Prototype Message Board

#community Yesterday night, the world of TV comedy got a bit of a drama injection when news broke that Community showrunner Dan Harmon had been fired by Sony pictures Television.P More »

#prototype Owen really liked Prototype 2's James Heller. I can see why. More »

#review In very few games have I truly inhabited the persona of a goddam-right-I-am badass, whose demonstrations of power were as personal as Prototype 2's. And it's not because I've imagined any of the superpowers you wield in this game, or how I'd perform with them. It's because of the very normal, very pissed-off man in charge of them. More »

#prototype Here's something I didn't expect in Prototype 2: A human bowling minigame. That's the best way I can describe "Collateral Damage," one of the Radnet challenges that the game will be offering week-to-week, with character skins, experience points, powers and other goodies as the payout. More »

Have you a heartstring? Then the sequel to open world anti-hero game Prototype would like a chance to pull at it. It has a sad Johnny Cash song, it has a dead wife and it’s not afraid to use them.(more…)

The Indie Royale "April Fool's" bundle includes Defense Grid: The Awakening, Hack, Slash, Loot, Alien Zombie Megadeath, Astro Tripper, and Explodemon. It also includes, as a bonus, exclusive access to the past.

A new surprise unlocked for the bundle yesterday is a 2005 prototype for Explodemon, used in level development of the final, polygonal version. This historical document is playable in Windows.

If you exceed the average pay-what-you-want price, you also get Sexy-Synthesizer's chiptune album Rock - Deluxe Edition. If you're considering the bundle, be sure to get this.

#timschafer Tim Schafer's the three-million-dollar man, thanks to a record-breaking Kickstarter his Double Fine development studio launched to fund a new adventure game. While work should be starting soon on that crowd-funded creation, the respected designer showed off a project that probably won't ever happen at a lecture last night at New York University's Game Center. More »

Double Fine's Tim Schafer was the guest of honor last evening at New York University's Game Center, joining Zynga New York's creative director (and NYU professor) Frank Lantz for an "Inside the Gamer's Studio" conversation. Schafer, however, brought more than just good conversation. He showed off two separate versions of a prototyped game that Double Fine ended up shelving. The prototype, for no reason at all, is dubbed "Specs."

In the first video (seen above), rudimentary concepts for the game are introduced. Two convicts sit in a prison cell, a shiv on the floor between them. The player character isn't one of the two convicts, or even the shiv, but instead a possessed amulet that's using its power of influence to guide the actions of those around it (inanimate objects included). As it turns out, one of the two convicts has said amulet in his hand when the prototype kicks off.

The two emotions that the amulet can produce - love and hate - are represented by blue and red cursors on-screen, each mapped to one of your hands. With just two emotions, a handful of set pieces to interact with, and a Kinect, a variety of potential outcomes with varying levels of hilarity ensued.

As far as we're able to tell, Microsoft envisions a future where powerful businessmen and hipster ultrabloggers (like ourselves) flail wildly in front of our laptops while on crowded public transportation. Yes, the Kinect's array of cameras and sensors is being tested on various prototype Windows 8 laptops, according to a preview by The Daily.

Beyond gaming applications, Kinect sensors integrated into a laptop could be used to navigate Windows 8's Metro UI, in a fashion not entirely dissimilar to navigating the Metro-esque interface on the latest Xbox dashboard. Additionally, a Kinect-equipped device could also be used for something actually useful by providing the disabled with another means of interacting with a computer.

Just like it does with its software, Microsoft be will licensing the Kinect technology out to hardware manufacturers, who will then implement it into their laptop designs. Considering the Kinect's rather expansive deadzone, we're interested in seeing how the technology functions in such an up close and personal application.

#prototype I did not like the first Prototype. Radical's open-world action title put you into the mutated skin of a super-cannibal that ate people in his quest for vengeance. Playing as aggrieved scientist Alex Mercer made me feel creepy, as I generally am not interested in eating people. The story and the reasons it gave for eating other humans didn't make much sense. More »

After what we can only imagine was an exciting and Hollywood worthy laser-grid-circumnavigating vault heist, two experimental Blade prototypes have been stolen from a Razer research and development laboratory in the San Francisco bay area, according to a Facebook post made by Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan.

