Developer Sucker Punch started life nearly a decade ago with its first release on the Nintendo 64. Since that time, however, the studio has created titles exclusively for Sony platforms, including the Sly Cooper franchise and recent electro-shocky superhero game, inFamous. Co-founder Brian Fleming recently spoke out on his company's love-in with Sony, explaining that Sucker Punch's platform exclusivity has less to do with money and more to do with simply enjoying what they do.

According to Fleming, while going cross-platform puts a game in front of more potential eyeballs, "it also introduces a whole bunch of problems and compromises and difficulty that doesn't make making games a lot more fun. In fact, I think it subtracts from that."

While the exec notes without reservation that the studio is in this business to make money, he adds that you "have to be careful about being greedy." He adds that the pursuit of dollars has to be weighed against other things, like enjoying what you do for a living, publisher relations and game quality. We'd be hard pressed to argue, especially since our obsession with inFamous has only grown since the game first shocked our hearts.

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/06/11/su...3-exclusivity/ ...

The second Killzone 2 map pack, the Flash and Thunder map pack, is out today, adding re-designed versions of two fan favourites from Killzone 1.

The pack features Beach Head and Southern Hills maps, which are apparently "two of the best" arenas from the original Killzone - now completely remade for PS3.

In regards to the changes made, senior level designer Stuart Billinghurst points out there's "an immediate visual difference: the original maps took place on Vekta, so we transported them to Helghan's desolate battlegrounds.

"We modified the basic layouts of the maps somewhat, based on accumulated player feedback. The layouts will still be instantly familiar to anyone who played the originals, but the flow of combat has been vastly improved."

Describing the maps, he adds: "MP-11 Beach Head is very much a tug-of-war, with two factions constantly trying to advance the front line in the other direction.

"MP-12 Southern Hills has a classic Capture The Flag-style layout with large open areas and mirrored bases, but the nuclear blast adds an element of unpredictability. In terms of player numbers, both maps are ideally suited for 8-24 players. This isn't a hard limit, though - they can still be played with 32 participants for some frantic fun."

http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=217362 ...

[Alan] isn’t very good at guitar. He says so himself. He’s not that great at guitar hero either. Was that medium difficulty? Let’s put aside his skill to talk about his controller. He has fused the guitar hero controller with a real guitar. The original guitar has retained its functionality, though the controller bits may get in the way if he jams really hard. With a flip of the switch, it turns into a guitar hero controller. You simply press the strings down at the frets where the buttons should be, while strumming the controller part.

http://hackaday.com/2009/06/10/real-guitar-guitar-hero/ ...

Publisher wants to stake a claim in $4bn category, CEO tells MCV
Not content with having conquered the music, licensed and FPS genres with its banner titles like Guitar Hero and Call of Duty, Activision is planning to make a bold move into action genre, MCV can reveal.
Activision Publishing CEO and president Mike Griffith revealed to MCV in an exclusive interview at E3 that despite his stringent approach to new IP, he wants the company to stake a claim on the action game sector.
“New IP is risky – most of them fail. Our approach is balanced and measured, very selective,” explained Griffiths. This year the publisher launches two new properties, open world game Prototype and FPS Singularity.
But the action genre - worth some $4bn, he said - is the next one ripe for Activision to expand into, following the same path as the firm did with the launch of new racing IP Blur. That game's developer, Bizarre Creations, was acquired specifically so the firm could expand into a new genre - and it seems there will be no let up in those growth plans, according to Griffith.
He said: “The action genre is $4bn in size. That will be our next major entry into a space where we are significantly under-developed.

"We haven’t detailed any specifics yet, that will come later, but it will be a very similar approach to our strategy in racing, where there was a big opportunity and the consumers weren’t being served.”

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/34682/Acti...ction-genre-IP ...

The short answer: For the time being, yes. But in the future, you may want to upgrade. The long answer after the jump.

The new iPhone 3GS introduces OpenGL ES 2.0 compatible hardware. Its 3D chip—reportedly a PowerVR SGX GPU core integrated in a Samsung chip—is more powerful than the previous generation.

The Graphic Advantage of the 3GS

The new graphic processing unit provides the iPhone with a modern GPU core with 5th-generation shader-driven tile-based deferred rendering. The current 3D graphics unit is 4th-generation tile-based deferred rendering, compatible with OpenGL ES 1.1, but not 2.0.

Simply put, the new GPU is capable of a lot more tricks than the graphics engine in the first and second generation iPhones: Faster frame rates, more detailed and photorealistic shading and lighting, and more polygons.There are also other characteristics that make the iPhone 3GS a better game machine than the iPhone 3G, like a faster CPU and more memory, which allows for larger datasets—bigger worlds—and higher resolution textures.

In other words: The iPhone 3GS has better graphics than the current iPhone 3G, and there is no way around that.

The past vs the future

Just like with computers, this will undoubtedly affect the complexity of applications, games being the most obvious example. With better hardware, developers will create better applications that can do a lot more. Not only have better, more detailed graphics, but also having the capacity to introduce other things, like real time voice chat during games, or physics simulation engines.

