The world is now a better place for those wanting to push the pedal to the metal and be intoxicated at the same time. Arcade system-developer Dream Arcades have enriched society with a Beer Arcade Racing Simulator for home use called Octane 120, now compatible with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The beermobile already comes with a high-end PC and 12 modern racing games, so practically everything is playable.

Apart from the beer taps (one located in the “trunk” and one in the dash) the Octane 120 is also delivered with a high output projector, a 120 inch portable projection screen and the obvious 5.1 surround sound. Other features of this devilish cyborg (I can keep going forever with the names) are the following:

- Fully adjustable steering wheel and seat
- Leather wrapped Steering wheel and shifter
- Dual motor force feedback
- Metal Gas, Clutch and Break pedals with variable resistance
- Conveniently located cup holder allows you to pour a drink while you play.

“The Octane 120 still features everything that a guy could possibly want in a home arcade racing cabinet,” says Dream Arcades owner Michael Ware. “With the addition of the Xbox 360 gamers can now use it even more like a home theater by connecting it to NetFlix to download more than 12,000 TV shows and movies,” he proclaimed.

Before you do anything rash, you should first make sure that you’re single, bored and too wealthy for your own good. The price of this wedding crasher is a mere $6,995 so think once, twice and thrice before doing anything stupid.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft is like Mike Tyson at his best — Unbeatable. Many thought that Funcom’s Age of Conan was going to be the next king of the hill, but that objective can now unofficially be declared as failed. Then came EA’s Warhammer Online which seems to have followed the same path. Simply put, many try the new MMO’s out, but many also go back after a while. The next WoW-challenger is BioWare’s Star Wars: The Old Republic which according to Blizzard won’t be knocked out that easily.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Blizzard executive Paul Sims acknowledges that BioWare have a good chance of reaching success with their upcoming MMO. “I wouldn’t bet against them, that’s for sure,” he said. “They are an excellent company and they’re utilising a well-known franchise as the backbone for that game. I think the combination of those two things bodes well for them, just because not everybody can say that.”

Sims then pointed out why an excellent development team isn’t going to make it alone. With a huge amount of subscribers there’s a lot more behind the scenes work, but there’s one thing that gives BioWare an advantage; namely a wealthy publisher.

“It’s a bit more tricky than it might seem, and I think that that is also why we haven’t seen any other games that really have blown up from a huge subscribership perspective,” he said. “Because how you react when it scales is very challenging, to say the least.”

“So it’s a hard road, and it’s also a very expensive road. BioWare have the benefit now of being with EA as relates to money, and EA has a pocketbook that is fat,” he explained.

There’s a lot of reasons to try out The Old Republic when it’s eventually released. Though having played its single-player predecessors is kind of the only reason I need.

Vienna, Austria, November 4th 2008; JoWooD Productions is pleased to announce the official release date for the upcoming puzzle adventure “Safecracker Wii™”.

As an expert safecracker, you are hired by the wealthy family of a recently deceased billionaire to search for the last will and testament of their late relative, Duncan W. Adams. Being an avid safe collector and an “eccentric” to say the least, Adams has hidden the deed to his riches in one of the 35 safes scattered in his flamboyant mansion.

(more…)

The latest fruit of Carmack's firm is the pictured-at-right "Fishbowl Spaceship." The craft is designed to offer space tourists a comfortable trek, as well as a full, 360 degree panoramic view of the cosmos.

The picture is a conceptual mock-up, though Armadillo plans to create a working prototype by the end of 2009. Manned suborbital flights are planned by the end of 2010.

To recoup the no doubt immense research and development costs that went into crafting such an unorthodox vehicle, Carmack's firm will be offering flights to the (extremely wealthy) general public.

This ship can carry two people simultaneously, and tickets for each flight are estimated at $100,000. It's a huge amount of cash, certainly, but that's almost chump change compared to the reported $30 million Garriott spent to visit the International Space Stationaboard a Soyuz rocket.

