Monthly Archives: June 2009

Satoru Iwata has told the Financial Times that Nintendo previously fiddled around with camera-based motion controls and decided to pass on ‘em.

The firm eventually decided that “accelerometer-based technology”, like what’s in the WiiMote, worked better.

Iwata admitted, however, that the company will wait and see what Microsoft and Sony do before regretting the decision.

“Until they say when they’re releasing it, how much it costs and what software it comes with, we won’t know whether that is the route we should have taken,” he said.

Via Engadget.

Ubisoft’s Sebastien Puel has promised that Assassin’s Creed 2 will have more variety and less predictability than the first iteration.

“We are now telling a story in a way that is intended to be very unpredictable,” Puel told Now Gamer. “There are no more ‘x assassinations’ to perform but a story that develops through a great amount of mission givers.

“Some will give you an assassination mission, others an intimidation or information-gathering mission. There is no limit now to the types of challenges we can give to players. We are very careful to create a lot of variation in the types of gameplay and pace we are proposing.

“The combat system is based on the first game, but with much more possibilities and strategy behind every encounter. Players won’t be able to simply button mash, killing guard after guard. There will be more thinking involved due to the new different guard archetypes and weapons; you will have to strategically plan your every move.”

More through the link.

Valve says that developing games for PS3 is too complex for the firm, and it wants to focus on experiences instead.

We have all heard this from the firm before, but a recent chat with designer Tom Leonard at E3 pretty much reiterated the fact.

“The PC and the 360 are just more straightforward,” he told Loot Ninja. “We can focus on what we want to do, which is make game experiences, instead of sweating bullets over obscure architectural decisions they make with their platform.

“I didn’t come into this business in the 90s because of some technical fetish. I came in because I wanted to give people experiences that made them have fun.”

There ya have it.

More through the link.

GamerDNA has launched a new website called Tweet My Gaming and it provides a feed of videogame tweets from anyone and everyone who posts on the subject.

It does this by tagging game titles, capturing Twitter activity, and then updates the site in real time with the results.

The site also ranks games based on the most Tweets and currently The Sims 3 has the highest ranking.

You can check out the site here.

More through Kotaku.

PS3 owners who had issues with installing Prototype can use a workaround provided by Activision.

Apparently, an error comes up saying that players have insufficient hard drive space. Until a patch is released to fix it, here’s what you can do:

• Change the available space on your hard drive by 700 MB even if you have enough memory and delete nonessential items.
• Once you have made the necessary change to your Hard Drive space insert the Prototype disc back into your PS3 and it should now install.
• The goal of this is to change the available space on the hard drive. You may need to try a combination of things.

More information, including how to clear HD space, can be found here.

Via Joystiq.

Nintendo,  Team Ninja, and Tecmo were so secretive regarding the development of Metroid: Other M, that Koei had no idea it existed for some time.

Even when the two companies merged, Tecmo was not allowed to disclose the project per the arrangement with Nintendo.

No word on when the game became common knowledge.

More over on Siliconera.

The most obvious news of the day comes from a study conducted at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, which shows that gamers get less sleep than non-gamers or even those who play casually.

According to the study, people who are more addicted to gaming sleep about 1.6 hours less during the week. They also spend less time in bed, suffer from shorter REM latency and tend to have longer sleep latency.

“Our statistics revealed that those who admitted addiction scored higher on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (sleepiness),” principal investigator Amanda Woolems told Science Daily. “It surprised us, however, that of the people who admitted being addicted to gaming, only about a third of them recognized an interference with their sleep.”

The findings were presented at the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (SLEEP 2009) this past Monday.

Via D’toid.

Sony has confirmed that VidZone will go live on June 11.

The free service gives you access to thousands of streaming music videos on demand, just in case you didn’t know.

Users can expect 10,000 videos right off the bat to download off PSN, with more to come.

Hooray.

Press release is below.

More »

Those who pre-order Dragon Age: Origins through GameStop will get some in-game goodies just for laying down five bucks.

One is the Memory Ring which gives players an experience bonus and the other is a Feral Wolf Charm (GameStop exclusive) that increases health regen and provides a stat boost to armor.

Game’s out in November and these perks will be made available to all three platforms.

Via D’toid.

Battlestations: Pacific players can download the Volcano Pack come June 25 for 560 MS Points.

Two maps are included in the pack for the Games for Windows title.

Island Capture includes competitive and duel modes while Choke Point supports escort, siege and duel modes.

Via BigDownload.

Very nice shots of Forza 3 popped up over on Kotaku this afternoon.

Some you may have already seen, but it doesn’t matter. The cars look real and extremely sexy. A couple shots of the interiors are there too.

“Our goal is to turn gamers into car lovers and car lovers into gamers,” said game director director Dan Greenawalt.

It might just do that.

Go have a look.

Thanks to strong sales of Red Faction: Guerrilla and UFC 2009, Janco Partners analyst Mike Hickey says that things are looking up for THQ.

