Come join us as we stream 38 Studios Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning during the Saturday Morning Happy Fun Zone. If you've got questions about the game, we've got answers, but it could just be fun to eat our cereal together and reminisce about Ren & Stimpy.
We've pored over your many awesome DC Universe Online screenshots for this week's "Screenshot of the Week," and today we're excited to announce the winning entry!
The Firefall team has thrown down the gauntlet to all fans to become filmmakers in the just-announced Battleframe Trailer Challenge. Devs have provided a bevy of images and clips of various battleframes and are asking players to put them together in a trailer showing off their favorite. After that, simply upload it to the Firefall site and wait to be chosen as the winner.
Earlier today, we reported on the lawsuit filed by Blizzard against a trademark filing by Valve over the DOTA name. In a new piece at RTSGuru.com, Cassandra Khaw gives some of the background on the issue and her thoughts about what's in store for the two gaming titans.
Repulse, just released into open beta by Aeria Games, has hit the ground running. We managed to catch up with Associate Producer Scott Hartz to talk about Repulse and what sets it apart from other games of its type. Read on!
According to a pair of legal filings, it appears that Blizzard is suing Valve to prevent it from trademarking the DOTA name. Blizzard claims that the DOTA name has been closely aligned with the Warcraft series for the past seven years. Defense of the Ancients was originally created as a mod for Warcraft III.
Another terrific article has cropped up on network site RTSGuru.com. This time, the team takes a look at several ways the community can help turn eSports into something more than just a hobby. Check it out at RTSGuru.com.
Repulse is the latest addition to the Aeria Games stable of F2P titles. As an "MMOFPS", Repulse is aimed squarely at those who enjoy PvP Mayhem. We recently logged into both the closed and open betas to check out Repulse. See what we discovered. Played Repulse? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
We are now more than three months removed from Rockstar's confirmation that (surprise!) Grand Theft Auto V is in development. Aside from what was yielded by the days spent dissecting the premiere trailer after its release, new information has been impossible to come by as Rockstar has returned to being characteristically silent about what it has in the works. That has, however, left us with plenty of time to ponder what GTA V may have in store for gamers and how many of its key features could be enhanced versions of ideas seen in Rockstar games past.
Firm details are scant, though based on the trailer there has been a great deal of guesswork. GTAV returns to Los Santos and its surroundings, much to the chagrin of those hoping for a brand-new locale like London or Washington, DC. Like how GTAIV revisited Liberty City (which was used in the GTAIII series), Los Santos, Rockstar's fictionalized version of Los Angeles, previously served as the first of three cities in San Andreas. Based on the trailer we know the landscape will be diverse -- ranging from skyscrapers and Hollywood (known as Vinewood) to mountains and farmland. There are also beaches and countryside, so essentially we're seeing a lot of what comprised San Andreas' iteration of Los Santos -- only it will now presumably be much bigger and denser without two other cities taking up room.
Everyone wants to be Batman, but no one wants to train like him. Welcome to the world of Gotham City Imposters, where wannabe superheroes (called Bats) and villains (called Jokerz) kill and maim themselves in the name of saving or destroying the city -- imagine if Civil War re-enactors used silly names, real weapons, dressed up like a giant bats, and fought 6v6, and you'll get a pretty good idea as to just how absurd and demented GCI can seem -- two qualities that the industry could use more of in a market dominated by military shooters.
You can tell that GCI developer Monolith Productions took the premise and ran with it. While the reductive and cynical amongst us might see a game that can be described as a "shooter with a funny art style," and declare it a Team Fortress 2 clone, Monolith has created their own game in GCI. It's refreshing to see the studio that made a name for itself with the laugh-out-loud funny No One Lives Forever series get the chance to create another humorous game -- given that the studio's two most recent franchises, F.E.A.R. and Condemned, traded in humor for some dark subject matter. Narrative and stylistic trappings aside, the developers' experience with first-person shooters shows through in many subtle ways; from the ease of aiming to the size of the magazines on the starting weapons -- which when fired at a target's center of mass, seem to run out of ammo just before downing an enemy (the takeaway: aim for the head.)
Many gamers who take the hobby seriously scoff at each year's Spike TV Video Game Awards. There are numerous reasons for this, the most prominent being that the show is often filled with gags, skits, and seemingly anything that does not consist of awards being handed out and accepted. You need only look at the show this past December where certain awards were given out beforehand and others were announced so rapidly they were gone in the blink of an eye. But about what the awards themselves -- are the selections, too, put to shame by other award shows?
