Blizzard gave The Make-A-Wish Foundation 50% of proceeds from the sale of Pandaren Monk pets in World of Warcraft, adding up to a $1.1 million donation. Fifteen Foundation kids also got an inside look at WoW, courtesy of Blizzard.
The Pandaren Monk was one of two pets introduced to WoW late last year at $10 a pop. Once summoned, the Monk follows the player everywhere and returns any /bows he receives. Sales of the pet between November and December 31, 2009 were used to calculate the Make-A-Wish donation — which means that Blizzard sold 220,000 Panderan Monks in that time frame.
Here’s what Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime had to say of WoW’s generosity in the official press release:
“We’ve had a long relationship with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, and we’re proud to support the priceless work they do for children. This donation also reflects the spirit and generosity of our players – their enthusiasm for World of Warcraft and for supporting a good cause made this possible.”
At DICE’s first keynote session, Disney Interactive Entertainment president Stephen Wadsworth revealed the company’s direction this year, and the new games that will bring them there.
Stephen Wadsworth, the president of the Disney Interactive Media Group closed the first day of DICE 2010 with a keynote about his company’s evolving audience and the games being made to satiate them.
Wadsworth described the new audience currently consuming its interactive products. Today’s audience consists of master multi-taskers, media sponges, multiple platform users (including what Wadsworth dubbed “PlayStation Arc,” adding more fuel to that fire) and seamless communicators who are in immediate need of content, but also willing to share. This has led to a change in the way the company works to earn money from them, moving the traditional “Acquire, Monetize, Engage” dynamic to one where customers are brought in with engaging products, then given the opportunity to pay for the product via premium content or subscriptions. However, the core Disney values are still at the center products, as Wadsworth stated “Story and characters form the basis and heart of our products today.” In order to prove this, Wadsworth went through the long list of licenses the company, including Toy Story 3, Pirates of the Carribean: Armada of the Damned, Tron Evolution, and Epic Mickey. Wadsworth also brought up Disney’s recent acquisition of comic book company Marvel, providing more proof that Disney may start publishing superhero games sooner rather than later.
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Capcom’s highly anticipated sci-fi shooter will officially be blasting its ways onto store shelves on May 18th, 2010, and it’s bringing along a few guests to help take down the Akrid.
Capcom’s highly anticipated sci-fi shoot-em-up Lost Planet 2 found an official release date at Microsoft’s X10 media event in San Francisco, slated to hit store shelves on May 18th, 2010 for the PC, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360.
Gamers have already found themselves equally thrilled and confused with the follow-up to action-packed 2007 title, especially since Capcom let slip that Gears of War’s Marcus Fenix and Dom Santiago would be making cameo appearances. Also appearing is legendary Resident Evil 5 mastermind Albert Wesker, who will be bringing his own unique brand of sunglasses-themed mayhem to the Akrids.
Just a few days ago Dante’s Inferno didn’t have much more to show for itself outside of an expensive marketing campaign. But Reviews Editor Tae K. Kim found EA’s Hell-based brawler a well-structured hack-n-slash with some memorable levels, inventive enemies, and a worthwhile combat engine; it’s just too bad the story doesn’t live up to its potential.
Game design feels like one big round of “follow the leader” sometimes: when a game does something successfully, everyone else tries to put their own spin on it. Grand Theft Auto III had that effect, leading to a bevy of like-minded titles that aped the concepts that made it so great. The God of War franchise has also left its own indelible mark and it’s finally starting to show with titles like Bayonetta and Darksiders following in Kratos’ deity-sized footsteps. Dante’s Inferno is another chip off the old Grecian block but it exists somewhere in the middle of those two aforementioned titles: unlike Bayonetta, which took the formula and gave it a total glam makeover, Dante’s hews closer to the tried and true; yet, unlike Darksiders, which was a little too familiar for its own good, it actively tries to do something different.
