General gaming

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• Professor Layton Goes Social
• How the PS Vita's Back Panel Almost Didn't Happen
• 1UP's Cars 2 Giveaway
• Try Games for Yourself Right on Wal-Mart's Website
• Duke Nukem Forever Crudeness Defended by Take-Two
• Here's Your Chance to Try Duke Nukem Forever for Free
• Microsoft Introduces New, Kinect-Powered Interactive Ads
• Wii U's Screen Was Originally Smaller, Placed on a Table
• Shadows of the Damned Review
• The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Party Photo Gallery

Professor Layton Goes Social Posted: 22 Jun 2011 06:30 AM PDT At a press conference a couple days back, Level-5 and Japanese social-game giant DeNA announced that the newest game in the Professor Layton series isn't going to be on the DS or 3DS or anything like that -- instead, it'll be played out on smartphones across Japan. Professor Layton Royale is part of a tie-up between Level-5 and the producers of the Royale series, one of the first mobile-phone social apps to hit it really big in Japan. The lineup started with Kaito Royale in October 2009 -- a basic Mafia Wars-type title where players compete to become the most notorious master thief in the world -- and has since branched out into other genres, including a Gundam-themed game. According to Level-5 head Akihiro Hino, however, Layton Royale won't play by the basic Mafia Wars formula. "Players begin by getting assigned a role from the Layton series, whether Professor Layton himself or someone else," he told Famitsu magazine. "There are three roles available -- detective, criminal, and citizen -- and detectives have to work with citizens to gather information and figure out who's the criminal. Meanwhile, the criminal can put up obstacles to this process to avoid getting caught before the game ends. So it's a test of deduction and tactics between players."

How the PS Vita's Back Panel Almost Didn't Happen Posted: 22 Jun 2011 05:56 AM PDT A few new tidbits on the current state of Sony's PS Vita, courtesy an E3-era interview with SCE Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida by Famitsu magazine: - The PS Vita's price point -- $249 for Wi-Fi, $299 for 3G -- was a pleasant surprise for most gamers. It certainly didn't come about by accident. "There was a lot of speculation about the price when we first announced the PS Vita, but most of the predictions placed it as more expensive than it became," Yoshida commented. "Hearing those predictions made me think 'Wow, we really did it.' We started developing the PS Vita in the spring of 2009, but the goal from the start was to sell the system at 25,000 yen ($311) or below. We abandoned the thought that we should do everything we want and shrug our shoulders at the price. It had to be something that customers could easily afford, but we couldn't afford to compromise on quality, either. That was one of our biggest goals with PS Vita development -- balancing quality with a realistic price point." - The Vita also has a surprisingly robust amount of third-party support from the get-go, another move on Sony's part to avoid repeating past mistakes. "We took pains to keep people from saying 'It's too hard to make games on this,' which is something you've heard about a lot of PlayStation hardware," Yoshida said. "You can use all the main tools as-is on the PS Vita. For any new platform, you have to work on an engine and basic toolset before you can develop anything, and it's plainly inefficient. With the PS Vita, we wanted a development environment where you could immediately run games on it. That allows companies to devote more time in the cycle to making fun games. The race to get as much as possible out of the hardware is a thing of the past; now it's about tuning your project, experimenting to get as much value as you can out of your game."

1UP's Cars 2 Giveaway Posted: 22 Jun 2011 12:42 AM PDT 1UP's Cars 2 Giveaway How To Play Okay, we know what you're thinking. Another video game based on a major motion picutre franchise. Here's the thing: this isn't another awkward third person beat 'em up. This is Cars 2. While you can see CARS 2 In Theaters June 24, you can win your chance to play the game today. Not sure about whether it's worth it? Take a look at the source material, and tell us it doesn't lend itself to games more than any movie you've seen itself in quite a while. Now let's see how it translates as a game:

Try Games for Yourself Right on Wal-Mart's Website Posted: 21 Jun 2011 05:32 PM PDT Wal-Mart's website now allows visitors to try games out for themselves right in their browser. The functionality is powered by game streaming company Gaikai, which launched earlier this year with a slate of Electronic Arts games available to be streamed. At the time, CEO David Perry boasted about the service, saying, "Nobody else in the world has achieved this kind of streaming performance directly into browsers, it's technically the most advanced interactive advertising unit in existence." He offered the apt description of saying it's trying to be like YouTube for games. The Wal-Mart deal was discovered by VentureBeat, which has since confirmed with Gaikai that a deal is in place that pays it for the amount of time users spend playing games.

