|
|
PSP News is a News and downloads site for the PSP, PSVita, PS4, PS3, PS2 and PSOne, We have all the latest emulators, hack and custom firmwares, homebrew and all the downloads on this site, we also cover commercial gaming and console news., the latest homebrew and releases, Part of the
DCEmu Homebrew & Gaming Network.
This Website
THE LATEST NEWS BELOW
|
March 27th, 2009, 21:29 Posted By: Shrygue
via Computer and Video Games
The latest LittleBigPlanet update should fix the one thing about the game that really gets on our nerves.
If, like us, you've played LBP extensively and collected a ton of community items, you'll most likely have had numerous play sessions interrupted by a freezing screen (usually mid jump) as a message pops up telling you that your profile is full and prompting you to delete photos and objects.
The problem with this is that even after you've deleted all of the community items attached to your profile the same message keeps popping up repeatedly - it's a real annoyance that can spoil what's otherwise a wonderful experience.
This should finally be fixed by the upcoming Cornish Yarg (?) update. Below the movie you'll find the full list of fixes and new features, via the PS Blog.
This update addresses several outstanding issues with the game:
- There is a new music player which lets player's choose their own music from the XMB to play during create mode and in their Pod
- Improved decoration mode makes it easier to customize your Sackboy
- New options to help prevent profiles becoming full of unwanted community objects:
- Option to delete all (unhearted) community objects and photos
- Option to select whether to automatically collect community prizes and photos
- A number of improvements have been made to make profiles more robust and to recover from certain errors
- We now support Japanese and Korean IME for text chat.
- Emitter prediction has been improved (this should help fast-moving projectiles e.g. in MGS levels)
- The player proximity switch now has a 'require all' option in it
- An option has been added to cycle between various level information when viewing community levels on the earth
- Various LittleBigStore improvements
We don't yet have a fixed release date for this update, but it has now finished primary development so won't be too much longer. Additional fixes, particularly for online connection reliability and save game/profile size problems are already well into development and we'll bring you more news on that just as soon as possible.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
 Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
 |
|
|
|
March 27th, 2009, 21:27 Posted By: Shrygue
via Eurogamer
Sony has updated the PlayStation Store with Burn Zombie Burn for PS3, downloadable content for LittleBigPlanet, PAIN, Resistance 2, EndWar and COD5, and a PSone copy of Magic Carpet (the latter costing GBP 4.79 / EUR 5.99).
Burn Zombie Burn, developed by UK outfit doublesix, goes for GBP 6.29 / EUR 7.99, and sees players trying to hold off a horde of zombies for as long as possible in order to set a score and hopefully unlock more content.
Then there's the Resistance 2 Aftermath Map Pack, announced this week, for GBP 3.99 / EUR 4.99. Elsewhere Call of Duty: World at War fans get access to Map Pack 1 for GBP 7.99 / EUR 9.99, which is a bit more than Xbox owners had to pay but the quality is certainly there.
Then there's the PAIN Smack Pack (GBP 3.19 / EUR 3.99) and El Chile Grande character (GBP 0.69 / EUR 0.99), while LittleBigPlanet owners can grab a Buzz! costume for GBP 1.59 / EUR 1.99. EndWar and Unreal Tournament 3 fans, meanwhile, get the Veteran Map Pack and Titan Pack for free respectively.
Finally, the PSP side of the store offers Buzz! Brain of the UK for GBP 19.99, but, as ever, we're forced to point out that it's a fiver cheaper in the shops. What's going on, Sony? We'll try to find out.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 22:14 Posted By: wraggster
Wolfenstein 3D is popping up on more platforms than the iPhone. Activision Blizzard has plans to release the game that popularized the FPS genre on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. An ESRB rating leaked the announcement, but provided no other details.
It seems unlikely a seventeen year old game will get a retail release so we’ll throw this in the unannounced Xbox Live Arcade / PlayStation Network pile.
Wolf 3D is a classic and if it gets re-released online deathmatches should be part of the package. A map editor and map sharing would be another great feature, but I wouldn’t expect Activision Blizzard to go that far.
http://www.siliconera.com/2009/03/26...-and-xbox-360/
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 22:13 Posted By: Shrygue
via Kotaku
Ratchet and Clank triumphantly return to the PlayStation 3 this fall in Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, the continuing saga of the robot and Lombax duo.
