General gaming

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• Team Fortress 2 Now Permanently Free
• Sledgehammer's Call of Duty Action/Adventure Game Could Still Happen
• Former I Am Alive Dev Working on New Survival Horror FPS
• Motion Controls Should be Firewalled Off From the Main Experience, Says Ken Levine
• Sonic the Hedgehog is 20 Years Old
• Halo Players Get Blue Flames, Marathon Goes Open Source
• See an Early Version of Super Mario Bros. 3
• L.A. Noire Takes its Rightful Place on PC This Fall

Team Fortress 2 Now Permanently Free Posted: 23 Jun 2011 06:52 PM PDT Alongside the announcement of the Uber Update earlier this week, Valve announced that Team Fortress 2 would be free to play for the next week. Unlike when the game has been temporarily made free in the past, the ability to buy the game was removed from its Steam page. This led to speculation that it might be going to free to play for good; Steam recently began offering F2P titles, so it seemed possible. Sure enough, Robin Walker has revealed in a Develop interview that Team Fortress 2 is now free to play -- permanently. The game added an in-game store last September to sell items (weapons and aesthetic-only hats) made by Valve and users. Allowing everyone to freely play the game increases the number of potential customers the store can see, so it's not as if this move is simply giving up money. "We've been toying with the idea ever since the Mann-conomy update, where we added the in-game Team Fortress 2 store," Walker said. "Over the years we've done a bunch of price experimentations with the game, going all the way down to $2.49 in our random one-hour Halloween sales. The more we've experimented, the more we've learned there are fundamentally different kinds of customers, each with their own way of valuing the product. Now that we're shipping it, it feels like a fairly straightforward next step along the 'Games as Services' path we've been walking down for a while now."

Sledgehammer's Call of Duty Action/Adventure Game Could Still Happen Posted: 23 Jun 2011 05:38 PM PDT After Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella were fired early last year, Sledgehammer Games was announced to be working on an action/adventure Call of Duty game. The company is now focused entirely on helping to finish up Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 ahead of its November release, but its original CoD project hasn't been forgotten. "Right now Sledgehammer's 100% focused on Modern Warfare 3," Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg told IndustryGamers. "We haven't announced the future slate or future plans for the studio. They were originally working on an extension of the Call of Duty franchise into an action/adventure genre and that's a game I still want to play. That's a supreme, incredible group doing that. All I can say is right now they're 100% focused on Modern Warfare 3." Call of Duty has never ventured outside the first-person shooter genre. For years now it's been an annualized series, and it's unclear if Sledgehammer's game would have been one of two CoD games released in one year or if it would take the place of one of the alternating Treyarch and Infinity Ward FPS releases.

Former I Am Alive Dev Working on New Survival Horror FPS Posted: 23 Jun 2011 04:23 PM PDT Darkworks has revealed its newest title, a survival horror/first-person shooter called Black Death. The company previously worked on I Am Alive before the project was moved to Ubisoft Shanghai. It has experience with the horror genre, having also developed Cold Fear and Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare. The game's official website outlines the story, which is set in a northeast city of the United States. A huge cloud of smoke overtakes the city and people being being infected, a process that turns them into violent mutants. The player's job is to stay alive and take out (or cure, if you so choose) the mutants using creative means. Players can create their own chemical weapons in addition to using traditional firearms. The Black Death in history was a massive pandemic that struck in the 14th century. It's estimated to have resulted in the deaths of between 30 and 60 percent of Europe's entire population at the time.

Motion Controls Should be Firewalled Off From the Main Experience, Says Ken Levine Posted: 23 Jun 2011 03:12 PM PDT Irrational Games boss Ken Levine came on stage during Sony's E3 press conference to commit to using PlayStation Move in BioShock Infinite in some capacity. Whatever form that support comes in, we don't yet know, just don't expect it to be forced upon players in any way. Levine has shared his policy on motion controls and he isn't in favor of being pushy as he describes himself as a "really conservative guy at heart" who still does "most of my gaming on mouse and keyboard." "Any experience that sits in the realm of motion play needs to be kept separate from the main experience," Levine told OXM during E3. "It needs to be firewalled off so that if this experiment isn't for you, or doesn't turn out to be all that great, you just ignore it." He said the main experience needs to be protected from "any new experience we add." Referring to Mass Effect 3's addition of Kinect voice control, which is used for commanding squadmates, Levine said, "I like the stuff they're doing with Mass Effect 3, in terms of making some of the interface aspects a little less thorny -- more the squad commands than the conversation, as that's a bit of a challenge on the controller."

