Codemasters has acquired the worldwide publishing rights to FUEL from Asobo Studios. FUEL is in development at Asobo in Bordeaux, France, for the PS3, Xbox 360 and PC. The result of over four years of development, FUEL will present players with a no-boundaries playfield over 5,000 square miles in size. FUEL will have players competing across different terrain and executing stunts as they race dozens of two and four-wheeled rides.

FUEL is set in an alternate present in which whole swathes of the globe have been ravaged by the effects of climate change brought on by decades of environmental abuse. Oil prices have rocketed, and yet a new breed of racing junkie takes to the wastelands, pitting their grungy home-tuned vehicles against each other as they compete to win fuel supplies. To triumph means traveling the wastelands to challenge the best; from the tsunami-wrecked Pacific coast through the Nevada wastelands, including the Grand Canyon, snowcapped mountains, thick forests, arid deserts, abandoned lakeside resorts and more.

Bringing this vast, open-ended landscape to life is a dynamic weather system with full day and night transitions, sunshine, rain and everything in between, plus destructive tornados, sandstorms, thunderstorms, lightning strikes and blizzards.

Complete with the ability to go online to explore this massive world and compete in hundreds of multiplayer challenges, FUEL is coming in 2009.

The PC Gaming Alliance today unveiled the key findings from its first Horizons Report, an exclusive research study of the PC gaming industry worldwide. Speaking at the Games Convention Developer’s Conference in Leipzig, PCGA president Randy Stude announced that PC gaming was a 10.7 billion dollar industry in 2007, with retail sales accounting for just 30 percent of total revenues. According to the report, growth was largely driven by online revenues from Asia, the world’s largest market, which is approaching half of total worldwide sales.

Online PC gaming revenue led the way in 2007 with 4.8 billion dollars, almost double the worldwide retail sales numbers for PC games. Digital distribution sales approached 2 billion dollars, while advertising revenues from Web sites, portals and in-game ads accounted for 800 million dollars. Both are expected to grow substantially as major developers and publishers begin to adopt formal strategies to take advantage of new online opportunities.

According to DFC Intelligence, there’s even more room for growth as the broadband market matures: “Broadband-connected PCs are the key driver of growth for PC gaming. DFC Intelligence estimated that by the end of 2007, less than one-third of households in the top 20 markets for games had a high-speed Internet connection. That indicates there’s still plenty of growth to come,” said David Cole, an analyst with DFC Intelligence.

The closed beta for Perfect World Entertainment’s online game, Perfect World International, has launched. Perfect World International is the English-based international version of Perfect World II. The game offers an online world with three unique races and six different classes, all within a free-to-play business model. In addition, it boasts an in-depth character creation interface, quests full of lore and depth, and an extensive selection of customizable fashion items. Fans of PVP will also enjoy Territory Wars, in which guilds compete in battles to dominate certain parts of the world. The victors walk away with a great deal of reward in addition to the added benefits the conquered territory provides. For more, visit www.perfectworld.com.

Futuremark Games Studio has revealed Shattered Horizon, a new game in which players battle to survive in the aftermath of a catastrophic Moon mining accident that throws billions of tons of rocky debris into near-Earth space. In this multiplayer first-person shooter for the PC, teams of players experience realistic zero gravity combat while surrounded by the millions of asteroids now encircling the Earth.

Shattered Horizon puts the player in the spacesuit of a survivor from the Moon mining operation or one of the astronauts trapped on the battered International Space Station. With Earth surrounded by debris, there’s little chance of rescue or return. Desperate battles are fought and control of limited supplies means the difference between survival and death in the cold of space.

The official website is www.shatteredhorizon.com.

But as you can see, the list of names is short. And the interactive entertainment industry is big — and growing bigger. How can we keep up? By leaving the past where it is and focusing on what’s new. That includes concentrating our energies on current generation gaming platforms and the PC. The former will soon include the iPhone.

We need to add some names to our ranks, though. We need volunteers who can sacrifice a few hours each week to share their thoughts via AVault about the games they’re playing. We require five things: that you be at least 18 years of age, that you live in the U.S., that you’re passionate about gaming, that you know what works and what doesn’t work in a game, and that you can write well. In exchange, we’ll send you new games on a regular basis.

Here are the positions we’re looking to fill. If you fit the profile, drop me a line. I’d love to add your name to the best staff of volunteer game reviewers on the Web:

• iPhone game reviewer
• PS3 game reviewer
• News reporter

Best,
David Laprad

Advanced Micro Devices’s best-known business has been struggling lately, but the chip maker’s other unit seems to be keeping pressure on its chief competitor. AMD, which lags Intel in the market for microprocessors, diversified into computer graphics by buying ATI Technologies in 2006. It announced a new graphics card Tuesday that some reviewers are calling the most powerful on the market, helping to solidify the reputation of a business that has fallen behind rival Nvidia in technology and market share.

