Be The Gamer

Mobile analytics firm Flurry says Google’s Nexus One is a sales flop. Using estimates based on usage of its apps, Flurry believes that the new Android-driven smart phone debuted to dismal sales.
The same metrics show that Motorola’s Droid launched to better-than-expected numbers, selling over one million units faster than the iPhone did when it was [...]

Sam Fisher, protagonist of Splinter Cell, has been updating his Twitter account with details of his flight from authorities.
The fictional special agent’s bio says it all: “I’m being set up. I need to find out who killed my daughter. Please help me.” Imagine the tweets posted by Real_SamFisher are being read by Michael Ironside, [...]

A recent study suggests that the introduction of a videogame console to a household can negatively effect early childhood academic achievement in boys.
The experiment was conducted by Robert Weis and Brittany C. Cerankosky, psychological scientists from Denton University. They surveyed families with boys between the ages of 6 and 9 who were considering buying videogame [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, says gamers are a bunch of head cases.
“Player psychology has nothing to do with rational thought,” said the acclaimed game designer during his keynote address at the Game Developers Conference on Friday. Titled “The Psychology of Game Design (Everything You Know Is Wrong),” the speech talked about [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — For the future of Final Fantasy, director Motomu Toriyama is looking to Uncharted 2.
The interactive cinematic scenes in Naughty Dog’s critically acclaimed action game seem to have inspired Toriyama to try the same thing in the Final Fantasy games, he said at his Game Developers Conference panel on Friday. “In Final Fantasy [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Final Fantasy XIII began its life as a PlayStation 2 game. Here’s what it looked like.
Speaking at Game Developers Conference on Friday, FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama talked a bit about the development history of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game, showing the early screenshot pictured above. The battle system, Toriyama said, [...]

The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 topped the sales charts in February, moving half a million copies in a month packed with big game releases, the NPD Group said Thursday.
Boosted by BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and continued sales of Modern Warfare 2, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling home game console in the U.S. last [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — “Audio is my lover,” Akira Yamaoka said as he kicked off his presentation Thursday at Game Developers Conference. Pulling out his guitar, he played some music that he composed over the past day on his trip from Tokyo to San Francisco.
Yamaoka is best known for his years at game publisher Konami, creating [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Nintendo’s Metroid games take their creative cues from an unlikely source: Dario Argento, the Italian horror film director.
At his keynote speech during the Game Developers Conference on Thursday, Metroid creator Yoshio Sakamoto said that Argento’s films Susperia and Deep Red, which he discovered in his youth, awoke his creative sensibilities. The horror [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Kumar Garg, policy analyst for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, wants the game industry to address America’s “national challenges.”
In a keynote entitled “Grand Challenges for Game Developers” delivered at the Game Developers Conference on Wednesday, Garg focused on videogames’ unique ability to engage, immerse and teach.
“We don’t [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony’s motion controller is called PlayStation Move and will be released this fall, the gamemaker said Wednesday. Whether any killer app games will be released with it is still in question.
At a lavish press briefing taking place a few blocks away from the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the final name and [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones.
At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the [...]

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Classic videogames like Street Fighter and Ms. Pac-Man inspired the artists whose works will be displayed in the Game Over 3 exhibition.
Put on by geek magazine turned art, design and clothing purveyor Giant Robot, the group gallery show will feature pieces from dozens of illustrators, painters, cartoonists, artists and [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference.
Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Big-name videogame designers are thinking small.
Creators of legendary games of the ’80s and ’90s like Sinistar and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are increasingly working on social games like those found on Facebook, largely because the development of popular time-wasters like FarmVille closely mirrors the creative process that drove the early [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — Think the music game market is already crowded enough? Here comes a new challenger, a full-band game that will use real electric guitars for controllers.
PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, published by Seven45 Studios, will be demoed on the Game Developers Conference show floor this week. It’s scheduled to be released this fall [...]