Marvel's Iron Man 3 trailer is coming next week, but fans can get a sneak peek of it via a simple Facebook like… or likes, anyway. Lots of them.
Do that by clicking on the below image, which enables Tony Stark's armor to get "charged" a bit. Once it hits a hundred percent, the video will be revealed.
Iron Man 3 will hit on May 3, 2013, starring Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Don Cheadle, Ben Kingsley and Guy Pearce.
Buying a game today no longer means buying the full experience. Whether it’s background information explained in a prequel comic, additional missions via DLC or a Facebook tie-in, what comes in the box is rarely the full and definitive package. Now more than ever, developers, publishers and their marketing teams are using supplementary material to keep players mentally, emotionally and - most importantly – financially invested and engaged with their products.
But in an effort to broaden their franchises, are they also running the risk of alienating their audience? Do these supplements add or subtract from the core experience? Let’s run through a few of the most common ways once-standalone games are being expanded upon. Have a read, and then let us know in the comments section if you think these developments are for better or worse.
The addition of multiplayer to titles that once-upon-a-time would have been single player experiences only is obviously a reflection of the importance of multiplayer to gaming today. In a general sense, as long as the inclusion of multiplayer doesn’t take resources away from the single player component, then it’s a nice bonus that gamers can either take or leave. That said, it adds a whole new challenge for the completionists out there, who want to 100% their games. Getting all the achievements/trophies/what have you in single player is one thing, but adding in challenges that are contingent on other players can make truly finishing a game an incredibly long road.
Dead Space 2 introduced multiplayer. It was basically extra value for those that wanted it.
That’s a challenge for some (and a first world problem if ever there was one), but the more worrying prospect for single player puritans is cross-over between the two aspects of a game. With Mass Effect 3, for instance, BioWare tied the addition of competitive multiplayer to progress in the main campaign. Sure, success in multiplayer wasn’t necessary for success in single player, but it's quite possibly a sign of things to come. Still, at least the addition of multiplayer comes at no additional cost, unlike…
Plenty of arguments have been made for and against the rise of DLC in recent years. When implemented well, DLC can expand on the scope of a game’s world and narrative (Fallout 3, Skyrim) or use existing assets and characters to tell vastly different tales (Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare, Infamous 2: Festival of Blood).
These expansions offer fresh takes on old favourites, allowing fans to play more of the games they love. Even so, it can still be confusing as to which DLC changes or adds to the core game, and which is kept separate. Saints Row: The Third we’re looking at you.
But is it canon?
On the other end of the spectrum, DLC can be used in a more cynical fashion to wring a few more dollars out of customers. In this regard, Final Fantasy XIII-2 and Asura’s Wrath come to mind. Both games finish with seemingly inconclusive endings. More definitive finales for these games can be purchased through DLC. Should gamers be grateful or outraged by this practice?
Releasing comic book series' related to upcoming games is a growing trend within the industry. Comics can be used to introduce a new game, bridge between two existing games (Portal 2, Arkham City), or to flesh out the greater mythology of the game world (Assassin’s Creed: The Fall). Tie-in novels are also common (Dead Space).
Gaining a new perspective and greater understanding of a game world can be interesting, though there is a fine line between using a comic series to bring depth, and using it to pave over plot holes or explain ideas that should have been expanded upon within the game itself. Arkham City is a fairly straightforward game, but a number of people queried plot points that were explained in the bridging comic series. Did this lack of information ruin the game? No, but it was only through reading the comics and playing the game that the full experience was achieved.
Bridging story summary: Batman is bad-ass.
Adding further confusion is the way the tie-in comic is marketed. The importance of the comic is usually emphasised (so that people will want to buy it) while it is simultaneously insisted upon that reading it is not necessary for enjoying the game itself. Either the information is important to the understanding of the game, or it's not… right?
Social media and smartphone tie-in games are now almost standard practice in the industry, and while many are forgettable, that’s not necessarily the rule. Two of the more popular examples of this type of game extension are Mass Effect Infiltrator (smartphone) and Assassin’s Creed: Project Legacy (Facebook). Each offers a very limited version of their respective titles, with completion adding and unlocking features within their console counterparts. Quality of these games aside, do you find them necessary? What - if anything - do they bring to your gaming experience? Should content (no matter how trivial) in games you have purchased be locked away, their availability contingent on you paying for or playing other content? Should games for social and mobile platforms stand alone?
Let us know your thoughts on these trends in gaming below. Which do you enjoy, which could you do without? Are there any other practices that you love or hate?
