Capcom cancelled what would have been Mega Man's 3DS debut in July, and former head of production Keiji Inafune apologised to fans soon after despite leaving Capcom last October. Speaking to 4Gamer - translated by Game Blurb - Inafune reveals that he reached out to the publisher in the hope of saving the game. He explains that, when he told Capcom he was leaving, he offered to stay on as a contractor to finish projects he had started.
There’s a line that should be drawn between encouraging players to make a game better, and relying on them to make it playable. Or is there? Even that, it seems, is for the Trackmaniacs to decide. Visit the official forums for TrackMania 2 and what you’ll see is a game being documented more than discussed.
The guns – all 17 million of them – may be the most obvious draw, but it’s the setting of Pandora that ultimately saves Borderlands from a life spent aping Halo. The planet’s as craggy and hostile as any Forerunner ring-world, but it’s built to serve humour rather than dry, rattling grandeur, and its dramas are personal, for the most part, rather than apocalyptic.
“Historically, however, video games have shied away from game designs that required social organisation. The industry has long believed that organisation of people in that way doesn’t scale, and that while its fine for sessional games like a Wii Sports party, it just gets too complicated to keep a long term game going for most players to bother.”
Players of the online game Foldit have helped discover the structure of an enzyme that had the scientific community stumped for a decade, representing a significant step forward in attempts to cure retroviral diseases like AIDS.
The topic of ‘personal identity’ in philosophy is a knotty one, as Julian Baggini’s recent book, The Ego Trick, shows. What guarantees that you are the same person from one day to the next, or from one decade to the next? Some thinkers favour a story about psychological consistency, which others attempt to challenge with fantastical parables. Suppose that, through some magic sci-fi process, you suddenly underwent ‘fission’, so that there were now two identical human beings who shared all your thoughts and memories. Which one would be ‘you’? Both?
Deep Silver's Dead Island is the UK all-formats number one for the second week in a row.
The open-world zombie holds its lead over last week's number two, Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, which stays in second place despite sales falling by 52 per cent.
Scribblenauts, the inventive DS puzzle game released in the west in 2009, has won the Game Designers Award at the Tokyo Game Show's Japan Game Awards.
Here’s an FPS which lives up to its name, if nothing else. It is indeed hard, and, in being so unforgiving, the messy drudgery of its combat and cheap instant deaths often see you blasted back to the last checkpoint. If only they had called it Rewarding Progress and extrapolated the design from there.
Videogame designer Jenova Chen was driving when he first noticed the grass fields. Arriving in America from the modernist steel-and-glass sprawl of Shanghai, he’d never seen anything like the verdant landscape beside the interstate highway in California. He stopped his car, grabbed his camera and started clicking. “It was like the desktop wallpaper of Windows XP,” he remembers. “Green grass fields stretching to infinity. I saw a windmill farm – something I’d never seen before in my life.
Rock Paper Shotgun has spotted that Portal is free on Steam. It's a limited offer, set to expire on September 20, and is part of Valve's educational initiative, Learn With Portals, which aims drive student interest in STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and maths - by getting them to create Portal levels.