Tekken Tag Tournament 2 – Fight Lab

Find out the new mode in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 to customize Combot’s appearance and, for the first time ever, his moves. The tutorial mode has become more advanced than ever, teaching you moves and abilities through a series of challenges and also letting you adjust and customize attributes and abilities.

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D Theatrical Trailer

Silent Hill: Revelation 3D is the long awaited sequel to the first Silent Hill movie and it looks to be hitting all the right beats. Heather Mason must venture to Silent Hill to find her missing father along with her friend Vincent – the journey will result in a disturbing revelation of who she still is and will threaten to trap her in Silent Hill forever.

 

Discover Nearby History

Here is an interactive guide to thousands of historic locations across the United States, brought to you by the History Channel. The easy-to-use interface, photos, video and dynamic maps bring history to life anywhere in the country. Whether you’re on vacation or just running errands, the app makes it simple and fun to get the facts on the history hidden all around you, including amazing architecture, museums, battlefields, monuments, famous homes and much more!

Most of the listings have images and all of the items have bite-sized descriptions, a link to any available Web site and a click-to-call link.

The app is free and ad-supported and can be downloaded from iTunes.

 

Avatar Celebrities Ready For The Spotlight

Everyone dreams of stardom and now your Xbox Live avatar can get some!

If you and your avatar are willing to pay that price, then the all new Avatar Famestars program is for you! The exclusive avatar items awarded only in Avatar Famestars marks your avatar as a gaming star!

Avatar FameStar is a new program from Microsoft Studios that delivers new and exciting ways to play online with your friends and compete for social recognition. Every Avatar FameStar game lets players earn Fame by accomplishing weekly and one time challenges.

Dress your Avatar with exclusive new outfits and items, and show your achievements off to your friends and competitors. Avatar FameStar puts you in the spotlight, bringing Avatar FameStar games together to reward people who play and compete!

Earn Fame in a variety of games, including Wreckateer, and updates to Full House Poker and A World of Keflings to support the new program. As you earn Fame, unlock new avatar items and outfits, showing off your skills and achievements inside the games. Future titles that will support Avatar FameStar include Avatar Motocross Madness, Fire Pro Wrestling, and Homerun Stars. Keep an eye out for these and even more exciting new games!

Wreckateer uses the Kinect to put you in control of a massive castle-wrecking Ballista. With the help of Wreck and Tinker, use 6 magic projectiles to travel the land and destroy 60 castles.

Go all-in with Full House Poker! Play Texas Hold €˜Em against your friends and thousands of players worldwide, and bring your personality to the table with unique tells and unlockables galore. Save your player progression and winnings between sessions as you increase the stakes and make your mark as a Full House Poker pro!

Fire Pro Wrestling is a raucous, light-hearted party wrestling game featuring your Avatar. Body slam your friends and family alike. Engage in fun, fast-paced single player modes as well as great same screen and Xbox Live multiplayer Battle Royals for up to 4 of your friends. If you like co-op play try out 2-on-2 tag team matches with custom Tag team moves that can only be performed by 2 players working together. Fire Pro Wrestling also allows you to customize your avatar wrestling style and looks with over 300 unlockable apparel items and more than 300 different wrestling moves. New attacks, aerials, grapples, and finishing moves are at your fingertips as you build and grow your character through a robust RPG style progression system!

 

Games Industry Is Moving Towards Free-To-Play Model, Says Gree

Free-to-play has changed how many companies approach releasing games and their business in general. To Gree U.K.’s head of EMEA developer relations David McCarthy, he thinks the model is now proven.

“It requires a very, very different mindset and business model to conventional boxed product gaming. The decision on whether to go free-to-play, certainly on mobile, is dead,” said McCarthy. “There’s no argument – free-to-play is the model that the industry is moving towards. If you look at the [games in the] top grossing charts the vast majority of them are free-to-play, and it’s very few people who can make pay-per-download work as well for them as free-to-play in the mobile space.”

“I think that’s going to have consequences for the boxed product business as well. Companies like Konami and Capcom are now deriving a huge amount of revenue from these kind of games and I think that the things that they learn in this space are going to affect the way that they make conventional games in the future as well.”

