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The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks John Ricitiello started his DICE keynote with a list of games he’s currently playing—Burnout Paradise, BioShock, Portal. The one game he’s playing that we’re not is Spore, a title he said he’d become “fixated” on. While John got the crowd up to speed on his gaming chops, he admitted “Deep down, I’m a business guy.” That helps explain Riccitiello’s publicly expressed hesitance about the ultimate success of the Will Wright “SimEverything” game.
The Into The Pixel art showcase at DICE featured plenty of wonderful artwork from beloved games like God of War, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life 2 and Rayman’s Raving Rabbids, each up for auction. The piece that looked to grab the biggest bucks was the Viva PInata digital painting seen above, which closed at $US 1400. The winner? None other than Epic Games’ Mark Rein, who hovered near the bidding sheet like a hungry wolf until the auction closed, growling at anyone who attempted to outbid him. My choice? It would’ve been the Team Fortress 2 piece seen after the jump.
AIAS Award Winners To Get Recognition At GameStops. Last night’s winners at the 11th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards will not only get a sales boost from those who caught the awards online, they’ll also get a kick in the sales pants from shoppers at GameStop. AIAS president Joseph Olin told DICE attendees today that the academy has partnered with the retailer to add special mention to games like Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed and others with a sticker calling out each game’s win. That means you’ll see yet another sticker on display cases at GameStop and EBgames across the country, promoting each title’s “Game of the Year” status.
Based on the newly launched Grand Theft Auto IV web site, we know that the game has some sort of multiplayer component. What we don’t know for sure is what it involves. But according to a rumored tagged report from Destructoid, citing an anonymous source, a suite of multiplayer options are planned, including death match, co-op, team based head-to-head battles and online races. While that may sound like a list of vague concepts that could be just an educated guess, the site’s source has names for each, including Cops ‘n’ Crooks, Bomb da Base and Hangman’s Noose.
Game maker Sega’s holding company, Sega Sammy Holdings, announced that the group’s pachinko and arcade business were suffering, warning of a 26 billion yen (almost $US 244 million) loss for the year. That near quarter billion dollar loss, Reuters reports, is a result of tighter industry restrictions on the pachinko business in Japan and the Wii’s impact on arcades overseas.
The company also said it’s planning to lay off 400 employees at Sega’s games division. The arcade division saw a profit of 132 million yen the year before, but plans to post a loss of 11.4 billion yen in the coming year. In times like these, when many people are about to find themselves without a job, we can always place blame on Shadow the Hedgehog. He must be responsible for at least some of this.
Hey, did you hear? Super Smash Bros. Brawl sold about a bazillion copies in Japan in its debut week. 820,000 is a bazillion, right? With all those copies out there, you’re sure to run into some spoilers eventually, if you haven’t already gorged on every Brawl detail leaked from before the Japanese release. Still, we’ll do our best to keep it spoiler free, but I can’t speak for the commenters. This week’s additions to the official Smash Bros. web site includes a profile on one hidden character, a bunch of assist trophies and one character’s Final Smash. I think you can guess who it is. If not, make your way to the rest of the Dojo Dump and catch up.
I’ll be playing a very realistic driving in a matter of hours, a sort of Need For Speed Most Wanted recreating using a rented Chevy Impala controller. It should be very, very exciting following the blue line from Vegas to LA. When I finally get home, expect me to unwind with a few rounds of Team Fortress 2, a title I’ve been chatting about a lot with colleagues and developers and DICE. Demos for Patapon and God of War: Chains of Olympus were stashed in the DICE schwag bag, so I’ll be giving those a spin, too. Yeah, I’m late to the party. So what?
Enough reading of this drivel. Make with the comments about your weekend gaming plans, pronto. Anyone going to grab a copy of Professor Layton this Sunday?
Here’s something disconcerting if it pans out as true: Siliconera reports that Echochrome will cost more than double for a UMD PSP ($US 37) version than a downloadable PSN/PS3 version ($US 17) when released on March 19th in Japan. While we’ve seen similar pricing discrepancies with downloadable vs. retail versions of Warhawk, that price difference included a headset for online chat.
The questions then become, are these two versions identical and will the game support Remote Play? And if so, just how much is it worth to have a UMD? UPDATE: Siliconera updated their post, pointing out that PSP Echochrome has twice the levels. I guess that explains the price difference. PS3 Echochrome costs 50% less than PSP Echochrome [Siliconera via OpposableThumbs]
Up until now, I couldn’t get enough Xbox 360 vs. PlayStation 3 side-by-sides. But after this direct HDMI feed from Turok, my mind is mush. The opening blacks look far better on the 360, but you lose sight of any contrast difference by the middle of the clip comparisons. Sometimes the PS3 has better textures, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the PS3′s full RGB gamut offers colors that pop a bit more, sometimes it doesn’t. Bottom line: if you have Turok for either of these next gen systems, you’re doing fine. And it seems that publishers are getting far better about their cross-platform quality control.
UPDATE: It would appear that there was no control for the 7.5 IRE black level difference between US and Japanese NTSC standards.
Bullfrog, Origin Systems, and Westwood Studios rank as some of the best development houses of all time. They also happen to represent three of EA’s most spectacular failures. “We at EA blew it,” said EA CEO John Riccitiello at the DICE Summit in Las Vegas this morning, “To a degree, I was involved in those things, so I blew it.”
While Riccitiello was proud of his achievements at EA following his return to the company, he warned developers and publishers not to make some of the mistakes the company has made in the past. Those mistakes, he said, involved the stifling of creative talent and their ensuing departure.
Riccitiello took DICE attendees to school this morning with his talk on Game industry Economics 101. EA, like Activision, Sony, Microsoft, will continue to absorb developers, as it did with Bioware Pandemic last year. And that presents a danger.
