Be Valve’s Employee of the Month with Portal 2′s Free Level Creator
First revealed on our very own GTTV, the Perpetual Testing Initiative (or PeTI) is live. Play at being an Aperture Scientist and create your own puzzles. Valve, in their typical fashion, are launching the initiative with some fanfare. Seems some lucky beta testers are even luckier than they thought, with one particular tester going by the moniker of Mevious being the luckiest of all.
Mevious has the honor of being the Employee of the Month for his test chambers that you can sample right now. Valve will continue to honor cromulent scienticians in the upcoming months. Working at Valve looks awesome, and having an honorary JPEG facsimile might be the closest a lot of us will get to working with house that built Half-Life and then never released the final episode.
In other Portal 2 news, Valve head honcho Gabe Newell in talking to site NeoGamr about PeTI mentioned that sequel has sold more than four million copies. With all the crazy Steam sales, it’s safe to say Portal 2 sold quite well on the PC, which is the only platform currently supporting PeTI, though Gabe didn’t answer NeoGamr’s questions about it appearing on the consoles. With Trails Evolution and the LittleBigPlanet series, would it really be out of the realm of possibility for this in-engine tool really be a technological hurdle? The free price might make Microsoft balk, but this could be another spot for the booming Valve/Sony relationship to flourish.
Ryan Stevens is the Director of Editorial at GameTrailers. He’d like to be glib here, but that’s a sure sign of a psychopath. Follow him on twitter at @OtherWhiteTofu.
Prototype 2 Review – A Good (Not Great) Sequel
2009 saw the release of Prototype, an exciting new IP from Radical Entertainment. It was generally well-received and laid the foundation for an intriguing franchise. Quickly-forward to the present and we lastly have our hands on Prototype 2. Radical has set the bar incredibly high, and while Prototype two succeeds in the “fun” department, there’s a sense that they just fell back into a “safety zone” and known as it a day.
The main issue I have is with the quite weak narrative coupled with a lack-luster story. This time about, you play as Sgt. James Heller, a soldier who returns property from a tour in Iraq only to discover his wife and daughter declared dead from the “Mercer Virus”, the virus that the original protagonist became infected with. Heller becomes extremely unbalanced and re-joins the army with the sole-intent of killing Alex Mercer and satisfying his lust for revenge.
However, when the tutorial is completed, Heller finds himself cornered by Mercer, who proceeds to inject the virus into Heller (without having any true explanation), giving him powers comparable to Mercer’s. Mercer then reveals that Blackwatch, the military branch from the original game, falsified the report on Heller’s household and they are the ones responsible for Heller’s family members. The two men enter an uneasy truce and Heller vows to get to the bottom of the scenario and make the guilty party pay for his family members.
Even though revenge is usually a robust motivator for a character, a huge dilemma is that it is extremely predictable. You meet a number of characters and you know specifically who will betray you and when. Whilst predictability alone does not necessarily make a plot stale, Prototype two fails at delivering an interesting plot and this is due to the lack of depth that all of the characters have.
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Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Won’t Break Sales Records, Suggests Analysts
Regardless of the game already setting pre-release records, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 won’t be able to surpass sales record upon its retail launch, according to several analysts.
Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter explained to GamesIndustry International:
I do not think Modern Warfare 3 is going to sell much more than the last Black Ops, so I doubt that this a single will break a record. I believe that Call of Duty is a phenomenon, selling way more than 20 million units annually, and it’s unrealistic to think that number can grow meaningfully with each and every annual release.
Dreaming Of The Future – Five Games We NEED…
If you could have one game made, what would it be? 5 3DS Buzz readers share their thoughts…
Dreaming of future game releases – we all do it at some point in our lives. I’ve accomplished it, and there’s even an complete week of the year based on video-game dreams coming up. But when tasked with talking about their dream game in a YouBuzz article, our readers didn’t disappoint with some awesome tips.
So, get that saliva prepared for a trip into a dream future…
Image from the Pokémon Project – click above for facts.
Traditional Model is “Broken”, Says Firefall Creator
Red 5 Studios CEO and Firefall creator Mark Kern has been in and about the gaming market for a whilst. Greatest known for his time spent at Blizzard, over the years Kern has watched the industry evolve from what was viewed as to be a kid’s hobby to a mainstream pastime with a culture of its personal. Video games have turn out to be a huge organization, though as Kern notes, it is not constantly for the much better.
“You’re either an indie game or you’re a enormous AAA, IP-backed sequel with derivative gameplay that’s rehashed over and more than again,” he told Eurogamer. “It’s the only secure bet you can make when you’re spending hundreds of millions of dollars. The failure is that there’s no middle ground.”
“The other troubling symptom is this wave of lay-offs we have after each and every product launches,” Kern continued. “People say ‘Oh, that is standard, Hollywood does it all the time.’ Properly, it’s not regular. It’s a symptom of your organization becoming broken.”
“I believe the model is broken,” he lamented. “You preserve creating these bigger and bigger bets and what that forces you to do is play it safer and safer. And if you play it safer and safer with your gameplay, people will get tired of the crap you are serving.”
Kern also thinks that the conventional publisher-led model that supports today’s property consoles is dying. “The model is transitioning away from these big boxed games where you are pouring hundreds of
millions of dollars into a title,” Kern claimed. “They do not need to have the distributor to succeed, so a lot a lot more income goes into the game rather than to advertising and you get to develop organically with your players.”
Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s First Trailer Reveals Future Warfare, Walking Tanks and Horse Chases
Call of Duty: Black Ops II is now officially official — much more official than ever — as the debut trailer for Treyarch’s sequel to the Cold War era shooter has been revealed. Set in the year 2025, Black Ops II will see the return of Sgt. Frank Woods and the introduction of future war technology that includes flying drones, walking tanks and all-new, never-before-noticed approaches to kill scores of virtual soldiers.
The initial Call of Duty: Black Ops II trailer shows a future Los Angeles below siege from hijacked drones and warplanes, intermingled with some low-tech battles on horseback. It looks spectacular and explosion-filled, the sort of action we’ve come to expect from Activision’s Call of Duty brand.
Black Ops II is coming November 13, 2012.
Michael McWhertor is the Managing Editor of News & Opinion at GameTrailers.com. He can be reached through e-mail at michael.mcwhertor@gametrailers.com and followed on Twitter at @mikemcwhertor.
Nintendo E3 Press Conference – June 5th
Nintendo’s press conference at E3 2012 has been scheduled for June 5th at 9:00 am PT. This puts Nintendo’s showing a day right after Microsoft and Sony’s. This placement appears suitable, as Nintendo are set to bring on the subsequent generation and unveil the Wii U in its final form. Pressure’s on, Nintendo.
It’s been tough to predict what to expect from Nintendo with so several rumors floating about. Nintendo wants to surprise us, but maybe we know far more than we feel we do.
Recent footage of the sequel to Rayman: Origins shows the Wii U functioning similar to the Portal of Energy peripheral device from Skylanders: Spyro’s Adventure. The inclusion of this technologies in the Wii U was mentioned before, but the new footage shows Rayman figures (and an Assassin’s Creed figure!) getting employed specifically like Skylanders - drop them in and watch them appear on-screen.
Digital download games have also been announced as a main characteristic for Wii U and 3DS as talked about here on Platform Nation, cementing Nintendo’s position that it is not afraid to adopt a modern day on the web method like Xbox Live and PSN. Mario and Pikmin games have also been announced for E3 2012, which could possibly be sold as downloads as effectively as physical copies.
All questions (effectively, mainly) about Wii U will be answered on June 5th at 9:00 am PT. I’m ready.