AMD and Nvidia have long competed in making faster graphics processing units, which are used to render three-dimensional scenes in computer games, but their strategies have recently diverged. While Nvidia has stuck to trying to make the most powerful individual chips, AMD has shifted to designing chips that aren’t quite as fast but consume less energy and cost less to make.

HardOCP.com, a Web site for PC enthusiasts that tested an early version of the AMD card in July, said it has “shown spectacular performance already, and we are really excited as it can get better from here.” AMD is also offering a slightly less sophisticated two-chip card for 399 USD. The company offered another two-chip card in January, and Nvidia responded with one of its own, but it’s not clear how easily Nvidia can do that again with the current design of its GPUs.

Source: Wall Street Journal

The economy has been slow, but the video game industry isn’t suffering so far this summer. Sales figures for July are due out soon, and they’re expected to show that there’s been solid growth for that part of the entertainment industry. Industry trackers credit the rise in sales to titles like EA Sports NCAA Football 09 and Konami’s Metal Gear Solid 4. In addition, a continued strong showing by the three next-gen video game platforms, the Xbox 360, Wii and PS3, is fueling the industry’s growth. One analyst says video game sales so far this year have been extraordinary.

Source: NBC News

The Strogg have finally reached Earth, and the nomadic aliens are hell bent on totally ruining our sweet planet (before we do that ourselves with our Hummers, overpopulation and sexually suggestive song lyrics). It’s a plotline that I wish I could describe further, but the opening cut scene of Strogg ships approaching Earth is the only semblance of storytelling in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It’s a shame, really, as the clichéd, ominous-sounding narrator and the menacing spaceships descending upon Earth really had me yearning to see what other plot devices the developers would employ.

As it turns out, the run-of-the-mill introduction to Quake Wars is only foreshadowing for the gimped game within. I’ve played my fair share of barebones games before, and the cupboards are nearly bare here. Like most games of its ilk, Quake Wars lets players choose from two sides: in this case, the GDF, the humans who are ensuring our way of life (which consists of listening to Big ‘N Rich for most of us); and the Strogg, the dudes who want to take that away.

When you’ve decided whose side you’re on, you’re thrown into an open multiplayer battlefield with 15 other people who may or may not be trying to kill you. It’s a recipe for success, right? You’d think so, but once you scratch the surface of Quake Wars; you’ve pretty much scratched it all. There’s a single-player mode, but trust me, you don’t want to bother, since it’s basically the same as the online mode, only without other players telling you how worthless you are. Where’s the fun in that?

Unfortunately, you’ll find that there really isn’t much in this portion of the game, either. Game modes include campaign, objective and stopwatch. You’ll be hard pressed to figure out the difference between any of them, because they’re all essentially the same. In objective, one team defends objectives, while the other tries to hold the “x” button next to them. In campaign, you do the same thing, only three consecutive times. In stopwatch, you repeat twice, but after the first round the roles are reversed and you must beat the other team’s time.

I have about 70 games on a shelf in my apartment, waiting to be played.  For almost all of those, I have found, reformatted, edited and downloaded walkthroughs from a variety of Web sites (walkthrough authors are notorious for not being able to find their spell-checker buttons).  Many trees have been sacrificed for this gaming asset; the combined pages require six large ring-bound notebooks to hold them all.  I try not to use them, but I’m what I call a Completionist.  When I start a new game, I don’t remove it from my hard drive until one of three things happens:

I finish the game

A fatal bug prevents me from finishing the game

I get stuck and a walkthrough is not available for the game

I used to supplement my walkthroughs with the corresponding god-mode cheats, but I don’t do that much anymore; either my skills have increased or games aren’t as tough as they used to be (the latter being more likely).  But I always go to the greatest of lengths to finish what I start.  And this is often impossible without a walkthrough.

I’ve heard the argument before — using anything but the materials that came with the game is cheating.  My attitude is that designers don’t set out to make games that you can’t finish.  As long as you don’t alter the program to allow you to complete it, anything that you can use to help you get to the end should be acceptable. Is it cheating to ask a friend for help?  How about calling publisher-sponsored hint lines?  Taking this kind of help is just like using a walkthrough, so I say, no.

How about you?

At least one segment of American video gamers isn’t just playing for fun; these “extreme” gamers are playing more than 45 hours per week, according to a new report from market research firm NPD. NPD surveyed more than 20,000 people aged two to 65 (two?) about their game-playing habits. Although these extreme gamers only make up a small percentage of America’s 174 million gamers — three percent according to NPD — that’s still more than 5 million players who are playing as much as they go to work or school. Are people who play this much addicted to video games? So far, doctors have been reluctant to make that diagnosis. Last year, the American Medical Association rejected a measure to classify video game playing as a formal addiction. Instead, it said more research is needed.

Source: ABC News