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alex

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#1 Edited By alex

UPDATE: Sony has informed us that Bloomberg's wording, which was the foundation of this story, is inaccurate and the May 31 "deadline" does not exist. There does not appear to be any hard deadline established, only to return services as Sony determines the appropriate security measures are in place.

Venture Beat first broke the dispute, which we separately confirmed with Sony. It's suspected the confusion may have come from this line in the recent press conference: "We are aiming to restore full services including PlayStation Store and purchasing features for Qriocity services within May 2011."

--

Hey, remember last week, when Sony said that it planned to get the ball rolling with restoring its PlayStation Network services starting last week? Right, just a quick reminder that it's not last week anymore. It's this week now. So, to be clear, last week came and went, and now this is this week, and yes your PSN services still aren't up. I know, I was confused, too. Just trust me on this one.

So, uh... how's that SOCOM single-player, eh?

Now, on the subject of the PSN and when-ish you might actually be able to get back online, the answer currently is: "Dunno?"

As of this morning, Sony does not have a firm timetable for getting PSN all the way back online, and is currently only stating that everything should be restored by the end of this month. This info comes from company spokesman Shigenori Yoshida, who told Bloomberg this morning that the company is currently uncertain exactly when everything will return to a live state, and that Sony has set a deadline of May 31 for all services to be restored.

Last week's plan to restore partial services fell by the wayside when Sony decided it needed to finalize testing to make sure its newly constructed system was operating correctly. So, until we get another projected time line from Sony, all we can do is sit, wait, and wonder which other version of Splash Damage's multiplayer shooter, Brink, to pick up tomorrow.

12 years ago

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#2 Edited By alex

Erik Wolpaw doesn't read too much science fiction these days, so trying to find a modern sci-fi influence on Portal 2, the game he wrote alongside fellow Valve staffers Chet Faliszek and Jay Pinkerton, might prove difficult. In his past, he never worked in any depressingly bureaucratic jobs that might explain away the incredibly overwhelming banality that is so ingrained in the ethos of the game's zealously inept mega-corporation, Aperture Science. He doesn't really seem to think that Portal 2 necessarily transcends any known boundaries of gaming narrative--just that it tells the kind of story he wanted a game to tell.

Over the course of his two-hour talk last night at New York University's Game Center, Wolpaw evaded just about every attempt by the talk's host, Game Center's Interim Director Frank Lantz, to perhaps pigeonhole his influences into tight, neat little references--apart from an acknowledged enjoyment of the works of Douglas Adams and Robert Sheckley--and seemed thoroughly uncomfortable with the notion of trying to dissect his game beyond the notion of it being an enjoyable entertainment. "Ultimately, I don't want to make games that are like modern art," he said at one point, "That only people who have studied modern art their whole lives, it only has meaning to them. Ideally, I'd like to make games that are entertaining for people."

Instead, much of the talk took on the tone of a kind of alternate commentary track for the game, with Wolpaw--who actually took time out of his vacation to give this talk to a room full of fans, NYU students, and the odd interloping journalist--quipping about various trials and tribulations of the game's production process, musing on his method for writing for games, and even dropping a few gems about some stuff that didn't quite make it into the final product. While there are a few mild spoilers peppered throughout this article, nothing is specific enough to inhibit any of the game's significant surprises.

On the Subject of Portals, and Why There Almost Weren't Any

It's been mentioned before around various corners of the Internet that Portal 2 almost didn't have any portals at all. Originally, the team spent the first six months of development time working on a clandestine new mechanic called "F-Stop." Wolpaw wouldn't elaborate on what F-Stop entailed (as he believes they may still use it someday down the road), but stated that early playtesting led to the removal of F-Stop and the return of the portal gun. Too many people were wondering what happened to GLaDOS, and why they couldn't shoot portals. "People didn't want a clean slate," said Wolpaw.
== TEASER ==

On the Story That Almost Was

With the development of F-Stop also came a fairly different script from what the final game ultimately turned out to be. "It took place in the 1950s," he said, "GLaDOS wasn't in it, Chell wasn't in it, it was Cave Johnson and the story of him getting put into a computer and realizing he was making a huge mistake." However, once the F-Stop mechanic was shelved, the story was rewritten to benefit the return of the portal mechanic. "After that we decided we were going to do this farther in the future, bring Chell back, and have everything be decrepit in a way that lets you see the results of what you did in Portal 1."

