W3i, a leading distribution and monetization network for app developers, announces its mobile social game investment subsidiary, Recharge Studios, completes a successful inaugural first quarter investing in twelve mobile social game titles....
A first hand account of the grim reality of being a new Facebook developer....
MEDL Mobile Set To Buy 1000's Of Struggling Apps From Developers...
Particle Universe is the particle engine and editor of Ogre 3D - the open source rendering engine - and has released version 1.4. Besides solving several bugs, special attention has been given to the editor. Some of the most requested features have been added. Real-time editting and viewing, visual editting of functions, visual editting of colour gradients, categorisation of particle systems and a new material editor are just a few examples. Download and try the demo at www.fxpression.com...
Autodesk, Inc. "has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Scaleform Corporation, the makers of Flash UI tools and middleware solutions for the games industry."...
Carolina Games Summit announced today that Time Warner Cable’s Connect a Million Minds (CAMM) will be the title sponsor of the sixth annual Carolina Games Summit. The summit will be held at Wayne Community College in Goldsboro, NC on Feb. 5 from 10 am to 9 pm. More than 1,000 local and national attendees are expected to participate in this all day event focused on the simulation and game design industry....
I'm back for the end of this week; Trent and I swapped Dailies this week so now I get to pull from a huge body of news and he got to piece together what happened over the weekend into a cohesive narrative. Without further adieu, let's take a look at what happened so far this week in the game industry.
The big news this week is probably CES; Microsoft announced that the Xbox is an enormous pillar of their corporate growth and mentioned that they shipped eight million Kinects. I don't think I know anyone who actually owns one, so it must have incredible mass-market penetration. They also announced Torchlight for Xbox Live Arcade and some other interesting details.
What really interested me this time at CES was NVidia and Microsoft announcing that Windows is going ARM in a big way; NVidia will be providing a set of awesome CPU/GPU chipsets (with instruction-level GPGPU for vector processing!) and Microsoft will presumably be providing the tools, applications and OSes. Get ready to see a ton of jobs appearing to port legacy software from x86 to MSIL/ARM, though I'd be surprised if they don't have any emulation/dynamic-translation layer ready to go for backwards compatibility. It's definitely good news for teams that have taken the time to convert their ancient legacy code to .NET; their changeover will hopefully be as painless as possible.
Also at CES, Intel did a bunch of talking about their second-generation i7 chip setup, Sandy Bridge, which will offer integrated graphics technology. Remember Larrabee? This seems a lot better than that. Valve was on hand to point out how awesome it is.
Sega announced that they were expanding the deployment of their pee-controlled videogames. This is a thing.
Before you go today, don't forget to stop by Science Daily to figure out if your cat is too stressed to eat.
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Congratulations on surviving Christmas so far! Provided you can still move and haven't loaded yourself too far down with holiday feasts, you're well on your way to enjoying a happy new year as well (as opposed to being pinned down by your ever-expanding gut as wolves bay in the background). I asked Santa for the new GDNet site software, and it looks like he has delivered.
Humble Indie Bundle 2 has finished its sales run, netting over $1.8 million USD. At one point, to make things better, they included the first Humble Indie Bundle when you bought the second one as well.
Steam is still having a huge amount of holiday sales, having had ridiculous prices like $5 Torchlight and a $10 FEAR bundle. New daily deals are showing up every day - the next ones are in just under an hour from the time of this posting.
Here's an interesting 96-page manual on how to use the PXTone program to make amazing videogame music. It's pretty handy, because the official PXTone manual is in Japanese.
Obviously there's not a huge amount of news since everyone has been on vacation, so feel free to make your own news in the comments. What did you get? What did you buy yourself in the Boxing Day sales?...
After the success of the first seven entries to the ShaderX book series, of GPU Pro (gpupro.blogspot.com) and the soon to be released GPU Pro 2 (gpupro2.blogspot.com), we are looking for authors for GPU Pro 3.
