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September 05, 2011

Game Designers Award panel announced

Last year the Japan Game Awards - the ministry of economy, trade and industry's annual celebration of the country's videogame industry - gave its inaugural Game Designers Award to Heavy Rain. The award is chosen by 12 of the nation's most respected developers, and the panel charged with selecting this year's winner has been announced. And it's quite a list, headed by Masahiro Sakurai and including Fumito Ueda, Ryutaro Takahashi, Hideki Kamiya, Jin Fusijawa, and Shinji Mikami. Any game released in Japan between April 1, 2010 and March 31, 2011 is eligible, with the winner to be announced at the Japan Game Awards ceremony on September 15, the first day of the Tokyo Game Show.
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/09/05/game_designers_award/
Andriasang


Kojima reveals Peace Walker HD online co-op

The Metal Gear Solid creator took to Twitter this morning to reveal that the upcoming PS3 remake of 2010 PSP title Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker will support online co-op for up to four players, and runs at a solid 60 frames per second. The game is being released as part of the Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, which also contains Metal Gear Solids 2 and 3, plus the first two MSX games, and is due for release in the west in November.
http://twitter.com/#!/HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN/status/110642620618903552
Twitter


Opinion: Why all the violence?

Violence is too often used as a crutch in game design, posits Randy Smith, but is it distasteful per se?

I sometimes wonder how the number of virtual people killed by the average gamer compares to levels of historical violence. 
For example, do we off as many people in our gaming careers as have been murdered in real life, ever? How about just in the US since 1960? That would be about 880,000 murders, so if you play 50 violent games in your life, you’d only need to kill 17,600 people in each to reach that. Seems like some of us might be close. Has a real person ever killed even close to 17,600?

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Sony slams Microsoft content policy

Says terms demanding feature and release date parity are holding back creativity for the sake of "protecting an inferior technology."

Sony has for the first time spoken about Microsoft's content and release policy, accusing its rival platform holder of "protecting an inferior technology" and warning: "Publishers are getting the living crap kicked out of them by Microsoft."

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Out There: Deus Ex Easter eggs, Driver tunes

Transhuman nods to 4chan and Demolition Man, and do game reviewers need to be good at games?

Edge columnist Tadhg Kelly discusses games as belief engines, dubbing the sublime experiences you can get with games 'thauma'. It's a good word - thaumaturgy relates to saints' ability to work miracles. "Thauma is more than immersion, gameplay, rewards or story," Kelly says. "You infer qualities of the game that are not actually there.

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Deus Ex holds UK top spot

Square Enix title retains number one despite falling sales as Bodycount gets off to a dismal start.

Eidos Montreal's Deus Ex: Human Revolution is the UK all-formats number one for a second week in succession.

The Square Enix-published title retains top spot despite its sales declining by 46 per cent week on week, with the newly released Driver San Francisco making its debut in second spot.

Recent chart king Zumba Fitness slips another place to third, but the biggest shock of the week is Bodycount: Codemasters' shooter enters the chart in a lowly 36th place.

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Dragon Quest X confirmed for Wii U

Online RPG, announced for Wii in 2008, now also headed to its successor with cross-platform play.

Dragon Quest X will be released for Nintendo's Wii U, Square Enix has confirmed.

The publisher revealed the news at a press conference in Tokyo earlier today, confirming that the next iteration of the enormously popular RPG will be headed not only to Nintendo's ageing Wii as previously announced but its successor as well.

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September 03, 2011

News round-up August 30-September 2

Team Bondi falls, while COD rises - a week in videogame news.

Tuesday

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September 02, 2011

Modern Warfare 3: multiplayer details and Elite pricing announced

Infinity Ward kills the killstreak and puts greater emphasis on tactics and teamwork.

Within a cavernous hangar on LA’s Hercules campus, the place where eccentric visionary Howard Hughes built his Spruce Goose aircraft, Activision unveiled its own ambitious vision of the future last night. Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is getting a range of updates, improvements and additional features, as well as deep COD Elite functionality – much of it free, the rest for a $49.99 annual subscription.

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Avalanche: DRM helps no one

Christofer Sundberg says developers and publishers need to stop complaining about piracy and punishing legitimate consumers.

Christofer Sundberg, founder of Just Cause developer Avalanche Studios, believes that DRM does nothing but punish legitimate customers, and is far from the solution to PC piracy that publishers proclaim it to be.

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Out There: FemShep's voice, first 3D film

She does "great grunting", first 3D film was made in 1972.