Some of the franchise's biggest questions will be answered in A Crack in Time, as Ratchet and Clank discover the truth behind their origins and their ultimate destinies as they struggle to reunite following Clank's kidnapping be the nefarious Dr. Nefarious. The official announcement teases us with the question: "Do Ratchet and Clank's destinies lie with each other? Or is it finally time for the universe's greatest duo to separate for good?" Chilling!
Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time will be powered by the same engine that Insomniac used to craft Tools of Destruction and Quest for Booty, so whatever happens to the dynamic duo we can at least be sure they'll look fabulous as they travel through time in order to save the future.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 22:09 Posted By: Shrygue
via Eurogamer
In a candid Game Developers Conference session, Mark Healey and Alex Evans - leading lights of LittleBigPlanet developer Media Molecule - revealed that the studio wants to develop the game much further.
"We still feel like we're halfway through the development of LittleBigPlanet, to be honest," said Healey in response to a question from the floor.
"I claim that LittleBigPlanet is potentially a game creation package, which isn't finished if you like, but potentially," he'd said earlier.
"We want LittleBigPlanet to be something that enables people to make games, not platform game levels." Healey said the moment he'd got a working version of Tetris up and running in the game was when he'd proved to himself that the team was on the right track.
Evans said that active development continues on the game, which was a flagship PS3 release for Sony late last year. The team's focus is on improving the content creation side, and making it more accessible to a wider audience.
"That's the least finished part of the game, which both excites and terrifies me," Evans said. The priorities were "taking it outside the walled garden of PSN" and getting more players involved in making content.
"One of the things we have to do is taking that 0.1 per cent audience that can create things in LittleBigPlanet, and bring that to a wider audience - and that's what we want to do next," he said.
Since the game is efficiently and flexibly programmed, expanding it after launch in this manner will be easy to do, Evans said. "The code base for LittleBigPlanet is very tiny, it's still very easy to iterate and play and do stuff. One of our programmers just did a new feature that will become a key part of the game, and he did that in 2 days."
It wasn't discussed whether changes to the game from this point on would come in the form of free patches, downloadable content or a new box release. A member of the audience asked how the team divided its attention between support for LittleBigPlanet and its next major project, and Healey suggested that the two were fairly interchangeable.
"[Whatever] we're working on, we don't necessarily know if it's going to be in 'the next thing', or something we put out to the community in a month," he said.
The team considers that development of LBP is open-ended, and the community takes an active part. "When we released the game, we thought of it as, OK, we've now expanded our team size to two million people," Evans said.
Just as well. Evans said that the community's levels have been far superior to the ones that Media Molecule itself and its games industry contacts made in the early stages of testing. "The quality of levels produced were shocking, really, really awful," he said. "It was only when we went to a public beta trial, within 24 hours there were high quality levels appearing."
The developers were full of admiration - if slightly baffled admiration - for the feats of some community designers, such as the mechanical, switch-and-pulley computers that run a calculator, or early computing experiment The Game of Life.
"Seeing things like this was like, oh my god, there's some really f***ed up people out there, man," said Healey, shaking his head at the vast switch arrays of Little Big Computer.
Healey and Evans shared details and video of earlier versions of LittleBigPlanet with the audience, showing how much it had changed since it was greenlit by Sony, not long before its first unveiling at GDC two years ago.
"We actually started with a user-generated content system that bore no resemblance to what ended up in the final game," Evans said, showing how it was entirely physical, down to players using shotguns to blow away stuff they wanted to delete, paint rollers to apply colour, and even running around physical inventory and menu spaces.
"We originally wanted to have no distinction between creation and gameplay at all," Healey said. "But when we decided we wanted to make a full game creation tool, we realised there was no way anybody would want to do that in that interface."
Although it was always a 2D platformer, Evans said that he'd wanted the game to be more 3D, with levels that wrapped around or bended along a "ribbon". "I really wanted to have the game embedded in 3D space, because I'm a 3D graphics programmer," he said "I clung to that for months and months and months." But none of the other designers were using the tools for it he'd built.
In the end, he spent a "painful" day deleting the code that made his ribbon work. "As I was doing that deletion of the code, the code got cleaner, I cleaned up loads of bugs, deleted thousands of lines, and by the end of that deletion process I was convinced it was the right thing to do," Evans confessed.
The change to a non-physical content creation interface was initially difficult for the team to reconcile, Evans and Healey revealed; they felt like they were making two separate games. It wasn't until they decided that all the Story levels had to be made with the game's own editing tools - and "no cheating" - that it came together.
