Gamernode: Latest Industry News

Robert Downey Jr. voices Iron Man game

As the days near for the release of the anticipated Iron Man movie, Sega is busy with their video game adaption. Now usually such adaptions end of being absolutely horrible (don't try Jumper), but in the case of the new Iron Man movie, Sega is putting their heart and soul (and wallet) into making a fun and enjoyable Iron Man experience.

How can they make such a game work out successfully? Good graphics, new gameplay mechanics, and most of all be true to the source. Luckily Sega nabbed themselves the chance to use the voice of Robert Downey Jr. (the actor portraying Iron Man in the movie) for the movie adaptation.

"SEGA and Marvel have announced that Robert Downey Jr. and other people will be doing voice acting in its upcoming Iron Man game," a Sega spokesman stated. "Downey Jr. plays Tony St...

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This week's NA game releases: 3/23 to 3/29

One of the notable game releases this week is the first expansion pack to Command & Conquer 3, titled Kane's Wrath for PC. Featuring a 13 mission Nod campaign and a Meta-warfare single player campaign, folks who pick up the expansion will get a code to enter the beta for Red Alert 3. Also the expansion will head to Xbox 360 in June; if you think RTS game handle well on consoles, take a gander at this.

Another big release is Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII for PSP; I'm sure a lot of FF fans have been clamoring all over this for awhile so the wait is finally over!

Serving as a prequel to FFVII, players will control Zack Fair and Cloud (as a lowly guard); other new features include a new battle system called Digital Mind Wave. The game sold 350,000 copies in one day in Japan, so I'm sure the re...

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Jesus says "Come and follow Mii."

Churches around the country are holding special services for Easter Sunday.

While many places of worship take a conservative approach in inviting guests to Easter service by sending out invitations and flyers, one church in particular has decided to be a little more creative in its campaign to draw more visitors.

The Mission Bay Community Church, located in good old San Francisco, apparently has some pretty savvy gamers in the congregation. The poster they created has the phrase "Come and follow Mii." For those uninitiated in Nintendo "Wii-speak," the pun on the word Mii refers to the cute little icons gamers use to represent themselves online and in Wii games.

In this particular poster the Mii looks like Jesus and an Easter bunny shows confusion as he looks at the Jesus Mii. I'm sure some o...

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EA wants Take-Two at all costs. Analysts stunned

EA's fixation on buying out Take-Two Interactive is becoming big news outside of the game industry and has the attention of surprised Wall Street analysts.

Last month Take-Two rejected an offer from EA for a $2 billion buyout and said the price was "inadequate." Wall Street watchers believe that the refusal was based upon the upcoming release of Grand Theft Auto 4 and how this blockbuster hit would obviously push up the value of Take-Two past the initial bid price offered by Electronic Arts.

The move by Electronic Arts to commandeer Take-Two through a hostile takeover has not only shaken up the shareholders of the company but has generated a small frenzy of opportunistic buyers that have snapped up Take-Two shares in the hopes of catching in on the impending buyout.

During these events, Wal...

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Ubisoft buys Tom Clancy name, MMO plans too?

Completely cutting out the middle man, Ubisoft announced yesterday they've fully acquired the IP rights to the Tom Clancy name. The agreement seems to not only include video games, but also books, merchandising products and even movies.

The price of the agreement wasn't revealed but the company updated their financial earnings for the end of fiscal 2007/2008 to around 130 million Euros ($204 million) instead of 150 million Euros ($235.4 million), which may hint the agreement cost around 20 million Euros. Also in light of the deal, Ubisoft would be saving around 5 million Euros ($7.8 million) each year in royalty charges.

In related news, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot revealed in a follow-up conference call that the company is pursuing a Tom Clancy-related MMO. While the MMO plans were on their ...

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Street Fighter film cast revealed, 2009 release da...

It's been a few months since we've had an update about Capcom and 20th Century Fox's upcoming Street Fighter film but more details were revealed today, including a cast list and a tentative release date.

Joining the already confirmed Kristen Kreuk of Smallville fame as Chun-Li are Michael Clark Duncan (The Green Mile, Daredevil) as Balrog, Neal McDonough (Minority Report, Band of Brothers) as M. Bison, Taboo (the Black Eyed Peas) as Vega, Chris Klein (American Pie series) as Charlie Nash and Rick Yune (The Fast and the Furious, Alone in the Dark II) as Gen.

Also Moon Bloodgood, Edmund Chen, Cheng Pei Pei and Josie Ho have been confirmed for the film, but for unspecified roles.

Currently the film has a scheduled 2009 worldwide release date. This summer will feature the release of Street Fighte...

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Greenpeace flunks Mario and Yoshi again

Last year in November, Greenpeace issued their report card and graded the top manufacturers of mobile phones, TVs, and game consoles according to its standards regarding the problem of environmental waste and clean manufacturing procedures.

The latest Guide to Greener Electronics is out and Mario and Yoshi have flunked out again--big time.

Nintendo scored eight zeros across nine categories which had to do with issues such as the use of toxic chemicals and recycling, timelines for phasing out toxic chemicals, producer responsibility, voluntary takeback, the amounts recycled and other factors. All in all Nintendo scored a 0.3 out of a possible 10 points.

Greenpeace chided Mario and Friends by saying:

"Nintendo remains the odd one out of the 18 companies in the Guide, without any public timelin...

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Fracture will push the PS3 and 360 to the limits

LucasArts believes that its new game, Fracture, will push the hardware of the Xbox 360 and the PS3 to their limits.

Now that's a pretty tall order for any game company to claim, especially in the case of the PS3, which most people agree has only seen about 15 to 20 percent of its full potential utilized.

However LucasArts feels extremely confident about the game and said, "While a lot of games are pushing the limits of what can be done visually in games, we also wanted to push gameplay to levels that literally could not be done on the previous generation of hardware.

"To put it simply, Fracture is one of the few games that really takes advantage of all of the processing power of the new consoles."

To put it simply, as LucasArts puts it, we've heard this sort of hype before from other game dev...

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Casual game saves Majesco from the brink of doom

Casual games are here to stay. Sorry hardcore crowd. But in most cases this is great since we are getting more people into the pastime we have all loved for so many years. Finally, the rest of the universe is finally accepting we were right all along.

Even better is due to the popularity of casual games; studios who were once finding themselves in financial straights are now rolling in the cash. Translation? More games for us to enjoy. The latest case of this is Majesco, who is behind the popular Cooking Mama franchise. To put it in dollar amounts, a year prior to when Cooking Mama was released, the net income for Majesco was minus two hundred thousand dollars.

Fast forward one year, and now Majeso is looking at a 2.4 million dollar income. What a difference one casual game makes. As a re...

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Analyst: iPhone not hardcore enough

Am I the only one that hates Michael Patcher? Every time he speaks I get distracted by something shiny and don't pay attention. Most recently he makes the claim that the iPhone is not commercially viable as portable gaming device.

While I did make almost the opposite claim, that's not the reason why I hate him. Patcher is far too vague and doesn't take any chances. Of course the iPhone is not viable as a gaming device, it's not a strict gaming device. It's a phone more than anything else, hence the name.

"I don't see it as a viable gaming platform, due to the cost of owning one. The iPhone costs $400 plus an AT&T wireless subscription for voice and data, I'm guessing this is $80 a month, so the addressable market doesn't really fit the core gamer demographic. To the extent that hip, ri...

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Pandemic says still independent after EA takeover

When Electronic Arts bought out Pandemic and Bioware last year, the gaming community became worried about what sort of influence EA's corporate machine would have on the creative aspects of the two game studios.

Pandemic's president and co-founder, John Resnick, says that his company is doing just fine under the new management and is still setting its own course as far as what it wants to do in producing games.

As Phoenix Wright, ace attorney would say, Objection! Many believe that EA has a history of just the opposite, but Resnick says that everything is different now.

To emphasize the point of his studio's independence, Resnick remarked, "Yes, it says Pandemic on the box, we've got Pandemic email addresses and we're making Pandemic games.

"John [Riccitiello, EA's CEO] has said that in the ...

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EA advertising is in the game

Remember when you heard that Xbox 360 and PS3 games were going to cost 60 dollars, up from 50 dollars in the previous generation. A 20% increase is a lot and I'm sure, just like me, you were unhappy.

The only saving grace was all the talk of in-game advertising. The idea being if publishers could sell enough advertising it would cost gamers less. Well where the hell is our cut?

I first really noticed in-game adverts while playing Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. There were these giant billboards that said "Viva Dodge!" or had the Dodge Ram logo on it. I'll bet Dodge paid quite a bit for having the exclusive advertising on the billboards in virtual Mexico. So with all that advertising, which I clearly noticed if I'm writing about it years later, why did the game still cost 60 dollars...

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The PS3 has made it. Woman nabs one in crime spree...

How do you know that your console is healthy? No, not the NPD, silly. It's criminals! Yes, criminals. You see, thieves have no interest in worthless dying products. They only want things that will fetch a high price on eBay or at the local pawn shop.

This is the moral involved with a new story involving a North Carolina woman and credit card fraud. In Cary, North Carolina, a woman swiped some credit cards out of a man's parked car and proceeded towards the nearest Target location and purchased herself a shiny new PS3, four games, and two ipods.

That must have whetted her appetite for crime, because she then drove to a nearby Best Buy where she purchased a new computer, four more videogames, and an ipod touch.

The woman remains at large.

Ok, so this isn't exactly the same as the time at the P...

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The Beatles and Activision Come Together

Guitar Hero is one of the biggest franchises in the videogame world at the moment. Whatever they do has a huge impact on the music industry, music listeners, and music teachers. That's a lot of power for a videogame to wield.

