Out of nowhere, EA has decided that it would be super neat if they went ahead and bought-out Bioware and Pandemic, to build upon their game-development Empire of Doom. If they were another less-established pair of independent developers, sure, this would be pretty decent news, since it would mean stable funding and a guaranteed publisher for whatever projects they come up with.

. . . but this is Bioware and Pandemic. When was the last time either of them had a hard time getting a publisher? And when was the last time EA bought out a developer and then let it retain its unique culture? Look at what's left of Maxis. Look at what's left of Westwood. Sure, it might turn out ok in the end, but the odds are stacked against them. Lets just hope we don't end up with MASS EFFECT '09 w/EA TRAXX.

Today, FASA Studio, that electronics division responsible for the such recent games as this summer's Shadowrun, closed just about as abruptly as their former corporate parent. In a post on the Official Shadowrun (360/PC Game) Forums, Mitch Gitelman (the studio's manager) announced that they were closing up. "About half" of the team has been absorbed into Microsoft Game Studios, while the rest have apparently ridden off into the sunset.

While it's sad to see FASA as a name finally die, maybe it's for the best. This year's Shadowrun was one of the most egregious wastes of a wonderful license I can recall in recent history. And anyways, most of the best games based on FASA licenses weren't actually made by FASA employees. Hopefully now that all that's left are the licenses, we'll see them get around a bit more, and maybe then I'll finally get to see Oblivion meets Shadowrun.

. . . or who knows, maybe it'll go the other way and we'll get end up getting a MechWarrior Kart Racing game for cellphones.

In one month, on 1 SEP 2007, EA will drop online support for the following games on the following platforms.

All versions up through 2006 for the following series on all platforms but PS3:

• Arena Football
• FIFA Soccer
• FIFA World Cup
• Madden NFL
• NCAA Baseball
• NASCAR
• NBA Live
• NCAA Football
• NFL Head Coach
• NHL
• Tiger Woods PGA Tour

Also getting the axe on September 1st are:

• Fight Night Round 3 (PSP/Xbox only, not 360 or PS3)
• Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects (PS2/Xbox only)

And then, two months later on 1 NOV 2007, even more games get dropped:

• Burnout Revenge (PS2/Xbox)
• Need for Speed Underground (PS2)
• Need for Speed Underground 2 (PS2/PC)
• Need for Speed Most Wanted (PSP/Xbox)

Good job, EA! Now people will be forced to buy your 2008 lineup! Brilliant and respectful way to treat your customers.

Source: TGDaily

Examine this wonderful quote from a recent interview LEC's President Jim Ward had with MCV, a UK Gaming Mag:

“There’s an attitude in this industry that says in order to make a great game, it takes whatever time it takes and it takes whatever money it takes, and that that’s okay,” he claimed. “Well it’s not okay – it’s wrong. It’s not okay in other entertainment businesses. In other businesses it’s big trouble.”

Guess what, Jim: videogames aren't like other forms of media. If you rush a movie by a couple months you're not going to risk releasing it with a bug that shuts off movie theater projectors 15 minutes in. You're not going to have to cut the entire ending because you didn't have time to get it to work. With videogames, even the smallest overlooked bug due to rushing can be the difference between "buy it at release" and "don't buy it at all because it's a broken piece of crap that's going to require seventeen patches to be playable".

Now, no one is expecting every game ever to be entirely free of bugs at release, hell, several of my favourite games of the past few years have had some quite major bugs at release, but when you have a corporate mentality of "RAR! DEADLINE SLIPPAGE IS RUINING THE INDUSTRY! RUSH FASTER!", your games are going to have more bugs and more severe bugs.

Look at KOTOR and KOTOR 2. LOOK AT THEM. Look at ANYTHING ANYONE SAID ABOUT BOTH GAMES. KOTOR wasn't rushed too horribly. It had bugs, but it was an overall amazing game. KOTOR 2 was rushed like mad to get it out for Xbox in time for the 2004 holiday season. It was impossible to go ten minutes in the game without running into some kind of glitch (ranging in severity from "depressing but benign" to "gamebreakingly horrible") or awkward poorly-designed bodged-together quest element due to the devs trying desperately to salvage all the cut content. The result was a confused and disjointed game that paled in comparison to its predecessor. It all made sense once the PC version was released and we could finally see all the remnants of the hastily cut content, including the entire ending of the game.

Luckily (but also sadly), there's only one game coming from LEC in the near future that I remotely care about: Lego Star Wars 2. Good news: it looked quite far along at E3, and we're still three months away from release. Bad news: it's got a hard release deadline that coincides with the re-re-re-re-re-re-release of the Original Trilogy DVDs. However, we know the dev team responsible for the Lego Star Wars games has had to deal with LEC's crazy hard deadlines in the past, with Lego Star Wars being released vaguely in conjunction with Episode III's theatrical release. So it might turn out ok, despite Mr Ward's attempts to rush all his games into the ground.

The real problem here is that deadlines are one of those things that you can't take to either extreme. If you enforce unflinching drop-dead dates like the one that was imposed on KOTOR 2, you end up with a product full of bugs and failed potential. If you take an absolute "when it's done" approach, you end up with Duke Nukem Forever. To produce good games you have to take the middle road. Deadlines are great, but shipping an unfinished game to make it hit an arbitrary deadline is ridiculous. I know LEC's business model in recent years has been based entirely around milking Star Wars license tie-ins, but I seriously question the value of getting a mediocre or bad game out "on time" vs a highly polished game out "slightly late".

Well now they do, for real.

