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Continue reading Now Playing: March 7-13, 2011

Now Playing: March 7-13, 2011 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rovio’s continued success with the Angry Birds franchise means we’ll be seeing much more from the Finland-based devs in the coming months — the company says it’s taking a “Disney 2.0″ approach to fleecing its bird-flinging franchise. “Look at how Disney got started. Steamboat Willie created Mickey Mouse, then they added more characters. You can see the same pattern today, but everything is happening much, much faster,” studio lead Mikael Hed explains in a recent Wired UK piece (via Develop), adding, “Other brands used to build recognition over the course of decades. We’ve done it in one year.”

A “collaborative” Facebook version of the game, as well as potential sports and driving spin-offs, are specifically named. Hed says the Facebook version will have “completely new aspects to it that just haven’t been experienced in any other platform,” and that “the pigs will have a more prominent role.” No word is given on when the game will launch on the ‘book.

This is, of course, in addition to the planned XBLA, Wii, and 3DS versions (it’s already out on PSN). There’s also a board game. And merchandise. And … uhh … this terrifying live-action version.

Angry Birds being flung to Facebook originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 07 Mar 2011 10:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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GDC 2011 has come and gone, and as expected, the annual gathering of game developers generated no shortage of news and interesting stories — including some tantalizing articles for the PC gaming enthusiasts among us. Winning! Let’s take a look at the highlights from the past seven days.

Continue reading The Best Of Big Download: February 28 – March 6

The Best Of Big Download: February 28 – March 6 originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 06 Mar 2011 23:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You’ve never played IGF Pavillion game Super Crate Box? Well then, let’s fix that right now (it’s free!).

Unfortunately, if you weren’t at GDC — or aren’t a resident of Winnipeg, Canada — it’s going to be a bit difficult to check out the game’s two player co-op mode, housed inside of the wonderful and mysterious Winnitron 1000.

Continue reading Seen@GDC: The Winnitron 1000, featuring Super Crate Box

Seen@GDC: The Winnitron 1000, featuring Super Crate Box originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 19:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How secure is Steam Guard? Valve’s Gabe Newell must think it’s pretty darn airtight, because he posted his Steam account email and password for the world to see during GDC.

Continue reading Steam Guard gets the ultimate test: Gabe Newell makes his password public

Steam Guard gets the ultimate test: Gabe Newell makes his password public originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How secure is Steam Guard? Valve’s Gabe Newell must think it’s pretty darn airtight, because he posted his Steam account email and password for the world to see during GDC.

Continue reading Steam Guard gets the ultimate test: Gabe Newell makes his password public

Steam Guard gets the ultimate test: Gabe Newell makes his password public originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 16:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Someone’s posted a steady, shaky cam version of Epic’s very sexy GDC 2011 Unreal Engine 3 tech upgrade demo on YouTube. Seeing as how Bleszinski and company are none too pleased, don’t expect it to be up for long.

Continue reading Check out Epic’s Unreal Engine GDC tech demo (while you can)

Check out Epic’s Unreal Engine GDC tech demo (while you can) originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 04 Mar 2011 15:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After taking a trip back through the development of his first game, Populous, at GDC today, Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux revealed that he’s actually still working on the game. Programmed by Molyneux in his spare time, “FeedMe” is a 256-player version of the original Commodore Amiga title — and the audience for his presentation got a rare look at it.

Showing if off wasn’t easy. Molyneux had to compile the Visual C++ code, encountered a fatal error and sucessfully debugged it. The result: a very basic, high-res Populous world map with almost no user interface. In the course of watching this, we realized that the famed designer has only one game in the taskbar on his computer: Minecraft — which, when you think about it, does draw inspiration from Molyneux’s world-manipulation-based classic.

Peter Molyneux’s ‘FeedMe’ is a 256-player Populous pet project originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 03 Mar 2011 21:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Famed game designer Eric Chahi shared an interesting yet somewhat terrifying anecdote about his legendary action-adventure Another World during his GDC talk today. It seems Another World nearly ended up being essentially another game.

According to Chahi, when he got to the point of shopping the game around to potential publishers, he initially approached (the now defunct) Virgin Interactive. The company proceeded to try and sway him to rework the game into a point-and-click adventure since “that’s what was popular at the time.”

Given the amount of work he’d already done on the game and the formidable task it would have been to re-tool all of it, Chahi decided to leave Another World alone. He went on to work with Delphine Software, which he described as being “very supportive” of the game as it was — and how it will appear on iOS devices later this year.

How ‘Another World’ almost became a point-and-click adventure originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 03 Mar 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Battlefield Play4Free senior producer James Salt told us this week at GDC that the game’s closed beta granted access to 600,000 participants; who obviously weren’t all online at the same time. He explained that’s why for the open beta, starting in April, Easy studio is planning a staggered launch, to avoid a massive “day one” spike of concurrent players that would crash the game.

Asked about a Mac version of the free-to-play title, Salt said the game runs on the fifth generation of the Battlefield engine, which was designed for PC. Even if a Mac version could be ported, the update schedule required for a title like this would necessitate a seperate Mac team at Easy for the game — which isn’t currently in place.

“It still might happen,” Salt added. “But it’s going to be quite a fight to make it be [on Mac].”

Battlefield Play4Free closed beta granted ‘access’ to 600K participants; Mac version doubtful originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 03 Mar 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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