The upcoming book will cover advanced rendering techniques that run on the DirectX or OpenGL run-times, or any other run-time with any language available. It will include topics on: Geometry Manipulation; Rendering Techniques; Handheld Devices Programming; Effects in Image Space; Shadows; 3D Engine Design; Graphics Related Tools; Environmental Effects and a dedicated section on General Purpose GPU Programming that will cover CUDA, DirectCompute and OpenCL examples.
Proposals are due by March 17th, 2011. Please send them to wolf at shaderx.com. An example proposal, writing guidelines and a FAQ can be downloaded from gpupro3.blogspot.com....
It's time for your Christmas Week Monday Daily. If you haven't gone out and bought gifts for your loved ones yet, there's still time! I hope. News will be a little soft this week, but that's to be expected since nobody is actually working.
I'm pretty happy to see the existence of these Atom-powered Commodore 64s; hopefully the price when it releases is reasonable.
Looks like Demon's Souls still has servers, which is great as I just picked up a PS3 and haven't bought the world's nastiest RPG yet. Crysis 2 has some more video footage available. Where can I get one of those suits?
A lot of people are really bad at relating to other human beings in the latest Bulletstorm trailer. I believe it's actually impossible to create a more hostile work environment, even without the explosions. Hello, HR?
Blizzard is indeed working on another MMO. This should surprise no-one, and make their bank rub their hands together with glee.
Favimon is a pretty weird freakin' game. Google is pretty vicious; not even the combined might of GameDev.net can defeat it!
Before you go today, you might want to check out the full-on Derezzed music video from Daft Punk for the new Tron film. Jousting is hard....
Hey all, it's time for another exciting week of the GDNet Daily. This week, we're going to get down and dirty and explore an abandoned Incan mine. Then, I'll fly off to Chicago to shear a sheep on top of the Sears Tower. Please watch the commercials. Please, please, please watch the commercials.
You should probably buy Minecraft this week if you haven't already, because it goes up in price very soon.
The big news of the moment is that Bethesda is ditching Gamebryo for their fifth (unless you count all the "side" games) Elder Scrolls game.
Is anyone at all surprised that Cataclysm is selling like hotcakes? No? Okay, let's move on.
So the Spike Video Game Awards were on Saturday. What got announced, and featured absolutely no gameplay footage? Well, Mass Effect 3, Uncharted 3, Forza Motorsport 4 (which will feature Top Gear content), a survival-horror snowboarding game, Guillermo Del Toro's game, Prototype 2 and a bunch of other games. I'm pretty sure you can figure out that I'm excited for Mass Effect 3 and Forza 4. There's a great trailer for Arkham City. Uncharted fans (Trent) will enjoy this little behind-the-scenes look at how they make very tiny actors to play out their storyline inside your PS3.
Is Epic's crack-rock of iPhone graphics goodness Infinity Blade poised to stab Angry Birds in the back and take over its mantle as the game your grandmother keeps playing when you look away from her for two seconds? Nope. But it's still selling a whole load of copies very quickly.
Remember Octodad, back when I posted about it a few weeks ago? Well, there's an interview posted with the game's creators. I was wondering what kind of breakfasts they have in order to produce this third-cephalopod shooter. Nobody even thought to ask.
You broke my singing fish! Why would you even do that?
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It's sort of a slow day for Daily content, but that shouldn't keep you from inventing your own game news and passing it off as fact in the comments.
So Final Fantasy XIV released recently to really poor reviews; at GDC China it was explained what steps Square will be taking to try and save the game.
Tomb Raider will be seeing a reboot. It will be named Tomb Raider. Has to be an interesting experience trying to rebuild a brand on a platform it never even came close to shipping on originally.
True story: I bought an Atari Jaguar over the weekend. I'm not entirely sure why I did, but it's here. The surprising thing is how strong their homebrew seems to be. If only I had the rare (toilet-shaped) CD attachment and upwards of seventy bucks for some of these lovingly made titles. Then again, maybe the CD attachment is worth it just to get VLM.