Last night, in the midst of the 2012 DICE Summit in Las Vegas, the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards (the IAAs) took place and were hosted by who else but comedian and BlizzCon frequent Jay Mohr. DICE (which stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is an event geared towards those within the industry and thus has a much different focus than a trade show like E3. Whereas the nominees and winners of the VGAs are chosen by a select group of those in the videogame press, the IAAs are "decided by a peer-based voting system," as the organizers, the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences, put it. One might therefore expect the awards to end up in the hands of different nominees than the VGAs.
The DICE conference in Las Vegas is good for a lot of things, but one thing it's great for is bumping into people. People who work in games and have opinions, even. So at this year's event, I posed two questions to many of them: what's the one thing you want to see most in next-gen consoles, and why are game budgets so secretive. (And perhaps notably, many of them said they'd heard the former question a lot in the past few days.)
This story, if you're playing along and read the headline, contains the answers to the first of those two. Head over here for the budget talk, read on to see what people in the industry had to say, and if you feel inspired, offer your own take in the comments below.
Before asking the question above to a bunch of people at this year's DICE conference, I assumed everyone would agree with me that the game industry doesn't like talking about how much games cost to make. It turns out I was mostly right, but not entirely -- some weren't aware of what I was suggesting, though almost everyone had a unique take on why things are the way they are.
Check out all the replies below, and we won't complain if you want to offer your own take in the comments at the bottom of the page. Promise.
Last November, Valve revealed that hackers gained access to sensitive Steam user information, including user names, billing addresses, and encrypted credit card information. Via a message from company founder Gabe Newell, the Valve informed users of the security breach but added, "We do not have evidence that encrypted credit card numbers or personally identifying information were taken by the intruders, or that the protection on credit card numbers or passwords was cracked."
Nearly three months later Valve is still attempting to assess the damage, which, according to a second message from Newell received by Steam Users today, was more extensive than originally thought. "Recently we learned that it is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008. This backup file contained user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It did not include Steam passwords." writes Newell.
In Spring 2008, Sony's top PlayStation executives gathered in an offsite management meeting to plan their second portable game system. Ask Sony's head of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida about it, and he'll give you a 700-word answer like it happened yesterday; however, the part that excited him most was what he learned about the role his teams would play this time around.
In that meeting, PlayStation boss Kaz Hirai said that he wanted the company's first-party studios to play an active role in designing the system, which may not seem like a big deal to an outsider, but Yoshida characterizes as "a total change" to how the company had gone about things previously. "There was very limited communication in the past, especially when it came to new hardware, because of the secrecy involved," he says. "[SCEI] had very tight security in terms of sharing information with us up through the PS3 days, so I saw a big sea change of culture and process."
Many modern developers don't like to show early versions of their games out of fear that someone might interpret a blocky collection of untextured polygons as representative of the final product -- even years after the game's release. Publishers and studios typically choose to show the press tightly controlled demos instead. However, we at 1UP have a history of convincing developers (and nervous PR managers) to let our readers see early builds of their games. Our latest video features prototype footage from next week's PlayStation Vita launch-day marquee title, Uncharted: Golden Abyss by Bend Studios (the same team behind Resistance: Retribution and the Syphon Filter series). Be sure to check out our full, in-depth look at the making of the game.
I've only played a few minutes of Zipper Interactive's Unit 13 -- enough to say that it's a third-person tactical shooter for the Vita. It's not SOCOM -- that franchise emphasizes teams of players while Unit 13 focuses on pairs of players (either cooperatively or competitively). Going through a Direct Action mission with IGN's Ryan Clements shows that Unit 13 hits all the basic points expected of a tactical shooter. Ryan and I can duck behind cover, we can use voicechat (I completely forgot that the Vita has a built-in mic), and blindly running and gunning results in quick death for the both of us.
Quite a bit has already been said about how the Vita's form factor -- now with dual analog sticks -- makes it more conducive to first person shooters. Hey, you can aim and shoot! So those types of games can play as expected, rather than go through severe compromises like when they were on the PSP. That stuff is all fine and well, but it's Unit 13's more social functions that make it a title to watch.
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