Tag Archives | Gaming

Nintendo 3DS Ad Grapples With 3D Marketing

Posted by Jared Newman on March 15, 2011 at 4:03 pm

With less than two weeks until the Nintendo 3DS launches in the United States, Nintendo is showing off its first commercial for the 3D gaming handheld. And in doing so, the company has raised a question that comes up every time someone tries to advertise 3D: How, exactly, do you market something that can only be witnessed in person?

In a way, this issue has dogged television makers for years. Back when tube televisions ruled, electronics companies had to convince us of HDTV’s visual fidelity through words or metaphor. That’s true with any incremental improvement in picture quality. But while it’s easy to believe that a new TV simply looks better than an old one, 3D has the challenge of selling the public on an entirely different way of viewing video. Take a look at how Nintendo handles it:

 

 

I think the visual effect of jumping into and out of the game is a valiant effort. If I were 20 years younger, I’d probably be flipping out over this stuff, and it definitely does a better job of selling the 3D concept than most 3D TV ads. (My personal least favorite is the one from Panasonic where a family gets sucked into outer space, accompanied by a voiceover from a creepy, whispering child.)

One other thing that strikes me about the Nintendo 3DS ad: the users. These people are my age, which is to say they fall into the stereotypical gamer demographic. In recent years, Nintendo’s made a killing by targeting everyone else.

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Tegra 2 Phones and Tablets Will Get Playstation Suite

Posted by Jared Newman on March 11, 2011 at 8:43 am

When Sony announced its next-generation portable gaming device in January, it also took out an insurance policy with Playstation Suite, a gaming service for Android smartphones.

Smartphone gaming gives Sony a backup plan in case its fancy, dedicated gaming device falls flat, but until now, we haven’t known which devices will run Playstation Suite besides Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play (a.k.a. the Playstation phone).

Enter Nvidia, which says it’ll bring Playstation Suite to Tegra 2-powered smartphones and tablets this year. Nvidia announced the news (via Engadget) in its “TegraZone” Android app, a spotlight for games that take advantage of the Tegra 2 hardware.

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Cloud Save Comes to Playstation Plus

Posted by Jared Newman on March 9, 2011 at 4:29 pm

Playstation Plus subscribers will soon be able to trust their precious game save files to the Internet as well as a hard drive.

Sony is adding Cloud Save to the Playstation 3 on Thursday. The feature provides Playstation Plus subscribers with 150 MB of online storage for up to 1,000 save files. This allows users to load their game progress on other PS3s — for example, unlocked costumes in Street Fighter IV — or just keep their files online for peace of mind. The feature will be available for most existing and all future PS3 games, and supports game saves that can’t be transferred by physical media due to copy protection.

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Let the Xbox 720 Speculation Begin!

Posted by Jared Newman on March 8, 2011 at 2:55 pm

Eventually, there will be new video game systems, but in the midst of an unusually long product cycle, Microsoft has avoided leaving any clues.

That changed with a few job ads, posted on LinkedIn by Microsoft. The company is seeking engineers and a graphics hardware architect for “next-generation console architectures from conception through implementation.” In other words, Microsoft is starting to work on the Xbox 720 — or whatever it may be called.

As for the other console makers, Sony has said that it’s not even thinking about next-generation game consoles. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime said the company doesn’t necessarily have to release a Wii successor this year, despite some very old rumors to the contrary.

Microsoft, of course, isn’t commenting, and the job posting is no epic reveal. It’s not even surprising given that Microsoft is in the business of making video game consoles. But it marks the beginning of what will surely be a trail of rumors and speculation, and it should be fun to watch.

(Xbox 720 concept by DeviantArtist djeric)

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Our Tapper World Tour/iPod Touch Giveaway: The Results

Posted by Harry McCracken on March 7, 2011 at 9:12 am

Thanks to everyone who entered our drawing for the new Tapper World Tour game and an iPod Touch to play it on. And congratulations to John Erickson, whose name came up when our random-number generator had done its magic.

Speaking of Tapper, I had fun last week meeting Don Bluth and his longtime artistic associate Gary Goldman, the creators of Tapper’s visuals and the animation for two iconic 1980s arcade games: Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace. (That’s Bluth and Goldman in the photo above.) I wrote about Bluth’s take on his videogame work over at Techland.

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Angry Birds’ Next Conquest, and Biggest Challenge, is Facebook

Posted by Jared Newman on March 6, 2011 at 3:51 pm

Although Angry Birds got its start on the iPhone, it didn’t linger there for long. The hit bird-slinging puzzle game has since migrated to Android, iPad, WebOS, Windows, Mac and the Playstation Network.

