Monthly Archives: July 2009

Are you an art director, lead animator, lead character or a network programmer? Then Sucker Punch is interested in your talents.

The team behind PlayStation’s inFamous and Sly Cooper is based in Bellevue, Seattle and the offices look over the the lovely Lake Washington.

Interested? Read more through here.

We have been putting this off all afternoon, but we have finally given into internet pressure along with the malaise of a slow news Saturday.

Thus, we now present you with the the fist picture from the actual Prince of Persia movie not taken by a paparazzi stalking Jake Gyllenhaal from the sideline.

Hope you are pleased. Sorry if it is a bit fuzzy.

Still, when all is said and done, we still prefer this guy to a shirtless Jake.

Blame Entertainment Weekly.

Whoops. Either IGN’s “having a laugh” on the subject of PS3 Slim, or someone just made a rather large booboo.

Speaking in the latest Game Scoop! podcast, an IGN staffer appears to confirm the site has a PS3 Slim. The other speakers then say the console is “under wraps” and someone timestamps the recording to edit the comment out.

Guess someone forgot to make the cut. Either that or it’s all a “joke”.

Here’s the transcript:

“Because we have one for real.”

“Yeah, but that’s…”

“Yeah, but that’s under wraps.”

“Sorry, I wasn’t supposed to say that, was I?”

“We can edit that out. David can edit that out.”

“45 minutes. OK.”

You can listen to the clip at the link. Go from 45 minutes. The comment comes at 45.35.

We’ll ask IGN and Sony for comment on Monday.

Braid creator Jonathan Blow has elaborated a bit on the project 3D puzzle-exploration game he is hiring for.

According to a chat with Joystiq, Blow can up with the concept behind the game before the release of Braid but was unsure if he could pull it off due to it being “a more-expensive, harder-to-make 3D game.”

He stated that he and the team just started “working on the game in earnest” a few weeks ago, and folks should not expect it for at least another two years.

More through the links.

Ensign’s Log, Stardate 63048.5: This week was the Develop Conference in Brighton and quite a bit of interesting news was announced for MMOs across the galaxy, but that was already covered on the main page.

Therefore, to make things more compact, the rest of the news has been complied into one entry.

Read on past the fold for more regarding Star Trek Online and ship customization, WoW getting its very own App, Champions Online getting the microtransaction treatment, and loads more.

Time to sign off. Spock, Kirk and McCoy have asked me to beam down to this strange planet with them, and they hate to be kept waiting.

More »

Masaya Matsuura thinks Natal would be a great platform to create new styles of music games.

Creator of PaRappa The Rapper, Matsuura told attendees at Develop that NanaOn-Sha is currently thinking up ways to make use of Microsoft’s latest gadget.

“It’s very interesting. We are thinking about ideas. I think any kind of interaction with a camera will be good for music games, but the important thing will be how we can find the new breed of gameplay,” he said. “That will be a very important thing.

“Guitar Hero and Rock Band and The Beatles: Rock Band, is just taking traditional rock music. Of course there are so many rock fans on the earth, so they will have a huge impact for the market. But there is other attractive music, so please try to find another style, another interaction, another gameplay with another type of music.”

Agreed. Because we all want to use Natal to play Paganini on a virtual Theremin as soon as possible.

Via D’toid.

Those who fancy pre-ordering Mortal Online can now do so through the Mortal Online store.

Once released, the MMO will set you back €14.25/$14.25/£14.25.

Also, the Beta starts on July 20 and will consist of five blocks with 2,000 players each. Hopefully you got your Beta key – if so here’s the schedule:

• July 20 Block A (including 999 Limited Editions)
• August 3 Block B
• August 17 Block C
• August 31 Block D
• September 14 Block E

System Specs

Minimum

• configuration (1024×768, detail reduced)
• OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista
• Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3Ghz or equivalent
• RAM: 1GB
• Video card: ATI Radeon 9800/nVidia GeForce 6600
• Video memory 256MB
• Hard drive space: 5-25GB

Recommended

• configuration (1680×1050)
• OS: Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista Service Pack 1
• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz or equivalent
• RAM: 2048MB Dual Channel DDR2
• Video card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT or equivalent
• Video memory: 512MB
• Hard drive space: 30GB

More through the link.

Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box will land in the US on August 24 and September 25 in Europe for DS and DSi.

Best part is that Level-5 will release downloadable puzzles every week for 33 weeks.

There’s a video of it after the break. Hope you don’t mind subtitles.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

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Activision is still keeping mum regarding details for Guitar Hero: Van Halen, but that has not stopped a supposed track list for the game from leaking out.

Here’s 18 of out 44 songs included on the game disc.

• Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love
• Dope Nose by Weezer
• I Want It All by Queen
• Jump
• Panama
• Semi-Charmed Life by Third Eye Blind
• The Takedown by Yellowcard
• You Really Got Me
• And the Cradle Will Rock…
• Unchained
• Atomic Punk
• Somebody Get Me a Doctor
• Everybody Wants Some!!
• Runnin’ with the Devil
• Little Guitars
• Spanish Fly
• Cathedral
• Eruption

Good selection for Van Halen songs at any rate. Hopefully the list is legit.

It’s supposed to be out sometime around the holidays for PS2, PS3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

Via VideogamesBlogger.

Some screenshots from S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat have shown up.

The images depict the Prometheus cinema before Emission, the Tree of People’s Friendship, etc.

It’s out later this year. Go have a look over on ClanBase.