Duke Nukem Forever Crudeness Defended by Take-Two Posted: 21 Jun 2011 03:30 PM PDT You can now try out the demo to decide for yourself, but one of the frequently expressed criticisms of Duke Nukem Forever is that it's downright crude. For example, as 1UP's review notes: "Remember the kidnapped women in the second episode of Duke 3D? They're back, but this time they scream in a combination of pain and ecstasy as they're raped and impregnated. Two of them -- who had given Duke oral sex earlier in the game -- beg him not to dump them and promise to 'lose the pregnancy weight.' The player can then choose to kill them on the spot or watch them scream as they suffer a painful death -- exploding with their alien babies." Tasteless? Many would say so. That doesn't mean there's no one out there that doesn't want this sort of content in their games, and that's who Take-Two is shooting for with the game. In an interview with Forbes during E3 (prior to the game's release), Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick defended Forever's questionable content and offered up a simple solution for those who don't like it: Don't play it.

Here's Your Chance to Try Duke Nukem Forever for Free Posted: 21 Jun 2011 02:20 PM PDT Duke Nukem Forever was released earlier this month to a... poor reception from critics -- 1UP gave it an F. A demo was made available prior to release, but only to those who had already expressed interest in buying the full game by placing a pre-order at certain retailers (or picking up Borderlands: Game of the Year Edition). Now that we're a full week past the game's launch, Gearbox has released the demo for everyone to try out for themselves. The demo is live right now on the Xbox Live Marketplace and Steam. PlayStation 3 owners will have to continue to wait; community manager Chris Faylor says Gearbox is "working with Sony to get the demo out as soon as possible." There's been quite a backlash to the criticism seen in reviews, and members of the 1UP community seem to come down on all different sides of the argument. If you haven't felt compelled to try out the game for yourself before now, here's your perfect opportunity to do so for free, whether it be out of a morbid curiosity or genuine interest in seeing what Forever is all about.

Microsoft Introduces New, Kinect-Powered Interactive Ads Posted: 21 Jun 2011 01:30 PM PDT Kinect will soon be used for more than playing videogames and navigating parts of the Xbox 360 dashboard. Microsoft today announced NUads (natural user interface ads), a new form of advertising that uses Kinect to interact with ads. They were revealed at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and, as you'd expect, Microsoft is making them out to be a big deal. You can bet the thought of more advertising on Xbox Live probably is not the sort of thing paying subscribers want to hear about.

Wii U's Screen Was Originally Smaller, Placed on a Table Posted: 21 Jun 2011 12:11 PM PDT What we now know the Wii U to be -- a system with a large touchscreen-equipped controller -- wasn't always what Nintendo had in mind. President Satoru Iwata has revealed planning for the system began immediately after the Wii hit the market, and the idea for a dual screen setup was established as early as 2007. The non-TV screen wasn't, however, always located in the controller. Speaking with Gamasutra, Iwata explained that the screen was to be placed on a table, separate from the controller. Due to LCD costs at the time, it would have been smaller than the current 6.2-inch screen. "Considering how expensive screens were then, it did not make sense to have this big-sized LCD," he said. "We would not have been able to come up with a reasonable price point. ... We had not decided when we were going to launch the new console [at that point], but we knew we needed to be flexible."

Shadows of the Damned Review Posted: 21 Jun 2011 12:01 PM PDT The names of the top creative talent involved in crafting Shadows of the Damned are so big that they're listed in the first line on the back of the box. And why wouldn't that be an impressive thing to tout through marketing? Damned is the collaboration of some of Japan's most creative video game talent; the combined influences of Shinji Mikami (Resident Evil 4), Goichi Suda (Killer 7), and Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill) should be, potentially, the Voltron of Japanese-driven video games. Only it isn't. Although Shadows of the Damned has fun and interesting moments, the end product turns out to be a decent to slightly above average shooter that, at times, feels a little bland. This isn't to say I'm down on the promise of big name collaborative projects -- some of them have led to sublime examples of timely artistic expression within a given genre (see Chrono Trigger). But there are also cases where the end results can feel mixed (see Metroid Other M). Shadows of the Damned seems destined to fill the almost-but-not-quite-there-yet grey space that exists between massive hit and huge miss. Mechanically the game resembles RE4 with a third person over-the-shoulder camera -- but with rougher edges and a more colorful palette of reds, greens, and purples. Conceptually, it's a marriage of the lurid subject matter from No More Heroes with the exploitation films of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez. The game takes place in hell and follows the adventures of demon hunter Garcia Hotspur -- a Latino man on a mission to rescue his girlfriend, Paula, from the clutches of Fleming (a.k.a. the Lord of the Demons).

The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Party Photo Gallery Posted: 21 Jun 2011 11:52 AM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet

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