If you’re looking to kill a few hours around the office, Atari has the answer for you. They’re commemorating the 30th anniversary of Missile Command with a flash-based remake, available free of charge.
Available over at OMGPOP, the remake adds in online cooperative multiplayer, bosses and unit upgrades. Not a bad way to celebrate a classic game, all things considered.
The remake is available now.
Making games is hard. Computer languages take years to master, and no one person can realistically create their own title from scratch anymore. Well, unless they’re Jonathan Mak. But Nintendo seems set to change that with its next WarioWare game, WarioWare D.I.Y.
At the Nintendo Media Summit, the company showed off the game, and walked me through the stage making process. Unlike, say, LittleBigPlanet, the crux of DIY lies in its creation tools. They aren’t just an addition for people who want to dig further into the game — they are the game. But Nintendo obviously learned some lessons from Sony’s creative playground: The tutorials (and there are a lot of them) gently introduce you to all the concepts that make-up a WarioWare “micro game.” From simple, “when this object touches another object, you win” to, “When you tap this object, it start swinging in an arc and allows you to stick a finger in a nose.” If you’ve seen it in a WarioWare game already, you can recreate it in DIY.
This month, we look back 20 years to February 1990. Nintendo was still dominating the industry, launching no less than two landmark titles this month alone. The toy industry tried desperately to win back some of the revenue being lost to the resurgance in videogames. Sega and NEC were slowly but surely worming their way into the market, and getting some crucial major media coverage by way of Popular Mechanics. And finally, the pool of “unlicensed” NES publishers — companies producing games for Nintendo’s system without its approval — became a little more crowded with the introduction of ShareData to the market.
The Plumber Has Landed
To be frank, the MotoGP franchise has been in a bit of a downward spiral lately. After the terrific MotoGP 2, the series then simply spun into a cycle of rehashing old ideas. Capcom has recognized the foul-up, and started to clean things up a bit by taking feedback from the community. Additionally, Capcom has placed Monumental Games (a studio founded by ex-Climax employees) in charge of getting things back on track.
Personally, I haven’t played much MotoGP lately because of the earlier-mentioned dip in form, so I came into a recent demonstration of MotoGP 09/10 with minimal enthusiasm — and was pleasantly surprised. There are a few new mechanics in the racing itself, front and rear breaking is a welcomed addition, and the new reputation system seems to be a nice way of gauging whether or not you’re performing terribly. Even though I only had a limited amount of hands-on time, the below strategy for revitalizing the series seems very promising.
If you live in the Salt Lake City area and have some experience developing games, Electronic Arts might have a job for you. The publishing giant has announced that they are expanding their Salt Lake operation, moving to a new a studio and making several new hires ahead of working on a “groundbreaking” project.
“Utah is a good place for us for a number of reasons, the first being that EA already has a successful operation in Salt Lake City called EA Salt Lake,” executive producer Ben Bell told Industry Gamers.
“This new project will tap into the strong team that is already on the ground in Salt Lake City, and we’ll be hiring for key leadership positions. Salt Lake City already has a strong game development community and the base of talent here is deep. Historically, the game development scene in Salt Lake goes back several decades, and now there are hundreds of people in the region working on games.”
With only about two months to go before Super Street Fighter IV launches in North America, it seems about time to start talking about pre-order bonuses. Capcom is answering the call, offering a plethora of items ranging from DLC to “Super Thumb Fighters.”
The DLC is a “Super Classic Costume” pack which contains alternate looks for Dhalsim, Guile, Blanka, Gen and Fei Long. Basically, if you’ve ever wanted Fei Long to wear a Kato mask, then check out BestBuy.com and Amazon.
In the meantime, GameStop is offering “Super Thumb Fighters.” There will be four sets of characters available, all of which replace the traditional thumb war with a Street Fighter bout.
Sega hopes to rejuvenate their flagship franchise with Sonic the Hedgehog 4, but one group in particular isn’t on board: deranged Sonic fans. Destructoid discovered an internet petition by a sect of gamers who believe — based entirely on the exceedingly brief footage that’s been leaked — that their money would be better spent on downloadable versions of the original Sonic.