“A lot of developers are really hamstrung by this project finance-based model where as soon as they finish one project they are scrabbling around competing with a ton of other studios, mostly talking to publishers asking for money,” McCarthy said. “If someone’s coming looking for money, publishers are the least likely people to give it to them. Social games give you a lot more control over your revenue streams. You can release a product, adapt the content, generate new content over the lifecycle of the game in reaction to the way users are playing it.”

Gree’s claims to have over 250 million users on its network, with the stated goal to build a user base of over 1 billion players worldwide. Find out more about Gree in this video interview.

Source: Edge

Kickstarter — Issues with Delivery And Quality

Kickstarter has become a common method for small developers to try and fund their projects, but now such projects are reaching saturation. Of course, with few of these projects having put out any product yet, a long term concern is whether some of these projects will fail before they put out a game, or if they simply put out a bad product, which might be just as damaging.

“At the moment, there’s no guarantee of delivery,” says Stainless Games’ Patrick Buckland. “Now, with a company like ours, we’re going to deliver because we’ve got a huge track record and lots of other blue-chip clients – Hasbro, EA, Microsoft – who expect that from us. But there will be smaller companies out there who go over budget, get things wrong, and, y’know, generally fail, and the people who pledge aren’t going to get anything for their money. It needs to mature to a more eBay-like system, where if you pledge your money you’re entering into a two-way legal contract. If you pay that money, they have to deliver you something for that money.”

“The general public may fund four games and only one of them will turn out to be any good, if they’re lucky,” he added. “Not only will some of these games never come out, some of them will come out and they’ll be crap, because some games are. You can’t get it right all the time. That’s any developer, and I’m including ourselves here. You can’t get it right all the time.”

Source: GamesIndustry International

Insomniac’s Ted Price Talks Opportunities In New Games Market

Retail sales have been poor of late in the U.S., diminishing in each of the last three years. However, Insomniac Games studio head Ted Price isn’t pessimistic, and he thinks the climate is forcing people to look to new avenues, like he is doing with Outernauts.

“Based on the quality of the games I’ve seen, the doom-and-gloom we’ve heard from various folks over the last few months about the console industry seems to ring hollow,” said Price. “It makes me very optimistic about the fall and the holiday in terms of great titles.”

“I think everyone is experimenting. I think what we’re seeing is more flexibility and a willingness to break down conventional thinking when it comes to distribution and monetization across the board. Whether it is across the board on Facebook games or console games, everyone who will succeed will probably be very flexible in their approach,” added Price. “For us at Insomniac, if you had asked me 5-7 years ago about being in the social gaming space, I would have said ‘what social gaming space ‘ Things have really moved fast and we as a small company have the great opportunity to move with it and react very quickly and do things like bring big games with console sensibilities to a new audience.”

Source: GamesIndustry International

Microsoft Surface Keyed In October 26

Microsoft revealed in an SEC report that the Surface tablet is planned to launch on October 26. That date is identical to the launch of the Windows 8 OS platform.

The Surface will launch in two forms, the first being a more price-friendly ARM-based version running Windows RT. A few months later, there will be a more expensive model that’s Intel-based running Windows 8 Pro.

The filing noted that “suggested retail pricing will be announced closer to availability and is expected to be competitive with a comparable ARM tablet or Intel Ultrabook-class PC.” Speculation has led some to believe that the lower end Surface tablets could cost as little as $500-$600, while more expensive ones could go over $1,000.

Source: CVG

Hobbit Film Series Now Officially a Trilogy

Peter Jackson recently posted on Facebook to say that looking at the first two Hobbit films in the editing room and were pleased with the story, characters and cast. To him and his wife (who has worked with him on all of his largest projects) they saw the opportunity as filmmakers and fans “to tell more of the tale.”

“We know how much of the story of Bilbo Baggins, the Wizard Gandalf, the Dwarves of Erebor, the rise of the Necromancer, and the Battle of Dol Guldur will remain untold if we do not take this chance,” said Jackson. “The richness of the story of The Hobbit, as well as some of the related material in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings, allows us to tell the full story of the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and the part he played in the sometimes dangerous, but at all times exciting, history of Middle-earth.”

“So, without further ado and on behalf of New Line Cinema, Warner Bros. Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wingnut Films, and the entire cast and crew of The Hobbit films, I’d like to announce that two films will become three,” announced Jackson. “It has been an unexpected journey indeed, and in the words of Professor Tolkien himself, ‘a tale that grew in the telling’.”

Source: Facebook.com