Monthly Archives: September 2009

Nintendo of America has said that it has no plans to launch the Connection Ambassador Promotion in North America at this time.

“This program is not available in the United States, and we have nothing to announce about it at this time,” an NOA representative told VG247.

The CAP program launches during October in Europe and gives Wii users an incentive to help other Wii users get online.

Those that get 10-20 people hooked into the net through the console, will be awarded with Nintendo dollars along with gold and platinum accounts.

A press release headed, “Ferrari exclusive to Forza 3!” just sailed through our newsreaders: get it here.

And it says:

“Exclusive to Xbox 360! Forza Motorsport 3 will include 29 classic models from the legendary manufacturer, including iconic cars such as the Ferrari 250 GTO, Ferrari 512 TR, Ferrari F40, Ferrari Enzo, and Ferrari 430 Scuderia at the title’s release on the 23rd of October.”

We’re just checking with MS as to what “exclusive” actually means here.

2K just confirmed that BioShock 2′s releasing on February 9.

It’s a worldwide, all-format ship.

PR after the break.

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The BBC has published a page on Watchdog’s website responding to a letter issued by SCE UK boss Ray Maguire yesterday on the subject of YLOD.

“Sony dislikes the term ‘the yellow light of death’, since it implies a single fault is afflicting all consoles,” said the corporation.

“It says the flashing yellow light is a ‘non-specific fault indicator that can be triggered in a range of different circumstances.’ Sony adds that the yellow light could indicate a problem caused by ‘any one of a range of issues that may inevitably affect any complex item of consumer electronics’.

“So if there isn’t one single thing that’s causing thousands of machines to stop working, why does it appear that one single repair appears to get them working again?”

Watchdog made a frankly laughable effort at highlighting the issue in a show last night. It claims more than 150 viewers have been in touch about the problem, which appears to largely affect the 60Gb launch machine.

Maguire said yesterday that “fewer than one half of one percent of units have been reported as failing in circumstances where the yellow indicator is illuminated.” To date, around 2.5 million PS3s have been sold in the UK.

Thanks, rrod360lol.

Eurogamer Network’s to launch a Digital Downland service called Get Games.

The venture’s a partnership with Mastertronic boss Andy Payne.

“At Mastertronic, we have sold 30 million units down the years across our group of PC brands and we feel very optimistic for the PC as a gaming platform,” said Payne.

“We have been selling some of our products by download for the last five years and have gained vital experience in this space. By combining this experience with Eurogamer’s quality editorial content and eyeballs we feel we have a winning combination.”

There’s no date for launch as yet. GI has more.

That’s right. For “only” £120 you can buy yet another insane Modern Warfare special edition, courtesy of GAME.

The Veteran Pack is basically the Hardened Edition with a 12″ statue of Soap MacTavish.

Here’s the full thing:

• Unique Gift Box Packaging
• “Captain Soap MacTavish” ultra-premium ARTFX Statue sculpted by Kotobukiya
• 1/6-scale, 12″ tall if standing upright
• Depicts Modern Warfare veteran Cpt. “Soap” MacTavish of Task Force 141, equipped with custom snow camouflage and weaponry as seen in “Cliffhanger” mission from Modern Warfare 2
• 3 sets of interchangeable weapons and arms, including: Dual ice-climbing pickaxes (pictured) Dual .45 caliber pistols, M14 Enhanced Battle Rifle (affixes to Soap’s back when not in use)
• Environmental ice base stores alternate weapons when not in use

Plus…
The Modern Warfare 2 Hardened Edition, including…

• Premium, special-edition SteelBook™ case with custom artwork by Infinity Ward
• Hardbound art book, “Behind the Lines”, designed by artists at Infinity Ward, featuring the art of Modern Warfare 2
• Call of Duty Classic full downloadable game. For the first time ever, Infinity Ward’s 2003 award-winning game that launched a franchise comes to consoles. Relive the original Call of Duty experience in HD; winner of over 80 Game of the Year Awards and 50 Editor’s Choice Awards
• Modern Warfare 2 full game

You need a GAME card to buy one. You can get it for either PS3 or 360. It’s out on November 11.

Elite is 25 this month, worryingly, and to celebrate Frontier’s launched a new website and a bunch of promo stuff.

Creator David Braben’s going to be taking questions through Twitter for a chat on Wednesday, September 23. Follow this to get involved. You can win t-shirts if you get a response to your question, and there’s a grand prize of a signed bit of artwork.

PR after the break.

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Charles Cecil and Watchmen co-creator Dave Gibbons are to host a BAFTA talk titled “Reinventing A Gaming Classic: iPhone “Beneath A Steel Sky” on October 5.

The present and future of narrative-based gaming is the order of the day, and there’s a chance to get stuff signed by the luminaries on the night.

The session runs from 7.00pm until 8.00pm. Anyone can attend but for non-BAFTA members there’s a £5 charge.

Full details after the break.

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Guess what? We’re going to play through the entire TGS build of Assassin’s Creed II in London next week. That’s the good bit.

Here’s the better bit. We want to know what you want to know about the game. Ask us questions and we’ll answer them.

We can’t do the playtest live, as we did with Far Cry 2 at Ubi’s office last year. We were hoping to, but all the content’s going to be embargoed until TGS itself opens next week, so you’ll have to ask the questions in advance. As soon as the Makuhari Messe doors part, we’re assured, we’ll be able to go live with all the details. It’s a general embargo, so you’ll see a ton more stuff from other sites at the same time as well.

