Giant, HUGE LAN Party In Sweden

What does a legion of Swedish LAN party-goers and a 120Gbps internet connection look like? Something like this. Dreamhack, officially (by Guinness Book of Records, no less) the world’s largest LAN party, offered up all sorts of gaming thrills along the lines of StarCraft II and Counter-Strike to the 12,000 attendees.

It looks like the air was thick with excitement, perspiration — and hopefully a little air freshener.

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Mirror’s Edge 2 To Use Frostbite 2 Engine?

The Mirror’s Edge and Battlefield franchises are related through more than developer-publisher relations — they’re poised to share digital DNA. If it is made, a sequel to Mirror’s Edge may use Battlefield 3‘s Frostbite 2 engine, according to Official PlayStation Magazine, which writes, "The Frostbite 2 engine will pave the way for Mirror’s Edge to make a free-running return."

We don’t know much more about the potential sequel or OPM’s "inside whispers," besides the fact that Mirror’s Edge is an "important franchise" to EA.

We may have to wait until EA and DICE stop coddling Battlefield 3 for confirmation of another game or details about its engine. For now, dreaming about free-running on Frostbite 2 will have to tide us over. Mmmm…

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R2-D2, C-3PO Inspired Star Wars-Themed Xbox

A limited edition, Star Wars-themed Xbox 360 will feature designs inspired by your favorite droids.

Microsoft and LucasArts unveiled a console bundle for the upcoming Kinect Star Wars game at a San Diego Comic-Con International panel on Thursday morning. The bundle will include an Xbox 360 console with a 320 GB hard drive, the Kinect sensor and the motion-controlled Star Wars game. It will also include the Kinect Adventures game that is currently bundled with the motion-sensing camera controller.

Set for release this holiday season, the bundle will cost $450, equivalent to the price of an Xbox 360 console, a Kinect and a game. Read more

Steam’s New Content Delivery System

Steam is cleaning the gunk out of its gears with a new content delivery system, upgrading its download rates and streamlining its publishing process. The new system boasts a larger aggregate bandwidth, meaning Steam will be able to more easily cater to large demands worldwide, and an HTTP delivery system.

Updates are getting tuned up in a big way — instead of re-downloading an entire file to install one update, the new system will only download the changes made to the file, because that’s what an update means. It will also be possible to update to a game while playing it.

Valve has written new tools for developers and publishers to simplify their behind-the-scenes processes and ship products faster, promising that publisher-side updates will also be streamlined, which is something EA in particular has been quietly vocal about changing.

The new system will be applied to "more and more" content over time, beginning "soon" with the release of Dota 2 later this year. You can try it out now by downloading an HD trailer from the Steam Store.

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Massive Multi-Touch Star Wars Strategy Game

There have been some big Star Wars videogames, but none as big as Fleet Commander.

Arthur Nishimoto, a graduate student in the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Laboratory, has developed his real-time strategy game to be played on a wall-size LCD screen. Players are divided into two opposing teams that take control of X-wings, TIE fighters and even Death Stars, all with a touch of their fingers.

“The purpose of [Fleet Commander] was to explore how a complicated application like a real-time strategy game … could be played in a large, multitouch environment,” said Nishimoto in an e-mail to Wired.com. Read more

Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, Coming Soon

Capcom apparently doesn’t want us or anyone else knowing the launch date for upcoming Dead Rising budget spinoff, Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. Though the Japanese publisher’s European blog posted details of the game’s release date recently — October 11 in North America and October 14 in Europe, by the way — the post has since been pulled. Thankfully, some quick Googling reveals that the post did in fact exist at one point.

It’s always possible that the release dates were incorrect, but we’re more inclined to believe it was simply posted before someone important said, "Go ahead." We’ve asked Capcom for confirmation, but haven’t heard back as of yet.

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City of Heroes Going Free-To-Play Late 2011

Paragon Studios’ superpowered flagship MMO City of Heroes is surfing the ever-growing trendwave of paid online titles moving into the free-to-play market. The developer has announced City of Heroes Freedom, a free version of the seven-year-old game which will launch later this year. The MMO will follow an increasingly popular model, giving free players access to a partial list of areas and features available to paid subscribers — however, in an unusual twist, free users will be able to pick and choose exactly which features and areas they want to access.