“We are increasingly more optimistic on [THQ's] near term financial prospects as our focus shifts from near term liquidity concerns to their upcoming game pipeline where buzz is beginning to build,” he said.

“Management continues to rebuild credibility through execution on planned cost cutting, increased financial transparency and recent / upcoming product releases including UFC 2009: Undisputed that meaningfully exceeded our initial expectations.”

Hickey figures that Marvel Super Hero Squad and MX vs. ATV Reflex will sell over 1 million units and Darksiders  will move  1.575 million.

Fiscal year 2011′s Homefront, Warhammer 40K: Space Marines, and a possible Saints Row 3 should help get the company back in the mix, and he estimates that Q1 2010 revenues will hit $219 million.

More on Gamasutra.

Warriors Orochi Z will not be released in the states, according to a report from Siliconera.

The game’s been out since March in Japan and it’s absence at E3 prompted the site to ask Koei if the game was even still being released.

Turns but plans for the project have been shelved which makes this the first Omega Force developed Warriors game not to get a release outside of Japan.

Sorry folks.

Peter Moore says that user reviews pertaining to Wii titles are more relevant that Metacritic because titles that get a 70 can still sell millions of copies.

Speaking with Gamasutra, Moore said that when it comes to EA Sports Active, “We’re not going to Kotaku or Operation Sports on this one, we’re going to Amazon.”

“The thing is with the Wii, it seems to be for the gaming sites, it’s the last platform they review,” he continued. “It takes a time to get an actual review score. I would pretty much guarantee that just about every Wii game ships without a Metacritic rating because [reviewers] haven’t got around, to it or they’re not interested in reviewing it.

“I absolutely guarantee you, the thing we’re watching most closely now [with Wii titles] is things like Amazon – and I’ll go look at women’s magazines that have powerful websites, and then we look at what we call ‘mommy bloggers’.

“That’s where those people go for their information. They are not going to Metacritic. They don’t know Metacritic exists.”

More through the link.

Nyko’s director of marketing, Chris Arbogast, has stated that the company doesn’t see controllers going the way of the dinosaur any time soon and that it will be quite a while before peripherals like Project Natal become a mainstay.

“People in the casual market like feeling something physical to keep your hands aligned,” he told Joystiq. “When you grab the Wiimote and swing it, it feels like you’re swinging a baseball bat, versus pantomiming swinging a bat.

“I think that if you take all [the controllers] away and you’re just pantomiming everything, there may be some disconnect with realism there.”

He does admit that if Project Natal becomes a massive hit, the company will have to rethink things a bit.

“We’ll have to think of other ways we can accessorize and augment the players’ experience,” he added. “Not with a controller anymore, but with other things to add to that camera functionality. It could be a whole new avenue of business that opens up for us because we’ll be forced to challenge ourselves.”

More through the link.

A DLC car pack’s been released for the “immensely popular” GTi Club+ Rally, Konami said today.

The download features four new cars, and costs €2.99. It’s a PS3-only affair.

Press release after the break.

More »

The Dante’s Inferno website received an update yesterday, and will every month on the ninth to commemorate the nine circles of Hell in the game.

Yesterday’s updates include a video with executive producer Jonathan Knight during E3 chatting about the show and reaction to the game.

Visceral Games has also added a blog to the site, and a new developer diary video describing Limbo, and we have that for you after the break.

Game’s out next year.

Thanks, Blue.

More »

Crystal Dynamics has loosed another 25 staff, Eidos has confirmed to Kotaku, following around 30 redundancies in January.

“We can confirm that Crystal Dynamics has made a reduction of approximately 25 people at the San Francisco studio,” said the publisher in a statement.

“This decision is a reflection of the continued drive to focus resources at the studio. We would like to thank all of the employees affected by this difficult decision for their hard work during their time at Crystal and we wish them all the best in the future.”

More through there.

Sony plans to make almost every PSP UMD game released after October 1 available for digital download.

Jeff Rubenstein said over on the US PS Blog that when third-party titles are released digitally would depend on the publisher, all first-party titles will hit PSN.

“It’s my understanding that just about everything hitting after October 1 will be available for download,” he wrote.

October 1 is when PSP Go hits the market.

More over on CVG.

PlayStation mega-chief Kaz Hirai told the Guardian at E3 last week that Blu-ray was the only choice for PS3′s drive.

“Purely from a gaming standpoint there was no other choice for us,” he said. “Why? The capacity of the disc. Last year’s Metal Gear Solid 4 was pushing 50GB as it was. If it was on DVD it would have been a 6 disc set.”

Going multi-disc to such an extent wasn’t an option, said the exec.

“The packaging and cost would have been prohibitive and it would have been hugely inconvenient to consumers,” he added.

“So from a gaming standpoint there was really no choice if you wanted a high definition gaming experience.”

Full interview through there.