Ziff Davis Media announced Wednesday that it was ending print publication of its 27-year-old flagship, PC Magazine, and would take the title online only.
PC Magazine’s circulation was 1.2 million in the late 1990s. It is the latest of several magazine publishers to drop a print edition, as advertising plummets and the cost of printing a paper version rises.
“The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn’t there anymore,” Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview.
To quote: Seven production, circulation and advertising employees will be cut as a result of the move, out of a total of about 140 who work on PC Magazine and PCMag.com. Mr. Young said the company was considering taking its other print magazine, the video-game publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, into an online-only format, but would not make a decision before the end of the year.
Per IGN, Famitsu has revealed some new details about Square Enix's new multiplayer RPG 'Blood of Bahamut' today. The game is 40% complete, and the game's producer Eisuke Yokoyama previously worked on Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wing.
To quote: The game's Official site promised over 130 missions for the game without specifying anything about beast count.
In the interview, Yokoyama said to expect over 10 main beast types. With variations in place, there may be up to 150 types. The variations include different target areas for your attacks.
As suggested by the trailer (above), you'll also be facing off against smaller enemies. Those, Toriyama revealed, are small enemies that have been summoned by the beasts. You'll end up facing off against the smaller enemies while you fight the main beast, with no transition between the two fights. One thing you'll have to consider is how to stop the main beasts fr... More »
Speaking briefly on this week's Famitsu, Fumito Ueda said that his new ICO 3 game for PlayStation 3 will be based on physical connection, similar to his previous two games, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus.
ICO was based on two characters holding hands and the core mechanic in Shadow of the Colossus was holding onto a colossus. Both of these functions were executed by pressing and holding a button. A similar form of contact will be present in his new game.
This aspect was already suggested in a previous interview Ueda had with Game Watch, just after finishing Shadow of the Colossus.
You can read more about it, and all the other things we know about 'ICO 3', in this interview here, which was put together by piecing all bits of information we have on the new game.
Below is a recent interview with the very friendly Ben LeRougtel of Capcom, who enthusiatically answered some questions on Resident Evil 5 courtesy of XCN.
XCN: What makes a classic Resident Evil game?
BL: It’s fear and tension. If you look at some of the enemies you encounter in Resident Evil games they’re always grotesque and you’re not sure what they’re made up of - sometimes they’re part human, sometimes they’re complete abominations of nature. But Resident Evil 5 has moved away from that survival horror tag that was there in the beginning.
It has more of an action feel to it but still the tension is there and it’s intensified with the addition of co-op. It’s a very different experience - normally your Resident Evil mindset is “me, me, me!” and it’s just about your survival. Now you’ve got to worry about someone else as well, and if the other person is only out for themselves it makes the game ver... More »
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In a recent interview, Insomniac CEO Ted Price admitted that he sees the benefits in going multi-platform and breaking the company's exclusivity with Sony.
However, for now it seems as if the benefits of actually sticking with Sony slightly outweigh the benefits of parting, so don't expect any radical changes in the immediate future.
To quote: Of course, Insomniac has historically been a Sony mainstay. "For the last ten years or so, we have been working very closely with Sony," Price said.
"I mean, people ask me all the time, 'so, do you consider going multiplatform? What are the drawbacks?'" He says that one benefit of exclusivity is that the company's games "tend to be associated with the hardware - but that could be a drawback too."
He cites the original Resistance: Fall of Man as an example of this kind of product association. "We did get a lot of additional exposure simply because it was synonymous with the PlayStation... More »
After the secret source code for its then-unreleased shooter Half Life 2 showed up on file sharing services in 2003, game-maker Valve Software cooked up an elaborate ruse with the FBI targeting the German hacker suspected in the leak, even setting up a fake job interview in an effort to lure him to the United States for arrest.
The gambit ultimately failed, and Axel "Ago" Gembe remained safely in Germany. He was indicted last month in Los Angeles on new charges of creating the Agobot malware, and sharing it with a crew of U.S. hackers who used it to stage denial-of-service attacks in 2003.
In September 2003, the source code for the much-anticipated Half Life 2 game turned up online, and Valve's managing director, Gabe Newell, revealed that the company's network had been breached. In a post to the company's Web forum, Newell asked for gamer's assistance in finding the hackers responsible.
"If you have information about ... the infiltratio... More »
A few weeks ago, I made my way to Ubisoft's Montreal studio to interview a pair of team members working on the latest Prince of Persia, and it turned out to be one of those interviews where we kept talking longer than we probably should have.
Below is an excerpt from that interview as follows:
1UP: Were you guys disappointed when those first couple of screenshots leaked out and everyone assumed it was going to be a two-player game?
BM: [Laughs] Disappointed? No, it was to be expected, really. I think if you see two characters on the screen, some people are going to assume one of their friends can control one of those two characters. So it didn't really disappoint me to see people saying, "Oh, oh, I think this is going to be a co-op game."
But we really haven't had much negative backlash about the fact that it's single-player. I've been reading the forums, I get e-mails, I get Facebook messages and that sort of stuff, and no one ever... More »
Gaming, like all mediums in existence, is constantly evolving. The Internet is almost unrecognizable from just 10 years ago.
Television programming has changed greatly, including such technologies as TiVo (DVR) and the unfortunate rise of reality shows on nearly every channel except Nickelodeon.
May God help us all. In the meantime, there are some trends we have noticed appearing in a lot of our favorite videogames, and those trends show a bright future for our favorite hobby. Some may disagree that these are good things, but they are indeed a part of gaming these days for better or worse.
5. Instant Co-Operative Play
Back in the day, co-op modes would typically split the screen in two in order to allow one player to move independently of the other. Split screens, however, were never very popular as they cut out the potential field of vision for both players and were often seen as a necessary nuisance. Since the Sega DreamCast... More »
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