to focus on UK’s Computer and Video Games Industry.

It will be chaired by Labour MP Bill Olner, and vice chaired by Lord David Puttnam, and Conservative MPs John Whittingdale and Philip Davies.

Tiga, which played a large roll in forming the group, will be administering and arranging meetings.

“All-Party Groups can be a highly effective vehicle to raise and discuss issues amongst interested Parliamentarians,” said Olner.

“I congratulate Tiga for showing leadership in instigating the creation of Westminster’s first All Party Parliamentary Group for the Computer and Video Games Industry, and for providing its secretariat. The entire All Party Parliamentary Group is looking forward to working with Tiga in discussing issues crucial to the video games industry.”

The group, along with Tiga CEO Richard Wilson, will be speaking at the House Of Commons on Monday for the launch of the ‘Play Together’ initiative.

More through Edge.

A Spinal Tap four pack and Evanescence three pack will arrive on the Rock Band Music Store next week.

Spinal Tap tracks “Back from the Dead,” Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare” and “Warmer Than Hell” are from the band’s new album Back From The Dead and “Saucy Jack,” a song St. Hubbins wrote about the life of Jack the Ripper, will arrive as well.

You may need to find a new drummer after that.

The Evanescence three pack consists of “Bring Me to Life,” “Call Me When You’re Sober” and “Weight of the World”.

Each will land on June 16 and 18 for Xbox 360 and PS3 respectively and individual tracks will run 160 MS Points ($1.99) or 400 MS Points ($5.49) for the Evanescence pack and 560 MS Points ($6.99) for the Spinal Tap pack.

Flipping awesome.

The Eurogamer Expo takes place in Leeds and London this October, and the first round of publishers to sign on for the event is full of heavyweights.

Bethesda, Capcom, Eidos, Electronic Arts, Konami, Microsoft, Sega and Sony will all be there with playable titles.

The four-day event starts off in Leeds on October 27 and 28 and moves to London October 30 and 31. GamesIndustry.biz will also hold a Career Fair so students can get face time with developers and publishers.

Via GI.biz.

Splash Damage was on-hand at E3 to talk about its upcoming action shooter, Brink.

The game allows you to start out in single-player mode before moving to online multiplayer, but according to creative director Richard ‘Rahdo’ Ham you don’t have to play online if you don’t want to.

“When you first start the game, there isn’t going to be any choice to play online or offline,” he told Joystiq. “That doesn’t exist at all. There’s a continuity across all of what you’d consider the game’s modes, you just play the game. So, you know, I decide I’m going to go into Container City, I’m going to do that mission, and you go through in a traditional, story-based kind of way, and you could do that alone or with up to seven of your buddies, or you could play that as a full-on multiplayer deathmatch.

“So we expect a lot of players are going to be like me, going along, having a good time, and there will come a point if we recognize you are online, we’ll actually stop you between missions and say, ‘You’re doing really well, you may not have noticed, you’ve accumulated a lot of stuff, so you may want to go online. We’re not going to make you, but if you do, we’ll pay you twice as much experience.’”

“So the players will try, because they’ll find things exactly the same. They’ll really be much more comfortable than they have before.”

Loads more interesting stuff through the link.

Pandemic’s open-world action title, The Saboteur, has a main story that will take you approximately 12-18 hours to finish.

That’s according to lead designer Thomas French.

“It’s honestly tough to say exactly how long it would be for someone to do everything,” French told D’toid. “We’re shooting for the player that just plays straight through the main story to be between 12-18 hours depending on how much the player is sprinting.

“There are a bunch of side missions as well that are easy to get distracted from the main thread going down their path, so add all those things together and you have, well, a lot of game.

“I’m sure we’ll get some speed runs that will min-max the entire game and find a faster way through.”

More through the link.

Sony boss Jack Tretton’s had a bit of a boohoo to CNBC about the fact his E3 press conference got spunked all over the internet before he got anywhere near the LA stage.

“People don’t respect confidentiality in this industry,” says Jack Tretton, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America. “It’s tough enough to keep a secret within your own company, much less when you speak to third parties.”

He added: “This is an industry that has trouble focusing on today,” he says “We want to constantly talk about tomorrow.… You have to prepare for people to know things in advance. The frustrating thing is they only know a part of the story and that opens up a lot of conjecture and misinformation that ultimately waters down the reality when you roll it out.”

Full thing through there.

EA’s Patrick Soderlund said during E3 that a small team over at DICE is currently working on Mirror’s Edge 2, and he is “excited” by the firms plans for the sequel.

“Mirror’s Edge was a risky move. It was a bold move, a very innovative and inspiring move,” the VP told VideoGamer. “The game wasn’t perfect by any means. We would have liked the game to sell better even though the game has sold better than most people think.

“You will see another Mirror’s Edge for sure. It’s just a matter of when that time is and what we do with it. We have a small team on it and I’m excited about what we do.”

