Gaming

After clearing its $70,000 goal more than a week in advance, the A.N.N.E. Kickstarter has concluded at $100,272. The total is enough to unlock three of ANNE's stretch goals, namely Mac & Linux versions, gender swap mode and achievements, and New Game+. While stretch goals for Ouya, PSN/Vita and Wii U versions were not met, creator Moise "Mo" Breton promised in a previous update that these versions will still be made, though it will take longer. Mo, whom we interviewed back in April, also posted an inspirational thank you video on YouTube, which retells the whole experience and, more importantly, heavily features his adorable children. "From now on, it's all about making the game," said Mo, thanking supporters for allowing him to develop full-time. He is planning to make monthly updates throughout development. ANNE is planned to launch in early to mid 2014.A.N.N.E. Kickstarter concludes at over $100,000 originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 22 May 2013 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

Time is a meaningless construct. A philosophically confusing frame that demeans our very existence when we acknowledge it. Destroy your clocks and watches, they are prisons, trapping you in a mental cells! Stop being tools of the elite chronologistia, and allow yourself to be free. Let’s not consider the seconds ticking off, falling like dandruff on the shoulder of life; the minutes that build up and up and up until the dam breaks and we all get covered in sticky time juice; the hours that segment our day but lazily repeat, not even having the common decency to go up to 24; the days that.. ooh, today’s Wednesday! That means Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger is out! Hooray for time and dates. And hooray for acknowledging Call Of Juarez: Juarez’s launch with a new trailer on that very day! There’s 4 minutes of footage, which covers everything that has been said about the game and finally demonstrates the unreliable narrator with guns schtick. It is below. (more…)

Does today's new cinematic Company of Heroes 2 trailer in any way inform you of how good the game will be? Not in the least. Does it give you a pleasant two minutes of watching something pretty? Oh absolutely! In that spirit, here, brighten up your morning with a miserable look at the trials and tribulations of a Red Army soldier.One imagines this could be the intro cinematic, setting up the single-player campaign. It seems to be in-engine, or at least uses actual game assets, and sets up a war-spanning framing narrative.Company of Heroes 2 rolls onto PC on June 25, developed by Relic and published by Sega.

Unity Empowers Games Industry with Free Mobile Publishing Tools Forget everything else going on this week. The BIGGEST STORY in gaming is probably this: Unity Technologies has made its basic mobile game development tools available for free. Indie developers and small studios rejoice! Unity Technologies, provider of the Unity multi-platform engine and development tools, is pushing the democratization of game development further than ever… Unity’s gigantic indie developer community can publish their games and apps to iOS and Android in the build menu. Publishing options for additional supported mobile platforms, such as BlackBerry and Windows Phone 8, will be included at no additional cost once they are released. Unity, the most adopted game engine, holds a central place in the videogame industry for driving the explosive growth in independent studios. By making basic add-ons tools completely free that previously cost $800, Unity is widening the path for developers looking to take steps towards creative and fiscal freedom. Individual developers and small studios using the free version of Unity can commercialize their games without buying licenses or sharing their revenues with Unity. That’s huge. Anything that gives more power to independent game designers is something that is helping to shape the future of gaming. As a new console generation lurches into view, its ugly fits and starts lain bare for all the world to see, the real excitement in gaming – and the revolution that’s already underway – is the rise of the indie scene. As mobile devices continue spread access to quality, affordable, unique gameplay experiences, free Unity dev tools will only help new voices be heard and new visions be seen. Am I sounding poetic? That’s because I am, unabashedly, excited by this development! I’ve played Unity-developed games. You’ve probably done so, too. Come on. Unity Technologies CEO David Helgason says they’ve wanted to make Unity free for mobile – just as they did for web and desktop computers – for some time. “Mobile games development is possibly the most dynamic and exciting industry in the world, and it’s an honor to be able to help so many developers be so successful in fulfilling their visions and in building their businesses,” he continues. Unity has enabled the creation of extremely nice-looking games of all kinds, and the “deep and intuitive editor for fast-paced development, and ability to deploy across a multitude of mobile platforms” makes it very popular among developers. Unity Technologies is the creator of Unity, a flexible and high-performance development platform used to make creative and intelligent interactive 3D and 2D experiences. The “author once, deploy everywhere” capability ensures developers can publish to all of the most popular platforms. Unity Technologies boasts a thriving community of over 1.8 million developers including large publishers, indie studios, students and hobbyists. To remain at the forefront of innovation, Unity Technologies tirelessly re-invests in its award-winning 3D development tools and its democratization initiatives, such as the Asset Store digital content marketplace and Union game distribution service. In 2012, Game Developer Magazine conducted a survey that found 53% of mobile developers were using Unity and Apple named 17 Unity-authored mobile titles to their “Best of” awards including The Room which was named Game of the Year on iPad. You can learn more at Unity3D.com. Now, get going and make something awesome.

