I know it was yesterday, and didn't see as much April Fools Day stuff as sometimes, but there were a few funny things around... here's one I saw on neogaf:
Quote: Following the success of our mobile-gaming lineup, we are proud to unveil the next entry in our series of epic handheld, pocket-sized entertainment!
It is a dark time for the galaxy. The alien forces of the voracious zerg and the ancient and enigmatic protoss have threatened the terrans for years.
Pushed to their limits, the beleaguered terrans plan a last-ditch attempt to save their people from extinction. They enter deep development on the most important research project of their time, one that will elevate warfare forever.
RAISE your expectations!
LOWER your enemies into the ground!!
Mankind's last resort is...
Supply Depot!
Features:
Endless hours of gaming including repeat playthroughs and Endurance Mode!
Deep, rewarding gameplay—multilevel play control allows you to both RAISE and LOWER Supply Depot!
Riveting backstory set in the StarCraft game universe!
Get up close and personal with an iconic StarCraft hero!
Multiple endings, each influenced by your choices and color-coded for your convenience! (Further epic endings planned for post release as downloadable content.)
Tens of hundreds of thousands of unlockable hats!
StarCraft: Supply Depot 2 is available on your favorite web browser, and coming soon for iPhone and Android!
Launch StarCraft: Supply Depot 2 now, and also make sure to check out Blizzard's other amazing mobile games!
Just awesome.
Oh, and yes, there is an actual game. Play it now, it's amazing!
Yeah... not good. They've said that they're going to focus on major franchises only for the Western markets -- Sonic, Total War, etc -- so yeah, not much hope for other stuff from Sega for a while, apparently. :( And also, a bunch of people at Sega of America were fired, and presumably some at other Sega branches as well, to go along with the cancelled games. Ouch.
As for cancelled announced games, they haven't mentioned any yet, but if Sega has anything announced that's not a major-name title, I'd be worried about it.
... Is anyone NOT losing money these days in the videogame industry? It's getting kind of ridiculous...
You know, an Online Pass, those games where if you buy used you have to pay extra in order to play the online play. Where they justified the charge by saying stuff about how it'd allow them to focus more on those games, or give them more online resources, or what have you.
Yeah, they were lying, that's for sure... EA always seems to be one of the first ones to shut down online servers. It's pretty sad, and frustrating... darnit, let the players create servers at least, once you shut down the official ones... :(
The original PSO was a pretty good game, as are some of its sequels, so I'm definitely hopeful about this one... I don't know if going F2P is a good move or a bad one, but hopefully it works out. I'll have to play the game at least some, PSO games are usually addictive. :)
The game is sure to have a Western release, but I'm not sure if it's going to be simultaneous or not... probably not. In Japan anwyay, there's also an iOS version coming in late 2012 and a Vita version in early 2013. I imagine we see all of them at some point.
It's from some of the original developers, who have apparently acquired ICOM's game library. Why they're starting with this one I don't know, I'd think they'd start with a more popular ICOM game like Shadowgate, but hey, you have to start somewhere.
They do have a ways to go -- it's at only $4,500 of the $55,000 they want, with 33 days to go -- and it's an FMV game so I don't know how many people will donate given the dislike many people have for the genre (rightfully so too, I think) -- but while they are live-action video, the Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective games aren't too bad... they are adventure games, with video. Watch the video in the kickstarter page; it's kind of amusing. They've got tiers from $9 to $600. He mentions making a new one too, maybe after the first nine are redone, with live actors and everything.
Anyway, the idea is to remake the 9 mysteries and release them individually on PC, Mac, iOS, and Android. The original games were three titles, each with three mysteries, but while they're selling them individually this time the price will of course be much lower for each...
Oh, and they joined the "Kick it Forward" thing Brian Fargo started up, too.
Returning to Shadowgate though, the FAQ also says this:
Quote:Yes! I have obtained the rights to all of my adventures including Shadowgate, Deja Vu, and Uninvited. The great part is that we still have the designs for sequels to Shadowgate (for instance) that were never published. We plan on rolling these out after the Sherlock Mysteries.
There were actually two published sequels to Shadowgate from ICOM -- Beyond Shadowgate (TurboGrafx-CD exclusive) and Shadowgate 64: Trials of the Four Towers (N64 exclusive), but I assume that there must have been more too... I am pretty sure that a Shadowgate 64 2 did start production, before being cancelled as ICOM fell apart and the N64 neared the end of its life.
Here is my of programs that are absolutely free that everyone should have in their tool box especially if they are doing anything with multimedia.
Blender 2.62: Enough said for making awesome looking 3D and 2D renders it's a awesome sandwich. And now Cycles adds physically accurate renders, motion tracking for special effects, and BMesh with NGONS (Polygons with other than 3 or 4 sides) and allot of other modeling tools.
Audacity: a free professional grade audio editing program, you can really mix folly like a pro with this software, and it supports industry standard plugs.
cam studio: a free screen capture program with all the features of the professional stuff, works great with no frame dropping on any machine. Make sure you grab the cam codec and select it. Cam codec is a compressor for AVI files that divers 32 bit color depth, no loss compression, and is super fast for no dropped frames.
WinFF: It's FF Mpeg with a GUI. FF Mpeg is a mpeg compression and play back library for converting and playing video in hundreds of format. WinFF adds a easy to use GUI for the converting video function so you don't have to know command line. So you can convert just about any format to any other format with studio quality. WinFF is used in many professional studios and is absolutely free.
Just wrote my first "out of the browser" app using Silverlight. This is really cool, Microsoft has combined flash and adobe air functionality into the new silverlight 4 and 5. I just wrote a Silverlight 4 app that installs from the web page with a single click and once the user grants the app "extended trust" my program has the ability to do anything a regular windows app can do, only now I can skin everything and create cool transition effects with the power of Silverlight and windows presentation API, and it's GPU accelerated.
Best of all Silverlight is free to develop for, all though I do own VS 2010 ultimate which does make life allot easier. It's really to bad that Silverlight isn't as popular as Flash it really has allot of cool features. Like as far as I know, Flash still doesn't support DRM for streaming video and it's really expensive to develop for.
![[Image: Ufyy6.jpg]](http://i.imgur.com/Ufyy6.jpg)
