Unity Technologies has acquired Canadian animation technology firm Mécanim, the company's first acquisition since development on the engine began in 2001.
The Unity3D development platform creator announced the acquisition, and subsequent creation of Unity Canada, today at its Unite 11 conference, in San Francisco.
Mecanim's animation technology will be closely integrated with Unity's game engine, providing users with an advanced animation toolkit.
Amazon has today announced the Kindle Fire, a full-colour, seven-inch tablet running on Android that retails for less than half the cheapest model iPad at just $199.
The online retailer unveiled the upgraded version of its Kindle e-reader at a press conference this afternoon. While the Kindle Fire is noticeably underpowered compared to the market-leading iPad - with a smaller screen and no 3G, camera or microphone - it comes with free cloud storage and a 30-day subscription to the Amazon Prime shipping and streaming service.
Crash Mode comes screeching back in a downloadable title that feels utterly out of place both on a home console and in the wider Burnout series. The loud and proud attitude of Paradise is the first thing you notice has been eschewed in Crash, a game with none of the flash or bang of a mode that’s meant to be all about controlling chaos.
Intelligent Systems, developer of the beloved strategy series Advance Wars, will release its first 3DS game, Hiku-Osu, on the Japanese eShop next week.
In Hiku-Osu - which is to be published by Nintendo - players are cast as Maro, tasked with clearing his town of a block-like toy called Hiku-Osu.
David Cage, head of Heavy Rain developer Quantic Dream, has revealed his past struggles in releasing his games in the United States, saying: "The US has a problem with my games."
Speaking to Develop, Cage pinned the blame on US marketing departments, who he said "have this image of their market being gun-loving rednecks. It's completely wrong."
Sony Ericsson has announced a partnership with Square Enix that will see 2010 console download Lara Croft And The Guardian Of Light released exclusively for Xperia Play in November, with more of the publisher's titles to follow in the months to come.
Last week, someone asked the Games For Change community how best to market a free web game game designed to promote careers in the nuclear energy industry. "Heated and lively discussion" ensued, according to the Experience Points blog, because nuclear power is not exactly in fashion these days, the assumption being that the 'change' in 'games for change' is meant to be good.
Sony has revamped its PlayStation 3 video on demand service, with a vastly improved AI and greatly simplified discoverability, and renamed it Video Unlimited.
As before, Video Unlimited offers a selection of films and TV shows for rent or purchase, in both standard and high definition. Now, a bar on the right of the screen suggests related videos, linked by genre, setting, actors and more.
Gran Turismo 5's next significant content update, Spec 2.0, will be released next month, Kazunori Yamauchi, CEO of developer Polyphony Digital, has confirmed.
Yamauchi revealed the news on Twitter, saying: "GT fans, thanks for waiting...The GT5 Spec 2.0 update is coming [in] the third week of October, with DLC following a week later."
Despite the announcement, to date no information has been revealed on what new features the update will contain, what the DLC is, or how much it will cost.
Players of the browser game Planet Hunters have helped in the discovery of two possible new planets outside Earth's solar system.
Since its launch 2009, Nasa's Kepler space telescope has been taking images every thirty seconds of a group of over 150,000 stars near the Cygnus constellation in the hope of finding new habitable planets. It has collected far too much data for the Kepler team to sort through themselves, which is where Planet Hunters' 40,000 registered users come in.
Diablo III is a game of revolutionary shifts and instant gratification: an RPG built for an audience that craves an almost impossible combination of excess, depth and immediacy. It’s revolutionary in that it seeks to entirely rewrite the fundamentals of character crafting, and it’s gratifying because despite those changes it will feel like you’ve been doing things this way forever, from your first click to your last.
If you're wondering what Media Molecule is working on after LittleBigPlanet, and you're an experienced programmer, here's your chance. It's a fantastic opportunity - MM is as multi-disciplinary a team as you get in games, so as a programmer, you'd be working across every technical aspect of its next project.
Over a million players have registered for free-to-play browser MMOG Drakensang Online, publisher Bigpoint has announced.
The milestone has been reached in less than two months and despite the fact that Drakensang Online is still in beta. With one update already launched, Bigpoint says it continues to add more content to the game, with PvP features imminent and more in the pipeline.
Skullgirls, the 2D indie fighting game that was due for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network this year, has been delayed until early 2012.
In a post on the game's official blog, lead designer Peter Bartholow explains that the addition of several new features means Skullgirls will not be released until the first three months of next year.
Kazuma Kujo, director of cancelled PlayStation 3 game Disaster Report 4, has said that the March Tohoku earthquake was not the driving factor behind Irem's decision to cancel the game. Instead, he says the team's inability to finish the project on time led to the publisher pulling the plug.
On Monday, Sega applied for a European trademark for Yakuza Dead Souls.
While several games in the Yakuza series are yet to head west - PS3's Kenzan, which was set in the 16th century, and PSP title Black Panther - the name points strongly to a western localisation of zombie spin-off Yakuza Of The End.
UK broadcaster ITV has apologised following the revelation that it had used footage from a fan-made Arma 2 video in a documentary about links between former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the IRA.
Glitch, a browser-based MMOG by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck studio, has officially launched.
World Of Warcraft has been translated into its tenth language, Brazilian Portuguese, publisher Blizzard has announced.
The language pack, which will be a free download to existing players, will also see a fully localised retail release in Europe. The official World Of Warcraft website will also be available in Brazilian Portuguese, as will the game's second and third expansions, Wrath Of The Lich King and Cataclysm.
Film studio Lionsgate has optioned the rights to create a movie based on Deep Silver's zombie action RPG Dead Island, with the game’s award-winning announcement trailer set to "serve as its primary creative inspiration”.
Apple looks set to unveil the much-rumoured iPhone 5 next week after inviting media to a "special event" called "Let's talk iPhone" at its Cupertino, California headquarters.
While an Apple spokesperson wouldn’t provide further details about the October 4 event when contacted by Reuters, it has been rumoured for months that the company will announce its latest iPhone in early October before rolling out the device later in the month.
BioWare has opened its first non-US facility in Galway, Ireland to offer round the clock customer support for Star Wars: The Old Republic.
The customer service centre was initially expected to employ 200 staff, but the company said that figure will double in time for the MMO's just-announced pre-Christmas release.
As the lead designer on Battlefield 1943, Patrick Liu is well versed in creating a fluid, perfectly balanced multiplayer gameplay. But as the producer on Battlefield 3, can he call on everything he's learned to create a truly memorable singleplayer campaign as well? We sat down wth Liu to discuss where Battlefield 3 sits in relation to other games in the series and what we can expect when its released later this year.
UK broadcaster ITV last night used footage from Arma 2 in a documentary about links between deposed Lybian dictator Muammar Gaddafi and the IRA.
The documentary, Exposure - Gaddafi And The IRA, used footage from a fan-made video of Bohemia Interactive's PC shooter that showed a helicopter being shot down, and passed it off as an IRA video from 1988.
Speaking to Gamasutra, Bohemia CEO Marek Spanel said he had no idea the clip was to be used in a documentary and had not been contacted by ITV.
"There’s a saying here in venture capital, “You aren’t anybody until you have failed three times.” Which works out for me, because I am the most-spectacular failure in games industry history."