On the Game's Hotel Room Introduction

One of my absolute favorite portions of Portal 2 is actually its hysterical--and, apparently, fairly complicated--introductory scene. The scene features Chell waking up from a semi-lengthy slumber to a sort of " Jack Wagner in Disneyland" kind of computer voice and finding herself in a miserable-looking hotel room. Wolpaw says that this intro was actually born out of a bigger, kookier idea.

"We were going to do this thing where we were going to try and visualize what it was actually like to be in suspended animation," he said, "Like it's actually this real-time simulation of you pacing back and forth in this shitty hotel room. It was just going to be the worst thing ever." Evidently, the transition between the perceived hotel environment and the real world just wasn't quite working, so someone simply said, "Why don't we make it an actual hotel room?"

At that point, the host of the evening piped up that it reminded him of the intro to the movie Oldboy, which Wolpaw confessed to having never seen. "Oh good," he added jokingly, "I hope this is just going to be a long series of 'Where I plagiarized from.'"

On British Comedians (Namely, Stephen Merchant)

Stephen Merchant's performance as Wheatley in Portal 2 is something pretty special. Maybe it's a little weird that his voice lacks the kind of vocoding effects so prominent in GLaDOS's persona, but in retrospect, altering his distinctive voice might have spoiled the top-notch comedic timing and seemingly improvised riffing that made Merchant's work so memorable.

As it happens, Merchant wasn't the first actor the team went after. Wolpaw had originally envisioned Wheatley as a slightly "more hectoring and annoying" character, and for that personality, he hoped to tap Garth Marenghi's Darkplace and The IT Crowd actor Richard Ayoade. IT Crowd creator Graham Linehan actually happened to be a fairly big Left 4 Dead fan, and had even sent the team letters in the past. So Wolpaw just asked if "his friend Richard" would want to be in their game. Regrettably, he was unavailable, due to his work on the Sundance darling indie comedy, Submarine, which he directed. Wolpaw assumes Ayoade doesn't regret the decision too heavily.

Wolpaw became familiar with Merchant through the BBC series Extras, and the actor became a factor during the game's writing process. "We'd been writing writing writing, and we'd been listening to this Stephen Merchant podcast. And, for lack of a voice, we kinda started writing in Stephen Merchant's voice."

Though the team didn't originally think he'd do it--they assumed he was probably "too rich," what with him owning 50% of The Office and its many different iterations--Merchant quickly signed on. Wolpaw was nothing if not effervescent about his work on the game. "He has this just awesome ability make things that are written down sound off-the-cuff," Wolpaw said, "I'm really really happy with the way this turned out, in the sense that it's a very natural-sounding performance, and it's just something that I hadn't seen a lot in games."

On Writing Dialogue for Games and Necessary Programming Experience

The subject of the Valve writing team's process came up at multiple points during the course of the night. Apart from an off-handed comment on their writer's room format being loosely based on a book that detailed the environment crafted by The Simpsons writers during the show's heyday, as well as something Wolpaw saw in a Deadwood DVD extra about that show's writing process, mostly Wolpaw spoke about how knowing a little bit of coding can only do any aspiring game writer some good.

He specifically mentioned that early on in the development process, he and co-writer Chet Faliszek would actually do all of the dialogue set-up work themselves. "Chet and I did this on Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress and I also did it on Psychonauts, which is we write all the dialogue, we record it, we cut it ourselves and we wire it into the game so that the timing's right." This process, he says, helps immensely with making sure the lines have the exact impact they hope for.

On Chell, and Her Utter Lack of Dialogue

Chell has always been of the silent protagonist ilk, which Wolpaw admits is often "a thing," but not exclusively "a Valve thing." When asked why Chell remains mute throughout both titles, Wolpaw cited it as being in service of the game's comedy.

"There's this thing with comedy, there's sort of two different patterns. One is, you're the straight man in a world gone mad, and the other one is you're a crazy person in a sort of straight world. Portal is definitely the world gone mad straight man, and the straight man is you. And again, because you have to write in the margins in a game, time is at a premium, so the fact that there's already this established thing where you have a silent protagonist, that saves us a lot of time. You may want to know Chell's backstory, you may want to hear her say things, but I guarantee, if she had to say her straight man lines at the expense of half of the other dialogue, it would suck."

While that might be of little solace to those who still want a little more out of Chell's character, Wolpaw feels the game is far more about your relationship to the world than Chell's. "I don't think people are super invested in the character of Chell... obviously because we haven't given her much character. But they're invested in the relationship they have as the player."

