vendredi 27 août 2010

Custom soundtracks, new costumes and Youtube support now available.



Hello Games has released a massive patch for its stunt racer Joe Danger, adding everything from Youtube support to custom soundtracks (via the PlayStation Blog).

The new patch has been dubbed "The People's Patch" by the developers, as it addresses much of the user feedback they have received since the game's launch. It includes new level editing props, costumes, additional multiplayer levels and more.

In addition, Hello Games will soon be showcasing the best user-created levels on their official site. The developer is currently hosting a level building contest for the game.

Joe Danger was released back in June for PlayStation Network, and we gave it a B+ in our review.

FTC says firm employees posted positive reviews pretending to be ordinary customers.iPhone

Gamers probably know better than anyone to be wary of glowing game reviews from seemingly "ordinary users" on the Internet, but now even the FTC is trying to make sure such "ordinary users" aren't in reality being paid for their opinions. The New York Times reports that PR firm Reverb Communications settled with the FTC over charges of having their employees post positive game reviews on the iTunes store without disclosing their working relationship with the companies that made the games.

These charges are the first to come under new Internet endorsement guidelines that passed last year, which now regulate promotional tactics across the Internet, including Facebook and Twitter. In essence, they basically come down to advertising agencies being required to be upfront with consumers about their ties with a product when promoting it online.

In this Reverb case, the FTC claims employees posted positive game reviews on the iTunes store in a manner that made them appear to be reviews coming from regular customers. There was no monetary penalty as part of the settlement, but Reverb agreed to remove all the reviews and to not post any more in the future without full disclosure of any ties to the companies that make the games.

For Reverb's part, they insist they broke no laws, and only settled out of expediency. "Rather than continuing to spend time and money arguing, and laying off employees to fight what we believed was a frivolous matter, we settled this case and ended the discussion," said executive Tracie Snitker.

The specific games for which the reviews were written (or even which companies they were written for) weren't revealed.


Writer Erik Wolpaw says it was "fun for two seconds," but "quickly devolves into pure chaos."


Portal 2 is expanding on the original game in a lot of ways, including a longer campaign and even cooperative multiplayer. One mode that won't be making an appearance however, despite early tests, is competitive multiplayer. In our visit to Valve as part of the 1UP Cross Country Game Tour, writer Erik Wolpaw detailed the idea behind the spite-your-neighbor game mode, and why it just didn't work out.

"Along with co-op, [we had] the idea of sort of a competitive Portal multiplayer," he said. "We went down that path, actually, for a little while and had something up and running -- the best way to describe it is sort of speedball meets Portal. You know, a sports analog. And it quickly became apparent that while it's fun for about two seconds to drop portals under people and things like that, it quickly just devolves into pure chaos. It lost a lot of the stuff that was really entertaining about Portal, which was puzzle-solving. Cooperative puzzle-solving was just a much more rewarding path."

The actual gameplay of the mode involved moving a ball from one end of a space to the other quickly using portals. The competition would try to stop the player by, for example, trapping them with a portal shot onto the ground. Wolpaw says in practice "it was a hot mess."

Check out the full video above for more details from Valve, including a terrifying look at the Left 4 Dead hand model, and the even more terrifying existence of a Keanu-Reeves-based pinball machine.