General gaming

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• Professor Layton Movie Getting U.S. Release
• Weekend Deals: Steam Summer Sale and 4th of July Goodness
• Duke Nukem is Now Almost Old Enough to Drink
• Shuttered Black Rock's Final Game Was Similar to League of Legends
• The Original Crysis May be Headed to Consoles
• LittleBigPlanet Dev Moving on, Will Work on "Some New Ideas"
• This Week in the 1UP Community 6/27/11
• Pac-Man 2: An Uncommon Sequel
• The Rise of Characters: Gaming's First Protagonists with Personality
• A Real Ladies Pac-Man: How Namco's Yellow Dot Won Over Female Gamers

Professor Layton Movie Getting U.S. Release Posted: 01 Jul 2011 09:59 PM PDT Habitual tea drinker Hershel Layton is the star of a series of handheld puzzle games, sure. But in addition to the Professor Layton series, he and his top hat have been adapted for manga and an animated feature film. The latter, Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva, was first released in Japan in December 2009. It isn't something you'd necessarily expect to ever make it out of Japan, yet an English version was created for British markets and was released last year. It's also seen release in other parts of Europe, and soon those in North America will have the opportunity to see it without having to resort to importing or pirating it thanks to Viz Media. As revealed at the ongoing Anime Expo 2011 in Los Angeles, the feature-length animated film is on its way to North America, Anime Your Way reports. For the cynics who assume it's not any good, it was actually fairly well received and did well enough that Professor Layton developer Level 5 has already commissioned a sequel and would like to have a new movie out annually. A new Layton title for smartphones, Layton Royale, was recently announced. There are also two more games, one for DS (The Last Specter) and one for 3DS (The Mask of Miracle), that are out in Japan and have yet to be localized in the U.S. And, lest we forget, Layton is also to be featured in a new game collaboration between Level 5 and Capcom alongside Phoenix Wright -- whom himself is getting a movie of his own, albeit a live-action one.

Weekend Deals: Steam Summer Sale and 4th of July Goodness Posted: 01 Jul 2011 06:17 PM PDT With Independence Day coming up on Monday, what better time is there to spend copious amounts of money on cheap videogames in an attempt to stay away from the sun? Direct2Drive has a month-long summer sale going with new deals every day; The Witcher 2 for $37.45 is among the best offers right now if you weren't able to pick it up on Steam while it was on sale yesterday. You can also pick up either of the first two BioShock games for $7.95 or Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for $9.95. GamersGate has the most recent Civilization game, Civ V, for $16.98, which is a terrific price for a terrific game. Perhaps even better than that is Impulse's $9.99 offer for the complete edition of Civilization IV. And of course there is Steam's ongoing summer camp sale. Today's daily deals aren't quite as excellent as yesterday's, but Just Cause 2 is a lot of fun, particularly for just $4.99, or you can dive into five classic Grand Theft Auto games for $7.49. Each of them offers up dozens of hours of content, so I can't even imagine where that deal would rank on my imaginary dollars-to-potential-hours-spent-playing scale.

Duke Nukem is Now Almost Old Enough to Drink Posted: 01 Jul 2011 05:42 PM PDT It was this day 20 years ago that the world was introduced to Duke Nukem. Although the series is best known for its first-person shooter offerings, it began as a Commander Keen-like side-scrolling action game. Duke has starred in more than a dozen games since his debut, including titles on PC, N64, Game Boy, PlayStation, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and more. He's best known for either the perpetually-delayed Duke Nukem Forever or his FPS debut, Duke Nukem 3D, which was released in 1996. (The XBLA version is pictured at the bottom of this post.) The game is what really made Duke Nukem a well-known name; it stood out with its interactive and destructible environments, ill-mannered and crude protagonist (voiced by Jon St. John), and no shortage of strippers.

Shuttered Black Rock's Final Game Was Similar to League of Legends Posted: 01 Jul 2011 05:02 PM PDT We learned earlier this morning that the developer of Pure and Split/Second, Black Rock Studio, was being shut down by owner Disney Interactive Studios. When layoffs struck the company in May, a source leaked that it had previously begun work on Split/Second 2 and Pure 2, but both were canceled. It struggled to find what to do next, although Eurogamer reports what it had been in pre-production on before its shut down was a free-to-play game called Champions Alliance. It was to be similar to Riot Games' Defense of the Ancients-inspired free-to-play game, League of Legends (pictured above). "The idea was that you had to do PVP and PVE to gain XP to somehow escape," a source told Eurogamer. He or she also said, "The game was intended to be released quite quickly, in beta anyway, in about six months or so."

The Original Crysis May be Headed to Consoles Posted: 01 Jul 2011 04:18 PM PDT While Crysis 2 came out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3, its predecessor has remained a PC exclusive since its release in November 2007. It doesn't look like that will remain the case for much longer. A listing for an Xbox 360 version of Crysis showed up today on the Korean game rating board, as noted by a member of the MyCrysis forums. Since then, an EA Korea representative has supposedly confirmed (via Kotaku) that the game is coming to 360. No release date was announced. The ESRB's website (as pictured below) also now shows an Xbox 360 version of Crysis, as well as a PlayStation 3 version, to go along with the PC game. Crysis Warhead, a PC-only spin-off, is still shown with PC as its only platform.