Just in case you were wondering, though, Chell isn't really a mute. "We always assumed she could talk," said Wolpaw, "She just chooses not to, what with the robots all being dicks. Why give them the satisfaction?"

On GLaDOS, and Her Torrents of Insults

One audience question brought up GLaDOS and her at least passing resemblance to someone's verbally abusive mother. Wolpaw more or less confessed that some of GLaDOS's particular brand of chiding does come from a personal place. "I was a fat kid my whole life and I had this passive-aggressive grandmother who was always needling me about it. That's kind of where that came from."

Originally, though, GLaDOS was apparently written to be a good bit meaner than she ended up being in the final product. "We definitely took some stuff out that was hated [by playtesters]. We got a lot of feedback on the initial GlaDOS arc, after you wake her up, that she was just too vicious and mean and people were kind of getting ground down by how awful she was being to you. Even Ellen [McLain] in the studio, she was kind of nervous about reading some of the stuff. She was just like, 'Wow, that's harsh.'"

Sadly, Wolpaw wouldn't bust out with any specific lines, so we'll just have to imagine what horrible things she might have potentially hurled at us. I personally envision something involving lady beards.

On Playtesting, and Non-Gamers' Need to Read

Valve has always taken a "playtest early, and playtest often" stance with its products. As Wolpaw put it, doing so prevented people from getting too ridiculously attached to any one specific idea. If something keeps failing over and over again right in front of you, that idea becomes fairly difficult to defend without displaying a great deal of personal hubris.

One of the more interesting anecdotes that came out of the playtest process came largely from people who self-identified as not being much into games. Specifically, they would often take long, pained looks at each of the large signs that precedes each of the game's testing chambers, looking for instruction on how to play the level. This would be in direct contrast to how those who did play games on a regular basis would often just go straight to work. In Wolpaw's opinion, "People who play games have this intuitive sense that the designer is going to make it so you don't have to read this sign. That they'll leave the breadcrumb trail in there and I can ignore the sign as anything but flavor text."

On Jokes That Didn't Make the Cut

When asked about any especially memorable material that perhaps didn't find its way into the final game, Wolpaw did come up with one nifty little gem. You may recall some of the spheres that appear at the game's conclusion, including the ridiculous Fact Sphere and Rick the Adventure Sphere (who Wolpaw says can actually affect a slightly different outcome in the game's finale, provided you sit through Rick's entire dialogue spiel), and originally there was another one. The " Morgan Freeman Sphere."

Recalling Freeman's character in The Shawshank Redemption, Wolpaw grinned as he described the bizarre concept. "There was this Morgan Freeman sphere, you find him in this little 10x10 room, and he was the wisest guy about this 10x10 space. He doesn't know anything about anything, he's blown away by the shit that's five feet outside his space, but has a lot of advice that all kind of relates to things that were in the 10x10 space."

"So he was gonna be pretty good," he added somberly. "I guess we can't use him now."

On Portal 2 as an Adventure Game

Throughout the evening, the host often attempted to chip away at Wolpaw's barrier toward pretension and over-self-analysis, often to no avail. But during one, brief moment, Wolpaw was willing to let his guard down and make a comparative statement regarding Portal 2's relevance to a bygone genre and how it could help make it better.

"So here's something pretentious!" he exclaimed, launching into a good-natured tirade on old school adventure games. "There are things I do like about adventure games. I used to play them, I liked the writing, they tend to be very funny, but the puzzles were never very good, and there was a huge disconnect… just mechanically I was never a huge fan. I used to like to tell [Tim] Schafer that all the time when I was working there [at Double Fine Productions], about all the crappy games he made."

In Wolpaw's mind, "Portal is kind of an adventure game! You're not shooting people in the face, it requires some thinking--but the puzzles are very logical--and it's got a storyline through it." And as for anyone currently thinking about delving into the adventure genre? "I think if you were looking to make adventure games, and you wanted to reach a bigger audience, [you could do] something along this line."

On Crafting an Ending that Allows for a Future

All too often these days we find ourselves inadvertently trapped within proposed trilogies that may or may not actually ever be seen through to their conclusion. Cliffhanger endings are just too-frequently the norm. This is something Wolpaw wanted to avoid with Portal 2's conclusion, which he feels is "satisfying," were the story not to pick up again in a future sequel.

