Infinity Ward gone frosty on Activision
No one knows if IW will last the day at the moment, with an apparently battle between and developer and publisher brewing for months
[There has been three new updates since this post was originally published]
Breaking last night in a story ran by G4, rumours have been filling the net about what is happening at Infinity Ward, developers of the Call of Duty games.
The G4 story explained that, quite dramatically, the studio heads, Jason West and Vince Zampella, of IW had gone missing, apparently summoned to Activision for a meeting. In the mean time, security staff had turned up at their HQ and were not telling the staff anything.
Steam coming to Mac?
I'm sorry this is such a boring image but, "OMGZ LUK OSX!!!!111!"
Popular game distribution and community tool Steam is rumoured to be heading to a Mac release, following uncovered files in one of the latest beta builds.
According to the image, originally posted in this thread, OSX named files have been found in the latest beta for Steam. Whilst there has been no confirmation of such, there has been various rumours regarding Valve’s status’ towards Apple’s Operating System, as well as toward Linux distributions.
The next big Steam release is moving the engine for browsing the store and community sections away from Trident, used primarily by the Internet Explorer browser and basically, what makes using Steam, even through methods such as WINE so difficult. They are now going to be using WebKit rendering engine, used in Mac OSX for a raft of applications as well as browsers, such as Safari and Chrome. This promises to improve speed, compatibilty and system stability. This is probably the first indicator of moving to other platforms.
Sony- Existing Franchises to get ‘motion’
Despite looking like a bootlegged image, this is the tech in action
It’s all well and good launching a motion controlling ice cream cone, but it’s a waste of time and resources if there are no games that support it or do it well *cough* SIXAXIS *cough*. Sony’s PS3 motion controller, which still hasn’t got a proper name, is being billed to compete against Microsoft’s Natal and the Wii’s dominance in this area of the market and whilst we’re able to see in theory how it could be used, I’ve not seen it’s usage in a proper game.
And I’ve still not seen it, but hopefully, should I decide to pick up the controller, I won’t have to invest in a whole new library (bearing in mind my Wii Collection already….) of party/waste of time games, but instead will have a whole host of games that will support it straight from off the motion controlled bat…Sorry….
Just Cause 2 will have a demo, also PARACHUTES
STUNT POSITION! AIR JACK! LOUD NOISES!
It’s an enthralling prospect, Just Cause 2. From someone who played a little bit of the original, it always looked awesome, but only in very short pieces, any longer caused me to just spot every technical flaw that a massive open world game was bound to have on the PS2. However, it had a “Stunt Position”, where the character would jump on the back of the car he was driving a second ago, then took off in a parachute. I think Matt and me described it at the time as ‘awesome madness’.
Pre-Prod. on Star Wars Battlefront Online?
This is only thing that could possibly be linked back to Battlefront Online (Courtesy of Kotaku)
Few rumours floating around the net today, so may not be that reliable I’ll have you know, that despite all signs of Star Wars: Battlefront III (the battlefield-esque style ones) being dumped and forgotten about, Kotaku have learned that the series may being kept alive in the form of Battlefront Online, an Xbox 360 and PS3 title.
The people behind it are Lucasarts (of course) and Six Slant Games, who made SOCOM: Confrontation and SOCOM: Fire Team Bravo. My only issue with this is I know for a fact that when Confrontation was launched on the PS3 and some would say to this day, the online experience has been terrible. But, I’ll try my best not to put a downer on things, as it wasn’t too long ago where everything looked bleak for the series.
The people behind the first two, relatively successful games was Pandemic, but when they were bought by EA, the license got swished around studios and ended up in the hands of Free Radical. “GREAT!” I thought, being a bit of a Star Wars geek who enjoyed the two previous games, we may get a next-gen version. I was even more encouraged when I saw the effort made by Pandemic on their next-gen license Lord of the Rings: Conquest, which was garbage. Free Radical had all the old Goldeneye team, had produced another favourite series of mine, Timesplitters, and all looked good. Then they released Haze.
Bugger.
By this point, the reputation of Free Radical had plummeted and despite the occasional pieces of concept art for both Timesplitters 4 and Battlefront III being released every couple of months, employees turned up one day to find notices on the doors to go home.
