Monthly Archives: November 2009

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot told investors and industry executives at the BMO Capital Markets conference in New York today that new genres are on the way from the company.

These include fighters, music, RPGs, and sports, but while he did not give specifics on what these games entailed or what the titles were, but it’s known that a Might & Magic fantasy MMO called Heroes Kingdoms is pegged for early next year.

Guillemot also said that Trackmania 2 will be out on 2010, as well, and in-house developers are currently sweating over casual games for Project Natal and Sony’s Motion Controller.

Good to know more is on the way.

Via Kotaku.

The official website for Final Fantasy XIV has been updated, revealing extra class details for the Gladiator and Pugilist, along with weapons used each.

Gladiators are typically wearers of heavy armor and carry a sword, like their Roman counterparts, but they’re also adept with throwing knives, do well offensively, and can use a blade-encrusted Lantern Shield that allows for not only defense, but offense as well.

Pugilists use light armor, and are Monk like in the sense they use hand-to-hand attacks, as well as classic Final Fantasy weaponry like baghnakhs and cesti.

There’s more over on the official site.

Thanks, Massively.

A preview of the upcoming Borderlands DLC, the Zombie Island of Dr. Ned, has popped up over on IGN.

Of course, with a title like that you know you are going to be fighting zombies, but there’s all different sorts of the undead you’ll be fighting – not just the normal ankle draggers.

Those are present of course, but there’s also crawling torsos, zombies that spit stuff at you which not only hurts but will blind you as well, suicide zombies, Tankensteins that look like Frankenstein’s monster, and psycho zombies that go mental and start charging you from all directions if provoked.

Some zombies even wear beer-helmets. Guess even zombies need an easy, hands-free access to beer once in a while, not just Packer fans.

It’s out November 24 for PS3 and Xbox 360, and will run you about a tenner.

The video is posted below. You should give it a watch.

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Max Schaefer, co-founder of Runic Games and Blizzard North has said that while there are similarities between Torchlight and Diablo, it’s nothing more than trying to “perfect the style” the teams has been working on since the 90′s.

‘We plead guilty to trying to perfect a style of game we’ve worked on since the early 90′s,” Schaefer told PC Games. “Since we have two of the founders of Blizzard North, five people who worked on the series, the creator of Fate, and the whole team that worked on Mythos, it only makes sense to make an ARPG as our first title under the Runic Games banner.”

Schaefer also said that the MMO version will be out in a couple years, will be in pre-production as soon issues from launching the single player are finalized.

“It will feature a lot of customization, an overworld, random and instanced dungeons, PVP, and much more,” he revealed. “It will be indeed free to play, and we’d like to get alpha and beta versions up and running as quickly as possible, though, so hopefully we’ll have a lot of community interaction during the development cycle.”

More through the link.

This week on PS Home, the first full episode of Fullmetal Alchemist’s second season will be playing at the 10-Screen Theater for free until November 19.

There’s also a never-before-seen Final Fantasy XIII video airing tomorrow, Friday the 13th, which is more than likely the same video we mentioned to you yesterday. Probably.

Hilariously, A&E’s reality series Lawman gets an advanced screening on Home and you can even get a free virtual item – a Lawman Vest – just for walking your virtual self into the 10-Screen Theater. Never heard of the show? Well, it’s about policeman/actor Steven Seagal enforcing the law in New Orleans’ Jefferson Parish district. We’re snickering now.

One last thing, virtual Assassin’s Creed II items like hats, shirts, hoodies and wristbands are over in the Home Mall this week.

More information can be found over on the US PS Blog.

Time Magazine has listed the top 50 best inventions of 2009, and Project Natal is one of ‘em.

The list includes the “best new gadgets and breakthrough ideas of the year”, and calls Natal “cool”

A $10 million dollar lightbulb is also on the list, and so is teleportation.

Go see for yourself.

