Goodbye, black octopus thingies. We barely knew thee. SCEA have confirmed earlier rumours that ad agency TBWA/Chiat/Day will no longer be handling the company’s PlayStation commercials. Despite having worked with SCEA for 13 years, from the launch of the original PlayStation through to current PS3 ads, Sony Computer Entertainment America have decided to let TBWA go, embrace the future and run with LA-based agency Deutsch, whose other high-profile clients include Ikea, DirecTV and Johnson & Johnson. Deutsch’s take on PlayStation commercials will begin airing in 2008. SCEA Lands New Ad Agency [Next-Gen]
This isn’t kind of NSFW, it’s totally NSFW and totally After Dark. British lad magazine Nuts has clips of “models” Cara and Kayleigh playing games like Wario Ware on the Wii. Innocent enough! Save for the embarrassing fact that they are not wearing shirts and oiled up. Get this: There are 12 (count ‘em, twelve) shameful Nuts clips. Endless jubblie overkill! NSFW Clips [Nuts, Thanks Sean!]
Randy Pitchford is boss of Gearbox. Gearbox make Brothers in Arms. Brothers in Arms is set in WWII. We’re all sick to death of WWII shooters, but Randy sees no cause for alarm: It’s…a great backdrop for gameplay. This is man to man fighting here. The stories are dramatic – we could make an infinite number of games in the World War II space and still have material to cover.
You’re right, you could! So go ahead and do it. The British campaign in Burma. Free French operations in North Africa. The Canadian raid on Dieppe. Those are three suggestions you can have for free, instead of having us fight as American soldiers in Western Europe in 1944-45 for the million billionth time. World War II still rich with potential – Pitchford [Eurogamer][Image]
Yasuhiro Wada is best known for cult hit barnyard RPG Harvest Moon. But he’s also busy running Marvelous Interactive! You’d think a guy who’s had creative and business success would be content. Wada still has things he’d like to do — grand plans if you will. Plans that include a Spore-like game. Wada explains:
Eventually, I’d like to make something like Spore, where you create something, and from there, new stuff is going to be created again and again and again. In a micro world, like The Sims for example, you have the city expanding but you can’t see it. But you want to be one of the people living in the city, and to be a part of this growing too.
Isn’t that what Harvest Moon is? Or is he saying he wants to make infinite Harvest Moon? Wada Interview [Gamasutra]
OK, so it’s not really Brain Age. But it’s close. And definitely the same basic principle. Here, we see a chimp hitting a bunch of numbers in sequence. It’s just the start of a test, getting them familiar with our crude, human numbers; as the test goes on, as soon as the chimp hits the first number the rest turn into white squares, meaning they have to remember the order the digits were originally displayed. While chimps were found to be no more accurate than humans, they were a lot faster than the human test subjects, which comprised of college students. This is where it starts, people. When we’re all hanging in bamboo cages wondering how the damn, dirty apes got the better of us, know that Dr. Kawashima gave them all the help they needed. [National Geographic, via Giz AU]
No surprises here. This recently unearthed embarrassing video The Queen of Fighters 2005 obviously dates from a few years back. That doesn’t make it any less shameful! It’s a cosplay “homage” to SNK’s The King of Fighters and features actress Misa Nishida as Mai Shirnaui. We haven’t seen this, but seriously doubt there’s any 2D fighting in it. It probably has other things though. Nishida QoF [NSFW via Hobby Media]
　The holidays are coming up fast, and people need to think about presents! So, people of Japan, which portable game machine do you want: PSP or DS Lite? A year ago, it was really hard to get the DS Lite in Japan. So hard that DS Lites had to be re-imported from America to meet the demand. But now, things have cooled off considerably. The PSP has experienced an upsurge of late thanks to a much overdue redesign. So which one do most Japanese folks want? Cross Marketing poled 300 people to find out. Know: 20 percent were in their teens, 20 percent in their twenties, 20 percent in their thirties, 20 percent in their forties and 20 percent in their fifties. The results:
Silly John Riccitiello! Big corporate gaming mergers are a thing of the past, eh? Guy didn’t get the memo. Not only did we get one of the industry’s biggest ever mergers only a few days after he said that, but now we’ve got Take-Two CEO Ben Feder saying more couplings are inevitable: I do believe that consolidation ultimately is inevitable…Video-game development is not getting any cheaper. It’s a capital-intensive business, and I don’t see that going away. That will drive some of the smaller competitors out.
Sure will! Then the new big, mean companies can go stale, break up and we can kick the cycle off all over again! Can’t think of a more entertaining way to lose a few billion investment dollars, can you? Consolidation inevitable, says Take-Two CEO [GI.biz]
Game site Insert Credit directs our attention to Korean MMO Perfect KO, which has Street Fighter‘s Ken and Chun-Li as playable and customisable 3D characters. What’s more, the game’s developer Neowiz is open to including character licenses from other fighters as well! As Insert Credit explains, the game is a 6-or-less simultaneous fighter with 3-on-3 matches and a survival mode. Beta test kicks off December 6th, and Ken will be playable. If more fighters are added, they should really call this fighter Neowiz vs. Capcom vs. SNK vs. SEGA vs. Tecmo vs. Namco. Chun-Li and Ken MMO [Insert Credit]
With review integrity in crisis, who can you trust? Not those score whores at Kotaku, that’s for sure. Not only did they give Kane & Lynch a glowing endorsement (read: “Kane & Lynch makes Grand Theft Auto look like the cartoon it is”) in their exclusive review, they went and gave it a perfect five star rating! Or, least Eidos seem to think so. For those curious, the quote actually comes from Joel’s hands-on time with the game at E3. In July. Where no stars were handed out. Not even one. Oh Eidos.
