Monthly Archives: December 2011

Nintendo and Sony are fighting an uphill battle against the staggering popularity of smartphone devices these days. But he and another analyst say there’s reason for handheld gamers to hold out hope. More »

A new controller unveiled on YouTube this week works entirely by monitoring the impulses of any four muscles. They’ve even released a video of a user beating a level of Super Mario Bros with it.
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Ubisoft’s released a new I Am Alive trailer, giving advice on how to manage the best of the situation you’re currently into in the game. Basically, don’t breathe the dust without a mask, get a map, climb up for air and be charitable now and then. Got it? The Ubi Shanghai title launches this winter for PSN and XBLA. Get the trailer below.

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Double Fine’s confirmed it’s to bring Stacking to PC “soon.” The news is, amazingly, brought to us via Russian stacking dolls in an acceptance speech for the game winning Best Downloadable Game from X-Play for the console version earlier this year. I blame Double Fine’s Tim Schafer and Lee Perry for what its just scarred my head with.

Video’s past the break. Thanks, RPS.

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The latest End of Nations Wafront’s gone live from Trion, featuring this time US community manager Lance James. Among other subjects, he talks about PvP and how much aspirations it has for it. Get the video below the break.

The MMO launches next year.

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Square’s confirmed this afternoon it’ll bring over Army Corp of Hell as a launch title for the EU release of PlayStation Vita, The RPG, which will come with touch support for front and back enables you to command a goblin army of up to 100 at war. Get the shots below the break.

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Remedy’s confirmed it will be the publisher of Alan Wake for PC when it launches on Steam early next year.

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Sony will have shipped 700,000 units of PlayStation Vita in Japan ahead of the handheld’s launch in the country tomorrow, one Japanese media outlet is saying.

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’1337′ at Battlefield 3? EA reckons you might be, hence why it’s throwing a contest for all BF3 players. Known as the ‘Only in Battlefield 3′ challenge, players are asked to upload HD gameplay of awesome gameplay moments taken from the shooter. The winner of the challenge will get a holiday for two to Stockholm and be able to meet developers DICE. There’s an example of some of these moments in action below the break. There’s more on the contest at Shack.

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Rovio has reportedly said in a Finnish newspaper this morning it’s to plan an IPO for the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in the next two years. Speaking to Tekniikka&Talous weekly, CEO Peter Vesterbacka said the Angry Birds company was aiming to have market capitalization similar to Disney. “That is the target. There is no reason why we should not be able to build a company of that size,” he said (via Reuters), adding revenues from the company for this year would be $100 million compared to $10 million in 2010.

IndieGames has posted a trailer of IGF finalist StarDrone, due to arrive on Vita in February. At the game’s core, you need to collect more stellar matter with your spaceship to the point you’re travelling “at the speed of light.” Developer Beatshapers has confirmed the game will use front and rear touch controls. Get the trailer below the break.

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Hideo Kojima, ever the teasing master he is, has posted two shots showing off the new Fox Engine, one of which is from a prototype of his next game, codenamed Project Ogre.

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AGB has it. See the digital box you’ll be looking at early next year from XBLA and get just the teeniest bit excited. Word to the wise: you’re going to see a big feature from us on the Remedy effort on Monday. Look out for it then.

ArenaNet has said the closed beta for Guild Wars 2 will start today. Speaking on a Reddit thread, system designer Jon Peter said there was no way in for the public, with testers already handpicked by ArenaNet. “We will officially enter Closed Beta Testing this Friday. It will be marked with an increase in our pool of testers. To clarify, this phase of testing is still under NDA and is not open to the public,” he said.

The NCsoft MMO is expected to launch next year. Thanks, IGN.

Yoshinori Ono and Katsuhiro Harada are coming together with Street Fighter x Tekken, a unique collaboration. The pair spoke to Johnny Cullen and Alex Donaldson in London earlier this month.

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“We were making up a lot of procedures as we went along, and we decided that the NPCs (Non Playable Characters) should talk and we would have to figure out how to make them talk (using motion captured cutscenes, something that had never really been done before, at least not on the scale we were doing it). So we decided that the game’s protagonist would not talk, partly to aid people identifying with him, but mostly because we had so many other problems to solve and this did not seem like a major issue. We started to discuss introducing a talking lead character when working on Vice City, but it was a lot of work. While the structure of GTA3 may seem obvious or natural now, and the use of cutscenes made in the game’s engine that look and feel like the game may seem simple and easy, it really was not the case back in 2001 when we had to figure out all of these things for the first time. Oh and in San Andreas, CJ calls Claude a mute because he does not talk and CJ finds this unnerving.” – Rockstar on why it went with a mute protagonist in Claude for Grand Theft Auto III.

GTA III 10th Anniversary Edition is out now for iOS and Android.

PopCap has quietly updated the iOS version of Plants vs Zombie to version 1.9, adding in two new ways to play.

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The dust has settled over the final battles of Sony Online Entertainment’s long-lived Star Wars Galaxies. The subscription-based MMO’s servers signed off today after eight years of operation, the closure triggered by the expiration of a contract, this month’s launch of BioWare’s The Old Republic, and questions of financial sustainability. The much-treasured universe went down fighting, in the last throes of the Galactic Civil War. So long, Star Wars Galaxies, and thanks for all the mouse droids.

Talk surrounding the looming Zynga initial public offering has the social games publisher asking $10 for each of its 100 million shares.

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A little radar blip for trade geeks, courtesy of Gamasutra: EA has announced a change in its NASDAQ ticker label. As of open trading on the morning of December 20, ERTS will be no more, replaced by the shorter EA, in line with the publisher’s acronym rebranding.