Mozilla and Epic Games are working on bringing a web version of the Unreal Engine 3.
Mozilla stated their commitment toward developing applications improving 3D performance on the web. Browsers will be enabled to fully utilize a hyper efficient JavaScript capable of displaying the fastest and most visually impressive 3D works.
Here’s the ambitious lowdown from Mozilla.
Capcom has announced that the PC version of Resident Evil 6 will feature characters and creatures from Valve’s popular Left 4 Dead 2.
PC owners will have the luxury of playing the exclusive version of RE:6 Mercenaries No Mercy mode that will allow them to select the cast from Left 4 Dead 2 along with the original RE:6 characters. It will also feature a couple of nefarious monsters from the Left 4 Dead series.
The PC version of Left 4 Dead 2 will also see the appearance of a few creatures from Resident Evil 6 making their presence felt.
I love the whole WipEout series. I bought in on the PSP and got it on the PS3 too. That said, I didn’t hesitate to download Repulze in the hope it was a clone of a good gravity racer.
Man was I mistaken. First and formost, Repulze may LOOK like WipEout but doesn’t play like it at all. The control is limited to onscreen left to right (or by tilting your iDevice which is not recommended due to the limited scope of your turning radius) and boosting is done by going through these colored gates. You need to collect a number of them to get a boost.
Then there is the gameplay. There are NO competitors! This is a pure TT race (TT being a Time Trial) and you don’t bump fenders with any opposing team. So this also means, no weapons to pick up to blow away the opposition.
Crashing is optional of course and should you do it too many times (which happens to be quite often) you get a time penalty handed to you. So in order to get through this game, you will need among other talents, clairvoyance, to get by those nasty turns.
The graphics are cool, that much I must admit. It looks the part and plays smoothly too. But beyond this shell, there isn’t much that will compel you play on, except maybe when you want to beat your friend’s score posted on the time standings.
Once you get past the spiffy graphics, you will find it hard to motivate yourself to do anything on the game. The controls don’t always work out and regardless of your need for an adrenaline rush, you will not be rewarded with the same thrills of say playing the real WipEout on a PSP for that matter.
Conclusion
Is there life on Mars? I think you’d be better off pondering such questions than playing the game. Repulze offers limited thrills and repeat gameplay. The only motivation is to challenge your friend’s time on different tracks if you have a friend to play with.
The idea behind a TT gravity racer has been done before, Repulze is just a repackaged version of the same thing. You’d probably marvel at the effort of putting the whole game together but beyond that. I can’t think of a reason to buy this game except when it cost only 0.99 cents.
The first slice of gameplay footage from Kickstarter success Shadowrun Returns has been released online.
Nearly 20 minutes of alpha gameplay are available to watch below. It’s our best look yet at Harebrained Schemes’ ambitious project, which completed its crowd-funding campaign almost a year ago.
Shadowrun Returns’ barn-storming Kickstarter raised a huge $1.89m (£1.25m), more than quadruple its $400,000 goal.
Highlights of the new footage include demonstrations of the game’s solo and party-based fight systems. You can holster weapons to try and trick the game’s enemies, use cover, and shoot people in the face with a shotgun.
The turn-based role-player is due for an “early summer” release for PC, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android.
Although the economy might not be in the thick of a recession as it once was, that doesn’t mean things are going especially great for videogame publishers. Take Electronic Arts, for instance, which hasn’t exactly set the world on fire with its performance as of late. The start of the next generation is an ideal opportunity to effect change that doesn’t come along often, and it seems EA doesn’t intend to miss it; just yesterday it revealed plans to proliferate microtransactions throughout each of its games. As EA and publishers in general attempt to do this (and try out other means for generating additional revenue), I hope they don’t forget to treat gamers with respect.
This current generation of consoles has seen the onset of numerous new money-making tactics. While expansion packs had been offered in the past, downloadable content became the norm for nearly every game, delivering everything from horse armor to new characters, maps, and more. Online passes have attempted to fight used games sales, encouraging gamers to buy new copies of their games or, failing that, forcing them to pay money directly to the publisher for access to certain (often multiplayer) content. Always-online connections, allegedly intended to enable new features but with the obvious benefit of trying to ward off piracy, spread from games where its use was implicit to those where its use is a detriment more than anything else.
