Round-ups, games, movies Jason England Round-ups, games, movies Jason England

This Week In New Releases [Week Of 19th March 2012]

We all need a gentle reminder from time to time. This Week In New Releases from New Rising Media aims to do just that – remind you of the biggest, best and hottest new media releases to look out for this week. From the latest big screen blockbusters, to this week's most anticipated Blu-Ray discs, via details of the next big triple-A videogame to reach consoles. This isn't a total run-down of everything new this week, though, these are carefully hand-picked for your viewing/playing pleasure entirely by us, enjoy.

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Heikki Kovalainen To Sport Angry Birds Helmet In This Year's F1
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Heikki Kovalainen To Sport Angry Birds Helmet In This Year's F1

Remember when Angry Birds was nothing but another game on the App Store looking to make it big? It might be harder than you first think, what with the 59p App exploding in popularity, winging its way into the heart of millions and earning billions in the process. Angry Birds merchandise is everywhere; from branded kitchen-ware, to felt iPad cases, irresistibly cute plush toys, playing cards, backpacks, lunchboxes… There are even plans to open an at a theme park in the developer’s homeland Finland this summer.

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An Interview With Remedy Entertainment

Drawing more parallels to the vibes of mystery-soaked, suspense-filled supernatural TV dramas, and putting a psychologically-disturbed protagonist front-and-center rather than your atypical videogame archetype, Alan Wake was an alarmingly risky proposition for its developer and backer to see through. But with the supernatural thriller recently reported to have surpassed the 2 million mark in units sold – a statistic no doubt helped along by the title’s recent release on PC – and rumours of a sequel in the pipeline, it’s a bet that seems to have paid off big for the team that cut its teeth on the bullet-time thrills and film noir vibes of the Max Payne series.

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Round-ups, games, movies Jason England Round-ups, games, movies Jason England

This Week In New Releases [Week Of 12th March 2012]

We all need a gentle reminder from time to time. This Week In New Releases from New Rising Media aims to do just that – remind you of the biggest, best and hottest new media releases to look out for this week. From the latest big screen blockbusters, to this week's most anticipated Blu-Ray discs, via details of the next big triple-A videogame to reach consoles. This isn't a total run-down of everything new this week, though, these are carefully hand-picked for your viewing/playing pleasure entirely by us, enjoy.

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Quantic Dream Gives Us A Glimpse Of Next-Gen Visuals, 'Kara' Demo Shown Off

Steered by its creator's technical expertise in motion capture technology and pushing the graphical capabilities of Sony’s home console to new heights along with it, Heavy Rain was not only one of the best examples of narrative within the medium of videogames, but it also happened to be one of this generation’s finest-looking games. Now the developer behind it, Quantic Dream, has aimed to raise the bar once again, showing off one of the most visually spectacular and technically-brilliant tech demos we've ever had the fortune of seeing.

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Round-ups, games, movies, tech Jason England Round-ups, games, movies, tech Jason England

This Week In New Releases [Week Of 5th March 2012]

We all need a gentle reminder from time to time. This Week In New Releases from New Rising Media aims to do just that – remind you of the biggest, best and hottest new media releases to look out for this week. From the latest big screen blockbusters, to this week's most anticipated Blu-Ray discs, via details of the next big triple-A videogame to reach consoles. This isn't a total run-down of everything new this week, though, these are carefully hand-picked for your viewing/playing pleasure entirely by us, enjoy.

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GameMaker Challenge #2 At University Of Lincoln

 

First year Games computing students at the University of Lincoln have been taking part in a series of GameMaker Challenges: setting the objective of making original games based around one central concept.  They've already taken care of 'one button games,' and now it's the turn of the 1980s Atari-esque 'ASCII' character set and graphical output.

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Halo 4 Is “A More Cinematic Experience” Says 343

 

343 Industries quite rightly has an enormous amount of pressure riding over its head. Not only does Halo 4 herald the long-awaited return of Master Chief as lead protagonist (a very welcome return might we add), but this, the seventh game incorporating the Halo license – a franchise racking up revenue of over $2.8 billion might we add, as of January 2012 – is the studio's very first as lead developer. With Bungie relinquishing the reigns of the franchise, 343 has an incomprehensible weight placed on its shoulders to live up to what's expected both from its ever-faithful fan-base and Microsoft itself.

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The 'OnaCon': TechArts 3D's Masturbation Stat-Tracking Gaming Peripheral

The world of videogames isn't averse to adult-orientated games – as our run-down of the best games to 'enjoy' over valentine's day no doubt proved, aroused 8-bit caricatures and all – nor indeed is it of frankly absurd add-on peripherals, such as Nintendo's Vitality Sensor (still yet to see a release) and bowling ball attachment for the Wii. Really. But even so, we struggle to come up with the words to describe what Japanese adult game studio TechArts 3D have come up with.

