The Godfather II Announced

EA has officially announced Godfather II. The game will be available on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox360.

Press Release:

Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and Paramount Digital Entertainment today revealed the first details of The Godfather® II videogame, the sequel to the 2007 multi-platinum hit. Inspired by the film and Mario Puzo’s Corleone family drama, The Godfather II game goes beyond the film’s story by setting players in the world of organized crime in 1960’s Florida, Cuba and New York. Read more

MySims Coming to PC, Screenshots

 

Another annoying Sims game is coming to PCs. This time, it’s a Wii/DS port. Lovely.

Press Release: 

The Sims, an Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) Label, today announced the first details for MySims, made for the PC, coming to stores in October, 2008. MySims first launched on the Wiiâ„¢ and Nintendo DS in Autumn, 2007 and has been a worldwide hit embraced by players everywhere. Now the game makes its way to the PC with new online features and new characters.

In MySims you can create original characters, build a town, grow a community and discover a world of your own. Start by personalising the appearance of your MySims from head to toe and go on to unlock cool new items as you befriend and build relationships with your neighbours. Make your creations unique when you design your own homes, shops, restaurants and more in this fun, open-ended game. All that you need is a little creativity and some help from the locals! Read more

Alone in the Dark gone Gold

Atari survival title has gone gold; coming to a store near you on 20th/24th June.

Atari today announced that development is complete on the highly anticipated action survival game Alone in the Dark, and the game is on track to ship 20 June in Europe and 24 June in North America for Xbox 360 game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PC, Wii and PlayStation 2 . The PLAYSTATION 3 version is scheduled for autumn 2008.

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Doug Lombardi talks about PC Gaming

Shacknews had a chance to chat up Valve’s Doug Lombardi, and Lombardi had tons of things to say regarding PC gaming:

Shack: Do you guys ever get tired of the same old “PC Gaming Is Dying” stories?

Doug Lombardi: I mean, I think, we sort of laugh at it. Because we’ve been wildly successful–we’re very fortunate, you know. Our games have all done really, really well, Steam has taken off and become this whole other business for us, Valve has never been in better shape–and yet everybody is talking about how in the PC world, the sky is falling. And we’re like, we’ve been doing this for 10 years now–actually 12 years since the company started, 10 years since the first game came out–and we’ve never been in better shape, financially or otherwise. The company is over 160 people now–it was 20 people when we shipped Half-Life. We’ve got multiple projects going–we were always a one-project-at-a-time group.

Codemasters gets F1 license, First F1 title coming 2009

After Sony decided to ditch the F1 license for financial and popularity reasons, another publisher has decided to pick it up. According to GameSpot, Codemasters has bought the rights to F1 license.

The first game to come out of this agreement will be released on “home console, handheld and PC gaming formats” in 2009, and is expected to be based on next season’s roster. The game is being developed with the developer’s own EGO engine, the same one being used in GRID.

The Sims Celebrates 100 Million Sold Worldwide

 

The Simsâ„¢, a Label of Electronic Arts, Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS), today announced a significant entertainment milestone, celebrating 100 million units sold around the world, thanks to players of The Sims everywhere. The first game from The Sims was sold in 2000 and has gone on to become the best-selling PC game franchise of all time and is sold in 22 languages and 60 countries around the world. The Sims franchise has inspired millions of players to tell stories, create characters, explore relationships, live through generations, design fashions, and build homes and design home interiors for their Sims. TheSims2.com, the vibrant online community of players of The Sims, has more than 4.3 million unique visitors per month, who have downloaded more than 70 million user-generated creations. A place to discover player creativity is on YouTube, where more than 100,000 videos and movies of The Sims have been shared, with about 200 million views. Read more

EA: “In-game Ads not “Silver Bullet”

Talks of In-game advertising reducing prices for retail games has been tossed around a lot lately. EA’s Battlefield 2142 was the first game to use dynamic in-game advertising module, but what about other titles? Is it possible to reduce the costs of games by placing ads in them? According to EA, No it’s not. Next-Gen had a chat over the phone with EA’s Shelby Cox regarding all these things. Here’s a snip:

“Advertising is not going to be that silver bullet to make everything okay,” she said. “We’re looking at a lot of different things to offset these rising dev costs. Next-gen dev costs are astronomical. We’re looking for any way to try and offset that, and in-game advertising is one of those things.”

Full interview after the jump. Read more

Alone in the Dark - Developer Diary 1

First developer diary of upcoming survival horror title Alone in the Dark, featuring the game’s producer Hervé Sliwa. Snippet from the diary:

As lead game designer on Alone in the Dark my job is to design all the content of the game, the story, and the game’s rules of interaction. I’ve worked at Eden for 6 or 7 years and my last project here was Kya: Dark Lineage. Before that I worked for Infogrames for 6 years, including working as the lead game designer on Sheep Dog and Wolf.

Full Dev Diary and 33 images after the break. Read more