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If you’re a massive fan of the Bioshock games, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. The developing company of the game, Irrational Games is being closed.
On their site at irrationalgames.com every page was taken up with a long message from Ken Levine, one of the founders of the company and the current Creative Director saying that after seventeen years and some enormous success in the recent years he had taken the decision to concentrate on other types of projects and so “I am winding down Irrational Games as you know it” and moving to a smaller group within Take-Two with only fifteen of the people currently working at Irrational Games coming with him.
He does stress however that they are committed to helping those who are being let go survive the transition and find new work.
Besides financial support, the staff will have access to the studio for a period of time to say their goodbyes and put together their portfolios. Other Take-Two studios will be on hand to discuss opportunities within the company, and we’ll be hosting a recruiting day where we’ll be giving 3rdparty studios and publishers a chance to hold interviews with departing Irrational staff.
He says that the next thing for him and his new smaller group of game developers will be to work on new narrative-driven games for the core gamer community, with hopefully a closer working link to those players and digitally delivered content exclusively. As for the Bioshock Universe? There’s no need to worry about it vanishing for good as Levine states that the reins for the games and its world are being handed over to the people at 2K who have worked with Irrational on the games in the past.
The message on the site will be updated with an FAQ later as questions come in, so more information will slowly be made available for those with questions that need answering.
Today sees the release of a game featuring a character who might be familiar to long time Capcom fans, but who hasn’t actually been front and centre of a game for a long time. That’s right, Strider is back in a new game!
Strider is, for those who don’t know, a Capcom character who first appeared back in the late 80s in his first game on arcade systems. It was celebrated back then for its play-style, definitive music and was notable for its use of multi-lingual voice acting during the cut-scenes (Japanese, English, Mandarin, Russian and Spanish) and was one of Capcom’s hits before Street Fighter II brought the company’s name to everyone’s attention. The main character was a young member of a group called the ‘Striders’, a ninja-like group within the world and you as the player were tasked with travelling through the side-scrolling world to eventually kill the ‘Grandmaster’, the rule of the dystopian future world Strider was set in. The game also saw home releases for many platforms such as the Mega Drive and Commodore 64, some which omitted the ending or replaced it entirely.
The game went on to have two sequels, Strider 2 and Strider Returns, which was a Western-only release that had no involvement from Capcom. The sequel Strider 2 introduced new mechanics into the game and had releases on arcade machines as well as the Playstation 1 in 2000.
Other than these games, the character of Strider has made many cameos in other Capcom games down the years.
The new game aims to combine the best aspects of the original game and the sequel as well as improving upon them using the technology of today. Hopefully gamers who fondly remember Strider will not be disappointed by this new adventure.
Strider releases for the Playstation 3 and 4 today and for Xbox 360, Xbox One and many PC digital distributors (including Steam and Green Man Gaming – pre-order for the free 20 track soundtrack and concept art!) tomorrow, February 19th.
Back in December EA told everyone that they were not going to work on any future projects or release any expansions or additional content for Battlefield 4 until they had sorted out the problems that continued to plague the game at that point.
Yesterday though they announced the upcoming release of a Battlefield 4 DLC, Naval Strike, coming at the end of March, hot on the heels of the Second Assault map pack being release on February 18th. As you can probably guess from the name, Naval Strike will add a lot of water-based craft and weaponry as battles are taken to the sea and will also add four new maps to the game: Lost Island, Nansha Strike, Wave Breaker, and Operation Mortar.
The problem seems to be that the reports of game crashes and players being randomly kicked from servers or even the entire game haven’t stopped. There are still people saying that doing certain actions, such as getting into a vehicle with another player is meaning that their playing of a game is stopped right there until they can reboot the game and rejoin the server. Some are even still reporting that they have a problem launching the game at all.
Back in December DICE general manager Karl Troedsson said that they had the “entire team working to stabilise the game” and that the reason they were working on Battlefield 4 before expanding it or concentrating on future projects was because “it’s the right thing to do.” and to be fair certain prominent bugs have been nipped in the bud already.
Hopefully the game will be a little more shipshape when the boats finally set out to sea.
SEGA has announced the third title in the Nintendo Exclusivity deal. The title is “Sonic Boom”, a Wii U and 3DS game set to tie in with the upcoming Sonic Boom CGI television series.
While this puts to bed questions any rumors about the nature of the third Nintendo exclusive, it’s also causing a bit of a stir. The main issue seems to be the design of the characters which is…unique. Thats if you are being charitable. Personally, I think they are terrible, particularly Knuckles. As one of my own station colleagues pointed out, it was always nice to have Knuckles be the strongman character without being BUFF. Yet now, he’s an overblown block of muscle perched atop tiny toothpick legs.
And lets not even get started on how trashy Amy looks. REALLY SEGA?
Furthermore, this is yet another example of SEGA continually sticking their foot in their mouth. After categorically denying rumors that the sign at the Nuremberg toy fair showing a new Sonic title were incorrect, they turn around and unveil a brand new title. Its literally like the left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing.
I’m a long time SEGA fan, but even my patience is beginning to wear thin. First they deny that something exists. Then they tell us it does. To top it all off, they don’t confirm or deny that it will be on PS4 or XBOX ONE. They CLAIM it’s a Nintendo exclusive. But we all know exclusivity in the console world lasts about as long as a stack of twenty dollar bills in Vegas. Bottom line, SEGA is making themselves look almost as dumb as Microsoft did at E3 last year with the XBOX ONE. We all know they are making a new Sonic game. We all know its going to be coming out soon. So when information gets slipped, don’t deny it and then turn around and confirm it. We aren’t stupid! Just say “Yep. You caught us! New Sonic Game! Free plushies for everyone! Oh, and we’re sorry about Sonic 2006. The developers responsible have been fed to Shigeru Miyamoto as a sacrifice so they would keep Sonic in the new Smash Bros!”
After some very disappointing games (looking at you Sonic 2006) and the blatant cash cow milking of the Mario & Sonic Olympic game’s series, I’m beginning to wonder if it might not be time to put the Blue Blur out to pasture for a bit. or forcibly wrest control of the character from SEGA. If the past few days have been any indication, they sure don’t know what they are doing with the franchise!
