Gadgets and Video Games

Most UI panels at the Game Developers’ Conference tend to be full of dry technical information, all about how the team developed their own font kerning tool and organized menu elements in a data-driven fashion. The Harmonix UI panel this morning hosted by Senior Artist Kevin McGinnis did have that stuff (McGinnis is a self-diagnosed font geek, and did sound overly excited about formatting bitmaps), but it was also full of art — beautiful The Beatles: Rock Band inspired art. McGinnis talked about the different concepts the team had tried — they first attempted to do a very clean, serene respectful version of the menus, but then decided to go much more colorful. They hired a few artists to build the menus up into actual 3D spaces (after accidentally telling Apple Corps that yes, the menus would all be animated), and McGinnis even showed off the 3D model that the camera zooms around in to guide the player into the game

Read more from the original source:
GDC: The UI of The Beatles Rock Band

This month, it’s finally good to be a Mac-based gamer. In addition to the reveal that Valve will be moving Steam (and the Source Engine) over to Apple’s OS, we discovered this morning that Blizzard is hard at work on a StarCraft 2 beta client for Mac.

Read the original post:
Blizzard ‘hoping’ for StarCraft 2 Mac beta client in April

GDC generally isn’t packed with the “oohs” and “ahs” that are typically exuded during E3 or the Tokyo Game Show. The name says it all, really, what with it being the Game Developers Conference. That doesn’t mean their aren’t hot scoops to be found though. This year we got our first taste of the PlayStation Move , Deus Ex: Human Revolution and, of course, the hamster ball-inspired future of video games . Now, with GDC over and done, it’s time for us to say goodbye

View original post here:
Joystiq vs. GDC 2010

Earlier this month, Take-Two announced the potential movement of one of the titles planned for release in its fiscal fourth quarter, extending from August to October. The choices were: LA Noire , Mafia 2 , Max Payne 3 , or Civilization V . During our demo of Mafia 2 on Wednesday, we were told the game would make its Q4 release, removing it from the list of potentially delayed titles.

See the original post here: 
Q4 release for Mafia 2 (re)confirmed; Payne, Noire, Civ V still on hit list

One of the big trends at this year’s Game Developer’s Conference is social gaming, thanks to wild success stories like Facebook-powered Farmville . While many see social gaming as the next big thing, Will Wright — famed creator of SimCity , The Sims and Spore — warned GDC attendees that expectations for the genre are unrealistic. “What people tend to do is apply a power curve to this,” Wright explained using the above diagram

Read more here: 
Will Wright predicts social games will grow to 25 percent of market

EA DICE has been a fairly prolific developer during the current console generation, churning out both a high-profile title based on original IP ( Mirror’s Edge ), as well as ones based on established franchises like Battlefield . EA was searching for a way to capitalize on the downtime between these blockbuster releases — a game which would be relatively quick and painless to create, while still standing up to the quality standards set by their previous releases. Thus, the idea for Battlefield 1943 was born. Battlefield 1943 producer Patrick Liu explained the studio’s unique design philosophy while making the game, which boiled down to “make the game as long as resources last.” They maximized the amount of content they produced under this strategy by settling on the somewhat smaller scope of the game early, and focusing on recreating the Battlefield experience to adhere to that scope

Continued here: 
GDC: EA DICE on building a bite-sized Battlefield

PlayStation Home director Jack Buser kicked off Sony’s final day of GDC 2010 panels, announcing that the virtual community’s worldwide userbase now stands at 12 million. The population has grown by two million users since December 2009, and is double of what it was in June of last year. Buser expanded on the stats, pointing out that these numbers aren’t based on one-off visits; according to Sony’s data, 85 percent of users who create a Home avatar return more than once. The average citizen, he said, spends an hour in Home each visit.

Read the rest here: 
PlayStation Home population at 12 million

Plenty of attention has been lavished on one nontraditional Japanese RPG this week — but Sega sneaked out another one alongside Final Fantasy XIII . Luckily, enough reviewers remembered that Yakuza 3 exists to provide a decent swath of reviews. While it’s certain to be the best game this week about playing fictional arcade shooters, singing karaoke with dates from hostess clubs and hitting gangsters with street signs, how did Kazuma Kiryu’s latest saga fare under more common rubrics? IGN ( 8.5 /10 ): “You’re getting this intense story about Japan’s seedy underbelly that’s set in an open world where you can take all sorts of side quests, but as you do so, random battles are popping up, you’re earning experience points so you can level up your moves, and you can take stuff from your extensive inventory list and craft new weapons and armor.

Read the rest here: 
Metareview: Yakuza 3

Whomever compiled this Brink trailer must have enjoyed themself some Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes , because we swear we’ve only seen dudes stylishly dodge projectiles like that in a Hideo Kojima game. But, we digress.

See the original post:
Brink trailer showcases acrobatic, lanky dudes

You’ve already seen the (arguably) most newsworthy video we filmed during Wednesday’s Rock Band Bar Night event hosted by Harmonix at GDC . However, our Flip Cam captured a few other magic moments which we’d be remiss if we kept to ourselves. They’re not the most news-y videos we’ve ever posted on our own site, though one of them does feature a preview of the upcoming Lady Gaga DLC . That’s gotta be worth something, right? Watch the whole sideshow after the jump

View post: 
Seen@GDC: Some weird things happened at Harmonix’s Rock Band event