Needless to say, it looks slightly more promising than it did.
Avatar Game Prompts Ubisoft to spend less
"You mean they are not doing a sequel?"
There is probably one good thing to come from Avatar the Game. Despite the actual film being pretty good, the game, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t very good at all. Being set two years before the film didn’t help that much and despite it running in mad 3D if you wanted it to, it sucked.
Well, looks like Ubisoft realised that and in a report by gamesindustry.biz, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot said:
“Our plan is to take more care of our high end franchises, we will leave less place for licensed games,”
Which hopefully means that we’ll be getting more in the kinda thing that EA have been trying over the past few years, what with the release of new IP’s which were received well critically, yet were kind of risks commercially. I really hope Ubisoft go for this, as either license games have to be well done (probably best one I’ve played not too long ago has been Spiderman 2…what an awesome swingy game), or not done at all, as they are just big tricks to get ill-informed or un-informed people to spend their money on trashy games.
Red Dead Redemption, may of lost the quick draw
Maybe it's best to ride off into the sunset....
According to quite a few people, Rockstar San Diego’s Red Dead Repdemption is turning definitely from ‘anticipated game’ and to miserable failure. According to Joystiq’s source, poor management, unfocused development and generally a bad 6 years of development has led to the game becoming a financial black hole and a ‘complete disaster throughout 2009′.
Whilst there is no confirmation of a ‘HAWX’ style mode yet, I’m sure it won’t be long
Once again, a shady French gamer has got hold of a game way before launch and in this pinnacle of filming expertise, shot some footage of the PS3 version of Modern Warfare 2, showing a ‘behind the back’ camera option in multi-player of MW2. So now join me as I attempt to link all this together.
First of all, here is the footage coutersy of Destructoid:
“It’s just another cool way to play the game, you’ll still have the option to play the other game types as normal”
Now that’s cleared up, Destructoid translated the game modes as being: “Third Person Deathmatch” (straightforward enough) and “Cage Match Third Person”. And that is pretty much it, apart from more thing. According to the aforementioned “FourTwoZero’s” twitter status, if you don’t want Modern Warfare 2 spoiling, vanish of the face of the earth, or alternatively, don’t pay attention to the video gaming news community. Problem being, is that I don’t really want it spoiling, nor can I stop checking the news. Oh crap.
Much Excitement: Wii Pokepark Footage
Make what you will people, Pikachu is branching out in his new Wii game
The earth nearly literally shook today when we found footage of Pokepark, from something called ‘Pokemon Sunday’, a new Wii title that stars the one and only yellow rodent Pikachu in his own little game. Now, it’s kind of difficult to fathom what is going on in the video and from what I’ve gathered, you (Pikachu of course) has to make friends who will in turn help you complete challenges, which, well, are there to help Pikachu for some reason.
To make poke-friends, your going to have to play mini games, such as the so far aptly titled “battle” and “Quiz” and then take part in a series of events; Furi Furi Dash, Habataki Sky Race and Marine Slide and more. The trick with these is your going to need different types of Pokemon, for example a water type, in order to do well at the Marine Slide, or a good flying type for the sky race. Or you could just be malicious and throw Charmander in a stream and Geodude out a plane…
Needless to say, this will contain a few tantalising bits of Pokemon RPG that all the fans of the Game Boy series are after, but possible won’t come to much, but to be fair, so long as the actual game contains the video below, we’re onto a winner.
Watch the 50 something seconds of awesomeness below, seeing is believing friends.
Halo 3: ODST leaked
Just some quick news, apparently, a video on youtube shows some French dude unwrapping his copy of Halo ODST, which he claimed that he bought over the counter at a store. The video that I saw has since being pulled by the user himself, but it looked legit as any game release does. Just perhaps 4 weeks early.
Microsoft France released a statement claiming that if anyone was found to be played ODST when logged into Xbox Live they would be banned from it. Now my question is sh0uld the person who bought the game, legally and legitimatly, despite the fact his guy obviously knew the game wasn’t supposed to be out yet, be punished, or should the retailer for releasing a anticipated title way to early. Either way, copies of ODST are floating around out there, so expect playthrough footage to be appearing over the “intenetz” very soon.
In the mean time, watch this clip from E3 of ODST, just to wet your appetite:
