Fancy a Bioshock Blitzer with your Mario Kart? Or how about an Earthworm Gin with your Portal 2 co-op?
We’ve been made aware of a pretty exciting development: the imminent opening of a second café from the people of Loading. It’s a pop-up bar at the moment, but will be arriving permanently in London as of April this year.
What’s so special about a café you ask? Modeled on the gaming cafés of Tokyo, this bar, like its sister café in Cornwall, lets guests play games with their drinks. Just a glance at the lovingly created menu with its themed, character-based concoctions and it becomes clearly evident that these people really, genuinely love games.
Its always great to see someone’s idea become reality and it’s a worthy one, a project that will hopefully spread the number of people positive about the culture of gaming and for those who already are, a community space to hold events. Thanks to a successful Kickstarter project with loads of big name backing from people like Ubisoft, BioWare and Codemasters, gamers in Soho will soon have their very own space to indulge in a spot of community spirit. Find out more at their website.
Wonder if they have their sights set on the second city?
If you get your hands on a copy of this week’s MCV, be sure to look at the feature “The New Rules of Games Marketing”, because Fluid’s very own head of marketing and PR, Lu is featured inside! Lu explains how factors such as digital routes to market, personalized one-to-one marketing and social media advocacy are changing the games marketing landscape, and we are included in a feature “Agency Insiders”, a run down of the leading creative specialists working in the sector. With a page spread featuring some of our latest projects, we’re really happy to be included in MCV again, because alongside our work in the fashion, music and arts sectors, as Lu says, “video games are our bread and butter”.
So the PS4 has been announced and we’re already excited, we’re officially on a countdown to the next generation of consoles and here’s a round up of the main facts from last night’s Sony conference in New York:
- Gaikai cloud streaming tech will allow games to be hosted and streamed, meaning that physical disc copies won’t be the only way you’ll be able to buy and play games. Backwards compatibility will also function through the cloud, so those looking for a dose of nostalgia will have only to stream a PS1, 2 or 3 game and play it instantly.
- After having apparently spent five years in talks with developers about what they want inside a console, the PS4 will use “supercharged PC architecture” – making life easier for developers who previously struggled adapting games to the PS3’s unique insides.
- New controller! The PS4 has a Kinect-like camera that can detect motion embedded in a light strip across the front of the DualShock 4.
- It looks like Sony want to make things social, including new recording and sharing features that allow you to record your in-game footage and share it with friends, or watch your friends play their games in real time. Whether this will catch on remains to be seen…
- And of course, a console is only as good as the games it plays and no less than 70 of the big publishers and developers enthusiastically announced their involvement with PS4 last night, so there should be plenty of title announcements to get excited about over the next few months…
Some things that the conference didn’t let on to were the PS4’s price, exact release date (holiday 2013) or what form the console will take. Guess we’ll just have to wait for E3 to see what it looks like!
The gaming industry is getting all fired up for Sony’s PS4 announcement in New York later tonight, which will be happening 11pm GMT. No doubt it will feature all sorts of next-gen technological delights for us to look forward to, but another effect of the current focus on the Playstation and its glittering history is that it has given us all a touch of nostalgia for the older, simpler days of gaming. Embracing the retro feel of 80s and early 90s video games is becoming quite a trend, from the success of cult indie game Hotline Miami to the release of Disney’s Wreck-it-Ralph, its homage to the days of pixellated arcade gaming.
This upcoming title by Jeppe Carlsen, the minimalistic 140, embraces a simpler time when games consisted of little more than coloured blocks, and if the trailer is anything to go by manages to make the whole thing a beautiful experience. It plays like an old-school platformer and your ‘character’s’ shape changes in a visual representation of its movements, something an old hand will be able to feel right away. No indication of when its out yet, but its nice to know that amidst all the next-gen chaos about to be unleashed tonight, the days of the side-scrolling platformer are far from over.