Guitar Hero 2 turned me onto a band called Bang Camaro, they had one song in the game, an unlocakble called (Push Push) Lady Lightning. When I went to download that track on iTunes it was the only one that had any kind of popularity rating, meaning others just like me were grabbing it just because they played it in a videogame.

Like I said, that's a lot of power. Martin Bandier also has a lot of power. He runs the Sony/ATV Music owners of the John Lennon - Paul McCartney copyrights. What ever he does also has a huge influence on the music industry and music list...

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Time to pray for Prey 2

If you enjoyed the creepy-scary sci-fi shooter Prey, you'll be glad to hear that Tommy will be coming back for a second episode - Prey 2 for the PC and Xbox 360.

Radar Group, which is handling the project says, "This time, abandoned and framed for the disappearance of his family and girlfriend, Tommy escapes an Earth that no longer wants him for a future that cannot survive without him.

"Building on the mind-bending portal and gravity-defying gameplay of the original with several innovative new twists, Prey 2 promises to once again take players into a compelling science-fiction world with breathtaking visuals and adrenaline-pumping action gameplay."

The first Prey game had an astounding (not as astounding as Duke Nukem Forever, of course) eight-year development cycle peppered with numerous d...

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The economy is down but GameStop is up. Way up

The US economy is down. The housing market is down. But there is one thing that has shot up in spite of sluggish economic conditions -- video games. GameStop Corp. has a lot to be happy about because its fourth-quarter net income rose 46%.

The surge in strong video game sales is attributed to all the top games that have come out for gaming platforms across the board. To put this into dollars and cents GameStop made $189.8 million in net income compared to only $129.8 million from last year.

The increase in video game sales activity seems to go against the tide as far as money being tight. In addition to this the video game industry has gone under the gun and received intense fire from politicians and children's rights organizations that continue to try to pass and enforce laws that "pro...

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EA buys mystery man to kill ActiBlizz "financially...

It looks like EA might be getting a bit worried about a games business boogeyman also known as the Activision-Blizzard merger. They've lost their place as the top dog, and now they're looking to shake things up a bit.

They've hired a newcomer so mysterious in his intent that he dresses all in black with black sunglasses, and black gloves, wearing nothing else except a look so cold it could freeze the sun.

At least that's how I like to imagine him--as sort of a videogame business hitman. His name is John Pleasants (delightful cover name isn't it? Heh, you almost fooled me EA,) and he's the former CEO of Ticketmaster and EA has hired him to handle its finances as the new COO.

Ok, so my imagination might be running a bit wild here, but he will be acting as a sort of finance hitman. Closing deals...

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Trusty ol' videogame legislation

Videogame legislation, I could set my watch by you. I had totally forgot it was that time of year already; I didn't even buy you a gift. This time around Massachusetts, one of the original thirteen colonies, arrives at the podium having unearthed the thought-dead "games-as-porn" bill.

Louisiana, Okalahoma, Michigan, New York, California, Illinois, Utah, Indiana, Washington, and Minnesota all have one thing in common -- other than being part of the United States, that is. They have all tried to put a ban on ‘violent videogames,' or get them re-listed as pornography. In every single case the Federal Court has ruled their respective bills unconstitutional in respect to the First Amendment.

The current Massachusetts bill, referred to as House Bill 1423, is startlingly similar to Hou...

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Toshiba to lose $1 billion due to HD-DVD's demise?...

After the death of HD-DVD format in February, folks have been wondering on how the aftermath will affect Toshiba, the format's biggest supporter. According to Japan's Nikkei Business Daily newspaper, Toshiba will suffer an estimated $1 billion loss but the company hasn't officially commented on the figure.

The newspaper report also said that due to continued poor sales of HD DVD players, DVDs and advertising losses, another 50 billion yen ($497.55 million) will be tacked onto Toshiba's mounting losses.

A Toshiba spokesperson said, however, "When we have determined of a revision to our earnings forecast for the fiscal year ending March is necessary we will release it as soon as possible." So in the end, they just don't know yet.

So what's next for Toshiba? They're planning to get into the flas...

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New game tech promises new experiences for GTA IV

A new game technology named Euphoria by NaturalMotion promises a new gaming experience never before seen in the Grand Theft Auto franchise. Rockstar Games president Sam Houser said:

"This is how we always wanted GTA to be, but it simply wasn't possible until now. And some of the technology that's gone into this new game, compared to what we had before, it's shocking."

What Houser is referring to is how Euphoria will allow gamers to see unique key animations and NPC actions based upon their decisions and movement within the game. This is called procedure role animation technology.

"I'll steal someone's car and some fist fight's kicked off, and then suddenly he'll be chasing me through the street, and I'll get in position - like, ‘I'm not running from you any more; I'm going to f*cking ha...

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