All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

The three-player cooperative adventure is back.

Company determined glasses-free technology to be too "imprecise."

#rumor Will Gran Turismo 5 have dynamic weather, go-kart racing, and a track editor when it ships this November? Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida seems to think so. More »

#screengrab As seen on reader Lockhart's mirror, but not mine, nor on Ash's. More »

The executive producer and creative director talk about launching a game based on one of the most controversial military actions since half a century.

Yuji Naka grew to fame within the game industry as one of the founders of Sega's Sonic Team, the core group of designers and programmers that created the Sonic the Hedgehog series. In his tenure at Sega, Naka produced titles like Phantasy Star Online, Chu Chu Rocket, and Samba de Amigo. He has since left Sega and formed his own company, Prope, who immediately began developing games to be published by ... Sega.

Now, with Ivy the Kiwi?, Naka has emerged from the grasp of the great blue hedgehog, with a game published in Japan by Namco Bandai and in America by XSEED. We spoke to Naka about the design of the game, side-scrollers, and the unique circumstances behind seeing your own game on display in someone else's booth.

- Conduit 2 will allow for remote patches to fix online issues - ships with a headset - chat actively in the gameplay lobby before matches, during the matches themselves, and in-between setup for matches that follow - SCAR semi-automatic rifle has secondary charge side effect that allows you to be invisible on radar - perk system akin to [...]

Blackhawks go back to back on EA's cover.

Transform and roll out.

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Last updated: Monday, 12:40 PM

#demo The Crackdown 2 demo goes live today, giving players a jump on their retail version achievements and extra goodies for those who play the tie-in Facebook game. More »

A portion of a Nintendo Life review… Still, you can’t deny that it’s addictive and fun in a way that few puzzlers manage to be, and those who get sucked in will guaranteed lose a large chunk of time in a hazed gem-swapping frenzy. If you have something to do or somewhere to be, don’t play [...]

Want to know what really was the biggest deal at E3? Let’s let Google Trends do all the number-crunching for us. As you can see, 3DS wiped the floor with Move and Kinect. Now to be fair, the public had seen much of Sony and Microsoft’s control schemes prior to E3, but no one [...]

Nintendo wowed E3 audiences this year when it unveiled the Nintendo 3DS. However, the Vitality Sensor, a mysterious peripheral for Wii announced at last year's E3, was missing from the lineup. What happened to it? Nintendo EVP Cammie Dunaway told Game Set Watch that Nintendo is "continuing to work on the Vitality Sensor." The reason for its absence? Nintendo had too much to show, such as the two dozen games showcased for the 3DS. "We realized we had a really packed agenda," Dunaway admitted.

Fans upset about the Vitality Sensor's absence won't have to wait until next year's E3 to find out more about the device, however. "We decided we'd think about other venues that would be more appropriate," Dunaway explained. "[E3] is noisy and adrenaline-filled, and loud and stressful, and it just didn't seem like the best environment to introduce a product that's really about relaxing."

But Cammie, will it help you be better at interviews? You wouldn't want Ubisoft to outdo Nintendo, would you?

Nintendo uses homegrown architecture for new system.

Rockstar's Wild West is about to get wilder.

#e3 Kinect Sports comes packed with more than half-a-dozen ways to play, but my limited time with the game only gave me a chance to check out one of them: Bowling. More »

If you were absent, either online or otherwise, from the Microsoft press conference last week at E3, you probably missed out on Cliff Bleszinski's brief demonstration of Gears of War 3's single-player campaign. No worries -- through the power of internet magic, we've captured this moment in time and embedded it in a video posted after the jump. Now you can witness all the profanity, bloodshed and bayoneting from the safety and comfort of your own home.

After a short break, our E3 coverage continues now with Final Fantasy XIV. A new trailer was shown at our E3 press conference, which we’ve included below. After that, our Jaffa Cake-eating colleague dropped by the Square Enix booth for a quick chat on the console-exclusive PS3 edition of this MMORPG.

So I was just passing through the Square Enix booth at E3 and I noticed a door slightly ajar. I can never resist a slightly ajar door so I poked my head in to find Hiromichi Tanaka, senior vice president of software development, sitting down for a Final Fantasy XIV round table interview. There was a spare seat so I sat down, whistling behind a newspaper, and asked a few questions of my own.

