.| UrbanNerd |.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Video game publisher Bethesda Softworks is bringing Simon & Schuster’s best-selling book franchise “Rogue Warrior” to Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC gamers in fall 2007.

In development at Zombie Studios, the story-driven shooter will put players in the boots of a Navy SEAL who leads a team behind enemy lines in North Korea on a covert mission to assess the threat posed by the country’s nuclear arsenal.

According to Mark Long, lead producer at Zombie Studios, “Rogue” is based on an original story that Richard Marcinko, author of the book series, wrote in collaboration with the game makers.

“Dick’s team gets trapped in North Korea, and World War III breaks out between North and South Korea,” Long said. “With only limited weapons and gear, the team must escape and evade the enemy while attempting to make it back to the DMZ.”

Bethesda Softworks president Vlatko Andonov said “Rogue” marks the publisher’s return to the popular shooter genre, which it most recently explored with its “Terminator” game franchise on PC.

Central to the game’s single and multiplayer experience is the idea of a freeform battlefield, where players are given the freedom to choose how to complete a given objective, allowing for creativity and surprises rather than heavily scripted events and tightly contained spaces traditionally used in the genre.

GameTap, an Internet gaming network owned by Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., said on Tuesday they are partnering with AOL Games to make nine Midway arcade titles available to AOL users. In addition to the games, AOL users will have access to original video from GameTap at the web address www.aol.com/gametap.

This may be painfully obvious once you think about it, but for those who haven’t, here’s a way to get around the Xbox 360 country lock for downloadable content. Microsoft’s chosen to disable certain game demos and game videos for people of certain regions, but we want all our media to be free, don’t we?

Go online to xbox.com and register a new gamertag with an email address not associated with any previous account. Then make sure you set your country to either Japan or America—perhaps making one tag for each. Then when that’s done, go on your Xbox 360 and choose “recover gamertag” to grab the info from this tag onto your 360. Now you can see all the Japanese games you’ve been missing out on.

Online auction house eBay has made a policy clarification regarding the PS3 and Wii pre-orders, so as not to have the same problems that occurred with the Xbox 360 launch (it almost did). Only experienced eBay sellers (with at least 50 feedback and 98% positive rating) can place a PS3 or Wii console for auction before launch, only one console per account, the picture must be of your pre-order receipt, and you can not set a “Buy it Now” option.

Reasons why we love this:

It discourages fake listings and encourages fulfilled orders.
Desperate gamers who are willing to spend thousands of dollars for an early PS3 can still do so.
Kudos to eBay for setting up guidelines to handle the impending console launch fiasco.

An eagerly awaited expansion pack to the online video game “World of Warcraft” will not be ready in time for the key Christmas holiday season, the game’s maker said Tuesday.

Gamers will instead have to wait until January to plumb the depths of Outland in “The Burning Crusade,” the “World of Warcraft” expansion pack that adds quests, locations and character levels to the persistent online role-playing game.

“WoW,” as it is often called, has become a global phenomenon since its November 2004 launch and now has an estimated 7 million subscribers, each paying about $15 per month to kill dragons like Onyxia or engage in player vs. player combat.

Earlier this month, “WoW” maker Blizzard Entertainment, a unit of French media company Vivendi SA, began testing the expansion pack with select players to help work out bugs.

On Tuesday, the Irvine, Calif.-based company said the January release affords a few extra weeks to polish the game.

“We feel confident that the extra time spent polishing the game will result in the high-quality experience that our players expect and deserve,” Blizzard president and co-founder Mike Morhaime said in a release.

Delaying a video game to fix problems is a much better alternative to releasing it early and riddled with bugs, said Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets.

He doubted the announcement would impact Blizzard as much as it would a new standalone game for consoles like Sony Corp.’s PlayStation 3 or the Nintendo Wii. “WoW” requires an Internet connection and only works on Windows and Macintosh computers.

“The bulk of revenues are coming from ongoing subscription fees,” he said. “A huge installed fan base is buying the expansion pack regardless of when it’s released.”

