Chris Kingsley is CTO of Rebellion, who’s done so many PSP titles he’s got good reason to wax optimistic about the platform’s future prospects. But wax he does, as part of a GamesIndustry interview in which he says that even though PSP has been “in the shadow” of the DS, the girl’s still got life in her:
“But there’s still very good business to be done on the less glamorous platforms – look at PlayStation 2, it’s still selling bucket-loads of consoles and bucket-loads of games, though they’ve got to be the right games for the right platform”.
He noted that the PSP is “kicking the arse of pretty much every other system out there” in Japan because the right games have come out – with a bit of luck, he thinks that some of those games will come out in Europe and be just as successful.
Seems to me, though, that as the most technically sophisticated handheld on the market, it’s no compliment at all for the PSP if one of its mainstay UK developers is comparing it to a last-gen console.
PSP has a good few years left in it still, says Kingsley [GamesIndustry.biz]
A new salvo’s been levied at the now-infamous Resident Evil 5 trailer by Tolu Olarunda at the Your Black Writers blog, who was upset by the trailer’s imagery.
A couple weeks ago, a friend sent me a A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a YouTube link. He described it as “African genocide.” Not knowing what to expect, I clicked on it. What I witnessed for those next 3 minutes, was nerve-wrecking, painful, mind-numbing and heart-racing. It was a trailer for a Video Game called “Resident Evil.”
To: Bash From: Crecente
It’s Friday night and I’m spending it waiting to board a plane back to Denver from Los Angeles. It was a pretty exciting week spent looking at the offerings that will be shown at this year’s E3 next month. It may not quite be the same calibre of games that were shown last year, because, well last year was insane. But we’ve got some very interesting triple-As headed our way.
Tomorrow morning I fly with the family to Miami and then Sunday we board a ship to cruise around the Caribbean for a week. I’ve sweet-talked MTV’s Stephen Totilo to guest edit on the site during my one-week vacation. Despite his insane schedule, he was kind enough to agree to fill in for me as I sleep… lots. I left the key for Kotaku Tower under that flower box next to the shed in case he asks. Oh and I think the ban hammer maybe under my bed… or in the laundry basket. Feel free to swing it around a bit when I’m oot and aboot.
Have fun, talk to you in a week!
PS. I’ll say hi to the pirates for you.
What you missed: Take-Two Settles FTC Compliance Issues In EA Bid Clone Wars Games Slated For Holidays, Trailers Hitting Spike TV Friday WoW Getting Level 30 Mounts Sega Creates Robotic Girlfriend Little Big Planet Rolls Out With PlayStation Experience Truck MGS 4: The Big Boss Of Japanese Sales EA: Best Of Luck To Former EALA Head Young In Amicable Parting
New King Of Games Tees Available Now!! Hey, remember when the King of Games announced it was making that sweet Kid Icarus tee? It’s available right now, should you have the 4900 yen (plus shipping!) required to make it yours. No, not cheap. KOG also drops word that older styles have been reprinted, if there’s some officially licensed Nintendo T you’ve always wanted.
So Team Fortress 2 fans have been eagerly awaiting the Pyro updates, but the gents at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been busy mulling gender issues. They found some evidence to support their theory that Pyro is a female character, and cited this CS-Nation interview with lead developer Robin Walker, where he conceded:
“Looking back, we should have shipped some of the classes as female and some as male”.
Said Walker further on:
If there’s one thing we know about casual games companies, it’s that they love to conduct surveys, don’t they? The latest one commissioned by RealNetworks’ RealGames division aims to correlate casual gameplay with improvement of bad habits. Need to lose weight, quit smoking, quit hitting the potato chips? Play a game, it seems.
59 percent of the survey participants said that casual games offer a “positive distraction” from overeating, and 42 percent said it helps distract them from smoking. Smokers apparently prefer “hidden picture” games to other types, by the way. No surprise, either, that the survey results show that taking a little clicky-break to play a casual game helped them relieve stress.
I wonder why console publishers don’t underwrite studies like these periodically, to show the positive impact games in general might have on their audience. Too much of a minefield, do you think?
Full study announcement after the jump.
The bad news? Activision is making Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. Wait, that’s not the bad news. The actual bad news was that all those Guitar Hero III tracks you downloaded from either Xbox Live or the PlayStation Store won’t work on your copy of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.
Here’s a dash of good. Guitar Hero World Tour will support your existing GH III downloads, which begs the question “Why would you buy Guitar Hero: Aerosmith?”
The populists at Valve have a new blog just for the Team Fortress 2 community, and explain:
Our hope is that we’ll be providing you with a variety of interesting things to read, whether you’re a hardcore TF2 player or whether you’ve just started. We’ll be going into the details behind some of the gameplay, posting a bunch of the concept art we haven’t released before, and showcasing the great content the community is creating.
Ooh! Up now is concept art for the flare gun, showing the different ideas that were considered before gameplay made the final decision. Watch that space, then, for more behind-the-scenes peeks. TF2 Official Blog [Valve]
Nothing says World War II game like a trailer that kicks off with a Frankie D quote. If you aren’t willing to pony up words of wisdom from Mr. Roosevelt or Winston Churchill, you might as well just make a plain vanilla generic war game and call it a day. That’s not the Eidos way, obviously. This debut trailer for BattleStations: Midway follow-up BattleStations: Pacific has all that and a bag of hip Japanese narration to make sure all the bases are covered. It’s moody, historic, and unintelligible to the majority of our readership. I call that a win.
