At the end of September Train2Game were at Eurogamer held in London’s Earls Court.
Below is the video from the event which has interviews with several students talking about their experiences with Train2Game and the Microsoft world record winning Game Jam.
Jason Bradbury spoke to The Sun to compare the Microsoft Surface to Apples iPad.
Mr Bradbury said: “It’s a lot less expensive than the iPad, if you compare like for like, and you get a touchscreen version of Windows 8, as well as a traditional Windows operating system.
“It also comes with a very innovative cover-slash-keyboard, which is one of the thinnest I’ve ever used. It’s only 3mm thick, and it really is exceptionally good.
“So what you’re getting is something that’s about the same size as the iPad, which is less expensive, has Office software, a relatively normal desktop operating system, and a keyboard.”
“Whether you’re a road warrior or a student, you don’t want to be touch-typing your 2,500 word essay, or your pitch.”
Jason also claims Microsoft’s tablet has the edge when it comes to design which was the traditional strong point of Apple’s tablets.
He explained: “The iPad used to be elegant and beautiful, but now it’s a little bit dated as a design, it hasn’t really evolved a great deal.”
Jason Bradbury will be in London this week for The Gadget Show live in London which will give people a chance to try out a Nintendo Wii U before its launch on Friday. As well as an array of new technology, The Gadget Show Live is set to feature a theatrical spectacular.
Running from November 30 and December 2, gadget fans can watch the TV star operating flying robots, driving a remote control car around an enormous loop-the-loop, and being towed on a skateboard at 30mph..
More information and tickets can be found at www.gadgetshowlive.net.
For our friends across the sea, it was Thanksgiving weekend last weekend. This is a time for family, being thankful and apparently Steam.
The digital distribution service from Valve managed to hit over 6 million users. The amount of players peaked at around 11:00 PST Sunday with 6,045,912 users logged on. This was probably due to the Autumn Sale and the waves of numerous major releases such as PlanetSide 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, and Call of Duty: Black Ops 2.
That is concurrent logins however, not active game sessions—while games define the vanguard of Steam’s excellence, the numbers rise from simply having the program launched and running.
Looking at the Steam Graph Chart of what people are playing shows a fair spread across PC gaming’s most popular genres. Dota 2′s beta boasted a little over 170,000 simultaneous players late on Saturday, while football-sim Football Manager 2013′s surprising strength topped at around 60,000. On Sunday night Black Ops 2 spiked at 51,000 soldiers, and PlanetSide 2′s fight for Auraxia swelled to 30,000 Steam conscripts last night. Lastly, as many as 15,000 stone-faced killers were concurrently shoving sharp metal objects into various people in Assassin’s Creed 3.
It was only in January that Steam hit a then-high of five million concurrent users. To hit six within the same year shows just how popular the service and gaming is getting.
The creators of Minecraft, Mojang, have developed a version of their hit game which can be loaded onto the Raspberry Pi.
Minecon was held in Paris last weekend and the news was announced that Minecraft: Pi edition will be released.
The Pi edition was developed by reworking the phone based, Minecraft: Pocket Edition. Mojang began work on this after the creators of the Raspberry Pi sent them a bunch of boards to work on a little while back.
The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of stimulating the teaching of basic computer science.
The port will have a revised feature set and support for several programming languages, allowing users to code directly into the game, opening a world of possibilities.
Mojang’s chief officer Owen Hill said “The possibilities are massive,
“You could organise the cheapest LAN party of all time, or use the Pi to learn the fundamentals of programming on a minuscule budget.
“It’s like hacking your way into Minecraft and modifying the game world with code, a bit like being Notch, Jeb, or Nathan, but arguably more fun and less stressful.”
The site states Minecraft: Pi Edition will be available for free “very soon”.
Hitman Absolution sneaks into second place this week following its release with Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2 still sits proudly at the top. Lego LotRs entered at number 6, Udraw Studio: Instant Artist came in at number 13 and Sony’s innovative new game, Book Of Spells, just got in to the top 20 coming in at 20.