At that price range, these tickets are probably a bit above most of your income tax brackets, but if you had that kind of cash would you take Armadillo up on the offer?

Image courtesy Armadillo Aerospace

Whee! View Outerspace From A Fishbowl[Geekologie]

Continue reading Watch a video of Richard Garriott's geeky but enviable space voyage

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Nintendo announced a ton of games at their Japanese conference today, here are some of the highlights.

Punch Out - The Wii version of Punch Out looks to be a revamped version of the NES original. It’s also probably safe to say that its title, along with Nintendo’s backing, will cause it to become a worthy contender to EA’s Facebreaker, which will arrive on the Wii in just over a month. Mike Tyson remains unconfirmed.

Sin & Punishment 2 - Younger gamers are probably lost on the excitement of this announcement, but it remains a bombshell none-the-less. N64 owners intrepid enough to import the original Sin & Punishment were treated to one of the system’s finest games, not to mention a gorgeous art style that pushed the N64 to its limit. If you’ve never had a S&P experience, we highly recommend downloading the localized version via the Wii Virtual Console.

Sengoku Musou 3 (Samurai Warriors 3) - A series that is largely lost on Western audiences, but remains relevant in the gaming landscape regardless. This one was clearly a focal point due to the fact the the conference itself was held in Japan.

Another Code (Trace Memory in the US) - Trace Memory remains one of the best reasons to own a Nintendo DS, and as such it is increasingly hard to find a reasonably-priced copy of the game. It was a little-known classic that became a cult phenomenon among many early DS adopters. Being released nearly 3 years ago, it’s difficult to hunt down the game in stores and you’ll pay a premium if you manage to find one online. Not much is known about the newly announced title for the Wii, but whether it is an entirely knew adventure or merely a port of the excellent handheld version, gamers should be excited.

Monster Hunter 3 - The Monster Hunter franchise is often cited for being the main reason the PSP is as big of a success as it is in Japan. The announcement of the 3rd installment of the series making its way to the Wii is a sign that the name alone is a license to print money. It will be interesting to see the Western response to this announcement, or if they even know that they should care.

New “Tales Of” title - Not much to say on this one other than it’s a really popular series being released for a really, really popular system. Soon, Nintendo may be more wealthy than Japan itself.

Insomniac CEO Ted Price might work solely with Sony hardware, but that doesn't mean he's not a fan of the Xbox 360. Owning both a 360 and a PlayStation 3, Price is looking forward to the release date of Gears of War 2, even if it does fall on the same day as his own game, Resistance 2.

When asked for his thoughts about the two huge exclusive games hitting their respective consoles on the same day, Price offered his own solution as to what you should buy -- both of them:

Ultimately, as a PS3 owner and an Xbox 360 owner myself, those are two games I would get. I want to have the most entertaining experiences on both consoles, so I am going to get the games that have the best feedback. So far, Gears has had fantastic feedback, and I think it looks beautiful. Resistance will make a lot of PS3 owners happy too.

That's pretty classy. I like it when developers are nice about other games, even if they appear on "rival" consoles. That deserves more respect than certain developers who will remain nameless -- Itagaki -- dumping on every game that isn't one of his. 

But for some of us in this biting recession, there can be only one. What's looking hotter to you? Gears or Resistance? None of the above? Or are you wealthy enough to snag them both?

I know the above is not enough, so here’s more - according to Microsoft, Xbox 360 sales in Europe reached the 6 million units mark. After these latest price cuts, the Arcade Xbox 360 became the cheapest home console from the current generation, with a price of only GBP 129.99 in the UK, while the Premium console retails for GBP 169.99 and, finally, the top-of-the-line Xbox Elite, complete with 120GB hard-drive, comes for GBP 229.99.

Software sales are also going strong, since hardware console sales usually drive software sales up, too. This, combined with a serious promotion from Morrisons, who sells chart titles for half the price, pushed Xbox 360 software to a very high level, since Star Wars: The Force Unleashed sold 48 percent of all copies sold for the Xbox 360 console, although it was released for no less than six platforms.

