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Remedy for a cold evening.
Scary game about a writer gone mad, Alan Wake, is now available to download from Xbox Live Games on Demand. It was only released earlier this year.
All titles on the Games on Demand service cost £20 or 2400 Microsoft Points in made-up wonga.
Alan Wake takes up 6.3GB of hard drive space and that represents just the base experience – all DLC will need buying separately.
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CEO says a number of staff have been retained for current projects with the possibility of growth in the coming weeks.In an interview with IGN, Australia-based Krome Studios CEO Robert Walsh says the developer has retained 40 staff following recent cuts.
Last month IGN reported that Krome had laid off its remaining staff with temporary workers brought in to complete existing projects.
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Microsoft’s Lync platform aims to “integrate the family room into the board room”.At a Microsoft event yesterday, the company unveiled plans to integrate its Lync video conferencing platform with its Kinect device.
Lync is intended to provide cross-platform video conferencing for mobiles, PCs and browsers.
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Day-and-date, DRM-free.
Polish company CD Projekt will break the Good Old Games mould by selling The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings there next May, Eurogamer can exclusively reveal.
Until now, Good Old Games had focused on adapting retro titles for today’s operating systems.
But sources have told us that on 17th May, The Witcher 2 will be found there. What’s more, the gritty action RPG will be completely DRM-free.
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Xbox Live red tape suspends 360 version.
Having criticised the red tape of Xbox Live, Blueside has said it is also making a PS3 version of Kingdom Under Fire II.
The “main reason” was because PS3 offers “many possibilities considering the aspects of an MMORPG that requires continuous updates”, Blueside CEO Sejung Kim explained.
The PS3 game is penned for a 2012 launch. The press release made no mention of the Xbox 360 version – only the PC game. When pressed about what this meant, Blueside told Eurogamer this morning that, “We’re still under discussion with Microsoft, and nothing has been confirmed.”
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Microsoft thinks so.
Kinect can do everything!* Soon the motion-sensing camera will help Microsoft deliver “probably the most important thing to happen to the office worker since the PC came along”.
It’s called Lync, and it’s a cross between MSN Messenger, Skype and, err, something with video, according to ZDNet via VG247.
It’s been in development for nearly six years and arrives next month, primarily as a business communication application, but with the future potential to involve Kinect, which could help add features like voice and face recognition.
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Wii also selling consistently, DS still top.
UK sales of the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii were not impacted by the recent surge in Xbox 360 sales that coincided with the launch of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Kinect.
UK Xbox 360 sales more than doubled in the aftermath of Kinect’s 10th November launch, but according to UK hardware sales figures obtained by Eurogamer, neither PS3 or Wii registered a noticeable slump.
The Wii outsold Xbox 360 in the week preceding Kinect’s launch, and both Wii and PS3 posted numbers consistent with their previous weeks’ totals following the camera-based controller peripheral’s much-hyped launch.
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Cloud-based game streaming service shipping TV plug-in device with wireless controller next month.US-based videogame streaming service OnLive has detailed its game system which will begin shipping to US customers on December 2.
The MicroConsole costs $99 and plugs directly into television sets and wired broadband internet connections. A wireless controller also comes in the package, though users can connect keyboards to the device via two USB ports.
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Report says it’s down from $100k.
US videogame scriptwriters are paid between $10,000 and $20,000 to do the dialogue in a game these days.
That’s according to a New York Observer article on the subject, which mentions the figures although does not attribute them.
Apparently a few years ago the story was very different, and scriptwriters could expect to receive closer to $100,000 for the same work.
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Broadcast info to other handhelds in Japan.
Nintendo has released a cute little gizmo for DSiWare in Japan that lets people broadcast image and audio samples to nearby DS systems via Download Play.
The idea behind Make Your Own DS Guide is more honourable than whatever dark thoughts you might be harbouring though it’s so that people can create guides for events and locations.
That’s according to Joystiq, which also reported that the guide program is a pet project of none other than Shigeru Miyamoto, who is smiling and radiant in the (as-yet untranslated) Iwata Asks column linked from the Guide app’s official website.