To: Crecente From: Ashcraft
I have been up since 4 this morning and am TOTALLY BLOTTO. But! Good new, I have steak tonight, Japanese beef. Big, fat steak. We all had steaks, and they were something like $AU 31.62 a steak. The in-laws came by today and had lunch. They brought meat. Delicious meat.
What you missed last night FFXIII still PS3 only UT3 box talks Gears 2 exclusive stuff Rose and Camellia are back JT transcript Konami cancels Akihabara MGS4 event Microsoft 360 RPG screenshoot blowout
Meat after the jump.
It’s been several days since tragedy hit Akihabara. While the internet is having its own grinning nerd witch hunt, the Japanese media is having its own. Standard defaults are bandied about (video games, anime). Website Canned Dogs has a handy recap:
Charge your MS points to this and watch time and space tear themselves apart. As part of their ongoing attempts to convince Indians to part with their cash and embrace the 360, Microsoft have teamed up with local bank ICICI to offer the Xbox 360 Visa card. Besides giving fanboys the chance to show their fanboy colours to…shop assistants and waiters, it actually seems a pretty sweet deal, since signing up for the card entitles you to 360-related discounts, like discounts on games and peripherals, including 10% off controllers and 15% off…Kameo.
Xbox 360 Credit Card [Redington, via Siliconera]
“Ron” Tajima from Japan has created Pacmba, a Roomba covered with 448 yellow LEDs. “Ron” Tajima is a LED soldering, Roomba modding genius. Waka waka.
Thanks, Barts!
There’s a cute feature up over at 1UP at the moment, where a bunch of noted developers have been given one wish. ONE ONLY (no secondsys). Or three, if they’d like, but not two. And those wishes can only be applied to some aspect of games development, not, you know. For their missus to get larger norgs, or to get a never-ending cookie jar or something. Warren Spector wants an engine that makes games as “easy” to make as movies. Will Wright wants better AI pathfinding. BioWare’s Muzyka & Zeschuk want convincing, emotional AI. Some of the others are more interesting than that, others aren’t, others cheated and are now trapped inside a brass lantern for a thousand generations. Three Wishes [1UP]
Way back in April, Epic exec and brown suit owner Mark Rein hinted at “a little Gears of War 2 related surprise on the disc of Unreal Tournament III“. Over at retailer Game UK, Xbox 360 UTIII box art has a sticker that shows the Gears logo and reads: “Exclusive Gears of War 2 Video Content On Disc”. Talk about a surprise! Holy shit, this is the biggest surprise like ever. Not like when Halo 3 beta showed up on Crackdown, that was totally not a surprise. But this, this will have us reeling in shock for days.
Unless you’re a die-hard fighting game nut (and British), you probably weren’t planning on popping round to the Battle of Destiny fighting game tournament next month. Shame. Because by not attending you’re not only missing out on a chance to play Street Fighter II HD early, but you’re missing out on a chance to play the arcade version of Street Fighter IV early as well. Oh, so you’ve changed your mind? Fancy that. It’s on July 26 & 27, at the London Metropolitan Uni.
The Battle Of Destiny [via Capcom]
Film Beowulf was sure expensive to make! The CG-laden flick was budgeted around $AU 158.08 million — not exactly chump change. Heavenly Sword developer Ninja Theory thinks it could have done the flick cheaper. Twenty percent of the cost, actually! Oh ho ho ho. Let’s hear what Ninja Theory’s Tameem Antoniades has to say:
We see an entirely different area of progress: a form of independent production based on real-time game engine technology. We reckon you could do something like Beowulf for 15-20 per cent of the cost… If you are already creating hi-res assets for a game, then sharing these can bring that cost down even further… We have a lot of experience in performance capture, animation, rendering and so on. We can compete in the same way that indie films can live alongside blockbusters.
20 percent of the cost is dandy and all, Ninja Theory, but would your film have Angelina Jolie? Well.
Make Beowulf [Games Industry]
