Sony is to give its PS3 virtual world, PlayStation Home, a thorough redesign, with a greater emphasis on social elements.
The move is designed to ensure Home stays relevant despite the decline in popularity of virtual worlds. The new-look Home, set to launch this autumn, will feature not only social games but quests, community events and user-generated content.
Everywhere has a beginning. In GTA III, radio host Lazlow tells an irate caller that, at the time the telephone was invented, Liberty City was no more than “a church, a cow pasture and three houses.” The city’s real-world foundations can be traced back to March 1995, and a document prepared by DMA Design for a game tentatively titled Race ’N’ Chase. Even at this early stage, much of what we know as Liberty City was present.
Nintendo is to radically revise the design of the 3DS, according to reports, with a new unit due in 2012 sporting a second analogue stick, reduced emphasis on 3D and perhaps even a new name.
The claims come from sources close to French site 01.net, and while they appear outlandish it should be noted that the site has, so far this year, published information on Wii U and Vita that was later proven largely correct.
Joakim Sandberg, the Swedish developer behind beautiful games Noitu Love & The Army Of Grinning Darns and Noitu Love 2: Devolution, takes Metroid Fusion as an example to demonstrate his idea of good action game flow. The video’s pacing isn’t too shabby, either.
The very last place you’d expect to direct your sympathies in the event of nuclear disarmament: those poor little warheads. Shaun Inman’s iOS game The Last Rocket evokes precisely such a response, however, placing you in control of an adorable missile named Flip. Every time his tiny pixelated eyes blink open and shut, a small royalty fee might as well get deposited in Nintendo’s bank account.
Human Revolution begins clumsily and in at least that sense it’s a true successor to the first game. Whereas 2000’s ‘thinking man’s shooter’ dropped the player off at a terrorist-occupied Statue of Liberty with barely more than a pat on the back, Eidos’ prequel over-eggs the orientation, locking the player into a series of technobabble-filled cutscenes and on-rails sequences that hurriedly set the scene.