"That was the key point in the project," Healey said. "As a developer, you know ways of wowing people, and we couldn't use those any more, because we couldn't cheat," Evans added.
LittleBigPlanet is coming to PSP later this year.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 21:25 Posted By: wraggster
When the PlayStation Network launched in 2006, many saw it as a sea of untapped potential, but Jon Webb from the SCEA Developer Support Group says Sony's made strides to correct that and that now it's up to developers to capitalize.
Webb spoke today at GDC about the PSN's past, present, and future. While a lot of the discussion focused on the nuts and bolts of running the service for the 20 million registered users, Webb did talk about all the improvements the company added to the PSN last year. Sure, a lot of lip service was paid to Trophies and the in-game cross media bar, but Webb said there are a wealth of other options the late '08 upgrade added that developers didn't drop into their games because of time constraints; the PSN booster shot came about halfway through the year and that didn't bode well for adding functionality to the holiday releases.
What beauts are hiding under the PS3's hood? Well, Webb says the PSN currently supports voting systems, integration of external media sources from the web (He mentioned pulling Twitter photos into a game.), location-specific information based on your IP, group functions such as clubs and club challenges, and in-game ads. Web also detailed the ability for drop "socially based commerce recommendations" into games so that if you and I were friends, you could buy things in Burnout Paradise, the game would tell me you just bought that product, and I could follow a link to pick up the goods as well.
However, the biggest mention Webb made in terms of untapped potential is PSN sub-sign in. Granted, LittleBigPlanet already allows you to play a local multiplayer game using more than one PSN profile on the system, but Webb said that this functionally will soon be patched into "a couple of high profile titles." He wouldn't say which games, but he did say that the system will pull save data from both users' personal saves and that making this work falls on the game itself supporting it. Sadly, at this point in development, the sub-sign in doesn't allow the second player to earn Trophies while playing as the red-headed stepchild.
With so much talk about the PSN making strides onto the PS3, PC, and PSP, I asked Webb if Trophies were any closer to coming to Sony's portable. His response wasn't super-inspiring. With so many of the older PSPs hacked and modded, he says that there's concern about what that would mean to the Trophy playing field. Webb said the PSP is a different iteration of the PSN because it's not always on like the PS3 so the team is working on expanding the experience, which may or may not include Trophies.
"We're always looking at how we can bring more parity to the PlayStation Portable," Webb said. "
When he was done with that Greg Miller gem, I threw the same question I throw at every Sony person I meet: what's up with avatars?
"We're looking to expand avatar functionality," he said citing this year. "I don't have any details on that."
Even when that update comes, don't look for PlayStation Eye support -- Webb said that using the camera opens up too many monitoring issues; odd, Xbox Live seems to handle it just fine.
Sigh. One day I'll get rid of that lame sheep next to my PSN name. One day.
http://uk.psp.ign.com/articles/966/966516p1.html
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 21:21 Posted By: wraggster
SURGE, a cutting edge studio and publisher created by NAMCO BANDAI Games America Inc., announced today that they have released an Afro Samurai update for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PLAYSTATION3 computer entertainment system. The update brings a set of features that will further enhance the gameplay experience:
Camera settings can now be accessed through the Options menu
Invert camera control option has been implemented
Gameplay tuning – Improved Brother 6 boss fight
Multiple bug issues have also been resolved
Released on January 27, Afro Samurai is a merciless action adventure game that expertly brings together the creative best from the worlds of Hollywood and hip-hop music to deliver an unparalleled entertainment experience. Graphically innovative, Afro Samurai's dynamic cross-hatch visuals give the game a truly unique look and feel as Afro wages a brutal war against anyone standing in his way. Featuring an unrivalled combat system, players can dismember enemies with surgical precision using vigorous slices of the blade. Afro Samurai lets the player feel the swagger and swordsmanship of the ultimate hip-hop warrior.
Afro Samurai is rated "M" for mature by the ESRB and carries a suggested MSRP of $59.99. For more information about the videogame, please visit: http://www.bloodisbeautiful.com. For more information about Afro Samurai, please visit www.afrosamurai.com.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 21:20 Posted By: wraggster
Last night, the world rejoiced when IGN showed the brand new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 trailer and announced the release date of Nov. 10, 2009. However, details on the actual game were more than a bit scarce. Thankfully, IGN knows a number of top COD operatives (see: nerds), and they were happy to tear apart the video for the news behind the sonar-like trailer.
