Capcom has announced that they will be restructuring, canceling overseas titles with low projected sales, and revising their corporate strategy to offset lower than expected profits for the financial year. The reasons cited for the underperformance included overestimating the sales of Resident Evil 6 and Devil May Cry, a decline in quality due to excessive outsourcing, and “drastic changes in the industry’s market environment.”
Solutions proposed included moving more development in-house, improving DLC profit, and growing the online and mobile content business. The board also announced that Capcom was discontinuing development on some titles, but did not specify which projects were being halted.
In other news, Capcom and Tencent announced Monster Hunter Online a free-to-play game developed with CryEngine 3 technology.
The development studio formed by ex-Team Bondi members after L.A. Noire, has reportedly laid off staff and their current game Whore of the Orient is on hold. MCV Pacific reports that Kennedy Miller Mitchell may not have completely shut down the studio, but that all development has been suspended.
Whore of the Orient is a unique and extraordinary story and game, and we are still actively pursuing the right investor to partner with.
Whore of the Orient was supposed to be a mystery thriller set in 1936 Shanghai that would use the same facial animation technology as the highly acclaimed L.A. Noire.
PAX Prime 2013 passes went on sale today. Those of you lucky enough to have grabbed a pass will see the wonderous sights (and large lines) of one of the biggest videogame expos still going. This year’s gathering will occur just before an E3 show that will likely feature three major console makers battling for positive press, so anticipation is high that PAX attendees will see some good previews. Did you get your pass? Probably not. The 4-day passes sold out in mere minutes with single day passes selling out before the evening.
Six hours later and we are again completely sold out of badges. We apologize for any technical hiccups we ran into early in the day. Our partners over at ShowClix were scrambling to fix any issues that came up, and we have some solid takeaways as far as what we would do differently next year. Thank you again for your patience, and we’ll see you in August!
PAX Prime will be held in Seattle from August 30th to September 2nd.
Correction: PAX Prime 2013 is held after, not before, E3 2013. These events exist on the same sequential Einsteinian time model as everything else on Earth, so August 30th is after June 13th.
The battle between Tom and Bruce in Nemo’s War might be over, but the war rages on! Nemo’s War creator Chris Taylor joins Tom Chick and Bruce Geryk for an in-depth (get it?) discussion of Jules Verne, boardgaming, and more boardgaming. Join us for a very special Tabletop Edition of the Quarter to Three Games Podcast.
Is anything more awesome than Euro Truck Simulator 2? I’m thinking, but I can’t come up with a good answer. I loved it so much that I chose to discuss it for my first Quarter to Three podcast. Maybe Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon will top it, but for now, ETS2 is so terrific that there’s a contest to become a real-life Heavy Goods Vehicle driver, sponsored by the UK publisher of ETS2. If you live in the EU, you could watch some videos, answer some questions, and win a free HGV driving course! Now, you can finally be the long-haulin’ cap-wearing knight of the road you’ve always dreamed you could be.
Valve has approved another batch of games through their Steam Greenlight process. Titles announced include Pinball Arcade, Dead State, and Frozen Endzone. The games will be offered for sale either through the Early Access program or as finished products as soon as the developers integrate the Steamworks features they need.
The full list of approved titles can be found here.
I’m sorry about the headline. I really am. It’s the tagline for Pieces Interactive’s upcoming naval strategy game Leviathan: Warships. PC Gamer has a hands-on preview of the Paradox published multiplayer game that looks lovely. It’s an asynchronous real-time game that pits player-designed battleship fleets against each another.
The framework of your Leviathan fleet is a Warhammer tabletop-esque point-buy system, with three tiers for Small, Medium, and Large fleets. Using these points, you can fully customize a handful of ship classes with different weapons, bridge types, speed-boosting modifications, energy shields, and more. Each hull has a limited number of hard points, which can generally fit one, bigger gun, or a couple smaller ones. The only limit to the type of fleet you can build is your point budget.
Shields and weapons are all directional, as well. You can save on points by loading up one side of your ship with a completely insane amount of guns while leaving the other side bare, but this opens up the possibility of your opponent out-maneuvering you and hitting your undefended broadside. Vision and weapon ranges also play a large role. You can only shoot what you can see, and most weapons have a minimum (as well as a maximum) range.
Ships created with a point-buy system? Yes, please! I’m a sucker for any game that allows players to pick and choose components and design their own machines of doom.
In 1842, the United States and Britain both colonized Seattle at the same time. This didn’t go over well. The world sat up and took notice. Would future Washingtonians call the trunk of a car a trunk or a boot? Would they think Mr. Bean movies were funny? And how good would they be at acting? It mattered. So the Great Powers were given the opportunity to weigh in. Spain decided to wait and see how everyone else was going to vote. And when the issue broke into war, Spain had forgotten to vote and was therefore dinged five prestige points.
