All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Rube Goldberg was a cartoonist who would create drawings of crazy machines that could complete simple tasks in wacky ways. Why are we telling you this? So that when we say this new Create trailer shows off some wacky, Rube Goldberg-like machines you can make in the game, you'll know what we mean.

#pc OnLive, the streaming service that has the potential to change forever the way we play (and purchase) video games, will begin selling its small TV "console" tomorrow. And it's got a rather attractive price-point to go along with it. More »

A portion of a GameSpot review… The Good Seeing your property develop is a nice visual treat Entertaining minigame auctions Plenty of options for custom play Classic boards available You can play as your Mii. The Bad Some character voices quickly grow annoying Poor pacing Only includes [...]

#writing What would you expect to be paid to write a video game script? $100,000? Maybe you'd get that a few years ago, but the rate is now more between $10,000 to $20,000, writes The New York Observer. More »

Our main complaint with Epicenter/Conspiracy's Rock of the Dead was that its zombie-killing, rock-fueled action didn't make the guitar peripheral a central part of the experience. But that's apparently working to its advantage today as Conspiracy has just announced that the game is coming to the very guitar-less Facebook in 2011.

No word on when the game is due exactly, but development is slated to start in Q1 of next year and it's a Facebook game so ... what, a couple of weeks after that?

No, no we kid. It'll be at least a month.

#review With so many multiplayer experiences these days revolving around perks and persistent characters, it's nice to see a game that remembers the key to good competitive gaming is often just to keep things simple. More »

A portion of an NWR review… There’s no denying it, Nintendo’s Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort remain the champion of motion-controlled sports games on the Wii. No matter how many modes the game claims to have, Deca Sports 3 is too poorly designed to be entertaining, and when your standard motion controls are better than [...]

In addition to announcing the launch date and price for its MicroConsole today, OnLive has confirmed that it intends to introduce a flat-rate pricing plan before the end of the year that will provide access to back-catalog and indie games for a fee comparable to Netflix Instant Streaming (think the $10 range). "We don't have everything together just yet, we want people to at least have this in the back of their mind when they decide whether or not to get the MicroConsole," OnLive CEO Steve Perlam told Joystiq regarding the decision not to announce an exact price at this time. "In December we'll announce pricing and the lineup of games. It's literally just a matter of getting publishers to sign this that and the other thing."

Like with the decision to eliminate a monthly subscription fee for the service, Perlman said that the idea of flat-rate pricing was something that was arrived at after polling OnLive's user base and crunching numbers. "We couldn't be sure that [flat-rate pricing] would really work until we began to see the economics," he said. "We just had to test people and ask what people wanted. Of all the survey questions we asked people, over 90 percent of the people surveyed were interested in a flat-rate tier. Knowing that these are older games and that newer games will continue to be a la carte."

Details on specific flat-rate tiles are expected to be revealed along with the finalized pricing, but Perlman confirmed that the back-catalog releases won't be titles currently available on the service. "[They will] sometimes not be as polished. They might say 'exit to Windows' instead of 'go to OnLive,'" he told us, stating that, "I think for people on this flat-rate tier, if they can just play something they've already paid for, they won't really care. They realize it's a classic title and off they go."

Perlman would like to see "related" titles added to the flat-rate tier to accompany new game releases in a series, using Duke Nukem Forever as an example. In this case, he said, Duke Nukem 3D would ideally be playable via OnLive around or on the same day Gearbox's latest effort ships.

We'll have more on the titles planned for the launch of the flat-rate tier, as well as pricing, as soon as it's available.

"I guess we're now a medium-sized company instead of a startup because we have over 200 people," OnLive CEO Steve Perlman told Joystiq when we met with him to get our hands on the company's final MicroConsole hardware earlier this month. "We've had over two million sessions, which is basically when someone uses the service. Some of them are short, while others are quite long, on the order of 20 hours."

While not providing deeper usage statistics, Perlman remarked that "The growth has been rapidly accelerating. We had more people using OnLive in October than in all the months previous. November is even growing beyond that." This in the absence of any substantial marketing, and without a presence in the living room. That will all change, he said, with the December 2 introduction of what is being billed as the service's "TV adapter" and a corresponding major media ad push.