During the short video, images briefly flash in green against the dark background. It might just look like sounds being recorded, but it seems like Infinity Ward put a whole lot more into it. Over on the official COD: Modern Warfare 2 site, you can go through the trailer second by second, zoom in, and see some hazy images lost in the green muck.
Nothing's official, but some of the things we've seen sure look like Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer and a Brazilian favela. Don't believe us? Go ahead and click on those links, or scope these images.
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/966/966592p1.html
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 20:52 Posted By: wraggster
SamuraiX has released a new version of Openbor for the PSP/GP2x and Windows, heres whats new and info for those who dont know what Openbor is:
OpenBOR
----------------------
OpenBOR is a continuation of Beats Of Rage originally created by the wonderful
folks over at http://www.senileteam.com
History
----------------------
As fans of the 'Streets of Rage' series that originally appeared on the SEGA
megadrive/genesis, we always wanted to see streets of rage 4. But the waiting
proved futile, and streets of rage 4 never came. That's why we tried to correct
this mistake and fill the void by making the ultimate tribute to Streets of Rage:
Beats of Rage!!
Development
----------------------
Beats of Rage was created by Senile Team. However, the character sprites and
some parts of the backgrounds are taken from 'the King of Fighters' games by
SNK Playmore. Therefore special thanks go out to SNK Playmore and SEGA who
unknowingly helped in creating this game.
*** Update by SX @ 3-26-09 Build 2191 ***
Features:
PSP Release. (Menu @ 95% Complete more to be done)
GP2X Release. (Compiles but since I don't own one I have no clue what issues are)
Fixes:
Select Player Screen is now referenced once again by loading order.
All Old Save files prior to 3.0 are no longer compatible with this PSP/GP2X release. Using them will cause instability and unexpected results.
Everyone must use all new files included with this release since menus have been redesigned. Especially PSP Version
Dreamcast and XBOX are to follow once I have completed them. No time-line at the moment but I am working on Dreamcast at the moment.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 19:15 Posted By: wraggster
News via emurussia
PAD plugin for Sony Playstation 2 emulators has been updated. Changes:
- Complete rewrite;
- SDL dropped; this version uses DirectInput instead.
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 26th, 2009, 17:08 Posted By: wraggster
Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet swept the Game Developers Choice Awards, claiming four victories - the do-it-yourself title won Best Debut Game, Best Technology, Best Game Design as well as the Innovation Award.
Bethesda's Fallout 3 was another star title, claiming the Game of the Year award and Best Writing. Meanwhile, Prince of Persia was awarded Best Visual Arts and God Of War: Chains Of Olympus, for the PlayStation Portable, took Best Handheld Game.
Best Audio went to Dead Space and Best Downloadable Game was awarded to World of Goo, reports Gamasutra.
Hideo Kojima, was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, while Rock Band founders, Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, picked up the Pioneer award and Tommy Tallarico, co-founder of Video Games Live, won the Ambassador Award.
"Over the past nine years, the Game Developers Conference has become the premiere videogame award show because it gives voice to those who understand games better than anyone; the people who make them," said Meggan Scavio, content director for GDC.
"The games being recognised here are virtuoso efforts that have truly advanced the state of videogames. Our congratulations to all the talented and hardworking teams that put so much of themselves into their art."
The results of the Game Developers Choice Awards follows:
Game of the Year:
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)
Best Game Design:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Best Writing:
Fallout 3 (Bethesda Softworks)
Best Technology:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Best Visual Arts:
Prince of Persia (Ubisoft Montreal)
Best Debut Game:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Best Handheld Game:
God Of War: Chains Of Olympus (Ready at Dawn)
Innovation Award:
LittleBigPlanet (Media Molecule)
Best Audio:
Dead Space (EA Redwood Shores)
Best Downloadable Game:
World Of Goo (2D Boy)
Lifetime Achievement Award:
Hideo Kojima
Pioneer Award:
Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy
Ambassador Award:
Tommy Tallarico
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/article...-at-gdc-awards
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 23:17 Posted By: wraggster
Ahman has released a new version of the Best Shell for the PSP and one of the scenes best releases:
This release is for PSP Slim & Lite only. It introduces an Advanced Multi-tasking feature which allows you to run 2 applications simultaneously and switch between them with a hot key. Of course, you can still multi-task these 2 apps together with iR Shell build-in functions.
