A recruitment ad on Treyarch’s website has confirmed that the studio is in the beginning stages of bringing the Call of Duty franchise to a new console. More »
Tom’s Guide has a pretty in-depth interview with the based God of coding – the creator of Doom, Quake and the upcoming RAGE – John Carmack. He had some pretty interesting things about the next generation of consoles, Steam, and the trend towards motion control. More »
Apparently I jumped the gun a bit last February when I announced that SouthPeak Games was brining Gaijin Entertainment’s Oniblade to the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC as X-Blades in late 2008. Turns out what the company really said was that they were brining it to the PC and next generation consoles, without mentioning any specifics, and I had just assumed they meant the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Now the company has sent out an official press release, clarifying exactly what they meant by next generation consoles.
Look for X-Blades this fall on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. Enjoy the new screens!
You may be familiar with top-shelf industry news site Next-Gen. They’re the online reincarnation of a long-dead US magazine, which was basically the American version of respected British mag Edge. Being so close and all (both are run by Future publishing), for the past few months, Next-Gen have begun hosting Edge magazine’s content, giving the magazine a decent online presence for the first time in its existence. A presence that’s about to get a lot more prominent. Next-Gen will, come Monday, be rebranding their website, which will now be known as Edge. Just like the magazine. This is being done in an attempt to “emulate the respect and credibility of the print magazine online”. Odd move, seeing as Next-Gen were already respected and credible, but so long as it doesn’t affect either the magazine or the current site, everything should turn out just fine.
We’ve heard from Time and Maxim so far on the best games of 2007 and Next-Gen has already chimed in on what it considered the year’s most innovative design decisions, but the online game business pub has weighed in proper with a best of list that might be the best one yet. Yes, I’m building a ranking list of lists. Obviously, we all know what opinions are like, and the staff of Next-Gen certainly gives themselves plenty of breathing room with thirty positions to fill but there are some solid choices in here. Super Mario Galaxy at number one? I can get behind that. Rock Band at number two? OK. They even remembered to give props to Super Stardust HD.
Anyone looking to fill in some holes in their gaming library would do well to give the list a once over. It certainly made me realise I needed to finally pick up Pac-Man Championship Edition.
NEXT-GEN’S BEST 30 GAMES OF 2007 [Next-Gen]
Will Wright doesn’t spend a lot of his mental resources complaining about hardware capabilities, focusing more on innovating gameplay and conjuring money from thin air. But he has a complaint about next-gen systems…or at least how they’re being used. With the next-generation games systems, unfortunately a lot of that CPU is pretty dedicated to graphics, so it’s not like you instantly get 50 times more computing power; you get 50 times more graphic computing power and so I think it’s actually more interesting if we had 50 times more general processing that we could then apply to physics, interactivity and AI.
Crave Entertainment’s COO Rob Dyer makes a good point about this holiday season’s console battle: In fact, we see it more of a four consoles, two handhelds market…Christmas will be very strong and we see PS2, Wii and the handhelds leading the way for us.
A family friend of a friend asked my advice on a good console to buy their kids this Christmas that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg—one with lots of kids’ titles, too. I responded, the PS2. They thought I was crazy. They meant “next-gen” console, apparently. And by “next-gen,” they really meant Wii. So then just buy a flipping Wii like you wanted! But the PS2 is cheap and has a huge, price-reduced library still worth exploring (and still expanding), and chances are that many parents will be keeping their pocketbook in mind this holiday season while picking up PS2s and PS2 titles—especially if Wiis sell out. PS2 still strong in software sales [gamesindustry] More »