I was in charge of Spain back then. You may not remember this from the history books, but it’s true. My bad. I was trying to figure out something else. Sue me. It’s not easy running a whole country. So we lost five points of prestige. This isn’t normally be a big deal, but at this particular point in history, Spain was low man on the totem pole of Great Powers. By losing those five points of prestige, Italy qualified for Spain’s Great Power slot. Spain had a little over a year to stay Great by earning more prestige. So she declared war on the Ottoman Empire, who had defaulted on Spanish loans some years earlier. Spain figured she could sink some Ottoman ships, sue for peace, rake in a little prestige from the victory, and hold her place in the geopolitical sun.
But Spain forgot to check that the Ottoman Empire was allied with Austria, which meant the 11 Spanish ships that weren’t policing Cuba and Indonesia were up against about 30 Ottoman and Austrian ships in the Mediterranean that had nothing better to do. Oops. Spain’s attempt to bully the Ottomans into renewing interest payments — “This is a nice empire you have, Ottomans; it would be a shame if something happened to it…” — resulted into the loss of Spain’s home fleet and a subsequent blockade of Spanish ports. What should have been a prestige gain turned into a prestige loss.
And that’s how the Brits and Americans bumping elbows in Seattle lead to the fall of the Spanish Empire in 1844. But as you also may recall from your history book, Spain didn’t give up! The invention of pressure chambers for thorax surgery — this is an actual thing is Victoria II, bless it’s historically detailed heart! — in 1848 gave the Iberian peninsula just the boost to prestige it needed to qualify again for the Great Power club. Take that, Italy!
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon marketing serves up another wonderfully campy commerical. This time, it’s a live-action extravaganza of synth music, bad acting, and goofy costumes. It’s glorious. I really hope the game can live up to the promise of the terrific videos we’ve gotten.
If there’s anything that’s guaranteed to get folks buzzing, it’s Bethesda posting a mysterious video snippet. Barbed wire, a record label, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Air on a G String is clearly visible. No, not that g-string. Sheesh! Feeding the fire is the fact that Bethesda had announced that they were moving on from Skyrim to other projects.
Psst! Fallout 3 lists the following Bach compositions in the soundtrack:
Gigue – Partita No. 3
Prelude – Partita No. 3
Grave – Sonata No. 2
Is it Fallout 4 or is that just wishful thinking? Another possible clue is that “The Moonbeam Trio” is printed on the record label.
Update: It’s not Fallout related. Bethesda’s Pete Hines tweeted that it’s something else. Let the wild speculation continue!
Pour one out for Burnout, my friends. Eurogamer captured the Twitter updates of Criterion chief Alex Ward telling fans that they will be moving away from racing games for the foreseeable future.
Here is what I want folks to know. Some folks are eternally disappointed. Nothing I can do about that. So many tweets asking for new Burnout.
Equally many tweets asking for a new NFS game from us. Also Road Rash. Whilst I love all of those games, I am personally not doing any.
After over a decade of making racing games it’s time to make something new. It is early days thus I have nothing to “announce” or talk about.
Criterion made Need for Speed: Most Wanted and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, as well as Burnout Paradise and the arcade download title Burnout Crash.
Interceptor Entertainment has posted an 18 minute video of ultra-bouncy super fast-paced twitch-and-you’ll-miss-him Rise of the Triad gameplay from the upcoming Unreal Engine powered remake. That’s fast movement, fast shooting, and fast respawning! I have fond memories of the original Apogee shooter, so I’m curious to see if “Dog Mode” holds up.
We all agree that The Place Beyond the Pines, the latest movie from Ryan Gosling and Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, is no Blue Valentine. At the 57-minute mark we focus on our favorite lasers for this week’s 3×3.
When you talk about Moon, there’s no reason to point out that Duncan Jones is David Bowie’s son. But when you talk about Antiviral, you can’t very well not point out that Brandon Cronenberg is David Cronenberg’s son. The younger Cronenberg channels his father’s body dysmorphia with scalpel precision, stark insight, and the same dreamy malaise of David Cronenberg’s best movies.
The subject of Antiviral is celebrity obsession, but not in the obvious way. This isn’t a satire, but it makes the same point as satire in the context of futuristic biopunk noir, with disease as a metaphor and McGuffin, with the subject matter being the unlikely intersection of disease and beauty, blemish and perfection. The world it presents is new, imaginative, and unsettling. It’s impossible to get through Antiviral without wincing several times. It’s not gore so much as squick factor, which is far worse than mere gore. I can watch Michael Ironside’s head exploding till the cows come home. But the early simple medical procedure in Antiviral will put you off your lunch. It’s only going to get worse.
Antiviral wouldn’t work without the fascinating Caleb Landry Jones in the lead role. His performance, which consists largely of lurching, is a thing to behold, every bit as integral to Antiviral as Jack Nicholson is to Chinatown.
Boy, does that screenshot bring back memories. Castle of Illusion, the 1990 Sega Genesis game, was a seminal platformer back in the day of Mario’s hegemony. I vividly remember hopping Mickey Mouse from leaf to leaf and just being gobsmacked at how beautiful the damn thing was, even though I couldn’t care less about Disney’s frontmouse.
I don’t know how well Castle of Illusion will hold up after 20 years, but Sega and Disney Interactive intend to show me with an HD update due out this summer. Maybe the best way to do a Mickey Mouse game is to go back to a time less Epic?