Video preview:
Download Here and Give Feedback Via Comments
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:37 Posted By: wraggster
News via pspita
Moscas user of our forum, updates its now famous Goblins PSP, multifunction utility for PCs that comes with version 2.3.1.1. Goblins PSP will allow you to perform backups of data on your memory stick, load and / or delete the backup of your UMD, launch programs like the RemoteJoy and USBIsoloader, update your Custom Firmware and manage your plugins.
Following the changelog for this release and the link to download.
Changelog v2.3.1.0 - v2.3.1.1:
Quote:
v2.3.1.0
-If you are upgrading from a version lower than v2.0.0.0 you must remove GoblinPSP
-Improved management of Organizing application menu
v2.3.1.1
-Fixed some bugs that arose into the applications menu, causing a loss of reordering of the applications
Download and Give Feedback Via Comments
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:32 Posted By: Shrygue
via IGN
The wait is at long last coming to an end for Bionic Commando, the new 3D rethinking of the classic series. Over in Japan, Capcom announced today a final release date for the Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game. Our friends on the island nation will get the game on June 25, priced at 7,340 yen (about $74).
For most games, a Japanese date usually has little relation to an overseas release. But this is Capcom here, so we expect the international versions of Bionic Commando to arrive close to the Japanese version. We'll let you know if Capcom's domestic office makes any announcements.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:25 Posted By: wraggster
Square Enix superstar producer -- and master of the zipper -- Tetsuya Nomura is featured in this week's Famitsu through a two page interview. Although most of the space was taken up by Final Fantasy VII Advent Children Complete talk, Nomura opened up towards the end about a few of his other projects.
First up, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. Development on the DS title is approaching completion, he said. The staff is now going through the final areas of debugging. In case you don't keep up with the Nippon gaming seen, the Japanese version is due for release on May 30.
Sharing the sales points of the title, Nomura noted that because it's mission-based, players who want to get through to the end quickly can simply play just the required missions. However, those who do clear all the missions will find a lot of content.
Next up, Kingdom Hearts Coded. Noting that the mobile title will be distributed as a series of episodes, Nomura revealed that the development staff is currently working on building up a stock of such episodes.
Finally, the main event: Final Fantasy Versus XIII. Nomura didn't share much here, stating only that the designs for the main characters' clothing is complete. These designs were previously announced as being a collaboration with Roen. He hopes to unveil them at a major event.
The magazine also asked Nomura about future possibilities for the Final Fantasy VII compilation series. He said that he believes he's done all he wants to do for Advent Children. However, he does have ideas for the next product in the compilation. Don't start celebrating yet, though! Nomura also said that he doesn't expect any developments on the series for the time being.
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/966/966108p1.html
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:23 Posted By: wraggster
Even just on paper, the number for Insomniac Games' second Resistance title is impressive: 60 players in the competitive modes (which include straight deathmatch as well as more objective-based modes that divvy up all those players into squads) and 8 players in the cooperative one. While one would naturally assume that adding 20 more players to what was already an impressive feat in the original Resistance's 40 online players would just mean bigger maps, there were far bigger ramifications.
In a session titled "Pushing the Limits: The Technical, Design, and Social Ramifications from Increasing Player Counts in Online Multiplayer Games," Resistance 2 Cooperative Design Lead Jake Biegel and R2 Competitive Design Lead Mike Roloson detailed some of the issues they came across when upping the player counts to the largest seen in a console game thus far.
To facilitate including the three main components of R2's experience, the Campaign, Cooperative and Competitive Modes, the team was actually split into three separate, semi-autonomous units that were each building their own part of the game. Though they obviously shared resources, it wasn't until they came together in a move Biegel claims was "analogous to Voltron" that the game really became a whole; disparate units that combined to become greater than the sum of its parts.
The teams had almost no ties to each other's modes, and the difficulty, Biegel explains, was to continue to promote teamwork and sense of unity despite the sequestered bits of development happening simultaneously. As it turns out, these were themes that carried over into the game because, as Insomniac discovered in moving to a comparatively huge number of players in on a map, things graduated from simple game design issues to overall social dynamics.
Nowhere was this more apparent than when they first dropped 60 players into a map. Juggling these "mob dynamics" was especially difficult because nobody had really attempted a game of that magnitude before. It created what the team affectionately called "The Ball of Death" -- a huge lump of chaos that would move around a map and draw in other players into the conflict. The problem with this was that the chaos in the middle was largely impregnable; players would spawn, run to where the chaos was, and then get killed on the periphery.