Digital Foundry has given Modern Warfare 2 the Face-Off treatment and says that while there are numerous comparison shots between both console versions, its has been noted that the “color balance is quite patently wrong”.

According to the post:

“Basic settings don’t cut it with Modern Warfare 2. You really need to spend some time setting up the game to play nicely with your screen… or indeed your capture kit. Usual form within any Digital Foundry Face-Off is simply to run the game at default settings and let the chips fall as they may – the assumption being that the default is equivalent to the color settings within the console’s framebuffer, or at the very least what the developer calibrates the output to. However, keeping the default settings is really not a particularly good idea within Modern Warfare 2 and we’re also not sure how effective Infinity Ward’s calibration method is for the end user is either.

“Bottom line: if you’re an Xbox 360 owner, you should be making the image brighter, and if you’re playing on PS3, it’s really a massively good idea to lower the brightness level significantly, otherwise the lighting – one of the really impressive things in this game – simply won’t look as good as it should. Many people online are discussing the PS3′s washed-out image, or talking about a “gray filter”. In truth, there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s simply a case of tweaking your settings.”

There’s tons more, and you’ll want to read it and see the differences for yourself, so we’ll shut up now and leave you to it.

Ex-EG chap Rich Sturgess is to head up a new games recruitment outfit in the UK.

GamesNatives is the gaming arm of NetNatives, and offers flat-fee recruitment advertising for games companies.

Good luck, dude. PR after the break.

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We knew it was coming, the pictures yesterday proved it, and now a source close to Sony had said once again that it is a sure thing.

Still, though, there is no date or even a hint of when to expect it and the offending images have been pulled due to being posted “by mistake”.

Sony PR says more information is to be announced “very shortly”.

Via Eurogamer.

There’s a bunch of Assassin’s Creed II Avatar clothing now up on live, as Tweeted by the Major.

There’s plenty of Venetian-style stuff there, including wrist bands, masks and helmets.

The game’s out next week.

A ton of DJ Hero stuff just went up, too. Check it out here.

EA just said C&C4 will release on March 16 in the US. Remember, it’s PC-only, kids.

Europeans get it on March 19.

Pre-order now and you’ll get “early access to the upcoming beta program, the game’s official soundtrack and an exclusive prequel bonus mission.”

PR here.

Someone’s put a compilation of some of the worst games voice acting ever on YouTube. You’ve got to hear this.

This is only “news” in the sense that it made us cry laughing, but what the hey.

Thanks, mart.

EA’s released a trailer for the Dante’s Inferno animation movie – watch it on EG.

Looks hot. And bloody. Bloody hot. It’s out on Blu-ray and DVD alongside the game next February.

The EU PS Blog just put the Euro PSN update live for the day, and there’s a few notables in there.

All the PS3 Fallout 3 DLC is now up at €7.99 a pop, as is a new Burnout Paradise bundle – including the game and the Big Surf pack – at £27.99/€34.99.

For the PSP massive, there’s a Jax and Daxter: The Lost Frontier demo, as well as a full version of Street Fighter Alpha Max 3 for, um, £13.99/€17.99.

Hit the link for the full thing.

Activision has claimed that Modern Warfare 2 has achieved the “biggest entertainment launch in history,” with UK and US day one sales totaling $310 million.

“According to internal Activision estimates,” the game sold approximately 4.7 million units in the US and UK in 24 hours of launching.

Mike Griffith, Acti head: “The shattering of these entertainment records is a testament to the compelling, cinematic and uniquely engaging experience that the Call of Duty brand delivers. Modern Warfare 2 has taken interactive experience to unprecedented heights setting a new standard for entertainment.”

PR after the break.

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Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch’s issued a statement to VG247 confirmed that final day one and week one sales data for Modern Warfare 2 will be released after the stat-tracker compiles this week’s chart on Sunday.

Chart-Track put out a 1.23 million day one estimate for the game yesterday, a figure Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter cast doubt on last night.

