Seamus Blackley, the man who spearheaded Microsoft's Xbox project, has told us that those who believe the rise of Facebook, iOS devices and cloud gaming means the death of the traditional console are wrong, saying: "The console business has won."
Blackley recently quit his position at Hollywood talent agency CAA in order to return to game development, and he believes there has never been a better time to do so: the potential audience is bigger than ever, and consoles are everywhere.
Last weekend, an estimated 5,000 fighting game fans descended on the Rio Hotel And Casino in Las Vegas for the tenth annual Evolution Championship Series. Known as Evo, it's the world fighting game championship, the biggest tournament of its kind in the year, and with the recent resurgence of fighting games, this year's was bigger than ever.
Electronic Arts has announced the EA Sports Season Ticket, a membership scheme that rewards users with early access to games and discounted downloadable content.
The Season Ticket gives members access to participating games three games before they hit store shelves by digital download, and a 20 per cent discount on DLC. EA also rather vaguely promises "premium web content" and "membership recognition" to those that sign up.
Following its original reveal a year ago, Brisbane-based technology company Euclideon has released a new video of its engine, which purports to show off progress it has made - and the "largest breakthrough since 3D graphics began".
The results are remarkable. The camera zooms into the company's logo, revealing it to be made of a one kilometre square world of trees, rock and ruined ancient buildings, and then it shows the ground to be made from individual clods of dirt. It consists, the video claims, of 21,062,352,435,000 polygons, and it runs at 20 frames a second.
Since its release, Kinect has been threatening to make good on its promise to shake up the way we play. But aside from a couple of standout titles, the games available have yet to fully embrace the devices full body tracking potential. We caught up with Kudo Tsunoda, creative director of Microsoft and Xbox 360 Kinect, to discuss what the company has learned since Kinect's release, what he thinks does and doesn't work on the device and where what we can expect from it in the future.
Aaron Staton will have come to most people’s attention via the AMC TV series Mad Men, but more recently the 31-year-old actor has become the face – quite literally – of Depth Analysis’ MotionScan technology, playing troubled detective Cole Phelps in Team Bondi’s groundbreaking crime thriller LA Noire. When he’s not starring in games, he’s a keen consumer of them…
With its tight control over the App Store, which has sold billions of game apps to date, Apple has asserted itself as a powerful gatekeeper in the rapidly growing sector of mobile game development. Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins – who worked as director of strategy and marketing for Apple in the early ‘80s – is intimately acquainted with Apple’s business philosophy.
Having eclipsed a million pre-orders already – making it the fastest pre-ordered Xbox exclusive title in the console’s history – Gears Of War 3 promises to be one of the biggest releases of 2011. We caught up with Rod Fergusson, the series’ executive producer, to discuss the company’s ambitious plans for the trilogy’s send-off, why he thinks Gears has been unable to approach Call Of Duty’s sales numbers, and to what extent the leak of an early development build hurts Epic.
Sony has confirmed that NTSC-J and NTSC-U PSone emulators are currently being prepared for release on European PlayStation Stores.
While no dates or titles have yet been confirmed, SCEE PlayStation Store Team member Ross McGrath revealed in a blog post that there are already US and Japanese titles being processed for release in the future.