News Snatch: Rain, Splinter Cell: Blacklist And Gamescom Gossip

Greetings one and all, come in and take a seat, plenty of room for everyone. We begin with a rather daring simulation of the young ladies from Essex, at least that’s what I presume Ms Germinator is about.

Super Stardust Delta and Dead Nation developer Housemarque will be at Gamescom, hopefully to reveal their first PlayStation 4 game.

Ubisoft will also be attending and will reveal yet another new IP for next gen consoles, they are rather good at keeping secrets so we have no idea what it could be.

Ubisoft have released the first fifteen minutes of Splinter Cell: Blacklist. The plot follows on from the events of Splinter Cell: Conviction and finds Patricia Caldwell, the President of the United States, shutting down the corrupt Third Echelon and replacing it with a new special operations and counter-terrorism unit called Fourth Echelon.

I bet she spent ages thinking up that name.

Another retailer has listed Injustice: Gods Among Us GOTY Edition for PlayStation Vita. Mortal Kombat is one of the best games on the handheld so let’s hope for an announcement at Gamescom.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the triumphant return of one of our favourite industry moguls, please be upstanding for Mr. Robert Kotick! Yes, they’ve let him out of his cage to speak to the public, albeit just to investors.

“My sense is consumers are going to be excited about this hardware and I think over the long-term that it will probably be as long as the current cycle,” said Bob. “I think you’re going to see new kinds of software that has not been available in this current generation. I’m seeing things we’re working on and developing that we’ve never been able to do before and I think we’ll excite audiences in ways that they haven’t seen before.”

Time for another video, they seem to be pouring in to my inbox today, a veritable torrent of filmic delights and the next one is for Rain.

See what I did there?

id Software technical director John Carmack has given his QuakeCon 2013 keynote speech has revealed that Doom 3 was heading to PlayStation Vita but due to the limited sales of the console the project was cancelled. He also spoke of home consoles in general and was less than impressed with Kinect.

“I think Kinect still has some fundamental limitations with the latency and frame rate on it. Interacting with it is still … when you interact with Kinect, some of the standard interactions — position and hold, waiting for different things — it’s fundamentally a poor interaction.”

“Kinect is sort of like a zero button mouse with a lot of latency on it.”

Ouch.

Id co-founder Tim Willits has also expressed and interest in returning to the Rage universe.

“I’m proud of what we did, I’m proud of the universe that we built. The franchise is not dead, we’re not doing anything immediately with it, but when I designed the universe, I designed it in such a way that it would be easy to step back into.

Drive Club developers Evolution Studios have revealed they were specifically asked by Sony to create a new IP for the launch of the PlayStation 4.

“When we were asked a couple of years ago to come up with another new IP for a console launch, we knew straightaway which idea to go with,” explained studio game director, Matt Southern. “We thought, OK, we’ve had this concept simmering for a number of years, it felt like the time was right because networked gaming had matured. Within Sony, we were contributing to a conversation about the pillars of PS4, about how important it would be to make games accessible, social and connected. It all lined up.”

As part of YouTube’s Geek Week four of YouTube’s most influential gamers El Rubius (Spain), Callux (UK), KSI (UK) and Ali A (UK) will attempt to break numerous gaming world records.

The four gamers have a combined YouTube audience of over 8 million and there will be live streaming of the event which begins on Thursday from 17:00hrs, tickle this link around that time to watch the action.

And Finally, YouTube’s Geek Week has also disgorged a new episode of classic kids LARP, Knightmare, complete with Treguard. I was assuming they would have given the Knightmare game engine  a graphical upgrade but apparently not.