9:17 AM
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9:15 AM
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7:15 PM
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Lara Croft is getting yet another face lift.
The next game in the multimedia Tomb Raider franchise will be a new origins story, developer Crystal Dynamics said Monday.
Aptly titled Tomb Raider, the game will feature “a young and inexperienced Lara Croft in a story which charts the journey of an ordinary woman who finds out just how far she must go in order to stay alive.”
According to the official website, the new Tomb Raider game will be available for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Also, Lara has a bow in the game and there’s a ship visible in the background of the first piece of artwork from the title (above). In case that’s not enough for you, more Tomb Raider information will be available in the January issue of Game Informer, which will be available for purchase Dec. 11.
Crystal Dynamics, a subsidiary of Square Enix, handled development on previous Tomb Raider games, including the critically lauded Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. Since Guardian of Light set out to start a new brand for the franchise, it’s safe to say that this new Tomb Raider reboot will be unrelated.
This isn’t the first time publisher Eidos has made over the Tomb Raider franchise. With Tomb Raider: Legend, Crystal Dynamics resurrected the series back in 2006. The developer then released Tomb Raider: Anniversary, a remake of the original Tomb Raider. Confused yet? We are.
Image courtesy Game Informer
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3:05 PM
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Update: Some readers experienced problems while trying to post comments to enter this Scribblenauts contest, so we’re extending the deadline. You’ll now be able to submit entries until 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Dec. 13, 2010.
See that adorable little vinyl doll? It’s a minuscule version of Maxwell, protagonist of the charming Scribblenauts puzzle-action videogame series, and we’ve got three of them to give away to fine Wired.com readers.
So how do you win one? Simple. Just post a comment below describing the funniest way you’ve beaten a level in either Scribblenauts or Super Scribblenauts. Be as descriptive and engaging as possible. Also, feel free to link screenshots or videos of your solutions — they’re not absolutely necessary, but they sure can’t hurt.
We’ll go through and pick the best three entries based on how much they entertain us. All entries must be received by 12:01 a.m. Pacific on Dec. 6, 2010. Winners will be contacted by e-mail, so make sure your Wired.com account is linked to your current e-mail address!
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com. Contest was originally posted Dec. 1, 2010, at 2:02 p.m.
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11:01 AM
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Action RPG DeathSpank did a lot of things right, but what could have it done better?
Several weeks ago I had a conversation (more of which will be available later) with legendary designer Ron Gilbert (Monkey Island). He said that if he could do his recently-released downloadable DeathSpank all over again, he would have tried to make the game’s combat more like a puzzle.
“I probably would have made battling a little more intellectual,” Gilbert said. “So it wasn’t just about hacking through a bunch of enemies, but more like treating combat as if it was a puzzle to be solved.”
Wired.com loved DeathSpank, but its hack-and-slash action was undeniably repetitive.
“It shouldn’t be about beating your head against it,” he said. “It should be about assessing the situation — asking, ‘what tools do I have?’”
Say for example that you walk into a camp full of nasty goblin-like Greems.
“You might say, ‘Hey, I can crowd-control people or maybe for this particular thing I need to get some ice-resistant armor,’” Gilbert said. “Really just turning them into puzzles. I think that might have helped people a little bit with not just having to button-mash their way through battles.”
As an example, Gilbert name-checked Dragon Age: Origins, which features a slower, more strategic system.
“I really like the intellectual component to the combat in Dragon Age. The RPG stuff fits a little more with the adventure game, puzzle-solving pieces of the game,” he said.
So in an ideal world, if DeathSpank had an unlimited budget and no strict deadlines, it’d be more like Dragon Age?
“Not in its turn-based nature,” Gilbert said. “More of the intellectual element. You see a little bit of that intellectual component come out in the game, but not a lot. I would probably have spent a lot more time making that stuff come out a little better.”
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6:36 AM
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A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas.
Instead of “Beat It,” players get “Bleat It.”
The phenomenon was documented by YouTube user ctkxtreme, who posted the video above with the following explanation: “This is Ubisoft’s attempt at anti-piracy to the game. The game is an [Elite Beat Agents] clone, and there’s no notes playing, it freezes when it’s paused, and fucking vuvuzela noises over the music.”
With the annoying noise of the plastic South African horns, the illegally copied game sounds more like a raucous soccer match than a Michael Jackson record.
“The development team worked this feature in as a creative way to discourage any tampering with the retail version of the game,” a representative of Ubisoft, the company that developed the game, told Wired.com in an e-mail Friday.
Piracy has become a major problem for Nintendo because of the ease with which copied games can be played on the handheld device. Unlike videogame consoles, which need to undergo elaborate hardware modifications to play copied software, the handheld DS is comparatively wide open. All one needs to do is to buy a cheap rewritable storage card, download an illegal copy from a file sharing site, and load the card into the DS.
Games can be coded to have the the software check to see if it is running on a legitimate DS cartridge or if the code has been copied to a similar card. Ubisoft would not elaborate, as of press time, about the specific anti-piracy mechanism in Michael Jackson: The Experience.
Battling pirates “has been like a game of cat-and-mouse,” Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told investors in October. He said that while Nintendo does not entirely attribute low software sales to piracy, the company is “beefing up” the copy protection for the Nintendo 3DS, which it will release next year.
The unique anti-piracy measure coded into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience, which was released Nov. 23, is just the latest — and perhaps most hilarious — method used to fight illegal copying.
Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user’s game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates.
But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates.
Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman’s cape-glide ability doesn’t work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps.
If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game.
Similar methods of messing with pirates’ heads go back at least to the 1995 Super Nintendo role-playing game Earthbound. It had a slew of anti-piracy gimmicks: In addition to filling copied games with an aggravatingly large amount of enemy encounters, it would freeze up just as the player was about to fight the final boss after 30 hours of adventuring, deleting every saved game on the disk.
Despite such measures, Alex Neuse, whose company Gaijin Games creates the Bit.Trip series for WiiWare, estimates that a whopping 70 percent of copies of his games are pirated.
“Piracy especially hurts small, independent developers who don’t command the sales figures/profits that the bigger companies do,” he said in a statement earlier this year.
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