Week ending 24 November 2012
| POS. | TITLE | PUBLISHER | LAST WEEK |
|
| 1 | – | CALL OF DUTY: BLACK OPS II | ACTIVISION | 1 |
| 2 | HITMAN ABSOLUTION | SQUARE ENIX | – | |
| 3 | – | FIFA 13 | EA SPORTS | 3 |
| 4 | – | ASSASSIN’S CREED III | UBISOFT | 4 |
| 5 |  |
HALO 4 | MICROSOFT | 2 |
| 6 | LEGO THE LORD OF THE RINGS | WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE | – | |
| 7 | – | JUST DANCE 4 | UBISOFT | 7 |
| 8 | |
SKYLANDERS GIANTS | SKYLANDERS | 5 |
| 9 | |
NEED FOR SPEED MOST WANTED | EA GAMES | 6 |
| 10 |  |
DISHONORED | BETHESDA SOFTWORKS | 14 |
| 11 | – | WWE ’13 | THQ | 11 |
| 12 | |
MOSHI MONSTERS: MOSHLINGS THEME PARK | MIND CANDY | 13 |
| 13 | UDRAW STUDIO: INSTANT ARTIST | THQ | – | |
| 14 | |
RESIDENT EVIL 6 | CAPCOM | 20 |
| 15 | |
FOOTBALL MANAGER 2013 | SEGA | 10 |
| 16 | |
NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. 2 | NINTENDO | 18 |
| 17 | |
THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM | BETHESDA SOFTWORKS | 12 |
| 18 | |
MEDAL OF HONOR: WARFIGHTER | EA GAMES | 19 |
| 19 | F1 2012 | CODEMASTERS | – | |
| 20 | BOOK OF SPELLS | SONY COMPUTER ENT. | – | |
Leisure software charts compiled by Chart Track, (C)2012 UKIE Ltd
Peter Molyneux has announced the next project from 22Cans. He is going back to his early days with a brand new God game.
Peter Molyneux, was the man behind Populas over twenty two years ago and with the game he created a new genre known as God Games which sees you in a god like role overseeing a world you help create. He went on to create games such as Black and White and Dungeon Keeper. Molyneux has now come back to his roots with the next project from Guildford based company 22Cans, Godus.
Godus is the second project to come from 22Cans, the first being Curiosity: What’s inside the cube?. Curiosity far exceeded the expectations of the company, so much so that they had to work thirty six hours straight to boost the servers. Godus will be made using what the company has learned from developing Curiosity.
Godus is an innovative reinvention of Populous and delivers exciting global co-operation, competition, creation and destruction to a whole new generation.
Further game details included are:
The game is being funded by Kickstarter. The company is looking to get £450,000 by December 21. At the time of writing this they are currently at £103,426 with twenty eight days to go. If you would like to pledge to the games development, you can do so here.
22Cans also released a video about the new project which you can watch below
The two crowd-funding efforts for Chris Roberts’ Star Citizen have come to a close, bringing in a combined $6.2m in pledges.
The game’s Kickstarter wrapped up yesterday at $2.1m in funding and over 34,000 backers, added to the $4.1m raised from the already concluded Roberts Space Industry drive. This smashed the old record, previously held by Tim Schafer which earned $3million.
Roberts’ said “I am absolutely elated by the incredible outpouring of support for this project.
“It’s clear that space sim fans have just been waiting for a game like ours to come along and rekindle some of the excitement that’s been missing from PC games and the space sim genre. With the resources that our fans have provided, it means the team will be able to provide more features in Star Citizen and deliver an even better game.
“With all the tools and tech currently available, I can now make a game that really provides gamers with cutting-edge visuals, a highly detailed, immersive world and visceral, heart-pounding combat that only the PC can provide.
In fact, PC gamers don’t need to take a back seat to any other platform. With Star Citizen, I want them to be able to stand up, be counted and completely enjoy all that their PC can deliver.”
Star Citizen’s development schedule has an alpha planned for a years time for backers who met or exceeded the $30 tier.
Stories such as these are incredibly inspirational as it shows that if the game idea is good you can do amazing things. With a good game, the sky is the limit.
Nomad Games have announced that the popular board game, Talisman, will see it’s video game début. It is aiming for launch on PC on the 22nd or 23rd November. It will cost £5.99.
Talisman: The Magical Quest Game is a fantasy themed adventure board game for two to six players, originally designed and produced by Games Workshop and now published by Fantasy Flight Games. The game was first released in 1983 and has gone through several revisions.
The game that launches this month is Talisman: Prologue, a single-player quest-based virtual version of the board game.
