Kotaku

Key Titles, Back Catalog Help Ubi Beat Expectations

Strong performance from Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Assassin's Creed and Rayman Raving Rabbids helped Ubisoft exceed its estimates for its fiscal first quarter, the company said today.

Ubi saw net sales up about 26% to €169 million ($263.65 million), while the publisher did €134 million ($209.05 million) over the same period last year. Its Petz, Imagine and MyCoach series from its "Games for Everyone" line also pitched in, representing a third of the publisher's total sales.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 has sold 6 million units, Assassin's Creed has now sold 7 million units, and Rayman Raving Rabbids has sold 1.5 million units. Nonetheless, Ubi owes about 55% of its sales to its back catalog.

What happened to Fatal Frame 4 At E3?

Tecmo, sensing a disturbance in the fanboy force, sent out a preemptive email today explaining to anyone and everyone why Fatal Frame 4 was not at E3 this year.

Actually, to be fair it's more like they passed the buck... preemptively:

Several of you asked about Tecmo’s other titles that have been announced in Japan which were not on display at the show. Fatal Frame 4 (Wii) will be published by Nintendo, so please contact your Nintendo PR contact for further information. Rygar: The Battle of Argus (Wii) is in development and we are planning to provide more information this fall.

I contacted Nintendo for comment and take their stony silence as complete confusion. We'll update you as soon as they update us.

Insomniac: There Are Many Ways to Get Into Resistance 2 Beta

Turns out that "exclusive to Qore" means not so exclusive to Qore.

The Insomniac guys contacted us today to try and clear up the Qore announcement confusion. The team promises to do everything they can to make sure the beta problem runs as smoothly as possible and that it is available in many countries and through many different outlets.

Liveblogging Will Wright Discussing His Inner Otaku At Comic-Con

Spore creator Will Wright is addressing the massive Comic-Con crowd at ballroom 6CDEF right now, talking about his own nerdy obsessions, a topic attendees are quite familiar with. Wright is talking about his otaku bent, the Stanley Kubrick directed 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film, which features aliens, evolution and space travel quite prominently, is clearly a perfect lead in to talk about the upcoming Spore.

Will's obsession with the movie sounds hardcore, as he talks about his hunt for a lenticular version of the 2001 movie poster. He finally came across one, a poster that he ultimately had Gary Lockwood aka Frank Poole from 2001, sign.

Will's now moving into other topics — his obsession with aliens, the acceptance of video games as an art form, and the evolution of the book, among other topics — moving at a mile a minute.

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 Hits This Month

Just ten days ago Acitvision let us know that Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2 would be hitting the Xbox Live Arcade on Aug. 6. Now they've gone and surprised us by letting us know today that the game has been pushed up to July 30. That's one more week that will be lost to SHUMP fever.

The 800 point game will include five additional game modes: Waves, which they say has been supercharged and tweaked; Pacifism, which has been promoted from achievement to full game mode, and new modes King, Deadline, and Sequence. All of the modes can be played solo or with up to four players on a single console. The multiplay allows for both co-op and competitive modes. You can also play co-pilots where one person drives and the other shoots.

Sounds like you're getting a lot for your Microsoft scrip.

"Bonus Redeem Software" A New Wii Feature?

Eagle eyes at the Nintendo Everything blog noticed a new "features" area within the Wii Shop channel in Japan that looks like it'll let you enter codes for free Wii Shop software goodies. After getting some translation help with Japanese Wii Shop manuals, Nintendo Everything learned that certain retail titles will somehow offer these codes.

Will certain games have codes along with them for extra DLC? Or will they offer vouchers for, say, Virtual Console titles? That could be cool — for example, buy Mario Galaxy, get a freebie code for the original Super Mario Bros. on VC, something of the sort?

Puzzled Nintendo Everything:

Spore E-Card Creator Goes Live, Makes You An E-Card God

Planetwide Media has launched the MashON Spore E-Card Creator, an online app that uses Spore monsters, backgrounds and props, in conjunction with the fun of word bubbles, to create custom virtual cards. With the right submarine placement, you too can create your own Spore penis monster and e-mail it to your parents.

The release notes that e-card fans can add their "customized content from the Spore Creature Creator," an option we don't have handy at Comic-Con this week. Our efforts to make snappy dick jokes with the MashON app have met with unsuccessful results. Perhaps you'll fare better.

Full release after the jump!

Is This Guitar Hero: World Tour's Setlist?

Console wars are so last season. Now we've got setlist wars for music games. When Rock Band 2's formidable list was confirmed during E3 week, we uttered a low whistle for all the catching up Guitar Hero: World Tour would have to do to to keep it a competition.

Now, via the Something Awful forums comes what purports to be a leaked list of World Tour songs by their respective sections. Now, we know now that Rock Band and Guitar Hero are somewhat different in terms of who plays them and what their motivation is, and a great Rock Band song might've made a boring Guitar Hero III song. But are all bets off now that we've got band sets for both games?

And if so, let's play pretend for a sec, and imagine that what follows after the jump is actually Guitar Hero: World Tour's list. If it is, then who do you think's winning now?

Hasbro Sues Over Scrabulous Facebook Game

Hasbro is suing the creators of the popular Scrabulous Facebook game, after a request the toy company made to the social network earlier this year to pull the game went unanswered.

