Dead Rising 2. And more original IP (a la Dead Rising and Lost Planet).

Ashcraft: Capcom has been cranking about a lot new IPs like Dead Rising, though — not just relying on sequels.
Inafune: And there are a lot more new titles coming. A lot more.

Labels: companies, rumors, TGS

• PS3 gets rumble -- I feel bad Sony's thunder was stolen by a third-party partner, but they did get to announce the DualShock3 at TGS -- so Sony now has Sixaxis (yawn) and rumble. Sweetness. (List of supported current and upcoming games is here.)


• Seaman 2 -- Stop giggling. Turns out they're making a Seaman 2 that is weirder than the first game, so it'll probably never see US (or maybe even EU) shores (how did the first game ever make it stateside?).


• MetaPlace announcement -- Wunderkind Raph Koster's MetaPlace "open MMO platform" made its official debut at TGS. Official after winning in the TechCrunch40 conference and being chatted up at the Austin Game Developers Conference. But official. Again. (This is part of what motivated me to share about my AnthropoMMO(TM) idea.)


• Soul Calibur IV -- One of my favorite franchises has a new, less-jiggly trailer (thank goodness)! The trailer has cutscene and gameplay footage, and shows tastes of the melodramatic (but for me, fun), mythos, and the WTF one-liners (love those). The video's also downloadable via Xbox Live as part of Microsoft's "Bringing it Home" effort.


• Metal Gear Solid 4 -- Gameplay videos have finally shown up, and I'm hoping the bandwidth hogging lets up so I can watch the officially released vids to get a sense of the non-cut-scene quality. I am hearing that even folks who hate MGS (probably the same folks who dislike Splinter Cell) are loving it.


• Lost Odyssey -- A playable version of the game is being shown at TGS. I really hope gameplay vids come out this week. Its from Hironobu Sakaguchi, fer crying out loud. Another nugget on the game? It'll be on four discs. Yeah, first Blue Dragon on two DVDs, and now L.O. on four. I wish Microsoft would rethink the non - high - capacity format thing, and the "don't - require - the - hard - drive" thing (but not in the "memory - management - poor - 5GB - per - PS3 - game" way). But, streaming is allegedly better off of the DVD-9 format compared to first- and second-gen Blu-ray streaming, so there is that.
  
• 2007 Game Awards -- Part of TGS are the Japan Game Awards. What's interesting is that the 360, despite sucking hardcore in the Land of the Rising Sun, picked up the "Global Award: Japanese Product" for Dead Rising and the "Global Award: Foreign Product" for Gears of War.
  
• PSP/PS3 neatness --Looks like updates to your PSP and PS3 are going to lead to some coolness. Things like turning your PS3 on or off when you're somewhere else with your PSP, using your PSP as a rear-view mirror for Formula 1 Racing, using your PSPs as PS3 controllers (Why? If you feel that extra analog stick is annoying?), and (eventually) you'll be able to play the PSPs and one PS3. That's all pretty cool.
  
• Folding @ home -- With the addition of the PS3 in the network, the project recently achieved the "petraflop" -- a quadrillion floating point operations per second. That's the equivalent of every person in the world (at the same time) doing 75,000 calculations in a second. That's cool because of its gaming connection, but it's cooler to me for the bigger application of successful (and useful) grid computing (whatever happened to Butterfly after the IBM acquisition).

There's more coming (in particular, I'm hoping for good some stuff from Capcom), but this stuff rose to the top for me so far.

Labels: events, TGS

• IGN.com
• Joystiq.com
• Kotaku.com

Labels: events

"We can confirm that Microsoft is not taking any action (such as banning Xbox Live accounts) against gamers who are playing Halo 3 before the official street date. Any rumours or speculation to the contrary are false," reads the statement issued by Microsoft this evening.

"... a Microsoft rep confirmed rumours that gamers who play Halo 3 early will have their LIVE accounts banned. Simply not connecting to the internet [sic] doesn't appear to be a solution either. The rep also confirmed that Microsoft is able to ban accounts based on information collected by the console which shows when the game was played."

