This has nothing to do with voyeuristic activities on game developers, but rather an MTV-produced video of a roundtable discussion with heavyweight game designers like Will Wright (Spore), CliffyB (Unreal Tournament series), Harvey Smith (Deus Ex), and David Jaffe (God of War). The discussion touches on topics such as violence in videogames, dream projects, and more.
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The first episodic content, Half-Life 2: Episode One, from Valve, has gone gold and should be available on June 1st.
Episode One is set for release June 1st via Steam and at retail outlets around the world. As we approach the launch of our first episodic release, we will be releasing a series of short gameplay clips that will focus, like Episode One, on Alyx. You will find these shorts in the new My Media area of Steam.
A study suggests that playing a game like Super Monkey Ball for 20 minutes before surgery can help prevent surgical errors from happening. This sounds about right, because video games is all about hand and eye coordination, which is right in line with surgery. So next time you go under the knife, ask your surgeon if he wants a quick time trial of Super Monkey Ball.
Researchers found that surgeons who played video games immediately before the drill completed it an average of 11 seconds faster than those who did not. Any errors committed during the training lengthened the time it took to complete the task — indicating that faster finishers made fewer mistakes.
Before the FedEx promotional film, Cast Away, there was The Wizard, a film that heavily promoted Nintendo and Super Mario Brothers 3, even the short-lived Power Glove made an appearance (did you know that was Spiderman/Tobey Maguire showing it off?) Well now according to 1UP, we can expect a DVD edition of The Wizard, due out August 29th. You can check out a trailer of the movie on YouTube. It is cheesy by today’s standards, but when I was a kid, The Wizard was awesome.
NVIDIA has let me know that they’ve made available new beta Forceware drivers, version 91.28, that adds more SLI support, PureVideo enhancements, and a brand new look to the Control Panel inspired by Microsoft’s upcoming Vista operating system.
As expected, the patch for Battlefield 2, now at version 1.3, is now available for download.
After stating intent on going with original IP, EA decided to partner up with Steven Spielberg, hoping to get something big out of him for some upcoming games. My opinion is that going to movie-makers to help create games is shooting yourself in the foot. Not only have games based on movies been notoriously money-wasting opportunities to bilk unsuspecting gamers, but scripts tailored for the movies don’t necessarily translate well to gaming methodologies.
Gamasutra talks with EA L.A.’s Neil Young about issues such as emotions from games, intellectual properties, and overtime in the industry, as well as the partnership with Spielberg.
With specific regards to new franchise IP, aside from the things that we’ve acquired, there are other things like the partnership with Steven Spielberg, and that’s focused exclusively on producing original, new intellectual property. And I was looking at the list of everything we’re working on across all studios last night, and there’s a lot of stuff there. There’s like 15 or 20 new, original concepts [in any stage of development] right now. So maybe two of them will work.
The game, Rag Doll Kung Fu, was an innovative, yet quirky game that came out on Steam a while ago. While it was certainly fascinating, it didn’t have the lasting appeal, but it is efforts like that one we want to foster in the PC gaming industry. With that in mind, the creator of the game has formed his own game development studio, Media Molecule, which will also consist of former Lionhead developers. Hopefully we can expect some quality, innovative games from this studio.
A demo for IO Interactive’s assassination action game, Hitman: Bloody Money, is available for download today. It features a single level in the game, and weighs in at a hefty 759MB. Grab it from 3D Gamers, VGPro, or 4players.de.
This demo contains the first mission of the game, Death of a Showman. As the world’s deadliest assassin, Agent 47, you have been offered a high-paying contract to take out Joseph Clarence aka The Swing King. Your client has asked that his recently deceased son’s picture be the last thing The Swing King sees before you end his life. Death of a Showman is the first level of the game and provides gamers a refresher course in the mechanics of being the world’s deadliest contract killer while tracking your target through a dilapidated theme park turned drug lab. Get a sneak peak at the incredible new graphic engine, ultra-realistic AI, and try out a few of Agent 47’s new moves.
It looks like Half-Life 2 envy gave everyone at E3 crabs, because that was the theme with a lot of games this year. Crabs! This hilarious blog post outlines all the games that got crabs that was shown at E3 this year.
Due to the “me too” nature of a lot of game publishers, pretty much every E3 has a very visible trend, like toon shading or World War 2 shooters. The trend that was noticeable this year, to me, was crabs. Yes, crabs. It became very obvious right from the start during Sony’s press conference. Microsoft’s subsequent showing confirmed it.
The industry is pushing for all PC games to come in DVD boxes. They don’t think that all games should come on DVD’s, instead of forcing us to swap CD’s constantly to play a game, thus wearing them out faster and increasing the chances of getting a corrupted/scratched disc. Save them money, but don’t let us save any money, is their motto, apparently.
The Interactive Entertainment Media Association (or IEMA to its close friends) is doing just that. The group today announced a new packaging scheme for PC games, offering a PC banner for the top of the box, a new “PC Icon” design (you know — the rectangle in the corner with “PC” in big white letters), and recommending DVD-style boxes similar to those used for console titles.
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