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High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle A fighter competing in the Ultimate Fighting Championship – guy by the name of Jon Fitch – has been booted off the circuit by the sport’s organisers, along with a bunch of his American Kickboxing Academy team-mates. Reason? They refused to sign a video game deal. See, the UFC have a licensing agreement in place with THQ. THQ publishes the UFC games, and UFC fighters…have to put their names to a contract singing away their name and likeness forever. Not one year, not five years, for their entire lives. Fitch, who says he was trying to be reasonable about the whole thing, is obviously a little upset: I’m more than willing to work with them, but I don’t see why we have to give up our whole lives for this. Why not a time limit? If we did a 10-year deal with them, is that that unreasonable? I don’t understand how this happened, honestly. It’s tough.
Like Oblivion before it, Fallout 3 is a great game. And like Oblivion before it, Fallout 3 launched fundamentally broken. And broken across all three of the game’s platforms. If you’re lucky, all you’ve had to contend with are crashes, lock-ups and graphical glitches. If you’re unlucky, like me, you’ve been unable to even play the game. Well, a few weeks of silence on Bethesda’s part has been broken, with a comment on the game’s support forums revealing that the company “are currently working on a patch for all three platforms”. With the amount of problems in the game that was bound to happen eventually, of course, but it’s nice to hear something from the guys on the subject. We were starting to think you didn’t care!
[Bethesda Forums, via Bluesnews]
Be warned, this is awkward. Still, it’s also good for a chuckle, as you can just picture the advertising meeting where this got pitched.
That’s right. MANDATORY. Refuse to put trophies in your game and you, developers, will be SHOT. Your families, BILLED for the expense. Or…at least, Sony will be very cranky with you. Because, come January, all new PS3 games must have trophy support. No ifs or buts. So no more patching, no more developer ambivalence, no more inconsistencies. Not sure why Sony didn’t do this from the start, but doing it now, at the middle, is better than never doing it at all.
PS3 Trophies to be mandatory from January 2009 [Videogamer]
To go along with the launch of the New Xbox Experience, Microsoft and their valued publishing partners have released a range of premium themes. The word “premium” comes in when you consider they cost 250 MS points each. Anyway, in typical Xbox Live style, when Microsoft’s Larry Hryb pointed the themes out earlier today on his blog, there was no way to actually preview what they looked like. Gah. Not to worry – some kids over on GAF have done the next best thing, and are taking screengrabs like it’s going out of style, snapping pics of almost every theme.
Ubisoft today took the wraps off two alternate player skins you can use when playing the new Prince of Persia. One is Altair, of Assassin’s Creed fame, making his second guest appearance for the year, albeit this time in a setting that’s a little more appropriate. The second is the Prince from Sands of Time. To get Altair, all you need to do is register on Ubisoft’s site, and you’ll get him for free. For the Sands of Time Prince, you need to preorder the game from GameStop. For a secret, Kotaku-exclusive third skin, click through…
Some of our more jaded readers may poo-poo Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe‘s softer, more broad reaching one-on-one violence, but there’s one organisation who has no qualms with the T-rated brawler. That would be the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry which has reviewed the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game, finding that it “will likely facilitate an adult joining a teenager in video game play.” Not a sexy box quote by any means, but maybe better than we were expecting.
Sony have a bit of an uphill battle in front of them this Christmas. Console sales have been poor compared to the competition, their flagship games for the season haven’t been the MEGAHITS they were hoping for and Home is…well, yes, you know all about Home. So what was needed from the company was a rousing holiday season television advertising campaign! One that shows off the very best features of the console, the best games, the benefits of the online network! Well, across their two commercials, they got it half right. The PS3 one above will seem like moonspeak to anyone who doesn’t already know what LittleBigPlanet and MotorStorm are, but it’s got exploding couches and looks pretty, so it’s OK in my books. But the second one?
It was a down week for hardware sales in Japan, with the Wii the only platform to see an uptick in sales week-to-week. The recently launched Nintendo DSi still tops the charts and is in no danger of losing its position to any of its hardware competitors. It does about half of the total hardware sales for the week of November 10 to 16. PlayStation 3 sales stay solid amid a half-dozen new releases over the past month, including Way of the Samurai 3, Resistance 2 and Grand Theft Auto IV. Wonder how long the DS Lite will continue to chart…
