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by Published on December 10th, 2011 23:58- Categories:
- DCEmu
A couple of weeks back, Oli told of how he spoke to a friend who believed that 2011 was the finest year for gaming since 2001 - and then promptly disagreed, saying how this year, for all that it's offered in terms of excellence, hasn't really offered anything particularly new. Games are now bigger and better, yes, but that heady thrill that defined gaming's last golden age is now gone.He's right, of course. The two titles that, in my mind, are 2011's best - and that's Portal 2 and Skyrim - are retreads, iterations that expand upon templates that, in Portal's case, had perhaps already been perfected before. Elsewhere, it's hard not to be disheartened by the thickening glut of lookalike shooters, or other games with pretensions of innovation merely offering up old ideas that have been twisted, bent or just plain misappropriated.I'll come clean though. I was that friend, and it's a belief that I still stand by. 2011 has been a vintage year, not necessarily for the same rush of novelty that we saw a decade ago, but for different reasons altogether. And they're reasons that I think are just as important as the sharp thrill of the new, even if it's admittedly a less raw excitement that they offer.It's important, first of all, to realise that the giddy euphoria of a year that brought us the bold innovations of GTA 3, Super Monkey Ball, Halo and Pikmin to name but a few is most likely lost to us, perhaps forever. 10 years ago, gaming was still in the throes of its own puberty: moody, unpredictable and occasionally incomprehensible but with its every action infused with an electric thrill of the unknown./7 The Binding of Isaac, which filtered Zelda through a roguelike structure, was one of many offbeat delights to be had in 2011....
For better and for worse, the last 10 years have seen the medium settle down into a smoother, more sedate rhythm. There's the famous assertion that there are only seven stories in literature, those base models twisted and repurposed ad infinitum. I think that, after a handful of decades of experimentation, we've begun to settle upon our own templates, ones that will likely be at the backbone of games for many years to come.We've lost the shocks, but we've gained a maturity that allows games - within a framework that's now been well defined - to experiment and to iterate. It's this kind of experimentation that can concoct an experience like Portal 2 - a game that doesn't quite achieve the delicately chiselled perfection that its predecessor did, but one that still manages to expand upon the original and create, arguably, gaming's first real comedy. A comedy that was defined as much by the player's actions as it was by the game's script, a facet that's further explored in the wondrous slapstick of Portal 2's co-op mode.Skyrim, on the other hand, is the 14th release in the Elder Scrolls series - and its horrendously compelling fantasy world is a product of each game before it, its allure a result of the 17 years of tinkering and iteration that preceded it. It's not a new experience, but in Bethesda's well-established template of hundreds of stories threaded across rugged landscapes, bigger and better's certainly something to be grateful for.Other highlights of 2011 have been the fruits of a Nintendo in panic mode, as it sought to satisfy 3DS owners who had been bereft of decent software for much of the year as well as seeing off the Wii and celebrating Link's 25th birthday in the space of three heady weeks. Nintendo's games have long been well-defined; the core appeal of Mario has been set since his first leap in 1985's Super Mario. Bros, and it's an appeal that has remained unaltered ever since, with Nintendo simply managing to frame it in ever more inventive ways.1/14 Portal 2 maybe wasn't as perfect as its predecessor, but it was a game that was happy to experiment within an existing framework.
For all of its structural innovation, Skyward Sword's the same story at heart as the one told 25 years ago. But in this year's Zelda game we have the most confident retelling and restructuring of those base elements since Majora's Mask, and in Super Mario 3D Land we have Nintendo, once more, introducing a new dimension to its mascot with a game that overflows with imagination. It's not as groundbreaking as Mario 64, of course, but it is in its own way every bit as enjoyable.But it's not really Nintendo, Bethesda or Valve - or, for that matter, any of the names behind what's been, however you look at it, a strong year for big-budget games - that have made 2011 a year to remember. It's the names, too countless to list, of indie developers that have helped broaden the scope of gaming to a degree never seen before.Games like Bastion, From Dust, The Binding of Isaac, Where Is My Heart?, To The Moon or Don't Take It Personally, Babe, It Just Ain't Your Story are just a handful of examples of the esoteric offerings to be found on the App Store, Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, PSN or indeed just lurking on the internet. Theby Published on December 10th, 2011 23:13- Categories:
- Android News
Nate the greatest writes"Can you play an MP3 file? Then you can jailbreak the new Kindle Touch. A new hack was posted this morning that roots the Kindle Touch/K5 and opens the way for future hacks. The hacker also reveals that the K5 runs on HTML5, which should make it a lot easier to come up with new apps. Epub, anyone?"
http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/11/...lest-jailbreak ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 23:11- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
SCE UK is splashing the cash to guarantee a merry Christmas for PS3. The platform holder has booked a late Christmas marketing blitz for a new PS3 bundle, which includes Uncharted 3, GT5, Battlefield 3, FIFA 12 and Karate Kid on Blu-ray for £259.95.