Were the series to pick back up, however, he feels there are "enough questions" leftover to create a solid starting point. And as for Chell's role in any possible sequel? Wolpaw seemed reluctant to again put her through the kind of torment she's endured over the last couple of games. "She's been through a lot," he said, "Let her have her day."

12 years ago

alex

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#3 Edited By alex

As much as we all love Portal 2, I know that every single one of you has, at one time or another, wished in your heart of hearts that the game were a little bit more like a Logan's Run-meets-Super Fly 1970s sci-fi action exploitation extravaganza. It's a story that's just begging for that kind of treatment.

While the folks at Valve are unlikely to grant you your greatest of wishes in playable form, one of the studio's artists, Tristan Reidford, whipped up a completely amazing '70s-style movie poster featuring the game's various characters. While your immediate reaction might just be to make it your desktop background, you can actually do yourself one better and put it on your real life, non-computerized wall, as the poster will be going on sale in the Steam store in a couple of weeks.

As our own Ryan Davis histrionically pointed out over Twitter this morning, yes, there are a few spoilers floating around inside that poster. We're going to drop the main poster below If you haven't played yet, so maybe don't stare at it too hard? As for me, I know I'll be grabbing one as soon as they go on sale.

== TEASER ==

12 years ago

alex

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#4 Edited By alex

We caught wind of the existence of Burnout Crash! thanks to the Australian Classification Review Board and their penchant for acknowledging games that have been put into their ratings database, regardless as to whether or not PR people have bothered to announce them yet. Now, the ESRB has gone a step further and written up one of their famously awkward summaries of what the game actually is, and... well, you know what? Why don't you just read for yourself.

The most disturbing lobster monster of them all.
This is an action game in which players earn points for creating traffic pileups. From a top-down perspective, players initiate crashes by driving 'cartoony' vehicles (e.g., cars, trucks, vans, buses) into busy intersections; multiple crashes trigger score multipliers and rack up large 'bills' of property damage. Each level is accompanied by crashing sounds, small explosions, and vocal encouragement (e.g., 'Cool,' 'Maximum Carnage!'). In some levels, players are instructed to crash into police cars (e.g., 'Crash them before they bust you!'); in other sequences, oversized airplanes, tornados, lobster monsters, and UFOs slide across the screen, destroying any vehicles in their path.

Okay, let all that sink in for a moment. I'll wait.

== TEASER ==We good? Excellent. So, on the subject of the top-down perspective, that would certainly fit, given that the current assumption is that this will be an Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network download. It also sounds like this game is, true to its subtitle, largely based around some kind of permutation of the classic console games' crash mode. As for the crashing into police cars? Sure! Why not? We all love crashing into cops. And the oversized airplanes, tornadoes, UFOs, and lobster monsters? I mean, hey! We can... I mean, you know, it's probably just... I mean, I love SimCity, and that game totally had... alright, you know what? I give up. I don't know what to do with any of that.

For what it's worth, the game is rated E-10+. Probably because of all the lobster monsters. No child should have to endure such a thing.

12 years ago

alex

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#5 Edited By alex

During yesterday's hearings held by the Congressional House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade on the subject of data theft--and, largely, the current situation with Sony and the PlayStation Network--the committee heard testimony from Dr. Gene Spafford, the executive director at Purdue University's Center For Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security. During his testimony, Spafford dropped a potentially damning piece of info regarding the Sony breach.

Specifically, Spafford claims that Sony employees were well aware that the company's security measures were out of date and vulnerable to attack. Spafford's claims come from an open Internet forum used by security experts, including several Sony employees. According to him, several people on those forums realized that Sony's systems were using "very old versions of Apache software that were unpatched and had no firewall installed." The issue was reported "two or three months" prior to the attack that brought down the PSN service. In that time frame, no acknowledgment of the report nor any visible updates to the systems came about from Sony.

Spafford himself was not a part of these original forum discussions. Rather, he cited reports from others reportedly involved in these security forum discussions. While that can lead to a bit of speculation on exactly how accurate his time line is, a statement like that under oath is still likely to add a great deal of fuel to the federal government's investigation, not to mention the various civil suits that have begun to spring up like wildfire since the scope and severity of the Sony attack became public.

12 years ago

alex

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#6 Edited By alex

@Afroman269:

Occasionally they watch Sneakers, just to change things up a bit.

