About Nick Santangelo

It’s no secret that 4J Studios’ XBLA port of developer Mojang’s Minecraft has been a runaway success. First it sold 1 million copies in less than a week, …
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The news that a Microsoft employee had publicly referenced the existence of a “new Xbox” spread rapidly across video game media outlets and blogs this past Monday. Microsoft Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall’s perceived reference to a next-gen home gaming platform to succeed the Xbox 360, released in November 2005, in the same breath as talk about Windows 8 would have marked the first time anyone working for the console holder acknowledged its existence. However, the publisher has since spoken with IGN about what most believed was an accidental slip of the tongue by Hall and said his words had been misunderstood by the media.

“The comments to The Verge were not understood in their intended context,” reads the statement Microsoft issued. “When Brian [Hall] mentioned a ‘new wave of products,’ he was referring to the full lineup of products coming later this year from Microsoft, including Windows 8, Office, Windows Phone and of course our fall Xbox update which will bring a host of new consumer experiences like Xbox Music, Videos, Games on Windows 8 and Xbox SmartGlass.”

That’s it then, right? Case closed. There is no new Xbox. Never was, never will be. Except for that there is. Proving as much isn’t really possible, but, in addition to the fact that there must be one simply because creating new consoles every several years is just what’s done in this industry, there are a number of reasons to believe the follow-up to the 360 is a thing. Epic has released sizzle footage of its next middleware engine, Unreal 4, in action. Ubisoft and LucasArts showed off games this past E3 that are all but confirmed to be coming to the PS4 and Xbox 720 (Watch Dogs and Star Wars 1313, respectively). A little while back, Kotaku‘s Stepen Totilo even went ahead and said, “people are making video games for the next PlayStation and the next Xbox.”

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As far as surprises go, Microsoft Windows Live General Manager Brian Hall’s frank admittance that there will be a successor to the Xbox 360 fell somewhere between Michael Phelps’ recent dominance of a multitude of swimming events at the London Games and NASA successfully concluding the 352-mile journey of its 2,000-pound rover Curiosity on Mars last night. To narrow that down a bit, that Microsoft is working on the follow-up to the nearly seven-year-old home of XBLA is about as (un)surprising to most gamers as that guy who swims really well swimming really well.

Despite the best wishes of the Big Three first parties of gaming that cyclically dump enormous sums of money into developing, launching and marketing home video game platforms, the life-cycles of their systems are always finite. The trio has managed to stretch the elastic holding this console generation together further than most industry vets and gamers would have thought possible only a few years ago, yet they have been unable to magic up the secret to console immortality. And so there was Hall letting the X out of the Box last week just over a minute into The Verge’s podcast. What’s more, the general manager mentioned Windows 8 — the software developer’s next operating system, coming to retail October 26 — in the same sentence as the next-gen Xbox.

“We’ve had Hotmail and operated Hotmail for about sixteen years. We obviously have Exchange, and Outlook, that people use at work,” he told The Verge before continuing on to mention Windows 8 and the 360’s eventual replacement. “We just decided it was time to do something new and bring the best from each of those and put them together and release it right in time for the new wave of products that we could have coming out with Windows 8 with the new version of Office with the New Windows phone and the new Xbox.”

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Action game Ascend: New Gods will be ported over to the PC, developer Signal Studios has informed Co-Optimus. The PC version’s content is said to mirror that of …
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Motocross racer Jeremy McGrath, 40, plans to donate his portion of the profits made off of last month’s XBLA and PSN release Jeremy McGrath’s Offroad to charity. McGrath’s haul from sales of the game will go towards “Be the Match.” The bone marrow registry charity maintains was crucial in finding wife Kim McGrath, 36, a donor this past week after doctors diagnosed her with leukemia back in May.

It has been a harrowing couple of years for Mrs. McGrath. Two years ago she was informed she had breast cancer, a disease that the American Cancer Society estimates estimates there being 226,870 new cases of in 2012 in the United States. One in eight women are believed to suffer from “invasive” cases of the disease during their lifetimes, and the chances of dying from it are about one in 36. As terrifying as those numbers are, the good news is that they are on the decline. There are currently two-and-a-half million survivors in the U.S., including the racing star’s wife.

She fought through the disease, enduring what she said in a blog post were “months of treatments and several surgeries.” Fifteen months later she said that she “was finally getting back on [her] feet.” The breast cancer survivor, having had the chance to recover and regrow her hair to the point at which it was once again “cute,” had reached a point at which she had turned her focus to getting on with the rest of her life.

Sadly, another excruciating battle with a serious illness — one that approximately 44,600 were diagnosed with last year in the United States — was on the horizon. More chemo was needed right away, and the mother of two would need a bone marrow transplant. Hospital visits lasting an entire month were in order, and her hair would fall out again. But that was nothing compared to the very real danger of losing her life if a donor was not found.

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Tony Hawk made his return to video games earlier this month in the form of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD after the previously annualized series of the famous skater’s namesake took a one-year hiatus. According to statements made by Josh Tsui, CEO of Robomodo, the studio behind the XBLA release that remixed elements of the first two titles in the series, publisher Activision is ready to call it a comeback. Speaking with Gamasutra, Tsui said that “the prospect of a fuller game is definitely on the table — it’s just a matter of when and how.”

On the subject of why digital platforms were the right choice for a stab at a series comeback (PSN and PC versions will eventually follow the XBLA release), the CEO cited simple distribution and low price. “I think for now Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD is a very good way to reacquaint people to the franchise,” he said. “People are more apt to try games that are smaller and downloadable. Moving forward we’d have to see what our options are for a completely new experience, especially for any new platforms. But for now, downloadable games for a low price allow us great flexibility to try new things.”

It’s an approach that essentially amounted to the polar opposite of the studio’s previous attempt to bring Tony back. Original series developer Neversoft took over development of the Guitar Hero games after Activision acquired the brand but not its dev team (Harmonix), and 2007’s Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground fell off the rails. As Neversoft tried its hand at the then-in-vogue plastic peripheral market, Robomodo got its first crack at Tony Hawk and went in a similar direction.

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Minicore Studios’ Laika Believes will be released episodically in three chunks, the developer has revealed. Staring a space-traveling dog and set in a Soviet-dominated world, the game was always planned to be a Metroidvania-style platformer, and the team feels that releasing it over the course of three episodes will allow it to dedicate more time to crafting levels of an appropriate scope for such a game while also getting content to gamers earlier than originally planned. Minicore is currently targeting spring 2013 for the game’s debut episode, with the other two set to hit the market place “within the following year.”

The studio’s latest blog post states that the focus of development will rightly be placed on “massive, nonlinear levels, choice-rich skill trees, and game mechanics.” All are elements that the team supposedly was looking to work into Laika Believes from the start; however, there were concerns internally that the enormity of those undertakings would end up being too much for the small studio to successfully juggle under a more traditional release strategy.

Supposedly the game already contains “natural break points,” allowing the devs to easily transition into the episodic format. Improved pacing and the ability for players to discover new sections of Laika Believes at their own pace are also components of the experience that Minicore thinks it can more deftly integrate into its title without the pressure of having to deliver the full experience in one release.

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Valve has announced that Minecraft will be getting a pack of skins inspired by Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 next month. All eight human survivors from the …
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Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins (aka Tycho Brahe) announced today that the first free DLC package for Zeboyd Games’ On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 3 is nearing completion. …
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Microsoft announced today that revenue for the fiscal 2012 fourth quarter ending June 30 reached $18.6 billion. That figure, which Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Steve Ballmer identified …
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