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*tap* *tap* *tap* Is this thing on? Because game designer Hideo Kojima has something to announce. More »
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It's time to turn down the lights down real low. Set the mood, right. Previously, Microsoft exec and ladies man Aaron Greenberg talked up Bill Gates hot tub habits with two Penthouse Pets. This time it is Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward's turn. Robert Bowling? Yes, ROBERT BOWLING. He talks to the Pets about his part in Call of Duty 4: More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5019421&view=rss&microfeed=true For those of you who missed GDC, the Gears of War 2 tech demos are available for free on Xbox LIVE Marketplace. For those of you who either don't own an Xbox 360 or are too lazy to connect it to the internet, the Gears of War 2 tech demo is above. It's direct feed and sweet. Another clip after the jump. More »
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You may have noticed that in the Music Store, coming with the Rock Band update later this week, is a reference to albums. In fact albums have their own selection (with a Coming Soon next to it) on the front page of the Music Store. But still no official word about when albums may be coming. What gives? More »
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Along with a slew of other updates, the latest patch for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 version of Rock Band includes a new in-game music store. The music store will let you preview and purchase songs from inside the game by selecting the option from the main menu. More »
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With so much controversy around the sexuality in Mass Effect, I'm kind of surprised it was so long before Bioware provided their thoughts on the matter. But at GDC 08, BioWare's General Manager Ray Muzyka gave his opinion on how proud he was of the team at BioWare, and the game they've created. More »
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One of the numerous panel discussions at GDC last month did things a little bit differently, setting up a panel of video game journalists, lead by Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, to answer some of the questions game industry professionals have for those that write about them and their work. The panel consisted of 1UP's Garnett Lee, MTV's Stephen Totilo, Game Informer's Andy McNamara, Geoff Keighly of GameTrailers.tv, and our very own Brian Crecente. More »
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Two days prior to my hands-on experience with Street Fighter IV, we held an impromptu Street Fighter III: Third Strike tournament at the offices of Massive Black. My Elena versus Crecente's Ryu wasn't so much a contest as it was a total bloodletting. (Ultimately, though, the Massive Black guys made the three Kotaku editors look like scrubs.) In Crecente's defense, he was more transfixed with Street Fighter II Champion Edition and largely ended his love affair there. I, on the other hand, latched on to every arcade release, through Super Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alphas I-III and all three iterations of Street Fighter III. Hell, I was even pretty competitive in Super Gem Fighter: Mini Mix for a while there. More »
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Warhawk's upcoming booster pack, Operation Broken Mirror, will feature an armored personnel carrier which can serve as a mobile spawning point and weapon producer and also create the "mother of all bubble shields," the game's producer, Dylan Jobe told me in a recent interview. More »
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Let me start by saying that my love of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition comes not from the perspective of an aficionado, or someone paid to study each nuanced piece of minutia that comes out about a game as it makes its way from concept to arcade. More »
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While Crecente and McWhertor will be flooding your consciousnesses with Street Fighter gameplay impressions later, I wanted to start things off with an amuse-bouche and just focus on one thing: just how freaking gorgeous SFIV is in person. More »
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For those who didn't attend GDC last week, there's another chance to catch the Game Developers Choice Awards/Independent Games Festival Awards megashow. Condensed to a 30-minute segment for an X-Play time slot, to catch the event, set your DVRs for G4 at 8pm (eastern) tonight. (You could watch it in real time, but we were pretending you had plans or something.) More »
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The 2008 Game Developer's Conference saw an all-time high in attendance numbers, as the GDC team has announced that over 18,000 people walked through the convention hall's doors. The five day event featured 400 sessions, 300 exhibitors, and enough Force Unleashed coverage to keep Tori happy (okay, the GDC team didn't announce that, but it's still true). More »
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Whiling away the time between sessions of Street Fighter IV ass-kickery (mine, not anyone elses) and my interview with Yoshinori Ono, I accidentally made eye-contact with a Capcom flak. The handler, notice my lack of doing anything, was quick to thrust a 360 controller into my hands and point me toward a screen showing off Bionic Commando ReArmed. More »
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During Takashi Aoyama's presentation at GDC, he told an interesting anecdote about developing the Wii. Specifically, current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata demanded that, for the Wii not to "to be seen as an enemy in the household," it should have a parental control timer that would automatically shut the console off after a period of time (sound familiar?). More »
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Over GDC I dropped in to see what was up with D3 Publishers of America and was greeted with a great surprise. They have officially announced the impending arrival of the next game in the Puzzle Quest family titled Puzzle Quest: Galactrix. This Puzzle Quest has left the realm of fantasy and entered the vastness of outer space. More »