12 years ago

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#7 Edited By alex

There is certainly no love lost between Sony and the theatrically-gifted hacker collective known as Anonymous. The group took aim at the publisher following their legal hassling of PS3 firmware-cracker George "GeoHot" Hotz, albeit largely through a series of proposed pranks and standard denial-of-service attacks that resulted in some supposed connectivity interruptions for the PlayStation Network service.

At Anonymous, every day is Guy Fawkes Day.

But even with all that chicanery going on, many an eyebrow was raised yesterday when a letter from Sony Computer Entertainment boss Kaz Hirai, directed at questions from the U.S. Congress over the mass theft of user information via PSN, directly called out Anonymous as likely perpetrators, citing files found on company hard drives titled "Anonymous," which contained a portion of the group's downright biblical slogan, "We are Anonymous. We are Legion."

Anonymous, troublemakers as they often are known to be, have never really seemed to be of the mind that stealing innocent people's personal information and credit card data was in any way okay, and today they reinforced that notion in an online statement denying any involvement in the theft.

Read part of the statement:

"If a legitimate and honest investigation into the credit card [theft] is conducted, Anonymous will not be found liable. While we are a distributed and decentralized group, our 'leadership' does not condone credit card theft. We are concerned with erosion of privacy and fair use, the spread of corporate feudalism, the abuse of power and the justifications of executives and leaders who believe themselves immune personally and financially for the actions they undertake in the name of corporations and public office."

Elsewhere in the statement, Anonymous was quick to point out that their corporate "adversaries" have, in the past, taken to erroneously blaming them for things they had nothing to do with, effectively insinuating that Sony may just be accusing them due to a lack of any other feasible target.

Granted, Anonymous is a multi-headed group with many different factions, and while the group's "leadership" might have had nothing to do with it, there's nothing to say a random, pissed off sect couldn't have gone rogue and done the deed themselves. Or, maybe no one at Anonymous was involved, and whoever did hack in and steal PSN user data just left those files as a smoke screen. Or maybe everyone is lying? Or telling the truth? Who knows? All we do know is that nobody is happy right now, and nobody will be until the dust settles on all of this and we truly know exactly what the ramifications of the whole event are. Anything else at this point just feels like a lot of noisy back-and-forth that distracts from the true issue at hand: Sony, its network security, and how things get made right for the affected consumers.

12 years ago

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#8 Edited By alex

A quick confession before getting onto this news: I never quite finished Super Meat Boy. As completely awesome as it is--one of my top ten from last year, in fact!--at a point, the game just became too hard for my namby-pamby sensibilities. The pure, unadulterated anger this game inspired in me too often made my eyes go green with pre- Hulk rage, to the point where at least one controller of mine is guaranteed to never work quite right again. Eventually, I just had to stop for the sake of everyone and everything around me. I never wanted to hurt anyone, I swear.

What unholy brand of Hell will you design?

Maybe I can find some catharsis for my still bubbling bitterness by inflicting pain on others via the newly released level editor on Steam for PC players. It's been long-talked about, and now Super Meat Boy players can design and construct their very own bite-sized chunks of hellish platforming acrimony by accessing it via the "Tools" option in your Steam library.

The editor is replete with all sorts of nifty features. You can use any element you've seen in-game in one of your created levels (short of bosses and warp zones--those are off-limits), and you can use all 20 characters to play through them, regardless as to whether you've unlocked them in the main game or not. You can even create your own chapter selections (five levels minimum) with your own par times, titles, and music.

Finished levels are uploaded to the Super Meat World community zone, which players can access via an in-game pad once they have collected 20 bandages. Community members can vote on their favorite levels, and the best stuff will be highlighted by Team Meat as "recommended levels." And by the best, we're sure they mean the most hateful, skin-peelingly torturous levels, of course. == TEASER ==

The best part of all of this is that it's free. As the Team Meat blog entry regarding the editor so succinctly puts it:

"It was a labor of Love/Hate but something we did because we knew the fans wanted it and were already creating so many awesome levels using our devmode. So think of this as a thank you to all the awesome fans who sent us cool shit, nice emails and created amazing levels with devmode, if you bitched us out because the free level editor was delayed, you should probably not update your game and burn in hell."

Nicely put. Again, this is currently only available via the PC version of the game. The Mac version of the editor is apparently forthcoming, but regrettably, Xbox Live Arcade players won't ever have their own editor. Apparently there's just no good way to do an unregulated level editor via Xbox Live, but Team Meat assured players that they hope to keep releasing new chapters for that version of the game.

