Sony continues to court indie game makers. The official PlayStation Blog notes that Sony will waive the $99 licensing fee to develop games for their mobile platforms.
This summer we’re throwing down the gauntlet for PlayStation Mobile development and are removing any existing barriers to get your brainchild of a game on this new PlayStation platform. As you saw with our recent Indie Arcade event at GDC, we’re always looking to support new developer talent, so we’ve decided to waive the $99 publisher license fee for PlayStation Mobile, which means you can bring your games to PlayStation Vita or any PlayStation-certified device free of cost.
Get to it lazybones! If the $99 fee was going to blow out your development budget, then you have no excuse now. You could make the next Chronovolt or Hustle Kings!
Electronic Arts is severing its licensing relationships with firearms manufacturers. Reuters reports that EA will no longer seek licensing permission from gun makers to use the names and likenesses of their firearms in their games. EA says it will still use those real-world weapons in their games, by asserting fair use and a constitutional right to free speech.
“We’re telling a story and we have a point of view,” EA’s President of Labels Frank Gibeau, who leads product development of EA’s biggest franchises, said in an interview. “A book doesn’t pay for saying the word ‘Colt,’ for example.”
Publishers initially approached gun companies for licenses to safeguard themselves from potential lawsuits when using real-world weapons in their games during the late 1990’s. These licenses were usually traded for little to no financial compensation because gun manufacturers knew that having their weapon appear in a game was good advertising.
The latest Diablo III patch just added a few cool new elements like re-tuned incentives to play cooperatively, some class changes, and a gold duping loophole. I’m personally most excited about the new incentives to cooperative play, which include a boost to experience points and the likelihood to find valuable magic items, as well a few interface improvements that make it easier to keep up with your buddy when he invariably runs after one of those treasure goblins. But a quick glance at Blizzard’s forums — something I would almost never recommend — reveals that many of the players over there seem most excited about the gold duping.
I have no idea how it works, and frankly, there’s enough inflation in the game that I couldn’t care less about it. It’s trivially easy to undermine the loot chase, even without a gold dupe, which will only make it easier to undermine the loot chase. Why should I care if the latest patch further dings an already gimped economy. I might as well fret about about a half point drop in the unemployment rate in Nigeria.
As much as I like Diablo III, I’m constantly reminded that the folks who made Path of Exile did the exact right thing by removing cash from their economy.
UPDATE: This looks like it actually might be a middling to big deal! The auction house has been taken down and some players who used the gold duping exploit have been banned.
Wizards of the Coast has revealed some new information about the upcoming Magic 2014: Duels of the Planeswalkers. Sealed Decks will be available to players for use in a campaign or against other mana-flinging wizards, but details were scarce until now.
The game will come with two available slots for players to start Sealed Campaigns. These slots will keep all the deck edits and additions you make, plus your progress though the Sealed Deck Campaign. If you’d like to save more than two Sealed Decks, additional slots can be purchased for $1.99 each, and each slot will give you access to a different pool of cards and allows you to unlock different boosters. All Booster Packs use cards from a 180+ card “set” that’s unique to the game. To begin a Campaign, players will pick an open slot and get six 14-card Booster Packs to open. Players are then taken to the Deck Editor so they can create a 40-card Sealed Deck out of the 84 card pool they’ve opened (plus Basic Lands).
When finished creating a deck, players can then battle their way through the Sealed Deck Campaign in order to unlock an additional three Booster Packs along the way. At the end of the Campaign there will be a boss fight where the player will play to defeat another Sealed Deck. You can also use your Sealed Decks to play against other players.
Sealed Deck gameplay has been a long-requested feature from avid Magic players.
Ubisoft and Patrice Desilets just can’t seem to work things out. Desilets, designer of Assassin’s Creed, left Ubisoft in 2010 to work for THQ as a creative director heading up two projects codenamed 1666 and Underdog. THQ went bankrupt and Ubisoft acquired the Montreal studio in the January asset auction. Desilets came along with the studio and Ubisoft said they were pleased to be working with him again.
Things must not have been as friendly as we were lead to believe. Patrice Desilets has left Ubisoft and a spokesperson had this to say about his departure:
“The acquisition of THQ Montreal in January allowed Ubisoft to welcome 170 experienced developers, including Patrice Desilets, to our existing and renowned workforce. Unfortunately, since the acquisition, the good faith discussions between Patrice and Ubisoft aimed at aligning Patrice’s and the studio’s visions have been inconclusive. As a result, Patrice has left the studio. Our priorities remain with the teams already hard at work on projects in development. They are at the root of Ubisoft Montreal’s past and future successes.”