Extra details or an estimated release date were not forthcoming.

Hit the link for the rest.

Ruffian’s just updated its homepage to include a list of jobs, presumably to work on Crackdown 2.

Are you an environment artist, senior gameplay engineer, senior environment artist, outsource manager or animator? Do you care that Ruffian’s based in Dundee?

Get on it, then.

EA’s put out a Dante’s Inferno dev diary centred on Limbo, the first of the game’s nine, hellish circles.

There’s no gameplay in there, unfortunately, but plenty of reason for the “core” to be cheerful. This really does have potential to be awesome.

It’s out next year. Hit the link to watch the vid.

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Ubisoft just confirmed that Assassin’s Creed II will release on November 20 in the UK.

The game was fixed for a November 17 US date at E3 last week.

Game of the Year? Unless something goes badly wrong, it looks as though it may well be one of them.

Update – Britain’s getting a special edition as well, according to Play listing noticed by EG. It’ll include “a 64-page leather-and-parchment-style Conspiracy development book; an Ezio figurine wearing Master Assassin garb; three in-game bonus quests promising to cover ‘the most prestigious moments’ of the Italian Renaissance; the soundtrack by Jesper Kyd; and behind-the-scenes developer interviews.”

Somewhat randomly, Southpeak’s announced the release of Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball for Wii.

It’s about pirates and ninjas playing dodgeball on Wii.

“The aim was to create a fun and exciting game for Wii that made the most of this rivalry in an energetic game that makes perfect use of Wii’s motion-sensing controls,” said Southpeak’s Sarah Brockhurst.

May as well give it a waz, innit. PR after the break.

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Speaking with Gamespot, EA Games president Frank Gibeau set the course for EA’s Wii games to come, and warned against the choppy waters ports tend to bring.

“These need to be stand-alone, high-quality games that are profitable,” he said. “Our operating assumption is that ports on the Nintendo Wii don’t sell very well, and we have to design from the ground up–design from the controller out, frankly–an experience that can happen in an IP universe that might be someplace else or might be on multiple platforms, but it really needs to cater to Wii players and how Wii players play games.”

“We think that there’s opportunity to bring custom designs like Dead Space Extraction, Spore, and Need for Speed Nitro, which are all in their own unique windows, they’re not shipping with other games on other platforms. They all have their own unique designs, their own looks. They’re also targeting different customers.”

He used Need for Speed as an example, noting that Xbox, PS3, and PC versions of the game are out to press high-end racing fans’ fun buttons, while the Wii version is more of an arcade racer.

EA knows you, Wii gamer. It knows when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake. Tons more through the link.

Joystiq sends word that Sam and Max Save the World, aka Sam and Max Season One, will be arriving on Xbox Live next week the only way a crazy dog and rabbit pairing can. The normal way.

Season two, titled “Beyond Time and Space,” is a little further off, but if you squint really hard, you can still see it. Telltale isn’t tossing around dates just yet, though, simply jotting it down for “the coming months.”

So, who’s buying?

N64′s Super Smash Bros. is being released for Virtual Console today.

ONM reckons it’ll cost 1000 Wii Points – around £7/€10.

It includes 12 fighters, nine stages and a four-player co-op mode.

Thanks, EG.

Halo: ODST wasn’t supposed to be a $60 game. It’s a short campaign and a bunch of maps. Bungie even sad it wasn’t going to be a $60 game. It’s been priced at $60. Why?

“At the time of those statements, the overall scope of Halo 3: ODST was not yet finalized, and since then the project has grown increasingly more ambitious,” Microsoft told Joystiq.

“We believe this standalone experience is much more than just an expansion. Halo 3: ODST provides a new campaign from the point of view of an entirely new character.

“Combine that with three new multiplayer maps, the entirely new cooperative mode called Firefight, and the complete Halo 3 multiplayer collection on a standalone disc, we feel this is a good value and tremendous addition to the Halo franchise.”

Saying nothing. Hit the link.

Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter has told IndustryGamers that he “sincerely regrets” saying Sony is “ripping off” punters with PSP Go’s pricing.

“I sincerely regret the choice of words in my response to Geoff Keighley’s question in last week’s Bonus Round, where I said that Sony is ‘ripping off’ the consumer by pricing the PSP Go at $249.99,” he said.

“I made a poor choice of words, and I do NOT think that Sony is doing anything nefarious in choosing their pricing strategy.”

The full statement’s through there. PSP Go launches on October 1.

Microsoft’s confirmed to Gamespot that Xbox 360′s now sold more than 630,000 units in Australia.

The figure’s an increase of 93,000 since January this year.

Xbox regional director for Australia and New Zealand David McLean dropped the news at E3, and also confirmed that the console’s Video Marketplace would launch Down Under later this year.