Michael Pachter is in the news again, telling everyone that obviously online multiplayer should be charged for in order to produce additional profit. Yes, the act of charging for extra services that used to be free does increase profit. Also, he thinks an unannounced portable game console has already been murdered by the iPod touch.
Before you go, you'll want to check out this article by Raph Koster on how "rare" items in Ultima Online came to be. Turns out they're artifacts of the excellent resource system in the game.
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I just passed a wiring closet at work that was buzzing suspiciously. Feeling cautious - after all, in today's modern world, you can't be too cautious - I immediately summoned a repair man. When the repair man came, he was a tall man, heavily built, with a salt and pepper beard missing only in ragged spots where his face had been brutally scarred in prior encounters. He wore mirrored sunglasses and regarded me with cold, almost predatory amusement. Shrugging his shoulders at me in some sort of heinous rictus as if to emulate human laughter, he bashed down the door. "There's your problem," he said. Indeed it was my problem - the wiring cabinet had become completely infested, clogged solid with a swarm of honeybees.
If you talked to me this weekend, I probably bent your ear about Costume Quest, the game which I picked up and devoured like a man possessed. Well, there's a new Double Fine downloadable game on the way, it's called Stacking, and it's about a little boy named FIFO and his adventures inside Hanoi.
Did you go out for Black Friday, Americans? Nintendo did, and they sold nine hundred thousand Nintendo DSes. Considering I have two, I'm wondering how many of these DS sales are people getting another one to go with their existing collection. If you missed Black Friday, Amazon still has a boatload of sales for the probably-made-up event of "Cyber Monday."
Jane Jensen put together one of the best adventure game series ever in Gabriel Knight, even if occasionally you had to make a cat-hair mustache or two. She's back, with Gray Matter, the demo of which is now available.
Check out Invaders: Corruption, a procedurally generated arena shooter with really bizarre semi-emergent AI behaviour.
Wikileaks' rumoured server site is pretty good looking. My servers sit in a closet and are occasionally rested on by a cat.
Before you go, try not to think about this robot coming through your window at night to grab at your face. Why are robots so damn creepy?
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The weather outside is frightful, but the GDNet Daily is so delightful. Do not light the GDNet Daily on fire, as it may anger it. Since there's no place for you to go, let it snow (industry news).
The big thing for me this week is that car-drivin' magnum opus Gran Turismo 5 will be released this week, unless Sony decides to make me cry like a little girl by delaying it further. Hopefully they choose not to do that.
Could it be Mass Effect 3 time? Here's hoping.
How hard is it to work with Western developers if you're an accomplished Japanese studio? Apparently, Westerners just keep discussing everything and starting a fight instead of knuckling under and accepting the demands of a director.
Do you want OnLive in your house after all? OnLive starts shipping this December.
Gamasutra talked to an actual black ops guy about how realistic a videogame about black ops is. It's actually a pretty interesting read. I've played a lot of Black Ops, but hopefully I'm nowhere near the career level where my guy has to fill out paperwork, sit behind a desk and attend boring meetings. In a pseudo-related point, Microsoft will actually ban the tons of morons who are using a swastika as their custom emblem.
Valve is hyping up their latest delay, with Portal 2 pushed back to April 18, 2011. It's worth reading the news article just for the press release.
I'm not entirely pleased that the DLC for Fallout: New Vegas is only going to be available for the Xbox 360. I know a handful of people who can't even get the game to run on their Windows machines.
Before you go today, watch this guy ride a bike.
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GDNet Daily is back, and you can tell a friend but aren't necessarily obligated to (we're trying to keep it jovial around here.)
I must reiterate that Gran Turismo 5 has an actual release date now. Hooray!
It turns out that when you release two giant things simultaneously, the game industry makes a lot of money. Black Ops and Kinect drove the biggest week of UK videogame sales in history. There's going to be a lot of people shooting mannequins in Nuketown tonight.
In a move that should surprise no one, Baldur's Gate II has become available on GOG. Have at it. Maybe do so while you're having some morphine cheese.
