General gaming

General gaming

Shuhei Yoshida Gives a Quick Last Guardian Update

Posted: 10 Feb 2012 12:42 AM PST

The Last Guardian

After more than six years in development, the recent news of director Fumito Ueda finishing work on the game as a contractor instead of an employee, and the lack of any substantial public updates in almost three years, it's hard not to worry a little about The Last Guardian. I don't want to, and it's still near the top of my most anticipated games list (I put it at #2 for the year), but to a certain degree it's unavoidable.

So when I spoke with Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida at the DICE conference in Las Vegas yesterday, I asked him for an update on the situation.

OP-ED: Showing Potential Skyrim Content Early a Risk Worth Taking

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 09:33 PM PST

Skyrim

During a keynote address at the DICE Summit yesterday, Bethesda's Todd Howard described an activity the developers of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim participated in after finishing up work on the game last year. Game Jam, as they called it, saw everyone on the development team work on anything they wanted for a week, with the only restriction being that it had to be made for Skyrim. After laying out the premise, a sizzle reel was shared with a selection of some of the concepts that were come up with. Contained within the video were a variety of crazy and/or awesome ideas: kill cams for magic and ranged combat, epic mounts, dark dungeons (that players have to manually light), an enormous mudcrab boss, the ability to become a flying vampire lord or werebear, Kinect-enabled shouts, and more.

Howard prefaced the video with a caveat, which is that none of this is guaranteed to ever make it into the hands of gamers. "How much of this stuff sees the light of day? To be determined," Howard said before rolling the footage. "Could it be in a future DLC? We don't know. Could various parts of it just be released for free? We don't know."

Can Twisted Metal Succeed Without DLC?

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 03:50 PM PST

Six years after the industry drove horse armor jokes into the ground, the concept of a major title without downloadable content sounds absurd (unless you're talking about a Nintendo game.) DLC gives publishers the chance to make a little more cash, and extends the life and sales of existing games -- thus limiting the damage used game sales can inflict on the bottom line. Combine those incentives with a population of gamers eagerly buying post-release content, and it's hard to find a reason for a publisher or developer not to push DLC, but that's exactly what Eat Sleep Play (ESP) and Sony are doing with the new Twisted Metal.

In an interview with Game Informer, Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe explained:

"Right now there are no plans. I always thought it was going to be a great game. But we weren't nursing these illusions that we were making Call of Duty in terms of sales. If it's a big enough hit I'm sure Sony won't let it wither on the vine. But right now there are no plans at all. There's no DLC plans, there's no sequel or expansion plans. We have to wait and see how it does."

Retrospective: How Maniac Mansion Made Adventure Games Playable

Posted: 09 Feb 2012 12:55 PM PST

Feature

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How Maniac Mansion Made Adventure Games Playable

25 years later, we take a look at how Maniac Mansion started a legacy and transformed a genre.

By: Bob Mackey February 9, 2012

Okay, so maybe the classic PC adventure game isn't dead after all. When a company like Double Fine can put together a kickstarter campaign and meet their one-month goal in just eight hours, even the most cynical among us have to acknowledge the growing demand for point-and-click adventures could make this very particular type of game profitable once again. So, as we (possibly) stand on the brink of an adventure Renaissance, there's no better time to take a look back at the game that sparked our love in the first place: Maniac Mansion, the Rocky Horror-esque classic that singlehandedly gave birth to Lucasfilm Games' successful blend of cartoony humor and mind-bending puzzles.

Undoubtedly, Maniac Mansion is one of Lucasfilm Games' (now LucasArts) most popular creations; from the late '80s to the early '90s it saw ports on nearly everything capable of producing an image, and even received a cutesy makeover for the Japanese Famicom. But why, you may ask, was this adventure game so much more popular than its contemporaries?

The answer lies in Lucasfilm's direct competitor, Sierra; while they made their share of impressive titles, their games had a tendency to be downright malicious to the player. Common features of the Sierra line included linguistic trickery via the traditional input of a text parser, instant deaths caused by simple player curiosity, and the always-great situation of "you forgot to pick up item X at the beginning of the game, so tough luck, chump." Maniac Mansion, while not as forgiving as Lucasfilm's later games, shook adventure gamers out of their Stockholm Syndrome by giving them an experience uniquely funny and downright playable at the same time.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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