Xbox store and gaming café for Dublin
An Xbox-only retail unit and gaming café is to open in Dublin under the name Xbox Live Gaming Centre.
It follows the opening of Bartizan Game World, a gaming café in Midleton, Cork.
It is owned and to be run by ‘Multiplayer’, with partners
Microsoft, Eircom, and Samsung. The gaming café is “strategically
partnered and backed” by Irish financiers, according to irishdev.com.
The centre is running apparently semi-open testing on Friday, with
the official opening on April 5. It was to open in March, we were told
recently that there were a “Few delays”, and that they “are
looking at 27 Mar now and have organized a press launch”, an email
sent early this week has gone unanswered.
Their website at Xboxlivegamingcentre.com, is publicly viewable vie xboxlivegamingcentre.com/services.asp.
With a mixture of Xbox and Xbox 360 consoles, and a focus on
multiplayer, according to the website, the “Centre is a revolutionary
concept in multiplayer gaming. A super fast broadband enabled console
environment with the best Audio Visual equipment”.
The outlet is set to also sell Xbox hardware, at least chart Xbox
games, Samsung TVs, Eircom broadband, and all-in-one services -
“There are various packages available along with our unique
“Multiplayer Home” service where you can have one of our engineers call
to your home and install the whole lot - Broadband, Xbox, LCD and Xbox
Live a/c”. The retail section fronts the two-story gaming centre.
Located at 51 South William Street, between Grafton Street and
Dublin Castle, the gaming café is expected to open to midnight on
weekdays and after on weekends. It will be open for bookings, including
corporate nights, and they “regularly cater for Microsoft and EA game
launches”.
As part of Microsoft’s long strategy of promoting Xbox Live using
celebrities, Nikki Hayes, an RTE radio and TV presenter, recently
played at the café with winners of a competition on her radio show and
others over Xbox Live. Previously the Dublin-based band the Thrills
played over Live, these plans to expand the list of Irish celebrities
using the Gaming Centre.
Athlone developer Frantic to fulltime
Frantic Games
, based in Athlone, are to take their PC game ‘1944 D-Day Operation Overlord’ into fulltime development. The developer is entering into DIT’s HotHouse program.
Operation Overlord is set to be a first person shooter on a massive
scale, with over 200,000 units, and a 24 hours battle. The firm is also
planning ‘The Educational Cut’ version of the game for use in the
classroom environment.
“1944 D-Day Operation Overlord
is the simulation of an event. It does not strive to tell the story of
one unit or one squad. Instead it endeavours to tell the story of the
battle” states Frantic’s website, “The game at its core is driven
by a highly adaptable AI system, this AI system controls over 250,000
units in real-time. Moving them all around the battlefield and adapting
their orders, objectives and tasks to an every evolving battlefield”.
Kotaku.com’s best poster of GDC
Dublin games company DemonWare wins kotaku.com’s GDC: Best Poster of Show award [found vie here]:
Multiplayer games outlet opens in Cork
Bartizan Game World, a new gaming café based in Midleton near Cork City, are to run ‘Open Days’ this weekend.
The open days are this Saturday and Sunday, March 25 26, from 10am until 7pm.
According to a front-page advertisement in Thursday’s Irish Examiner, the outlet has “75 stations” which include PCs, PS2s, and Xbox 360. While their website claims to have “a choice of PC, PS2, PS3 and Xbox 360º”. All with “supper fast high speed broadband”.
They say they will have 100’s of games, and “the most exciting new titles before they hit the shops”.
REVIEW: 24: The Game
Developer: SCEE Cambridge | Publisher: SCEE | Format: PS2
Reviewer: Craig Gallagher For
the vast majority of us, a bad day involves being late for work and
losing the television remote. For Jack Bauer, it involves his daughter
being kidnapped, an attempt on the vice presidents life, and the
bombing of his workplace, the Counter Terrorist Unit. That fact that
all this happens before, the half way mark indicates just how true the
game stays to the series.
Taking place between the events of season two and three, the game
goes to extreme lengths to copy the series in all areas, hand held
cameras, dialogue that’s shouted, split screens, and the hectic pace.
Almost every character from seasons one and two who wasn’t killed plays
some part in the experience, and given that they’ve all lent their
likeness and voice talents to proceedings makes the game feel like a
lost series of the show.
The game packs one hell of a narrative, you feel compelled to
continue playing just to see what happens next. This is where the
problem lies; the quality of gameplay fluctuates between the good and
the down right atrocious. Taut unnerving interrogations, race against
the clock run and gunning compete with boring stealth scenes and
terrible driving sections. And let’s not forget the difficulty level,
which is amazingly simple one minute and almost unplayable the next.