In independent videogame news, Link-Dead is now in public alpha. You may know its author from a little game he made before, called Soldat. Additionally, some Xbox Live Indie Game developers are banding together to promote their titles.
Remember when I got excited about Shenmue City a few weeks ago? Well, I'm ready to be even more excited, because Segata Sanshiro is still Ryo's dad. When can I have this game in my hands? I am willing to buy an otherwise-useless foreign market cellphone for it.
Last week's Kickstarter project to deal with interactive fiction seemed pretty popular, so here's another project you can fund; a series of interviews with prominent game designers and music composers in Japan. What, no Yuzo Koshiro?
Before you go today, you might want to check out the Kinect making this guy look all weird.
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Today's Daily features a variety of exciting chills and spills. Your loyalties will be tested. Your friends will become enemies, and your enemies will become friends. Reading this Daily grants you a Science skill point as long as you don't drink too much immediately afterward.
Some game called Black Pops or Crack Tops came out recently. It will probably sell a billion trillion copies.
Apparently Gran Turismo 5 is now leaking out into the world. Clearly Sony's plan was to blow several release dates in a row, solidly announce another release date, blow it and then just kind of push the game out when nobody is looking. There will probably be a press conference later today where they just say "it will come out someday," before throwing copies of the game at attending journalists and peeling out in a rusty '98 Firehawk. It looks like the actual release date may be somewhere near the end of the month.
Want to pay a guy to work fulltime writing some of the best interactive fiction games? You're in luck, as he has set up a Kickstarter page to get you to pay for the development of his game. The donation goal for his first game has already been reached.
Wolfire Games has a bizarre little Beard Drive going on to get people to subscribe to their YouTube channel. It's not every day you see developers of a rabbit-based fighting game pose in kilts to beg you to subscribe to their video sequence by growing facial hair.
Before you get out of here, you might want to check out this terrifying-looking quadrotor flying camera rig which makes a sound that seems a cross between angry bees and a cheese grater caught in an F1 car.
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While Promit's off doing his civic duty, I'm sitting here in Canada reading the Internet to figure out which candidates and votes to mock later. In Canada, we don't really get up and carry around funny signs; we just have a multi-party system which makes for some bizarre ballots.
Microsoft is looking for a developer to pick up Project Gotham Racing. I nominate myself, on the grounds that I would really like to spend their money playing with recording sounds from high-powered race cars.
Here's a news flash from Obviousville: physics-based avian murder simulator Angry Birds is tops for Halloween sales on the iPhone app store.
Remember when I was a little frightened that there was a Shenmue cellphone game coming out? I bought a used Dreamcast just so I could clutch it to my chest and softly weep as gentle harp music played in the background. Turns out I should have shut my hole, because Yu Suzuki is working on it after all. Nice.
Ubisoft missed the boat on "plastic instrument" games, but they're pretty sure that dance games are where it's at now. This is not a repeat from 1998. Also included in that press conference: sales of the Michael Jackson game under development will come with a replica of his infamous single white glove. There are a lot of unanswered questions regarding this. How will Ubisoft's two new dance games compete against other developers' dance games, being released at basically the same time? How did we ever get to a point in the industry where major publishers' holiday bottom lines have been decided by how a saturation point of dancing-based videogames fight it out? When will someone make me a musical theatre RPG where I can kill space mutants?
GameStop has an innovative plan on how to survive the advent of digital distribution - they're going to resell the codes that you plug into someone else's digital distribution system, through a method less convenient than the existing one. It's brilliant ideas like this one that are why I actually have mostly stopped buying brand new games at launch for not wanting to deal with GameStop employees.
Microsoft is playing silly business and moving around Xbox Live Indie Games in their new dashboard update. Now you'll have to go past "Avatar Marketplace" to get there, and honestly I've never been to the Avatar Marketplace. I don't think I want to buy any shoes there on my way to buy another game involving a literate dinosaur.
