Ready For The Moonshine Challenge?

Lawless is the true story of the infamous Bondurant Brothers: bootlegging siblings who made a run for the American Dream in Prohibition-era Virginia. In this epic gangster tale, inspired by true-life tales of author Matt Bondurant’s family in his novel “The Wettest County In The World,” the loyalty of three brothers is put to the test against the backdrop of the nation’s most notorious crime wave.

On the official Facebook page, you can take the Moonshine challenge and see how you would stack up in three bar games as you tug on some moonshine. Enter the bar to begin and get ready to test your drinking skills. Three skill games challenge you based on dexterity, strength and agility.

Brass knuckle beatdown is a face to face challenge with a local. Use the keyboard to knock him out.

Play quarter toss and see if you can get the coin into the jar without letting the moonshine get to your head.

Be careful not to cut yourself and see if you can keep all your fingers playing the five finger fillet.

Want to find out if you’re as bad as a Bondurant Play Locked & Loaded and blast away an onslaught of liquor agents.

Browse around the page and check out a set of infographics about the history of the era.

 

NimbleBit Addresses Zynga Cloning Issue

Nimblebit attracted a lot of attention when they created an infographic showing the many similarities between Zynga’s Dream Heights and their Tiny Tower. Nimblebit co-founder David Marsh said that above all else, he was sad that the best Zynga could manage with all its talent was a clone of his company’s game.

“We were kind of just a little bit taken aback at just how close of a clone it was because we thought it would just be based on Tiny Tower with the same basic theme. But actually, the more we played it, the more it was really pretty close mechanically to our game,” said Marsh before adding, “I would like to be known for our games and not because we got cloned by a much bigger company or something like that.”

“I don’t think we’ve seen any kind of downturn in our revenue because of Dream Heights. I don’t think it’s devastating to us but that’s definitely why they can put out a lot of derivative games and still flourish,” he said. “The annoying part to me was that I know that there are lots of really talented people at Zynga because I used to work with them and they all went to work at Zynga. It’s just kind of sad for me to think that they would all get tasked with just ‘here’s a game, make something exactly like it’ instead of ‘here’s a genre, a basic idea, what can you come up with ‘”

Source: Develop

Apple Market Capitalization Sets Record

According to reports, Apple is now the most valuable company of all time by the measuring stick of stock price. The tech company’s stock recently rose 1.8 percent at $660, pushing Apple’s market capitalization up to $619 billion.

The previous historical record for top market cap belonged to Microsoft, whose market value topped out at $616.3 billion in December 1999, according to Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at S&P Dow Jones Indices. Apple’s market cap is over $200 billion more than the second most valuable company Exxon Mobil with market capitalization at $405 billion, followed by Microsoft, Wal-Mart and IBM rounding out the top five.

Driving up the price are the anticipated announcements of the iPhone 5 and new iPad products. Jefferies has boosted its price target on Apple to $900 and two firms put $1,000 price targets on the company earlier in the year and predicted Apple’s market cap will top $1 trillion.

Source: Wall Street Journal

Nintendo Talks Digital Sales Of New Super Mario Bros. 2

Nintendo has generally been reluctant to release their games digitally in the past. However, they have embraced the model with their newest releases and Nintendo president Satoru Iwata notes that New Super Mario Bros. 2 digital sales make up 5 percent of the total Japanese sales for the title since its launch on July 28, 2012.

“This initial offering going forward, we’ve gotten a good reaction going,” said Iwata.

Iwata also noted that sales of Demon Training in Japan came to 20 percent of the game’s total revenue, which he attributes to its nature as a daily puzzle game.

Source: Wall Street Journal

EA’s Moore Sees Zynga Lawsuit From Larger Industry Perspective

Electronic Arts is now locked in a legal battle with Zynga over similarities between The Sims Social and The Ville. EA COO Peter Moore described the battle as one not just for the developers at EA, but also for other developers around the industry who have had similar problems with Zynga.

“When we looked at The Ville we felt somewhat affronted by what we saw as copyright infringement,” said Moore. “We also feel from an industry perspective that a number of these things have happened before related to Zynga, but there’s never been a company that has the wherewithal and the resources to take it to the next level. We do.”