Dante’s more or less succeeds on that latter point, at least in terms of the overall game world. The Divine Comedy might seem like an odd choice for source material, given its relatively small mass market appeal — before any of you literature lovers decide to write me angry yet elegantly worded hate mail, I’m only pointing out that it’s not something most gamers will know intimately — but Dante Aligheri’s epic poem gave the developer lots of material to work with and it actually manages to step away from Kratos’ imposing shadow. The nine circles of Hell deserve a lot of the credit for that: they’re impressively constructed and the dev team got a lot of mileage out of the unique setting.
The architecture in the Lust level, for instance, is appropriately composed of phallic structures and pulsating flesh while the Greed level shines with spilled gold, both in coin form and the molten lava in which the avaricious are constantly bathed. Unfortunately, while the environments are well done, the overall atmosphere is incredibly lacking: You are surrounded by woe but it’s all rather vague; you see disembodied souls plastered into the walls and you hear shrieks of agony, but it’s never more than ambient fluff. I expected my experience to be suffused with suffering but it’s almost an afterthought; even without reading the Divine Comedy, I’m sure Aligheri describes the horrors that he witnesses in great detail and the resulting sense of dread and foreboding is curiously absent here. The puzzle design — a definite holdover from God of War, complete with block-moving puzzles and handles you have to rotate — also doesn’t leverage each level’s theme enough; a lot more could have been done with the material but it’s mostly a rehash of the timing- and environmental-based puzzles that you’ve seen before.
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Square-Enix published a very positive financial report for the final three quarters of 2009, largely buoyed by the release of Final Fantasy XIII, as well as the company’s purchase of European developer Eidos Interactive.
In 2008, Square-Enix was creating Final Fantasy games. In 2009, they released Final Fantasy games. In 2010, they’ll release more Final Fantasy games. Those three facts are the main reasons Square-Enix reported a 50-percent increase in revenue for the last nine months of 2009 over 2008, and why the company forecasts a successful first quarter for this year.
Due in large part to the release of Final Fantasy XIII in Japan, Square-Enix reported a 48% increase in income from March to December of 2009 when compared to the same period in 2008. Eidos published Batman: Arkham Asylum during that same timeframe, which probably helped things a bit, as did the worldwide release of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. With Final Fantasy XIII and Just Cause II coming out in the US next month, the predictions for the final quarter of this fiscal year (which ends in March) are upbeat, predicting a 58% increase in revenue for the fiscal year overall over the previous one that ended last March.
A comment from the financial report pointed out Square-Enix’s methods of success. “We are pleased with the success of our Final Fantasy XIII launch in Japan” said Yoichi Wada, the President and Representative Director of Square Enix, who continued “Further, our integration activities since the acquisition of Eidos in April are progressing rapidly and allowing us to strengthen our global business framework.”
What should be interesting is seeing how the next fiscal year shapes up for Square-Enix, as the company has many relatively unestablished IPs like Nier and Supreme Commander in the works for major consoles, as well as iPhone versions of the first two Final Fantasy games.
No, that’s not a typo. Metal Gear Solid: Piece Walker is Kojima Productions’ promotional, web-based Flash game for the upcoming release of Peace Walker. It even has competitive multiplayer.
If you just can’t wait for the impending release of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, you can kill some time right now with Kojima Productions’ decidedly clever web-based, online Flash jigsaw game, cutely titled Piece Walker. The game has you matching tiles by placing them on top of the franchise’s iconic boxes, and then walking them to the appropriate place on a board to construct an image from the upcoming game. It’s a decidedly fun game, and you don’t even have to register in order to play. There’s even a competitive multiplayer mode to try.
Chaos Rising is the first expansion for real time strategy game Dawn of War II. We get a look at the new faction and a new multiplayer mode that redefines the meaning of “chaos.”
Fans of real time strategy (RTS) games like me are no strangers to expansions. The reason I never got into the first Dawn of War is because it had three heavy-hitter expansions that I needed to buy in order to keep up with my friends online — and this was even before developer Relic Entertainment announced a proper sequel. Now that DoW II’s been out for almost a year, though, I guess it’s high time for the sequels to start and Chaos Rising leads off.
