Three of the leading men behind Halo break away to create high quality downloadable games.
Lead by managing director Michel Bastien, who was a producer on Halo 2 and 3, the team also comprises Damián Isla, who led Halo’s AI design, as director of technology and Rob Stokes, who was a design lead on Halo 3 and a designer and writer on Halo 2, as creative director.
Books and films are a linear form – a one-way communication from author to audience. Games are interactive, and increasingly players are discovering that the stories that matter most to them are the ones that they express through the game rather than the one that the game’s predefined narrative attempts to tell them. From the Machiavellian wrangling of Eve Online’s player-sustained universe to that last, improbably perfect, sticky grenade that garners you a Killtacular, player expression is rapidly overshadowing the script and setting.
President of Nintendo of America emphasises software as main driver for motivating continued Wii sales success.
Asked in an interview with US business news TV channel CNBC whether he saw further price cuts in Wii’s future, he said, “Absolutely not. What we have is great software.”
Ask anyone who doesn’t read comic books what other people like about comic books, and you’ll often hear: “They’re a power fantasy.” Take a cliché: the class runt comes home from a day of getting beaten by the bullies, reads a superhero comic, and dreams about putting on tights and throwing buses at everyone he despises. Complex problems turn into concrete objects, and then you smash ‘em. And so the bigger the wham-bam, the better.
As announced at its worldwide developers conference, the news that Adobe has enabled the conversion of Flash games into native iPhone apps has split opinions among developers.
Nicolas Doucet, a producer and art director at Sony Computer Entertainment's London Studio, has suggested that PS3 titles The Getaway and Eight Days have not been completely axed but instead “just put to one side”.
Sony appears to be making concrete steps towards the introduction of a digital rental service for PSP games.
The platform holder has added "Starts," "Expires," and "Hours Left" options to the information pane within PSP titles, according to The Retail Gamer and GameSpot.
Almost half of the workforce at Activision’s 7 Studios has reportedly been laid off.
The Los Angeles-based developer, which has worked on projects including Fantastic 4: Rise Of The Silver Surfer, Shrek The Third and Napoleon Dynamite: The Game, has cut around 30 members of staff, sources have informed Kotaku.
Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime has said that the firm isn’t anticipating any Wii or DS shortages this holiday season.
37 per cent of Wii games released from January to June 2009 were not reviewed, according to Jesse Divnich, director of analyst services at Electronic Entertainment Design and Research.
As our preview in E205 noted, and our review reiterates, it’s hard to press Scribblenauts’ start button. The game opens in a sandbox in which you can spawn objects ad infinitum, with no rules or conditions to get in the way, and it’s an awfully long time before you’re willing to translate your experimentation into the game proper’s more confined walls. That’s hardly a fault: how could you criticise a central mechanic for being so fun that all the normal apparatus of playing seems unnecessary?
King of casual plans to use money to aid expansion into social media and reaching new audiences.
The capital marks the first PopCap, maker of Bejeweled, Peggle and Plants Vs Zombies, has secured in the 10 years the developer has been in business.
Format: PS3
Release: Out now (US, Japan), TBA (Europe)
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: From Software
The disorientation you feel during the first few hours of Demon’s Souls is unprecedented. It’s not that you’ll be in any doubt about the mission: with a sword in one hand, a shield in the other, and a horde of approaching undead, the challenge is one of gaming’s most familiar. Few, however, will be prepared for the relentless setbacks heaped upon their miserable bones in facing it.
