AIAS Award Winners 10:12 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: General News
(12 comments)
Dave is over in Vegas for the DICE summit. Right now he's at the AIAS awards and is passing along the results as the winners are being announced. Here's what we have so far:
Best Animation - Gears of War
Best Art Direction - Gears of War
Best Handheld Game - Brain Age
Best Cellular Game - Orcs and Elves
Lifetime Achievement Award - Minoru Arakawa and Howard Lincoln
Outstanding Achievement in Soundtrack - Guitar Hero 2
Outstanding Achievement in Original Music Composition - Loco Roco
Outstanding Achievement in Sound Design - Call of Duty 3
Family Game of the Year - Guitar Hero 2
Children's Game of the Year - Locoroco
Outstanding Character Performance Male - Marcus Phoenix, Gears of War
Outstanding Character Performance Female - Leafos, Viva Pinata
Outstanding Achievement in Story and Character Development - Zelda: Twilight Princess
Role-playing Game of the Year - Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Outstanding Achievement in Gameplay Engineering - Wii
Sports
Best Online Game Play - Gears of Wars
Downloadable Game of the Year - Bookworm Adventures
Outstanding Achivement in Visual Engineering - Gears of War
Outstanding Achievement in Game Design - Wii Sports
Racing Game of the Year - Burnout Revenge
Outstanding Innovation in Gaming - Wii Sports
Hall of Fame Award - (the late) Dani Bunten Berry
Fighting Game of the Year - Fight Night Round 3
Action/Adventure Game of the Year - Gears of War
Game of the Year Sports - Tony Hawk Project 8
Simulation Game of the Year - Microsoft Flight Simulator X
Strategy Game of the Year - Company of Heroes
First-person Action Game of the Year - Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
Massively Multiplayer/Persistent World Game of the Year - Guild Wars: Nightfall
Computer Game of the Year - Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Console Game of the Year - Gears of War
Game of the Year - Gears of War
Update - The list is now complete.
A Big Huge Xbox Live! Arcade Game 06:26 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Real-Time Strategy
(7 comments)
The guys at Big Huge Games (Rise of Nations & Legends) are working on an Xbox Live! Arcade game called Catan, which is expected to ship early this year. Catan places the player in the role of colonists on the newly discovered imaginary island of the same name. Through strategy and trading, 3-4 players vie for control over the valuable territory and resources of this uncharted wilderness. With ten million copies already sold, "Settlers of Catan" is the rare board game that appeals to casual players as much as hardcore enthusiasts.
Catan for Xbox Live Arcade continues the tradition of great gameplay and easy accessibility. Players compete online with their friends from around the world or choose from up to 6 dynamic computer personalities. The game features a robust AI developed in a landmark collaboration between Klaus Teuber and Brian Reynolds, designer of Civilization II and Rise of Nations.
"I'm a great fan of Settlers of Catan, having personally played at the tournament level. We jumped at the opportunity to create a version for the millions of gamers on the Xbox 360," Brian Reynolds says of the title in development. "The design is so elegant you can teach someone to play in minutes and then spend years trying to master it. With our expertise in interface design and artificial intelligence, it seemed like a natural fit for the project!"
Klaus Teuber, creator of the original Settlers of Catan boardgame, had this to say about the collaboration with Big Huge Games: "I had no doubts that Brian Reynolds would do a great job, and the first version of the game exceeded my highest expectations. The AI is so clever that I even lost several games in a row! Hands down, this game for the Xbox Live Arcade is an amazing achievement".
The Witcher Release Plans 06:21 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Role-Playing
(2 comments)
Valhalla.pl has some release plan scoops for Atari & CD Projekt's upcoming RPG, The Witcher. Citing a print interview in Polish business daily, they aim to sell a lot of copies:
"We want to have 750 thousand copies at launch. The game will simultaneously go to stores in Japan, the US, the EU and Russia. We're working on 11 localized versions. Our goal is to sell 1 million copies in the first year" - said Kicinski.
Kicinski's statement might mean that The Witcher will be further delayed. Currently it's slated for an early 2007 release, though it's very unlikely that the date will be kept. Both Kicinski and Iwinski refrained from commenting exactly when the game will appear in stores, hinting only that it will happen this year.
NVIDIA Adopts Monthly Driver Releases 06:10 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- hardware: NVIDIA
(15 comments)
Taking a page out of ATI's book (well, AMD now), NVIDIA plans on having regularly scheduled monthly driver releases instead of random, sporatic offerings. Thanks Beyond 3D. Here's a snip: With all that information put aside, we really wanted to know what NVIDIA was willing to tell us about their upcoming driver development plans. While we know that GeForce 7-series cards currently can't run SLI under Windows Vista, when will users that shelled out their hard earned dough for this hardware get to put it to use?
NVIDIA told me that they planning to start releasing a new version of their Forceware driver for Vista at least once every month. I say at least because Diercks said that if they find several game fixes or bugs that are substantial they may have intermittent releases as well to help appease the gaming masses. This move is very similar to the driver development cycle that ATI's Catalyst drivers have been in for a couple of years now, with updates about once a month. Having this type of regular schedule should help NVIDIA users feel more at ease about their purchases knowing that a fixed time length is ahead of them to await another software release that could address whatever issue that ails them. They also reveal the drivers themes for the next few months: February is "achieve a WHQL certification on Windows." March is "full support for SLI on the GeForce 7-series" and for April, "DirectX 10 SLI support."