Films based on video-games are notoriously bad – Streetfighter: The Legend of Chun-Li anyone? Disney’s latest animated offering does it differently – creating a fictional faux-retro 80s style game in which to set the hero, Wreck-it-Ralph and begin his tale.
Disney have done a pretty amazing job of getting their fictional game ‘Fix-it-Felix Jr’ to feel like a real arcade classic (which in a strange blurring of the lines you can actually play on the Disney website), and there are plenty of cameos from ‘real-life’ game-characters such as Pac-Man, Sonic and Streetfighter stalwarts to really give some depth to the game world, which has a bit of Toy Story’s brilliant toys-coming-to-life vibe about it.
Can Tetris ever be legitimised as a pro-sport? The game has been a worldwide favourite for decades and documentary “Ecstasy of Order” follows a number of the best Tetris players in the world as they ready themselves to compete in the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship. Gaining accolades such as “one of the best video game films of all time” (Destructoid) might not encompass a huge category, nevertheless this is at the top of my list of films to see this week.
Now if you don’t mind, I’m off to play some Tetris.
Learn more about the film here.
It’s a new year and as we here at Fluid are lucky enough to work with so many exciting games companies and IPs, naturally our thoughts turn towards what this year’s E3 may hold…and this year promises to be a big one. Not only are console giants Sony and Microsoft expected to unveil their PS4 and Xbox 720 respectively later this year, but exciting news from the Consumer Electronics Show this week reveals that Valve’s Steam Box “Piston” and Nvidia’s “Shield” promise to offer PC gamers a new way of playing their games through their TV.
This generation of consoles has been the longest running yet, and many gamers are anxious to learn more about these new pieces of hardware that promise to inject some new life into the industry. Rumour has it that Sony may be the first to tell all ahead of E3 at their Destination Playstation event in February. And could the mysterious appearance of a clock counting down to E3 on the personal blog of the Xbox director of programming mean the Xbox 720 will make an appearance?
What with these developments, and Valve and Nvidia promising to introduce an entirely new product category into the mix, this year’s E3 is shaping up to be very interesting indeed.
Maybe this is old news to you or maybe you know already but we do have a twitter account if you would like to keep up with what’s going on here in the studio. We do try to muster the odd tweet between deadlines and choosing the correct pantone colour. So say hello over HERE. And for our 495 followers #hellothere.
As you know we are big game fans here and we like to keep on top of what going on behind the scenes at the publishers HQ’s. Unless you have been living under a rock the last year you will have heard of some of the killer release’s that Platinum games have dropped, Madworld, Bayonetta & Vanquish being some of their most talked about recent releases.
Here is a little peep behind the scenes of Platinum Games HQ. Check out the early concept art and the fan art is a must see too. Some fans are hell bent of giving us a run for our money on the advertising campaigns it would seem. Check out the PG studio Flickr here, and our recent Vanquish campaign here.
With a recent trip to Dublin over the Xmas, I had the nerdy joy of catching a touring exhibition called “GAME ON” Game on is a retrospective of videogaming since its inception in the 70′s, curated by the Barbican. The exhibition mainly consists of classic old console games, starting at the start with Pong and working right up to today. All the games featured in the exhibition were fully playable. It was pretty good fun having a blast from the past on the old Mario titles, Street fighter 2 and some old Atari 2600 gems.
A real bonus to the exhibition was the gaming marketing material and original ephemera, some original sketches of early Sonic were brilliant to see. It was amazing the development of his character through the ages, as technology and trends changed.
Another 10 on the geek factor scale was the original hand drawn flat plan level layout of GTA, complete with developers post-it notes. The GTA section also had early character development and a glass cabinet of collectors edition GTA promotional items.
Also nice to see quite a few publishers we work with in the exhibition, such as SEGA and EA, and even one or two titles we have previously worked on such as Ridge Racer. All in all, Worth a look, for the casual gamer and hardcore geeks alike.
Check it out HERE.