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Capcom Is Charging for a 3DS Demo
A demo is like a sample sachet of shampoo. A piece of sausage a lady at a supermarket offers you. It’s a small, free thing, designed to lure you into buying a product. It is not, and never should be, a product itself. Yet Capcom is testing the waters in Japan with a paid demo…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 5, 2011 -
Activision Is Getting Sued over a Music Game. Again.
A few years back, it was all the rage for musicians to sue Activision over appearances in Guitar Hero. Courtney Love was doing it, The Romantics were doing it, No Doubt was doing it, even Axl Rose was in on the action Now, Johnny-come-lately Adam Levine, lead singer for Maroon 5, wants a slice, suing…
By Luke Plunkett Published August 5, 2011 -
Supreme Court Justice Opens Up About Her Vote on California Video Game Law
Justice Elena Kagan [back row, far right], whom Stephen Totilo said “did seem to get it” during oral arguments in Brown v. EMA, called the case the most difficult of the Court’s most recent term, one in which she felt she was constantly in the wrong no matter her current state of mind. Ultimately, Kagan,…
By Owen Good Published August 4, 2011 -
Skyrim Chief: More Games Should Cost $29, But Not Skyrim
It’s a safe bet that Bethesda’s upcoming RPG Skyrim will offer enough hours of gameplay to merit its $60 price tag. However, while speaking to PSM3, Skyrim director Todd Howard shared his belief that while his game will be worth every penny, many other games are not. “I do think industry-wide we would benefit from…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
John Carmack Explains How to Make Rage Look Terrible
This afternoon, in an empty conference room inside the Hilton Anatole—a bizarre amalgam of hotel, conference center, and shopping mall—John Carmack sat alone in an uncomfortable metal chair, staring straight ahead. The technical director and co-founder of id Software, the company that invented the first-person shooter genre that now dominates much of the hard core…
By Joel Johnson Published August 4, 2011 -
Kinect Fun Labs Adding “Air Band” Soon
Kinect Fun Labs, the free-to-download toys for Xbox Live Arcade (and Kinect) that have delivered optimized avatar generation and zany object animation (but not advanced penis recognition heuristics) look to be joined by an air-band application getting you and your friends in on a pantomime jam session. Germany’s ratings board has passed judgment on “Air…
By Owen Good Published August 4, 2011 -
Watch Game of Thrones in Magnificent 16-Bit
There is a fair amount of overlap between “Video Game Fan” and “Game of Thrones Fan” on the venn diagram of life, and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that someone has merged the two to great effect. College Humor has posted a truly fantastic video called “Game of Thrones RPG,” which re-creates the…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
Choice Quotes from John Carmack’s 2011 QuakeCon Keynote
Rage has been in the pipe for six years. “We invented this genre and we followed it a long ways…Maybe we shouldn’t have been quite as ambitious.” On Rage: “It really is probably the most enjoyable id game, from my perspective, we’ve ever made.” “I’ve never been one who played deathmatch for 8 hours.” “Everything…
By Joel Johnson Published August 4, 2011 -
Torchlight 2 is Too Big for Xbox Live’s Memory Limit
Torchlight did land-office bidness on Xbox Live Arcade, but Torchlight 2 is so far above the memory limit on an XBLA game that the developer is focusing instead on a MacOS port after its upcoming PC release. Max Schaefer, the Runic Games CEO, told Eurogamer that the first Torchlight just barely fit under XBLA’s file…
By Owen Good Published August 4, 2011 -
Retro Game Master Episode 7: The Mystery of Atlantis
In this seventh episode of Retro Game Master, our game-testing everyman, Shinya Arino, faces off against The Mystery of Atlantis The Mystery of Atlantis was released by Sunsoft for the Family Computer in 1986. In it, players control a boy named Wynn as he explores the mythical land of Atlantis and fights to defeat and…
By Brian Crecente Published August 4, 2011 -
This is Either Art from Bungie’s Next Game or Clever Misdirection
Earlier today we showed you the one-hour documentary celebrating the 20th anniversary of Bungie Studios. It ended with a curiosity. You want to go the the 53:30 mark in the documentary to see these some powerlines and a windmill set up in a desert near some mountains. Signs of the new mystery franchise/universe/game that Bungie…
By Stephen Totilo Published August 4, 2011 -
Wolfenstein and Doom Games Get Big iPhone Price Drop
To celebrate today’s Quakecon kick-off a slew of id Software games are on deep discount over on iTunes. Here’s the run down: Wolfenstein 3D Classic Platinum is now available on sale for $.99 (was $1.99) DOOM Classic is now available on sale for $1.99 (was $6.99) DOOM II RPG is now available on sale for…
By Brian Crecente Published August 4, 2011 -
Quake… KHAN!!!
QuakeCon is Live – Our own Joel Johnson is stalking the halls of this year’s QuakeCon. Here’s a pic of the first to show up. (Photo by QuakeCon) One of the iPhone’s Biggest Games Slices Out a Sequel There are a handful of iPhone games that pretty much everyone who owns an iPhone has. Cut…
By Brian Crecente Published August 4, 2011 -
EA Sports’ Peter Moore Takes Over as EA’s Chief Operating Officer in Company Reorganization [Update]
Peter Moore, president of EA Sports for the past four years, has been promoted to Electronic Arts’ chief operating officer in a company-wide reorganization, John Riccitiello, the EA chief executive, said today. Moore, 55, takes over a position vacant since former COO John Schappert left for Zynga in April. Moore had been president of EA…
By Owen Good Published August 4, 2011 -
Blizzard Thinks Always Online Diablo III Shouldn’t Surprise You
Blizzard really thinks you should get with the times. There’s really no reason why an always-online Diablo III should shock you, Blizzard VP of Online Technologies Robert Bridenbecker says in an interview with MTV Multiplayer “I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and…
By Joshua Rivera Published August 4, 2011 -
Uncover a Twisting Tale in this Brilliant, Deceptively Deep Half-Life 2 Mod
Branching storylines have become quite the thing in games lately, but most games don’t take the idea much farther than “choose option A to get ending A, choose option B to get ending B.” That’s not the case with The Stanley Parable, a smart, twisty new Half-Life 2 mod by Davey Wreden. The first time…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
Rhythm Heaven Still Tops In Japan, But Erotic PSP Fighting Is Also A Hit
WIi game Rhythm Heaven Wii (Minna no Rhythm Tengoku in Japan) is still the bestselling game in Japan, according to the people at Media Create. But Namco Bandai’s Queen’s Gate came closest to beating that with its suggestive, girl-on-girl role-playing brawler. Queen’s Gate: Spiral Chaos, the PSP sequel to 2009’s Queen’s Blade: Spiral Chaos, was…
By Michael McWhertor Published August 4, 2011 -
Have Some Cake, Atlus. Catherine Sold Quite Well.
We get game news in some pretty strange ways. Today, Atlus USA’s twitter feed posted a picture of a cake, upon which was the news that their groovy/odd sex-puzzler Catherine sold 200,000 copies in its first week. So while that number is unconfirmed, it seems worth taking Atlus at their word. Or taking them at…
By Kirk Hamilton Published August 4, 2011 -
San Francisco Welcomes Reckless Multiplayer Drivers
I just want to play Driver: San Francisco to try and figure out how taxi drivers take those hills without launching their vehicles into low Earth orbit. Other crave a little competition. This video is for them. Give me a large city to roam about in my vehicle, and that’s just what I shall do,…
By Mike Fahey Published August 4, 2011