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So a funny thing happened at last week's Valve party. More »
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We tried, at this year's GDC, to have a quiet sit down with a number of different developers. And for a number of different reasons, many of them fell through, but I was able to beg 2K into giving me 15 minutes with one of the developers who probably most adversely effected my college career: Sid Meier. If it weren't for Civilization it probably wouldn't have taken me six years to get my two bachelors degrees... OK, that's probably not true, but I did spend a shocking amount of time playing his games in college. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=360375&view=rss&microfeed=true Here we have another look at the new Mario Kart game for the Wii. We get see a bunch of multiplayer gameplay as well as some people "enjoying" the Wii wheel. Something about that wheel just leaves me scratching my head. Perhaps it's the fact that it's not attached to anything and just seems to be floating there. I think I'll stick to driving my Kart with a good old fashioned controller thank you very much. More »
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I got a chance to swing by the SNK Playmore Suite at GDC to check out some of their offerings. Most of what they had going on on their screens were showings of their various game anthologies including Fatal Fury Battle Archives Vol. 2, King of Fighters 98 Ultimate Match, King of Fighters Collection Orochi Saga, Samurai Shodown Anthology, SNK Arcade Classics Vol. 1 and World Heroes Anthology. Not a whole lot new here but there were a couple of nice looking trailers for King of Fighters XII and the New Samurai Shodown. More »
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Late Thursday night I rolled in to Jillian's at the Metreon Center spent and exhausted. A week of running around GDC was beginning to take it's toll, but I was told I had to come check out a special surprise dealing with Texas Instrument's DLP technology. Being a DLP owner myself I decided I'd check out what all the hub-bub was. Turns out it was really quite interesting. More »
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President and CEO of Double Fusion, Jonathan Epstein put all the other GDC rock gods to shame this week at IBM's Guitar Hero Competition. Epstein won the $1,500 grand prize with his face melting rendition of Eric Johnson's White Cliffs of Dover. According tho the short press release, you can challenge Epstein to an epic battle of the bands by going to Double Fusion's website. I went there myself and didn't really see a place to sign up per se, but I suppose an email will do nicely. Just don't count on wrestling that $1,500 from him. I think the title will be the best you can hope for. More »
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For the last part of my three part coverage of the Lucas Arts presentation, we'll talk a little about LEGO Indiana Jones. The portion we saw dealt with the iconic scenes from the beginning of the first movie: running from giant boulders, stealing golden idol heads and the like. We were also introduced to some of the game mechanics. Indy will of course make much use of his whip to destroy things, grab objects and swing his way through his adventures. He will also have an ally who will help him through each of the various levels of the game and each ally will have a special skill such as excavation that will come in handy. These helpers can also be controlled by another player in the co-op mode. Players can look forward to Lego versions of all their favorite characters including Dr. Henry Jones Sr., Sala and everyone's favorite little screaming Asian kid, Short Round. Each characters phobias, such as Indy's famus aversion to snakes will come into play as you progress through the game. As in the other LEGO Star Wars titles, humor plays a huge part in the game and the few little cut scenes we saw were quite funny and had the gathered crowd laughing aloud quite a bit. We even got a special appearance by the golden head of a certain Star Wars robot that was used to great effect. All three movies will be covered in the game with each film being made up of six levels. More »
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During Dave Jones' GDC session, essentially a reveal of Realtime Worlds' online game APB, he touted the game's character customization tools. After generating a handful of characters you certainly wouldn't want looking after your kids, he showed off APB's ability to recreate real-life characters. Namely, Jones showed digital versions of developers Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Warren Spector and Richard Garriott that were made in the character editor. More »
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Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw, two of the key developers on Portal, gave GDC attendees a behind the scenes look at The Orange Box hit, focusing on the process of integrating narrative and design. The two also showed early and, by their own admission, failed, version's of the game's final boss fight with GLaDOS, the talkative, ever present artificial intelligence. They highlighted three attempts at making a successful boss battle, driving home the fact that ample playtesting brought them to the incinerator battle they ultimately settled on. More »
]]> http://kotaku.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=359961&view=rss&microfeed=true After Mike brought us our first real info and shots of Realtime World's upcoming MMO APB, we've now got the first footage of the game in action. Looks like a nice break from - and alternative for those not interested in - the orcs-n-loot status quo. Above is some cops-n-robbers action, while after the click's a walkthrough of the character customization utility. More »