I expected the usual laundry list of new maps, units, and campaign sections, but I was pleased to see that Chaos Rising adds a little pizzazz to DoW II in the form of the gruesome Chaos faction. These guys were Space Marines, but after a trip through something called the Warp, they’ve become something else – something corrupted and bloodthirsty (seriously, one of their faction heroes wears the skin of a Space Marine’s face as a banner — sick). The story behind the expansion campaign is that a planet lost in the Warp reappears a year after the events of the base game. As the Space Marine faction, you explore this icy, strange planet to find clues about where it’s been and what happened to the Space Marines who held it. The campaign introduces players to the Corruption System where certain events in the game corrupt units under your command depending on the player’s choices (which in turn changes their skill set and personal attacks). Presumably this is what happened to the Space Marines who held the missing planet after they went into the Warp, and this is where we get the flashy Chaos faction from.
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Much as we may have wanted it, we’ve never been able to play against PlayStation owners from our Xboxes when it comes to games with the same name. On mobile platforms, it’s quite different though.
We’re going to see this kind of thing a lot more in the coming months. With numerous mobile game studios working on both iPhone and Android applications, it makes perfect sense that the games would be able to talk to each other. One of the first to market is Com2Us Homerun Battle 3D (iTunes link), a new variation of a previous iPhone game called Baseball Slugger. Though a well-regarded baseball game in its own right, the fact that you can play multiplayer games between iDevices and Android devices through an online connection without any fuss is the kind of thing that we wish console manufactures would have allowed with their online services from the beginning. Check out the video below from Touch Arcade to see it in action.
Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma told Japanese video game magazine Famitsu that he’d like to have something on the new Zelda game for Wii in playable form at E3 in June. This follows reports last month that the game will probably be released before the end of this year.
While it’s by no means a confirmation that the game will actually be shown, Nintendo’s Eiji Aonuma, the producer on the still unnamed Zelda sequel for Wii has said that he’d “like to show something playable” at E3 this year. He stated that “we’re doing everything we can to have people play the game as soon as possible.”
Nintendo remains cagey about release dates and any confirmed details on the game. In January, Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime had said that, “right now it’s still in development, but the key message that Mr. Aonuma and Mr. Miyamoto are telling us is that it really has to be perfect when it launches. That is what fans are expecting.” Around the same time Nintendo boss Satoru Iwata confirmed to Japanese newspaper the Ashi Shimnun that the game will release “by the end of the year,” though gave no further details.
Update: According to Japanese gaming news site Andriasang, the game will be Wii MotionPlus exclusive. “After making it compatible,” the site notes Aonuma saying, “it just feels so natural. Link’s sword and the controller that you’re holding become one.”
The E3 expo runs from June 15-17 in Los Angeles this year.
Upcoming downloadable pack dubbed the “Trials of St. Lucia” to include a co-op mode, fully customizable level editor, and online community to share creations for Visceral’s upcoming hack ‘n slash action game.
Thanks to a apparently leaked video appearing on French video game site Playscope, details of a planned downloadable content pack for Dante’s Inferno have emerged, revealing cooperative multiplayer and customizable content creation for the game, set for release on April 29. According to senior producer Hans ten Cate in the video, “you can custom create trials adding waves of enemies from the core game as well as enemies like The Summoner which are exclusive to the Trials of St. Lucia.” These levels will then exist on the game’s servers and will be able to be shared with other players who can rate and rank the creations.
The co-op play allows players to play as Dante or St. Lucia. So…who is St. Lucia? “St. Lucia of Syracuse is a third century Christian martyr who has her eyes plucked out because she refuses to marry her pagan suitor,” says Jonathan Knight, the executive producer on the game. “She’s mentioned in The Divine Comedy a couple of times, including at the beginning of Inferno and she’s kind of Dante’s guardian angel.”