After purchasing Lucasfilm last October, Disney has decided to shut down the company's video game development arm, LucasArts. In a statement released to GameInformer, Disney says that it's "decided to shift LucasArts from an internal development to a licensing model, minimizing the company's risk...
Move made as an attempt at "minimizing the company's risk"
Sony announced plans to add Epix to its growing list of PS3 video-on-demand services earlier this year, and today US gamers will be able to download the app. Epix's content catalog includes over 3,000 movies in high definition, according to Sony,...
Some games have something meaningful to say, but others are content with you battling sentient pieces of toast while riding a cube-shaped pig. The sheer ridiculousness of Battleblock Theater, the latest release from Castle Crashers developer The Behemoth, makes it worth a look, but the enormously fun side-scrolling gameplay is what makes it nearly impossible to put down. Though The Behemoth...
Zynga has become one of the more ubiquitous purveyors of online games and it's also well known for its free to play mobile games — now it hopes to nickel-and-dime players to death with its entry into true online gambling. ZyngaPlusPoker and ZyngaPlusCasino are launching on April 3rd in the UK and will let players gamble real money in a variety of games including Blackjack, Roulette, Baccarat, and, of course, multiple poker options. For starters, these games will be available either through your browser or a downloaded app, but Zynga says it wants to launch social versions on Facebook and mobile apps at some point during 2013. Zynga is partnering with Bwin.party, a company that it calls "one of the largest and most reputable real money gaming operators worldwide." There's no word yet on when Zynga's real money games might roll out to...
Gambling with friends
"No statues. No bullshit. Just games and the people who made them, there for the audience to discover." Jeff Dunn
It's been a long road for the Oculus Rift — the virtual reality headset's Kickstarter began back in August, and was supposed to ship by the end of the year. However, things were delayed till March of 2013, but the company just announced it has made it in under the gun: Oculus Rift developer kits started shipping out to buyers earlier this week. These shipments should cover those who backed...
The developer who crafted the creepy puzzles for the 2010 platformer Limbo is close to releasing 140, a side-scrolling rhythm game with constantly changing levels. The landscapes in 140 alter as its overlaid techno soundtrack hits major percussive beats, requiring players to time their movement and jumps with the rhythm to stay alive — the game's soundtrack controls everything from the player controlled character to the environment's shape and color. The music design earned the game Excellence in Audio from the 2013 Independent Game Festival awards presented at last week's GDC. 140 looks...
Epic Games, the maker of highly-regarded franchises like Gears of War and Infinity Blade, is probably equally well-known for its Unreal Engine. While Unreal Engine 3 still looks great, it's starting to show its age a bit — so Epic has finally given the gaming world a look at Unreal Engine 4. According to Polygon, the company is giving a closed-doors demo of Infiltrator, the first tech demo running Unreal Engine 4 at the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Judging from the screenshots Polygon posted, it's a pretty impressive step forward, and the hardware requirements aren't even that outrageous. Epic VP Mark Rein tweeted earlier that the...
When architecture critic Justin Davidson started playing Sim City, he had dreams of building a utopia. A lifetime of experience had given Davidson an idea of how to craft his dream city, but he soon discovered Electronic Arts' city-building simulation was restrictive. Unable to recreate a "chaotically functional" city like New York, he found himself obeying the game's rules, marking out sets of industrial, commercial, and residential zones,...
Wealth breeds greed
After moving on from the Halo franchise, studio Bungie announced a new project in February of this year. Called Destiny, it combines first-person shooter mechanics with more MMO-like qualities, asking players to help protect the last remaining city on Earth in the far future. While we've already...
Now in its 10th and final year, the Game Design Challenge here at GDC is a competition that pits gaming's most innovative minds against each other to come up with a game based upon a particular theme or concept — and this year developer Jason...
When Double Fine — the studio behind the cult hit Psychonauts — went to Kickstarter in February of last year asking for $400,000 to make a point-and-click adventure game, backers responded with overwhelming approval and a total pledge of over $3 million. At the time, the...
We knew that Ouya was going to be released this June, but now we have a final release date: according to a listing at Amazon, Ouya will be available on June 4th for $99.99. According to a press release posted at Engadget, Ouya will also be available at Best Buy, Game, GameStop, Target, and on the...
"The word 'Newtown' is something we need to be thinking about and having conversations about."
It's a jarring moment at GDC 2013's Narrative Summit, where writers gather to swap tips on everything from creating relatable characters to finding freelance work. Debates over gaming violence have been particularly active in the past year: a blood-soaked set of E3 2012 presentations left even fans of shooters...
YouTube has been making a big push into live streaming as a means of expanding the types of content it can offer users, and here at GDC the company has announced a new set of programming APIs to make the process even easier for game developers....
It's a seriously impressive thing, winning the same award twice – for the same product. That's what Razer managed over the last two years, hoarding accolades at CES for the Project Fiona in 2012 and again for the Edge in 2013.
Razer's been so lauded because it set out to do something that...
If you thought Sony's creepy tech demo involving that old man's face was something, wait until you see what Activision's R&D department has been...
"Just for you guys today we're going to do something special, something that's never been done before" said Victor Luo, NASA human interface...
Mobile gaming has come a long way since you first played Snake on your Nokia 8210, but the latest release from Pocket Planes developer Nimblebit is taking the platform back to its roots. Nimble Quest plays a lot like that classic, but adds traditional role playing game elements like magic and combat. It's a simplified, casual take on the...
In an effort to showcase the potential of browser-based gaming, Mozilla has teamed with Epic Games to bring the developer's Unreal Engine 3 to browsers — with no need for any plugins. To...
The portable Android gaming console GameStick proved to be a hit when it reached its $10,000 Kickstarter goal in just two days — and here at GDC 2013 PlayJam is showing off the the developer version that will be shortly shipping out to some early backers. In concept, the GameStick is similar to the Ouya: it's a gaming console powered by Android, complete with its own proprietary gaming store. But while the Ouya focused on creating a stylish box of its own, the hook with the GameStick is portability. The guts of the console are a stick roughly the size of a USB thumb drive that plugs into the HDMI port on your television — and slots...
Confirming previous speculation, the mysterious trailer for The Phantom Pain, which teased audiences last December, has been revealed as Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Videogame auteur Hideo Kojima took the stage today at the Game Developers Conference to officially announce that both the mystery game and the previously-announced Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes are actually part of Metal Gear Solid 5, accompanied by a trailer that shows off the photorealistic FOX Engine.
As usual with...
AMD launched its new Radeon Sky graphics cards today, beginning a new war with rival NVIDIA as both companies try to capture the burgeoning cloud gaming market. Cloud gaming's promise has long been that it would allow anyone to play visually...
Kid-focused augmented reality game Disney Infinity seems like a me-too cash grab, and in a lot of ways it is. After the massive, on-going success of Activision’s Skylanders — a franchise that combined relatively simple video games and...
One of the lone pieces of hardware that Sony decided to reveal at its PlayStation 4 event last February was the new DualShock 4 controller, and now the company is showing it off in person at this year's Game Developers Conference. The controller looks quite nice in person — there's a nice matte finish to the hardware — and the light bar on the back gives it a real Tron vibe.
Seeing as it's presenting to an audience of developers, Sony...
Ouya is positioning itself as a hackable, Android-based gaming console — so now it's letting users modify its case as well as what's on the inside. Thanks to a partnership with Makerbot, the 3D-printing files for the Ouya console enclosure are now available; users can download the files, modify them as they see fit, and then 3D print their own custom cases. You can download the 3D printing files right here and also see a variety of...
