Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better Warhawk’s upcoming booster pack, Operation Broken Mirror, will feature an armored personnel carrier which can serve as a mobile spawning point and weapon producer and also create the “mother of all bubble shields,” the game’s producer, Dylan Jobe told me in a recent interview.
“You can roll this around a map and it’s like this clean blank canvas for combat,” he said. “When it’s driving around it works as a mobile forward spawn point and when you spawn into it you get additional equipment.”
Jobe said the APC will also be able to deploy a piece of equipment that is “like the mother of all bubble shields” and is a couple of hundred feet wide.
Let me start by saying that my love of Street Fighter 2 Championship Edition comes not from the perspective of an aficionado, or someone paid to study each nuanced piece of minutia that comes out about a game as it makes its way from concept to arcade.
My experience with Street Fighter 2 CE was born entirely in my time first hanging out at arcades and then running one in the 90s in Maryland. I loved the game so much that my time spent playing it is what likely lead to me being fired from the job. I slathered more attention on our big-screen SF2 box than I did every other machine in the place, combined. I regularly replaced the cherry switches and springs on a weekly basis.
But I couldn’t have told you who the game’s producer was, what sort of lore was buried in the creating of such an indelible franchise or how they came about with the idea of the characters in the game.
That being said, read on.
While Crecente and McWhertor will be flooding your consciousnesses with Street Fighter gameplay impressions later, I wanted to start things off with an amuse-bouche and just focus on one thing: just how freaking gorgeous SFIV is in person.
Because while I was initially skeptical about the 2.5D art direction, now I’m a total convert. SFIV’s graphics dropped my jaw in a way that hasn’t happened with a fighter since the original Virtual Fighter. Even when you don’t have the pleasure of actually playing, the game is pure eye candy high fructose corn syrup concentrate.
For those who didn’t attend GDC last week, there’s another chance to catch the Game Developers Choice Awards/Independent Games Festival Awards megashow. Condensed to a 30-minute segment for an X-Play time slot, to catch the event, set your DVRs for G4 at 8pm (eastern) tonight. (You could watch it in real time, but we were pretending you had plans or something.)
Not only is this the first developer-powered award show to make it to mainstream television, but everyone who attended was entertained by some extremely funny acceptance speeches. Tune in and enjoy.
G4 To Show Game Developers Choice Awards Tonight [Gamasutra]
The 2008 Game Developer’s Conference saw an all-time high in attendance numbers, as the GDC team has announced that over 18,000 people walked through the convention hall’s doors. The five day event featured 400 sessions, 300 exhibitors, and enough Force Unleashed coverage to keep Tori happy (okay, the GDC team didn’t announce that, but it’s still true).
Whiling away the time between sessions of Street Fighter IV arse-kickery (mine, not anyone elses) and my interview with Yoshinori Ono, I accidentally made eye-contact with a Capcom flak. The handler, notice my lack of doing anything, was quick to thrust a 360 controller into my hands and point me toward a screen showing off Bionic Commando ReArmed.
Ugh, I wasn’t really a huge fan of the original and didn’t really have a whole lot of interest in checking it out… but after Tarzaning across a level and using my bionic claw to toss barrels at people and people at barrels, I quickly changed my mind.
During Takashi Aoyama’s presentation at GDC, he told an interesting anecdote about developing the Wii. Specifically, current Nintendo president Satoru Iwata demanded that, for the Wii not to “to be seen as an enemy in the household,” it should have a parental control timer that would automatically shut the console off after a period of time (sound familiar?).
Aoyama explained that a “debate raged for several weeks” until the team came up with what they felt to be a better direction, the play history list.
I’d been playing around with the Bad Company beta for a few days when McWhertor asked me what I thought of it.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Hey, is this the one that’s free, or that other one?”
McWhertor tells me I’m confusing it with Battlefield Heroes.
“How much are they charging for it?”
“$US 60″
“WTF! That’s insane, it’s fun, but $US 60?”
But ten minutes later I’m back on the game and I can’t seem to stop playing it. I even sneak in a piddly five minutes of playing between the time I put the Lemon Chicken in the stove and I need to come back up to check on it.
It’s an addiction!
newVideoPlayer("SFinterview_gawker.flv", 463, 387,"KotakuGDC.png"); On the last day of GDC, while we didn’t have a chance to actually participate in our 3-way Kotaku Street Fighter IV Tournament To The Death, we did have a chance to sit down (or more aptly put, stand up) with Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono. Even after hours of interviews, he was still boyishly enthused about the game and willing to answer all of Crecente’s frothing fanboy questions (like, how awesome will SFIV be, kinda super awesome, or really super awesome?). I was just pleased to hear that we have the same favourite character: Dhalsim.