In case you like to suffer, Bit.Trip Beat is now available for Mac and PC. It will ruin your life.
Before you go today, you're going to want to see MADHOUSE. Holy crap, this game is awesome-looking and actually motivates me to get back to working on my game.
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You thought you could avoid the GDNet Daily. You told your friends and family that it wouldn't happen to you, that you didn't go home at night and cry and clutch your computer to your chest. What was that noise? The scratching. It's almost like you're being informed about the videogame industry. Run! Run and don't look back! They're right behind you!
Are you Trent Polack? If not, you probably didn't buy a PSP Go. In that case, you can now pick one up for less money than before.
Ignition, developers of long-term ambitious project WarDevil, have shuttered, with the project being cancelled and the CEO reportedly unavailable for contact. Best wishes to anyone displaced from all this.
With the delay of Gran Turismo 5, it's now looking that the release date of Hot Pursuit was oddly prescient. Instead of being demolished by Polyphony's monolith of car-drivin' goodness, it will now flourish and run amongst the flowers, hand in hand with a videogame playing population. The demo is out tomorrow. Hopefully someone got the rental insurance on these cars before they started smashing them into police officers.
Want to make easy bank in the game industry? Apparently the ticket is to crank out games on demand for publishers. I think I'd rather work somewhere with original IP, but I suspect that's not nearly as stable work.
In some small news bits: Tribes MMO, Ireland gets another game studio, check out this nice Archon remake, more Japanese indie games are coming to PlayStation Network, check out this weird indie fighting game from Korea, and as Drew said and I must repeat, there is a whole crapload of entries to this year's IGF.
Before you go today, contemplate why you didn't think of this first....
Press release announcing the arrival of an online marketplace that will host a new form of dynamic and lightweight texture material called substances. These new substances can be customized to fit individual needs, providing design visualization professionals with endless creative possibilities....
It's yet another week of fantastic Daily value. It's like a buffet, except instead of food, you get some news about videogames.
First up, since it's recent, Steam has more than thirty million accounts. It's hard to believe it has become so popular considering its initial reception, but it sure is popular - I had a real problem trying to find a physical copy of Civilization V - or any other recent PC game - over the weekend.
Speaking of popular, Monster Hunter is some kind of bizarre Japanese crack rock that can't avoid being purchased. They've sold one million copies for cellphones in two months.
Warren Spector wants to protect games' First Amendment rights by calling people to action, uh, tomorrow. What do you get to do? Join an ECA group, sign their petition, and post about it on your Twitter. I'm honestly a little disappointed that there wasn't some kind of march or rally on DC.
If you've talked to me about videogames for more than about three minutes, I probably mentioned my love for Dead Space. Dead Space 2 packs in a plasma cutter, which is apparently just a "collectible replica" with LED lights. This is disappointing; for $80 I expect a real plasma cutter, just like the collectors' edition of Gran Turismo 5 comes with a real Nissan GT-R.
Super Meat Boy comes out on Xbox Live Arcade this week, and to celebrate it, here's a hokey 90s style commercial. All it's missing is a rap solo by Kris Kross at the end. Bonus: more videos of platform joy in there, including "Super Crate Box," which I have never heard of before now but must immediately jam into my computer and possibly ears.
In recent news, the Tim Langdell/Edge saga continues, with Langdell's IGDA membership being terminated.
Apparently there is a Canadian Games Conference being planned for May 2011, including a "Best of GDC" content track. I'm probably not going to be the keynote speaker.
RIP Benoit Mandelbrot. Fractals are awesome - they're even in broccoli.
It's a little soft on news today, so here's a recent Image of the Day post about a path-traced Minecraft level. Looks awesome, like some sort of tiny theme park dedicated to cubes and horrible exploding monsters who sneak up on you and destroy half your base in one shot....
Welcome to another amazing GDNet Daily. I'm Mike, and I'm taking over for Trent, who took over for me for Monday because I took over for him for Friday. This will make sense eventually; stick with me.