The firm says Christmas spending is ‘happening later this year,’ and is confident it can beat its 2010 hardware performance by attracting users of Xbox 360 and Wii.
“This bundle is for people looking to upgrade from Xbox 360 or Wii to the best platform on the market,” said UK marketing director Alan Duncan. “And it could be for the family audience, or for someone buying for their boyfriends or their husbands. It is an entertainment solution for the whole home.
“We have got a lot of Move and family-based activity out there, but we felt it was also important to reassert the game credentials of the platform as well.
"We think people are looking for that all encompassing family gift. We have much higher ambitions for this year than what we managed last year. We have the best offer on the market and we want to let people know about it. But not only that, it also reflects the market as it is at the moment, we think Christmas is happening later than ever because there is a lot of uncertainty out there.”
The campaign is running throughout December, around football matches, The X Factor and key movies, and Duncan says the company is being flexible in regards to other opportunities.
“This is a big chunk of our hardware marketing budget. It is in the millions,” he added. “We’ll look at other opportunities. We are trying to be as flexible as possible because there are fluctuations in the market at the moment.”
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/sony-...tmas-ad/088428 ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 23:01- Categories:
- Nintendo 3DS News
For a while I’ve been hopeful that more people will see the depth that 3DS has to offer. I don’t mean the 3D display – because, in many ways, that’s been a bit of a red herring. I mean the genuine potential that a high-powered Nintendo handheld can deliver.
3DS is packed with clever features.Just take StreetPass. David Yarnton at E3 encouraged me to wander the Nintendo stand to collect StreetPass hits on the off chance I snatched Satoru Iwata’s elusive Mii; crossing anonymous gamers on the Tube and swapping Mario 3D Land times and achievements has been one of my most enjoyed extra-curricular games activities all year.
They are just two of the cheeky, innovative challenges that even the most risqué iPhone games haven’t managed.
Now, with software worth playing to match the hardware, we’re seeing sales seriously pick up. It was the best-selling device last week.
Here’s hoping momentum carries through to Christmas and beyond. Retailers want that to happen. Third-parties also – and Sony too, I reckon (because if Nintendo can’t sell a handheld that has two exciting Mario games with it, the handheld games device market really is in trouble).
HAS?PRICE?CUTTING?GONE?TOO?FAR?
I don’t have the answer to that question, but there’s plenty going on to suggest this question needs one.
As we go to press, Gamestation announced a deal that halves the cost of Skyrim. It’s just the tip of the iceberg in a year that has seen games come in expensive for day one and plummet in price by week five. In many cases these games are shipped in with agreements to slash prices – buyers and sales execs have been doing these deals for years. But this year it’s happened to almost every game.
£20 for Elder Scrolls, which you can see in the November charts published this week has done incredibly well, or £10 for Deus Ex, one of the better games released this year. Won’t this do more harm than good as time goes on?
DON’T FORGET TO TUNE IN
Next Monday’s Young Apprentice final focuses on video games. Lord Sugar charges his young would-be entrepreneurs with making their own games, and the best wins his backing.
I don’t know who wins, but I do know this: you should tune in. One segment summons the collective intelligence of UK games personnel (and some from MCV) to watch the young designers’ pitches.
And the games themselves are good. If the finale matches the content, the episode will be an early Xmas present for the UK industry: good PR when there’s more eyeballs on us than ever.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/opini...ts-feet/088429 ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:59- Categories:
- DCEmu
Generalist retailer Argos has ceased offering second-hand video games.
MCV understands this extends to Argos' bricks-and-mortar outlets, with all stores instructed to stop accepting or selling pre-owned video games.
The company's website previously allowed customers to check how much credit they would receive for selected titles, but now states: "We no longer offer a video games trade-in service".
MCV has contacted Argos for further comment.
