Concept Art From Warren Spector’s ‘Epic Mickey’ Leaked?

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

Web supersleuth Superannuation has uncovered some images by concept artist Fred Gambino that appear to be for a Wii game called ‘Epic Mickey’. As reported last year by Gamasutra, the title is rumoured to be the code name for the project being worked on by Warren Spector at Disney. Further investigation has surfaced additional images and details.

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Spector has been largely out of the limelight for the last few years, having formed Junction Point Studios in 2005, which worked on unannounced and unreleased games before the company was bought by Disney two years later. Since then nothing has been said about the game in production there other than that it is his dream project 1)http://www.gamepro.com/article/features/164608/warren-spectors-new-game-is-well-its-a-secret/.

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The images contain many elements from Disney’s various intellectual property as well as themes not usually associated with their work, creating unprecedented combinations of iconic characters and real-life theme-park structures all with a dystopian steampunk make-over.

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Yahtzee Game Special Editions Now Free

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, of Chzo Mythos fame (although admittedly now far better known for his ramblicious Zero Punctuation series that Nabeel somehow never fails to tweet for you guys), has decided to release, for free, each and every special donation version of his games. Quoth Yahtzee, “I have simply attained so much money from donations that I no longer have any earthly wants.”

The entire Chzo Mythos is thus available: 5 Days, 7 Days, the parser-based Trilby’s Notes and 6 Days, in this order; also free for the taking is the special edition of the nihilistic, Flashback-influenced platformer 1213 (the game that laid the groundwork for the addictive Art of Theft). All of the aforementioned games are highly recommended and I would advise everyone to take a look at these pre-fame Yahtzee gems. If you never did play these well-esteemed AGS games before, the definitive versions are now out there for the taking!

Personally, as fun as Zero Punctuation is, I’d still take the games over Zero Punc any day if it came down to deciding between the two: Let us plebeians do the talking and the real designers do the walking, eh? In the same post, Croshaw also briefly mentions that he’s working “…on a couple of ideas [for new games]. It’s just that all of my free time is gradually melting away. They’re interesting ideas, though.”

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Resident Evil 5 PC Release Date Announced, Benchmark Tool Released

Nabeel Burney 1 Comment

Capcom have finally announced the release date for the PC version of Resident Evil 5: September 14 in North America and September 18 in Europe. Additional features in the port of the console game include compatibility with NVIDIA’s 3D Vision technology, new costumes, and an improved mercenaries mode with “three times as many enemies”.

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As expected, Capcom have also provided a benchmarking tool that allows gamers to witness the game’s performance on their PC systems. The unplayable demo clocks in at almost 600MB and includes the 3D stereoscopic render mode for people with the required hardware. Note that if you don’t have any 3D Vision-compatible hardware the demo runs just as fine normally. Two benchmark modes are available, Variable and Fixed. Fixed mode plays a short sequence in a single outdoor scene, panning the camera around the environment for a while before giving a performance analysis. Variable mode is more representative of the experience, with an actual demonstration of gameplay through a number of areas in the game.

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BioShock 2 Delayed ‘Til “Fiscal 2010”

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

It seems like it’s not enough that four studios are working on BioShock 2, the game will not be ready for its previously set launch date of November. Take-Two announced today that it would be moving the release of the game past quarter 4 of ’09 to “fiscal 2010”, in order to devote additional development time to the title.
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Meanwhile, the ARG-lite viral site Something in the Sea has continued to receive updates, unravelling the story of Mark Meltzer and his search for the missing girls, and involving the community as well by sending out puzzle items. The Cult of Rapture community site has been posting concept art and sound clips of the Little Sisters and Big Daddies, providing more insight into their creation. In related news, 2K Boston’s Ken Levine has contributed to Rock Paper Shotgun’s Gaming Made Me series with a post about his gaming education.

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Dyson

Nabeel Burney 1 Comment

I’m not a big strategy gamer, in general, but I’m fascinated by both turn-based and real-time strategy games. I like the idea of a world simulated on a macro level, in which units and vehicles and structures all interact in the tens, hundreds, thousands. So even though I don’t quite have the tactical mind required to keep control of the vast numbers of entities, I still am intrigued by seeing the results of my strategizing and planning unfolding before me, complex and unpredictable.

But I also like the simple, the minimal. I love small indie games, with the most rudimentary visuals and focused purely on gameplay. The more successful ones often employ clever techniques to produce appealing graphics to overcome the lack of manpower and budget.

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Dyson is described by its developers Rudolf Kremers and Alex May as an “ambient real-time strategy game with abstract visuals”. Originally created in one month for submission to a procedural generation competition at TIGSource a couple of years back, the game quickly caught the attention of the community and soon was nominated for awards at the Independent Games Festival. The team have expressed plans to expand on the game and so continue to update the build on their site – the current version available being the one they showcased at IGF.

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