In January when Hasbro first began to fuss about Scrabulous, many were perplexed — wasn't the prolific Facebook board game an homage to the original, arguably even a sort of viral marketing? But today's infringement suit announcement comes just after Electronic Arts, through its partnership with Hasbro, launched its own official Scrabble game on Facebook, a launch no doubt complicated by the existence of an unlicensed, competing game.

Hasbro says Scrabulous infringes on its intellectual property rights, and is suing creators Rajat Agarwalla and Jayant Agarwalla, while requesting that Facebook pull the application immediately.

Full announcement follows the jump.

EA, DC Bring Mirror's Edge To Comic Books

Electronic Arts announced today it has partnered with Wildstorm, an imprint of DC Comics, to bring its Mirror's Edge intellectual property to life as an ongoing comic book series. A limited edition prequel issue will be available to Comic-Con attendees at Booth #5233. The first person adventure, currently in development at DICE, will join sister property Dead Space in the four color 2D medium later this year. The move is part of EA's IP³ initiative, a push to bring internally developed properties outside of the video game space and into areas like movies, animation and graphic novels.

EA announced yesterday that it had tapped United Talent Agency to represent the company as it moves its internally developed franchises into the realm of motion pictures and television series.

Hit the jump for the full press release on the Mirror's Edge comic book series and check back all week for further Comic-Con coverage from Kotaku.

Splinter Cell: Conviction Delayed

When Ubisoft didn't show Splinter Cell: Conviction at its last event, people worried a little about how the game might be doing. Fear not — the game's doing great. So great, they say, that Ubisoft just decided it'd be better off releasing it as part of its "2009-2010" lineup instead of in this year's fiscal fourth quarter. You know, to "bolster" next year, as the company said in its fiscal first quarter results statement.

Signs at Ubidays seemed to suggest that the game was undergoing a reworking, though Ubisoft's reps were specifically vague on details. We also heard that a "way too egotistical" Michael Ironside would no longer be returning as the voice of Sam Fisher.

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot elaborated a bit during the company's call to investors:

Mutant-Riding Bandicoot To Save the World

This Crash Bandicoot: Mind Over Mutant video gives you a quick glimpse of Crash's mutant wrangling abilities and touches on the free-roaming and co-op play aspects of the game.

Epic Preps Unreal Engine 4 For "Next Console Generation"

Epic president Mike Capps guesses the next console generation will begin anywhere between 2012 and 2018 — and when it does, Unreal Engine 4 will be already waiting for it. At least, that's what Capps told an audience Microsoft's Gamefest 2008 in Seattle this week, according to a Gamasutra report.

Said Capps:

"We've got Unreal [Engine] 4 in production right now... it's going to be in the next console generation - our rough guess is 2012 [to] 2018."

Tim Sweeney also has a guess about what the platforms will be at that time, and in what order Epic will address them:

Study: MMORPG Biz Needs More Freebies

More free games will help the MMORPG market expand, found a Parks Associates study. Apparently, only "hardcore" gamers, who represent only a small portion of the audience surveyed, are willing to pay subscription fees, and so for everyone else, the study recommends offering more free titles.

Out of some 2000 online gamers surveyed, Parks said, 14 percent would be interested in playing more MMORPGs if they were free. According to Worlds in Motion, Parks Associates' Michael Cai said that the excess of 10 million players WoW's scored is a major exception that most publishers shouldn't expect to emulate using a subscription business model.

Everyone who visited Capcom's booth at E3 last week were treated to a peek at a glorious retro Mega Man t-shirt. The shirt reflects the decision Capcom made to turn Mega Man 9 into an "impossible hard" 8-bit revival of the franchise.

The marketing group decided that since the game was going to look like it came from 1987 they whole marketing campaign should too. So they called up I Am 8-bit artist Gerald de Jesus and had him whip up a truly fantastic bit of fantasy Mega Man art for the fabled shirt.

Only four of the shirts were created for Inafune and Takeshita to wear during last week's show. The good news? Capcom promises to start selling the shirts on their site soon.

EA has dropped details on this year's celebration for the release of Madden NFL 09, annoyingly titled Maddenpalooza. Mentioned during Leigh's interview with Steve Schnur earlier this month, Maddenpalooza is a music festival featuring bands from current and past Madden soundtracks that will take place at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California on August 11th. Fans can snag tickets through local radio stations or at the Rose Bowl on event day, which entitle them to a day filled with music, NFL star signings, and various other bits of marketing, all leading up to 9PM when the stadium's pop-up Wal-Mart will sell the first copies of the game.

Artists scheduled to appear include headliners Good Charlotte, Busta Rhymes, Rev Theory, Airbourne, From First to Last and Young Dre The Truth. Sounds like a worthy successor to the traditional Maddenoliday, more than enough to hold us until they add the word Madden to the front of some new festive term.

Age Of Conan Buddy Codes Are Go

Just received an email this morning from Funcom to let me know that the 7-day Age of Conan buddy codes that shipped with the collector's edition of the game are now ready to be passed out among your friends in a suitably lordly fashion. Unlike most MMORPGs, where friend codes tend to be active from launch, Funcom wanted to give players sufficient time to get acclimated to the game before flooding the servers with people that didn't care enough to buy it. It might seem to the outsider that the company was waiting until the game was in a more presentable state, but that's just crazy talk.

Funcom suggests you allow your friend to use your game DVDs, as that not only allows you to spend quality time together, but also helps them avoid the $2.99 charge they'll incur from downloading the trial client (though they do get an extra 3 days to make up for the cost).

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