Welcome to the Monday edition of GNoI (Game News of Interest!) - the countdown continues for GTAIV, with the obviously far reaching entanglements for EA and Take2 as well as some not so surprising move-spurning from RealTime Worlds (who offer an MMO version of GTA/clone), this is a no doubt a big event, and one that is shaking up the industry as well as the very focus of decision making itself… lots going on, and only days left until the release of the title - so let’s look at the news, both GTAIV and nonGTAIV related - GNoI news feed is live:

Due to journalistic coverage (and the term is being used very loosely) by Fox news of GTAIV and current street violence in Chicago, the CTA bus adverts for GTAIV are being pulled. In fact, they’ve already been pulled, hooray for the ability of neo-con journalism to directly control our media… wait, what’d I just say?

Matt Damon’s mother is giving her two cents on what contributes to youth-tied violence in the media, basically, action figures (O_O!)… But apparently, violent, Spy-movies are considerably ok, because, well, you know they’re not real or something

RealTimeWorlds is looking to resecure their global rights from Korean co Webzen, for upcoming title, APB. This is more than a little unusual, but perhaps it shows that there might be something to the current rumors that ‘Western’ based companies are looking to directly cash-in to the online gaming craze and not simply leave their babies in control of publishers who may not have the cultural touchstones necessary to handle them… or just plain GTAIV cash-in-greed, you decide.

Take2 has officially responded to the newest offer from EA. The crux: it’s another rejection. Which is simply awesome, thank you Take2 for making a direct stand against another pushy-corp buy-out attempt.

Ubisoft is opening a new campus is Casablanca, you may happily begin your black-and-white-noir-film jokings in earnest.

The ESRB is working to educate parents by partnering their efforts with national PTA’s, honestly, I’m not entirely sure that this is a good thing, anytime we have to basically ‘force’ parents to educate themselves on some new topic what interests the kiddies, it throws up a lot of red flags to me, makes me think that perhaps our nation’s parents do not put in the amount of time and care that they should be for their spawn.

GamerDNA (formerly GuildCafe Entertainment) has secured $3mUSD in series A funding and has will be expanding their current market with the new resources, including the launching of their official website, the interesting thing about this company is that they seem to be trying a recent soc-net / game hybrind community idea that hasn’t quite been proven to work yet.

LindenLab has let on that they are closer to finding a replacement CEO for the house that made SecondLife, but even with a new CEO I doubt it will make their product suck any less.

Another perspective, according to a new article being passed around, via Kotaku and others, it seems that the core of good game design is fewer not more mechanics and choices. Interesting read for anyone who is *really* into MMOs and the like, or simply aspires to design games in general.

Kian Bashiri, creator of the extremely fun and oironically funny, YHTBTR mini-flash game complete with a Portal-esque ending theme is interviewed. Again, the game is pure gold, and worth the 5 min of your time it takes to complete it and get to the snazzy song!

And here it is, your daily dose of FDA approved zen intake, featuring PowerPoint cliches, and the awesome rejection of Uwe Boll. Zen intake begins now:

Blizzard has (very wisely) rejected Uwe Boll’s request to direct any upcoming WoW movie - more companies should follow this sound example of integrity.

Finally, someone takes a good scathing look at Powerpoint and its over-usage in industry presentations.

The weekend has ended…

–Aleister

18 Visions - Black and Bruised

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 6:02 pm and is filed under GNoI, Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.