Alpha Protocol Hits Oct. 6 [Sega]

Spy role-playing game Alpha Protocol will be hitting the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on Oct. 6, according to Sega.

I took the game for a spin during the lead up to E3 and was quite impressed with how well the game blended the best elements of shooter, action and adventure. I'm hoping my time playing the final game will live up to my new, heightened expectations.

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Telltale engine doesn't support PlayStation ...
yet

Telltale has been churning out some fantastic adventure games as of late. The team responsible for Sam & Max, Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People and Wallace & Gromit has found its games on both WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade. But why no love for the PlayStation Network? It's "easy," explains Dave Grossman to The Guardian. "Our engine doesn't run on the PlayStation yet."

We'd like to think that the developers are working on making the engine that powers these games fully multi-platform. We don't see why Telltale couldn't handle the PS3, especially considering the success found by the folks behind Penny Arcade Adventures.

Telltale engine doesn't support PlayStation ... yet originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Lets Tap (Juniors)

Let’s tap is at first a curious game.  It comes with two cardboard boxes that you sit your[...]

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http://ready-up.net/reviews/lets-tap-juniors/

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Zoo Escape

Zoo Escape is another new type of room escape game from Addicting Games. Prison is demeaning, even for aquatic birds. Help those penguins make a break for freedom! Use arrow keys for escaping. Good...

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Kirbys Dream Land 2 Retro Review: Gray Puffballs
and Furry Friends

For those of you too young to remember Nintendo once launched some of their big name franchises on their handhelds, the first of which was their lovable powderpuff Kirby. His first Game Boy game "Kirby's Dream Land" hit stores in August of 1992, whereas he didn't make his console debut ...

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http://www.truegameheadz.com/blogheadz/kirbys-dream-land-2-retro-review-gray-puff
balls-and-furry-friends/

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A week of silence

It's been a hell of a week. It's going to be a hell of a weekend, and I kick off next week with another talk at another venue for another large bunch of people. I've barely had time to kill...

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http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Wonderland/~3/obZhKVCV4jk/a-week-of-silence.html

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Three new gameplay trailers for Madballs in Babo
Invasion

Madballs in Babo Invasion is an upcoming XBLA title where you'll be playing as murderous disgusting looking ball demon things. I brought you a preview of for Madballs yesterday and it's actually a pretty fun game. It's promising to be one of the deepest experiences on XBLA thanks to all the features that developer Playbrains has put into it.

While previews are nice, videos are always better and we have three videos for Madballs for you all to check out. Find out what Invasion and Avatar Attack mode are all about and see just how hectic battles can get after the break.

This trailer shows you how Invasion mode works. Both teams put down their tiles and their bases before the match and the game will generate the map instantly. Then each team has to destroy the other team's base.

This just shows off a few battles from the skirmish and CTF mode. One thing I didn’t mention in my preview yesterday was that you have two viewing objects you can switch between. You can have the camera follow you in a third person view or switch to an over the top camera view.

And this is the mode that everyone has been talking about. It’s the game’s Avatar Attack mode. Avatars are converted into a rolling head of doom and can go after other Avatar heads.

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Rumor: Skate 3 in the works

Apparently EA is working on a sequel to Skate 2, if the Epicly Trife twitter is to be believed. Epicly Trife (NSFW) is a site dedicated to skating, and its twitter account said the following: "I just got told 'tonight we gotta celebrate,' one of the bro's got offered to be in SKATE 3." By no means a confirmation, we're still excited, as Skate 2 was not only a great sequel, but pretty much the best skating sim around. Plus, it's much easier to get up after falling down four flights of stairs in a video game, as gravity is a much more harsh mistress in real life.

We've put in word to EA for comment, but with almost everyone taking the day off today, don't hold your breath for a response. We sure aren't.

[Via Kotaku]

Rumor: Skate 3 in the works originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How To Name A Video Game Studio — And
Hopefully Get It Right [Feature]

The decision to give something a name, whether that be your struggling rock band, your first dog, your only child, or your game development studio is no simple task. For better or worse, you might be stuck with it.

Names carry weight. They give a group of people and the products they create an identity. For companies like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft, Sega and others, those names are associated with memories, even if those words have little meaning.

Sega, for example, is simply a portmanteau of the words "service" and "games." Nintendo, officially, a direct translation from the Japanese to mean "leave luck to heaven." And Sony, well, that's a fabricated word, a twist on the Latin word "sonus" and the familiar "sonny."

But how did video game developers decide upon the likes of Insomniac, Naughty Dog, Harmonix, and the recently re-christened Visceral Games? And what the heck is a Capybara, anyway? We asked game development studio founders to explain themselves.

The studio that started us wondering just how one settles on an identity was the young Capybara Games, a Toronto-based independent group of initially a dozen game developers. The team most recently had a double showing at E3 2009, with Critter Crunch for the PlayStation Network and Might & Magic Clash of Heroes for the Nintendo DS.

The studio is named for the world's largest rodent, the capybara, a relative of the guinea pig that can weigh more than 200 pounds. How exactly does one decide to identify oneself with a giant South American mammal?

"Unfortunately, with 12 very different opinions on what makes a cool name, coming to a unanimous decision was impossible," Nathan Vella, Capybara co-founder and Art Director said. "We bitched at each other for far too long before deciding on a fair and democratic process. Names of varying quality, from ?surprisingly awesome' to ?literally the worst name ever' were tossed out by members of the group, and each person chose their Top 3 from the pool."