Though pricing and an exact release date haven’t been confirmed by Blizzard, online video game store GameStop.com indicated a Jan. 23 ship date and a $39.99 price for the expansion.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Video game maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. said Tuesday its founder and former chairman and CEO Ryan Brant has resigned from his most recent executive role after being on disability leave since June. He resigned as vp of production on Monday, Take-Two said. Brant was CEO until Feb. 2001 and its chairman until March 2004.

Northwestern University researchers have created a program that turns the alien-blasting character Alyx Vance from “Half-Life 2″ into a news anchor. In their project, Vance is guided toward a news area — foreign events, say — and computers take over from there.

“Everything in there is automatic,” says project leader Kristian Hammond, co-director of the university’s intelligent information laboratory. “There’s not a single moment, from the begining to the end, of human intervention.”

The program scours the Web for an article that Alyx will read aloud on-screen through text-recognition technology that edits existing text for clarity, changing some passive verbs to active, for example. It then automatically inserts photos and video from related sites, along with a CBS News “Free Speech”-style segment that adds outside commentary from blogs, read aloud by a different “Half-Life” character.

In between the action, Alyx has been known to kill a newsroom-invading alien or two — an entertaining flourish designed by grad students who helped create the presentation.

Read the full story here

Source: Variety

Universal Pictures and 20th Century Fox have backed out of co-financing the big screen adaptation of Microsoft’s Halo, reports Variety.

The trade says that while rumors had the studios concerned over a budget that was rising above the original projected $135 million budget, the filmmakers said the double defection came after Universal and Fox played hardball and unsuccessfully tried to get the filmmakers and Microsoft to reduce their profit participation.

The studios made the pay cut demand as a Oct. 15 deadline approached. On that day Microsoft was to have received the bulk of a promised $5 million upfront payday. The software giant also stood to receive 10% of gross for rights to the game and a script by Alex Garland.

“The only budget the filmmakers every spoke about was $145 million less the 12.5% rebate that you get from shooting in New Zealand, which would put it at about $128 million,” said Ken Kamins, who represents the pic’s executive producers Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh. “That was the only number that was ever discussed.

“What happened was this: Universal, on behalf of both studios, asked for a meeting with the filmmakers just prior to the due date of a significant payment. Basically, they said that in order to move forward with the film, the filmmakers had to significantly reduce their deals. They waited until the last minute to have this conversation. Peter and Fran, after speaking with their producing partners and with Microsoft and Bungee, respectfully declined.”

Kamins said Microsoft is already in talks with other distribution partners. Prep work on the film continues, he said.

Source: Bloomberg

Sony Corp., which slashed its profit forecast yesterday, said it may not reach this year’s shipment target for the PlayStation 3 game console because of a parts shortage in the Blu-ray high-definition disc drive.

Sony plans to ship two million PlayStation 3 players this year to the U.S. and Japan, and six million worldwide by March. The Tokyo-based company said yesterday annual profit would fall 35 percent to its lowest in five years on price cuts of the console in Japan and a recall of 9.6 million computer batteries.

“The honest answer is it’s more of a target” for PlayStation 3 shipments, Jack Tretton, co-chairman of Sony Computer Entertainment America, said yesterday in an interview. “Clearly we’ve had production issues.”

A shortage of the PlayStation 3 would give Microsoft Corp. and Nintendo Co. a bigger head start in the $20 billion console market when they sell their players next month in time for the year’s biggest sales season. Sony cut the price of the PS3 in Japan after consumers complained it was too expensive compared with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii.

Even though their competition has yet to debut, Microsoft has gone on the record and admitted to working on a successor to the 360. No specific details were given, but when asked about a follow up to the 360 in a video interview with online gaming site Kikizo, Chris Lewis, the head of Xbox Europe, went on the record saying, “you can’t sit back on your laurels in this business–the consumer won’t let you, the developers certainly won’t let us. So that’s happening right now.” Personally, we’re just waiting for Halo 3 to come out, but if you’ve got some advice/pointers for the MS folks, feel free to share.