Mark Rein on Vista and other Issues 06:00 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: General News
(4 comments)
Firing Squad shot up an interview with Epic's Mark Rein who chats a little bit about Gears of War post-release support, UT3, and Microsoft's Vista launch:
Despite his feeling about the 64-bit versus 32-bit version of Vista, Rein still feels Vista will be worth getting once all the kinks are worked out. "There are some great new features in Vista and they're doing things to make the experience better for gamers so it is certainly something I'm planning to have in the next computer I purchase." After the launch of Windows Vista on January 30, we followed up with Rein and asked him what he thought of some of the hardware web sites that claim some games performed significantly slower on Vista than XP and his response was, "Users should make sure the software and hardware they want to use works and performs to their expectations on Vista before making the switch but by mid-summer I would hopefully expect most of the major kinks will be worked out. If you buy games within the Games for Windows program you should feel fairly certain they've been well tested on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista. I think Microsoft is doing a good job with that program and I believe it will help raise the profile and quality level of PC gaming."
Pete Hines Interview 05:50 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Role-Playing
(0 comments)
Shacknews has a five-page interview Bethesda's Pete Hines who discusses a number of topics ranging from the upcoming Oblivion expansion, to the PS3 version, Fallout 3 and some more general stuff as well. Here's a pinch of the Fallout 3 portion of it: Shack: So you're pretty far into development [of Fallout 3], I'd think?
Pete Hines: We're a fairly good ways away. Projects reach different stages of development based on how many people are working on them. You can have eight people working on a project for a year and a half and still consider yourself in preproduction just because they spend so much time speccing out what they want to do and how it's going to be implemented. But yeah, we've got a full team working on it now. Of course, as we said with all of our stuff, we don't believe in showing it or even talking about it until we can say, "This is what we're going to do." That time is not that far off.
Bethesda Lore 05:31 pm
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Role-Playing
(2 comments)
The Escapist (who have been pumping out some pretty good stuff lately) has a new story up called "Bethesda: The Right Direction" that looks at the storied history (and future) of Bethesda Softworks. But even though Bethesda has the chops to make an open-ended RPG dripping with carve-your-own-path potential, history has proven that it's not easy capturing Fallout's humor and charm. Howard, a guy who's done a good job picking up on The Elder Scrolls' nuances, isn't too worried.
"Like I was talking about before, with sequels, you have to define the experience the first one had and stay true to it," he said. "I think the first Fallout's tone is brilliant, but then they start to drift in the sequel and subsequent games. When it comes to humor, I'm very anti 'jokes' in games. Most designers try too hard to tell a joke, and it just doesn't work. I think good humor for Fallout is dry, almost satirical. Like getting your leg blown off, blood starts spraying all over the place and you get the little [PIPBoy] interface image giving you the thumbs up - I find that funny. Horrible situations juxtaposed against cartoon mascots. But that's just me.
TES4: Oblivion - Shivering Isles Preview 03:30 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Role-Playing
(14 comments)
In the not-too-distant past, we spent a few hours playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Shivering Isles and lived to tell the tale. Here's a taste: It's apparent that Bethesda has put a whole lot of thought into the characters you'll meet in Shivering Isles. Some are outright crazy, some seem rather normal—but without exception, their personalities are turned up to 11. After getting past the Gatekeeper I get to meet one of the most outrageous of them all, Lord Sheogorath himself, the Lord over Shivering Isles. Sheogorath introduces himself in the following manner: "I'm so happy I could tear out your intestines and strangle you with them!" Further along in the dialogue he extends his fixation as he ruminates about skipping rope with intestines. Yum.
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (PS3) Preview 03:00 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Consoles: PS3
(25 comments)
Yesterday, Bethesda was in town to show off The Playstation 3 version of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion which is coming along rather nicely. Graphics aren't quite as good as a super high-end PC, but are better than the 360 version. It also comes with Knights of the Nine, which is a nice touch as well. The rendering quality looked very smooth, and in some spots it seemed richer than the Xbox 360 version. Pete Hines, our Bethesda host, attributed this to a new shader the developers are using that blends higher-quality close textures with the lower-quality distant textures. Effects looked smooth when we had our mage cast a volley of fire bolts across the star-filled night sky above the Imperial City. Later on, we picked up on a small hitch where some horizontal seams appeared about an inch apart when we looked closely at a hillside. However, the problem only seemed to happen at this particular location and we could not duplicate it elsewhere.
Hellgate London Screenshots 02:15 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Action / Roleplaying
(4 comments)
Three sexy new screenshots of Hellgate London, Flagship's upcoming DX10 action/RPG:
(Click to Enlarge!)
  
Hardware & Tech Nuggets 01:45 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- hardware: General News
(0 comments)
RPG Vault Goodness 01:41 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: Role-Playing
(0 comments)
War Rock Interview
From Dream Execution Technologies and regional publisher K2, an evolving online title with persistent characters - Includes seven exclusive screenshots
Game Reviews 01:29 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- Games: General News
(0 comments)
In Other News... 01:15 am
- Robert 'Apache' Howarth
- In-House: In Other News...
(45 comments)
Sorry for the slightly late update. I was building one of those big-ass super cannons in Supreme Commander and it literally took 40 minutes. Crazy stuff when it's up and running though. I think it had more kills than my entire army.
Today's question is from Groovecat2, who asks:
Name a game that was poorly rated or dissed by the masses, but you're embarrassed to admit you really liked?
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