No one, however, decided the name "Capybara" was "surprisingly awesome."

"In the end, Capybara was unanimously everyone's second or third choice? and so it won the name election," Vella said. "It was the name everyone thought was 'ok' but didn't really want to win. That's democracy for you... you're not picking the best, you're picking the least-worst."

There was an unintended metaphor in Capybara's "least-worst" choice, Vella says.

"At this point we had not yet realized the irony or accuracy that we were naming our 'guinea pig' of a company after the world's largest guinea pig. In hindsight we totally should have caught on to that earlier."

The developer informally calls itself Capy, as seen in its logo. But it employs a "modern day mustache hero" known as Hank Hudson as its official mascot, not a capybara—though Vella jokes it has flirted with taking an Argentinean agency up on its offer to open a capybara farm.

Another developer that didn't go with its first choice for a studio name was Resistance and Ratchet & Clank developers Insomniac Games.

Before the Burbank, California area developer shipped its first game—the first-person shooter Disruptor for the original PlayStation—it went by a trio of other names: Planet X Software, Outzone Software and Xtreme Software. That last name almost stuck, as the company had already incorporated itself as Xtreme prior to announcing Disruptor. Then it found out someone else, a database company, was already using it.

"We only had a few weeks to come up with something new," says Ted Price, president of what we now call Insomniac Games. "So we hung a whiteboard in the office and began writing down everything we could think of. There must have been 200 names on the list."

Some of the rejects? Ragnarok, Black Sun, Ice-9 Games and Blue Moon Turtle.

"Seriously, Blue Moon Turtle," Price admitted. "However, every name we liked was already being used by someone else. We actually got permission from Kurt Vonnegut's estate to use Ice-9 but someone else was already using it without permission."

Faced with the prospect of launching Disruptor anonymously, a last minute suggestion arrived—Insomniac.

"It was one of those rare moments when everyone looked at each other and said 'Yeah, that works,'" according to Price. "It definitely described us at the time. We sure weren't sleeping much."

From our discussions with game development studio founders, it seems like the best piece of advice they can impart about naming one's studio is to check early (and often) to see if someone else is using your descriptor of choice.

Such is the case with Harmonix, creators of Guitar Hero, Rock Band and, when it first formed, "music software technology."

Eran Egozy, Harmonix co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, says that he and general manager Alex Rigopulos debated over a key aspect of the developer's name, whether to spell it Harmonics or Harmonix.

"The 'ix' ending won," Egozy says. "Hey, it was the mid-90s." To be clear, the company's full name is, in Egozy's words, the "somewhat awkward" Harmonix Music Systems.

"Unfortunately, we did not check to see that harmonix.com was already taken when we named the company," Egozy says. "So our domain name is harmonixmusic.com. If we had checked, maybe the company would be called something else now."

One video game maker that did get an opportunity to change its identity was Dead Space and Dante's Inferno developer Visceral Games, once known by the more sterile EA Redwood Shores or, unfortunately and informally, EARS.

Glen Schofield, general manager of the newly re-branded Visceral Games explains.

"There were a bunch of names we threw away," he says, culling hundreds of ideas and concepts solicited from Redwood Shores team members. "I got tons of great ones but I really wanted a name that had a real meaning for our studio. Visceral just worked perfect as it is a term we use all the time to describe the feeling we want in our combat. It captured our more mature or action type games we make."

The developer's very web site is behind an age-gate, highlighting its mature focus.

The name change had support from the top, with president of EA Games label Frank Gibeau and CEO John Riccitiello supporting a more autonomous model, already seen at individually named EA developers like Criterion, BioWare and Pandemic.

"They welcomed the idea of studios having a distinct identity," Schofield says. "Once I mentioned it to Frank he kept asking me when we were announcing the name. He wanted it changed right away, it was pretty funny. But obviously once you have a name you then have months of creative and legal wrangling before you can go live with it."

Visceral's coming out party, as it were, was a little different from start up studios who sometimes choose their names under the gun. It had time to plan, hire an outside brand agency, and build a style guide for the new identity. Then it went public with a studio-wide meeting, press release, site launch and a tasty visceral treat.

"We painted the walls and hung up mounted artwork from our games," Schofield says. "We had posters, decals and a shirt for everyone. There was even a huge Visceral skull cake waiting. It's the only time we've ever had to have a cake maker sign an NDA!"

And that was that. "When the meeting was over the entire place was now changed and we were ready to move on as Visceral Games."

That sense of identity is something that Uncharted developers Naughty Dog share, with employees (positively) referred to as "the Dogs." The explanation for that choice is much simpler than some of the other stories we'd heard.

The company, formerly known as JAM—hey, it was the mid-80s—when it shipped its first game Ski Crazed for the Apple II, was changed to Naughty Dog the next decade. Founders Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin were "dog lovers," with Rubin often taking his puppy to work.

That continues today, with current co-presidents Evan Wells and Christophe Balestra giving their dogs a second home at the Naughty Dog offices.

And the names of their dogs? Pogo and Trumpet. How those names came to be, we'll just have to wonder.

[Photo Credit]

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Platinum Art Sandbox: Tutorial Video

Platinum Arts Sandbox - Free 3D Video Game Maker and World Creation Software - Tutorial 1

Read The Full Article:
http://www.gamerchip.com/platinum-art-sandbox-tutorial-video/

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