Midway Closes LA Studio

Midway Inc, will soon be closing it’s L.A studio and will offer relocation to all the employees to the San Diego office. One of the main reasons for the relocation is the development of the TNA video games.

Combining the locations will allow the TNA Impact development team to further leverage synergies with Midway’s other development studios in Chicago, Austin, Seattle, and Newcastle, UK, and work in close conjunction with the third party production, licensing, and quality assurance groups that are currently in San Diego.

Press Release:
Midway Games Inc. (NYSE: MWY), a leading interactive entertainment publisher and developer, today announced it will be combining the operations of Midway Studios – Los Angeles, located in Moorpark, CA, with Midway Home Entertainment, located in San Diego, CA. The newly combined operations will be located at Midway Home Entertainment’s current San Diego facility. The majority of Moorpark employees, including the entire development team for Midway’s TNA iMPACT!™ franchise, are being offered the opportunity to transfer to the San Diego facility. Midway expects to complete the transition out of the Moorpark facility by September 30, 2008. Read more

Half Life 2: Episode 3 to No Show E3

Sadly, the next installment of Half Life franchise won’t be making an appearance at E3. According to Doug Lombardi, instead of Half Life 2: Episode 3, Valve will be hosting a playable version of Left 4 Dead in their private suite.

PC Gaming is The Future

Valve has been notoriously loud about defending PC gaming and it’s titles, and this time it’s no different. Speaking with Eurogamer, Gabe Newell, the man behind brilliant Half Life franchise has slammed all the false accusations and snarky comments thrown at PC Gaming. According to Valve, PC Gaming is the future. Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Where console platforms have merciless and well-funded PR armies poised to combat any criticism, negative stories about the PC - mostly publishers, or developers like Crtyek, complaining of rampant piracy and flat sales - run unimpeded. Sales data that focuses solely on boxed copies sold at retail appear to back them up. Valve has had enough. “There’s a perception problem”

“I don’t want anyone between me and my customers,” says Walker. “I want to write code today and I want all my customers running it tomorrow.” Possible on the PC - Steam in particular, naturally. Not possible on consoles. For his part, Fitterer added achievements to Audiosurf in a total of two days. This constant iteration creates a feedback loop between developer and customer that, reckons Walker, can only improve the quality of the game. “The more I talk to my customers, the better my decisions will be. Without a system of talking to my customers, I will make bad decisions.”

Make you read the whole article, as it’s, for the lack of a better word; Brilliant.

And VAVLe, we couldn’t agree more!

Crysis: Warhead to be the LAST PC Only title from Crytek

In an interview with Next-Gen, Harald Seeley of Crytek has unveiled that Crysis: Warhead will be the last PC-only title from Crytek. Future titles from the german developer will be (sigh) multiplatform.

When Cevat said we would not create new PC exclusives, he was referring to any new projects we will start in the future.  Of course Warhead has been under development for quite some time, and we had no desire or intention to disappoint our loyal PC fans.  So, after some careful consideration, we decided to continue our support for the PC Crysis franchise with this release.  But yes, all new franchises we develop in the future will be created with a cross platform strategy in mind.  Of course we’re also aware of the danger of making a game that is only designed for one particular audience and platform, and failing to meet the needs of the others.  So any game we create will always offer something unique on each platform and will be carefully tuned to both the capabilities and strengths of that platform, as well as the intended audience.

Devil May Cry 4 PC Demo & Benchmark Tool Released

Capcom has released the PC demo of Devil May Cry 4; The latest in Devil May Cry franchise. Alongside the demo, Capcom has also released Devil May Cry 4 Benchmark tool that allows one to stress their system with DirectX9 and DirectX10 graphics.

The demo is 10 minutes long, looks visually solid and includes a boss fight!

Download -
GamersHell
FileShack
FileFront
Size: 804MB 

Postal 2: Share The Pain Full Free Multiplayer

 

Running With Scissors, the developers of Postal games franchise, have released Postal 2: Share The Pain’s multiplayer counterpart as a free addon. The multiplayer features 14 multiplayer maps, 25 playable characters, 11 crazy weapons and 4 different gametypes. The game weighs 597MB can be downloaded from. Read more

Red Faction: Guerrilla Preview

CVG has a hands-on preview of THQ’s upcoming title Red Faction: Guerrilla. Red Faction: Guerrilla will be the third game in the Red Faction franchise and is set 50 years after Red Faction 2. Unlike the predessors, Red Faction: Guerrilla is no longer an FPS, instead, the game has become a free-roaming third-person-shooter. Here’s a bit from the preview:

 It’s almost like a modern take on the Wild West - humans are establishing settlements and frontier towns in an attempt to colonise the planet. Naturally - since the human race can’t agree on anything without getting into a fight - war breaks out and you, Alec Mason, the man in the fluorescent builder’s jacket, find yourself in the middle of an all-out extra-terrestrial war zone. Which is the perfect excuse to stomp all over the EDF’s buildings, vehicles and soldiers in giant robots and smash them with massive hammers.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview

Bit-tech.net got up close and personal with Josh Drescher, producer of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The Warhammer based MMO being developed by EA Mythic. Here’s a snip from the interview:

BT: So you were specifically offered the rights to a Warhammer MMO without having to hunt it down?

JD: The head of our studio is actually very good friends with the guys at Warhammer and they’ve known each other for years. It was one of those things where we’d been offered it before, but the timing was never quite right because of this or that. Luckily though the star just aligned a few years ago and we got a chance at this idea we couldn’t say no to. Warhammer is something that everyone knows, everyone loves.

For example, every time you’ve ever seen a green Orc then that’s come from Warhammer. Traditionally Orcs weren’t green until Warhammer. So, part of our artistic approach was trying to capture that traditional feel of the franchise. We have a high level of detail and, though some proportions are exaggerated, we’re certainly less cartoony than you’ll find in some other games.

That said, we’re perhaps not as photorealistic as some other games. The whole thing is about finding the right balance and avoiding that uncanny valley where the character is looking almost too real and is weirdly abstracted as a result. We needed to find something immersive, detailed, fantastic and evocative. It helps when you have a great art director.

Call of Duty 5 Details

Following their $2.9billion earnings, Activision’s latest conference called has revealed details about Call of Duty 5:

“We’ll bring the intensity of the recent Call of Duty: Modern Warfare title to a new military theatre, to engage our significantly larger user base which nearly doubled last year as new users came into the franchise,”

The game will also be available on PlayStation2/Nintendo Wii.

Fallout 3 Not “Dumbed down” for consoles

In an interesting interview with Next-Gen, Bethesda Softworks’s Emil Pagliarulo (Fallout 3 lead designer) had a handful of things to say regarding the recent developer spree of dumbing down titles to appeal to a larger audience.

It’s funny. I look at Fallout when I play it every day, and I sometimes think that there’s a lot of old-school hardcore PC stuff in there too, and part of me thinks, “God, is this too inaccessible for console players?” There’s a lot of dialogue to read, a lot of just hacking computers and looking through things like “VAT.” I don’t know. Sometimes I think it’s just the opposite. So I don’t feel like we’re dumbing down the franchise.

…I think we’re starting to find that there is a market for [hardcore "PC RPGs" on consoles]. People like myself and some people that work here actually grew up as hardcore PC guys, and now we’re older, we have kids, we don’t have that much time, so we’ve transitioned. We’re console players now.

You can also hear Emil Pagliarulo on the GameTheoryShow.com podcast.

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