Panasonic has come out with a gadget called the "Jungle," which is apparently pitched at playing MMORPGs on a Linux-based handheld system. I'll let you think about that for a little while.
You may have heard previously that the new NBA Jam game features politicians as secret characters; naturally, the people who are concerned with the characters of politicians have become concerned with the videogame. Personally, I'm all in favour of adding politicians, celebrities and famous authors to videogames, mostly because on every Create-a-Character feature (including the Mii) I always create Steve Buscemi and John Goodman.
Gearbox may be handling Duke Nukem Forever, but they're also making funny videos.
Famous game developer Will Wright has an interactive TV show on Current TV, home of Infomania and other fine shows.
Want to learn how to write a poker AI from a guy who worked on a car racing game? Today's your lucky day.
Nintendo's advertising regarding the 25th freaking anniversary of Mario is really good, including this video of Satoru Iwata and Hiroshi Imanishi about bringing the Famicom/NES to market.
I'm surprised I haven't talked about Haiku Hero before now. It's basically what you think it is - you burp out a haiku, the game judges you and the quality of the haiku improves your majestic quest. I also missed talking about this hilarious video montage from the TIGSource "A Game By Its Cover" competition from a few weeks ago. I want to work in that game store. Last, you might want to drop by and look at these gorgeous Spelunky for XBLA screenshots.
A new Shenmue game is coming out!!! But it's on your cell phone. It's okay. I cried too.
Before you go, this Super Scribblenauts trailer went to kind of a weird place. Also, if your buddy's car has a strange black box fitted to it as a result of an FBI probe, don't remove that device, take pictures of it and post those pictures to the internet, even though Finders v. Keepers is probably still in effect....
Trent's away this Friday, but you'll get a double dose of him next week (while I sip Long Island iced teas on the exclusive GDNet Daily yacht). It's the first Daily of October, so you'd better beware of spooky ghosts and other paranormal influences that appear in your morning coffee and are not easily attributable to caffeine over/underdose.
Remember the controversy over how Medal of Honor actually named the non-US faction in multiplayer the Taliban? Well, they went back on it.
I pre-ordered Gran Turismo 5 (even though I don't own a PS3 yet) because I wanted to play on the Top Gear test track. Now it appears that Top Gear is coming to Forza Motorsport 3, somehow with the Stig included.
Good Old Games has just halved the price of Arcanum, immediately after I purchased it because I can't find my actual physical discs after moving. Oh well, at least they didn't pretend to shut down and then reveal it was just a joke.
As a new Netflix user, I'm excited that Netflix Canada is coming to the Xbox 360 soon. Now I can watch movies and TV without having to crowd around my laptop and bump heads with whoever else is watching at the moment.
In really miscellaneous news, Blizzard is backing down on Real ID, letting you opt right out of it. Tim Schafer got himself a lifetime achievement award for being totally awesome. After playing the Shadow Broker DLC for Mass Effect 2 this week, I'm excited to see this amazing Garrus/Tali cosplay.
Last, if anyone ever said anything mean about you on the internet you should consider not travelling four hours with a gun to try and murder 'em. I'm just sayin'....
In case you just stepped out of a block of solid ice into today's modern and confusing world, hello. This is the GDNet Daily, and it gives out information on "computer entertainment software" (colloquially known as "games"). Unfortunately, since you may be a caveman of some kind you don't understand English, so I could just as easily say that it's a documentary about kangaroos that can rap.
Bungie has announced when the Halo Reach campaign matchmaking will arrive; previously they claimed that they wanted to wait to avoid spoilers.
I dimly remember Fantastic Fest from a few years ago, but it turns out they created a videogame-oriented Fantastic Fest attraction called Fantastic Arcade. It's got custom-built cabinets for various art/indie games and open and frank discussion between guys who write games. Hopefully it continues in future years.
Something is a little weird in South Korea, in that their government ratings boy has decided that videogames you made yourself and give away for free are subject to their interference. If you don't get your RPG Maker game rated by the South Korean government, they'll demand you pull it. There's also a report in the same article that the same ratings body has gotten into it with local juggernaut Google over their Android Market games.