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Last night, Electronic Arts threw a little party for the gathered game developers and various hangers on at the Mezzanine. About an hour into the party, EA's Neil Young took to the stage to introduce Will Wright who wouldn't, he was clear to point out, be talking about anything even remotely Spore related. Instead, Wright took to the stage to deliver a talk in the scatter-topic method that has earned him a small cult following, touching on everything from Godzilla and lunch boxes to James Bond and the abundance of Sims titles to hit the market. More »
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I got a chance to check out Portal's famous credit song Still Alive today on Rock Band in the Harmonix hotel suite. More »
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We had a few minutes yesterday to play a bit of shoot-em-up Zauri, that fast little game shown during the Microsoft keynote. The game plays surprisingly well. The ship constantly fires and you move it around with the Zune's touch pad. To fire off bombs you click the pad. Unfortunately, the game was developed specifically for the keynote, so it's not clear if it will ever actually see the light of day. More »
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Taku Murata, general manager of Square-Enix's research and development division, announced at today's GDC session that the company has dropped the White Engine name for its cross-platform game engine. Squenix is now pitching it as Crystal Tools, showing off a fancy new logo that extends the Final Fantasy brand even further. More »
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Dave Jones of Realtime Worlds wowed GDC audiences this week with his presentation "My First MMO", debuting the successor to the award winning Crackdown known as APB. APB, Jones explained, is a massively multiplayer online game without the grind, one that draws inspiration from Counter-Strike more than it does from Ultima Online, EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Why Counter-Strike? "There's no persistence, no progression, no customization, its just damn fun," Jones said. More »
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No word yet on exactly how widely distributed Capcom's latest Street Fighter will be to U.S. arcades, but a Capcom source told us yesterday it's definitely coming to the U.S. More »
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Earlier this morning we ran a well-sourced rumor about Microsoft halving the royalties they pay to indie developers for the games they create for the Xbox Live Arcade. More »
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Super Smash Bros. Brawl director, similarly famous for his work on the Kirby series, is speaking at the Game Developers Conference this morning to talk about the creation of the Wii fighter. His talk, "Building Characters: The SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL Postmortem," is about to get underway, if just a few minutes late. We've been warned that Nintendo has restricted video and still photos of the talk, so you'll have to imagine what's going on with the combined power of your imagination and Kotaku-style liveblogging. We've also been promised exclusive, confidential information about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so it should be worth your while to make the jump and F5 like mad. More »
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Today, during a GDC presentation, Nintendo's Takashi Aoyama announced a new expansion to Nintendo's Wi-Fi services called Wii Pay & Play. Aoyama explained that Nintendo will begin "collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly." In other words, by subsidizing additional, unnamed service and feature costs to consumers, Nintendo feels they can explore new concepts and channels. More »
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After the Star Wars: Force Unleashed presentation, we sat tight in the Lucas Arts auditorium to check out some bits of their new game, Fracture. Lucas Arts has been working with Day One studios to create what they hope will be a fresh new IP in their corral. Unfortunately from what I saw it doesn't seem to be much of a contender, at least at this point. The story is based around a future Civil War over genetic engineering and the bits that we saw took place in the San Francisco of the future. The battle mechanic is all involved with manipulating terrain. Weapons can be used to rain down rocks on your enemies, giant spikes of earth can be brought up to repair bridges or hills can be created to block you from enemy fire. Giant vortexes can also be created that will sink the earth, dragging in everything around it. More »
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"One thing that stands in my mind...we got an inquiry from the Wall Street journal asking about succinctly captured tax policy," Sid Meier relates to a packed audience of GDC attendees, referring to the most surprising response to his games. "It's just a slider." More »
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Whilst my Kotaku brethren were toiling away at various long winded sessions, I had th honor of being shipped out to Lucas Arts Studios to check out some of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Once we arrived I was greeted by a Yoda fountain outside and an incredible waiting area with amazing old movie posters and some life size figures of Darth Vader and Boba Fett. We were then ushered into the theater where the the presentation began. More »
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News of Microsoft's democratization of indie game development was overshadowed this week by an increasing discontent among established indie developers that the company was halving the royalties paid to them for future Xbox Live Arcade projects, several well-informed sources told Kotaku. More »
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While many of GDC's industry attendees were excited to hear about LucasArts' technology pipeline and day to day methods of operations, we sat in with the hopes of getting a sneak peek of the game. And after listening to an interesting anecdote (The Force Unleashed could have been replaced by the self-explanatory game Wookiee Warrior had Lucas not ripped the idea), LucasArts did show us several minutes of restricted-photography real-time gameplay...along with a few early concept videos that were fairly amusing. More »
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