So. What do you want to know?

No way. Ninja Theory’s Enslaved’s based on Monkey! Well, sort of. It’s loosely based on middle ages Chinese novel Journey to the West, the background for the greatest television program of all time. We know because Destructoid read the title’s Game Informer reveal article and put details on the internet.

The game’s story’s written by Alex Garland, and centres on the travails of Monkey (voiced and mo-capped by Andy Serkis), who comes to be controlled by a woman called Trip. Trip needs Monkey to get home, and can make him go mental with a headband he can’t remove.

It’s set 150 years in the future after third and fourth world wars. The human race is almost dead.

Sounds sassy. Hit the link. First images of this popped up yesterday.

EA’s finally released an APB trailer that’s nothing but gameplay. It’s after the break.

Cars, guns, tattoos, people with spiky hair and a man shouting about “crystals”. It’s got it all.

The Realtime Worlds MMO’s out next spring. Take a look.

More »

GI’s reporting that NCsoft free-to-play MMO Dungeon Runners will close on New Years Eve this year.

“The game just isn’t profitable. And, the first rule of business is to be profitable,” said Stephen Nichols, producer and lead programmer.

“We’ve got some ideas that could work. But, they’re expensive to implement and pretty risky. Those two facts, coupled with the recent loss of some key developers, make achieving the success we seek pretty much out of the question.”

Salute. More through there.

With the Japanese Slim rush over, PS3 sales fell back from over 150,000 last week to 55,000 in the week ending September 13.

Still. Only DSi’s beating it. More thrills next week.

• DSi – 66,498
• PS3 – 55,344
• PSP – 18,375
• Wii – 17,568
• DS Lite – 11,179
• Xbox 360 – 7,568
• PS2 – 2,612

Final Fantasy Tactics and Tomb Raider III are up on PSN for our American cousins this week, as are the FIFA and NBA demos.

The first bit of Batman DLC’s there as well.

Here’s the Euro update, in case you missed it yesterday.

A long Witcher 2 video’s up on YouTube. Quick. Before it gets yanked.

It’s called Assassins of Kings. The movie features documentary footage of CD Projekt’s offices.

Quick quick quick. It looks fucking awesome.

Thanks to everyone that sent this in!

Watchdog’s PS3 repair segment last night didn’t work, in a nutshell.

The program centred on the “thousands upon thousands” of UK PS3s that have shown the YLOD and have to be fixed outside of warrantee for a charge.

The show establishing a repair team outside Sony’s UK HQ earlier this month, complete with branded van, and filmed 11 users getting their consoles repaired for free: it admitted four of those consoles repaired by “experts” were no longer working.

The report claimed PS3 costs “£400″ and with repair will total “£528″.

Also included in the segment was an x-ray of the PlayStation 3 showing “trapped gas”, although no explanation of this was offered.

SCEE strongly refuted the show’s content yesterday.

There’s a lot more on GamesIndustry.

All the exclusive, convention-only Murloc plushies in the world can’t recoup the cost of cramming 20,000 frothing fans into the Anaheim Convention Center, it seems. During the 2009 Austin GDC, Blizzard co-founder Frank Pearce explained that – while certainly an excellent marketing opportunity – BlizzCon does quite a number on Blizzard’s wallet.

“BlizzCon is operated at a substantial loss for the company,” said Pearce. “It’s a huge marketing opportunity, so that’s the benefit we get out of that. But in terms of any kind of financial gain, it actually is a loss for us.”

As to how many arms and legs the company pays each year, Pearce wouldn’t say.

Fear not for BlizzCon, though. The jolly blue gaming giant loves its fans, and treats the massive gathering as “an operating expense.”

Thanks, GameSpot.

Don’t get the wrong idea, now. The Aliens RPG is still very dead, but if you’d like to sift through its grizzly remains, mark your calendars for February 2011.

“It’s a tough thing for us, because it means we’re all still under a non-disclosure agreement, at least for awhile,” Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquardt told Joystiq, speaking of the legalities behind game cancellations. “We have our ideas, but they’re purely opinions and they could be absolutely wrong. The NDA was two years past termination, so talk to us in February 2011.”

Urquardt did, however, reveal that Obsidian is applying the engine it developed for Aliens to its unannounced project. The game probably won’t be an RPG where creepy crawly aliens burst from people’s chests, but at least it’s something, right?

More through the link.

During his keynote at GDC Austin, Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman spoke to attendees about three of the major mistakes Mythic made with the MMO.

These mistakes being challenging play, the lack of economy, and the fact that the game was so easy that social tools were made irrelevant.

“There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use,” he said. “One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

“Economy brings people together.”

There’s loads more from his talk over on Gamasutra.

Activision has told VG247 that there are no plans for a Modern Warfare 2 bundle on PS3.

When asked if there were any bundles including Infinity Ward’s shooter in the future, an Activision representative told us: “No, there are no plans, but thank you for asking”.

Curiosity got the best of us when MCV asked SCEE if it had any plans for such a bundle and were told: “We’ve not made any announcements about bundle packs, but will let you know should that change.”

Guess this means that if you want MW2 bundled with a console, Xbox 360 is your only option.