Scott Clarke is a freelance games journalist based in Australia. You can follow him on IGN or Twitter, and why not join the IGN Australia Facebook community while you're at it?
After many months in development, Zynga announced today that FarmVille 2, perhaps the company’s biggest title to date, is now out of closed beta and available to players on Facebook and Zynga.com.
The sequel includes a variety of improvements and changes to the social farming formula Zynga helped popularize back in 2009, but the most dramatic change is undoubtedly the new 3D visuals. Gameplay plays out from the same semi-overhead viewpoint found in most other Zynga titles, but now all decorations, crops and animals are rendered in full stylized 3D instead of 2D pixel art.
In a recent demo of the title, members of the FarmVille 2 team stressed repeatedly that one of their big creative goals for the title was to give players the feeling that they were “bringing the farm to life.” FarmVille 2’s 3D crops, animals and decorations are far more interactive than in any previous Zynga games. Crops and trees sway in the wind. Animals will wander around freely unless kept in a pen. All decorations spring into action when players mouse over them – fires crackle to life, rocking chairs rock, kites fly lazily, and so-on.
When playing in full-screen, the fidelity of the visuals and the high-quality animation and sound made it easy for me to forget I was looking at a “simple” Facebook game. Zynga’s presentation and artistic prowess has come a long way in the last three years.
Only a lengthy hands-on play session can determine if the company’s game design chops have also kept up, but here my early impressions are also positive. All of FarmVille 2’s farming systems are now interconnected and feature actual crafting trees, giving “hardcore gamer” min/maxers something to chew on. Is it better to sell your wheat, or turn it into feed for your cows and sell their milk? Or should you save the milk and use it to craft and sell baked goods like pies, custards and cakes?
Gone are the days of clicking on a crop to see an abstract pile of coins pop up – players must now balance crafting, feeding their animals and watering farm plots.
Just as some elements of Farmville 2 are becoming more complex and properly “game-like,” Zynga strove to simplify some of the original’s rough edges. Players can now mouse-over large swaths of crops to plant, water or harvest them – no need to click hundreds of times! It’s a change sure to please the wrists of millions of virtual farmers.
Since FarmVille 2 uses Flash 11 as its foundation, this also gave Zynga access to the right-mouse button for the first time. The company put it to use as an easy “redecorate” button. Right-clicking a farm plot, decoration or animal picks it up. Right-clicking again drops it in its new location. Simple.
FarmVille 2 is full of little details that show the game was created with more care than most social games. When purchasing an expansion for your farm, the land doesn’t just magically open up. Instead n army of goats rush in from off-screen to et up the tall grass, tin cans and other trash to make the land farmable. When picking up an animal to move it, it dangles in the air, eyes bulging out, as if it had been picked up by the scruff of its neck. Your custom avatar is also fully animated and will jump fences & perform other complicated movements to perform his or her farm chores as efficiently as possible.
Zynga told me that their goal for FarmVille 2 was to create an experience that felt “relaxing and pastoral.” They want the title to evoke a feeling of nostalgia and recapture the feeling of living in a small town and running a small farm. They want the five-minute breaks people spend with FarmVille 2 to be “The best five minutes of their day.”
Whether the social gaming giant has achieved that goal remains to be seen, but FarmVille 2’s combination of actual crafting complexity, lively and atmospheric visuals & quality-of-play improvements are all steps in the right direction.
Justin is Editor of IGN Wireless. He has been reviewing mobile games since the dark days of Java flip phones. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
A recently-surfaced 1980s brochure reveals that Nintendo nearly released a knitting add-on for the NES. Posted on the Facebook page of former Nintendo employee Howard Phillips, the brochure shows off the Nintendo Knitting Machine, a device that would have connected to the NES and allowed players to create and print their own designs.
“You're looking at the Nintendo Knitting Machine,” the ad reads. “It's not a game; not a toy; not something a young girl can outgrow in three or six months or even a year. It's a machine that interacts with the powerful Nintendo Entertainment System to actually knit sweaters: and not just one or two patterns but a multitude of different and unique designs.”
“The Nintendo Knitting Machine is just one more example of the innovative thinking that keeps Nintendo on the cutting edge of video technology," it continues. "And your customers on the edge of their seats. Of course we should probably mention that no other video game system offers anything even remotely similar. But why needle the competition?”
According to Phillips, original Nintendo of America president Minoru Arakawa asked him to pitch the peripheral to Toys R Us chairman Charles Lazarus in a live demo, which he humorously describes as “one of my least genuinely enthusiastic demos.” While no reason for the cancellation of the Knitting Machine has been revealed, it’s said to have been briefly shown off at a late 1980s Consumer Electronics Show and has never been seen or heard from since.
