Metro 2033 has pushed Xbox 360 graphical standards in a way that hasn't been "done before", according to THQ's head of communications Huw Beynon.
Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment has said it plans to release at least two downloadable episodes to expand the title this year.
"I think it'll depend a lot on the audience, but certainly we want to -- if we're successful -- we want to do a large 'Season 2', if you will, at some point," said Remedy managing director Matias Myllyrinne. "Right now, I'm not allowed to say what we're doing exactly this year. But we're going to have more than one episode come out this year."
Blizzard's Rob Pardo has said the company could make its upcoming Battle.Net publishing and multiplayer platform available to third parties.
"It's something that we've definitely always talked about," Pardo told the Escapist. "The problem for us is that it takes a lot of work from our other teams."
LA Noire is a unique open-world detective title that doesn’t “have a point of reference from other games”, according to Rockstar.
In other words, though it’s being published by Rockstar and takes place in an open city (a near street-for-street recreation of LA circa 1947), those expecting GTA to turn up in a fedora have been following a bad lead.
Microsoft will release Crackdown 2 worldwide this July, the publisher has confirmed.
Announced last June, the Xbox 360 exclusive will hit North America on July 6, Asia, Australia and New Zealand on July 8, and the UK a day later.
Unlike the 2007 original, which was developed by Realtime Worlds, the sequel is being created at fellow Scottish studio Ruffian Games.
Out tomorrow, blowing the case wide open on LA Noire, Rockstar's off the record, on the QT, detective thriller.
We travelled to LA to meet developer Team Bondi and play the game that isn't, contrary to widespread assumption, just GTA in a fedora. Yes, it's open-world and features its share of gunplay and fisticuffs, but LA Noire is rather more about sleuthing and casework.
Activision Blizzard’s Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has become the second highest selling game in UK history.
The title has overtaken Take-Two’s Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and now sits behind Nintendo’s Dr Kawashima’s Brain Training, according to sales monitor Chart-Track.
Gavin Cheshire, vice president of Codemasters Studios, has told us that negative user experiences will put people off using Sony’s PSP.
Asked about the handheld’s future, he told us: “Well, speaking as a person who bought a PSP, the problem was that I always thought, because it was a better screen than iPod’s, that I’d be doing more with it. But it was such a bollocking useless waste of space; just getting stuff on it was ridiculous. That was its downfall.”
Officially, the 2010 edition of the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas began on January 7. Unofficially, however, the show kicked off the moment that James Cameron’s record-breaking hit Avatar landed in cinemas around the globe. Anyone who was paying attention to the pre-show buzz for CES knew that 3D TV sets were going to be heavily hyped at the event. But there was a certain doubtfulness that accompanied the advance coverage, an underlying assumption that TV manufacturers were simply making a cash grab.
PlayStation Home director Jack Buser has revealed that the online service now commands a 12 million strong user base.
The 3D virtual space launched on PS3 in December 2008. Its population stood at six million in June of last year and at ten million in December 2009.
Computers don’t do chaos particularly well. They don’t like randomness, or clutter, or anything that can’t be reduced down into a logical pattern. It’s part of the reason why games that attempt hyper-realism can end up collapsing under the weight of their own pretension – because chaos is a fundamental part of real life.
Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII jumped straight in at number one on the UK all formats chart during the week ended March 13.
Sales monitor Chart-Track said that the standard PS3 version claimed 45 per cent of overall sales, versus 43 per cent for the Xbox 360 one. The PS3 special edition accounted for nine per cent of total sales and the 360 one for four per cent. Strangely, those figures adds up to 101 per cent.
A former employee at defunct RTS developer Ensemble Studios has blamed its closure on the developer's crunch culture and work addiction.
"The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make," said Paul Bettner while speaking at GDC.
"Microsoft is a public company, they answer to their shareholders, and we were simply too expensive."
Sony has said that its UMD format for the PlayStation Portable is far from dead, describing it as "alive and well".
During a session for idependant developers at GDC last week, the company explained that it had no plans to stop supporting the format. PSP games will continue to be available digitally and in UMD format at retailers.
Vince Zampella and Jason West have signed up to be represented by top Hollywood talent agency, Creative Artists Agency.
West and Zampella were unceremoniously ousted from Infinity Ward under accusations of insubordination by owner Activision. The pair responded with a US$36 million lawsuit claiming a breach of contract had occurred.
Following the NPD Group putting total February Xbox 360 sales at 422,000 units, Microsoft has hailed the results as the best for the month "in Xbox 360 history".
While Microsoft's console out paced rivals, BioShock 2 also topped software sales< at 563,000 copies on Xbox 360.
Splash Damage CEO Paul Wedgwood has said that the studio has been working on its upcoming FPS Brink from a "platform agnostic" perspective.
He said the studio "set out from the very beginning wanting to design the game that worked well for all three platforms."
Veteran game designer Sid Meier gave the keynote of the Game Developers Conference Friday morning, and dispensed lessons he’s learned about player psychology. He described the “unholy alliance” between the player’s suspension of disbelief and the designer’s willingness to defy their own logic and the laws of math to satisfy the player’s expectations.
David Hego, art director on Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham Aslyum discussed the use of art and lighting within the game to direct the player experience and maintain a consistent and believable—yet still definitively Batman—game world at GDC.
Publisher Ubisoft has reportedly recalled the collector's edition of Silent Hunter 5: Battle Of The Atlantic in Germany.
The move was made because the localised version of Ubisoft Romania's submarine sim didn’t have World War II symbols properly removed or edited in accordance with German law, according to German website ComputerBase (via Blues News).
A number of ex-EALA developers have announced the formation of a new studio, San Francisco Bay Area-based Supergiant Games.
The independent developer is currently working on a game for digital download platforms that it hopes to release in 2011. It’s showing the title off at the ongoing GDC.
The twelfth annual Independent Games Festival and the tenth annual Game Developers Choice awards at GDC offered few surprises, but plenty of good feeling, with the crowd enthusiastically responding to the success of the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game/Excellence in Design winner Monaco, developed by Pocketwatch Games, the Lifetime Achievement award for John Carmack, and the Pioneer award going to Gabe Newell.
The full list of IGF award winners:
Codemasters Studios vice president Gavin Cheshire has revealed that the company’s currently at work on a sequel to last year’s Colin McRae - Dirt 2.
The executive made the first mention of Dirt 3 during an interview featured in the latest issue of Edge, E213, which hits UK newsagents on March 16 and should be in subscribers' hands now.
Best known for his work as the composer, sound director and producer on the Silent Hill series for Konami, Akira Yamaoka is now working at Grasshopper Manufacture on an unannounced title. Delivering a talk that offered no hints to his future direction, Yamaoka considered the methods that he’s used in sound design to help enhance players’ connection to his games.
Nintendo’s DS was the bestselling system in the US last month, moving 613,000 units, while Microsoft’s Xbox 360 leapfrogged Wii to take the top home console slot with 422,000 sales.
Both systems achieved monthly personal bests, with Nintendo saying that the “DS family of systems set a new US record for portable video game sales in the month of February”, and Microsoft noting that it enjoyed “the biggest February in Xbox 360 history”.