Today, we talk about Valentine Day's best and worst dates with ace reporter Caroline McCarthy. Also, Time Warner and Viacom are coming to Hulu, Spielberg's new video game Boom Blox, and EA's GameShow. We also hear from some our loyal listeners about Optimash Prime.
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Electronic Arts held a large preview event in New York yesterday. Among the various other titles EA has planned for the next several months, Spore stood out. The Sims and Sim City creator Will Wright's brainchild attempts to tackle the scope of the entire universe, from microscopic life to interstellar travel. On every level of the game, you can design exactly how you want your world to be, from microbes to animals to buildings to space ships. While there wasn't enough time to get a broad view of the entire game and all of its aspects, I managed to spend some quality time on the title's creature and space ship editors.… Read more
The good people over at EA were able to send us a copy of Burnout Paradise an entire week before its release. While we're by no means completely through the game, we've gotten a great idea of what the game is all about, how it works, how it doesn't, and what you can expect.
The biggest news about the latest iteration of Burnout is the new open-world environment you're introduced to just seconds after you begin the game. Known as Paradise City, the town is loaded with destructible areas, jumps, billboards, and hidden paths. In addition, the team at Criterion (the British development house that continues to shepherd the series for publisher Electronic Arts) has decided to drop all menus and car classes in favor of a system that allows you begin an event just by pulling up to various intersections around town. This system works well, but one major drawback is that you won't be able to restart an event via the Pause menu. No, you'll have to return to the intersection at which you began in order to retry the same event. We've noticed ourselves not even worrying about which event goes where, and just beginning a new event at the next available crossroad.
Burnout Paradise is all about leveling up your license,… Read more
One of our predictions for CES 2008 was that DVD recorders with ATSC tuners would get a couple of key features upgrades that take full advantage of the built-in digital tuner. Well, if Panasonic's new line of DVD recorders is any indication, we were wrong.
Despite some significant clamoring for a DVD recorder with a hard drive, the new Panasonic Diga line of DVD recorders includes only two standard DVD recorders, plus two DVD/VHS recorder combo units. There's also no mention of a few features we were hoping for: true HD output for ATSC programming, an EPG … Read more
Now that the deal between Vivendi and Activision has been officially announced, it looks like the former will take two-thirds control in the popular developer and be able to compete more effectively against the video game industry's de facto big shot--EA.
And while the $1.7 billion will allow Vivendi to become a more "complete" organization that can offer a wide array of games for people on all platforms, I just can't see how this will benefit any consumers.
Sure, the merger between Vivendi and Activision will finally create a competitor for the behemoth that is EA and with Activision's current streak of 74 percent growth since 2003 as compared to EA's paltry 25 percent, it's certainly possible that the former could overtake the latter in terms of size within the next decade.
But is an environment where two major video game developers control a significant stake of the market really beneficial to consumers? Unfortunately, the answer is no.… Read more
The state of the PC gaming industry is fine. Just ask any executive whose business depends on PC gaming.
Representatives from Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, and Crytek held a combination political rally/pep talk for the PC gaming industry Friday at Nvidia's GeForce LAN 4 event in Alameda, Calif. The audience--several hundred rabid PC gamers with plans to spend the entire weekend playing Crysis--cheered the panelists as they reassured attendees that all was well in the PC gaming world.
The runaway success of gaming consoles like Microsoft's Xbox 360, Nintendo's Wii, and Sony's PlayStation 3 … Read more
According to a weekend report on Ars Technica, leading game maker Electronic Arts has decided to give their pioneering game SimCity to the One Laptop per Child project for installation on every machine distributed to children in developing nations).
You probably played SimCity as a kid. Remember laying out your own city, making decisions about geography, building roads, residences, and commercial areas? You got to watch how your choices play out over months, years, and decades.
The game also reveals the importance of city planning and civic policy-making to ordinary citizens, making it likely that at least some children in … Read more
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