Kotobukiya have announced that they will release the Japanese ARTFX statue of Halo‘s Master Chief in the U.S. this November.
Category: Video Games
Jeff Broadbent is no stranger to games. A composer and sound designer, he’s worked on the post-apocalyptic single-player-focused I Am Alive, the sci-fi online-only Planetside 2, the movie-inspired Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, the upcoming near-future military skirmish Tom Clancy’s Endwar Online, as well as his most recent work on the fantasy multiplayer online battle area game Dawngate. But in talking to him about that latter game, Broadbent went into how a game’s setting and genre can influence the music he makes for it.
As a Jew-ish, World War II first-person shooter fan whose history with the Wolfenstein series goes back to the original 2D game from 1981, Castle Wolfenstein, I came to the first-person shooter Wolfenstein: The New Order cautious but hopeful. But MachineGames — who made it for the Xbox 360, Xbox One, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PC — have managed to assuage my fears and exceed my hopes by making a Wolfenstein game that plays like modern-style first-person shooter.
If you’ve been to this site more than once, you might’ve noticed that I have an affinity for the pinball games made by Zen Studios. Be they based on the Star Wars movies, Marvel Comics, or an original idea, Zen’s pinball tables always manage to mix realistic physics and sounds with physic-ly impossible mechanics. Which, for a gamer who grew up on pinball, hits a real sweet spot.
I recently had a chance to pick the brain of Peter Grafl, one of the pinball table designers at Zen Studios, and asked him who decides what tables they’ll make, how they’re designed, and what tables he’d like to make.
Buena Vista Home Entertainment have announced that they will release the movie Need For Speed — which was inspired by the video game racing series of the same name — on DVD, as a DVD/Blu-ray combo pack, and digitally on August 5th.
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Skylanders Comics Announced
IDW have announced that they will launch a comic book series based on the Skylanders video games, starting this July.
In many tower defense games, your towers are defended and attacked by characters of the sci-fi or fantasy persuasion. But in the iOS tower defense game Toy Rush, your attackers and defenders are toys…adorable, adorable toys. I spoke to John Comes, the design director from Uber Entertainment and the project lead for Toy Rush, about what inspired this game, why they went this cute route, and is that a shark with legs and a top hat?
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Mario Kart 8 Review
For more than twenty years, the Mario Kart games have brought cartoony, arcade-style racing to Nintendo’s systems. But while Mario Kart 8 does a good job of continuing this tradition on the WiiU, it’s hard not to think that it could’ve been better.
With a name like TownCraft, you might expect this crafting and village building game to be completely unoriginal shovelware made by a couple of unscrupulous developers who have no problem ripping off someone else’s hard work. But TownCraft is neither a Minecraft clone nor a riff on Animal Crossing. Instead, it takes elements of both and other games — games that help inspire Minecraft and Animal Crossing — to make an interesting hybrid.
With TownCraft, now available on iPhones and Macs — and, apparently, coming to PCs at some point — after already been available on iPad, I spoke to lead designer Leigh Harris and his brother, lead programmer Rohan Harris, of Flat Earth Games about how TownCraft came to be, how it came to be on iPhones and Macs, and why they couldn’t come up with a better name.