The retailer entered the pre-owned market back in March 2010, trialling the scheme in its North East stores. It later rolled out its trade-in offer to all stores in July 2010.
Argos' venture into pre-owned sales followed those of Tesco and Asda, making it one of the first mass market retailers to take on the likes of GAME and Gamestation in this sector.
We reflected on the questionable progress of generalists in the trade-in market back in October. You can read our conclusions by clicking here.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/argos...-market/088430 ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:56- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
A new operating system is not the most exciting Xbox 360 launch this year. There are no hordes of eager consumers queuing outside GAME to get their hands on it. No outlandish launch party. There's a distinct lack of chainsaw-wielding monsters, super cars or spartan warriors. What we have are menus. Shiny menus. But menus all the same.
MAKING A DASH
Yet to dismiss Microsoft's Xbox updates for those reasons would be doing it a huge disservice. It’s these updates that have kept Xbox 360 relevant. The console doesn’t feel like a six-year old device and isn’t selling like one either. It’s a surprise the firm’s competitors haven’t followed a similar strategy.
"That's why we are market leader at the moment," answers Microsoft's UK consumer channels group lead Neil Thompson.I've gone on record before saying we will give you a new Xbox every year without giving you a new Xbox. That's what we’ve done.
"The reason we got into the traditional console business was because we felt, as a software company, that we could make a difference through these sort of innovations. You need content innovation. You need innovation around the interactive technology, which is what Kinect has done. And you need services to keep refreshing themselves.
“When you get all of those things working together, then the hardware will have a much longer life than what we traditionally understood in this business.”
The most obvious difference with the latest Xbox dashboard is how it looks. Microsoft has adopted a tile-system (or ‘metro user interface’ as Microsoft calls it), which is designed to make Xbox Live easier to navigate.
"The Metro interface is integrated with every single application on every screen,” says Xbox Live UK product manager Pawan Bhardwaj. “The pervious interface was quite overwhelming and you had two hubs, the Kinect hub and the controller-based hub. We have got rid of those two and now have one hub that you can control with gestures, the controller or with your voice.”
This tile look isn’t new. It is already used in Windows Phone 7 and Microsoft is incorporating it into its next PC operating system, Windows 8. The firm is making sure all its interfaces look alike. Why?
“We’ve found a consumer-friendly way for people to navigate devices,” explains Thompson. ”It’s intuitive irrespective of the piece of plastic and metal you’re using.”
Along with the physical changes, Microsoft has also added functionality, namely Bing search. Kinect users can simply say “Bing Harry Potter” and the console will list all the Harry Potter content found on Xbox Live – be it movies, soundtracks or games. And this can be broken down into categories.It goes some way, Microsoft hopes, to fixing the problem of finding content in the digital space.
Thompson adds: “Wherever you are searching for content, you need a facility to make it intuitive and quick. The ability to say what you want and Xbox just delivers it, that is a powerful element versus having to look through multiple menus.”
NEXT BOX
The new update offers some hints to what the future of Xbox might look like. Microsoft has introduced cloud storage to Xbox Live, which lets users back-up their saved games to the cloud and access it on a different Xbox 360. Surely it is just a matter of time before Microsoft launches an OnLive-style cloud streaming service?
“For full feature games? I think we are a while off,” says Thompson. “We need broadband speeds to become consistent and bigger. But the Government has announced a massive investment in Broadband capacity, so who knows. There will be a point where you will have those sort of facilities.”
The new dashboard also opens new advertising opportunities, and Microsoft believes Xbox Live can be a more effective ad platform than your typical TV channel.
“We are fairly unique as a company in that we cover the phone, the PC and the living room,” says Thompson. “The ad model is changing. Broadcast advertising is getting smaller and personalised digital advertising, based on behaviours and trending, is exponentially growing. And Xbox is the biggest entertainment service in the living room worldwide. There is no one bigger.
“You can imagine over time, as we learn more about what sort of content people like consuming, we can get clever in how we promote that content to individuals.“
ENTERTAINMENT GIANT
Microsoft has a dream. It wants Xbox to become ‘a true entertainment platform.’ And the success of this new dashboard will be defined by what consumers do with it.
“It is all about how frequently people are using the services and what breadth of services they are using,” says Thompson. “It is fair to say when we first started Xbox Live, it was all core gaming services – Halo match-ups and the rest of it. But it has moved on.”
