In this week's Community Spotlight, Community Manager Mike Bitton shines the light on a thread that expounds the virtues of many different developer houses. Take a look to see if your favorite made the cut, and be sure to chime in with your thoughts.
MMORPG.com has partnered with CyberPower and Bigfoot Networks to bring you a very exciting sweepstakes contest event! From now until August 2, 2011 @ 9PM EST you can enter for a chance to win a very powerful gaming laptop featuring a mobile gaming network adapter by Bigfoot Networks!
Red 5 and the Firefall dev team have a terrific new video diary about the story behind the game including the announcement that Orson Scott Card is working with the team to build the back story! The video also contains some terrific game play footage so check it out!
Bioware and Star Wars: The Old Republic dev team have released a new trailer showing off the Bounty Hunter progression through skills, equipment and advanced classes.
In celebration of the US 4th of July holiday on Monday, Faxion Online devs are giving all players who log into the game a chance to win their wings! The best part is that the give away isn't confined to Monday only but will continue through July 6th.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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!"
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!
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.
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.
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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During the server maintenance during the past Wednesday, the new Samurai class was added to Eden Eternal Taiwan, also known as Finding Neverland Online. If you have missed my Facebook post about a week ago, this class will require character base level 60, level 55 Warrior and level 55 Martial Artist to unlock. The class uses the Katana blade weapon. With its armor, it has higher defense despite having no shield and deals incredible amount damage as well.
The Samurai is a perfectly balanced class, with self-defense buff, skills which lowers enemies' defense and performs straight-line AOE skills with its Katana. There is also a new system added to the Coliseum, but I shall not spoil the surprise for that one. You can view videos of the game at my YouTube channel (search for Eden Eternal) or proceed to the official English website.
Hi everyone! I made this video out of interest. I hope it can help more players to understand priest better. It is my first video. Hope you like it, thanks!
July will be a very Dragon Nest summer holiday. Both SEA and NA will open the Beta gate for players. Rusty Hearts will enter Closed Beta on July 27th, next to the DN NA beta day.
I believe it is safe to assume that most of the people in this community know their gaming acronyms very well. Acronyms are a big part of gaming culture, from AYBABTU to FPS to MMORPG to ZOMGWTFBBQ, gamers just love their acronyms.
GamesCampus.com (www.GamesCampus.com), today unleashed the details behind Scarlet Legacy's new skill system. Fittingly named "Martial Arts", players must use their experience to train up in each of the three revealed categories
In addition to the new iLevel 365 gear that players can purchase from unlockable vendors at the Molten Front and the epic armor sets they can claim from Ragnaros and his minions in the Firelands raid, patch 4.2 also boasts a wealth of cool items for collectors and completionists alike.
Riot Games together with their awesome community have reached their goal and as promised, new Blooper Reel video got released. Enjoy watching it and prepare yourself for a possible maniacal laughter.
Bioware and LucasArts have released a new Bounty Hunter progression video to show off all the configurations of the class from Star Wars: The Old Republic.
This Location Preview Video explores an area known as The Savage Coast, situated on Solomon Island in New England. As one of many locations in The Secret World, it stretches over a vast expanse of land and contains key locations.
Riot Games and the League of Legends team have released a new champion profile. This time, the subject is Yorick the Gravedigger. As his name implies, he is a specialist in all things undead.
Aeria Games has announced today the upcoming release of its first major content update to Eden Eternal. The patch, scheduled for an early July release, includes new endgame content and introduces the Zumi race. The Zumi are small, mouse-like creatures with affection for invention and commerce. They hail from the distant, parched deserts of the [...]
Zemi Interactive, Inc., has announced its successful launch of the new PvP content for 4 Story, the Aerial War. Every Wednesday, twenty minutes after the end of Sacred War, comes the war every player has been waiting for: The Aerial War. Only at the second week since the launch of the Arial War, there have [...]
T3 Entertainment has launched the Open Beta for its online action-RPG Hellgate today in Europe and North America. Those who missed the closed Beta finally get a chance to experience Hellgate's pulse-pounding fusion of action and role-playing as they take on the demons of Hell. Hellgate will celebrate the Open Beta launch with four special [...]
Civ World is a MMOG developed by the acclaimed game developer Sid Meier and Firaxis set to launch in 2011 on Facebook. The game is currently in Beta phase. According to Sid Meier, Civilization World will offer “everything you enjoy in Civ in a fully persistent environment — you can play as much as you [...]
Funcom has released an all-new, free-to-play version of Age of Conan named 'Age of Conan: Unchained'. The new version replaces the existing version of the game, and players everywhere will now be able to freely explore the sexy, savage, and brutal world of Hyboria with their friends – and enemies. Players now get to choose [...]
APB Reloaded is a free to play third person shooter MMO game. The game runs on fast, high-quality dedicated servers allowing you to enter cities and engage in a new style of game where your actions bring you into opposition with other players dynamically: there's no waiting in lobbies. You can encounter thousands of other [...]