Source: Tiny Cartridge
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.
Let's just clear the air: for a long time Facebook's iOS app has sucked.
Features that worked fine in desktop browsers took on an awkward UI or were just left out, and interminable loading screens tried our patience to the breaking point. (When loading the news feed takes so long you have time to guess what its contents will look like and think better of reading it, you know there's a problem.)
And, believe it or not, all that design talent Facebook poaches thought so too. They explain the problem, along with what went into fixing it, on their "Under the hood" blog. "We realized that when it comes to platforms like iOS, people expect a fast, reliable experience and our iOS app was falling short," wrote engineer Jonathan Dann.
The problem with the app's older versions was that instead of being entirely coded with Apple's iOS SDK, it embedded the HTML5 code Facebook used for all its mobile platforms. This made it easy to support mobile access for dozens of devices, but it also slowed everything down.
The solution: "We rewrote Facebook for iOS from the ground up (I really did open up Xcode and click 'New Project') with a focus on quality and leveraging the advances that have been made in iOS development." So while the new app mostly looks identical to its HTML5 predecessor, optimizing it for iDevices has made it smoother, more responsive, and just plain faster.
The new app also includes a few added features and UI updates - a "New Stories" banner and improved gestures for photo viewing among them - but the main focus of the update was speed.
Facebook is reportedly working on a similar update to improve its app for Android phones, but has yet to announce release dates.
Jon Fox is a Seattle hipster who loves polar bears and climbing trees. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN.
Two quick teasers have been released, via the official American Horror Story Facebook page page, for the second season - a brand new story (set in the 1960s), called American Horror Story: Asylum. Both are mum on plot details, but offer plenty of creepy atmosphere. Check them out below.
Magnet Releasing announced today via Twitter and Facebook that they will be distributing Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning On Demand and in theaters.
The fourth installment, which stars Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, picks up where the third film, Regeneration, left off. The franchise centers on Luc Devereaux (Van Damme) and Andrew Scott (Lundgren), two soldiers who kill each other in Vietnam but are subsequently reanimated through a secret government project along with a large group of other once dead soldiers.
John Hyams, who wrote Universal Soldier: Regeneration, has co-written and directed this latest film.
Bloomberg reported yesterday that Facebook “is working with HTC Corp. to build its own smartphone for release as soon as mid-2013,” vaguely citing “people with knowledge of the matter” (i.e. an anonymous source). But despite this rumor swirling around for years now, it will have to continue swirling.
During today’s 2nd quarter earnings conference call, Facebook’s CEO discredited the hearsay about a proprietary device, expressing the company’s intention to pursue alternatives “that aren't really building out a whole phone, which really wouldn't make much sense for us to do."
The Facebook team also revealed their struggles to monetize increasing mobile usage of the service; an exclusive mobile platform would give the company greater options - especially with regard to ad-placement.
For now, Facebook has a team of UI designers poached from Apple working on its notoriously sluggish iPhone app. “I think we're much closer to the beginning than the end in terms of what we can do with the apps we use today,” said Zuckerberg.
Facebook is expected to launch an improved and better-integrated app with iOS 6 this fall, with further updates to follow.
Sat inside a Vancouver, a studio so swanky that it might put even Facebook’s offices to shame, there is just one thing on IGN’s mind as FIFA 13 gets its official red-carpet roll out: why is it that EA employees are allowed to take their dogs to work and we’re not?
Seriously though, the one word on everyone’s lips – as well as plastered across a floor-to-ceiling cinema screen – is: ‘Unpredictable’. Borrowed from a Jose Mourinho interview (“One of the great things about football is that it’s unpredictable,” said the Special One), it’s a buzzword for the beautiful game in modern times and also the mantra for FIFA 13.
Along with the unenviable task of bettering the best football game known to man in FIFA 12, EA Sports’ goal for this season is: “Capturing the unpredictability of real-world football”. And after previewing the ‘Big Five’ new gameplay features at E3 in June (Attacking Intelligence, Complete Dribbling, First Touch Control, Tactical Free Kicks and an updated Player Impact Engine) prepare to bid farewell to your social life once more, with a host of new features to electrify both casual and ardent gamers alike within the new game.
Firstly, one of the few shortcomings of FIFA in the past has been that many of the game's silky-yet-subtle skills go unused by even the most proficient gamers. FIFA 13 squashes this notion with the addition of Skill Games. Combining training ground capers from football tennis to crossbar challenge via several dinks into rubbish bins and dribbling round poles, Skill Games present a surprisingly addictive new game mode, for that rare occasion when thumping your mates 6-0 starts to get tedious.