That’s right — they intend on punishing Sega by throwing money at them. Here’s their spiel in all its unedited glory:
“Fans of the sonic series are like most sega fans, we want their old games brought back to the glory days when sega was pretty much the power in video games. Seeing the gameplay of sonic 4 has made many of us realize what we already knew, Sonic 4 will simply not be anywhere near as good as the original sonic games. Either way, We will decide to finally show sega what the fans truly want. A real sonic 4, as long as sonic 4 stays the way it is, we will not buy it, we will in fact buy sonic 1 on release in protest of sonic 4, till we end up with a re tool, or change, we want sonic in hd, not sonic RUSH HD. We will not buy a future sonic game, till we get a true successor to sonic 1/2″
Whatever your opinion on Sonic’s upcoming 2D adventure, you’d be hard-pressed to find much logic in their proposal. Never mind the fact that, by definition, these Sonic fans have almost certainly played through the original Genesis game already — probably on several platforms. And what message, exactly, will Sega get if people march in droves to buy the nearly 20-year-old Sonic the Hedgehog instead of Sonic 4? It’s sure to be about as effective as shopping at Sam’s Club because you’re boycotting Walmart.
Make no mistake — even at their most average, the Total War games are thrilling experiences. Though the move to the musket age in Empire was accompanied by some unfortunate AI glitches, it still won me over with the simple crack of cannons and flash of steel as my lancers rode down hapless conscripts. And welcome changes to the diplomatic and economic models overshadowed my own misgivings at the time.
But in a huge pseudo-sequel like Napoleon: Total War, you can’t just give Creative Assembly credit for maintaining the thrilling sights you’re already familiar with. This isn’t really a new setting; most of the game is the same, and some things that were so important to Empire have been pushed aside. For example, as important as control of the seas was in the Napoleonic Wars and in Empire, Napoleon is all about big land battles — on some of the campaign maps, naval engagement is frankly impossible. So the elaborate overseas trade system from Empire is less important, and all those pretty (if unwieldy) sea battles are more irrelevant to the final outcome.
Professional guesser extraordinaire Michael Pachter has said some silly things in the past, but no matter how frequently his prophesies get called out after the fact, the Wedbush Morgan analyst rarely publicly acknowledges any miscalculations on his part. Hindsight’s 20/20, of course, but even Pachter himself looked back at his recent $50 Natal prediction and thought it sounded a bit off.
“I probably aimed too low with my $50 Natal comment, as I’m sure that consumers will come to believe that the product and software has a lot of value. That means to me that Microsoft may try to price higher than I guessed on the Pach Attack segment,” Pachter reasoned in an interview with Industry Gamers. “Regardless, if consumers think that Microsoft is providing a lot of value with Natal, it could be priced higher.”
With that out of the way, how does Pachter think the latest motion control options will affect the market? Pachter explains what he thinks will go down:
“The more they and Sony charge, the lower unit sales of the competing controllers will be, and the less they charge, the higher. I don’t see either expanding the GAMING audience, but do see them expanding the user base beyond the core gamer in the household. I do not expect the multi-user household to buy a significantly higher number of games, but think that once these other household members are introduced to the PS3 and 360, they may begin to enjoy the many features of each, and are more likely to justify movie downloads, joining Netflix, or whatever is planned in the future, as the consoles are more approachable with motion controls.”
Rumors of a successor to the Nintendo Wii have been flying around for some time now, not the least because last year saw a slight downturn in sales following previous record-breaking years. According to Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway though, the platform’s install base still has plenty of room to grow.
Speaking with GameSpot during yesterday’s Nintendo Media Summit, Dunaway suggested that gamers shouldn’t be holding their breath for the next generation of the Wii, “I don’t think it’ll be anytime soon. Even though our install base is, at this point, five million households larger than the PS2 install base was at the same point in its life cycle, it still has a lot of room to grow.”
She continued, “If you think PS2, there’s been about 50 million sold — Wii close to 28 million sold — so it says to me there’s still a big audience out there that we can access with Wii.”