As a final sign-off, the game-developing Cenobites at Team Meat made it abundantly clear that they are not planning on a Super Meat Boy sequel. It's a bittersweet notion, one that seems likely to inspire equal amounts of sadness and solace among players. We'll just have to wait and see what dastardly horrors the Team Meat crew are plotting next. I'm already cowering in fear just thinking about the possibilities...

12 years ago

alex

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#9 Edited By alex

Konami's E3 press conferences are The Room of E3 press conferences. Each year is like some magically delicious disaster of seemingly unrehearsed ludicrousness that almost morphs into a kind of bizarre, surrealist performance art. After the Rock Revolution debacle of 2008, I thought they could reach no greater peak, but 2010 somehow offered up an even wider array of non-stop insanity, most notably with the introduction of both Tak Fujii and Naoki Maeda and whatever the hell was going on here. Then again, at least there were luchadores...

Can Konami come up with someone more huggably bonkers than Naoki Maeda? Probably not, but I can't wait to find out!

So, what could possibly be in store this year? No idea yet, but Konami is banking that you'll want to experience the awkwardness firsthand. Konami plans to promote its unique brand of ramshackle press conferencing--which will actually take place on June 2nd, five days before the show officially kicks off--by setting up live viewing parties for the event at cities around the globe, including, but not limited to, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, São Paulo, and Mexico City.

== TEASER == Yes, for real. You and your friends can attend a real life local screening of the Konami E3 2011 press conference and participate along with the rest of the audience as they shout hilarious callbacks at the screen, like "ONE MILLION TROOPS!!!" and a creepily whispered "Extreeeeeeeeeme..." Just don't be the jerk who yells "Riiiiiiidge Racer!!!" That's like shouting Rocky Horror lines at a Birdemic screening.

If you're not in one of the participating cities, or just don't fancy the idea of sitting in a room full of Konami fans while watching trailers and presentations full of long, excruciating pauses where laughter is presumably expected, you can also stream the conference online and enjoy the hilarity all by your lonesome. Regardless of method, you should almost assuredly tune in. Maybe this will be the year when Konami announces it's all been a gag, that the previous press conferences were purposely weird in service of a long-term, Kaufman-esque black comic prank. How great would that be?

12 years ago

alex

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#10 Edited By alex

LinkedIn seems to be the new spoiler for game reveals these days, with resumes popping up all over the place that reveal projects we're not supposed to know about yet. One of the great hunters of LinkedIn's vast employment wasteland is Twitter user superannuation, who has quite the reputation for knowing "things" about "stuff" and for digging up tidbits of info regarding upcoming, unannounced projects.

Someone made this for the game's Wikipedia page. I thought it was kind of cute.

His/her latest find seems to be evidence regarding Far Cry 3, a still-unannounced new sequel in Ubisoft's best-selling shooter franchise. Though some of the originally-cited resumes have since been scrubbed to axe any mention of the title, multiple Ubisoft programmers and animators were quoted as working on an "undisclosed First Person Shooter" with "exotic gameplay." One still left standing mentions work on an "unannounced Shooter AAA."

More damning would be a pair of resumes from stunt men who claimed to have worked on the title. Both Lee Villeneuve and Stephane Julien straight up list Far Cry 3 as a project they've each worked on.

This isn't the first time a third Far Cry game has flirted with acknowledged existence. All the way back in 2009, an Ubisoft scriptwriter told the UK's Official PlayStation Magazine that the game was in the works and looking "pretty exciting." Retailers have also accidentally listed the title at various points.

Ubisoft had yet to respond to request for comment as of this story's publish. With this fall marking the three year point since the last entry in the series, not to mention the heap of of fringe evidence that seems to keep piling up, it seems safe to assume that Far Cry 3 exists in some fashion. As for when Ubisoft might choose to reveal it? Well, I do seem to recall some manner of gaming convention coming up this June...

12 years ago

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alex

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alex's forum posts

On the Subject of Portals, and Why There Almost Weren't Any

On the Story That Almost Was

On the Game's Hotel Room Introduction

On British Comedians (Namely, Stephen Merchant)

On Writing Dialogue for Games and Necessary Programming Experience

On Chell, and Her Utter Lack of Dialogue

On GLaDOS, and Her Torrents of Insults

On Playtesting, and Non-Gamers' Need to Read

On Jokes That Didn't Make the Cut

On Portal 2 as an Adventure Game

On Crafting an Ending that Allows for a Future