Sonic the Hedgehog is 20 Years Old Posted: 23 Jun 2011 01:37 PM PDT 20 years ago today, the first Sonic the Hedgehog was released on Sega Genesis in North America. Sega had been looking for a character to counter the increasing popularity of rival Nintendo's Mario. The titular Sonic would go on to become the company's iconic mascot and perhaps the company's most important franchise. Sonic was developed by the appropriately titled Sonic Team, which consisted of designers Hirokazu Yasuhara and Naoto Oshima as well as programmer Yuji Naka, who would serve as the developer's head for years before going on to found Prope. The game was a hit thanks to its straightforward, super-fast sidescrolling action. It's gone on to be ported to a great number of systems and the franchise has appeared on more than a dozen platforms. Sonic the Hedgehog 'Parade' ad

Halo Players Get Blue Flames, Marathon Goes Open Source Posted: 23 Jun 2011 12:21 PM PDT In Halo Reach's multiplayer, a blue flaming helmet is an indication that a player is a Bungie employee and not some jerk liar who just claims to be one with the power to ban you. That distinction is no longer applicable, as Bungie has decided to give fans a parting gift as it moves away from the Halo franchise. By registering on Bungie.net or using the new Bungie Mobile iOS app, players can land themselves both the flaming helmet and a Bungie nameplate for use in Reach. It's also giving four-player teams a chance to earn themselves a real life steak by beating a team of Bungie staffers by 20 kills or more. One of Bungie's earliest games, first-person shooter Marathon, is in the process of being ported by a fan to iPad, something that Bungie considers "totally sweet." To honor its development, the final Marathon title, Infinity, is being made open source, a move that it says it "should have done a long time ago (but didn't because our legal counsel 'forgot')."

See an Early Version of Super Mario Bros. 3 Posted: 23 Jun 2011 11:43 AM PDT By now there's a good chance you've played through Super Mario Bros. 3 from beginning to end a dozen times. What you've likely never seen is footage from before the game was complete. The video above surfaced on Japanese video sharing site Nico Nico Douga and comes from the September 1988 edition of Famimaga. It shows a chunk of World 1-3 along with screenshots of other, unknown areas of the game. There are a number of differences in the level design of areas recognizable in the final game. In the section pictured below (seen at about the 17-second mark in the video) highlights this fairly well. Another change is seen in the HUD: Mario's name was replaced by the number of the world you're on, with the number of lives you have left being simplified to "M X number of lives" in the bottom left corner. It's been noted that the timer runs down noticeably faster in the old footage than it does in the final game.

L.A. Noire Takes its Rightful Place on PC This Fall Posted: 23 Jun 2011 10:40 AM PDT Much like Rockstar's previous release, Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire was available only on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at launch. Noire was a stranger decision as it is, unlike Red Dead, essentially an adventure game, a genre that has its roots on PC. Luckily Rockstar will be bringing to the game to PC later this year, complete with a few additions. The port is in the hands of Rockstar Leeds and is being "built to run on a wide range of PCs." Those who have higher-end PCs will get to enjoy enhanced graphics and, for anyone with the necessary hardware, 3D support. There's no word on if any of the game's downloadable content will be included. It's not the first time PC gamers have been forced to wait for a Rockstar game. Grand Theft Auto IV on PC trailed behind the console versions by more than eight months. There was also a long wait for both expansion packs, although the PS3 version had to deal with that as well thanks to Microsoft's exclusivity deal with Rockstar. Meanwhile, neither Red Dead game has seen release on PC; Redemption is particularly surprising given how well it sold on consoles.

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