Inspiration is a funny thing. Most things start as some form of creative spark—It’s crucial to the creative process. Truly inspiring games often rise to greatness while a lack of inspiration just leaves you with nothing more than a steaming pile of horse dookie. Unfortunately, Quantum Theory leans a lot toward the latter.
Double Fine Productions is home to some of the best creative minds working in the game industry today. But while their first two releases Psychonauts and Brutal Legend were praised for their inventive worlds, good sense of humor, and entertaining stories, they also had some issues with their game design and failed to make a big impact financially. That resulted in a new strategy for Tim Schafer and his team. Instead of pouring all their energies into large projects that the whole company’s future hinged on the success of, they abandoned the retail market in favor of splitting into smaller groups to work on cheaper downloadable titles to limit the risk and boost their output. Costume Quest is the first release using this strategy, and while we don’t know how much this strategy will help the company, it could result in a lot of really fun projects.
PC Peripheral-makers, Razer have unveiled two new lines of gaming-optimized accessories; one based on Starcraft II, and the other on Tron. Both include a high-performance mouse and keyboard, while the Starcraft II series has a headset, and Tron has a special mouse mat. The Starcraft II headset, called The Banshee after one of vehicles in the game, goes for $119.99, and it has a color-coded “Actions Per Minute” system which lets players know how efficiently they’re using their time.
Both Parasite Eve and its sequel are said to be headed for PSN. Tetsuya Nomura has confirmed, using Twitter, that both the PSOne classics by Square Enix should be arriving at some point, although no date has yet been given.
The movie Tron was made back in 1982, and it about those new-fangled electronic thinking machines; “Com-pu-tors” they were called. This was the primitive past when a typical computer was the size of room, didn’t have a mouse, and only a handful of people had ever used one. They were big, mysterious, frightening machines and- as far as the average person knew- it was perfectly plausible that a computer with 1 meg of ram could become sentient, then zap you with a ray gun and pull you inside the terrifying world of its digital brain!
Fallout: New Vegas just launched this week and Bethesda has already promised a patch to fix the bugs reported by numerous players. Befuddled players have uploaded several YouTube videos of New Vegas containing moonwalking dogs, floating enemies, and characters with Exorcist-style spinning heads, all the result of glitches.
Bethesda’s Pete Hines announced that the company is currently working on patches for all versions of New Vegas and that additional information on the patch is “forthcoming.”
Space Channel 5 Part 2 will be one of two new Dreamcast games that will be arriving on PSN and Xbox Live.
For those who never experienced it, Space Channel 5 is a rhythm music game developed by United Game Artists. The player has to copy sequences of dance steps given by an on screen character.
