Great games blog

Game developer Valve’s co-founder Gabe Newell talked in a recent interview about a good place for retro games nowadays, their online game download service Steam. Over 13 million Steam users seem to agree. To quote Mr. Newell’s own impression:

“Retail doesn’t know how to deal with those games. On Steam there’s no shelf-space restriction. It’s great because they’re a bunch of old, orphaned games. They’re games I want to play. The day we turned on the Team Fortress 2 beta I was sat in my office playing Quake 1, saying, “Hey, this is great!” I’d never had been able to find my original Quake discs, they are long, long gone. But it shows up on Steam and I can start playing.”

When Mr. Newell asked if he expects more retro games to show up, he gives the surprising answer that he wants every game ever made on Steam!

Question: And you expect more old games to show up?
Answer: Oh yeah, I expect we’ll go back in time and eventually pretty much every game that’s ever been available will be on there 24/7.

Question: Old LucasArts games?
Answer: Sure, those are some great games. I mean there are some real problems, where the waters are muddied and companies have gone out of business. That makes things difficult.
(more…)

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Id Software recently announced they’ve started a new division, called id Mobile, with which they will develop mobile versions of their classic games like Quake Arena and Wolfenstein, as well as a sequel to the cellphone game hit, Doom RPG. This is no surprise since Doom RPG for cellphones has sold more than 1 million copies. Sales of last year’s Orcs & Elves have topped 400,000. Id Software co-founder John Carmack mentioned last week they released a Nintendo DS version of Orcs & Elves, and Orcs & Elves II will go on sale for cellphones in December. Previously Carmack indicated Quake DS and Doom RPG were also underway for the Nintendo DS. The company is also working on unannounced new franchises and ideally sees four releases happening each year.

Both the action games Doom RPG and Orcs & Elves were co-developed by id with Fountainhead Entertainment, a company founded by Carmack’s wife, Katherine Anna Kang. A former director of business development at id, she will now serve also as id Mobile’s president.

“The whole reason we are in the mobile arena now is I was just really appalled at how bad (cellphone games) were,” Carmack says. “We’re already making profit on 2 million units of games (sold), but we are kind of holding out this hope there might be a breakout moment when the industry gets five to 10 times larger.” So far analysts are predicting the mobile games industry will double from $5 billion this year to $10 billion worldwide by 2009. — Quotes from USAtoday

While John Carmack has expressed interest in developing on cellphones, DS, PSP and maybe Wii. Don’t expect id Mobile to release games on Apple’s portable platforms though, for the iPod and iPhone apparently “the honest truth right now is that Apple’s not exactly hugely supportive of this. When they finally allowed games to be put on the iPod… in many ways it’s one of the worst environments to develop games for.”

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Enemy Territory: Quake Wars has gotten a final release date of October 2nd in North America and September 28th in Europe and Australia.

Quake Wars is one of the most anticipated upcoming shooters this holiday season and was first revealed at E3 2005, it has missed both of it’s previous release dates but has now gone gold at the factory and will make this date for sure.

The PC version is the only one coming this holiday so far, the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions have been pushed back to unspecified date.

Set before the events of Quake II, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars drops players in the middle of the beastly Strogg’s initial invasion, when they went head-to-head with the Global Defense Force. Players can join either side as one of five character classes and play online or offline with the help of computer-controlled teammates and opponents. The game also lets players grow their characters over time and offers submissions to help new players contribute to the battle without needing to understand the big picture.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars is a rare entry in the Quake series, as it carries a rating of T for Teen. The only other installment to avoid an M for Mature rating was the Sega Saturn version of the original Quake, which was also bestowed a T rating. - Via GameSpot