Ubisoft creative director argues that “closed loop” games without endings are a good thing, says he hasn’t finished many games he loves
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, News, Podcast Stories | 2 Comments
“The ability for players to stop playing whenever they feel like it is inherent in the form. This is not a bad thing; this is a good thing. It is part of the game-design landscape. And if you learn to worry less about insisting that everyone who starts finishes, and put your attention on the advantages this fact of gaming gives you, you will not find a more personally liberating moment in game design than in designing your end.”
“Putting down the controller somewhere before the final climactic scene in a video game is not a sin. It is an intrinsic part of our art form. I never finished the first BioShock, yet it remains a game I thoroughly enjoyed. Grim Fandango? Never finished it. But I sure as hell use it as an example in design discussions! I have never finished a single Z, but, man, they are fun (usually).”
– Ubisoft creative director Jason VandenBerghe
I’m not sure I entirely agree with VandenBerghe. Like it or not, a game is a piece of art just as any other media experience is, and as a piece of art if you want to judge it you should first experience everything the game pushes you to experience. Single player campaigns are part of this, but so are things like multiplayer modes or side-content, and judging it without fully experiencing (to the degree the game wants you to) those things isn’t necessarily fair.
[Feature] Justifying the existence of the Wii U Gamepad, and why the device already speaks for itself
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in Features, General Gaming, General Nintendo, Wii U | 22 Comments
Author: Austin
Coming out of the vacuum that was the E3 show-floor, the last thing I expected to hear out of the gaming press was that Nintendo needed to “justify the existence of the Gamepad”. But alas, that is indeed what I heard! Writers weren’t terribly coy with their impression that we’ve yet to see a truly exceptional experience on the Wii U that couldn’t even remotely be done anywhere else, and they– by their count– certainly didn’t see anything like that at E3 this year.
Neglecting experiences like ZombiU or Nintendo Land (which is an understandable and deliberate oversight), they might be right: We haven’t yet seen a game that both uses the Gamepad in a truly creative way and manages to pass the level of critical acclaim that many people are looking for. But here’s my question “why is that what the Gamepad needs?”
Multiple ‘Shaq Fu’-related trademarks discovered
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, General Nintendo, News, Podcast Stories | 0 comments
You heard that right: The greatest fighting-game franchise ever to grace consoles just might be returning, despite being dead for nearly 20 years. Siliconera was doing some digging around and discovered four trademarks for “Shaq Fu” registered by the same folks (“Mine O’Mine”) who registered “Shaqfighter” back in May.
Could this mean the return of Shaq to gaming? Or perhaps we’ll see a 20-year anniversary edition of the game?
Konami pre-E3 show 2013 about to begin
Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Gaming, News | 0 comments
Update: Looks like there was a whole lot of nothing! No new announcements as far as I can tell…
I can’t find any embeddable streams at present, but Konami’s pre-E3 show 2013 is about to kick off. The presentation will begin at 1 PM ET / 10 AM PT.
I won’t lie: there’s a good chance that Konami won’t have anything Nintendo-related to show. You can, however, look forward to the latest on Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2, PES 2014, and “key announcements”. Hopefully at least one Nintendo system is included in the latter.
Konami will be hosting a stream on its website here.
Tekken producer Harada gone missing?
Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Gaming, Rumors | 1 Comment
Update: Brought to the top of the page. Here’s the latest…
*This is TEKKEN Project support team*There appear to be some news articles worrying for Harada-san’s safety (cont…
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) June 5, 2013
…cont)However, we were able to confirm he has been logged into Steam daily, so we believe he is OK, but just has not shown up for work.
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) June 5, 2013
So just some kind of promotional thing on Harada’s part? He doesn’t appear to be missing at this point…
Something strange is going on with Tekken producer Katsuhiro Harada. A tweet from Harada’s official Twitter account, published by the “Tekken project support team”, states that he “has been missing from office since a week ago.” The tweet continues: “We are still searching for him.”
*This is TEKKEN Project support team*Mr.Harada has been missing from office since a week ago. We are still searching for him. Thanks.
— Katsuhiro Harada (@Harada_TEKKEN) June 5, 2013
So what’s going on here? Is something truly up with Harada? His last tweet was on May 26 – quite a long time ago.
