Killzone 2 environments: "not just grey urban wasteland"

It appears that dark city slums and warehouses are not the only locations players will visit while exploring the world of Killzone 2.
Speaking on the Official PlayStation forums, Guerrilla Games Q&Q Manager Seb Downie promised users, "[Helgan] is not just grey urban wasteland."
Downie's comments go with EGM's August issue Killzone 2 preview, which states that some levels will highlight the "natural beauty" of Helghan. While this doesn’t mean that you’ll be taking in grassy hills and crystal blue oceans, it does serve as an indication that players will get a chance to venture outside of the grey cities and tackle different environments than what's been shown in the trailers.
Killzone 2 is set to release this February

Taken from PSU.com

One More Dissidia Character Still To Be Announced

Initially the roster was announced at 20 characters, and this made sense; two from every title up to Final Fantasy X. However, the announcement of Shantotto completely threw this out of whack and people thought that at least one other character would be joining her, on the Side of Evil. Well, it turns out that those people thought correctly.

V-Jump Books have just put up a page to promote their Dissidia: Final Fantasy Destiny Hero's Guide, which will feature information on all of the characters, all 22 characters that is. Now, for the purpose of the game, both Cosmos and Chaos aren't playable characters, so that currently leaves the roster at 21.

Who will the 22nd character be? Well, logically it should be someone from Final Fantasy XI, so it could be Eald'narch; but I think most people would like to see a representative from Final Fantasy XII and who better than Judge Gabranth?

Taken from finalfantasyunion.com

Mikami: "I won't play Resident evil 5"

Ex-Capcom Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami has said that he won't play Resident Evil 5.

Speaking in a recent interview with Official PlayStation magazine, Mikami, who's now working on games with ex-Capcom studio Platinum Games, said that playing Resident 5 would "just cause me stress".

"I probably won't play it. I won't like it, because it's not going to be the game I would have made," he said. "It'll just cause me stress if I play it. I think it could be fun for gamers to play it, but not for someone who has developed Resident Evil games.

"If I see anything in Resident Evil 5 that isn't done well, I'll be angry!"

On number five's similarities to Mikami's fourth Resident, he says "that's fine, isn't it? I think Resident Evil 5 doesn't need to change the series, but Resident Evil 6 will have to reinvent the series with another full model change or else it won't be able to keep on going."

Mikami's current projects are a joint Suda 51 horror game with EA and an unannounced game for Sega.

Mikami calls working on two projects at once "difficult", "but I'm director on my game for Platinum Games and producer on the game for EA. So if Suda does his job properly, my workload will decrease."

A demo of Resident Evil 5 is due on the Japanese PlayStation Network next week, and "a bit later" everywhere else.

Taken from computerandvideogames.com

Sony: Home is "imminent", avatars "par for the course"

Speaking to website Gamasutra, PlayStation Home Director Jack Buser has described avatars such as Nintendo's Miis as "par for the course" this hardware generation, but insisted that Home's contributions in this area would "leapfrog" the competition.

"Avatars are now considered "par for the course" when it comes to next-generation consoles these days, sure," he said, "but we think we've taken it a step further because we also have that personal space for your avatar."

"Users can express themselves in more ways than just how their avatar looks," Buser explained. "That's important, because in the real world you might learn some things about a person by the way that they're dressed or the things that they talk about, but you don't really know someone until you see how they live. Do they have dishes in the sink, what posters did they put on the wall…"

Providing that personal space is important, said Buser, because the decline of the arcade has meant that western gamers have fewer places to hang out.

"We really see this as revolutionizing the concept of the "friends list" for console gamers," he said. "Before, your friends were either people you already knew or people you'd met in a specific game, and with the latter, you'd probably only ever play that one game with them, and never really get to know them."

"PlayStation Home gives you a neutral space where you can really get to know someone. Even in the real world now if you're a gamer and you want to get to know other gamers, there really is nowhere left to go."

"If you're a gamer, unless there happens to be an event in your town there is no place to meet like-minded people. Home is that place," Buser declared, probably whilst grinning ear to ear. "It really leapfrogs the offerings on other game consoles."

Home hasn't had the most trouble free of gestations, of course, but Buser was confident the service would launch this year as planned. "It's imminent. We haven't announced a specific date but we will make a public announcement."

Taken from psu.com

Microsoft in deep trouble?

Microsoft once had a near monopoly on web browsers with Explorer, so it comes almost as a shock to find that the web browser most used to access Bruceongames is Firefox 3 and that even the undermarketed Chrome has made a significant impact. When it comes to search Google always had the majority of the market but MSN now seems to have slipped away to nearly nothing. It doesn’t bring many people here.

You can forgive the above because Microsoft, famously, misunderstood the internet so came to it late. Operating systems are different though, Microsoft have owned this sector since MSDOS. But even here there are massive cracks appearing. By far the fastest growing section of the PC industry is Netbooks. And the Linux derived Ubuntu has become a great success. Microsoft have fought back by bringing XP from the grave. But they are imposing stupid maximum system specifications that attempt to defy Moore’s law.

And of course their worst operating system problem is Vista. This has been the biggest trainwreck in the history of Microsoft and they are rushing out Windows 7 to try and mitigate the disaster.

You might think that Microsoft own the market for standard applications with the Office suite of programmes that have swept all in front of them to become global standards. Even here, though, Microsoft are in big trouble from Google Docs which is free for most users and which massively reduces the IT costs for the many corporates that are now using it. Basically Microsoft didn’t see the cloud coming.

So Microsoft are having problems in many of the most important areas that made them great. But the reality was always that this was inevitable, you cannot hang on to monopolies for ever, especially in the fastest changing area of technology that the world has ever seen. And Microsoft must always have known this. Their monoplies will continue to fade away in the face of this change and new competition from agressive competitors.

So it is against this background that the Xbox/Zune/Live project makes so much sense. The gaming industry is still at its very beginning. The future growth potential is very many times the current size of the market. So it will grow to be a far bigger market than the IT markets that Microsoft have monopolised for so long. In other words Microsoft could become a bigger company because they will be in a bigger marketplace, as long as they have a significant market share.

So Microsoft are playing a long strategy in gaming (and it is growing to be a lot more than gaming). They are building market position over successive generations of platforms, both hardware and software. And they are using their massive financial and intellectual resources to win.

Applying this strategy they must have been amazed that their main competitor, Sony, decided to make so many strategic and tactical mistakes and to basically throw away their market dominance. They must also be very pleased that Nintendo chose to remain in the “toy” end of the market and so did not build the infrastructure necessary to compete in the long term.

Microsoft are in the middle of one of the biggest shifts that any major corporation has ever made. From an IT company that did a bit of gaming to a consumer media company that does a bit of IT.

Taken from bruceongames.com