Developer Semi Secret Software is offering up the source code for their hit game Canabalt. The company is doing this after a successful run with a charity sale.
Canabalt was offered with Eliss, Drop 7, Solipskier, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and Osmos as part of an iPhone indie sale, raising over $25,000 for Penny Arcade’s Child’s Play charity. The source code can be downloaded at the link below.
Source: Semi Secret Software Blog
Bethsoft has been ambitiously targeting the Japanese gaming sector with Fallout: New Vegas, and they’re continuing that with an 8-bit approximation of the Fallout universe. Purposefully, the Japanese site resembles the original Dragon Quest in many ways. What would Fallout look like if it had been made in 1987 by a Japanese development studio reads the Bethsoft blog. Our scientists have answered that question, taking over the Japanese Fallout website with an 8-bit version of the Capital Wasteland. Just like that import copy of Final Fantasy 5 you nabbed in the 90s, this game is Japanese language-only, it continues. Fortunately, it s still amusing to gaze at the pixelated approximations of super mutants and the like. Check out the game at bethsoft.com/jpn/fo/fo_quest/. Source: Bethsoft Blog
7-Eleven will be giving away exclusive in-game content for LittleBigPlanet 2, Killzone 3 and PlayStation Home. The rewards include a Slurpee sticker pack for LittleBigPlanet 2, map pack for Killzone 3 and Virtual Slurpee Machine for Home.
Players can get these virtual rewards by accumulating rewards points from limited edition Sackboy and Helghast Slurpee cups found in 7-Eleven stores nationwide. The 7-Eleven promotion will run until the end of March.
Source: Slurpee.com
According to information gathered by App Data, CityVille has become the biggest-ever app on Facebook. CityVille recently crossed 84.2 million monthly active users, better than FarmVille‘s peak numbers of 83.76 million users.
CityVille originally debuted on December 2, quickly becoming the fastest-growing app on Facebook ever. However, CityVille still has a ways to go to equal FarmVille s peak of 34.5 million daily active users; right now, it’s set around 16 million.
Source: VentureBeat
Monster Hunter has gone a long ways towards making the PSP a top selling platform in Japan, but the imminent release of the 3DS and PSP2 put the system’s future in question. While the series has been exclusive to the PSP platform, Capcom’s CEO Haruhiro Tsujimoto made a roundabout comment suggesting that Monster Hunter could be 3DS bound.
3DS is releasing, too, so (it seems like) the time to switch to a new platform is coming, said Tsujimoto.
Source: GoNintendo
Duncan Jones is a self-professed hardcore gamer along with being a movie director. So like many core gamers, the director of Moon and son of David Bowie is not happy with the current state of gaming movies at all.
I’m very cynical of the number of directors who say they’re actual gamers, said Jones. When you meet a lot of them in person, they’re not really gamers. I’m a real gamer and I think there are less real gamers involved in directing only because you have to spend so much time making films that there’s no time to be a hardcore gamer. I’m just slightly insane and I stay up all night playing games. In the day I’m working and at night I play games.
While most gaming movies don’t come off the way similar comic and book adaptations do, Jones still thinks it’s possible for a game adapted into a movie to be great. I think we’re waiting for the right project, noted Jones. I really believe it. I definitely think there is an intangible aspect of video games in the interactivity that a film is never going to capture. But that is not what a game adaptation needs to be. A good game adaptation is where you find the story or the emotional aspect that’s at the heart of a computer game and you replicate that on film. It doesn’t mean you need to have first person perspective or try and capture the mechanics of a game. If you’re going to make a film of a game it’s got to be about the essence of why you, the audience, care what s going on. There are certain games where that will work, and there are certain games where it doesn’t.
I m hugely jealous of Sam Raimi, Jones added. I really believe World of Warcraft could be the launch of computer games as good films. And from the little I’ve read of interviews with him the way he’s approaching it makes so much sense. It’s what I was talking about it’s not worrying about how the game plays, it’s about creating the world of the game and investing the audience in that world.
The world will have to wait on Raimi and the World of Warcraft movie, since it was put on the back burner for The Great and Mighty Oz and isn’t scheduled until at least 2013.
Source: BadAssDigest.com
The clout of Facebook continues to grow as Goldman Sachs has teamed up with a Russian investor to put $500 million into the social networking company. This investment, which values the company at $50 billion (putting it ahead of eBay, Yahoo and Time Warner) shows not just the rising in importance of the social networking company, but it also shows that Wall Street investors are taking companies like this more seriously.
When you think back to the early days of Google, they were kind of ignored by Wall Street investors, until it was time to go public, said Chris Sacca, an angel investor in Silicon Valley. This time, the Street is smartening up. They realize there are true growth businesses out here. Facebook has become a real business, and investors are coming out here and saying, We want a piece of it.
Source: Dealbook
BioWare has revealed that the news updates for Mass Effect 2’s Cerberus Network will be going on hiatus on January 24. The in-game news service (which offered tidbits on both real-world and in-game happenings) will only see a handful of updates in 2011, right after the PS3 version of the game releases on January 18.
“Daily postings will cease except for three weeks in 2011,” said a recent Cerberus Network update. “A week of posts will precede a downloadable content release, and two more weeks will lead up to the release of Mass Effect 3.”
