Monthly Archives: June 2009

Blizzard’s confirmed to VG247 that StarCraft II will indeed lack LAN support, saying the decision to drop the feature was “difficult”.

Last night’s reports that no local multiplay is to be included in the game were met with general disbelief.

Said Blizzard in a statement:

We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Beta, please.

More than 50,000 people took advantage of Microsoft’s offer to download Michael Jackson’s Thriller for free at the weekend, MTV reports.

The promo was only available in the US.

Mindware – the studio behind Cold War and Painkiller: Overdose – has announced Dreamkiller, a “mega-bloodbath first-person shooter”.

It’s all about entering people’s minds and shooting their demons. A lot.

PC and 360 this autumn. More on Shacknews.

The US PS Blog’s holding a live chat with Uncharted 2′s creative director Amy Hennig and director Bruce Straley tomorrow at 2.00pm PST, as you can see here.

What to ask? A release date would be nice. What about the movie? Get your questions ready, in any case.

China’s government has officially banned gold farming.

According to InformationWeek, the ruling will affect “more than 300 million Internet users in China,” theoretically stemming a trade worth nearly $150 million per year.

According to a 2008 survey by the University of Manchester’s Richard Heeks, between 80 and 85 percent of gold farmers are based in China.

Thanks, 1UP.

NPD figures released today have shown that the amount of female “Console Gamers” in the US has risen 5 percent in the past year, up from 23 percent to 28 percent.

The rise in Wii use was attributed for the lift.

“Last year was one of the most transformative in history in terms of defining the audience for gaming, said NPD analyst Anita Frazier.

“Even with the increased competition from mobile and social network gaming, the console gamer segment added the most new participants to its ranks in the last year.”

Press release after the break.

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Um. What? According to this Incgamers piece, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo’s confirmed that StarCraft II won’t have LAN support.

We got quite different answers about local area networking (LAN), where both Dustin or Sigaty said they were still discussing it, however, Pardo knew immediately: “We don’t have any plans to support LAN,” he said and clarified “we will not support it.” The only multiplayer available will be on Battle.net.

Blimey. Very progressive. Kind of makes LAN parties not LAN parties any more.

The game should be out this year.

Wedbush Morgan said in a report today that “OnLive could change the landscape” of gaming, and that its preview of the service at GDC left onlookers “blown away”.

“It is not clear to us that OnLive will dominate any time soon, but we are confident that this breakthrough technology will ultimately be widely adopted,” said the firm, adding that OnLive’s ultra-low-latency set-up is likely to appeal to those demanding videoconferencing as a sideline.

Verizon or another broadband provider could buy the company for its videoconferencing capability, Wedbush said, and could offer games as an add-on to the videoconferencing service.

“The possibilities are endless, but the technology is quite appealing, and we are confident that OnLive will end up as part of the video game culture some time next decade.”

The service is expected to launch in 2009.

Quakecon’s to be held at the Gaylord Hotel in Grapevine, Texas, id said today, not the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas as previously planned.

If you’d already booked into the Anatole for the shoot-fest, your room’s been cancelled. You need to ring up the Gaylord and get re-reserving.

Quakecon 2009 takes place from August 13-16.

Thanks, BigDownload.

In a giant report issued today, Wedbush Morgan’s predicted that no new console will be released until at least 2013.

“Because it is eminently clear that no new console is planned for launch in 2010 (the fifth year of the current cycle), we do not expect hardware or software sales to peak any time soon. Rather, we expect that hardware and software sales will peak, as they have in the past, in the year prior to the introduction of a new console; this cycle, we think that will happen several years from now, if at all,” said the paper.

“Hence, we believe that the “peak” of the cycle will be in year n-1, with “n” representing the launch of a next generation console. As we believe that will not occur until 2013 or later, we calculate year n-1 as 2012 or later.”

The report estimates sales figures up to 2011, putting Wii at the top of the home console heap at that point with 93 million units sold worldwide, compared to PS3 at 49 million and 360 at 44 million.

See the images below:

John Carmack’s told MTV – via PocketGamer – that the first three Quake games are on the way to iPhone.

