The Daily GameDev.net - GameDev.Net Discussion Forums

The Daily GameDev.net

Posted by: Trent Polack at November 6, 2009 1:02:31 AM

I want to point out that yesterday was November 5th and I was wearing jeans and a t-shirt as we walked around in 81F weather. Texas is a brilliant place. Also: every time a girl says "Y'all" I swoon a little bit.

The big news of the week that, for once, isn't Infinity Ward causing some crazy scandal, but rather that Epic released a free version of their Unreal Editor called the UDK. This is a vastly improved release of the editor that, supposedly, has features that aren't even in any commercial game yet. More to the point, it's a better mod/development solution than the Unreal Tournament 3 editor which, while powerful, has some stability issues (and a painful Generic Browser compared to the UDK one). And while the release of UDK is huge on its own, Epic has also updated the license terms (quoted from Gamasutra): "[...] creators will still need to obtain an official licensing agreement to develop a commercial project using UE3; according to the new licensing terms, Epic receives twenty-five percent of revenue after the first $5,000 is made, with a per-seat yearly fee also potentially applying if the project is solely used internally." Very cool. Between this and Unity (which serves a very different audience), independent developers are having some high-quality tools in the wild now.

In case you didn't already know, Dragon Quest IX is kind of a big deal. For comparison purposes: Madden NFL 2010, a hugely popular game, that has been released across the Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii, and PSP in the United States and the UK, has sold 2.61M copies from July to September (it was actually released in August). Now, Dragon Quest IX, which has only been released on the Nintendo DS (and, even then, only in Japan) tops the chart with 3.92M units sold. My brain has just 'sploded all over your collective faces with how popular this game is.

So Halo: Reach screen shots have leaked. Or may be fakes. Either way, that's a thing. There's also an anime which, um, I guess is a thing that Halo fans always wanted. I'd much have preferred the Neill Blomkamp (District 9 director) movie, but I guess anime is a replacement.

Bayonetta still looks absolutely insane. Basically it's a game about the life of super-sexified Sarah Palin in bizarro world. Or something like that. I don't know. Video games are really getting bizarre.

None of this news is as important as the fact that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is getting closer to its release. In this case it's a Playstation 3-exclusive demo, but I won't pick hairs. I want this game. Badly.

At this point in the Daily, I think it's time for me to admit that I must go play Dragon Age right now. It's not a game that I expected to get, but Tuesday night I discovered that there was a Best Buy near my apartment, so I drove (for the first time in two months) to go get a 360 copy. I am really digging the game, far more than I expected. I'm also, as expected, very engrossed in Forza 3 and all of the things I loaded onto my PSP Go. Yes, I finally caved and got a PSP Go. Don't judge me. I could also tell you about my Halloween night, but I think that's inappropriate for a Daily. Cliff notes: I got in a cane fight with a person dressed as a 105-year-old, Walker Texas Ranger stalked us, there was a Bichon dressed as a Bumble Bee, and if you're the girl that I ran into I could really use your number.