Next up is Facebook, where Angry Birds will be landing later this year, according to Develop. And because of the game’s existing popularity — it’s been downloaded 75 million times on other platforms, and some pundits have compared its cultural impact to Pac-Man — Angry Birds has a decent shot at stealing the Facebook gaming throne from Zynga, developer of Farmville, Cityville and Mafia Wars.

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Death By Smartphone: Panasonic’s Jungle Gets the Axe

Posted by Jared Newman on March 3, 2011 at 4:39 pm

The skeptics were right to dismiss Panasonic’s Jungle, a handheld gaming device that surfaced in previews last October. With development cancelled and no launch in sight, the Jungle is down in the deadpool alongside Panasonic’s failed 3DO.

The Jungle was designed as a Linux-based handheld with a high-resolution display, a physical keyboard, touch pads and a niche focus on massive multiplayer online games. Battlestar Galactica Online was supposed to be a launch title.

Panasonic won’t say why it aborted the Jungle other than “changes in the market and in our own strategic direction,” but I can make an educated guess that smartphones — and to some extent tablets — are to blame.

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Valve Plots Living Room Takeover With Steam

Posted by Jared Newman on March 1, 2011 at 10:12 am

Steam is a popular gaming service for PCs with over 30 million player accounts worldwide, but it’s missing out on the huge audience that prefers video game consoles and gaming in the living room.

That may change with a couple of new efforts from Valve, which runs the Steam service. The company announced that it’s building a “big picture mode” with controller support and navigation designed for big screens. Valve’s intent is to help gamers play from their couches without a mouse and keyboard.

In addition, Valve is bringing a version of Steam to the Playstation 3, starting with the release of Portal 2 in April. This will allow PC and PS3 gamers to play together, and may someday allow players to resume their saved games across both platforms.

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Gaikai Launches a Streaming Video Game Sampler

Posted by Jared Newman on February 28, 2011 at 9:51 am

Gaikai, the yin to OnLive’s yang, has entered public beta with video game demos that are instantly playable in a web browser.

Like OnLive, Gaikai uses its own servers to perform the heavy graphical lifting that modern PC games require. Users play the game through highly compressed audio and video streams, which are capable of running on low-end PCs. But instead of selling games to consumers through a software client, Gaikai wants game publishers to serve instant demos on their websites or Facebook pages. All the player needs is Flash and the latest version of Java.

Demos are available for Mass Effect 2, Spore and The Sims 3. You can also play a demo of Dead Space 2 by taking a short survey. They’re all published by Electronic Arts, which entered a “multi-year” licensing agreement with Gaikai in June 2010.

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Win Tapper World Tour–and an iPod Touch to Play It on

Posted by Harry McCracken on February 25, 2011 at 9:53 am

Tempest. Tapper. Rampage. Popeye. Dig Dug. Those are my five favorite classic arcade games, and I’m really not sure what order I’d rank them in. Tempest would probably come out on top–but Tapper would have a shot, too.

Tapper debuted in 1983 and existed in two versions. In one, you played the part of a bartender who served Budweiser beer, in an early example of product placement in games. The other edition was Root Beer Tapper–shown above–in which you were a soda jerk serving non-alcoholic refreshments. The gameplay was identical: You ran around tapping beverages and flinging them down counters at hordes of impatient customers in various settings. It was twitchy good fun, the graphics and sound were excellent for their day, and I know that the game has held up well–I played it, repeatedly, just a few months ago at the amazing California Extreme arcade mega-event.

And now there’s Tapper World Tour, a new version for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad from Warner Bros. and Square One. You may not be surprised to learn that the graphics are more ambitious this time around, and you serve drinks in a lot more settings. But the basic drink-flinging gameplay looks like it’s come into the modern era intact, as it should:

Lovers of 1980s gaming have another reason to be interested in this revival: Its graphics were designed by Don Bluth, whose animation studio produced the animation for Dragon’s Lair (1983) and Space Ace (1984), two games which used laserdiscs to provide astoundingly rich animation and audio for their era.

Interested in playing the new Tapper? It’s scheduled to show up on the iOS App Store in early spring. And courtesy of Warner Bros. and Square One, you have a chance at a free copy–and an 8GB iPod Touch to play it on. We’ll be giving an iPod Touch with Tapper World Tour preinstalled to one lucky winner.

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