It's unclear as to whether or not these were the only two prototypes, however its safe to say that any loss like this is a significant one, and that the prototypes are worth far more than the $2,800 retail price originally quoted for the laptop. Tan is asking for anyone with information about the theft to send an email to cult at razerzone dot com.

The Blade, revealed earlier this year at PAX, makes use of a proprietary user interface and LCD touchpad; trade secrets which Razer must desperately (and understandably) want to keep out of the hands of the competition. We're not saying this was corporate espionage, of course, but we are heavily implying that.

#prototype Activision commissioned TwitchGames, makers of Slice HD, to create a Prototype 2-themed minigame available now for iOS devices on the iTunes App Store. It's a big free ad for the upcoming game, but it's also a small free game that utilizes the multitouch interface in a challenging way. More »

#prototype Everybody's favorite super-cannibal franchise is back with more spikiness and more dodging. The open-world whup-ass sequel hits next year. More »

#cosplay My best camera lost its shutter button a year ago. My second best camera lost its button five shots into today's Dragon Con day one cosplay harvest. My third best camera was purchased at Wal-Mart a half hour ago. More »

#lookwhatwehavehere Head- and eye-tracking will be the next big breakthrough in motion-controlled gaming. Forza Motorsport 4 will deliver it via Kinect. But for first-person shooters, we're still stuck controlling our look with our arms, an act as unnatural as it is inconvenient. Some University of Texas students have whipped up a solution for that. More »

Previous "Iwata Asks" interviews have brought up several previous 3D prototypes from Nintendo, including GBA and GameCube-based versions. During his talk about the 3DS's development, hardware producer Hideki Konno revealed another prototype, designed before the 3DS was even a glimmer in Nintendo's collective eye.

Nintendo wired up a glasses-free 3D display to a Wii, and set it up on a cart to wheel around the company for demonstrations. And then, because it wasn't hacky or impractical enough, the team hooked a proof-of-concept version of the 3D depth slider to a Nunchuk -- with hot glue.

Microsoft's chief research and strategy officer Craig Mundie wants to show you the haunting bridge his team has built over the uncanny valley. Employing Kinect hardware and custom PC software, the research team at Microsoft has created an unnervingly realistic new avatar that can handle text-to-speech when combined with a script and can recognize the words in any order.

"This is a way to create a synthetic model of people that will be acceptable to them when they would look at them on a television or in an Avatar Kinect kind of scenario," Mundie told USA Today in a video interview. "There's no reason that we couldn't do that in real time by feeding the information that we get from a Kinect sensor, including its audio input and its 3D modeling, spacial representation, and couple that to the body and the gesture recognition in order to create a full body avatar, that has photo realistic features and full facial animation," he added.

This impressive (if not somewhat terrifying) demo is still very much in the prototype phase, however, and Mundie said it would be "some time before we see it show up in products." We're just hoping those first "products" aren't T-1000s.

Last week, Activision uploaded a teaser site featuring the tagline "Murder Your Maker," which we hypothesized was hinting at the reveal of a new installment in the Prototype series during the Spike VGAs. A brief video which was recently added to the site appears to confirm our suspicions.

#rumor A second Prototype game? How many people actually want this? More »

Earlier this week, a mysterious Spike VGA 2010 site asked its visitors to consider the secret meanings of two mysterious and secret words: "MURDER" and "LOOK CLOSER." Today, a new teaser site offers a few more clues. The page, titled "Murder Your Maker," features the image seen above: A bald man, staring at a wall covered in maps, newspaper clippings and delicious strands of black licorice. Or, wait. String. Yeah, that's definitely string.

The "Murder Your Maker" tagline has led some theorists to believe we're looking at a teaser for a sequel to last year's super violent, open-world title, Prototype. Alex Mercer certainly has some daddy issues, but our money is on that new God of War game, where Kratos is literally tasked with killing God.

