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Atari arcade vets form Innovative Leisure
Posted by Jegar on 02-03-2012 5:10 PM
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Creators of Asteroids, Missile Command, Battlezone, and more team with Seamus Blackley for mobile and social focused studio; THQ signs on to publish multiple projects.
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The creators behind a host of Atari arcade classics are reuniting to take on mobile and social games. Their new studio, Innovative Leisure, was unveiled today through a Time Magazine feature and a THQ announcement that the publisher would be handling multiple games from the developer, starting later this year.
Innovative Leisure is the brainchild of Seamus Blackley, technical director of the original Xbox. As president of the new outfit, Blackley tapped a handful of old-school arcade developers--most of them from Atari--for a new venture to leverage their experience with pick-up-and-play projects in social and mobile gaming markets that share the same priorities. The lineup of developers includes Ed Logg (Asteroids, Centipede, Gauntlet), Rich Adam (Missile Command, Gravitar), Ed Rotberg (Battlezone, S.T.U.N. Runner), Tim Skelly (Rip Off, Reactor), and Owen Rubin (Major Havoc, Space Duel), among others.
There are a number of parallels between the arcade market and the current social and mobile sector of today, including a low barrier to entry for casual audiences, both in terms of the investment required and the complexity of the games themselves. "We've come full circle," Rubin told Time. "The iPad and the iPhone--they're the new arcade."
According to the magazine, Innovative Leisure has a total of 30 employees working to release seven games this year. One of the games, WWI Dogfight, is a turn-based flight combat game that features asynchronous multiplayer action with players piloting biplanes back and forth.
Innovative Leisure will have a formal unveiling at next week's DICE Summit in Las Vegas with a featured keynote panel titled "The New Arcade." The DICE Summit (It stands for Design, Innovate, Communicate, Entertain) is an annual conference where movers and shakers in the game industry converge to talk about the latest trends and discuss the next big thing with their peers. GameSpot will be at the event, with complete video coverage of all the sessions, as well as the Interactive Achievement Awards, which will be held Thursday, February 9 and hosted by Jay Mohr.
By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot
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Ubisoft DRM games to be temporarily unplayable
Posted by Jegar on 02-03-2012 5:09 PM
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Publisher's antipiracy scheme will prevent customers from playing some of its Mac and PC games for an undetermined period of time during server transition starting February 7.
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Starting next week, a number of Ubisoft's legitimate PC customers will be unable to play their games because of problems with the titles' digital rights management (DRM) antipiracy schemes.
The publisher has announced that it is "transitioning the hosting of many of its online services from a third-party data center to a new facility" starting on February 7, and as a result, most of its games will lose online functionality. However, because some of Ubisoft's PC and Mac games feature DRM that require a constant online connection to the publisher's servers, those games will be completely unplayable when the publisher takes those servers down for the transition. Ubisoft's uPlay service will also be down during the transition.
Ubisoft apologized for the downtime, saying, "This move ultimately will help us improve the maintenance of our infrastructure and deliver better uptime and greatly improved services for our customers."
Not all of the publisher's games will be impacted. It is keeping servers running for newer releases like Assassin's Creed: Revelations, Driver: San Francisco, and Just Dance 3. Full lists of the games that won't be impacted and the ones that will be rendered completely unplayable follow below.
Games that will be unplayable during transition
Assassin's Creed--Mac
Tom Clancy's H.A.W.X. 2--PC
Might & Magic: Heroes VI--PC
Splinter Cell Conviction--Mac
The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom--PC
The Settlers--Mac
Games that will have online functionality throughout transition
Anno 2070
Assassin's Creed: Revelations
Driver: San Francisco
Just Dance 3
The Settlers Online
By Brendan Sinclair, GameSpot
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Shooters, MMOGs linked to problem game playing - Study
Posted by Jegar on 02-03-2012 5:07 PM
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A new study conducted by the Institute for Special Populations Research in New York reveals that some game genres are more prone to problem game-playing habits.
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Video game addiction has become a widely debated public health issue both in the US and overseas in the past five years, despite the lack of a formal diagnosis. While the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recently rejected a proposal to include video game addiction in the next Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V)--to be published in May 2013--researchers around the world continue to investigate methods of determining, treating, and preventing what has now become a recognized mental-health issue.
A recent study conducted by the National Development and Research Institutes' Special Populations Research branch in New York has discovered a link between problem game playing and particular types of game genres.
Luther Elliott, Andrew Golub, Eloise Dunlap, and Geoffrey Ream (the latter from the School of Social Work at Adelphi University in New York) surveyed 3,380 adult participants over the age of 18 who said they played video games for an hour or more during the last week.
The survey paid particular attention to characteristics of video game use, including time played, titles played in the past year, and problems associated with playing. The research team then used Gamefaqs.com to sort the 2,652 valid titles into 15 mutually exclusive genres: massively multiplayer online role-playing games, other role-playing games, action adventure, first-person shooter, other shooter, sports general, sports other, rhythm, driving, platformer, real-time strategy, other strategy, puzzle, board and card games, gambling, and other.
The results of the survey showed that only 5 percent of respondents reported moderate to extreme problem game playing; of that 5 percent, the most problems showed up among those who reported playing either first-person shooters, action adventure, role-playing games, and gambling games during the past year.
The most common titles reported by participants in the problem categories were: Call of Duty (first-person shooter category); Grand Theft Auto (action adventure category); World of Warcraft (MMORPG category); and poker (gambling games category).
This led the team to conclude that there is evidence to suggest that problem game playing is linked to particular kinds of game genres, but that future research into this area is needed, particularly research that pays attention to the game-design elements specific to the problem genres.
"Recent sales figures for blockbuster series such as Call of Duty and Halo indicate a huge audience for the FPS genre in America; our findings suggest that a considerable sub-population is experiencing at least moderate degrees of problem video game playing," the study says.
"Perhaps the immersion potential of a first-person perspective, commonly combined with online competition, largely accounts for the higher rates of problem game playing. For action adventure games, a trend toward nonlinear 'open-world' style environments in which extensive, time-consuming exploration is encouraged may create a context for more pervasive experiences of problem game playing."
"These interpretations are speculative at this point, but suggest important avenues of exploration for future research."
By Laura Parker, GameSpot
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