Labels: Halo

Labels: announcements, companies

1. Leveling up within your chosen people (leveling and interaction is restricted to those within your chosen cultural and geographical restrictions).
2. Interacting with other groups, peoples, or tribes (creating a powerful "what if" simulator) for academic research and exploration.
3. Spectator mode for "untouched" peoples (largely for research and observation).

Labels: game design, serious games

• Halo 3 "Believe" diorama fly-through
• "Believe" campaign on Xbox.com
• "Museum" commercial
• "Diorama" commercial
• "Making of" video for the diorama

Labels: Halo, media intersection

1. I'm a toy fan.
2. I'm a fan of Todd McFarlane.
3. I like McFarlane's toys for their sculpts, and dislike them as action figures (as a generality, they're not pose-able).
4. I said I'm nervous about the articulation for the Halo 3 toys.
5. I call Todd McFarlane "Toddy", because no one else seems to. No word yet on whether he's OK with that, but I'm told someone is checking this out for me.

Anyway, as far as point #4 (from a prior post):

...at least Master Chief will have "more than 18 points of articulation" (would that be "19"?), which ups the Joyride Series One's 15 points. No articulation notes are given for the other figures, which makes me nervous.

Master Chief:

Master Chief does, indeed, look decent. The photos, unfortunately, are not good at showing how much range of articulation the figure has. A little of critical analysis yields encouraging stuff, though:

• Photo 1: Looks like the shoulder joint is pretty versatile
• Photo 2: (with Photo 1) showcase a range of motion for the knee joint, and similar jointing for the ankle (which would be good news)
• Photo 3: Looks like the elbow has great range of motion

What I can't tell from the photos is what the hip joints are like (Photo 2 is closest to giving a view, but it's too dark to see). To be fair, hip joints are hard -- you have to avoid the whole "adult diaper" look (epitomized by Hasbro's Marvel Legends White Queen). But I can't tell if the Chief can stand straight, or he's eternally ready to crap Brute spike grenades.

The deco looks spot-on, though, and I'm curious about the tenuously attached frag grenade -- Clever magnet gimmick? Pin and socket? Breakable and child snortable in waiting?

Cortana:

Cortana is a non-articulated statuette with a light up base. And honestly, Scott Fischer set the sexy bar for our favorite semi-corporeal Femme AI in The Halo Graphic Novel. That's the new Femme AI Sexy Bar, or FAISB(TM). And "Mother" from Alien is our favorite non-corporeal Femme AI. So I'm mheh on this sculpt until I see it in person.

Brute Chieftain:

The Brute Chieftain has probably the coolest deco scheme of the lot. The picts are also better about showing a range of motion the other product photos don't. The gravity hammer accessory is almost a character in itself (hmm, new weapon for the game?). My only concern is whether his "I'm compensating" loin cloth thingy gets in the way of posing the figure. I dig the sculpt, though.

Jackal Sniper:

Imagine if there was unholy wedlock between Pan (the goat dude, not the cross-dressing broadway dude/tte) and Skeksis (from The Dark Crystal). This would be their baby.

The sculpt and deco are complex and detailed, the picts again show a more varied range of motion, and I'm curious what the spiky things on the head and forearms are made of. I'm more curious as to the balance of the figure, given the goatish legs. This will either be amazingly done, or amazingly frustrating.

Grunt Two-Pack:

Speaking of balance, that could be the bugaboo with these cooly crafted little ... buggers. The Grunt Two-Pack has one each teal and burnt orange armoured Grunts (What? Specificity is good.) that look great, down to the nubby little feet that could make their back-heavy Notre Dame(ish) humpbacks a problem. But if the weighting is good (and the rock-like feet are cleverly sculpted to compensate for character tilt), these could be a couple of little winners.

I do hope the guns are removable. And I wonder if it's too late to have Jason Staten voice clips emanate randomly from the figure as they sit otherwise quietly on the shelf?

So, there's my unsolicited (but stunningly brilliant) deconstruction of the toys. If I get permission to post picks from McFarlane Toys, I'll update this post with those.

