Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

Aww. Feel the love.

Joyous tidings abound, as Free Radical has found a home; Crytek. The PC game developers, famous for the original Far Cry and the much-lauded Crysis have saved over forty jobs by sealing the deal last night, though it’s not clear whether or not any IPs have been saved along with the company just yet. It’s a wonderful start to a bit of news-hunting, as it would have been a huge shame to see not only a home-country based developer, but a developer of the legendary Goldeneye 64 go down amongst others in the wave of layoffs hitting the videogame industry this year so far. Hopefully we’ll see a few more titles from them yet to regain their position as FPS geniuses after the shockingly disappointing Haze. Fingers crossed for a next-gen TimeSplitters.

Electronic Farce

Sadly, the same cannot be said for Electronic Arts, who are planning to shut 12 different studios, resulting in the redundancies of over a thousand employees. I’m speechless really, if I was working on a development team right now, I’d be horrified to even step foot in my office for fear of getting fired. If studios keep up the rate of layoffs there’s not going to be anyone to lay off. I know the industry employs millions of people, but at a rate of over a thousand a month, they’re making a sizeable dent in their employee turnover.

The Wild Wild West Coast

It seems Rockstar are busy with their next title in a batch of new games, as Red Dead Redemption has been announced for autumn 2009. The title sees a return to a series started on the previous generation of consoles, described by the publisher as a “Western epic, set at the turn of the 20th century when the lawless and chaotic badlands began to give way to the expanding reach of government and the spread of the Industrial Age.”

The game focuses on one John Marston, former outlaw turned cowboy adventurer, allowing you to explore, get into gunfights, ride horses and a variety of other “distractions”, to quote the publisher once again. I’m very much intruigued, it’s been a while since a decent Wild West title, and I’m hoping it’ll provide the same amount of open world freedom and fantastically showboating storyline that GTA IV did earlier last year.

Personal Ads

In a really bizarre turn of events, it seems the crew in charge of Lord of the Rings Online are offering five pound Amazon vouchers to every single gamer who introduces a friend to the MMO. So, presumably, I’d be a hundred pounds sterling up from where I was simply by getting 20 friends to join and start rampaging around Middle Earth yelling “lol” and “ganked” at eachother. This stinks of desperation, guys, and I have no idea how you intend to equate someone purchasing something worth a lot more than a fiver, to then play a game so someone else can squander a voucher the value of half a bucket of KFC. Not that you can buy KFC on Amazon, but that’s not a bad idea. Online games are appearing on their store, so why not chicken?

Prototype No Longer a Prototype

Prototype is shaping up for a June launch date, it would seem, and anticipation couldn’t be higher for the “we modeled our world on the real Manhattan, har har Rockstar” title, involving everything from an inspired freerunning system to Venom-esque morphing of appendages for collosal damage on tanks, monsters and soldiers. Think Assassin’s Creed meets Spiderman 3 with a Brooklyn accent. Sadly, said New Yorker has lost his memory (shock horror) and must therefore figure out his origins. Ignoring my jibe at the uninspired plot obstacle, it seems like a title really worth taking a looking at, and with the ability to disguise yourself as literally anyone, with their looks, voice, powers and other miscellaneous aspects, it seems an interesting blend of stealth and destruction, without the need for 10 hours of cutscenes. I’m looking at you, Kojima.

P.S.: On another note, the new Plot Wholes column is up for this week. You can find it here.