Posted by: Drew Sikora at April 23, 2009 2:38:56 AM
My preamble fails me today.
Industry Feature Roundup Let's check out some cool features from around the web to start us off. First, there's Kotaku's interview with Phil Fish, where he talks about his gaming heritage and how he became indie thanks to the success of Fez. Sticking with Kotaku, they cover a Variety article that sits down with some of the top music talents in the industry - a good read for any musicians out there. Finally we hop over to Gamasutra to get a peek behind the scenes of Saints Row 2, which is excerpted from the postmortem published in Game Developer Magazine.
Technical News: O3D, Ray Tracing. Promit announced the release of Google's new plugin/API 3D browser graphics library O3D back on Tuesday. Ben Garney, a developer for Flash-based Push Button Labs and formerly of Garage Games, blogged with a quick yet detailed walkthrough of all the interesting points in the codebase. For more graphical coolness, check out Caustic Graphics and their next-gen ray tracer. Remember math co-processors? Well they're beefing up conventional 3D processors with a separate Ray Tracing Processing Unit (RTPU), a graphics co-processor. And it's huge.
Financial News: Midway, Interplay, Square-Enix. Oh Midway. While the saga may be coming to a close soon with the company due to run out of money in June, courts and creditors are still trying to figure out what went down with the fishy-smelling sale of the company and are none too impressed with it's former owner Sumner Redstone, saying he treated Midway 'like a toy'. Soon to possibly be in their own sinking ship, Interplay could be facing bankruptcy or liquidation after apparently ending 2008 with a cash balance of USD 0 and a deficit of approximately USD 2.4 million. Lastly, the final approval of the Square-Enix acquisition of Eidos has been passed down from court. It's been pretty much a done-deal for a while now, but actual transition of power and the closing out of Eidos stock will now go into action.
Are kids really addicted to games? A study was released earlier this week claiming that as many as 8.5% of U.S. youths are addicted to video games. However just yesterday ABC News' Director of Polling, Gary Langer, pointed out several problems with the study, the big one being that it was performed via an opt-in online panel rather than a random sampling of the population. Statistics at its best, right there.
I'm talking about the Pirate Bay ruling. Well, not directly. Instead I'll let Dave Perry and Mona Ibrahim share their views on the subject, both of which I agree with. Mona's view is the straight-up legal take (she's working to become a gaming lawyer), while Dave uses the ruling to fuel his views on software piracy in general, saying that we need to come up with models that are "better than free" to entice people to stop pirating games. Will we ever ultimately stop piracy? Of course not, and we have the Pirate Google Bay to prove it.
So it should be well-known by now that I love me some indie game music, and I hear Braid has some wonderful tunes. Well now they have them compiled into an album that you can purchase online (through an interesting method of choosing your own payrate). Previous indie sound tracks I've listed are World of Goo and Legend of Princess. Mirror's Edge also had a technolicious remix pack up for download a few months back. I'm sure you can find it through... dubious means...
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Rynus_Rein
Member since: 12/24/2006
Posted - 4/23/2009 4:00:05 AM
Posted - 4/23/2009 8:44:26 PM
Posted - 4/23/2009 8:52:42 PM