This would eventually give rise to the game's objectives and, most importantly, the squad system that would not only split up the 60 players into groups, but assign them objectives and a rival squad to give the game a sense of rivalry and familiarity. After all, when there are 60 players running around, it's almost impossible to keep track of friends, much less that one person that keeps gunning you down throughout a match.
It was an example of the admittedly fascinating dynamics of social interaction. Mike Roloson equated it to a series of small gatherings. A six or so person dinner lets everyone stay cordial, encourages a central conversation, and lets some people dig a little deeper into topics as the flow dictates. When you double or even triple that, moving to around 15 people, then you start to see individual conversations and people starting to glom together into groups. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, as it's impossible to juggle four or five conversations at once with any real involvement, but it was nevertheless an issue when trying to pit people against each other. At 24+ players (or, as Roloson compared it, the "bar" setting), people begin to arrive in cliques and tend to stay in those, sometimes largely ignoring everyone else and staying within their bubble.
The trick, you see, is to have a central focal point (in the bar analogy, that could be a band or a sports even on TV) that bands everyone together and creates a channeled objective for the whole, while still allowing the freedom of having smaller groups. Thus, the squad system was created and forced rivalries were introduced -- apparently a source of internal contention. "The debate still rages," Roloson joked.
By breaking things up, the Ball of Death was mitigated to a degree and could even be manipulated as needed to create a sense that the matches had culminated into something bigger at the end. In truth, Insomniac actually designed their matches in both Competitive and Cooperative Modes to grow as they went on, keeping things isolated at first, and then layering in more squads until the matches reached a chaotic apex.
This worked no matter what the player count because of an innate ability by the dev team to scale the entirety of the experience. What begin as more compartmentalized map designs eventually gave way to shared maps that could then be divvied up into chunks for specific modes like Capture the Flag. In this way, the teams were able to share resources and hit their milestones, which Insomniac has oft prided itself on never missing.
http://uk.ps3.ign.com/articles/966/966265p1.html
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:22 Posted By: Shrygue
via Computer and Video Games
Resident Evil 5 producer Masachika Kawata has said that gamers may have to wait up to eight years for Resident Evil 6, assuming the project gets the go ahead.
"We haven't decided whether we're going to make Resident Evil 6 yet," Kawata told The Gadget Show. "But if we do, it could take anywhere up to eight years, but hopefully only four."
Fellow Resi 5 producer Jun Takeuchi said previously that the next instalment in the series will be a full franchise reboot, but we'd be more than a little bit surprised if it took eight years to rework the formula.
The horror series has already undergone somewhat of a change in formula recently, with the latest entry more action-orientated than previous releases.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:15 Posted By: Shrygue
via Computer and Video Games
Namco Bandai is expected to release Katamari Damacy Tribute this year on PS3.
The series will reportedly be getting a visual update and arrive in full HD with 1080p resolution, while the game's song list features numerous tracks from previous Katamari games, hinting that it could be a remix of past Katamari titles.
The news comes from the latest pages of Japanese gaming mag Famitsu (via Silicon Era).
Katamari Damacy director Keita Takahashi's set to give a game design lecture at GDC tomorrow focusing on recent release Noby Noby Boy, but perhaps we'll hear something of Katamari Damacy Tribute then.
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
|
March 25th, 2009, 22:03 Posted By: Shrygue
via Computer and Video Games
Developer Sucker Punch's sweet-looking action game inFamous just got even more intriguing with the unveiling of a 'Karma System'.
A number of the new screens (below) for the PS3-exclusive city-roamer show off the system, which comes into use after the game's city is struck by an explosive disaster that leaves its protagonist Cole sporting super hero-like powers.
"One of the most important aspects of inFamous is its Karma System," says Sony. "Depending on Cole's actions, he consciously shifts into either a Good or Evil Karmic State, and this is more than a superficial change. Nearly every aspect of the game, from the way pedestrians react to Cole, to the powers he can use and upgrade, to Cole's appearance, and even the story, is impacted by Cole's Karma."
Screenshots
To read more of the post and Download, click here!
Join In and Discuss Here
Submit News and Releases Here and Contact Us for Reviews and Advertising Here |
|
|
|
|
« prev
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
next » |
|
|