Good, now we covered Xbox 360 sales in Europe, and I hope we’ll get to PlayStation 3 sales pretty soon, since I am also interested in a console, and probably the chosen one will be a PS3, but that remains to be seen, there’s still plenty of time until Christmas!

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Much has been made of developer Tose in recent years, mostly because of the amount of games the company has been involved with and the secretive nature in which it operates.

Interviews have been done in the past with Tose staffers, but they have usually been with higher-ups, not with people who work in the proverbial trenches.

Daniel Auld is an American technologist and consultant who worked as a 3DO programmer at Tose in the early 1990s, and GDRI was very lucky to find his résumé online.

He worked on two games - a fighting game based on the Ultraman Powered television series and a graphic adventure based on the works of Japanese horror author Misa Yamamura. We asked him to share anything he could about his time there, and he gladly went into great detail in his own words, before we quizzed him further in a Q&A.

Auld On Tose

"Tose was a cut-out company, meaning they would be contracted by large game publishers to develop complete products, but would not put their name on it when released. The programmers would only get satisfaction by looking at the scrolling credits at the end of the game where they could watch their pseudonym names drift up the screen.

Tose was one of the first development houses to take on the task of writing software for the 3DO Multiplayer. At the time, there were concerns among investors that this device did not have a "killer app" that would catapult it past the established platforms from Nintendo, Sega, and Atari. Trip Hawkins, who came up with the idea for the product, repeatedly pointed to his reputation and said, "Trust me."

I was brought onboard with great excitement after responding to a classified ad the company had placed in the newspaper looking for American programmers. As a general rule, Japanese programmers are not known to be especially creative. If there is documentation, they are experts at applying and perfecting advanced techniques. But when it comes to "just winging it," they are typically paralyzed.

Americans are known to be very creative, and a great deal of incredible titles were coming out of the gaming houses in California and elsewhere at the time. For this reason, they were ecstatic to have me join their team, and the managers were doubly interested in my Japanese ability to help translate what I read/discovered to the rest of the team.

Interestingly, however, they would not give me credit for my work (possibly out of cultural pride). I would explain in detail some new feature that I had managed to figure out by trial and error (i.e., how to get sprites to behave in a 3D plane with appropriate clipping), but they would all stare at me with blank, confused looks, even though I spoke in Japanese.

Then the manager would repeat my words EXACTLY (literally to the syllable), and they would all say, "Oh, NOW I get it!" Very interesting (and frustrating, as you can imagine). I stayed at the company from 1992 to 1994, making around 200,000 yen per month (roughly $1450 with the exchange rate at the time).

About a year after I got there, The 3DO Company was going to present at a large convention in Las Vegas (possibly the CES show?), and we would be able to ask direct questions to their engineers. This was a perfect opportunity for me to travel with my Japanese co-workers and get first-hand answers to our questions (I would act as translator).

The managers indicated to the president that they REALLY wanted me to go with them -- but the president refused since I had only been at the company for a year at that point, and he "couldn't justify the expense for such a new employee." That didn't make sense to me, but [it] demonstrates how strict the adherence to rules [was] at the company, regardless of rational arguments to the contrary.

In the end, it cost the company more in lost time as the managers who went could barely speak a word of English, and the video tapes they brought back of their trip had such terrible sound, I couldn't make out what was being said. Our questions remained unanswered.

There were at least three managers that I remember, one of which reported directly to the president of the company, who was probably in his early 30s at the time (though it is sometimes difficult to tell the age of Asians). This man was incredibly wealthy, which created a stark dichotomy with the rank-and-file workers (of which I was one). While the president was fussing over where to park his 10th boat, some of the programmers were paid so little, they actually had to stop eating near the end of the month when their money ran out.

