Everyone's Rhythm Heaven for Wii topped the Japanese software chart in its debut week on sale, ahead of fellow new releases Sengoku Basara Chronicle Heroes for PSP and No More Heroes Red Zone Edition for PS3.
Other new entries to make the top 20 included Noora And The Time Studio for DS at number eight, the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Alice Madness Returns, which charted at number nine and number 17 respectively, and Sniper Ghost Warrior for PS3 at number 16.
I’m standing in my local video game store. At the counter is a young kid who’s standing on his tiptoes, game in hand, stretching to hand over the game to the guy behind the till. Next in line is a grandmother with her family around her. She’s buying the grandkids two Wii games and they’re all engaged in conversation as the games are paid for and put in bags.
Eccentric and inventive, but ultimately late to the party, Solatorobo is more than deserving of the small amount of attention it’s likely to attract coming in the wake of the launch of its host console’s successor. It’s a JRPG with brisk, snappy battling, and a pick-and-mix quest structure that prioritises variety over grinding monotony.
Mobage, the enormously popular Japanese mobile social gaming network, has been launched on the Android Market in English-speaking countries around the world.
The gaming platform was known as Mobage-town until it was rebranded earlier this year by owner DeNa ahead of a big western push. In Japan alone it has 30 million users, and VentureBeat reports it brings in $1.3 billion in annual revenue.
I am writing this rebuttal to reports of statements made by Michael Pachter because it's something I feel very strongly about, and I want to see this kind of misguided support of crunch get shouted down as much as possible.
Mike Inglehart, producer of Hothead Games' upcoming The Baconing, has added his voice to the crunch debate, telling us that, as the industry and those working in it mature, excessive unpaid overtime should largely be a thing of the past.
"The industry's maturing now: lots of guys have families," he tells us. "When I started [in the industry] I was 25, so the only thing I had to do was go home and pay the bills and lock the door.
“If we’re honest, it was initially just as an excuse to go to TGS, and even then as an excuse to go to Tokyo!” managing director Sean Murray tells us of the decision he, and the three other developers that make up Guildford-based Hello Games, took to bring PSN racer Joe Danger to Japan - a decision which coincided with a UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) trade mission to the Tokyo Game Show in September 2010.
The Humble Indie Bundle - which lets players pay what they want for a selection of five indie games - has returned for a third time.
Included in the promotion are 2008 IGF winner Crayon Physics Deluxe, Indie Game Challenge winner and IGF finalist Cogs, Terry Cavanagh's excellent VVVVVV, Russian melée combat title Hammerfight, and Indiecade finalist and WiiWare game And Yet It Moves. Purchasing the games separately would cost some $50.
Electronic Arts has reported growth in profit and revenue for its first fiscal quarter ended June 30.
Net profit for the three months totalled $221 million, up from $96 million during the same period a year earlier, while revenue rose 23 per cent to $999 million.
Xbox 360 and PS3 software were the biggest revenue drivers for the publisher, bringing in a combined total of $653 million, while PC titles generated $205 million and mobile games $57 million.
Another World creator Eric Chahi’s latest is a surprisingly gentle game, given that its vocabulary is built of eruptions and tsunamis, and its founding principle is the chance to see nature working at triple speed. Oceans boil, mountains crumble and, somewhere in the distance, you might just hear the wails of some disciples that you’ve accidentally set on fire, but you’re pleasantly removed from it all – far too high up to feel the true sting of failure, far too powerful to see disaster as anything other than a fascinating setback.
QuBit is a great racing and crashing score attack game, with plenty of obvious inspirations without being quite like any of them. You control the titular cube as it travels into the screen, accompanied by an increasing number of floating cubes. Crashing into crystals that match the colour of the floating cubes dims them. Dim all the cubes around QuBit and that's a combo, and one step closer to the end of that wave. But crash into the wrong colour crystal or run out of energy and the game's over.
Talk about a classic: Z was released in 1996, and turned out to be the last great game from The Bitmap Brothers, the Wapping-based developer responsible for Speedball 2 and The Chaos Engine. A realtime strategy game with semi-automated combat and economy, Z casts the player as a disembodied general constantly sending new troops to new battles, and watching what happens.
Perhaps we're cynics, but Reckless Getaway looks like a game made in anticipation of a license that never happened. It has a lot that's familiar, but what gives things away is the car – a 1970 Dodge Challenger, exactly as seen in Driver: San Francisco.