Rick Poulin
Maxis and EA have officially announced a successor to SimCity 4 at the Game Developers' Conference (GDC) today in San Francisco, after much buzz, rumours and supposed leaks on the internet in the past weeks. Read More.
Cryptic Studios has announced that their MMORPG Star Trek Online will be free-to-play by the end of the year. The differences between the subscription model and those features available to everyone haven't been nailed down yet, but the current model is bringing up a lot of questions as the closed beta begins. Read More.
A new bill has been proposed in the USA to curb the online upload of videos of copyrighted content. While the bill is aimed at preventing the internet community from uploading music, TV shows and movies to services such as YouTube and MegaVideo, the rather loose wording of the bill has some rather nefarious consequences for the video game industry and the way in which video games are marketed today. Read More.
The Entertainment Software Association (ESA) has released updated statistics about the gaming industry as it kicks off its annual Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3). The ESA's article on the topic draws some interesting conclusions pertaining to common debates about video games, namely that "parents remain highly involved in their children's game play and see several benefits of entertainment software. Read More.
From Nintendo.com:
Launches: Read More.
Long before the show started, there were rumours that Activision's preview event was going to be less "press conference" and more "party" than most. That said, most pre-E3 events typically contain some degree of useful information for gamers and the journalists present on their behalf. Read More.
Here at GamingExcellence, we don't often post news bits about add-ons for music games, largely because we get some almost daily and we imagine that interested readers will be subscribing to their favourite games' newsletters if they care to hear about such things. Read More.
Video Games Live is proud to announce the very first video game concert ever in Quebec! The show will take place at the beautiful St-Denis Theatre on Friday, February 8th, 2008. VGL was the first concert to ever bring video game music to Canada (back in 2005) and since then they've been selling out shows all across Canada including Edmonton, Vancouver, Toronto & Calgary. Read More.
Spike TV held their annual Video Game Awards in Las Vegas this weekend, celebrating this year's achievements in our favourite industry. Though it's always nice to see industry support from a major television network, the televised version of the show was little more than a two hour advertisement segment. Read More.
Rockstar was forced to censor parts of its controversial game Manhunt 2 a few months ago to get around the ESRB's "Adults Only" rating, a virtual kiss of death in the gaming industry. It would now seem that the censored parts where merely "disabled" rather than completely taken out, as Matt Martin at GamesIndustry. Read More.
EA has announced that a free demo of Need for Speed ProStreet is now available at the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. The demo allows players to test out the BMW M3 E92 and the Nissan GT-R Proto in two events: Speed challenge on the Nevada Highway and a Grip challenge on the A-43 interloop. Read More.
Skipping over the delights of navigating the downtown Toronto core, our adventure begins at the College Park Shop, a multi-storey art-deco landmark across the street from Ryerson University. The rather unremarkable first-floor shopping area drastically changes as we round the corner to an out-of-sight elevator lobby, whose lavish decor seemed at odds with the adjoining Canadian staple Tim Hortons coffee shop, not to mention the small crowd of eager journalists sporting jeans and game-related printed t-shirts. Read More.
We've all been waiting for DirectX 10 games to come out and many are wondering when and whether to upgrade their video cards. Not too many titles have targetted DX10 yet, possibly because of the poor support of current-gen consoles: Microsoft's Xbox 360 only supports DX10 as a DX9 port, meaning you won't be seeing any of the new features and you'll probably get smacked with terrible performance. Read More.
A number of websites are reporting that Sony has recently updated the database of their backwards compatibility status-checking application. Some speculate that the recent scarcity of the 60GB models have sparked increased sales of the 80GB model, thus prompting the update to the website. Read More.
The Canadian gaming press converged in downtown Toronto on August 28th for the latest Xbox event, featuring some of the hottest titles to hit the console this fall. This event seems to have been largely ignored outside of Canada, perhaps due to some bitterness regarding the cancellation of X'07 in both Europe and the United States. Read More.
