PS3 was the bestselling individual system in Japan during the week ended August 22 as Bandai Namco’s Another Century’s Episode R made a chart-topping debut.
It was a relatively slow seven days for hardware, with sales of all systems down week-over-week. While PS3 was the bestselling system ahead of PSP, Nintendo’s DS line of handhelds claimed an overall sales victory, moving a combined total of over 45,000 units.
Hardware sales week ended August 22 (previous week):
PS3 – 29,433 (33,057)
Introducing our latest issue, looking at Harmonix's attempt to bring musicianship to rhythm action.
Issue 219 of Edge will be reaching subscribers very soon, and will be in UK shops on Tuesday, and features our visit to Harmonix. We spend some time with Rock Band 3, a game which introduces fully functioning instruments to the rhythm action genre for the first time. Of course, strung guitars and two octave keyboards are not the only peripherals on the developer's mind, and we also take a closer look at its Kinect title, Dance Central.
Xbox Live Studios boss Jerry Johnson has stated that the company is “still squarely focused” on its core gamer audience despite moves to widen Xbox 360’s appeal.
"I know there's a lot of controversy over, are you turning your back on the core gamer? Are you just focused on the Wii bunch? My answer to that is an emphatic no," he said at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, Eurogamer reports.
Ubisoft has cut 38 staff at North Carolina-based Red Storm Entertainment, the first party studio co-founded with Tom Clancy in 1996.
The developer is best known for its work on the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six series, although production of the those franchises is also handled at other Ubisoft studios. Red Storm's most recent releases were 2007's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and America's Army: True Soldiers.
Zynga's chief game designer, Brian Reynolds, is to keynote October’s GDC Online, event organiser UBM TechWeb Game Network has announced.
Reynolds' career has spanned more than 20 years of game development at studios including Firaxis and Big Huge Games. He’s worked on titles including Civilization II, Alpha Centauri and Rise Of Nations, and most recently his first social game, FrontierVille, which reaches six million players daily.
BioShock publisher Take-Two has failed in a bid to wrestle control of www.Bioshock.com from a professional domain name purchaser known as Name Administration.
Cayman Islands-based Name Administration acquired Bioshock.com in December 2004, shortly after rumours of the original BioShock game surfaced. Take-Two didn’t file for the trademark BIOSHOCK until November 2005.
SCE UK managing director Ray Maguire isn’t expecting “massive” Move sales at launch, suggesting adoption of the motion control peripheral will grow over time through word of mouth like EyeToy did on PS2.
“Exactly as with EyeToy in the PS2 days, it's a product that needs to be sampled. You need to get your hands on it. You need to understand it. You need to try it,” the exec told Eurogamer.
Format: 360, PS3
Release: Out now
Publisher: EA
Developer: Klei Entertainment
Shank, despite the pointed pseudonym, is pure blunt instrument. Fiery of temper and thick of neck, he barrels through the game’s brisk but brutal run time like Schwarzenegger in his prime, minus the one-liners. The game from which he takes his name is equally cinematically inspired, owing as much to Tarantino’s more kinetic efforts as it does to genre trailblazers like Double Dragon. Notably, the violence is at once cartoonish, adult and satisfying.
Red Dead Redemption takes the top spot this week as Kane And Lynch 2: Dog Days debuts at number two.
SCE CEO Kaz Hirai believes PS3 can surpass PS2’s sales to become the company’s most successful console to date.
While PS2 has sold 146 million units worldwide in a decade, PlayStation boss Hirai reportedly told MCV he’s confident PS3 can achieve 150 million sales by 2016, ten years after the system’s launch.
Unity Technologies has announced that author, game designer and one-time Disney theme park attraction creator Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games, will keynote Unite 2010.
Schell Games is currently using the Unity development platform to create The Mummy Online in collaboration with Universal and Bigpoint. The MMOG is set to launch in winter 2010.
Tokyo Game Show organiser CESA has announced that key Microsoft Xbox executives are in line to deliver one of the two keynote sessions at next month’s event.