Prologue includes 10 characters, ranging from the warrior to the wizard, who each have five quests. Once you complete a character’s set of quests a bigger quest is unlocked. It’s designed as an introduction to the game, with a bigger version, complete with AI, multiplayer and a new set of quests for Prologue, due to launch on smartphones, tablets and PC early 2013.
The quest system is designed to give players a way to experience all the different characters and discover their strengths and weaknesses.
Nomad commercial director Don Whiteford explained “If you’ve got the board game, in order to try out 10 different characters you’re going to have to play the thing 10 times,
“And even then after 10 times you’re probably not fully au fait with what that character can really do strategically.
“The questing system is a great way to get people into the game and let you try stuff out.”
Nomad accepted Games Workshop’s offer to work on Talisman because of the success it had seen others have with video game versions of board games, such as Carcassonne, Catan and Ticket to Ride. In addition to that one of its designers is a huge Talisman fan.
Talisman also has a Steam Greenlight page. Whiteford reckons it has a 50/50 chance of being greenlit on Valve’s community approval platform. Even if it is successful, it could be months before it launches on Steam.
I am personally really looking forward to this game as I have many memories of playing it with my family through my childhood. I have played a demo of the game and it does feel like the board game. I am very happy to see this being released.
Flying Squirrel entertainment has announced that they are working on a five hundred player game based on the American civil war.
The game, Battle Cry of Freedom, is going to be historically accurate. So all of the uniforms, weapons and scenarios will all be historically based on the American Civil War. There is going to be a large variety of player controlled artillery available, like mortars and cannons, each of which can use special ammunition types. There will be an engineer class who can build barricades, trenches and explosives and a musician for when you feel less violent. Lastly, the maps will be entirely destructible when it comes to fences, buildings or whatever is in the way.
In addition they are going to use real war civil war music, all the maps will be historically accurate recreations, there will be a regiment focused system that helps players join up with their unit, there is a goal system that assigns squads with specific objectives like supporting fire for artillery and there will be an engagement mode that is basically a historical objective mode.
Earlier this year Flying Squirrel Entertainment released the multiplayer focused Napoleonic Wars for Mount and Blade: Warband, which sold rather well with around 200,000 sales. With that game they unleashed two hundred players into early 19th century line battles that involved muskets, artillery and a customize-able battlefield.
Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars having two hundred players was pretty hard on their servers, so Flying Squirrel Entertainment has quite the challenge in front of them to make five hundred player battles without all of the lag. However, they are using a different engine this time around and they are entirely focused optimizing the game so it won’t needlessly load what the player cannot see. They are already reporting successful tests with up to three hundred and fifty players, so they have plenty of time to work on getting five hundred players to be manageable.
They plan to release the game in a year but, unlike Napoleonic Wars, this standalone title is being crowd funded by the fans and they are taking donations on their website.
Cliff Bleszinski, better known as CliffyB, has received a mysterious package in a hotel room he is currently staying at. The package contained a phone with a Ubisoft background and one phone number in it. CliffyB told his twitter fans that he would ring the number saying “I do have a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me an asset for people like you.”
What started off as a breeding ground for indie titles now seems to be the only form of submission to the digital distribution service, Steam. This is a bold move by Valve as it means not only the bedroom developers but also the big hitters will have to submit their game to Greenlight.
Halo 4 earned $220 million on the day it launched. This isn’t quite as much as Halo 3 or reach but it is still an impressive figure. Microsoft reckons its juggernaut franchise is on track to hit its $300 million global sales target within its first week, thrusting lifetime sales for the Halo franchise passed the $3.38 billion mark.
Of course the other big release lately is Call Of Duty: Black Ops 2. The game is Amazon’s most preordered game ever beating last year’s Modern Warfare 3. Amazon said it “shattered” the previous record. The company wouldn’t reveal any further details on the launch or preorders of Black Ops 2.
Valve president Gabe Newell has has revealed Valve is working on a next generation successor to the Source Engine. Newell also confirmed the Source 2 engine would be completely new, instead of just another update for nearly ten year-old tech. Source made its debut in Counter-Strike: Source and Half-Life 2 in 2004.
Mass Effect 4 will run on DICE’s Frostbite engine, the latest version of which was used in Battlefield 3. There also seems to be a lot of interest in being able to play as different alien races, similar to the style of Dragon Age:Origins.
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