Forza Horizon Sponsors ‘Chasing With Steve Aoki’

BY

Microsoft launched a campaign for Forza Horizon, with a an eight-episode online reality series as a centerpiece. Starring dance club DJ Steve Aoki, it will run biweekly for the next month.

Titled Chasing With Steve Aoki, it has three teams of characters competing in a series of real-life challenges. The teams will sometimes receive helpful clues by pulling up video messages from Aoki on their Xbox 360.

Forza Horizon will be receive placement throughout the episodes, including branded clothing and gear. The game, which is more focused on arcade racing rather than simulation driving like the Forza Motorsports series it spun-off from, will be the focus during the show’s fourth installment when the teams face off in the action-racing game.

 

The series will also air on Fuse’s cable TV channel along with Alloy Digital, 215 McCann and Starcom MediaVest. Alloy’s comedic duo Smosh will also appear in the videos while explaining rules to the Chasing With Steve Aoki participants.“We have a healthy mix of digital because we know the game-playing audience entails heavily digital consumers who are socially connected,” said Rob Matthews, Microsoft’s gm of global consumer marketing for the company’s interactive entertainment business.The show could get attention from the million Facebook fans and Twitter followers that Xbox, Fuse and Steve Aoki have. There will also be a Facebook hub for the video game, and TV spots and print ads for Forza Horizon.“We also have extensive reach through Xbox.com that we’ll utilize,” he explained. “We are deploying all of our channels to promote Forza Horizon and this [online video] series.”
Source: AdWeek.com

Assassin’s Creed III Smashes Pre-Order Records

BY

Ubisoft has announced that Assassin’s Creed III is the company’s most pre-ordered game to date. The publisher says that pre-orders for the game are more than double Assassin’s Creed Revelations, which previously claimed the high-water mark for Ubisoft and pre-orders.

“Pre-orders for Assassin’s Creed III at GameStop are 100 percent higher than last year, putting the game on track to be one of the top titles of 2012,” said Michael van den Berg, VP of international merchandising, marketing & digital at GameStop.” In addition, Ubisoft is offering a Season Pass and high quality DLC available at launch to bring even more excitement to this title.”

Breakfast Will Never Be The Same

BY

Peruvian illustrator Guillermo Fajardo has been creating digital art that reimagines various cereal characters. Much like various “real world” renditions of video game characters, the final results are kind of scary.

Source: Behance.net  {link no longer active}

Apple Revenue, Profits Set Record For Q3 2012

BY

Apple announced their quarterly financial results, where they revealed they sold 26.9 million iPhones (up 58 percent year-on-year) and 14.0 million iPads during the quarter (up 26 percent over the the same quarter last year). The company also sold 5.3 million iPods, a 19 percent unit decline during the same quarter in 2011.

Apple sold 200 million iOS devices, including 125 million iPhones and 58 million iPads, in the past year. Despite all these staggering numbers, it did not meet analysts expectations that the company would once again shoot past their stated forecasts.

“Going into earnings we were wondering if the slowing economy will catch up with Wall Street, and it has,” said Channing Smith, co-manager of the Capital Advisors Growth Fund. “Apple is very well positioned with the iPad and now the iPad mini. It has a great smartphone and we expect the iPhone 5 to sell very well. The outlook is conservative, but that’s not surprising. Err on the side of caution is a proven formula.”

Source: Reuters

Minecraft Tops Xbox Live Activity Chart

BY

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition has ascended to the top of the chart of games played on Xbox Live. It surpasses Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which had held the top spot since the week the game launched on November 7, 2011.

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition continues to sell well on Xbox Live Arcade, topping that chart above games like The Walking Dead and Sonic Adventure 2. In the indie games category, the top three slots are occupied by CastleMiner Z, Murder Miners and CastleMiner, and at least seven games inspired by some aspect of Minecraft are on the top 20 XBLIG chart.

Source: MajorNelson.com

Windows Store Amended To Sell Mature Games

BY

Microsoft has amended the guidelines of the Windows Store in Windows 8 to allow the sale of games rated M for Mature in the U.S. and PEGI 18 in Europe in December. Also, Windows’ corporate VP of web services Antoine Leblond assured developers that there will be means to sell games outside of the Windows Store.

“This is to give developers a heads up that that’s where we’re going,” Leblond said, “So they can have the peace of mind around developing the kinds of games that will have those ratings.”

“We want the world of desktop apps to to keep existing [outside of the Windows Store],” he added. “There’s no reason to get in the way of that. Valve can keep being Valve.”

Source: Gizmodo.com

The Last Of Us Comic In The Works

BY

Dark Horse will release a comic called The Last of Us: American Dreams in 2013 around the same time as The Last of Us, detailing the backstory of Ellie. Growing up in military orphanage, Ellie didn’t think there would be another way to live other than joining the army, but an older girl puts her on a path to meet Joel, changing her life forever.

“At first I was very reluctant to do anything like this, just because we’re still developing the game,” said Naughty Dog creative director Neil Druckmann. “There’s a lot to be done in the game and it requires so much energy that I didn’t want to be distracted by something else. At the same time, I didn’t want to just hand off these characters and find a writer, find an artist and do this thing and just say it’s not canon. If we were going to do this, we wanted to do it right.”

“The hard part was — where was Ellie before all these events of the game? How was her character different? And then trying to make those differences be a big part of this story,” he said. “In the broad strokes we kind of knew her backstory, and then we picked out a particular event and said ‘let’s flesh out this event for this story.’ Just like we do with the game, it’s very character-driven. That’s the journey of Joel and Ellie, here we have the events of Ellie before, but we introduce this character Riley who Ellie is very drawn to for reasons you’ll see in the story in the comic. The relationship that she forms with this other girl sets up some of the events that lead into the story of the game.”

Source: IGN