Microsoft Game Studios boss Phil Spencer and Xbox Japan head Takashi Sensui will present ‘Xbox 360's Vision and 2010's Strategy’ on the first business day of the show, on the morning of September 16, Andriasang reports.
Google's gaming evangelist, Mark DeLoura, has left his position as developer advocate for games after just four months at the company.
DeLoura joined Google in April to focus on game development and game developers as part of the web giant’s increased focus on interactive entertainment, saying at the time that he felt “very philosophically aligned” with his new employer.
Ubisoft thinks it’s unlikely that Move or Kinect will extend the lifecycle of the current console generation to the extent hoped for by platform holders Sony and Microsoft.
When asked by GamesIndustry.biz if the new motion control peripherals can extend the life of PS3 and Xbox 360 beyond another two years, European MD Alain Corre said: “I don't think so, no.
Nintendo now owns a 96 per cent stake in Japanese studio Nd Cube, developer of Wii Party, making the company an official subsidiary of the platform holder.
Nintendo owned 78 per cent of Nd Cube when it formed it as part of a joint venture with Japanese advertising firm Dentsu in 2000, but it has now significantly increased its control over the studio, it was revealed in the latest Iwata Asks interview (via Gamasutra).
The spirit of emergence is unpredictability. The player will wind up in situations they did not expect. They will find solutions you did not foresee. This will break your design, unless the design is too flexible to be broken. The situations may seem too harsh, the solutions too degenerate, but the player has had as much a hand in creating them as you have. To support emergence is to empower co-authorship, to reach towards the interactive medium’s highest calling. If unpredictability is incompatible with your design, do not pursue emergence.
Format: Wii
Release: Out now (US), out tomorrow (UK)
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Broken Rules
With a twist of the Remote, Broken Rules’ paper world pivots around its sketchy protagonist. Freefalling mineshafts become amiable corridors at 90 degrees. Tree branches form makeshift ladders, and 180 degrees later cradle the hero from falling into the sky.
Casual and mobile game developer Digital Chocolate has sued social game maker Zynga over its use of the Mafia Wars name for its popular Facebook, MySpace and iPhone title.
The firm argues that it laid claim to that name first, and alleges that Zynga has been producing its Mafia Wars games in violation of trademark, according to Courthouse News.
A surprising volume of accusations of racist intent were squared at Capcom from many corners of the internet following Resident Evil 5’s video showcase at E3 2007, and the Japanese publisher says it has learnt from the experience.
Crytek will hold a recruitment showcase this Thursday and Friday at the Apex Hotel, City Quay, Dundee.
The Crysis developer has partnered with leading Scottish games recruitment specialist Specialmove for the two-day event, which will provide an in-depth overview of the company, it’s projects and latest vacancies across its studios in the UK, Frankfurt, Kiev, Budapest, Sofia and Seoul.
Edge readers entitled to discounted entry to social game and MMO developer conference if registering before September 1.
Edge readers are entitled to a 15 per cent discount on entry to GDC Online 2010, which takes place between October 8 - 15 in Austin, Texas. Those interested must register before September 1 using the promotional code: GDCEDGE.
Channel 4 is to invest £1 million – ten per cent of its annual digital budget - in the Dundee games industry.
The money will be used to create a series of projects based on some of the broadcaster’s popular TV shows, according to Herald Scotland.
A number of former Realtime Worlds employees have hit out at the company’s senior management after the developer went into administration last week.
While the ex-staff in question acknowledged that recent RTW release APB suffered from some design flaws, they suggested that the wider management of the company was largely to blame for its collapse.
The hardcore bullet-hell shooter has scorched eyes and cramped hands for the whole of its history, with its waves of miniature foes and pulsing chaos as iconic an image of Japanese arcades as you’ll find. It’s not the most obvious fit for Apple’s iPhone. The key players at Cave’s Mobile Content Department, fresh from a superb version of Espgaluda II, would beg to differ.
Microsoft is aiming to deliver real-time multiplayer gaming between Windows Phone 7 and home platforms like Xbox 360 in the “near future”.