News
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COD: Black Ops knocked off perch.
Long-awaited PlayStation 3 exclusive Gran Turismo 5 has topped the UK all-formats chart.
Sony’s simulator is the first game to knock Call of Duty: Black Ops off its perch since the shooter’s release at the start of the month. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood remains a place below, dipping to third.
FIFA 11 and Just Dance 2 were fourth and fifth.
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BioWare talks up port.
BioWare has reassured PS3 users that their forthcoming version of Mass Effect 2 won’t make any sacrifices in its visual and will be “as good, if not better than the Xbox version”.
“Oftentimes when you go to the PS3 you see stuff like down-ressing and using a smaller than 720p resolution to try and get back some of the framerate,” producer Jess Huston told the Official PlayStation Magazine (according to a post on NeoGAF.
“We haven’t done that. We really wanted to try to make it as good, if not better than the Xbox version.”
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Nintendo revives one franchise and celebrates another with this week’s releases.
Donkey Kong heads back to the platforming jungle this week, ending his long break from the genre that launched his career post-Mario. Kept quiet until Nintendo’s E3 press conference this year, Donkey Kong Country Returns is a nod to the famous ape’s ’90s games and is packed with features that are aimed at nostalgic players. Keep an eye out for Donkey Kong Country Returns when it’s released in Australia on Thursday.
The second big game of the week from Nintendo isn’t so much a new offering, but rather a bundle of four retro Mario games in limited-edition packaging. Themed around the 25th anniversary of Mario, the Super Mario All-Stars pack contains Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3 all on one disc that’s playable on the Wii. On top of that there’s also a soundtrack and a short text and pictorial look at the history of gaming’s most iconic character. The Super Mario All-Stars bundle will also be released on Thursday.
Rounding out the week’s releases are The Sly Collection, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn, and FIFA Manager 11. While the end-of-year slowdown kicks off next week, there are still a handful of games due out, one of them being World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and AU Shippin’ Out will be covering them until the end, so keep watching this space for updated release dates.
To find out what else is out this week, check out the list below:
December 2, 2010
Zumba Fitness: Join the Party (360)
Golden Sun: Dark Dawn (DS)
Donkey Kong Country Returns (Wii)
U-Sing 2 (Wii)
House M.D. (DS)
Pac-Man Party (Wii)
Karaoke Revolution Glee (Wii)
Shane Watson’s PowerPlay Cricket 2011 (DS)
Super Mario All-Stars (Wii)
The Sly Collection (PS3)
Game Party: In Motion (360)Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot
“AU Shippin’ Out November 29-December 3: Donkey Kong Country Returns” was posted by James Kozanecki on Sun, 28 Nov 2010 22:36:57 -0800 -
Minecraft players, I’m rapidly coming to understand, are a very special kind of mental. Not a bad kind, mind. They’re unlikely stab you up in the street because your scarf looked at them funny, and I highly doubt we’ll ever see a mass ritual suicide of cultists in the name of block building enterprise. But mental they are all the same. Mad in the face.
You have a game that lets you build anything. What do you make? How about everything? A chap by the name of roddds469 (interesting Christening, by all accounts) has done just that, creating a scale model of the whole goddamn planet. And he’s driven around its skies in a minecart to show it off. You know you need to see this. …
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It’s getting itchy over at Ubisoft. All November long, employees at Ubisoft’s San Francisco, Montreal, Quebec, Vancouver and France offices have been letting their facial hair fly free as part of the annual ‘Movember’ cancer research fundraiser. …
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Most games “not taxing it to full accuracy”.
Sony is able to improve the accuracy of motion-sensing controller Move through firmware updates to the PlayStation 3 but it may decide not to.
“We can certainly update it through firmware,” Anton Mikhailov, a software engineer at Sony Computer Entertainment America’s research and development department and one of Move’s chief creators, told Eurogamer in a new interview published today.
“The real question is, do we want to? So far we haven’t had any real requests from studios to improve the accuracy. There are a couple of issues here and there we can fix, but the majority the games are not even taxing it to its full accuracy.”
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Releasing figures makes you “genuine”.
Publishing sales figures for your games helps users see you as more “genuine”, according to the creator of runaway indie hit Minecraft.
Earlier this year, Swedish developer Markus ‘Notch’ Persson made headlines when he decided to include a counter on his website tracking how many people had bought the game, which then allowed all and sundry to calculate how much cash he was bringing in.
Persson told GamesIndustry.biz that he did this not to show off, but as a way of engaging with his customers.
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DS RPG gets biggest game manual ever?
Level-5’s forthcoming DS RPG Ni no Kuni will come bundled with a fully-illustrated hardback that will serve as a reference guide to the game’s puzzles.
Two new Japanese advertisements for the game, posted below, show how you’ll need to refer back to the chunky tome in order to crack a number of the game’s brainteasers.
The RPG, a slobber-inducing collaboration behind Dragon Quest IX developer Level-5 and legendary animation house Studio Ghibli, is out in Japan on 9th December, with a PlayStation 3 version due in early 2011.
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BioWare fills out RPG sequel’s cast.
Soldier Aveline Vallen is the latest key character to be unveiled for Dragon Age 2.
A posting on the game’s official site divulged a few details of the new cast member.
“Aveline Vallen is a soldier, a master of sword and shield, and a tireless guardian… to a point. The daughter of an exiled chevalier, Aveline is not the knight her father wished her to be.
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I don’t fancy yours much.
Here’s what we were picking from: Out This Week.
Are we nearly there yet? Not quite. As the games industry’s annual jamboree of big game releases shudders to a close, there are still a few bits and bobs to look forward to between now and Christmas, not least the lovely Donkey Kong Country Returns and PC gaming’s clash of the titans on 7th December World of Warcraft: Cataclysm versus Bejeweled 3.
It’s been an orgiastic couple of months, but the last week of November had the feel of a nightclub just before the lights are turned on, with the last few lonely singletons on the dance floor making a desperate lunge for a date.