“There’s no doubt that we’ll go through Quake and Quake 2,” he said.

“I can probably manage to do Quake 3 on the conventional iPhone platform, if Apple winds up addressing just a few things in their system software. When you start looking at the 3GS, [Quake 3] would not be a problem at all.”

If you can’t be bothered waiting, though, you could always pick up Doom: Resurrection: it’s available through the App Store today.

Blitz Arcade’s released the PS3 version of puzzler Droplitz, as seen on the US PS Blog.

It’s already out on 360. Grab it now for PS3, Trophies and all, for $10.

Read today’s feature about Blitz Arcade and the future of smaller, digitally distributed titles, right here.

Capcom’s released three new vids of Marvel Vs Capcom 2, as seen after the break.

It’s out at the end of July, and looks to be a bit of a no-brainer for anyone with no brain. Joking. It looks awesome.

Thanks, Kotaku.

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Blizzard boss Rob Pardo’s told EG that work on World of Warcraft is to blame for the fact StarCraft II’s taken so long to finish.

StarCraft II dev started in 2003, but Blizzard didn’t even announce the game until 2007. Apparently Blizzard’s had a playable version of the game since late 2005.

“One of the reasons that StarCraft II had some delays very early on in development is because a fair amount of the design team went onto World of Warcraft for a year to really help finish that game off,” Pardo said.

“They had a lot of really great experience to bring, with their knowledge of how they approached the map editor problems, how they dealt with balancing – which we could then leverage into class balancing.”

Beta very soon. Hit the link for more.

Epic’s launched a Korean presence, in the form of an office in Seoul.

Don’t expect any games to be developed there, however. The new outfit will be concerned with aiding licensees with Unreal Engine issues.

Epic owns two other studios apart from the Seoul office and its main centre in North Carolina, in Chair in Utah and People Can Fly in Poland.

Halo 3: ODST is an open-world game, Bungie’s told the Seattle Times.

“We’re doing a lot of pretty neat things in terms of mixing it up, introducing some non-linearity, some free exploration,” said Joseph Staten, writer and creative director.

“This is also a mystery story so there’s a lot more clue-finding and mystery-solving than you would normally find in a game of this kind — nothing that strays too far from the fun ‘Halo’ experience, but we definitely decided to take a little bit of risk and have some fun with this one.”

But stuff boring old 2009. What about next year’s Halo Reach?

“I absolutely think Reach could be enabled with [Natal],” said the developer.

Hit the link for more.

CVG has a few direct-feed Ninja Gaiden Sigma videos showing (amongst others) Momiji – the new playable female character from Ninja Gaiden Dragon Sword DS.

The Tecmo/Koei PS3 venture is looking rather lovely, as we pointed out the other day, and these videos only support that notion.

Take a look.

Frozenbyte’s confirmed to Shack that Trine PS3 will sell for $20: that’s half the price “official list” price.

In defence of the news, a Trine dev said on the site’s forums:

“[Pricing] guidelines are set by our publisher. Trine is far from a game created by a solo hero developer (we have over 20 employees and Trine has contributions from a double amount of people)” and “we are very confident that we can deliver a full retail experience with Trine (hence PC version is sold in retail also for approx 35 to 40 eur/usd!).”

“As for the PSN price, our publisher and Sony sets it,” Lauri wrote in a subsequent post, later adding “heck, even I don’t know it.”

“I just don’t find it fair to compare us to games which have started at similar or higher pricepoints,”

“It’s very obvious Trine will eventually cost less, so I guess I just wanted to say that if the price hurts more than waiting, then that’s the option.”

More through the link.

Koei has put up the official site for Warriors: Legend of Troy.

There’s not much there apart from the E3 trailer and yellow warning sign donning the title.

Hopefully we’ll get more media soon.

Destructoid broke the news, but there’s no link to the site itself. We’ll update when one emerges.

What more is there to say apart from below you can watch seven minutes of Blizzard’s super strategy Starcraft II in action?

The beta’s just round the corner, the internet is awash with written details but this has to be the icing on the cake.

Watch.

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