For sheer thrills 24 is unparalleled, its just a shame that
sometimes it has nothing to do with the gameplay and a lot to do with
the narrative. Fans of the series will be in heaven, anyone else should
best look elsewhere.
REVIEW: Kuon
Developer: FromSoftwares | Published: Agetec | Foramt: PS2
Reviewer: Craig Gallagher It’s
been a while since we’ve had a proper supernatural exploration game
taking place in a spooky mansion. Out of nowhere comes Kuon, a proper
old-fashioned spook fest, in the vein of Alone in the Dark and Project
Zero.
You begin as one of two characters - there’s Utsuki, the coy
daughter of the temple’s mystic priest, or Sakuya, a disciple of the
temple who’s a bit more gung ho. Both young women go to the manor
seeking to discover why its inhabitants are disappearing without a
trace.
Utsuki takes with her, her sick sister, Kureha, to try to find their
father, while Sakuya arrives with a group of disciples dispatched by
the priest to purify the mansion and its people of all ill. As in this
type of narrative, things soon take a turn for the worse and our
protagonists are plunged into a nightmarish world of evil, with twists
around every corner.
From her the game turns into a Resident Evil clone with you
traversing the mansion, fighting off the evil zombie like creatures,
the “Gaki”. You have a t your disposal a range of different spells
which are activated by special cards located around the mansion and
it’s grounds. This is where the games major fault lies. Combat is
sluggish and unresponsive; attacks are slow to be carried out. This
instantly raises annoyance rather than tension.
Kuon is perfectly adequate in all areas, but when there are a
hundred other perfectly adequate puzzlers on the market, it’s hard to
recommend a one which offers nothing new. While it’s no classic, Kuon
is still worth playing if you can get your hands on a copy.
Irish games companies in the news
The Sunday Business Post reports the flock of some Irish games companies to California this week, for the Game Developers Conference 2006. A second article covers the Galway-based Nephin Games raising $1 million in funding.
‘Game on for Irish tech firms‘
centres on Demonware, as well as Havok, Torc Interactive, Upstart
Games, and Selatra, the article also lists off BitRabbit, Gmedia,
Eirplay Games, Meedja, and PopCap.
To make
itself seen among the big players, Demonware is hiring a San Francisco
cable car on wheels to transport people around San Jose. The company
hired a fleet of Hummer limousines for last year’s GDC, but it has
been prudent with its cash.It has raised just over
PS3 delayed until November says Sony
- Worldwide launch
- PS1 PS2 compatibility
- hard drive ‘required’
- no pricing details announcedAfter holding firm since last May, Sony has today stated that their
next console, the PlayStation 3, will launch this November, and not in
“Spring 2006″ as originally planned for at least Japan. Expanding
on the release the console maker claims that the PS3 will be in Europe,
North America, and Japan in early November.Confirming the expected delay with their normal style, Sony paid
little attention to the previous launch window - although their
briefing in Japan confirmed that Blu-Ray security issues caused the
delay.A 60GB hard drive will ship with the console; it will be required, and designed for the possibility of an upgrade.
PlayStation Network Platform, the online offering, will be free –
so far with no paid for option. The PSNP will offer multiplayer lobbies
and matchmaking, as well as downloadable content, and the ability for
text/voice/video communications. The download content is reported to possibly include PS1 and PS2 games.Meanwhile, in PlayStation Portable news today, a “Base Model”
PSP is set to retail from March 22 at 209 euro in Ireland. While this
autumn, an EyeToy-like camera, and a GPS receiver will be in shops. A
new download service, with an unspecified release, will allow users to
obtain “selected popular” games from the original PlayStation
format.Computer game book from Irish academic
A book that covers the business and culture side of computer games is
being published this month, it is written by Dr Aphra Kerr of the NUI
Maynooth.‘The Business and Culture of Digital Games - Gamework and
Gameplay’ according to the publisher’s website is “Written
as an introductory text for media and game students this book aims
present an overview of industry and scholarly work on who makes games,
where they get made, what kind of media and cultural form they are and
who plays them and where”.Kerr lecturers at the Department of Sociology in Maynooth, and is the project manager, editor, and founder of GameDevelopers.ie.
Sage Publications publish Digital Games at a price point of £18.99 paperback or £60 (around 27 or just under 90 euro) hardback.
Belfast firm make web game for film
CanDo Interactive have developed a promotional Shockwave game for
the recently release film Running Scared — it can be played by going
to the ‘game’ section at runningscaredthemovie.com. CanDo has previously worked on a game for the film Triple X 2 and helped with an SUV safety promotion run by the US Attorney General’s office.