The good news here is that it won't result in any changes for us consumers. Had Lionhead been gobbled up by the competition, like EA or Ubisoft, Bad Things might have happened. EA, well, EA would have probably wanted to make Black and White or The Movies into a yearly franchise. You don't want to overwork people who already have a hard time meeting deadlines and feature lists. Though, a yearly dev cycle would give Molyneux less time to hype up the features that won't be making the cut. And as for Ubisoft, well, do you really want the disappointment of another Lionhead product to come with a bonus side of StarForce? That'd just be mean.

So that leaves us with Microsoft. Sure, it means we won't be seeing any Lionhead games on any platform other than the PC or Xbox, but name the last Lionhead game you saw that wasn't exclusive to those platforms. Go on, I'll wait. Here's a hint: there aren't any. Sure, cross-platform things get announced and hyped, but like so many other features of Lionhead games, they get cut before release.

Lionhead recently had some cutbacks, having axed about a fifth of their dev team shortly after shipping The Movies, as for what the rest of them are doing, we don't really know. Having just shipped Black & White 2 a few months ago, it's safe to assume there's some manner of expansion on the table. And since it's the only other thing they've made in recent history, there's probably some manner of sequel to Fable in the works for the 360. As with most things, we'll probably be hearing something about what they have up their collective sleeves next month at E3.

Source: BBC News

In a press release yesterday, Blizzard President Mike Morhaime announced that the main reasoning behind the shelving boils down to the current state that consoles are in right now. It doesn't make sense to ship a semi-high-profile game like this when we're already in the middle of the transition between hardware generations. Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to try and focus on just the Xbox 360, and makes even less sense to try and ship for both the 360 and something like the PS2. So rather than try and do something like that, they're just shelving the project altogether.

In the coming months, Blizzard claims they'll be evaluating next-gen consoles and figuring out exactly what they want to focus on. Once they've made a decision, they may choose to port / revamp Ghost, or kill it outright and work on something else.

Source: Yahoo! Business Wire

The winners? Four games ended up taking everything: Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Guitar Hero and Nintendogs. I don't think I could have come up with a better list.

Shadow of the Colossus came up with top honors, with the Best Game award, plus the awards for Game Design, Character Design, Visual Arts, and Innovation. The other three took two awards each, Psychonauts [and Double Fine] with the Writing and New Studio awards, Nintendogs with Technology and Innovation, and Guitar Hero with Audio and Innovation. They apparently hand out Innovation awards like candy at the GDC Awards, as they gave out three this year. Not to say they weren't all deserving.

More GDC news later today, with a wrap-up of both the Sony and Nintendo Keynotes.

Source: Next Gen

In a post to their forums yesterday, one of the admins of the semi-official fansite Stargate-Game.com announced that he had word from inside Perception [the game's developers] stating that after years of development and major publisher issues last summer, the game had seriously been cancelled, for real this time. No reason was given, and he's been rather tight-lipped on protecting his sources, but he has mentioned several times that it was confirmed by multiple people from inside Perception.

This seems somewhat fishy to me. Maybe I'm just gun-shy since the last major news we had about The Alliance was the abrupt reversal from "totally cancelled" to "no seriously it's not cancelled honest". Maybe it's just the justaposition of this news with a recent interview that's currently being announced at the top of Perception's homepage. I'm not entriely sure, but I think it's a combination of these.

I'm only somewhat wary of the news, though, it's still probably true. The game has been on very shaky ground since the shenanigains that erupted last year. It seemed like things might have been turning around, since they did a semi-public test-day last month, but other than that we've heard very little over the past year. In my experience, when you hear very little about a game that's supposed to be released within a few months, things generally aren't going so well.

Of course, this news just had to conveniently break on a Friday afternoon, so the earliest we could possibly expect confirmation would be Monday morning. As such, we sorta expect confirmation from Perception, MGM or both on at least some time next week. When a confirmation or denial comes in, we'll update accordingly.

Yesterday, Majesco announced that they're pulling out of the big leagues when it comes to publishing. They sold off the rights to some of their games about a month ago, and as part of yesterday's announcement, they added that they've outright cancelled nearly all of their expected 2006 releases, including such games as Taxi Driver and Demonik.

Majesco is expected to go back to doing what they used to be good at: waiting for good handheld games to get old, buying the publishing rights for cheap and re-issuing the games at budget prices. This is how they used to make money back before they thought they could do real publishing.

While it apparently didn't work out for them, I'm really glad Majesco tried being a real publisher. Specifically, I liked them because they were risk-takers. The industry is full of companies like EA who are too afraid to take a risk on games that aren't sure-bets, games like Psychonauts which Majesco saved from certain doom. Unfortunately, they were a bit over-eager in taking on such games, and you just can't run a company that way. But they were on the right track. We need more publishers willing to take risks. You guys don't have to fund 100% long-shot experimental games, but gee, it'd sure be nice if we didn't continue on the path we're on now, where 90% of games being released are the 5th or 6th iterations of longstanding series.

Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, a single-player level custom-created to showcase High-Dynamic Range lighting (HDR) in the Source engine.

As this is effectively a tech demo, it has a quite hefty set of system requirements, which it will prompt you about before you try to download it. Apparently my box just barely squeaks by. I'll let you all know how it plays in the comments.

(Note that this isn't "HL2:Aftermath". That's the full proper expansion that's coming out Later. It will presumably have the same system requirements as HL2 when it comes out. No date has been set for Aftermath yet.)

In other news, the Xbox (normal, not-360) port of Half-Life 2 went gold a few days ago. It's expected in stores around November 15th, so look for it then.

And finally, in HL2 mod news, the highly-anticipated version 9 of Garry's Mod is being released later today. Garry's mod is . . well . . it's a mod. It lets you screw around in HL2 to a degree never seen in any other game ever. Just know that it's one of the few third party must-have mods, and there's a new version today.