I’m assuming that this isn’t a joke of some sort, but you never know. I just hope Harada is alright!
A look at the Tokyo Game Show 2013 main visual
Posted on 12 years ago by Brian(@NE_Brian) in General Gaming, News | 0 comments
The Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association gave a look at the Tokyo Game Show 2013 main visual today.
This year’s main theme is “Games: Limitless Evolution”. The character above, “She”, represents this.
“She” is a futuristic woman who can transform herself into something “beyond the reach of imagination.”
Ippei Gyoubu created the Tokyo Game Show 2013 visual this year. Gyoubu has been on board with the expo since 2010.
Gyoubu commented:
“Games make a change entering a new phase that games themselves cannot imagine due to a never ending evolution. Games that continue to evolve unlimitedly have been represented. While character is the core of games, scattered parts are tools for games to evolve. The condition in which character combines with parts and transform itself depending on the needs of the age is truly the ‘infinite possibilities’ that games have.”
Capcom says they’d be willing to do more “retro remakes” a la DuckTales, hint at Aliens vs. Predator (1994) possibility
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, News, Podcast Stories, Wii U, Wii U eShop | 0 comments
In an interview with Polygon, Capcom’s senior product manager revealed that the company would absolutely be willing to continue looking to the past for old franchises or games that could use modern remakes, similar to what they’re doing with DuckTales later this year. They’re unable to talk about exactly what games might be getting the treatment, but they did hint that Aliens vs. Predator (the 1994 side-scroller) is the one that fans have been requesting most.
We’ll let you know if they announce anything else for a remake.
Precursor CEO says staff is made up entirely of former Silicon Knights employees, maintains that it’s not just a Silicon Knights rebrand
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, Wii U | 0 comments
Precursor Games (the team behind the upcoming Eternal Darkness sequel “Shadow of the Eternals“) is made up entirely of former staff of Silicon Knights, according to CEO Paul Caporicci, but he maintains that the two companies are entirely separate entities.
Silicon Knights– a Canadian based developer– has been having intense legal troubles over the last 5 or 6 years after losing a lawsuit to Epic Games over Unreal Engine licensing fees, and now, some folks are worried that the skeleton of that company left and built a new company– Precursor Games– to avoid having to pay damages. This allowed them to purchase assets from Silicon Knights in order to build Shadow of the Eternals, the pseudo-sequel to a game that was built by Silicon Knights in the first place.
Quite an odd situation, but I’m happy that we’re getting a sequel to Eternal Darkness.
Silicon Knights appears to have closed its office, sold off assets
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, News, Podcast Stories | 0 comments
We still don’t know too much about the situation, but various outlets have been reporting that Eternal Darkness and Too Human developer Silicon Knights has closed its office and sold off their assets to other companies. This comes in light of the fact that their most famous property– Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem— is getting a spiritual successor developed by Precursor Games called “Shadow of the Eternals“, and amidst the word that Precursor had actually purchased various assets from Silicon Knights in order to work on it.
There were still rumblings yesterday from the few Silicon Knights employees left who said the company is “very much alive”, but as time chugs forward it’s starting to look like that may not be the case.
15 EA games are going to skip Wii U due to its lack of support for Frostbite 3
Posted on 12 years ago by Austin(@NE_Austin) in General Gaming, General Nintendo, News, Podcast Stories, Wii U | 0 comments
Madden is out the door, FIFA is up in the air, and now we’re hearing that a total of 15 games are set to skip out on Wii U due to the console’s poor testing when put up against EA’s ‘Frostbite 2’ and (consequently) ‘Frostbite 3’ engines. We don’t know for sure which games will be skipping the console, but it’s a safe bet that Battlefield, Mass Effect, and some of the studio’s Star Wars titles won’t be hitting Nintendo’s home console when they come to PS4 and the next generation Xbox.
So when it comes down to it, much like with Wii, Wii U owners may just have to give up on multiplatform support. We’ll certainly have good third party games (it’ll be much cheaper to developer for Wii U than PS4, after all) and great indie titles, but when it comes to these big-budget action games, we seem to be missing out on pretty much everything! Which may not be much of a loss given that most of us bought a Wii U for Nintendo first party titles and other games like that anyway.