14.5 million players have killed 3.3 trillion monsters in Diablo 3, Blizzard has revealed in a whopping great infographic released as part of the action-RPG's first birthday festivities. Yet only 33% of them have even beaten Normal difficulty, which is arguably the point where it starts to get interesting, and a measly 6% cleared Inferno. If you like numbers, big numbers, and lots of them, it's a fascinating look.Demon Hunter is the most popular class in Normal mode, the infographic reveals, with some 13.5 million of the rogues running around Sanctuary. In Hardcore, however, the threat of permadeath sees the hardy Barbarian coming first, with 1.6 million out there tanking hordes. Combining the two modes, Demon Hunter still narrowly comes out on top in total.67.1 million characters have been created worldwide, which is 127 per minute on average. Perhaps surprisingly, 9% of those are Hardcore; it's nice to know one in 10 isn't a baby.Do bear in mind that these statistics cover all Diablo 3 accounts, including the Starter Edition demo and players in LAN cafés. And that they're at least two days old now.A staggering 648,510,803,462,686 gold pieces are in circulation, and I don't want to say something snide about duping gold but I'm defusing the joke for other people, see.I'm going to stop repeating numbers now, because you're perfectly able to read them yourself.I mean, you don't need me to reword everything for you, do you?

NetherRealm's Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition will be arriving on PC July 3rd, it includes the original game and all DLC. Click the headline to read the press release.

Xbox One will not have separate sections for indie or download-only games, such as Xbox Live Indie Games and Xbox Live Arcade on the 360 - instead, Microsoft's new console will feature games, and "just games," Microsoft Corporate Vice President Phil Harrison told Eurogamer. "In the past we had retail games which came on disc, we had Xbox Live Arcade and we had Indie Games, and they had their own discrete channels or discrete silos," Harrison said. "With Xbox One and the new marketplace, they're games. We don't make a distinction between whether a game is a 50-hour RPG epic or whether it is a puzzle game or whether it is something that fits halfway between the two." In this new approach, indie games, AAA games and everything in-between will co-exist in the same "Games" marketplace. Harrison said this will solve discoverability problems that indie games face today, and Microsoft will still be able to highlight titles that it thinks players should pay attention to. "We don't give up the ability to put a spotlight on the products that we think are going to be exciting to our user base, but in addition to that, what your friends are playing, what other people think is hot in your area, your country, your continent, will propagate up the most interesting and exciting games," Harrison said. The Xbox One "Games" tab will feature game recommendations and trends, and will have catalog and search functions. The entire system is a blend of curated and popular games, Harrison said. Microsoft will maintain its current strategy with indie developers, meaning indies won't be able to self-publish their games on Xbox One, as they can on PS3, Vita, Wii U, Steam, and eventually, the PS4.Xbox One marketplace won't have separate XBLA, XBLIG channels originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 22 May 2013 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Permalink | Email this | Comments

Man of Steel has dropped another massive montage of intense of action that it calls a "trailer." Clearly, Henry Cavill's Superman is destined to ...Continue reading Man Of Steel: Action-Packed New Trailer With Plenty Of Zod Smack Talk

Can you guess which games each of these icons represent? I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty tired of seeing the bulky, medical-blue 'Like' button on every website and, increasingly, coffee shops and other random locations boasting their profile pages and begging for interest. But if they were video game-themed, like those above, they might be more fun and less of an eyesore. Maybe Facebook could take some cues from the artist, Lucas Felipe. Now you just have to guess which icon matches which game, using our nifty image annotation feature. (via Dotcore) To contact the author of this post, write to tina@kotaku.com or find her on Twitter at @tinaamini.

Now that the Xbox One has been revealed, it’s time to begin speaking about when the device will actually be released to the market. This week the Xbox One (code-named Durango or otherwise Xbox 720) was shown with several details including those surrounding the device’s innards, but as far as official word of its real Read The Full Story