We're a little late with this one, but in this podcast, writer Tom Bissell talks to the New Yorker about his piece on Mass Effect FemShep voice actor Jennifer Hale, including an interview with the voice herself. "She does great grunting sounds," says Bissell.

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Now recruiting on Edge Jobs

Find your future at Crytek, Codemasters or Ninja Theory on the game industry's premier recruitment board.

Currently available on Edge Jobs are a variety of roles at some of the world's premier game studios. Crytek is advertising a variety of artist, programmer and technical roles at its UK office, formerly called Free Radical Design.

Codemasters is similarly skilling up, advertising lead artist, level and game designers, producers and programmer posts.

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Eidos Montreal planned on more Deus Ex hubs

Plans for more Montreal, Upper Heng Sha, and India dropped due to the work involved: "We could fill an Ikea catalogue with all the furniture we designed."

Eidos Montreal, developer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, has told us that it originally planned for more city hubs in its chart-topping RPG shooter.

In a recent interview, art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête told us that the team originally planned for Montreal to be a fleshed-out city hub, and lead game designer Frank Lapikas added that there were even initial plans for a fourth.

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Eidos Montreal planned on more Deus Ex hubs

Plans for more Montreal, Upper Heng Sha, and India dropped due to the work involved: "We could fill an Ikea catalogue with all the furniture we designed."

Eidos Montreal, developer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, has told us that it originally planned for more city hubs in its chart-topping RPG shooter.

In a recent interview, art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletête told us that the team originally planned for Montreal to be a fleshed-out city hub, and lead game designer Frank Lapikas added that there were even initial plans for a fourth.

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Just Dance heads to Japan

Nintendo is to publish a localised version of Ubisoft's Wii dance game, which together with its sequel has sold more than 14 million units worldwide. But this is no straight translation: instead Nintendo has licensed a host of J-pop songs ahead of its release on October 13. Follow the source link below for a list of artists and songs that have been confirmed so far.
http://www.andriasang.com/e/blog/2011/09/02/japanese_just_dance/
Andriasang


Sledgehammer's Call Of Duty game shelved

Speaking to Eurogamer, Sledgehammer Games co-founder Michael Condrey revealed that the studio's thirdperson, action adventure Call Of Duty was shelved at the prototype stage because the studio wanted to work on Modern Warfare 3 with Infinity Ward. "We were working on it for about six months," he said. "We had a prototype together that was pretty compelling, and it looked really good. [But] the opportunity to work on the biggest thing in the industry with Infinity Ward was just an opportunity we couldn't [miss]." With some of Sledgehammer's staff having worked on previous games in the series, and others confirmed fans, Condrey described the decision to switch to Modern Warfare 3 as "a nice marriage of experience in the genre and a kind of fan desire to work on this franchise."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-02-sledgehammers-cancelled-call-of-duty
Eurogamer


Konami calls on UK retail to "stop the price war"

The publisher's European head Kunio Neo has said that the UK market will struggle unless retailers stop the aggressive price cutting of recent releases. "UK games pricing is very poor," he told MCV. "Retailers are always reducing prices and the profits for publishers are getting smaller. The UK is really suffering." Konami's European GM of sales, marketing and products, Martin Schneider, gave a rather blunt assessment: "Tell the UK shops to stop the price war."
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/stop-the-price-war/084060
MCV


The Friday Game: Tuper Tario Tros.

Miyamoto meets Pajitnov in a scrappily brilliant IP mash-up.

If you’re on Steam or Xbox Live anytime soon, you really should think about buying Blocks That Matter, Swing Swing Submarine’s feisty blend of Tetris, Minecraft and Boulder Dash. It’s an elegant, wonderfully infuriating platform-puzzler in which you chew through chunks of wood, sand, metal, crystal and stone and then spit them out again in sets of four in order to navigate devious mazes.

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Xseed confirms Corpse Party for the west

Corpse Party was originally an amateur project developed in RPG Maker, but it was picked up by 5pb and subsequently remade for PSP. Its 16-bit, anime-styled visuals conceal what appears to be a thoroughly unsettling adventure game, set in "a haunted elementary school filled with the decaying corpses and tormented souls of countless children who'd mysteriously vanished from the Japanese countryside years, months or sometimes only days prior." The below trailer is mostly text, but still manages to shock, and be warned: there's the occasional disturbing image that might not be especially suitable for the workplace. Xseed will release Corpse Party through PSN this autumn.
http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/01/xseed-hosting-a-corpse-party-on-psp-this-fall/
Joystiq