Here’s the full thing Dorian just sent through by email:

Concerning the comments made on VG247, subsequently picked up on by various sites, including Gamesindustry.biz, I would like to clarify the situation concerning UK Day 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′, especially the “I don’t know how anyone could aggregate UK sales that fast”.

• The first point is that UK retailers have been at the forefront of electronic data capture for decades, which in turn allows us to capture daily sales from 99% of retailers on our panel. That’s over 6000 retail outlets plus all the etailers – currently 25 different store fronts.
• Every retailer on our panel supplies Electronic Point of Sale data. In the specific case of pre-orders through retailers with high street stores, we can and do pick these up sometimes months before a product actually launches and these are set up by the retailer to report as a specific retailer code. When the product goes live we begin to track sales on the actual barcode for that product, along with the actual selling price for every single transaction.
• In the specific case of online retailers and pre-orders, the moment they ship a product it registers as a sale in the daily transaction files we are sent. Online retailers have to ship the product in advance in order to hit the street date, so we will pick up actual sales (shipped to the customer) prior to the day 1 release. These are re-dated to day 1.

I hope that this helps to explain how we get to release an accurate day 1 sell-through so quickly. Of course, with so many retailers and stores, we will release a final figure for day 1 / week 1 sales of ‘Modern Warfare 2′ after we have produced the week 46 UK entertainment software chart, this coming Sunday. We run a Sunday-Saturday chart week, so this will cover the first 5 days of sell-through for MW2 and the date range is Sunday 8th November up to including Saturday 14th November, sales up to midnight. Because we get daily sales we actually produce the final chart each and every Sunday, with our retailers/publishers getting a full analysis of the UK market by Monday morning, 10am.

The reason why we call the 1.23m a day 1 estimate is because with so many retailers, it is always possible that some data will actually arrive later in the week, due to technical reasons or transmission problems. We will therefore release final figures as indicated above.

And there you have it. Watch for final UK figures next Monday.

There’s an ad after the break showing the imminent DSiLL being used in a Japanese home.

To all intents and purposes, it looks like a little laptop.

There’s footage of chat software being used there, and a handy comparison of the stylus and “touch pen”.

It’s out in Japan on November 21, and in the US and Europe early next year.

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Infinity Ward has warned against judging Modern Warfare 2 on web videos of the game’s now-infamous airport scene, saying leaked movies before release aren’t representative of the full shebang.

“What was leaked was out of context, and I encourage people to play the game for themselves and see what they think,” said Chance Glasco, the game’s lead animator, speaking to EGTV at the London launch on Monday.

Other’s noted that while the scene is bound to be contentious, the game’s rated appropriately.

“About the Airport situation with terrorists… you can understand [the controversy],” said Craig Fairbrass, Ghost’s VO actor in the game.

“At the end of the day it is a game for adults, not for children. As long as you’re responsible and you do the right thing…”

Watch the full thing through there.

Chart-Track’s defended its 1.23 million day one UK sales figure for Modern Warfare 2 in the UK, following Wedbush Morgan’s Michael Pachter casting doubt on the number last night.

“UK retailers have been at the forefront of electronic data capture for decades, which in turn allows us to capture daily sales from 99 per cent of retailers on our panel,” said CT director Dorian Bloch, talking to GI.

“That’s over 6000 retail outlets plus all the etailers – currently 25 different store fronts.”

Pachter told VG247 overnight that Broadpoint AmTech’s Ben Schachter’s day one estimate of 7 million units for MW2 was “very reasonable… if we accept that the UK figure is accurate. My guess is that it’s not.”

Pachter himself put the day one number at around 4 million. Hit the GI link for a fuller explanation of how Chart-Track arrived at its figure.

Salem and Rio are the bestest buddies They do everything together. You can see the Army of Two: The 40th Day duo getting it on co-op stylee on EG.fr.

The lift each other up, go back-to-back, surrender together and shield themselves from the pain. It’s a beautiful thing.

The muscly shooter’s out on PS3, 360 and PSP on January 12.