News Round-UP! (12/11/2010)

So this is basically i now idea for the news part of the site. Basically i do read a lot of news, especially game development/industry news. So i thought why not do a sorta round-up every Friday? Each Round-up will be utterly personal, on what i feel are they best stories i’ve heard all week. Then showing my opinion on them. So let’s begin  ;)

Story 1 – Harmonix Up for Sale

Viacom (the owner of MTV and youtube adversary) has placed Harmonix, the creator of Rock Band and of the Guitar Hero series AND the recently released Dance central has been placed up for sale. Citing loses of $299 million as the main reason for the sale.
My opinion: A very odd move by viacom, especially with what looks like to be the best launch title of Kinect (Dance Central) looking to be a major hit even more so looking likely to be a big franchise as-well. It also looks like a re-direction of viacoms efforts, it looks like it’s going to partially abandon the industry for awhile as it’s subsidiary MTV Games being pretty much solely placed around Harmonix’s franchises(See here for games released by MTV games, here ).Also to note from an article from Kotaku, quoting that the sale of Harmonix “won’t effect Rock Band after it’s sold nor Dance central”, doesn’t say specifically in the article but my guess is that Viacom holds the rights to both IPs. But with Harmonix’s ability to make great social music games, it still would be a good buy for EA perhaps Activision? (Original Kotaku article here ).

Link to original story

Story 2 – Kinect “Hacked” already

Yes already, it’s not so much “hacked” as the original story has placed it but a set of drivers have been released for Linux showing people using Kinect on there Linux computers and also reports of videos on Youtube of being using their Macs to use Kinect (ironic eh ).
My opinion – No a bad effort at all by the “hackers”, though money was involved so don’t think this was purely a “fun effort”, competitions were set up to see who could produce the best working driver the fastest. It’s hard to say if this will be of any use to developers who may want to use this but at least for PC users it seems that they may soon have a chance to play with it. (Link to that story here with other exciting updates

Link to original story

No surprise, Black Ops storms the charts

No surprise at all here, Black Ops has topped the charts in both the U.S and the U.K and it’s also been reported that Black Ops has surpassed Modern Warfare 2′s day 1 sales with reportedly over $360 million worth of sales already comparing to Modern Warfare’s $310 million. (Quoted from Kotaku here )
My opinion – No surprise really like i stated, i’m pretty much the only guy who doesn’t own this game a shame for me, having zero money. Will have to wait until Christmas it seems for that nice new ps3 slim . But I’ve had mixed reviews from my friends, mostly saying the graphics aren’t as good as Modern Warfare’s and noticing the “slowness” of the gameplay compared to Modern Warfare, but it guess you got to say that Black Ops is it’s OWN game and not to compare it. From Youtube players, they talk about the hit detection being slightly “worse” saying it takes around 5-6 bullets to kill people, whereas Modern Warfare’s 3 bullets. This could be partially true, if referring to the engine used which is the same base-code used in World at War which had this similar slower gameplay and the increased amount of bullets needed to achieve a kill.
The major praise i’ve heard is how “fair” the game is, with it pretty much taking out every advantage people had over other players, i.e sound hoarding, drop shooting, the biggest one being the removal of “stopping power & juggernaut”. But all in all it looks like a rather good game and one i can’t wait to play it  :agree:

Link to original story

This concludes the first Round-UP! Hope you guys like this. Would love to see your thoughts of possible improvements in the comments. *Even though only 3 stories doesn’t look like much here, there is 7 links to stories here! Just like any good book, you include your references .

Site Update

To start, we the staff are sorry for the lack of updates to the site. Especially with the front-page which has been neglected far to much. But that is going to change.
But first we have exciting news. The forums and site have been updated and if you haven’t been following the forums then you’ve missed a lot. And i’d suggest that you sign up and read the latest news over at the forums .

As for the site, were going to slowly move away from the homebrew scene on the PSP and move more towards the middle covering a wider aspect of independent development on mobile and desktop platforms.
We’d like to thank our members for sticking by us and were going to re-pay the favour and make this site great again .