Speaking of Android, game services company Scaleform has been showing off a 3D Android phone which is probably pretty similar to the Nintendo 3DS in terms of function. Speaking of the 3DS, Zee Germans believe it comes out November 11 in Japan. Speaking of awkward segues, the guy who runs the Segway company died recently when the Segway drove off a cliff.
Unity 3.0 is out, exciting many people who like occlusion culling, debugging and, uh, audio filters.
Do you like not throwing up? According to Rotating Agent Koko, the trick is to chew some garlic before you play the aforementioned title.
Before you go today, this is the coolest thing ever. Ever.
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It's a whole new week for a whole new series of Dailies. Don't forget to download the DLC to get the remaining 25% of today's Daily.
The biggest news of today so far is Great Old Games' bizarre announcement about the termination of their service. Some people are saying it's a poorly-planned PR stunt, cryptically presaged in Polish. Personally, I'm kicking myself for not buying the games on my wish list earlier.
If you're reading this right now, you may well have missed the free weekend of Minecraft. Here's an implementation of Bioshock Infinite's Columbia in the blocky game.
So what comes out tomorrow? I think it's a little game called Civilization V. Right now, though, I've been playing Recettear, an RPG about managing an item shop. Don't screw up or you'll be living in a box.
Someone deep inside DICE is still patching Battlefield 2142. Included in the latest patch is the entire Northern Strike expansion, which I never bothered buying because I got into 2142 too late for, you know, other people to be playing with me as-is. More games should be obsessively patched by the original developers.
I remember back in middle school that they would tell us not to do drugs, because sometimes drugs were cut with other, harder drugs. This doesn't make sense to me now financially, but that didn't stop Blizzard from including a Plants vs. Zombies clone in the new WoW expansion. Play this, and within a few weeks you'll be hiding in dark alleys, wearing black sunglasses and scaring schoolchildren with your tales of hardcore drug abuse. Blizzard's making sure they're getting you coming and going, since tomorrow they will release Patch 1.1 for Starcraft 2. As a left-handed mouse user, I approve of their new hotkeys.
Just like Intel's new DLC for the Pentium, you're going to have to shell out some more money to unlock the remaining content of this Daily. Sorry, but you reading more of this Daily adds value, and if there's value, I should be able to charge for it. Hey, where are you going?
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Welcome back to the GDNet Daily. I took a vacation last week starting on Labour Day (which, despite Promit's accusations, Canadians do participate in, we just spell it differently). Now I'm back, and there is a lot of news to catch up on. Here it is, served piping hot.
Gabe Newell doesn't really care for the Xbox 360 patching process. It's probably because patches cost money, lots of money. Normally, this is where I'd make a snide remark about Alpha Protocol, but it turns out that a patch for that game is in QA. Microsoft probably needs the money to remodel the Xbox 360 dashboard again.
Hey, what comes out this week? It's probably Halo: Reach, the game about oblong ring-shaped planetoids and the space marines that shoot aliens on them. You might want to look at this quick interview with their creative director.
Capcom is wringing a lot of power out of the new Nintendo 3DS, with this set of screenshots demonstrating some pretty respectable graphics at a reasonable framerate. Did you ever think we'd live to see normal mapping on a Nintendo handheld system?
Valve has launched the Steam Wallet beta. For which purpose? I couldn't tell you. Regardless, based on Valve's past history, I expect Steam Wallet currency to displace the Euro within five months. We will all pay for our hamburgers and shoes with Gabe Dollars under his strict but fair yoke.
Are you a better Android programmer than me? You probably are, because I can't figure out how to interpret that damn accelerometer. Go apply at id Software.
Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Super Mario Bros. Play it again and remember why you like super Mario Bros in the first place.
Before you go today, you might want to check out this Starcraft 2 professional league commercial. They've got them some weird courses in South Korea.
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