Portsmouth-based Climax Studios has hired staff left jobless by the closure of Black Rock, the Split/Second and Pure developer that was formed following the sale of Climax Racing to Disney Interactive in 2006.
July's Experimental Gameplay Project theme was 'disintegrate'. It’s a verb with which designers have been working hard since the early days of the arcades, and along with the likes of Asteroids, Impossible Mission, and Super Mario Bros, it’s now given us 19 new games on the subject. Let’s take a look at five of the best.
Closer, Valmi Krishna
Can you teach an old MMOG new tricks? Jagex seems to think so. Last week the Cambridge-based developer released one of the biggest updates in Runescape’s history, filling the skies with hundreds of clan citadels. These floating fortresses not only provide a social hub for clan members to gather, but also bring a little of LittleBigPlanet’s spirit to the massively multiplayer space through clan battlefields which allow players to create and save their own custom games.
Can you teach an old MMOG new tricks? Jagex seems to think so. Last week the Cambridge-based developer released one of the biggest updates in Runescape’s history, filling the skies with hundreds of clan citadels. These floating fortresses not only provide a social hub for clan members to gather, but also bring a little of LittleBigPlanet’s spirit to the massively multiplayer space through clan battlefields which allow players to create and save their own custom games.
It turns out that there’s emulation and there’s emulation. Ars Technica’s story about a quest to build the perfect SNES emulator charts the difficulties of making software act like hardware, which purists say may require up to 3GHz of processing oomph to mirror the original 21MHz system.
US retail videogame sales hit their lowest level since October 2006 last month, according to market research firm NPD Group.
The nation's retailers saw sales fall 26 per cent year on year, from 2010's $961.3 million to $707.7 million. Every sector of the market saw declines, but the steepest falls were in sales of hardware, which slumped 29 per cent, and software, which fell 30 per cent.
Collaborating scientists and researchers from various companies and universities, including Microsoft and Disney, have detailed several powerful new 3D facial tracking solutions at Siggraph 2011.
The speakers, hailing from Disney Research labs, Microsoft Research, Carnegie Mellon University, ETH Zurich University, Texas A&M University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Technion-Israel Institue of Technology have all approached the problem from different angles.
Games have arrived on Google's new social networking service, the company announced last night.
While only a few titles are currently available, and the new feature is yet to be rolled out to all users, they are a signal not only of how seriously games are being taken not just by Google itself, but by developers. Rovio is there with Angry Birds, EA with Dragon Age Legends, PopCap with Bejeweled Blitz and, of course, Zynga, with Zynga Poker.