Labels: announcements, Halo, media intersection

Labels: Halo, media intersection

• Lost Odyssey will be out December 6 (in Japan; probably)
• Ace Combat 6 from Bandai Namco is exclusive to the Xbox 360
• Gundam Operation Troy will be out in 2007, as will Katamari, and Gundam Musou International (that last one is a maybe)
• Dynasty Warriors 6 will be out in November
• Ninja Gaiden 2 was announced, and looks to be an Xbox 360 exclusive
• Age of Empires, Crysis, World in Conflict, the new Viva Pinata party game will all be out for Japan's Games for Windows Live
• New controller colors have been announced (possibly just for Japan): green, black, pink, and white
• New XBLA titles include Rez HD, Every Extend Extra Extreme, Ikaruga, Trigger Heart, Exit, and Omega Five
• New RPG Infinite Discovery was announced, a joint project between Square Enix, Microsoft, and developer is Tri-Ace
• Square Enix's other project, The Last Remant, will be playable at TGS this week

Labels: announcements, events, XBLA, Xbox 360, Xbox Live

Labels: announcements, rumors

Quote:
Nemesisdesignz wrote:
I installed Bioshock on my laptop under one admin user, Everything works fine, but I then tried to switch users on my computer and whenever I launch Bioshock it is asking me to enter my serial again for the game.... IS THIS GONNA CHARGE ME TWO OF MY 5 Activations???? IF SO THAT IS GAY.... I need to know this ASAP before I attempt to play this on my pc under the other user... THis is a bug if the case be....so get yo stuff fixed!

Here's the response from moderator 2k Tech JT:

Quote:
2k Tech JT writes:
The other way to view this, is one USER has purchased the game. Not the whole family. So why should your brother play for free?

"NOTE: Details/facts in this story have been adjusted at the request of Realtime
Worlds."

Labels: ramblings, rants

Labels: rumors

Labels: innovation

Adam Creighton. Video Game Nut. Comic Book fanboy. Actor. Biz and Tech Dev Wunderkind.

1. That game had potential.
2. It gave superstar artist Jae Lee a platform to showcase his awesome work.
3. The new game is being done by EA Chicago, and spearheaded by Kudo Tsunoda, the wunderkind behind Fight Night Round 3 and Def Jam Icon.

There was a preview of the game when it first aired on SpikeTV's Game Head, but I noticed clips showed up online today. They're not the whole picture that was in the full episode, but they do give you gameplay, CGI cinematics, and behind-the-scenes insight. Besides Tsunoda (who continues to look like he's channeling his inner Tomonobu Itagaki), there are sound bites from Liam Miller (Line Producer), Darren Bennett (Senior Produce), Josh Tsui (Art Director), Dave Pasciuto (Lead Environment Artist), and Nathan Turner (Lead Environment Artist).

For comic book fanboys, yeah, that looks like Ultimate Captain America in the gameplay, and possibly a variation of Ultimate (shirtless) Juggernaut, but (thankfully) with the traditional helmet.

The game's still a year out, but already looks great, and I can totally see EA Chicago rising to the high bar set by Raven Software and Activision with their Marvel Ultimate Alliance game. There better be customizations and unlockables out the wazoo.

And on the sour grapes side, I'm irked host Geoff Keighley got placed into the game, when I as a trained and skilled voice and on-camera actor can't get EA to give me the time of day. And Chicago is a union town; but maybe Canuck Geoff's SAG. Dunno. End Gripe.

Anyway, the vids:

World’s First Look at the Marvel Fighting Game:

The Hulk’s Destructive Gameplay:

Level Design on the Marvel Fighting Game:

Labels: announcements, comic books, fighting, Xbox 360

• Gamasutra Austin GDC 2007 coverage (the best, since they're both owned by CMP Game Group)


• Kotaku.com coverage (maybe; wicked light right now; why don't they hire an Austin local (me) who's been doing this for 5 years? Fahey's gonna be wicked hungover after tonight's Tabula Rasa party; and his feet will be dirty)


• TenTonHammer.com (maybe)

As an aside, one of my pet peeves is people with no sense of history. Or can't remember where they parked their car. The game industry seems to be particularly full of both. Anyway, a lot of the online sites are talking AGDC's "new theme" of being MMO-centric this year.

This year? That's exactly what it was last year, before the CMP Game Group bought them. Stay awake, kids.

Labels: announcements, events

Labels: releases