This could mean an instant breach between the old iPhones and the new iPhone 3GS. Fortunately for developers and users, the new GPU includes a driver that supports OpenGL ES 1.1. This introduces three possible scenarios. All of these scenarios will happen sooner or later.

• First, developers can choose to develop a single game. That's the easier, less complex option. Games will use OpenGL ES 1.1 on both machines, and the same graphical assets—same textures, same 3D models, same sprites.

This is happening now: Existing iPhone/touch games will work without any problems in the iPhone 3GS too, looking exactly the same.

• Developers can choose to introduce a game programmed for OpenGL ES 1.1, but taking advantage of the more powerful iPhone 3GS hardware to make it look a bit better and have a faster frame rate. This requires some more effort. Ideally, however, they can also choose to make a game for OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0, building both engines in the game so it plays seamlessly for iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS.

This second scenario will happen soon: Companies like Ngmoco have announced that they are planning to introduce games that will run in all models of iPhone, but will look better in the 3GS.

• Finally, developers can do a 100% OpenGL ES 2.0 game, putting all their resources into this engine and making a great looking game, taking full advantage of the new GS and future hardware. This last part is important, because new hardware will be available and it will be invariably more powerful than the previous generation, allowing for more complex games and applications to appear.

This last scenario won't happen anytime soon. 40 million devices—including iPod Touch—is a market too big to ignore. But it will happen. There will be a breaking point.

The breaking point

In fact, the breaking point may be the iPhone 3GS itself. By introducing a completely new, modern, shader-based 3D API—which is extensible and will be here for many years to come—Apple has put in place the architecture that will make its iPhone OS product line grow. So whenever the new iPhone or the new iPod touch or the new iPod tablet appears, they will be using OpenGL ES 2.x, and that means that developers will be able to scale up and down their apps with ease, without having to handle both standards.

Then, in a not-so-distant future, a developer will really push the hardware envelope and create a killer app. They will drop the iPhone 2G/3G support and set the iPhone 3GS as the minimum hardware configuration. That day, the divide will happen and everybody will think is normal, just like a five-year-old computer can't run Crysis or Photoshop CS4.

Because that's the real key: iPhone OS-based machines are really tiny computers running a version of Mac OS X. So get used to it, because one day people will upgrade their iPhone OS thingie not because new Apple features, but because future killer apps and games. It's just a good thing nobody keeps the same phone for 5 years.

http://gizmodo.com/5286263/will-futu...your-iphone-3g ...

Gamers who play for more than seven hours a week sleep less than casual or non-gamers, a new study has claimed.

According to research presented at the wicked-sounding SLEEP 2009 event, 'hardcore' gamers sleep less during weekdays and experience all-round greater sleepiness.

So Nintendo really could be on to a winner with that Wii sleeping game.

"Excessive" gamers have significantly poorer sleep hygiene and sleep less on weekdays than other gamers, says the study, which claims to have found "a significant positive correlation" between the hours of game play and sleepiness. Probably because "excessive" gamers are playing WoW at two in the morning instead of getting shut-eye.

Gamers who reported that their gaming interfered with sleep slept for 1.6 hours less than other gamers, it says, while those who "claimed to be addicted" to gaming slept one hour less on weekdays.

"Our statistics revealed that those who admitted addiction scored higher on the Epworth Sleepiness Scale (sleepiness)," said investigator Amanda Woolems. "It surprised us, however, that of the people who admitted being addicted to gaming, only about a third of them recognized an interference with their sleep."

Sleep is for the weak. We power on.

http://www.computerandvideogames.com....php?id=217345 ...

While Sony didn't announce a PS3 price cut at E3, Amazon is shaving $50 off 80GB systems all day. It's pretty much the best you can do unless you enlist for a Sony Style credit card.

Buy Now at Amazon

http://gizmodo.com/5286898/dealzmodo...amazon-all-day ...

There's something vaguely reminiscent of vintage sci fi in this new remote from Monster, but there's not nearly enough of that something to make the design palatable in any way.

http://gizmodo.com/5286931/monster-m...denberry-blind ...

Hubert at Ubergizmo walks us through how much more powerful the iPhone 3GS can be for graphics over the previous iPhones—he used to program for Nvidia—and it's potentially mindblowingly better.

It's not just that the new graphics chip is more powerful, it's the jump from a fixed-pipeline graphics architecture to an OpenGL ES 2.0 architecture that he says is "like going from Half Life to Half Life 2." That's because a whole bunch of modern graphics techniques—ones programmers use on big boy computers and consoles for games like Doom 3 and Gears of War—are suddenly available to developers, like bump mapping, shadows, and multi-textures and lightmaps.

Obviously, you shouldn't expect Xbox 360 level graphics—besides developers not wanting to unceremoniously ditch the 40 million other iPhone users out there, the iPhone 3GS is running on just a 600MHz processor with 256MB RAM and that Power-VR SGX GPU, after all. It's just that programmers can do a whole lot more with that than they could the older iPhones, so games are gonna look way better and vastly more sophisticated than they used to on the iPhone, once devs decide to leave the old hardware behind.

Which should be pretty good, since EA said last year the iPhone was more powerful than the DS Sega said it was as powerful as the Dreamcast, the second greatest console of all time.

http://gizmodo.com/5286972/iphone-3g...nna-get-really ...