Microsoft has officially unveiled Nuads, the Kinect-powered interactive advertising platform on which we first reported last week.
As Microsoft's trademark filing suggested, Nuads - shorthand for Natural User-Interface Advertising - is a platform that will see interactive advertisements on the Xbox 360, a move which Microsoft's Mark Kroese says in a blog post "will change television as we know it - forever."
Paul Cuisset first came to prominence as the creative director of now defunct French studio Delphine Software and is the auteur behind the rotoscoped adventure Flashback, the best selling French game of all time. Now helming Vector Cell, Cuisset's latest project is Amy, a PSN (and eventually XBLA, too) survival horror title in which you must protect the titular Amy, an autistic girl with mysterious powers, from marauding infected townsfolk.
Parliament saw fresh calls for a dedicated Games Tax Relief for the UK videogame industry today after an MP urged culture minister Ed Vaizey to review the issue "as a matter of priority."
Online doesn't much figure in the success story of DS and Wii, so spare a thought for poor old DSiWare. Forever closeted by Nintendo's terrible online store, it is a swamp of chopped-up boxed games, the usual Gameloft suspects, and half-hearted iPhone ports. As its best moments transfer to the 3DS shop, it would be wrong to call DSiWare a service in decline: it never really got going.
While Far Cry may be synonymous with open-world tropical playgrounds, spare a thought for Stockholm-based Avalanche Studios whose Just Cause titles provide destructive holidaying destinations of equal appeal. Just Cause sweetens the deal with a grappling hook, too. Now Avalanche is expanding its operation to the US, opening a studio in New York and starting a new project.
While Far Cry may be synonymous with open-world tropical playgrounds, spare a thought for Stockholm-based Avalanche Studios whose Just Cause titles provide destructive holidaying destinations of equal appeal. Just Cause sweetens the deal with a grappling hook, too. Now Avalanche is expanding its operation to the US, opening a studio in New York and starting a new project.
Digital storefronts are having an inexorable effect on the common videogame: names are ever-blander. Touch Grind BMX? At least it's not called Angry Bikes.
The game belies such drabness. With one finger on the handlebars and another on the rear wheel, you guide a riderless bike through linear courses filled with jumps that may be gnarly. The smooth framerate make things very easy on the eye, and when the perspective starts shifting the camera doesn't miss a thing. The magic, of course, is in the tricks.
Swedish developer Avalanche Studios has explained its choice of New York City as the location for its US studio, telling us that it was more cost-effective than setting up on the west coast.
The studio announced its US operation, Avalanche Studios New York, last week. An accompanying press release explained that the new studio would focus on "large-scale, online-enabled original IP", with its first project an unannounced triple-A title to release on next-generation hardware in 2014.