LittleBigPlanet Dev Moving on, Will Work on "Some New Ideas" Posted: 01 Jul 2011 03:23 PM PDT Having worked on nothing but the LittleBigPlanet franchise since the studio's inception in 2006, Media Molecule is ready to work on something new for a change. While it won't be completely abandoning the series it made its name on, the company has said it is looking to develop something different, although it wasn't specified it that meant a new or existing IP. At Gamelab 2011 in Bareclona, Spain, studio director Siobhan Reddy said, "We're stepping away from LittleBigPlanet to focus on some new ideas," according to Edge. The U.K.-based developer followed up with a reassuring tweet for LBP fans that stated, "Loyal sackfolk - please be reassured that we will always be involved with LBP, at least a bit, and there's lots more fun yet to come!"

This Week in the 1UP Community 6/27/11 Posted: 01 Jul 2011 03:06 PM PDT Happy 4th of July! With the 3-day weekend just around the corner, enjoy the sun with a tall glass of lemonade in hand and this week's batch of community-driven content!

Pac-Man 2: An Uncommon Sequel Posted: 01 Jul 2011 03:05 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet Pac-Man 2: An Uncommon Sequel Finding the good in Pac-Man's new adventures 1UP PRESENTS ISSUE 1: Dial Other M for Murder | A Retronauts Metroid Comic | Rich Outer Life | Other Missteps | Pac-Man 2 | A Real Ladies' Pac-Man | The Rise of Characters | The Collector's Guide to Sega Saturn Gamers often pine for innovation in an industry starved of creativity. However, when a truly original title is released, the same players will retreat to more familiar territory? and the unlucky publisher will be left wondering where that hunger for new ideas went. Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures is one example of a game that dared to be different, and suffered the consequences. It distanced itself from every convention established in the 1980 original, leaving fans bewildered and furious. They expected a faithful sequel to the action-packed arcade game they obsessed over for much of their childhoods. What they got instead was a lost episode of the Pac-Man cartoon series. However, there's one thing these fans always seem to miss. Pac-Man 2 was released in 1994, when the retro revival movement was still in its infancy. Old-school gaming was a playground for only the nerdiest of nerds, and emulation was well beyond the reach of early 1990s technology. Beyond that, the world at large just wasn't ready for a Pac-Man sequel played straight. This was the age of Final Fantasy VI and Street Fighter II. Mainstream players had come to expect depth and purpose from their games, and a "real" Pac-Man sequel, no matter how well designed, just couldn't provide it.

The Rise of Characters: Gaming's First Protagonists with Personality Posted: 01 Jul 2011 03:04 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet The Rise of Characters: Gaming's First Protagonists with Personality These guys are more than just shapeless blobs of pixels 1UP PRESENTS ISSUE 1: Dial Other M for Murder | A Retronauts Metroid Comic | Rich Outer Life | Other Missteps | Pac-Man 2 | A Real Ladies' Pac-Man | The Rise of Characters | The Collector's Guide to Sega Saturn Pac-Man In the 1970s, there were video games, but no video game characters. The paddle in Breakout, the ship in Asteroids, the tank in Space Invaders... these were mere extensions of the player, tools and weapons which ceased to have purpose when the controller was put down. However, as graphics improved and developers grew more creative, games became a storytelling medium, with worlds that existed outside the player's influence. An early example was Pac-Man, released by Namco in 1980. This arcade hit introduced gamers to a hungry yellow orb and his pursuers, four brightly colored monsters with their own distinct personalities. Not much was revealed about these characters in their debut, but Namco would fill in the blanks and even give Pac-Man a family in later installments.

A Real Ladies Pac-Man: How Namco's Yellow Dot Won Over Female Gamers Posted: 01 Jul 2011 02:35 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet A Real Ladies Pac-Man: How Namco's Yellow Dot Won Over Female Gamers Pac-Man creator Toru Iwatani's five-step program for attracting women 1UP PRESENTS ISSUE 1: Dial Other M for Murder | A Retronauts Metroid Comic | Rich Outer Life | Other Missteps | Pac-Man 2 | A Real Ladies' Pac-Man | The Rise of Characters | The Collector's Guide to Sega Saturn It's easy to look back at Pac-Man -- a game in which a yellow circle eats dots in a maze and chases ghosts around -- as some kind of strange fever dream, coming from the same weird mindset in Japanese game development that created a world where a fat plumber eats mushrooms and jumps on turtles. The truth, though, is that every minuscule detail that went into the making of the original Pac-Man was laser focused on just one thing: attracting women. Japanese game centers in 1979 were dank, smelly dens of vice just for adolescent boys, a place only the bravest girls dared enter. The air reeked of cheap cigarette smoke, and all of the loud, flashy games catered to one specific theme: violence, be it against aliens, tanks, or -- on some of the stranger, lower budget games -- unidentifiable blobs of color.

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