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'Snake The Planet': Taking Classic 8-Bit Gaming To The Side Of Buildings

It's likely you're all familiar with the simple, classic, yet oh-so-addictive game 'Snake' by now. First introduced to arcades in the late 1970s, it was when mobile phone manufacturer Nokia began pre-loading the game onto its old monochrome-display phones when it exploded into the public consciousness, where it has remained ever since. Now, a team of media artists and computational designers – known by the name Mobile Projection Unit (you'll see why) – are taking the classic game one step further, and in a very big way – the side of buildings big.

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How To Earn PlayStation Vita Trophies On Pre-Owned Games

The game industry’s maraud against the pre-owned games market is gathering momentum at a frankly alarming rate. From online passes to one-time use activation codes for downloadable content, publishers and developers alike have stressed time and time again the danger the pre-owned market poses the industry. Lionhead Studios, developers of Fable, notably implied during the run-up to Fable III’s PC release that pre-owned console software was worse for the industry than piracy on PC.

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Round-ups, games, movies Jason England Round-ups, games, movies Jason England

This Week In New Releases [Week Of 27th February 2012]

We all need a gentle reminder from time to time. This Week In New Releases from New Rising Media aims to do just that – remind you of the biggest, best and hottest new media releases to look out for this week. From the latest big screen blockbusters, to this week's most anticipated Blu-Ray discs, via details of the next big triple-A videogame to reach consoles. This isn't a total run-down of everything new this week, though, these are carefully hand-picked for your viewing/playing pleasure entirely by us, enjoy.

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GAME Will Not Be Stocking Mass Effect 3 On Release, Pre-Orders Cancelled

Game Group’s future as a major high-street videogame retailer is looking ever more worrying as reports have emerged today that the retailer will not be stocking any of EA Games’ March releases immediately following the European release of SSX this Friday. Crucially – and perhaps foretelling of what is to come for the company – that will mean no store shelving will be reserved for EA and Bioware’s trilogy-closer Mass Effect 3, the biggest and most noteworthy game of the year so far.

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Game Review: SSX

If you've ever plunged down a slope of death-defying proportions, listening to a certain Run DMC song, playing as a male individual with a giant afro, you probably have been watching this game very closely to see whether it is the renaissance of a genre that's been dead for too long, or a metaphorical final nail in the coffin of video-game brand rebirths.

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Street Fighter X Monopoly. Street Fighter Edition Of Monopoly Unveiled

Marvel vs. Capcom, Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, Street Fighter X Tekken… We all enjoy a good license crossover from time to time, granting us the gift of experiencing the delights of two IP’s for the price of one. For publishers it makes perfect sense: facing off against a typically competing property allows both to enjoy the success that two fan bases will often bring, while also opening up the IP to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t have looked twice. What we didn’t see coming, like a swift Ryu hurricane kick to the jaw, is the most unlikely of partnerships between the typically fast and frenetic fighting franchise, Street Fighter, and the, well, not so frenetic classic property-trading board game, Monopoly.

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Hardware Review: PlayStation Vita

You have to give Sony credit. It takes a ballsy company to release major new hardware at a price upwards of £200 in such economically difficult times (and at a time where we're constantly reminded of the games industry's troubling outlook), but it takes even more confidence to launch hardware that, essentially, swims against the tide of current gaming trends. In a market now chock-full of often-shallow social games, 59p Apps for mobile devices and free-to-play triple-A titles, it's an immensely risky strategy to put so much marketing grunt and belief behind a portable gaming machine in which off-the-shelf titles are priced comparatively to their console equivalents, and where going all-in for the hardware is likely to cost much more than buying another home console.

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Syndicate Devs' Hidden Message Urges Pirates To Apply For Jobs

Novel ways to prevent piracy of videogames don't come along too often, but when they do it's usually worth discussing; from Digital Rights Management (DRM) to one-time use activation codes, Cloud Copy Protection (employed by Ubisoft, but currently on hiatus as seen with its absence in AC: Revelations), unstoppable mutant scorpion (used by Serious Sam 3: BFE dev Croteam to discourage early piraters of the game and everything in-between.

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Editorial: How A Dancing C-3PO Represents Everything Wrong With Kinect Development
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Editorial: How A Dancing C-3PO Represents Everything Wrong With Kinect Development

It happened when the Nintendo Wii was first announced, and then again when Microsoft unveiled the Kinect upon the world: gamers across our universe were filled with anticipation; imagining how motion control would finally bridge the gap between dream and reality, how simple gestures aimed at our TV screens would bring us one step closer to truly feeling like a Jedi. The force is strong in Kinect, after all.

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