Monolith the Developers of the latest installment to the Lord of the Rings Saga … (oops I’m not allowed to say that any more) Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor have come under fire of late after airing there Alpha build that allowed them to show off their procedural enemy system.
Why have they come under fire you ask? Well take a look at the video:

As you can see the stealth mechanic and some of the assets look very similar to Ubisoft’s Assassins creed series. This provoked at twitter rampage from ex Ubisoft developer Charles Randall saying:

Now no one knows for sure if these allegations are true or if Monolith just took allot of inspiration from Assassins Creed but to be honest there are some assets that stick out like a sore thumb.

The Assassins Creed 2 Tightrope for example:

Middle Earth Shadow of Mordor

Assassins Creed 2

But is this just money for old rope at this point (see … see what I did there) in your opinion do you believe that there are too many copycat games out there nowadays or do you think it’s fine for games to copy elements providing the overall experience is different enough to warrant it being a separate game?

Personally I think that the Nemesis system and Wraith mode really set Mordor apart in enough of a way that the familiar aspects of Assassins Creed only enforce my positive feelings towards the game.

Now Charles Randall did later turn round to say:

This does show that anyone is going to be annoyed if they believe there work has been plagiarised, But that he didn’t mean any ill will towards Monolith.

But the questions still stands is reusing assets and code from an existing game in order to make up the backbone of a new game really classed as stealing? Personally I believe that using existing code to help get a game up and running is almost a necessity in this day and age with the number of bugs and issues that coding from scratch can cause. And ok it is someone else’s work but the last time you bought a kettle for you kitchen or a sandwich for your lunch, did you complain because it was basically the same as any other? Constructively reusing ideas and assets is the only way to push anything forward in the world today, not just in gaming.

And in a final piece of irony Randall also tweeted this:

Funny how he has become the story rather than the Assets implementation itself.

Only an hour ago, users in Europe, the U.S., Canada, India and beyond all reported suddenly being unable to access their GMail (or Google Mail) accounts in what appeared to be a widespread outage. Google’s App Status Dashboard was originally unaware of the issue, but at around 7:20pm GMT the service updated to show downtime for GMail and Google+, though further details of the downtime are still unknown.

The error being seen by most users at the moment is a 500 Internal Server Error. These errors, as the name suggests, always tend to be a minor issue on the server (in this case, Google’s) – although it says nothing about what the problem actually is – and are usually temporary. Judging by the response on Twitter, however, the problem is currently affecting a huge number of users both on GMail and Google+. The latter also affects Youtube Comment boxes under the new system now in force there, which means those aren’t loading at all on videos, as well as Hangouts across the web and mobile. GMail users report their issue affects not just web access, but also other clients trying to download GMail via both POP and IMAP.

As of an update released just before this article published here on S.FM, many users state their services have returned; though others still state they are unable to get in; and those who HAVE gotten access to their email back are continuing to report intermittent problems. Nevertheless, it looks likely all issues will be resolved shortly; and we await Google’s response on what happened if any is delivered.

King is a big name in the area of casual, mass-appeal gaming. They seem to specialise in match-3 games like the popular Candy Crush Saga… which makes it all the more confusing when you hear that they filed a ‘Notice of Opposition’ for the use of ‘Saga’ in the game… Banner Saga?

The notice basically says that because King make use of the word ‘Saga’ that Banner Saga is not allowed to use it themselves for their game as players might ‘confuse’ the two games. As mentioned above, Candy Crush Saga is a match-3 game in the vein of similar games such as Bejeweled (although Bejeweled is more of a match-4 last time I checked…), you swap the ‘candies’ get a match, they vanish and more drop down to fill the board. Banner Saga on the other hand is a game inspired by Nordic tales and has a rich RPG-style to the play. So either someone at King has never played or heard anything about Banner Saga or else someone in their legal department has gone mad.

When contacted with questions about the notice King said that they had applied for a video game patent on the word ‘saga’ and claimed not to be targeting Banner Saga because it bore any resemblance to their own game, but purely because they needed to be seen to be defending their copyright against the ‘real copycats’. In other words, this ridiculousness is purely because they wish to make an example of Banner Saga to warn off competition. Somehow, I think this action is not going to be taken seriously by the copycats who must be laughing themselves silly.

On the other side of the dispute, Banner Saga developer Stoic has said that the patent notice is putting the idea of a sequel to Banner Quest in jeopardy.

“We won’t make a Viking saga without the word Saga, and we don’t appreciate anyone telling us we can’t.” the studio said, noting that while King’s position on the issue remains unchanged the future of their planned sequel remains uncertain.

Earlier in the week Stoic’s Alex Thomas told Polygon “King.com claims they’re not attempting to prevent us from using The Banner Saga, and yet their legal opposition to our trademark filing remains.” and that the studio is ‘humbled’ to have received support and have others standing with them for the right to tell their own ‘saga’.

Sometimes you really can’t make this stuff up.

(Due to the size of the screenshots, thumbnails have been used below. To see an image in full size, just click it)

It’s been a couple of months now since the crowd-funded game by Megaman creator Keiji Inafune smashed all records – and more then secured the release of spiritual successor, Mighty No. 9, on all current gen consoles and PC – and newly leaked screenshots have let us take a glance at the current status of the game’s development.

Keiji Inafune’s Comcept dev studio gave a peek at the Mighty No. 9 alpha build in images that only backers of its crowdfunding campaign can see – but you can never keep secrets from fans for very long; and those same images soon got out to the wider public. While clearly a lot of the screenshot contents are placeholder elements, they DO give a good look at the current character model design for No.9, and reveal a graphical style to the game that’s not unlike the Classic Stages of Sonic Generations.

Some have commented that the placeholder walls and other elements in the screenshots look similar to Unreal’s default elements, perhaps suggesting the game will be running a version of the Unreal Engine. Nothing’s been stated in this regard, but it WOULD be cool if so. We’ll have more news when it arrives!

The wait for Marvel’s “Ant-Man” just got two weeks shorter!

Marvel’s “mite”-iest hero will now hit theatres July 17, 2015 courtesy of director Edgar Wright, two weeks earlier than the previously announced date of July 31.

Ant-Man fans have had quite a few reasons to rejoice lately, with the casting of Paul Rudd as Scott Lang/Ant-Man and Michael Douglas as Hank Pym as we get ready to start production on the highly-anticipated film later this year!

In addition to “Ant-Man,” Marvel Studios will release a slate of films based on the Marvel characters including “Captain America: The Winter Soldier” on April 4, 2014; “Guardians of the Galaxy” on August 1, 2014; and “Avengers: Age of Ultron” on May 1, 2015.