Games

SimCity's launch may be long remembered as a complete disaster, but in a new update, Lucy Bradshaw, General Manager of Sims creator and EA subsidiary Maxis, aimed to alleviate the sour mood by promising to fix the connectivity calamity and deliver a free game as a peace offering.

"To get us back in your good graces, we're going to offer you a free PC download game from the EA portfolio," said Bradshaw. "On March 18, SimCity players who have activated their game will receive an e-mail telling them how to redeem their free game."… Read more

Nintendo's Wii U could benefit from a price reduction, a Ubisoft executive director says.

Speaking to Edge-Online in an interview published yesterday, Alain Corre said that his company "always" likes to see a hardware company cut the price of a console.

"We always want the hardware to be at a low price because we want as many fans as possible to afford to buy our games, so that's for sure," he said in response to a question asking if he'd like to see Nintendo cut the price of its console. Corre is Ubisoft'… Read more

The most popular mobile-gaming franchise in the world is now a bit easier for you to get your hands on.

Customers who head over to the App Store today will find that the iPhone and iPad versions of Angry Birds are available for free. Previously, the iPhone version was on sale for 99 cents. Angry Birds HD for the iPad was available for $2.99. Rovio previously offered free versions of the titles, but those were limited to only a few levels. Those now appear to be gone from the App Store.

Angry Birds was the game that kicked off … Read more

Valve's highly anticipated Steam Box game console will be ready for testing in a few months time.

Speaking to the BBC in an interview published recently, Valve CEO Gabe Newell said that the console should be ready for testing "in the next three to four months," adding that his company will pass out the device to customers to try out.

"There are noise issues and heat issues and being able to [deal with] that while still offering a powerful enough gaming experience is the challenge in building it," Newell told BBC, adding that Valve still hasn't been able to finalize the device's controller design.… Read more

Microsoft's Kinect might eventually reduce your reliance on the mouse.

At Microsoft's TechFest this week at its headquarters in Redmond, Microsoft is showing off an update to its software development kit that will allow developers to add more hand-gesture functionality to their programs. According to The Verge, which tried out the hand detection, the technology allows users to pinch-to-zoom with their hands and pan around the screen. All of that is done by simply waving and clenching their hands in front of the Kinect.

Microsoft's Kinect was first delivered to gamers by connecting it to the Xbox … Read more

I don't know how much crossover there is between fans of old-school Mario games and fans of East Coast hard-core rap duo Mobb Deep, but there's at least one guy who qualifies. Teddy Faley has so much love for each, he created an entire mashup album of the two.

"Mario Deep" (fair warning: adult language in the lyrics) consists of vocals from Mobb Deep playing over a soundtrack culled entirely of samples from the first few Mario games. At first, you might think the combination would be pretty jarring, but after a few seconds, you can really get into the groove of it.… Read more

Gears of War: Judgment has turned at least one aspect of game creation on its head, according to a behind-the-scenes video about the upcoming game for Xbox 360.

The 7-minute video sheds light on how the shooting game's co-developers, Epic Games and People Can Fly, integrated the two lead writers early in the game's creation -- instead of adding dialog and conversation later in the process.

Rob Auten and Tom Bissell, the lead writers for the fourth iteration of the game, spent a year creating 20,000 spoken lines for Judgment, which they estimate clocking in somewhere near 100,000 words. There are only about 17 minutes of cinematic cut scenes, so a lot of the dialog occurs during gameplay. Players can also increase the difficulty of levels in Judgment, and these experiences contain different script material for enhanced replay value. … Read more

Oh yea. Ouya is on its way to the Android open-source gaming console's original Kickstarter backers.

Developer kits went out to hackers and programmers a few months ago, and now the rest of Ouya's tens of thousands of crowdfunders who are primarily interested in getting their game on get their turn. The startup says it will begin shipping consoles to those folks on March 28. … Read more

Editors' note: The following is a response to Jim Kerstetter's commentary, "Why do we blame games for real-world violence?"

I have fond memories of the hours lost playing Medal of Honor on PlayStation 2 and even the original GoldenEye on Nintendo64.

It was immersive and exciting, and to me it was entertainment. Now as a parent I have a different perspective: I wonder if such games are actually bad for my own kids. That's why I found Jim Kerstetter's article "Why do we blame games for real-world violence?" an interesting read, and also … Read more