Desilet disputes this version of events and told Polygon that he was fired without cause.
“Contrary to any statements made earlier today, this morning I was terminated by Ubisoft. I was notified of this termination in person, handed a termination notice and was unceremoniously escorted out of the building by two guards without being able to say goodbye to my team or collect my personal belongings.”
“This was not my decision.”
“Ubisoft’s actions are baseless and without merit. I intend to fight Ubisoft vigorously for my rights, for my team and for my game.”
Sources within Ubisoft say that both of Desilets’ projects have been canceled.
Bethesda announced Wolfenstein: The New Order, the next chapter in the Wolfenstein saga, will be coming to gamers in Q4 2013. The game will showcase an alternate universe 1960 in which the Nazi menace has taken over the world. Players will infiltrate their strongholds, and fight against Nazi super-weapons. The game is being developed by MachineGames, which was founded by ex-Starbreeze Studios employees.
“We are excited to bring a new chapter of Wolfenstein to gamers everywhere,” said Jens Matthies, creative director at MachineGames. “As fans of the series, working on this game is an honor, and our team is driven to create an unforgettable action-adventure experience that will make FPS fans proud.”
I expect occult-powered machine guns, Don Draper, and Austin Powers. If you’re in the nostalgic mood, check out the original game in all its pixelated glory here.
Will Wright spoke to GamesIndustry International after he gave a lecture at the University of California’s Santa Cruz. During the interview he said EA’s SimCity server problems were “inexcusable.”
When the discussion turned to the launch of Sim City Online, Wright was quick to declare his first thought. “I feel bad for the team,” Wright said. Beyond that, Wright had some definite opinions about the launch. “I could have predicted – I kind of did predict there’d be a big backlash about the DRM stuff. It’s a good game; I enjoy playing it a lot.” Still, Wright understands the audience response. “It was kind of like, ‘EA is the evil empire, there was a lot of ‘Let’s bash EA over it,'” Wright said. “That was basically inexcusable, that you charge somebody $60 for a game and they can’t play it. I can understand the outrage. If I was a consumer buying the game and that happened to me, I’d feel the same.”
Wright also talked about the state of EA and the general direction of the industry. He noted that Google’s recent hiring of veteran game designer Noah Falstein was probably related to their efforts to get better at understanding games.
This weekend, Baz Luhrmann takes a crack at interpreting F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby seems to already miss the point, but given how sexy the trailer is, I couldn’t care less.
While we wait for the movie to open, there’s always the Great Gatsby videogame. Like Gatsby himself, you can’t really be sure where this NES tie-in came from. One version of its backstory is that a guy named Charlie Hoey made it. The backstory I prefer, supported by a magazine ad not nearly tacky enough for videogame ads from the 90s, goes as follows:
I found it at a yard sale. I bought it for 50 cents and went home to try it out. After dusting off my NES for like, 20 minutes I got it working, and jesus. So weird. Apparently it’s an unreleased localization of a Japanese cart called “Doki Doki Toshokan: Gatsby no Monogatari”
Whatever its true origins, The Great Gatsby videogame has not been gunned down while floating on an air mattress in its pool. Instead, it is fully playable here. I can’t get past the Valley of Ashes myself, which is probably for the best where Myrtle Wilson is concerned.
That’s no moon! That’s EA and Disney teaming up! EA announced that they have signed a multi-year agreement to develop and publish new Star Wars games for Disney. EA Labels President Frank Gibeau disclosed a few of the studios that will develop new games starring beloved characters like Watto, Nute Gunray, and Kit Fisto.
“DICE and Visceral will produce new games, joining the BioWare team which continues to develop for the Star Wars franchise. The new experiences we create may borrow from films, but the games will be entirely original with all new stories and gameplay.”
DICE and Star Wars. Maybe now, we’ll finally get Battlefront 3.
EA has officially announced The Sims 4 will be coming in 2014. There’s a newsletter sign-up form here if you need more junk email. There aren’t many details, but the Sims team did want to address the elephant in the room right away.
The Sims 4 celebrates the heart and soul of the Sims themselves, giving players a deeper connection with the most expressive, surprising and charming Sims ever in this single-player offline experience. The Sims 4 encourages players to personalize their world with new and intuitive tools while offering them the ability to effortlessly share their creativity with friends and fans.
