Everybody likes pirates, right? Not the pirates we have nowadays, the pirates popularized by a certain series of Disney films, who sail the seven seas on big ships waving cutlasses and shouting ‘yarr’. If you’re a particular fan of that kind of pirate, you’ll be interested to see that Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes, the developers of Risen 2: Dark Waters, have released the first in what will be a series of in-depth ‘making of’ videos for the game.
Many of you are already familiar with Bethesda’s legal escapades with Minecraft developer Mojang, but it’s highly possible that Bethesda isn’t taking everything involved too seriously. As seen in the screen below, a character in Bethesda’s latest game, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim¸ is about to loot a “notched pickaxe,” the central tool of Mojang’s Minecraft.
Today, Microsoft has released the Halo Living Monument, an interactive 3D model of Master Chief which allows fans of the Halo series the opportunity to load pictures of whatever they wish related to their experiences with Haloonto it. Master Chief’s body is split up into hexes, much like Civilization V, for the pictures to be uploaded to.
Another Call of Duty release, another record-setting launch. Within 24 hours of being released, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 sold over 6.5 million copies in the U.S. and U.K alone. Activision reports that the game generated $400 million in revenue, which topped its predecessors handily: Black Ops’ generated $360 million in 2010 and Modern Warfare 2made $310 million in 2009.
Dubbed “the biggest entertainment launch ever,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said that “Life-to-date sales for the Call of Duty franchise exceed worldwide theatrical box office for Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, two of the most successful entertainment franchises of all time.” Microsoft also reported a record amount of users on Xbox Live after Modern Warfare 3 was launched.
Today has seen the unveiling of the new Metro style of the Xbox Live website. An update is expected soon for the dashboard itself, but as of now the Xbox.com is designed to show off what is to be expected from the new setup that has been dubbed Metro.
The Assassin’s Creed series has always done one thing spectacularly well: throwing the player into a beautifully-realised historical city and give them free reign to wander around and explore the sights and sounds as much as they choose. It’s the open-world of Grand Theft Auto, but in times and places much more distant and exciting than the faux-American cities of the GTA series. The newest game in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is to take place in the city of Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), notable historically for being located in between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea near Greece, the meeting point between the Middle East and the Mediterranean.
If you’re a videogamer of any type or creed, unless
you’ve been hiding in a Siberian cave for the last few months, you’ll have
noticed that a new Call of Duty game was on the way. Well, the wait is over- Modern Warfare 3 was released yesterday amidst a wave of hyperbolic
press and claims of it being “the most anticipated video game in history”
(courtesy of Gamestop executive Bob McKenzie).
Microsoft announced yesterday that they are planning to release their successful foray into motion gaming, Kinect, for Windows in 2012. The news comes from General Manager for Windows Craig Eisler via his official blog.
Microsoft also released a new beta version for Windows SDK yesterday which features “faster skeletal tracking, better accuracy rate when it comes to skeletal tracking and joint recognition, and the ability to plug and unplug your Kinect without losing work/productivity.” This is the 2nd beta version of the peripheral.
When the highly-anticipated The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim releases this Friday, November 11, there will be a patch available for download from Bethesda. This patch will be available for all platforms (PC, Xbox 360, PS3). It is unclear what the patch will actually do or fix, but hopefully those details will emerge sometime before release and won’t contain any serious issues.
In a recent interview, director Todd Howard explained the company’s plans for future DLC for Skyrim, saying that there are plans for “substantial” pieces of downloadable content. Howard told Wired.com that “We’re not going to be doing a lot of it.” This is a little misleading, as Howard went on to explain that “Our high-level thinking is that there’ll be not as many [pieces of DLC], but they’ll be bigger and more substantial. The goal overall is not necessarily to put out more content, but to make the game better.” Chances are the plans for Skyrim are a little bigger than something like the Horse Armor Pack from Oblivion.
If you’ve owned an Xbox 360, chances
are very high that you’ve experienced the infamous “red ring of death,”
something that has plagued the console since its launch. Those who are still on
the fence about buying an Xbox because of its problems, read on, because a
recent survey by PCMag determined that the failure rate of the console has
dropped to 10 percent. Polling their readers, 10 percent of the participants
reported that they had to send in their consoles in for repair. While this
number might still seem high, it is a considerable improvement, as PCMag
confirmed that the failure percentage of last year’s survey was 23 percent. 10
percent, though, is still twice the failure rate of the competitors, according
to the survey.