The company is betting on the device's $99 price point and simple setup to establish a foothold in console gaming -- Perlman said that it's more about the "TV market," which "is 10 times larger than the PC or Mac market" -- and that publishers continue to be sold on the platform. "All the hand waving and all the slide shows and demos ... checks seem to have more influence on publishers than anything."

First shown at E3 2009, the OnLive MicroConsole -- the "cloud gaming" company's pocket-sized means of streaming games to HDTVs -- is finally in production and will begin shipping on December 2 directly from OnLive. Pre-orders are being taken via its site as of ... right now. $99 gets you the MicroConsole, one wireless controller and a voucher redeemable for one free game from the service's library.

The first major advertising push for OnLive is going to hit the airwaves in the run-up to the early December launch. Company CEO Steve Perlman told Joystiq during a recent Q&A -- the highlights of which we'll be posting later today -- that the console will be available exclusively from OnLive's site until sometime next year and is, for now, offered in "limited quantities."

We have a review of the hardware coming right up.

While we've been using the OnLive service since it debuted for PC and Mac this past June -- whose client we've already put through its paces -- for the past 10 days I've been gaming on the OnLive MicroConsole (the "TV Adapter," as it is also referred to by the company). Now that the pricing and release date have been announced I can finally share with you, dear Readers, my experience with this teeny-tiny (truly micro!) console. Read on for the full review, and check out some photos I took of the final hardware in the gallery below.

The perfect shirt for fans of Grasshopper that want to confuse everyone else! Grasshopper is definitely a company that thinks outside of the box!

#iphone Following EA Sports MMA into mobile gaming, THQ's mixed martial arts franchise UFC Undisputed will hit the iPhone and iPad this week, a company executive says. More »

Check out this latest trailer for the 360/PS3 version of NBA Jam. Tell me if the way this is presented doesn’t make you feel a bit miffed as a Wii fan.

#dildo Lemme tell ya, I have, that game was called "my third marriage." Hey-oooo! But seriously folks, the ESRB summary for Dead Rising 2's DLC mentions a wieldable sex toy. I thought that was the paddlesaw! Bang, pow, zoom ... More »

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Who needs a new version of Thief when you can just hack some multiplayer into the old one? A group of modders has painstakingly hacked the ten-year-old Thief 2 into a multiplayer game, and the beta is now available for download and testing. While it will supposedly run, it's not actually playable by laymen quite yet. You'll need a fair amount of networking code knowledge to actually get it working in any sensible way, and even then it will apparently crash and burn.

But feel free to geek out at what's been done here -- these guys have gone back through, found unused code in the still closed-off game client, and then rebuilt and rewritten it to try and get it working on modern computers. And this was a game that was never actually designed for multiplayer! What they've done is like taking an old Model T and making it race the Indy 500. Sure, it won't actually win, but the fact it showed up running on four wheels is pretty amazing anyway.

#screens Gymkhana, the "car rodeo" YouTube video phenomenon, will join the redoubtable Rally in DiRT 3 next year. Loosely described, gymkhana features a start and finish line and some obstacle to negotiate. Codemasters dropped several screenshots illustrating both modes today. More »

#biowaremontreal The BioWare project teased earlier today by Spike TV's Video Game Awards is not an early look at Mass Effect 3, according to a development source, but the multiplayer-focused Mass Effect spin-off currently in the works at BioWare Montreal. More »

In case you missed out on the PS2 release of Phantom Brave, or the updated Wii port, NIS America has announced a more upgraded-er port, for PSP! Phantom Brave: The Hermuda Triangle, out this March on UMD and PSN in North America, and on PSN in Europe.

This version of the isometric tactical RPG features all the new content, including characters and the "Another Marona" campaign, added to the Wii release, Phantom Brave: We Meet Again. NIS has also added additional new characters from other NIS games, including Hero Prinny and the Unlosing Ranger (according to Siliconera).

It's because those five characters make this a slightly different game that the box art can claim it as "Only on PlayStation." Apparently.

Quite colorful. Link Thanks so_happily_unsatisfied!