All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

#halloween Ninja Golf. Phalanx. Wall Street Kid. David Jaffe. If any of these names ring a bell with you or your friends, you may have a great Halloween costume idea ripe for the taking right here. More »

#valve Halloween has come to Team Fortress 2! And so has the game's first boss monster, the axe-wielding, jack o' lantern behatted Horseless Headless Horsemann. It's all part of Valve's second annual TF2 Halloween special. More »

Microsoft has announced the immediate appointment of a new studio manager for its wholly owned, UK-based developer, Rare. Scott Henson, who has been involved with the Xbox brand since before the original black behemoth launched in 2002, will relocate from the US to Birmingham within the coming weeks.

Henson has been part of Microsoft's Xbox endeavor in numerous roles, including product unit manager for the game technology group (where he contributed to the XNA development initiative), director of platform strategy for the Xbox 360 (back when the Xbox dashboard looked like this) and Xbox group manager. "The timing is actually perfect," Henson told MCV. "I've worked on Xbox since before the original Xbox. I helped bring Xbox Live to life, which has reached millions of people. Rare over the last 25 years is the same story."

Rare's reach will become a major talking point on November 4, when Microsoft's Kinect launches in North America (Nov. 10 in Europe) and the company's casual-oriented games hope to find a new audience.

#disturbanceintheworkforce EA has issued its latest round off layoffs today, describing them as "season roll-offs," which sounds much more pleasant. According to sources claiming knowledge of the situation, EA Canada, developer of Skate and NBA Elite, bore the brunt of those cuts. More »

Being a giant, beloved video game site has its downsides. For example, we sometimes neglect to give independent developers our coverage love (or loverage, if you will) as we get caught up in AAA, AAAA or the rare quintuple-A titles. To remedy that, we're giving indies the chance to create their own loverage and sell you, the fans, on their studios and products. This week we talk with Steve Hunt, half of the team behind the music-fueled dual stick shooter action of Beat Hazard.

How did you get started in game design?

I first started making games when I was about 10 on an Atari 800. I remember I made a grave robbing game (unpublished!) where you had to break into a cemetery and drag out corpses without getting seen by the guards or caught by ghosts. I'm not sure if my parents though I was clever or messed up in the head.
I've been doing game design pretty much ever since.

Who wants to save up hundreds of thousands of bottlecaps for the right to buy all those tasty, expensive Energy Cells in Fallout: New Vegas? Sure, we could play Craps or Roulette, but wouldn't this handy dandy ghost bucket be, like, way easier? Sure would!

I am posting this in honor of GoNintendo podcaster, Lube, because I don’t know anyone who was looking forward to a disaster game more than him. I’d say that besides that Wii “smashy hammer” game, Disaster: Day of Crisis not coming out was his biggest disappointment. Mine would be the Fatal Frame or the [...]

Two blog posts in two days? Your eyes don't deceive you. We're blog-writing machines this week, and there's plenty of gas in the tank.



Today's update includes both of the Art Pass Contest Winners' maps: Mountain Lab by Valentin "3Dnj" Levillain, and Mann's Manor by Tim "YM" Johnson and Alex Kreeger.

Also included in this update: You being scared! [sound of bat wings] That's right, it's the Second Annual Team Fortress Halloween Special. Will there be ghosts? Quite possibly. Will there be exploding pumpkins? You never know. Will you wet your pants in terror? If you're anything like us, emphatically yes.



And what more perfect holiday than Halloween to add the scariest feature yet to the Mann Co. Store: Gift wrapping! If someone decides to trick or treat on your server, wrap up that spare bottle of Jarate and give them the gift a thousand words could never describe, and a thousand therapist appointments will never undo.

Also added to the store: new community items themed for Halloween and a few scary hats of our own dark design. Some of these new holiday items are only available to purchase during the holiday, but will remain wearable all year round, so grab 'em while they're grabbable.

We think Bioshock Infinite looks great and all, but after seeing developer Irrational Games' decade-old pitch for a game about Godzilla-style monsters versus the humans trying to destroy them, we can't help but look at Infinite with a bit of contempt. Sure, it's irrational to think this pitch is what the team would be making if they weren't making the next BioShock -- but we are talking about Irrational Games here!

"The pitch promised some 20 monsters, a living city, heavily destructible environments, and a dynamic civil defense network," Irrational's Chris Remo recounted in the studio's latest "From the Vault" feature. The game would have let players control either a monster or the defending forces.

To twist the knife, Irrational artist Jorce Lacera went back and illustrated some concept art for the unmade game, including the image above and a reimagining of the classic movie monster Anguirus. Check out the article and spend the rest of the day dreaming about what will never happen.

Want to hear more tales from the Mojave desert? Well, sit down and enjoy.

#clips Star Trek - Infinite Space gets its first trailer today, giving us a glimpse of what the free-to-play game hopes to deliver. More »

#patchwatch Gearbox Software's promised patch for its smash-hit action RPG Borderlands is coming, raising the level cap for everyone in the pursuit of better loot and harder bosses. When's it coming? Soon. Soonish. Maybe. More »

We know good news/bad news is a cliché, but the latest episode of Evil Avatar's Shotgun Podcast is such a classic example of it we hope you'll indulge us. Think of it as a tribute to this old standby, or perhaps a painfully unimaginative remake of it.

