This week, the crew discusses all of the news surrounding Activision/Blizzard after its purchase by Microsoft, and the consensus is that Bobby Kotick is still a slime.
Other news includes:
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Harmonix, MTV Games and Electronic Arts has announced their next block buster killer app: Rock Band 2. First, the most important feature is backwards compatible downloadable content. They’ve surpassed 15-million paid downloads, we want our content and we want to keep all the awesome songs for future games, else we might as well stop purchasing now, right?
The question remains, will we want to upgrade our instruments? They’re saying we’ll have “more variety of instrument choices than ever before with new and improved drum and guitar peripherals, enhanced functionality and innovative new designs – all fully compatible with the original Rock Band instruments.” Will the enhanced instruments really want to make us go out and buy them?
If these new instruments are highly desirable or add any new features to the game (or make newer features ‘easier’) then we may be persuaded to look into new hardware…yet with Guitar Hero World Tour we’re already pressured into considering another drum unit.
So confusing, but yet so much desired. I guess that’s the love hate relationship of a gamer with a passion and a, slight, addiction!
The place to be, this week, is Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) as Popcap’s now released Feeding Frenzy 2 on the 360 platform. Xbox Live Arcade has been the go to place for awesome new content brought in high definition on both shrink wrapped box games along with classic casual titles.
Not into casual games? Perhaps your spouse or children are into them! If you’ve got an Xbox 360 and continually consider it a “big boys hardcore console” it’s time to change your perspective because that’s old world thinking. Microsoft, together with Popcap, plans to change how people game on the Xbox 360 console system.
This isn’t Popcap’s first title, many may remember Heavy Weapon on the Xbox 360. This sure won’t be the last!
Read on for full press release details!
Electronic Arts may be considering the Spore system as an “Engine” for licensing to other developers to build RPG’s, action games, web-based games and many other options. Much like ID Software and Epic Games have done, this could be a build system for new creative additions to the industry.
Considering the amount of crazy Spore mini-games that have hit the street in the last few months, it seems possible EA’s already using this technique in-house to build hype and extension to the Spore product line. Usually such engines are licensed by smaller developers (smaller compared to Electronic Arts anyway) and not a big publisher such as EA.
Frank Gibeau, president of Electronic Arts’ Games Label says, “What’s so beautiful about Spore is that it’s extremely malleable, you could add RPG or action, you could take it to different platforms, like (Web-page) flash games, the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360, Nintendo’s Wii” (kotaku)
While EA did use the word “you could” they may be referencing the fact that “one could do it, if they worked at EA.” Electronic Arts wants to win the battle of the publishers, no doubt, and they continue to grow in size; would they let loose the Spore engine on outside developers? Or, would they keep it as an in-house engine for their own groups to leverage in future projects?