As an extra titbit, there was PC monitor running the game in stereoscopic 3D in the same room, although Tanaka told me that this was purely a technical demonstration and he wouldn’t be drawn when I asked if they had any 3D plans for the PS3 version of the game.

How do you feel about the challenge of developing the first MMO on PlayStation 3?

“We had a similar experience with Final Fantasy XI as that was the first MMO on PlayStation 2 [in Japan only]. So this time, things came quite naturally for us and it helped us having the technology in mind from the very beginning.”

How do you intend to reach out to those console gamers that haven’t experienced an MMO before and are used to more instant gratification in their games?

“Because Final Fantasy XIV is designed as a cross-platform MMO, there is no difference between the PC version and the PS3 version. We believe that previous attempts to bring MMOs to consoles have been unsuccessful because they focused too much on adapting their style to suit that audience and they lost the feel of a true MMO. Therefore, regardless of the platform, we are aiming to produce a real MMO with Final Fantasy XIV.”

How much co-operation has there been between you and Sony Computer Entertainment in bringing an MMO to PS3?

“Sony [Computer Entertainment] has been extremely helpful to us, particularly with technical data while we were at the programming stage of development. We’ve also held talks regarding PlayStation Network functionality and we will be making the most of what that offers, integrating trophies and other features.”

What do you think of the PlayStation Move motion controller?

“Unfortunately, we haven’t had chance to try it out yet but we’ve heard very interesting things about it and we’d like to look at supporting it in Final Fantasy XIV, if we get the chance to do so. However, at the moment I would say that there are no current plans.”

#e3 Sony's E3 2010 booth was filled with eagerly anticipated titles like Killzone 3 and God of War: Ghost of Sparta, yet I made a beeline for PSP augmented reality Pokémon clone Invizimals. Why? More »

When we were ripped from the E3 3DS demo units by heartless Nintendo reps, our minds raced to calculate precisely how much we'd be willing to pay to take one home with us. The answer was ... unnerving, to say the least. While we still don't have an official price, we've got a slightly better idea courtesy of a recent VentureBeat interview with Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata.

He says that the handheld will, unsurprisingly, cost more to produce than a DS does today and that it won't be sold below production cost. We don't know the current DS Lite production price, so determining a minimum price from that quote is tricky. But here's a little perspective: The original DS cost $150 at launch, the DS Lite cost $130, a price point it's still doing crazy numbers at four years later. Our gut's saying at least $200 for the 3DS, but we'd be thrilled to be proven wrong ... provided we're overestimating.

Also of interest in the VentureBeat piece: Iwata says that the 3D tech in the system has been prototyped on the GameCube and the Game Boy Advance. Just imagine! There's an alternate reality where the Wii has six dimensions duct-taped together.

This week's Nintendo Download features a pair of Square Enix WiiWare games originally released in Japan as Kumanage, which sounds a lot cooler than The Tales of Bearsworth Manor. More »

Nintendo Lets the Fun Shine in with Eight New Game Downloads

#clips Wow, and I thought yesterday's violin-rendition was amazing. Check out BeatBoxer Hikakin bipping his way through the first level of Super Mario Bros, seemingly with a borrowed voice or two. More »

As I played through the combat-only demo of Yakuza 4, I noticed a small group of onlookers gather around demo station. It's not that I was fighting exceptionally well, but the fighting in Yakuza games is something of a rare spectacle, with a single tough guy weaving through a crowd of gangsters, deftly punching, kicking, dodging, stepping on faces, and bashing them with weapons ranging from swords and stun guns to traffic cones, advertising signs, and beer bottles. Whatever's handy, really.

#profile Starting this month we'll be running a series of profiles about some of the most important people in gaming. More »

Attendees of Microsoft's E3 media briefing reacted to the news that they'd all get their hands on a free, slimmed-down Xbox 360 in peculiar ways. For instance, one writer at AnandTech apparently reacted with excitement -- not because he'd be getting the new model at no cost, but because it he couldn't wait to completely dismember it.

You can check out the pictorial fruits of AnandTech's labor over on their site, and glimpse some of the technology that powers Valhalla. The highlight of this teardown? We finally get to see the single chip (teased by the motherboard we had Ben Heck look at earlier this year) that houses the 360's CPU, GPU, and eDRAM, which can all be cooled by a single, more powerful fan. When you turn on your new 360 and it doesn't sound like a pair of jet engines, you've got this little guy to thank.