Driver dev defends DRM

Martin Edmonson, founder of Driver San Francisco developer Ubisoft Reflections, has thrown his weight behind the publisher's controversial always-on DRM that has been a constant source of frustration among PC gamers since its debut last year. "You have to do something," he told Eurogamer. "It's just, simply, PC piracy is at the most incredible rates. This game cost a huge amount of money to develop, and it has to be, quite rightly, quite morally correctly, protected. If there was very little trouble with piracy then we wouldn't need it." Edmonson also defended the recently introduced Uplay Passport, saying: "If people don't buy the game when it first comes out and wait and pay for rental or for second-hand usage, then the publisher sees absolutely nothing of that. [The online pass is] just one of those things we have to get used to. It's going to happen."
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-01-driver-dev-defends-ubi-drm-online-pass
Eurogamer


Zynga's Adventure World inspired by Zelda

Zynga announced its latest Facebook game, the Indiana Jones-inspired Adventure World, earlier this week, and has gone into more detail on the title in an interview with Gamasutra. Promising greater emphasis on puzzle-solving and storytelling than in previous Zynga games, lead game designer Seth Sivak said: "We love the action-adventure genre, we love games like The Legend Of Zelda, and we want to find a way to make that for everybody." There will also be reduced emphasis on base-building in Adventure World, to encourage players to spend more time exploring the large game world. No firm release date was set, with Zynga only saying it would launch "in the coming weeks."
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36969/Interview_Zynga_Emphasizes_Storytelling_PuzzleSolving_With_Adventure_World.php
Gamasutra


September 01, 2011

Eidos Montreal to double headcount - report

Square Enix plans to grow the staff count at Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Thief 4 developer Eidos Montreal from 330 to 680 over the next three years, La Presse Affaires reported Thursday (via Montreal Gazette). It said the publisher intends to add 100 new employees by the end of 2012 and the remainder by 2015, making it the city’s third largest studio behind Ubisoft Montreal and Electronic Arts Montreal. Following negotiations with the Quebec government, Square Enix has reportedly been assured a $2 million subsidy from Investissement Québec to facilitate the growth. The news comes a week after the publisher launched the critically acclaimed Deus Ex: Human Revolution, which debuted atop the UK all formats chart on Tuesday.
http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/Square+Enix+plans+double+Montreal+video+game+studio/5340714/story.html#ixzz1WjUWIz7m
Montreal Gazette


Call Of Duty boosts digital growth at Activision

Activision has reported a significant increase in digital revenues for the 12 months ended June 2012, driven in part by the increasingly popular Call Of Duty franchise. Speaking during a conference call with analysts today, which was listened in on by Gamasutra, Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirschberg said the firm’s online revenues reached $1.7 billion during the period. The figure represents a 22 per cent year-over-year increase from $1.4 billion, and a 41 per cent rise from the $1.2 billion generated during the year ended June 2009. Hirschberg said the publisher has sold 18 million $15 Black Ops map packs to a still growing base of 23 million Black Ops owners. In comparison, Activision shifted 11 million $15 map packs to Modern Warfare 2’s 19 million owners, and nine million $10 map packs to World at War’s nine million owners.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/36985/Activision_Blizzard_Reports_Digital_Sales_Growth_18M_Black_Ops_Map_Pack_Sales.php
Gamasutra


Yves Guillemot and Jason Rohrer to speak at Montreal International Game Summit

Taking place on November 1 and 2 at the Hilton Bonaventure, the conference will bring together over 80 internationally esteemed industry figures, including Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot on the future of the videogame industry, art game maker Jason Rohrer on interactive storytelling and Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand on the making of the Uncharted series. Look out also for Rocksteady's David Hego and Eidos Montreal's David Anfossi on what happens when your studio's debut game is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Click the source link below for the full schedule and registration info.
http://sijm.ca/2011/schedule/conference
MIGS 2011


Yves Guillemot and Jason Rohrer to speak at Montreal International Game Summit

Taking place on November 1 and 2 at the Hilton Bonaventure, the conference will bring together over 80 internationally esteemed industry figures, including Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot on the future of the videogame industry, art game maker Jason Rohrer on interactive storytelling and Naughty Dog lead game designer Richard Lemarchand on the making of the Uncharted series. Look out also for Rocksteady's David Hego and Eidos Montreal's David Anfossi on what happens when your studio's debut game is Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Click the source link below for the full schedule and registration info.
http://sijm.ca/2011/schedule/conference
MIGS 2011


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