Swipe The Spider

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They may look like your average spiders, but these have super strength and can’t wait to take you down. Think you can beat them Inspired by the famous Mentos Rainbow Spider commercial, this game allows you to exact revenge on these ferocious arachnids. It’s your thumbs against their eight legs in a fight to the finish! From veteran Game Designer Graeme Devine, lead designer of 7th Guest, 11th Hour, Quake III and Halo Wars. Fight your way through the six classes of these mini beasts and compete for status in Game Center. For a bonus, beat the 1st spider and get a coupon for a free roll of Mentos with purchase.

Could You Handle Kevin?

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A Facebook engagement for the new Lynn Ramsay film We Need to Talk About Kevin has been launched. Fans are asked, “Could you handle Kevin ” and must authorize the App to continue. Fans are presented with a series of five questions that test their ability to deal with obnoxious children and their behavior issues. Once complete fans are told whether they could handle Kevin or if they should have even clicked submit in the first place.

Sony Considering PS3 Virtual Items Policy

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Sony Computer Entertainment is reported looking in ways for all virtual items on PS3 to be sold. This would establish pricing tiers of virtual items and decided a revenue split between Sony and developers.

In particular, Dust 514 could come to retail and that could lead to custom virtual currency cards. “We are both trailblazing together. CCP and Sony are right there in the same room figuring all this out together. I’ve only joined the company for about 72 hours and about half that time is speaking to Sony,” said David Reid, CCP’s marketing executive. “If there is a retail play, Sony has tremendous routes into that. They have PlayStation Network cards sold over the counter. There’s so many ways for us to get our brand everywhere.”

Source: Develop

Microsoft Points May Be Discontinued

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According to reports Microsoft’s proprietary virtual currency system Microsoft Points will be phased out by the end of 2012. This will affect the marketplaces on Windows Phone, Zune Marketplace and most prominently on Xbox Live.

Reports are that transactions will instead be based on a regional purchasing account and based upon real currency, which for Windows Phone would put it on par with the App Store and the Android Market. For Xbox Live, this would mean that content would now not just be listed in real dollar amounts and not necessitate buying Microsoft Points in “blocks.”

Source: Inside Mobile Apps

Sony Says It’s Invested More First-Party Than Nintendo/Microsoft Combined

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One of the criticism early on in the lifetime of the PS3 was that it did not have the competitive first party offerings to compete with what the Xbox 360 had. However, that concern has fallen away as games from Sony have come out more frequently, to the point where Sony Computer Entertainment’s Director of PlayStation Home and Sony PlayStation Network Jack Buser thinks they produce more that their competitors.

“We have a 15 year heritage of investing very, very heavily in the PlayStation platform. We have actually invested more in our first-party studios than Nintendo and Microsoft combined,” said Buser. “We have a tremendous catalog of game titles that are second to none out there, and now with PlayStation Suite and PlayStation Network the ability to deliver those experiences across so many devices and even potentially across third-party devices is an incredible competitive advantage.”

While Buser was it it, he also trumpeted Sony’s relationships with third parties, as well. “The PlayStation philosophy has always been about our third-party partners and our ability as a games industry to raise all boats together as partners,” said Buser. “We’re not like some other game platforms that say ‘Hey! Put your game out here on the App Store and maybe you’ll be one of these 10 featured apps if we feel like it right now, and then the rest of you guys can all go out of business.’”

“Or some other platform owners who are saying, ‘Look, we’re gonna make all the great games and if you guys can maybe make a great game on our platform, good luck but we’re not going to help you much.’ Or some other guys who say ‘Hey, we hand-picked you and we’re gonna shove a bunch of money in your pocket and the rest of you guys can all dial the 800 number and try to dial through to the front desk,” he asserted. “We’re all about our partners, our publishing partners, we always have been. If you talk to any game publisher out there, and you mention the word PlayStation, they are going to be very, very loyal to our brand.”

Source: IndustryGamers

Sony’s PS Vita Once Had No Physical Buttons

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The PS Vita right now is a full on portable gaming system, with accommodations to touch-screen controls on both the front and the back. However, Sony once considered making the Vita more tablet-like.

“When we first saw a prototype of the beautiful OLED screen we used on PS Vita, we felt it deserved to be bigger than the 4.3 inch screen on PSP,” said Sony Corporate Design Center’s Takashi Sogabe. “It’s almost as if we settled on five inches in order to really maximize the same impact that we felt when we first saw it. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking bigger is better when it comes to screen size but it isn’t.

“There was a great deal of discussion and we even talked about using a 5.5 inch screen with all of the buttons included on it,” noted Sogabe. “but that had a negative impact on the operability of the device and the idea was abandoned.”

Of course, once the addition of buttons and analog sticks was decided upon, there were other problems. “The engineers have been working on the PS Vita analog sticks for quite some time and it is a much greater technical challenge to build sticks this small than you might imagine,” Sogabe added. “We also built a prototype with flat slide pads, a bit like what you have on your laptop, but it just didn’t feel responsive enough for gaming and we learned that you need that physical response of tilting the stick to feel like you have total control.”

“For me as a designer they have presented a huge challenge, partly because it much easier to design products with entirely flat surfaces,” he continued. “We also discussed the position of the analog sticks at great length: I didn’t feel that they were in the perfect position from a design perspective but Worldwide Studios were adamant that they were in the best position for comfortable gameplay, and in the end they won out on that point.”

Source: PlayStation Blog

Nintendo Had Most TV Airtime In U.K. For 2011

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According to a study by Generation Media, Nintendo occupied the British TV airwaves for the full 52 weeks, achieving the greatest “share of voice.” Microsoft saw the highest TVR (an equivalent to one percent of a target audience) despite having only 10 TV campaigns.

The study also showed that Bethesda beat out Warner Bros for ninth place, thanks to each of their titles reaching over 200 TVRs. These top ten publishers accounted for 86 percent of all games and consoles TV advertising in 2011.

Source: mcvuk.com

PS Vita Getting Flickr Support

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Sony has added support for Flickr for the PS Vita via a new app. The app allows users to share photos to Flickr and also post comments on the web service.

Access to the app is only available in English, despite the announcement coming from Japan. This means the PS Vita has support for Nico Nico Video and Twitter and will eventually have apps for Foursquare, Facebook, Skype and Netflix.

Source: Andriasang.com