Ken Levine has said that he and his team at 2K Boston are hard at work on a new project that’s “more ambitious than anything we’ve ever done.”

“I think that when we think about a project now… When we thought about this project, we accounted for the fact that hiring the staff that we needed to hire would take some time,” he told Gamasutra. “And when we thought about the shipping date of the project… We needed a certain kind of length for the title, because we had a scope and ambition in mind which is more ambitious than anything we’ve ever done.

“Even more, substantially more ambitious than BioShock. And we knew that was not going to happen overnight.”

No word on what this new project is just yet.

More through the link.

Metroid Prime Trilogy will be released on Wii in North America August 24, and September 4 in Europe.

Until that time, there’s a video of it posted after the break, courtesy of IGN.

More »

The third Star Wars: The Old Republic Developer diary has been released and it shows some really spanking in-game voice acting and the early user interface which is used to create your moral choices.

It shows a bit of combat too.

We’ll be lucky if Star Wars: The Old Republic is comes out before 2011 as much work as BioWare’s putting into it, but at least it will be something to look forward to.

Hit the link for the video.

The first bit of screens for the recently announced Valkyria Chronicles 2 have arrived.

Kotaku has posted all eight of ‘em.

Looks rather nice.

Game’s this winter in Japan, with a US and European date to be announced.

Jhonen Vasquez has released the first bit of artwork in an ongoing series for BioShock 2 by guest artists.

It’s a rather creepy looking, and apparently, Vasquez used his nieces as reference for his piece titled: “The Sisters”.

“Who says kids are good for nothing other than emergency food in disaster conditions? I don’t, because at this point my badass nieces helped out quite a bit for reference,” Vasquez wrote over on The Cult of Rapture.

“I dragged them, much like Big Sister there, out for a quick photo session and we had a damn fine time in freezing winds posing like little the little, demonic wee ones that they are. Being my niece, the youngest had no problem finding that place in her heart that allowed her to simulate the howling face of a child being dragged down a nightmare alley by an unspeakable horror.”

Hit the link to read more about the process, and the sketches he created before finishing the final piece.

Looks like modders have created nude skins for some of Street Fighter IV’s characters.

Takes all kinds, we reckon.

There is even a forum dedicated to making nude skins for video game characters, and it had loads of pictures that are uncensored, and some including Zangief with his big bare ass hanging out.

Seriously, what the hell?

Thanks for ruining breakfast: Gamervision.

HMV and GameStop have exclusive rights to distribute the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition in Ireland and the UK, respectively.

So if you want it, that’s where you will have to get it.

HMV has it listed for November 10 at £199.99  and while availability is limited, three per person is allotted.

At GameStop, it will run you €149.

Might wanna start scoping out the perimeter of your hot neighbor’s house in preparation. Just be sure to plan an escape route in case she points a hunting rifle at you through her bedroom window.

Via Joystiq.

Rumors floating about over on NeoGAF state that Square Enix will be supporting Dragon Quest IX by releasing extra goodies via the downloadable content every week for the next year.

These rumored additions include 25 treasure map bosses, 12 of which are old DQ bosses: all of these bosses start at lv1, and level up as you beat them, making the next encounter harder than the previous one.

Supposedly, it’s also possible to recreate all past game heroes and characters in this game with downloadable quests and ultra rare drops.

Sounds great, but not a sure thing until we get official word from Square.

Thanks, GoNintendo.

Stephen Toulouse, Xbox Live’s head of policy and enforcement, says that the company is looking for ways to allow gamers to express their sexual orientation without being exposed possible negativity.

Once Microsoft figures out how to do this properly, the change will be implemented.

“The overall policy we have today is that the expression of sexual orientation in a Gamertag or text field is not allowed,” he told Kotaku. “That doesn’t matter what the orientation is. We recognize that the policy is not just, that some communities feel like they are being targeted. Our challenge is how to do that. We are working on that now.

“I don’t know what shape or form it will take, but yes we will go back and figure out how to make it work.”

Microsoft found that 98 percent of those who used the word “gay” on Live did so in a pejorative manner.

Toulouse will be present at the EA hosted talk today,sponsored by GLADD.

Having read every book, graphic novel and played every game with the word “Halo” in it, Stuart Beattie believes that the series is this generation’s Star Wars.

Speaking with Sci Fi Wire, Beattie told the site that he has written a screenplay for the Fall of Reach, which was novelized by Eric Nylund, and is showing the script around to producers and Microsoft.

“I just think it’s an amazing story about this child that no one cares about and who cares for no one else, who kind of ends up saving all of humanity,” Beattie said. “So I just started calling, because I really believe a Halo movie would just be awesome, especially this Halo movie.

“I firmly believe that the first Halo movie needs to be the Fall of Reach story, because it sets up all the characters, the world, the Covenant, the big struggle between mankind and the aliens, all that stuff,” he said. “So that’s where my money is.

“It’s not something I can direct right now, because it’s a big $100 million-plus film Maybe in a few years, if things work, maybe one day, two or three movies later, I can get the reins of that and maybe direct that, because I would just love to see a Halo movie up there on screen. It’s magnificent.”

“It’s massive,” he said. “It’s like our generation’s Star Wars. The whole Halo nation that’s out there, and a 100,000-year history of the Halo universe, it’s just breathtaking and so much fun to play in that sandbox. I’ve read every book, played every game, every graphic novel. It’s just a fun world to be in.”

Stuart Beattie is the fella behind the scripts for Pirates of the Caribbean and G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra.

Via Kotaku.