The next generation will bring with it consoles that are more open to alternative business models and give publishers an opportunity to reprogram the way gamers think about buying games (much in the same way they have over the past seven or eight years). What that means is we can expect to see the way games are delivered to us, and the way we’re asked to pay for their content, to change. You can’t blame a company like Electronic Arts, which has posted more than its fair share of losses in recent years, for trying; I like a lot of the company’s games, and I want to see more of them. I appreciate that these companies are businesses with stockholders expecting them to make money, but I do worry that things could be taken too far in a hostile direction.
I have no problem with downloadable content. I like having the option to play more of a game I enjoy without having to wait for the sequel. Provided the content in question is worthwhile and wasn’t yanked out of the base game because it’s something that they knew gamers would have to buy later, I’m perfectly okay with downloadable content continuing to be a mainstay going forward. After all, without it, we’d never have gotten something like Minerva’s Den — widely considered the best part of BioShock 2 — and so long as games are released as complete experiences like they used to be, I don’t see downloadable content as the plague that some do.
Online passes aren’t especially objectionable to me, though it’s easy to see why people dislike them. Simply by choosing to take advantage of all of a game’s features, the game loses value because a secondhand buyer would then have to purchase an online pass to gain access to whatever it locks. It also makes the simple act of borrowing a game from a friend a less-than-ideal experience.
But it’s always-online requirements that I find much more hostile. Take Diablo III, for instance. Blizzard liked to point to the benefits this requirement allowed for (persistent friends lists, server-side characters accessible from any computer, and the like), but it ignored the fact that this prevented a segment of gamers from playing the way they wanted to. This is not World of Warcraft where an online connection is critical to the experience; Diablo III can be played solo, but you have to connect to Battle.net’s servers in order to do so even if you have no intention of ever taking advantage of an online feature. Considering the sales success of Diablo III and what’s almost assured to be a big hit in Destiny, we’ve got the makings of a trend that’s only going to become more prevalent, not less.
Microtransactions are something that have already become a common sight in all sorts of games, with the possible exception of the traditional, $60 retail titles. Dead Space 3 made headlines earlier this year when it was revealed the game includes microtransactions that essentially act as a shortcut for obtaining resources used to craft weapons. It’s not the first time a shortcut like this has been offered — we’ve even seen it in multiplayer games before. In case you thought it was a one-time experiment, this kind of thing officially is not going anywhere, as EA declared this week that it will include microtransactions in all of its games.
I’m not necessarily opposed to this option being offered for those who want it — if people want to spend their money on shortcuts, so be it — but there is something that simply feels untoward about it all. Trying to squeeze extra money out of gamers, not with new or better content, but by hoping they won’t have the time or inclination to play a game the old fashioned way, strikes me as a poor strategy for turning a business around. Again, I get that this is a business and the goal is to make money, but wouldn’t better products be a preferable path to profitability? I certainly think so, and that’s before raising the concern that microtransactions could eventually influence design decisions in some capacity; if companies are going to sell weapons and the like as DLC, who’s to say they won’t also make the time investment required to obtain a high-end weapon/car/whatever higher in order to nudge people in the direction of microtransactions? Even if that doesn’t happen, the suspicion will be there, and the potential backlash won’t be good for anyone.
The bottom line is that the gaming industry needs to ensure it treats gamers with respect. It might ultimately view them as walking bank accounts, but that doesn’t mean it can’t shy away from some of the more anti-consumer practices out there. Take DRM, for instance: Far too many companies (which is to say, more than zero) place an emphasis on trying to block pirates from accessing their games rather than making the experience of buying and owning the game more pleasant. Instead of everyone putting effort into delivering a kick-ass boxed product, as some do, you have a company like Ubisoft that has, in the past, employed always-online requirements as a form of DRM that only punished legitimate customers once the DRM was cracked. It’s the equivalent of the piracy warning you’re subjected to when you boot up a DVD that can only be skipped on pirated discs, only far more detrimental. Paying customers shouldn’t be treated like criminals.
Asking to be treated with respect is not that outrageous of a request. At the very least, doing so will avoid running the risk of scaring gamers away from the industry altogether. Beyond that, publishers might even find that treating people with respect is to their benefit. By passing up an opportunity to make a quick buck, considering things from the gamers’ perspective, and delivering better games, they might find they instill a sense of loyalty that ultimately leads to gamers who are more willing to open their wallets. Perhaps the path to making money that seems to elude these companies has been in front of them this entire time.
