#crime
A Counter-Strike player in France has spent six months plotting a revenge attack against a man who beat him in an in-game knife fight. His eventual revenge was not in-game. More »
Valve's latest "mutation" gametype for the Left 4 Dead 2 "The Passing" DLC takes three survivors out of the equation. "Last Man on Earth" is a single-player mode in which the player is the only Survivor left in the world, and must face nothing but Special Infected without the help of other players or even bots. In other words, it might has well have been called "The Player is Murdered Immediately."
Instead of an opportunity to play with developers (since, you know, it's single-player), Valve is encouraging players to record sixty-second clips of gameplay and upload them to YouTube with the tag "L4D2LastSurvivor." If you want to see lots of footage of player characters being torn apart by Special Infected, now you know where to go.
We're sorry if the above headline is misleading, but we feel we should inform you of two things. One, Crave has not announced a game show entitled "Bowling for Natal," so don't expect to see everyday schlubs competing for a Natal on daytime TV anytime soon. Two, what Crave has announced, according to Multiplayer, is a bowling game that will support Microsoft's Project Natal.
More specifically, it's actually a Natal-ified version of Brunswick Pro Bowling, the PlayStation Move bowling title revealed earlier this year. While it was essentially inevitable that Natal would receive some kind of bowling game, we can't help but wonder how strange it will be to pretend to bowl without something to hold on to. If only there was some peripheral, something tangible we could use to enhance the experience.
Impulse's Memorial Day sale this weekend has Sins of a Solar Empire at the heavenly price of $4. Go buy it now -- full stop. Whatever nit-picky issues the 4X strategy title may have can be thrown out an airlock at that price point. It may lack a single-player campaign to teach the ropes of glorious galactic armada warfare, but setting up a medium-sized map using normal AI is a good place to start. Which reminds us: Gratuitous Space Battles is also on sale.
Impulse also has a more mainstream space opera experience on sale with the first two chapters in the Mass Effect saga bundled for $42. Want something not involving spaceships? There's a Dragon Age: Origins bundle, which includes the original game and Awakening, for $48 -- that'll definitely keep you busy all weekend. Check out the rest of the Impulse weekend sales after the break.
#list
It was a week of "transmedia" entertainment in the world of Kotaku reviews, with big games like UFC Undisputed 2010 and Red Dead Redemption (finally!) reviewed alongside new books and movies. What's next? Reviews of chicken sandwiches?! More »
#clips
Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward will unleash the new Resurgence map pack for Modern Warfare 2 next week and creative strategist Robert Bowling is here, in video form, to tell you all about it. More »
So it looks like the team at Warner Bros is sticking with the live-action ads for F.E.A.R. 3. Apparently it's just a thing it's doing, so you'd best get used to it. Anyway, the latest trailer for F.E.A.R.3 is all about telekinetic bad boy, Paxton Fettel. The actual gameplay segments of the trailer show off some of Fettel's abilities, including telepathic control of enemy soldiers. He can also lift soldiers in the air, making them easy targets for F.E.A.R.'s perennial protagonist, Point Man.
He also glows a really pretty orange. After all, there's no reason to murder hapless goons without a little flair, is there?
In its yearly online study of gaming habits for consumer panel members age two and older, the NPD says that this year shows a nine percent increase in console gaming over last year, whereas PC gaming saw an increase of six percent from those polled. Portable gaming didn't fare as well, seeing a sharp decline: 16 percent, despite previous evidence of portable gaming becoming increasingly popular among younger gamers.
The study also offers some insight into the gamers themselves. This year, the average age of a gamer was 32 compared to last year's age of 31. PC gamers are the oldest, with an average age of 42 -- PC gamers who engaged in online and offline play comprised 11 and eight percent of the gaming population polled, respectively.
Now you may be wondering exactly how the NPD parsed this data. 18,872 individuals were part of the study, where gamers aged 13 and older had their responses pulled directly. For those younger than 13 years, the NPD employed "surrogate reporting," where a parent or guardian accompanied the subject to the terminal and either inputted the answers for them or simply supervised their session. The final data was then "weighted and balanced to represent the U.S. population of individuals ages 2 and older."
#clothing
Like casually cosplaying as Tron characters, but found the original Tron-inspired hoodie, dubbed "My Other Ride Is A Lightcycle" lacking in evilness? The Sark-like version of that video game-inspired zip-up is now available. More »
Treyarch is no stranger to the Call of Duty franchise, having created Call of Duty 3 and World at War, but, up until it began work on this November's Call of Duty: Black Ops, it was stuck in the past -- World War II, that is. After getting our first look at its take on more modern combat, we spoke with Black Ops producer Dan Bunting to find out what to expect from the series' move into the Cold War and the world of deniable operations. Oh, and zombies -- we had to ask about those.
Joystiq: Black Ops seems to me to be "modern warfare" -- with s lower case "m" and lower case "w." It's a lot different than the Call of Duty games that Treyarch has made in the past. What's it like going from World War II to a more modern setting?
Dan Bunting: It's a completely untapped era; there's been a small number of games that have covered that in the past. It's a really rich time frame to draw inspiration from for creativity. The team is completely jazzed about the theme of the game, and taking more of a special ops angle to it. The Cold War era, there are so many stories there that people don't even know about. A lot of people don't even know what the Cold War is, but there was a kind of birth of these special operations happening during this time frame.
We start with Studies and Observation Group in Vietnam, which was SOG, basically the predecessor to the Black Ops, in a lot of ways. These guys were behind enemy lines to do covert missions. They were given carte blanche; these were deniable operations so nobody really could know. It was classified, so they had free reign to do whatever they needed to do to get the missions done. That means that you can have some really great game design elements and story elements to draw from there. In the beginning it was just an explosion of creativity. We've been working on World War II games for so long, it was just a completely fresh, new era for us.
Supervillain Studios has posted up this comic strip on their official site…
Well, here’s a few things that this image might be pointing to. First off, a sequel or some other offshoot of Order Up! might be happening. It could end up going to the PS3, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t be [...]
#review
No game took an emerging sport to the mainstream in its first edition like UFC 2009 Undisputed did last year. But once you join sports gaming's A-list, even in your rookie year, you have to start making sequels. More »
#consoletaisen
The original PlayStation Portable continues its reign as Japan's bestselling platform, with the PlayStation 3 and Wii continuing their close battle for second place. How'd every other platform fare? More »
There are still many questions surrounding Insomniac's mysterious new multiplatform game with EA Partners. Perhaps that's why Insomniac Games released a new episode of the Full Moon Show podcast all about its canceled game, code-named I:5, or Girl With a Stick.
Comparisons can be drawn between the company then and now. Company head Ted Price explained that after "several years of just making sequels" the opportunity to work on something new was quite exciting. "I think we were all looking for something different, because we've been working on Spyro for years, and we were thinking 'we got to branch out,'" he explained in the show. Making "a brand new IP on a new platform was a big challenge, especially since we made the decision to try and avoid platformers."
Insomniac clearly had some ambitious ideas for Girl With a Stick, described most succinctly as "Tomb Raider meets Zelda." Even now, the concept sounds very different from any game Insomniac has released. "I think we had a very conscious line we drew where they couldn't have technology," John Fiorito explained. "Very different from Ratchet and away from Spyro, which had castles and other fantastic things. This was much more primitive."
But why didn't it end up seeing the light of day? "It wasn't fun."
Here’s a really interesting cross promotion going on in Japan. Somehow, Marvelous got a cross-promotion set up with George Romero’s Survival of the Dead release in Japan. Now the sites for the movie and game will be helping promote each other’s work. I don’t know if this will bring any more recognition [...]