If you just want more details now, you’ll have to wait for someone to translate the simlish on the announcement page.
After the jump, take a crack at the simlish code! Continue reading →
Kiss of the Damned has a promising pedigree. The director, Xan Cassavetes, is the daughter of John Cassavetes, so it’s no surprise that she gets how to do an homage to movies from the 70s. In this case, Italian horror. But she’s also the daughter of Gena Rowlands, so you’d think she’d know the importance of casting good actresses, particularly in a movie about three female vampires.
Unfortunately, this occasionally intriguing homage can’t bear up under the weight of its three awkward performances. It opens promisingly enough with Josephine de la Baume, unconventionally lovely in the way that people are lovely in movies made 40 years ago, as a vampire who reluctantly falls in love because sometimes guys are just so darn persistent. There’s enough style and sexual heat in these early scenes that you might think you’re in for an adult version of Twilight (pictured). Sounds good! Remember that scene in Coppola’s Dracula movie when all the naked vampire chicks writhe invitingly around Keanu Reeves? I sure do.
But then Roxane Mesquida shows up as the bad sister vampire. In the surreal horror movie Rubber, her nearly impenetrable accent lent a touch of hilarity, particularly when she tried to coax the killer out of a house by voicing a booby-trapped mannequin. But here her accent just makes her hard to understand. I suppose bad English in an English-language movie is another way to represent the exotic, timeless, and worldly quality of a vampire.
Finally, there’s Anna Mouglalis as the mother figure standing between the sisters. Mouglalis has a long list of credits, which includes playing Coco Chanel to Mads Mikkelsen’s Igor Stravinsky. But by the time she’s called in to lend some gravity to these squabbling vampire sisters, Kiss of the Damned has long since left the realm of the sexy and stylish and wandered into a maze of camp and bad acting. I suppose it is an adult version of Twilight after all.
Kiss of the Damned is available to watch instantly at Amazon.com.
It’s Monday, so that means we must have new rumors regarding the next-gen Xbox! This time, Ars Technica claims to have a Microsoft internal email that outlines basic functions that the console will be able to support without a continuous connection to the internet.
“Durango [the codename for the next Xbox] is designed to deliver the future of entertainment while engineered to be tolerant of today’s Internet.” It continues, “There are a number of scenarios that our users expect to work without an Internet connection, and those should ‘just work’ regardless of their current connection status. Those include, but are not limited to: playing a Blu-ray disc, watching live TV, and yes playing a single player game.”
Unfortunately, the email date wasn’t revealed, so there may have been significant changes to this directive since it was sent to employees working on the project.
The inclusion of “watching live TV” does seem to confirm that the console will be tied directly into the cable TV signal in some way. Previous rumors had said that the console would act more like a cable box in that it would hook directly to the incoming signal and play normal cable television signals, but with the Xbox interface being used instead of the cable menu. This would allow seamless switching between games and watching Duck Dynasty.
This week your wallet is entirely safe from new releases, because there aren’t any. So what better time to sample something you might have otherwise overlooked, like Sang-froid, Monaco, or Don’t Starve (pictured)?
Nintendo is courting smartphone app developers for its Wii U console. According to The Japan Times, Nintendo is offering conversion software to smartphone app developers to assist them in porting their software to the Wii U.
Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.
A lack of popular games was one of the primary reasons cited in the recently released annual report for the lower than projected adoption rate of the Wii U console.
Besides porting smartphone games to the Wii U, Satoru Iwata told investors that Nintendo is also looking into subscription and free-to-play games as a possible strategy to entice gamers more used to digital gaming prices.
“We will not simply change our existing packaged software distribution channel. Rather, we might have many other types of business models in addition to packaged software.”
“For example, we might see more games that are similar to free-to-play games, games that cost much less or games that require a monthly subscription fee. Digitalization allows for greater flexibility, whereby having more ways to make payments, both software developers and consumers have more options.”
“And Nintendo 3DS and Wii U have flexible systems to handle such trends, so it is now a question of putting these ideas into action. I can definitely say that Nintendo will make new offers that go well beyond simply replacing packaged software with digital software.”
We might be too cool for Thor, Dark Knight Rises, and Elektra, but we’re not too cool for Iron Man 3. Maybe these comic books aren’t so silly, after all. You can skip this week’s 3×3 about lip syncing as soon as you hit the 1:20 mark.
Next week: The Great Gatsby
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