“We’re defending our Maxis studio, and we’re standing up for the industry,” continued Moore. “The roots of what we do as an industry is creative, from the minds of people who sit there and build storylines and characters and mesh it all together and work hard to do it. You take years to do that. And when you see somebody, quite frankly, take months replicating what you’ve done, you’re upset. We were upset. We were upset for Maxis. And we’ve seen enough of it from an industry perspective, with smaller publishers and developers who also put their hands up and said, ‘this is not right, but I don’t know what to do about it.’ We do.”

Source: Eurogamer

Political Conventions Prime Social Media

Democrats and Republicans are both planning to use social media extensively during their national conventions. The Republicans call theirs a “convention without walls,” while the Democrats say their gathering will be “the most open and accessible in history.”

Democrats will stream caucus meetings and the council discussions of the party’s platform and ideals along with prime-time speeches live. Meanwhile, the Republicans have hired a full-time blogger and a full-time digital communications manager to engage people online.

The conventions’ Facebook and Twitter sites are pumping up the events, with photos of the Republican stage under construction in Tampa and profiles of Democratic volunteers and delegates. To show the growth of social media during this time, Twitter said number of items posted on Election Day 2008 is equal to about six minutes worth of tweets today.

Republicans have social media team with its own “Social Media War Room” in the Tampa Convention Center, pushing out videos on YouTube. “Our goal is to leverage these technologies, to reach every American, whether they are in Toledo, Ohio, the convention floor in Tampa or a forward operating base in Afghanistan,” he said.

The Democrats will have a similar setup at their convention September 4 – 6 in Charlotte. “We’re able to expand it even further and invite the whole country to participate in a more interactive way then you might traditionally experience by tuning into a television,” said Nikki Sutton, director of digital media for the 2012 Democratic Convention.

Convention organizers will use social media to emphasize themes that might get lost in the traditional media’s limited coverage. “There’s just not a lot of convention coverage that is going to be offered by the major networks, and this becomes a way that individual figures’ speeches get publicity,” said Daniel Kreiss, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Democrats have also released a smartphone app that provides one place for videos, blog posts and photos. The app also includes an interactive map to help visitors to Charlotte find convention locations or restaurants.

Donna Chen, the director of marketing and communications for the Tampa Downtown Partnership said more than 15 tourism and convention groups are setting up their own “Social Media Command Center” for the convention. Tampa Bay and Co., the area’s tourism and marketing agency, is coordinating the effort using the hashtag “TampaBay” to curate the posts.

Source: AP

Team ICO Still Working On The Last Guardian

There were recent worries that The Last Guardian project had been abandoned by Sony when the trademark for the game had apparently expired. While that turned out to be a false dilemma, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida still had to confirm that the game was still being worked on.

“The team is still working on it very hard,” said Yoshida. “There are certain technical issues they’ve been working on. That’s the period of time when the game, looking from the outside, doesn’t seem to be making much progress. But internally there is a lot of work going into creating the title,”

“We had the game playable. At one point we felt that it would be produced for a certain time period. That was the time we prematurely talked about the launch window. But it turned out the technical issues are much harder to solve. So the engineering team had to go back and re-do some of the work they had done,” noted Yoshida, who responded when asked if The Last Guardian is now a PlayStation 4 project, “The game is developed on PS3.”

Source: Eurogamer

GameStop — Digital And Mobile Now 10 Percent Of Sales

GameStop’s revenue was 11 percent down compared to the same quarter last year, with profits dropping down to $21 million versus $30.9 million last year. While physical retail sales saw double digit declines in sales, GameStop CEO J. Paul Raines pointed to the positive returns in the digital realm.

“We are pleased with our digital, mobile and new merchandising assortment such as headsets and sound accessories,” said Raines. “It is clear that our investments over the last few years are paying off within our Other category, growing 40.6 percent in the second quarter. In the digital and mobile space, we have built businesses that did not exist just 2 years ago, and today, represent 10 percent of sales.”

Source: GamesIndustry International