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You Rock Guitar: From Games to the Garage to Beyond
Merging the needs and fantasies of musicians and gamers alike, Inspired Instruments’ You Rock Guitar offers a new way of thinking about the multiple uses of new technology. A hybrid digital “guitar” and gaming platform that can be plugged into the video-game console and used as a controller for all your fave rock star games, it also serves as an instrument that can be connected to your computer or amplifier for recording or practicing.
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Potential Console Killer OnLive to Go Live June 17
OnLive, a streaming video game service that, if properly implemented, could threaten traditional console makers like Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo, announced Wednesday that it will launch on June 17.
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The Making and Unmaking of Infinity Ward
The implosion of Infinity Ward, one of the best videogame studios ever founded, is the latest chapter in a long saga intertwined with the history of intense combat video games.
A lawsuit filed by the studio’s co-founders last week against parent company Activision Blizzard was a sad milestone at a studio that has come to be cherished by millions of hardcore game fans.
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Review: Final Fantasy XIII
Final Fantasy XIII’s gimmick is that it pares down the gameplay to a few basic elements: Turn-based battles against mobs of fantastic creatures and elaborate, movielike story sequences. But this time, Square Enix finally threw the baby out with the bathwater: The things that make RPGs feel so different from other games — the sense of a grand, nonlinear adventure and the rising and falling action of an open-ended world — are gone.
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Battlefield Logistics: A Bad Company 2 Interview
The Battlefield series seemed like a strange fit for consoles, given its rich heritage on the PC side — that is, it did seem like a strange fit, until Battlefield: Bad Company came out and became one of Electronic Arts’ larger hits of this generation.
Here, senior producer for the series at EA’s Stockholm-based DICE studio, Patrick Bach, discusses how the philosophy behind the series has evolved as it has made the transition to consoles — and how that transition has fundamentally shifted the way the developers think of the series as a whole.
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Sony Calls PlayStation Phone Speculation
The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that Sony is involved in a pair of intriguing products: first, a phone that could download and play PlayStation games, as well as an iPad-like tablet device.
PCMag.com phone analyst Sascha Segan tends to dismiss unsourced stories – which, unfortunately, are both the genesis of scoops as well as rumors that are later proven to be unfounded. In the WSJ’s case, the paper’ is banking on its reputation.
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Review: Battlefield: Bad Company 2
Military-based action games have become the first-person-shooter staple thanks to franchises like Call of Duty. We’ve seen attempts to capture the same experience before, but Battlefield: Bad Company seems to do the best job at tackling the genre with its own take on things.
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Metastudy: Violent Video Games Raise Aggression
A study aggregating results from 130 research reports on more than 130,000 subjects worldwide has more breadth than most of its predecessors regarding the effects of violent video games on youths. The conclusion of the metastudy: Exposure to violent video games directly causes increased aggressive thoughts and behavior, and decreased empathy and prosocial behavior in the youths exposed to them. The team says these study conclusions hold true across geographies, cultures, and study methods.
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Is Sony Playing a Dangerous Game with PS3 Customers?
The recent outage that crippled PlayStation 3 consoles for millions of gamers didn’t seem to faze Sony management very much. While frustrated players tried to figure out why their systems wouldn’t work — losing time, trophies and tempers — Sony’s response was lackadaisical. Sony apparently doesn’t understand that we’re now living in a social universe, and the balance of power between companies and customers has shifted.
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Facebook-Xbox 360 Overlap Games Launch
You play a game on Facebook. I’ll play one on Xbox 360. Our winnings will contribute to the same side of a virtual reenactment of World War I. Behold, the first Facebook-360 gaming link, launching this week.
About 11,000 Facebook users are playing Match Defense: Toy Soldiers, a Microsoft Games Studios game quietly launched a couple of weeks ago. The game will link to Toy Soldiers (pictured up top), an Xbox Live Arcade game that launched Wednesday.
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