One of FIFA’s sole pitfalls within its domination of poor Pro Evo in the past has been that many of the games silky-yet-subtle skills go unused by even the most proficient gamers.
“The design idea behind it was to create little scenarios that really focus in on one skill, whether it be passing or ground pass, lob pass, shooting, free kicks or penalty shots,” says FIFA Gameplay Producer, Aaron McHardy. “At the end of the skill challenge, [we] put you in a bit of a match-type scenario and see how well you can execute it in a game. We really think that in doing that we’re going to be able to transfer the skills you learn in the Skill Games and ultimately make everybody a better FIFA player.” But with the addition of leaderboards and with achievements, XP and trophies all on offer within the 32 bite-sized challenges, Skill Games go far beyond a FIFA refresher course for the uneducated, and will swiftly establish itself as yet another way to embarrass your pals online.
Meanwhile, Career Mode’s also gone to the next level, with the chance to manage and play for club and country. Play as Robin van Persie and you too can give Arsenal the finger before netting silverware and a multi-million pound contract elsewhere, before firing the Netherlands to World Cup glory… maybe. Fancy something a little less predictable? Why not start life as a fresh-faced starlet of Barcelona’s La Masia academy, before being shipped out on loan to the altogether unglamorous Accrington Stanley, in the hope you can dispose Lionel Messi upon your return.
Transfer dealings have also been tweaked to mimic the market more closely, with form, contract length and morale all representing a player’s true market value. You can now also meet each bid for one of your players with a counter offer, naming the exact amount it’d cost for someone to snare your prized asset. Similarly, you can now add players into any deal, so be sure to keep a keen eye on the Manchester City reserve squad as they soon could be slotting straight into your starting XI.
Elsewhere, after giving itself a cool two years breathing space to decipher just how to incorporate Microsoft’s little black box, FIFA is finally embracing Kinect's capabilities for 13. That means, in the interests of realism of course, you can now drop all manner of ‘F’ and ‘C’ bombs in the direction of the referee, just because. But despite a flurry of recent rumours that turning the air blue will see your on screen counterparts punished on the pitch, FIFA’s Line Producer Nick Channon is quick to rectify the gossip.
This is our first year with Kinect and we’re very happy with this year’s feature set, we think it’s game enhancing. We want to see the reaction to it and then we’ll go from there.
“I don’t know exactly where that came from, obviously it’s a slight misunderstanding,” laughs Channon. “Ultimately we do listen to what people are saying within the game, especially around decisions, but it’s more an influence within career mode, where it’ll develop storylines and we’ll actually get feedback within the game.”
In other words, swear like a sailor and you’re likely to endure the condemnation of Martin Tyler through the game’s commentary, but also get yourself a reputation of being a touchline hot-head in career mode. “We feel it’s just a little bit more immersion,” continues Channon. “A lot of things we’re doing in career mode this year is a lot more depth, and we think this is one extra thing that brings a bit more life [to it].”
Aside from flagrantly disregarding the referee Respect campaign, the in-game voice-activated controls also make use of menu options. Substitutions, camera angles and even fully customisable tactics are but one breath away. No longer will you have to commit the cardinal sin of tweaking your entire line-up midway through a crunch game on Xbox Live, you can now simply yell, ‘Park the bus’ and grind out that vital (if thoroughly boring) 0-0 draw.
What’s more, in Be A Pro, you can actually request your AI team-mates' pass, cross and shoot via the mic, with the AI players harbouring enough intelligence to ignore dodgy calls. So bark for them to whip it in when you’re 10-yards offside and they might just think better of it.
The emphasis is to make FIFA purely a “really realistic but ultimately fun experience.”
Notable in its absence though is the lack of any motion controls for the Kinect, with the FIFA team clearly cautious to jump in headfirst, at the risk of turning FIFA into a poor man’s Wii Sports.
“I think we’ll have to wait and see,” admits Producer Channon. “This is our first year with Kinect and we’re very happy with this year’s feature set, we think it’s game enhancing. We want to see the reaction to it and then we’ll go from there.”
On a crusade to get flabby gamers thin they ain’t, with Channon affirming the emphasis is to make FIFA purely a “really realistic but ultimately fun experience.” So should FIFA 14 come complete with its own set of weighing scales, ushering in Career Mode’s pre-season with a stern telling off by the gaffer, then you know it’s time to start panicking. But then again we’ve been surprised before, football is “unpredictable” after all…