Premium subscribers get access to the whole kit and caboodle, as well as special rewards they’ll be able to choose from every month. These include new costumes, consumables and power sets, almost ensuring their supernatural superiority over their free-to-play counterparts. Basically, they’ll be the Justice League to the free players’ Alpha Flight.

Continue reading City of Heroes going free-to-play later this year

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The Walking Dead, Fables Game Adaptations Coming Soon

In addition to Jurassic Park, Telltale is currently adapting The Walking Dead and the Fables comic book series into games, reports All Thing’s Digital’s eMoney blog, part of the WSJ network. The developer is expected go into detail on the titles at a pre-scheduled press event tonight, during which a total of five multiplatform projects are supposed to be announced.

According to eMoney, the Fables game is part of "an exclusive worldwide publishing agreement" with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, while The Walking Dead game will be based on the AMC television adaption of the franchise (which also originated as a comic). Steve Allison, SVP of marketing for Telltale, told the site that he thinks The Walking Dead has the potential to become a $20-30 million franchise for the studio.

"See the movie, play the game doesn’t work anymore," Allison said, "but the way we make content, it does." Both new series are expected to be episodic adventure games, in line with Telltale’s current and past efforts, and "will trickle out over the next year," according to eMoney, through digital retailers including Telltale’s online store and Steam.

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Activision Bails Out of Guitar Hero, Cancels Games

Updated: Feb. 9, 2011; 5 p.m. PST

It’s game over for Guitar Hero.

Activision Blizzard will close its music-game business division, laying off hundreds of employees, and cancel the Guitar Hero game that was in development for 2011, the publisher said in a conference call Wednesday.

The drastic move comes after significant industrywide declines in the music game business. In 2007, Activision sold 1.5 million copies of Guitar Hero III in its first month of sales. Last year, Activision only sold 86,000 copies of the latest game in the series, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock. Slowing sales of chief competitor Rock Band led Viacom to sell maker Harmonix and close the MTV Games publishing division.

Activision said that the decline of the genre, plus the high cost of licensing music and producing the games, led it to close the business.

“There was nothing that Activision or anybody could have done to save Guitar Hero,” said Jesse Divnich, vice president of analyst services for Electronic Entertainment Design and Research, in an interview with Wired.com. Divnich said that Activision realizes the “opportunity cost” of continuing to make Hero games when it could instead be putting those resources towards more profitable games.

Divnich said that the casual gamers that made up the majority of guitar games’ audience have now moved on. “if your primary hobby is not gaming, you get your fill quicker on entertainment products,” he said.

The publisher will also cancel upcoming game True Crime: Hong Kong. It said the cancellation of these two projects and the layoffs will affect 7 percent of its roughly 7000 employees worldwide, or about 500 people total.

But Activision said that it expects its net headcount to bounce back to that 7000 number by the end of the year, since it is making further investments into a new massively multiplayer online game from its Blizzard division, makers of World of Warcraft, and into new Call of Duty projects like a free-to-play game for the Chinese market and a suite of online services for players of the military shooter games called Project Beachhead.

Although Guitar Hero is a goner, games built around music “will never die,” Divnich said. “Harmonix has [Kinect game] Dance Central, and that took off huge. [Publishers] just need to find the next big thing.”

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Battlefield 1943 and Bad Company 2: Onslaught canceled on PC

Battlefield 1943 for PC is not going to happen. Posting on the official Battlefield blog, Karl Magnus Troedsson, general manager of DICE, confirmed that both 1943 and Onslaught, a co-op add-on for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, have been "officially canceled." He states that the team is focusing all energy on Battlefield 3 in order to make it "the best Battlefield game ever" and "the biggest launch in DICE’s history." (Good luck getting into a game during the first three days!)

Battlefield 1943‘s delayed trek to PC had become hopeless in recent months, though company reps believed it was still set to deploy at some point when we followed up last summer. The downloadable experiment has been a resounding success on consoles, netting $16 million for Electronic Arts.

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