So: There's good news and bad news, which do you want first?

Good news: It's a happy day for fans of The Maw, 'Splosion Man and Comic Jumper: Developer Twisted Pixel is working on two new games, according to CCO Josh Bear. Hooray!

Bad news: Remember earlier, when we said it was a happy day for Comic Jumper fans? Well, it may have to be downgraded to "pretty OK day" when they learn that Twisted Pixel won't be churning out DLC for its well-received game.

It's a shame, as you'd think other comics to leap into would have been a perfect fit. But if one of those secret projects Twisted Pixel is toiling on instead rhymes with "Flosion Dan Woo" all will be forgiven.

Anyone who listens to the podcast knows my torrid history with LoZ: Majora’s Mask. I hated it for about… oh, I don’t know, 9 and a half years, then finally played through it on the VC. I liked it a lot, I really did, but it’s not one of my favorite Zelda titles. [...]

The investigators move from the strip to your social network.

#rumor Here's a glimpse at the mutliplayer map select and killstreak screens of upcoming shooter Call of Duty: Black Ops. More »

A few minutes with Atari's Zen-inducing downloadable game.

Two Dirk adventures plus a Dexter/Ace epic equals one well done collection of games from the past.

Welcome to New New Vegas. It's like New Vegas, but without as many of the glitches that you might be familiar with from the old place. Bethesda announced on its forum that the Fallout: New Vegas patch released over Steam last week has now rolled out for the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions as well.

There's no firm list of changes, but according to senior producer Jason Bergman, the update contains "over 200 fixes" related to quests and scripting. Unfortunately, players are still reporting glitches post-update, including freezing -- so it would seem there's more patching yet to do.

I’m not going to go into this Nintendo Community Fangame Convention too much because it’s not a “real” convention, but I must say that “Pyscho Waluigi” intrigues me. Maybe, and I know I’m in the minority, Nintendo can make a Waluigi/Luigi teamwork game! Link

The first rule of the cage: you do not talk about the cage.

#clips Geek. This word is power, Chris Metzen, Blizzard's senior vice president of creative development tells us. This is word is identity. This is our word. And for one weekend it was also BlizzCon's word. More »

A pair of marketing posters for Saw 3D is under fire for ever so closely resembling PS3 advertisements you may have seen during Sony's "This is Living" campaign. We guess that's appropriate, seeing as how both the new film and the old campaign are designed to unsettle their viewers -- still, it would be difficult to argue that the Saw 3D posters' designs weren't totally yoinked from their PS3-promoting predecessors.

The first comparison shot is posted above, while another, slightly less identical pair of posters can be found after the jump. What do you think? Is this mind-theft? Or extremely coincidental individual creation?

Cartoon Network's stable of characters will make the jump to stereoscopic 3D this spring thanks to an agreement with Crave. The publisher announced a deal through which it would release an "action-packed battle game" on 3DS starring characters from various current and classic Cartoon Network shows, including Ben 10, the Powerpuff Girls, Dexter's Lab, Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, and not Adventure Time.

Developer Papaya Studios is also working on versions of the game for Xbox 360, Wii, and PS3 for release in holiday 2011, but without the appeal of new hardware, those aren't nearly as exciting!

Following scattered reports of EA layoffs on Twitter, Joystiq confirmed with the company this afternoon that "seasonal roll-offs" have begun in the wake of the publisher's holiday release schedule. EA corporate communication spokesperson Jeff Brown explained: "As you know, seasonal roll-offs that follow game launches are common and vital to maintaining a healthy business. Because so many of our games ship in the holiday quarter, the team size adjustments tend to follow in the same timeframe. However, EA is growing and several of our studios are looking to hire talented people." Notably, this is (at least) the third year in a row that layoffs hit EA in the holiday season -- also like previous years, we'll have to wait and hear more when the company speaks about financials publicly on its quarterly investor's call this November 2. For now, EA wouldn't confirm which studios or how many folks were being affected by the firings. As always, we'd like to extend our best wishes to all parties involved. If you'd like to share more information regarding the layoffs, don't hesitate to get in contact.

#pc No, this isn't my current gaming rig. It's a postmortem picture of the last computer I built myself which died by heat and electrical shorts. More »

Mama has proven her prowess at Cooking, Gardening and, soon, Babysitting -- but it seems she could be showing off her remarkable outdoorsmanship in the franchise's next outing. Cooking Mama Ltd., the series' developer, has filed a U.S. trademark for "Camping Mama," which has, in turn, sent our heads reeling over the possible gameplay implications therein. Just imagine the activities Mama could practice in a wilderness setting:

• Tent pitching
• Campfire making
• Marshmallow roasting
• Mosquito swatting
• Killing a bear with her own hands and turning its pelt into a victory coat, The Edge-style

We talked about the Halloween-themed update yesterday, but now you can see an incoming Christmas update as well. Seems like there might be other items in each update that get a theme update, but you’ll have to hunt them down on your own!

#treyarch Treyarch is declassifying information on Call of Duty: Black Ops' many multiplayer features, offering a quick briefing on the online half of the game a few weeks before launch. For example, did you know that Black Ops supports split-screen online multiplayer? More »