Video Games Daily News Digest

Highlights from our community-written blogs, featuring PlayStation Home’s potential for gaming and the emotional impact of Heavy Rain.

EvilRedEye plays Sodium, an action MMOG based in PlayStation Home, and he finds what he plays promising for Home's future, provided it gets the support it deserves from both Sony and PS3 owners. If it doesn’t, well, those 12 million users will have to keep making do with dancing in front of strangers for entertainment.

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Sony has confirmed a May 25 North American launch date for PS3 and PSP kart racer ModNation Racers.

The company said that it hopes to release the United Front Games developed title during the same week in Europe.

“ModNation Racers is the first HD kart racing game, with the accessibility that you expect from a kart racing title, but with the physicality of a racing game,” Dan Sochan, producer of the PS3 version, told us last year.

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Sony has said that passing up on worldwide publishing rights to surprise sleeper hit Demon’s Souls was an error.

Speaking at GDC (via 1UP), Sony Japan Studios localisation and licensing rep Yeonkyung Kim said that the company had expected the game to appeal to a niche audience due to its unorthodox design and challenging difficulty level.

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Microsoft director of product management Aaron Greenberg believes the absence of an Xbox 360 Blu-ray drive has played a significant role in the console’s success.

“We’ve just taken a different strategy. Sony bet on the physical disc, and there are costs associated with that,” he told us.

“The fact that we’re able to offer a console starting at $199 is a benefit of not being burdened with that cost. Being $100 cheaper is part of the reason why we’re nearly twice their installed base.”

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Brian Fargo (CEO and founder of inXile) misses the olden days. Back when people like him made games like Wizardry, Might & Magic, Dungeon Master, and the original 1985 version of The Bard’s Tale. Fargo comments that those titles created and defined the classic dungeon-crawling experience, but as the years passed on, the genre started becoming a bit more action-driven. The methodical mazes of Wizardry gave way to the FPS-RPG mash-up that you’d see in Ultima Underworld, the Hexen series, or even the first Elder Scrolls game (Arena). But afterwards, you don’t really see that; the traditional RPG itself split off into Baldur’s-Gate-versus-Final-Fantasy branches, the dungeon crawler transformed into Diablo or Rogue-like games, while the first-person action-RPG would go on into games like Deus Ex, System Shock 2, or even Mass Effect 2.

As commented earlier, Fargo misses the days when you can have an intense, medieval/high/low fantasy dungeon game that is on par with concurrent games from other genres. That’s essentially where Hunted: The Demon’s Forge has come from: a strong desire to take the old-school dungeon crawler, and produce a new high definition version for the modern generation. Don’t expect a game full of graphs and single-monsters taking up your screen; what Hunted actually looks like, if I had to describe it in a movie-pitch-style logline, is, “Gears of the Rings.”

While Blizzard completely revamps Battle.net to accomodate the upcoming StarCraft II, Impulse is quietly doing the same with their new Impulse Reactor functionality. Speaking with 1UP during GDC, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell said that both services will help set the bar for multiplayer PC strategy games going forward.

“Everyone who wants to make a good strategy game is going to be compared to the bar set by Blizzard,” he said.

Consequently, Reactor features much the same functionality as the new Battle.net, including placement matches and tiered online leagues. But the functionality will also soon be fully integrated into supported Impulse titles.

Thanks to strong performances by both their flagship and new intellectual properties, publisher Atlus USA has posted massive gains.

According to a Siliconera report, the North American wing of the Japanese firm made 378 million yen (approx $4.15 million) in operating profit for the first half of their financial year. That’s up a staggering 236.1% compared to the equivalent period last year.

The stats from the previous quarter are even more impressive. Here operating profits were up 578.5%, with Atlus USA racking up a cool 346 million yen ($3.81 million). Good showings for Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, and (relative) surprise-hit Demon’s Souls are being attributed to the success. 101-in-1 Party Megamix is being mentioned too, but we’re putting our fingers in our ears and pretending it’s the good games that bring the money in.

Some form of id Software’s upcoming Rage property will appear on Apple’s soon-to-be-available iPad tablet computer, John Carmack told Kotaku at GDC — where he accepted the Lifetime Achievement Award — last week.

“Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves,” he said of the device. “But we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”

The Bethesda-published shooter is expected to arrive ’sometime in 2010′ for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. More news will likely arrive at E3 2010 in June, or QuakeCon 2010 which was just recently dated for August.

Either you’ve played Perfect Dark before, or you haven’t. Most readers who find their way here probably have, and the ones who haven’t, well, you’ll probably need some serious convincing to play a decade-old game that pretty cheerfully ignores the innovations the FPS genre gained from games like, say, Half-Life, and came out on a console that wasn’t exactly known as the cutting edge of graphical holyshit-osity. For that first bunch it’s really easy to say, yeah, with the HD upgrade Perfect Dark on XBLA looks every bit as good as you remember it. Which, if you actually pop in the cart these days, you’ll realize is a hell of a lot better than it actually looked back in the day. Between the replaced textures and multiplayer over Live (in splitscreen, no less) this is a great way to re-enjoy a game you already love. It deserves that love. You should be proud to love it. More so now that it’s been touched up without losing a single bit of its original character.

On the other hand, Perfect Dark is old as hell and likely to alienate anyone who cut their teeth on games that came after. If you’re one of those people…I’m sorry, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a reason to say that this is kind of a major gap in your videogaming experience that you absolutely have to go back and fill in. Unlike some other genres, most first-person shooters are pretty far from timeless. We can’t look back on, say, Tetris, and think, “Man, this would be way the hell better with snappier graphics, more block shapes, and an epic storyline that makes us question the nature of our humanity or whatever.”

Epic Games will not be releasing Gears of War 3 in 2010. In fact Epic Games will not be releasing anything in 2010. The slackers.

Speaking to G4 at last week’s Game Developers Conference, Epic Games VP Mark Rein outlined what the coming year holds for his studio.

“We don’t have any games coming out in 2010,” said Rein, splattering our dreams over the floor like a particularly bloody headshot. “So from a games standpoint, it’s more about our customers’ games, right? Already this year we’ve seen some pretty great games this year — Mass Effect 2, BioShock 2, Arkham Asylum’s coming out in 3D, the GOTY version, so that’ll be kinda cool.”

Whatever Rein. Telling us about other people’s games just won’t cut it, even if you did make the engine. We want Marcus Fenix running around with his Sequoia-necked chums, shooting stuff up. Alright!? *sigh*

Still, at least we know they’re doing something over there. Epic Games subsidiary People Can Fly is currently developing a new shooter called Bulletstorm, to be published by EA. Word on the street is that it may have something to do with Rein’s tease of an “exciting” E3 for Epic fans.

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