And to ensure new services get used, Microsoft will add some 14 new applications to Xbox Live in the UK (40 globally) between now and Christmas, with LoveFilm, YouTube and 4OD ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:54- Categories:
- Nintendo DS News,
- Nintendo 3DS News
In what many gamers will say is a long overdue move, Club Nintendo is to begin offering free games in exchange for Nintendo coins.
Coins are earned when consumers purchase a Nintendo or select third party title for Wii, DS or 3DS. A user can exchange them against Nintendo’s catalogue at any time, though the selection is more often than not crammed with throw away items such as wallpapers or cheap collectibles.
From time to time decent gifts will show up – such as the thoroughly brilliant SNES-style Classic Wii controller – but this is the first time that games have been offered.
CVG spotted the news via a splash page on US Club Nintendo site, though it has since been taken down.
The titles being offered included Super Mario Kart on the Wii’s Virtual Console or a 3D version of Xevious for the 3DS. Both were priced at 100 coins.
It’s unknown if the offer will be replicated outside of the US.
The European Club Nintendo store currently allows users to swap coins for Nintendo’s digital currency.
http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/gamer...o-coins/088435 ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:49- Categories:
- Nintendo Wii News
Official Nintendo Magazine marked five years of Wii yesterday with a list of the top ten Wii games of all time.
The list - which was voted for by ONM readers - featured a surprise winner as Super Smash Bros. Brawl beat Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword to No.1.
Wii was released in the UK on December 8, 2006 and one launch game made the list - Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.Elsewhere, both Super Mario Galaxy games made it into the top ten as did Okami, Xenoblade Chronicles and Monster Hunter Tri.
Yet there was no place for Metroid Prime 3 or Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition.
You can read the full list of the best Wii games of all time over on ONM.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...f-all-time-is/ ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:43- Categories:
- Xbox 360 News
Networking-savvy gamers have figured out a way to disable the adverts in the latest Xbox 360 Dashboard overhaul.
360 users seem quite fond of the new-look Dashboard, but one major gripe on the forums points to the prominence given to adverts, and in particular how they take priority over the games and content.
Searching for a solution, the proactive users on Reddit have taken matters into their own hands and blocked 'rad.msn.com', the server Microsoft uses to beam ads to the 360.
The first method involves blocking the domain through your router, which will throw up a 404 if you try and access it from a PC. Alternatively you can use OpenDNS, a free service which can block specific sites.Here's how to do it (using this method will require you to re-download title updates):- Sign up for a free OpenDNS account.
- Add a network for your current IP address.
- Go to Advanced Settings and next to 'Domain Typos', check the box 'Enable typo correction' if it's not already checked and apply.
- Go to Web Content Filtering settings and set the filtering level to 'None', and under 'Manage individual domains', put rad.msn.com and select 'Always block' and then click 'Add domain'. Screenshot.
- On your Xbox, go to System Settings -> Network Settings -> (your connection) -> Configure Network -> DNS settings -> Manual, and enter the OpenDNS IP addresses for the primary and secondary DNS servers: 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220.
- You may need to clear your hard drive cache before ads disappear entirely: System Settings -> Storage -> Hard Drive -> press Y -> Clear System Cache (note that you'll have to re-download any title updates for any games you play after doing this).
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...dashboard-ads/ ...by Published on December 10th, 2011 22:41- Categories:
- Nintendo 3DS News
Shigeru Miyamoto has personally addressed reports suggesting he plans to retire from Nintendo.
His latest comments were made following seemingly misinterpreted statements featured in an interview with Wired earlier this week.The Mario and Zelda creator is said to have told the Wall Street Journal that he is very healthy and isn't planning to retire any time soon.
He said through a translator: "We have to construct the structure so that the organisation... can make it without me.
"I should also admit that it might be better without me; I mean that a different approach and different talent might emerge, though I shouldn't dwell on this because then the article might indeed say 'Mr. Miyamoto is thinking about retiring,' because that is not the case."
Miyamoto also urged consumers to try 3DS now that flagship games Mario Kart 7 and Super Mario 3D Land are out.
"We were often asked, 'What can you do with the 3DS?' and it was difficult for us to explain in words," he said. "Now we have Super Mario 3D Land and all we have to say is, 'Please try it, and you'll see what the 3DS entails.'"
The legendry designer reportedly acknowledged that both Mario games should have been available for the 3DS at launch.
http://www.computerandvideogames.com...-not-the-case/ ...
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