Short Shrift
PC players are gaming's great investors. They outspend their console brethren on regular, iterative hardware upgrades, and put in the hours tweaking settings and downloading large files rather than popping to the shops and returning with a disc. In 2011, PC gamers' patience was stretched to limit with delay after delay to some of the year's biggest games.
Despite the boundaries between genres becoming increasingly blurred, if 2011 belonged to any one strand of gaming, it was the shooter.
We're signing off for the Christmas break today, so this will be the last main post of 2011.
However, we've made sure that there will be plenty for you to read over the festive period in between mince pies and sherry.
Expect to see round-ups of the year's biggest reviews and most important events over the next week, including our looks at Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft's years, mobile, free-to-play, politics, and the best soundbytes.
Every year, the standard of games I write about here on The Friday Game seems to get a little better, and 2011’s been a wonderful case in point. Here are some of my favourites from the last 12 months.
Sony has revealed line-up and prices for the European launch of Vita next February 22.
As previously reported, the console will come six AR Play cards and a voucher for three free AR games.
The full software line-up is as follows:
GameStop has apologised for wrongly informing customers that The Last Guardian, Team Ico's in-production PlayStation game, had been cancelled via an automated email.
The game was removed from the company's website and in-store systems at the same time that the email was sent.
Sony quickly moved to quash the rumour, senior director of corporate communications Patrick Seybold issuing a statement saying this wasn't the case.
Sony has revealed that its 32GB memory card for Vita won't be available in Europe and other PAL territories at launch.
The cards come in 4GB, 8GB, 16GB and 32GB flavours, but the largest one will only be released with the console in the US and Japan.
It will, however, come bundled with six AR Play cards and a voucher code to download three AR games for free. The games in question are Table Football, Cliff Diving and Fireworks.
Jeff Gamon, an executive producer at EA Partners, confesses that he didn’t learn the etymology of Syndicate’s exotic-sounding codename until just recently. “The name Project RedLime came from the first page of the rough draft of the script,” he says. “A side character was heard on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor saying: ‘Sell RedLimes at 157’. And that’s it. The name stuck.”
Our first look at Cyanide's Game Of Thrones RPG has been a long time coming - it's due for release for Xbox 360, PS3 and PC early next year.
Playdead's striking monochrome adventure Limbo is now available on the Mac App Store, with a Steam release to follow on January 13.
So, assuming you either make games or want to, what’s your model for how to do that? Pull a team together, make a game and pop it up on Steam? Upload it to an app store? Make a demo and sell a full-priced version? Hope to hit the wave and strike it lucky?
You’re probably making a huge, but fairly common, error: you think you’re in the business of making stuff.
Unity Technologies is launching a public beta of its 3.5 update for the Unity development platform, along with a developer preview of its upcoming Flash support.
The top 200 apps on the iPhone App Store generated four times as much revenue last month as those on the Android Market, according to a new study.
The report, by mobile analytics firm Distmo, also found that iPad apps made twice as much money as their Android Market equivalent. It also shows a dramatic shift towards freemium, with half of the top 200 iPhone apps, and 65 per cent of Android apps, are free-to-play and supported by in-app purchasing.
Sony has released a free update, version 2.02, for PS3 racer Gran Turismo 5, more than a year after the game's release.
The update adds the ability to change wheels on standard cars, and ten free coupons for tuning tweaks in GT Auto. Also included is the Family Upgrade, which enables the DLC released in October to be used on multiple accounts on the same console. New paid DLC is also available, with four vehicles included.
Square Enix's RPG sequel Final Fantasy XIII-2 is the new number one in the Japanese all-formats software chart after selling 525,000 copies in its first week on shelves.
With the Xbox 360 version failing to crack the top 20, it was left to the PS3 release to unseat last week's number one, Monster Hunter Tri G, which slips to number two.
Weapon Of Choice maker Mommy's Best Games has released a co-op shooter called Game Type to highlight the difficulty of finding Indie Games on 360's new dashboard, featuring Hoodie Girl's battle against the "evil" MediaBall.
The 22nd edition of the game development competition attracts record game submissions, with contributions from Markus "Notch" Persson, QWOP maker Bennett Foddy and Traal maker Jonathan Whiting.
Based on the theme of "Alone", the competition took place between December 16 and 19, attracting 891 entries in total, up from 599 in August's competition and 352 in April. 717 entries were in the 48-hour main competition, and the 72-hour Jam took 174.
Videogames were originally built from blocks, and some of them never got over it. Can you blame them? From the pixel to the tile to the cube – it counts, even when it’s built from polygons rather than the more honest, but exotic, voxels – and from the ammo crate to the tetronimo, blocks are as good a basic unit of currency as the medium is likely to get.
Allods Online publisher Gala Networks has announced that its gPotato gaming portals have now amassed over 20 million registered users worldwide.
Gala doesn't disclose active user figures, however, so it's not clear how many of those registrations are still seeing regular use.
Gala Networks Europe played a significant part in the company's overall growth, accounting for seven million, or 35 per cent, of those users alone.
Dead Island’s promotional trailer, created by Glasgow-based studio Axis Animation, made a splash back in February. Partly because the trailer displayed unusually high craftsmanship, partly because its story of a child’s death sparked an industry-wide debate on tasteful advertising, and partly because the promotion failed to include actual footage of the game. But did the sexy tease promote a comparable experience?
