There is a seventh member to Noble Team in the upcoming Halo: Reach. While many have been speculating that the final member of the squad would be Master Chief, the revelation isn’t quite so startling.
Here he is from the front . . .
Bungie has created the seventh team member specifically for the San Diego Comic Con. Right now, he’ll only appear as an action figure at the event, but you never know what the future might hold.
. . . and the side.
Source: Kotaku
The Video Games Live special is airing on PBS starting July 31, 2010 and going through August. Here’s a small sampler, with music lifted from Civilization IV, which is actually the Lord’s Prayer sung in Swahili.
The anticipation for StarCraft II is quite high in some circles. As a tribute, a fan named Owen Davis made this old school recreation of the seminal RTS title.
Verizon likes their attention grabbing ads and they’re not beyond paying a pretty penny. Their latest ad has CG visuals reminiscent of the Transformers movies and seemingly pokes fun at the iPhone 4 and AT&T with the slogan the most powerful transmitter is you.
Villain has revealed that Archetype has sold over 160,000 copies in its first week and is the third-highest grossing application in the Apple App Store. They indicate that the game has also seen over 320,000 thousand iPwnage sessions as well.
We are beyond thrilled to see how Archetype in the short amount of time it s been officially released has found such an amazing and enthusiastic fan base, along with the high praise from the editorial community, said Dane Baker, Lead Producer at Villain. This has been an amazing project for all involved, and speaks to our love for games, so we re taking this warm reception to further fuel our passion to work even harder on future updates, offerings and new game features to support our community of iPwnage fanatics.
To find out more, please check out the recent [a]list interview with Baker.
The 3D revolution is coming to all mediums, be it movies, television programming or video games. Not only does it give games a neat visual element, but senior development manager at SCE Worldwide Studios stereoscopic team Simon Benson says that it makes games more approachable as well.
“One interesting thing that we have found is that it tends to make the games more accessible in a lot of cases,” said Benson. “If you’re playing a racing game and you re getting some additional [3D] information you can actually measure distances with your eyes, making it easier to judge breaking. Many of our hardcore gamers are already pretty good at that anyway, so how much of an edge is it going to give them compared to someone who s only just tried a game for the first time? We often see that if you give the controller to someone for the first time they might crash a lot until they get used to the fact that they’ve got to use other cues to perceive distances and breaking and stuff like that, but suddenly you can give a controller to someone to play a stereoscopic driving game and even if they’ve not played it before the cues are more relevant to them because they re used to measuring things with their eyes and they really do feel like it s more familiar to them.”
Source: Edge
There was a time when every bright-eyed gamer wanted nothing more than to grow up and make the latest hit game for their console (or PC). Now, however, making a top-of-the-line game takes a team of dozens and tens of millions of dollars, and BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk acknowledges it’s just not something most developers should pursue these days.
“Triple-A game creation is a poor goal for developers working today,” said Zeschuk at the Develop conference. “While blockbuster game creation is everything that most game developers working today growing up wanted to do, it’s precisely the wrong thing to chase in gaming’s contemporary landscape.”
“With more money involved, publishers have become more risk adverse. As a result, innovation and creativity [are] being squeezed,” described Zeschuk. “Where the bottom of the market had dropped out at one point, now it s the middle of the market has dropped out. Unless you can be in the top ten releases at one given time, it’s unlikely that a triple-A game is going to make money.”
Source: Gamasutra
Twitter is slowly making its venture towards profitability with new ad efforts. One of these new programs is called @earlybird for time sensitive ad offers the first company to do so is Disney, which is offering a two-for-one ticket promotion for The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with the tweet taking users to a Fandango page to purchase the tickets with a special code.
Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said it would continue to test concepts that can breed activity. “There’s going to be lots of iteration and testing,” said Costolo. “So far it’s working.”
The company is working on advertising with Promoted Tweets on the search page and Promoted Trends on the home page. Coca-Cola, for instance, reported 86 million impressions in a day and a 6 percent interaction rate for its Promoted Tweets campaign tied to the World Cup.
“I’m confident the ad platform already works for big brands in terms of the reach and engagement we can provide,” said Costolo.
The ads on Twitter are designed to work with functions in the service already, such as retweeting by @earlybird and running Promoted Trends on things that are popular now. “We’re trying to make sure our ad platform is organic to how people are already using Twitter,” said Costolo.
Source: AdWeek
While Peter Jackson has not been confirmed as the director and The Hobbit has not even been greenlit, work on the film is still being done. Jackson has spent the past week in Los Angeles meeting with actors, and will continue his casting trip to New York and the U.K.
According to insiders, the agreement to have Jackson sign up to direct both movies is nearly done, but the fiscal situation at MGM (which holds half of the rights) continues to hold thing up. While WB is working as the lead studio and wants to get a deal done, any contract would have to be approved by MGM’s committee of creditors and financial stakeholders.
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
In what could be one of the most bizarre promotional items of all time, there are some genuine Klax-brand cigarettes. Actually, re-badged Mild 7s, these tchotkes were given out at a Japanese arcade show during the 1990s. It’s practically unthinkable that any game company would give out cigarettes in the U.S. under any circumstances, but this shows how common and still generally accepted smoking is in Japan.
There is time for . . . Klax.
Back when Klax hoped to become a big thing.
Helpful advice.
Source: IncrediblyStrangeGames.com