The managers were in the typical "salaryman" mode of work, where they would show up at 5:00a and stay until 1:00 or 2:00a. In Japan, it is said that "the company is your mother and takes care of you, so you owe it your full devotion." At one point, I asked one of the managers (who was married with two children), "Doesn't your wife mind that you are never home?" He replied simply, "She minds," and left it at that.

The floor I worked on was sparsely staffed -- about 20 people total. Half were working on cartridge games for the established platforms, the rest on 3DO. The cartridge programmers were on one side of the floor and worked with large desktop boxes that served as emulators for the final product and would compile/run machine code directly. The documentation for these systems was very detailed, and the engineers had no problem finding the information they needed (it was all in Japanese).

By contrast, the 3DO team were all on Macintosh desktops and had only skeletal documentation, all in English, that looked like it had been photocopied at Kinko's late at night. Large sections of this 3-ring binder simply said "TBD," and there were areas where the hardware was changing so fast that what was printed was already obsolete -- the documentation was definitely not keeping up with the hardware evolution. In a few cases, the text suggested some ideas on how to use a particular feature and encouraged us to "play around to see what you can accomplish" -- that was an alien concept to the Japanese programmers I worked with.

One interesting point of working at Tose was the attitude toward copyright and piracy. The company had no problem copying anything they could find, though they called it "borrowing the idea." There were elements of competitors' games that they couldn't figure out how to do (very advanced sprite animation, for example), so they would simply buy the game and without even playing it, put the cartridge in their hardware and pull the code apart.

The societal attitude towards gender roles also came through in the company environment: On our floor was a small area where we could prepare coffee or tea. There were cups, hot water, etc. as well as a sink to clean the dishes once you were finished. At one point, I had finished my drink and began washing my cup to put back on the rack. The president of the company tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, the women will take care of that.""

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Auld talks more in-depth about 3DO hardware and software in the full interview.]

Q&A: Daniel Auld

GDRI: Did you go by a pseudonym on the games you worked on?

DA: I don't recall what pseudonym I used, but it was probably something like "Elvis" in homage to The King.

GDRI: Do you remember any other games being developed at Tose besides those you worked on?

DA: I remember Tose working on the Dragon Ball Z series while I was there, but I don't recall specifically which one.

GDRI: Were employees assigned games to work on? Considering Tose's supposed output, might an employee work on multiple games at the same time?

DA: Employees were definitely assigned to more than one game at a time. While I was there, I contributed to both of the titles I've mentioned, and I know some of the other programmers had been splitting their time between 3DO and console programming (most of our guys came from that side of the house originally).

GDRI: How long did it take to develop a game? Do you know how long it took between the end of development and release?

DA: As far as the time frame to complete a title and then bring it to market, I didn't have any visibility into that realm. I know for the entire two years I was there, we were heads-down on 3DO, and neither game was quite ready for prime time when I left, but they did come out eventually.

Ccome to think of it, I don't believe I've ever heard anyone else mention Ultraman anywhere except me, so that product may have died on the vine [ED: It didn't.] -- the action on the 3DO console was not as fluid and crisp as what was available on Nintendo/Atari/Sega, so it may not have been able to compete. What made the Multiplayer unique at the time was the ability to play video and some of the specialized hardware).

GDRI: Were there any other non-Japanese staffers working at Tose?

DA: I remember there being one attorney who was white, American, and far more proficient at Japanese than I was. I don't remember his name as I only met him once while in a large board meeting. It is very possible there were others as well, as I did not meet everyone in the building.

GDRI: What brought you to Japan to begin with?

DA: Originally, I went to Japan with an exchange program from Antioch College in Ohio. We went over for six months to perform around the country in a traveling theater troupe. When the program ended, everyone went home except me, who had already found work as a programmer (not with Tose yet). I ended up staying another 3 1/2 years until coming back to the U.S. in 1995.

[Game Developer Research Institute is a website dedicated to finding out more about game development companies and people in the industry.]