What’s Jade Raymond best known for? Probably not her greatest, if still unproven, achievement, which is to establish a major new game development studio for Ubisoft in Toronto. Nor for heading its prized Splinter Cell series.
The UK's videogame rating system has been revised by the government to bring it in line with European standards from July.
As such, games released in the UK will receive a PEGI rating from the Video Standards Council (VSC) as opposed to the British Board of Film Classification. The BBFC will still deal with games that are considered to contain gross violence or sexual material, however.
Post-grads: can you remember much about your final thesis? The Arcades Project? Something to do with Kracauer? A quote or two from good old Richard Feynman? It’s probably a bit of a hazy collage to you by now - a few scattered snapshots of short-term loan books and Post-it notes, a jumble of photocopier cards and cups of grainy Maxwell House.
The announcement that Japanese social gaming titans Gree and DeNA are to phase out the lucrative "complete gacha" mechanism will hit both companies hard, analysts say, with one describing it as "a disaster of historic proportions" for Japan's social game industry.
Facebook has announced that it plans to launch App Center, a hub that will host apps for the social network, as well as iOS, Android, mobile web and desktop apps that make use of Facebook.
App Center will be available via the web, and Facebook's iOS and Android applications, and will introduce paid-for apps to the network for the first time, providing developers with an new revenue option beyond in-app purchases.
Recently, I have spent a great deal of my time thinking about prototyping, and as one of the faculty members of Marc LeBlanc’s Game Design Workshop at GDC, I am privileged to get to help other game developers think about it too. I am a big believer in the process of breaking down a design to find the element that you need to prove, disentangling it from the rest of the game design, and making quick-and-dirty prototypes that help you find the engaging core of a system so that you can iterate it forward. But this process has limits.
Japanese fashion retailer Uniqlo is launching a collection of 10 t-shirts to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Metal Gear Solid series.
Sony Corporation was hit with losses of ¥456.7 billion (£3.56bn) in the fiscal year ending March 31, with the consumer products and services division, which includes Sony's PS3 business, reporting an operating loss of ¥229.8 billion (£1.8bn).
Massive Joe's previous title, Age Of Monsters - Rock Paper Scissors brought the lavish Saturday morning cartoon aesthetic of Emmy-winner Jeff Matsuda to a classic game design. Follow-up Escape From Age Of Monsters keeps the style, but layers Matsuda's art and the guitars of The Binges over the endless runner genre.
As with the TV adaptation of Robert Kirkman’s nihilistically bleak comic book series, it’s not so much the writing in The Walking Dead that compels as the raw, vivid scenario. One or two dramatic highlights aside, the dialogue is tin-eared, the characterisation simplistic and the voice acting mostly unconvincing. Then again, those still watching Rick Grimes and his irritating spouse agonise weekly over the whereabouts of their errant son will be grateful for the small mercy that there’s no Lori equivalent here.
New Star Soccer may not be reliant on in-app purchases, but their presence here holds up a mirror to the modern game. As with those clubs bankrolled by Russian and Saudi Arabian petrodollars, spending money is no guarantee of success on the pitch, but it’s more likely to speed your progress from also-ran to superstar. In a simulation of an increasingly corporate sport it’s almost certainly no accident that the in-game currency you’re rewarded with for your real-world investment is named ‘star bux’.