Oh, Activision runs the website? Well, in that case ... does "Bloodhunt" sound about right?

Grumbling over the prospect of spending $150 on a Kinect sensor? At least you didn't have to drop $30,000 to get your Sonic Free Riders on. The NYT reports that the first Kinect prototype cost Microsoft that much to build -- which kind of makes the fact that Microsoft was able to get that technology into a $150 box (on each sale of which, the Times' Ashlee Vance notes, MS will profit) a bit more impressive.

The article provides a tidbit of new information about how the device recognizes people. In the case of identical, identically-dressed twins, the Kinect's software will evidently distinguish between the two by asking each to identify him or herself. "'If it can't disambiguate, we say, 'Please tell us if you are A or B,'" Xbox director of incubation Alex Kipman said. "Then, you end up with the equivalent of a different bar code." You'll be able to turn your family into bar codes on November 4.

According to industry vet Jake Kazdal, immediately following the completion of Rez, a small group of developers at United Game Artists worked on a prototype for Rez 2. Kazdal -- a man who's worked everywhere from Nintendo to Irem to Sega, and is currently developing Skulls of the Shogun -- also explained on the latest 8-4 Play podcast that another game he worked on, Steven Spielberg's now mythic "Project LMNO," has been canceled. EA confirmed as much, telling Joystiq this afternoon, "While EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg, we ceased development of LMNO."

We pushed EA for clarification about the status of any projects in development with Spielberg and were told again, "EA maintains its relationship with Steven Spielberg. EA has ceased development of LMNO. EA continually monitors development resources and adjusts resources as appropriate. No new title announcements."

#new Apparently a lot of you are sick of playing video games in the city I live in. More »

Reports began circulation this morning about major layoffs at a handful of Activision-owned development studios, affecting as much as half of Radical Entertainment's staff (Prototype), an undisclosed amount of Neversoft employees (Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), and the entirety of Luxoflux (Tranformers). An Activision rep confirmed the layoffs to us this afternoon, not giving specific numbers, but solidifying the closure of Luxoflux in entirety.

The full company statement reads: "Activision Publishing continually evaluates its resources to ensure that they are properly matched against its product slate and strategic goals. In 2010, the company's SKU count will be smaller than in 2009 driven in part, by a decrease in the number of music-based games we will be releasing. As we discussed on our earnings conference call yesterday, we are directing our resources against the largest and most profitable business segments, and as part of this initiative, we are realigning our resources to better reflect our slate and the market opportunities. At the same time, we are increasing our digital/online capabilities as we expect that digital/online will continue to become a more meaningful part of our business model in the years ahead."

Activision makes cuts to several studios.

The image above could serve as kind of robotic Rorschach test. What do you see? A cute little tripod help-o-bot, whose head is cocked curiously to the side, as though its studying its new master to better serve his or her robotic needs? Or is it a three-legged killing machine, who's observing his new master's weaknesses, which it plans to exploit with its now-charging eye lasers? Sadly, the answer's not as provocative as either of those two choices -- its actually a photo of a Project Natal prototype, as nabbed by the Seattle Times. According to the report which includes the photograph, Natal units and iPhones are being produced in the same factory. We're terrified of the thought of these two consumer electronics cross-pollinating -- we're pretty sure that's how SkyNet got started. [Via Siliconera]

The website for Eric Testroete, who recently made the rounds for his "big head mode" Halloween costume, shows work-in-progress screens of an unannounced Wii war game he animated for MLB Superstars developer Deep Fried Entertainment. The game uses an almost top-down, zoomed-out perspective, and appears to put the player (or players) in control of jeeps equipped with machine guns. As Kotaku notes, it looks rather like Konami's Jackal, prompting the site to speculate that it's a ReBirth made for Konami, like the recent Castlevania, Contra, and Gradius games. If true, it would be the first ReBirth title not to be developed by M2 in Japan. Of course, the American side of Konami is also working on refreshes of old Konami franchises in the form of Rocket Knight, so there is precedent.

Soften up the target and accomplish the impossible.