Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As reported earlier-yesterday, later-yesterday lead to the unveiling of Call of Duty: Black Ops on gametrailers. Very fast flashing imagery, so be warned strobe-fearers and be excited obsessive-panel-pausers. Also, the release date is on the site. 9th of November, this year. So – er – the trailer, yes? It follows.
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See this axe? Yes, the imaginary one I’m holding, made from laserbeams and impossible fury. Well, I’m going to grind it.

I quite like Transformers. Ergo, I am quite looking forward to Transformers: War For Cybertron. One of the Transformers I most quite like is Shockwave. Shockwave is a playable character in War For Cybertron – but only if the game is pre-ordered from Gamestop. Or, if you’re all goody two-shoes and want famed Autobot Jazz, you can only play as him if you pre-order the game from Best Buy. There’s also Demolisher if you get it from Amazon, but whatever.

Basically: aaaaaaaargh. Angrytank, roll out.
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Well, 10 years, which is BFF! in corporate terms. News broke of this yesterday, with the aforementioned 10-year publication agreement to bring Bungie’s next game universe to market. Bungie will keep intellectual property rights and remain independent. Obviously, this is enormous industry news, and there’s no real details yet – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some at E3 – but this is relevant for one key reason. This is a multi-format deal. And something which hasn’t been mentioned explicitly yet… well, the PC (and the Mac, for that matter, given Bungie’s roots) are other formats. It’d be good to have Bungie back with us. Question, is what are they doing? What would you like them to do? The MMO angle is brought up repeatedly, certainly. Personally, I’d be a little disappointed if they split from Microsoft just to make another Sci-fi universe…

In other notes, analysts are reaching new levels of incisiveness with this one.

News breaks that the latest Call of Duty game will be unveiled tonight on Gametrailers. It’s called Call of Duty: Vietnam, it’s being made by Treyarch and – er – that’s it. Vietnam based games have… well, they’ve traditionally not fared as well as other operational theatres. You have to kind of feel sorry for Treyarch operating under a double shadow – both the continuing high-level corporate drama of The Infinity Ward Wars and having to try and make a game that actually works out of a setting which has proved incredibly awkward to translate. I have to wish them luck, and hope they can do something to skew the numbers on the traditional “In World War II the average mark of the combat game was 82%… it Vietnam it was 49%” style gags. Which sounds like a cue for a song…

UPDATE: Except the news which break has broken! See here.
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A while back, on a slow news day, I wrote a spoof story about there being only one man left at Infinity Ward. I’m started to wonder if it was prophecy. The Modern Warfare developers are rapidly running out of employees as more leave, many to join Respawn Entertainment, the new studio started up by former Infinity Ward top dogs, Vince Zampella and Jason West. The total number of IW employees who have now jumped ship or been pushed, at the time of writing, is 28. That leaves 75 remaining. And now things are getting even more strange, with 38 Infinity Warders, calling themselves the Infinity Ward Employee Group, filing a lawsuit against Activision for up to $125 million.

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No, the game, not the bizarre nerd rapture. And anyway, it’s a manshooter news day, alright. Raven’s time-bending shooter, Singularity – which I maintain should have been called TIME GLOVE! – is actually being released in 2010. In fact, we can be more precise still: it’s coming out on June 29th. And there’s a new trailer, which is around here somewhere… Blimey, it actually looks moderately interesting. Some of the time-based transformations are pretty impressive and… well, if Raven can make a full game out of them then we might just be in for a treat. Also, I want to fight people by making them old.
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The next True Crime game is bound for PC and this time it knows Kung Fu. The reason for this is that it’s going to be set in Hong Kong, where apparently people are just as adept with their feet as with guns (see illustrative image). Once again it’s an open world tale of undercover police work and horrible gangsterism in the real world. 2010’s not a bad year for sandbox criminality then, even without a GTA game… “We tried to give the franchise a reboot and take a more mature slant,” producer Jeff O’Connell told peerless news-trumpeter, VG247. “In doing that, to get the background information we needed, one of the writers gained the trust of an ex-Triad to make the experience more authentic.” Hmm. For some reason the words “mature” and “immature” both now have the same meaning in my head. Anyway, first trailer below.
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You’ll probably have already picked up on the ongoing fallout from Tuesday’s Activision-Infinity Ward oh-so-modern warfare, but as the talking point du jour we should probably cover it. The story so far: Infinity Ward heads Vince Zampella and Jason West didn’t turn up to work after a meeting with the developer’s owner Activision – but some hired muscle did. Shortly afterwards, Activision filed suit against the pair for “breaches of contract and insubordination”, a charge that is yet to be explained. Since then, Zampella and West have filed right back at ‘em, with accusations of withheld royalties and “Orwellian moves” to construct a case for their dismissal. Activision have duly refuted the claims, but it’s increasingly looking like this stems from a tussle for control of the Call of Duty and Modern Warfare franchises. Oh, why can’t more happy things happen in the videogame industry?
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This is, I suspect, only the start of a story which is going to grow and grow. G4 broke the rumour yesterday that “a bunch of bouncer types” had showed up at Infinity Ward, following the Infinity Ward heads Vince Zampella and Jason West’s reported meeting with Activision in the morning – which they hadn’t returned from. Kotaku picked up that Jason West’s facebook account claimed to be drinking and no-longer employed. G4 uncovers that morning Activision had an SEC filing stating investigation into “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward.” And now VG247 are reporting rumours that unpaid royalties to Infinity Ward was part of the cause of stress. Oh – and Tim Schafer says the best one liner about the whole thing.

Really, all we’ve got right now is theories. Though, like Rock8man at Qt3, Bobby Kotick’s hailing of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” does tend to leap worryingly easily to mind.

Goodbye The Silver Lining. Our culture is formed by the sharing of ideas. Throughout history, for millennia, every piece of art, music, literature and entertainment has been the result of a worldwide collaboration. It’s been an astonishing act of creative evolution, the most vibrant and extraordinary gene pool of imagination and inspiration, from which all were free to draw and create. It has been exceptional, and in the last 50 to 100 years it has come to an end.

The tragedy of the abuse and misuse of intellectual property and copyright cannot be counted. After centuries of sharing, we have allowed a “MINE!” tag to be affixed to every thought, string of notes, doodle on a page, or merest whim. We have committed a grotesque cultural suicide. And the extent to which this has reached should be a parody. We have now allowed ourselves to be in the situation where art museums ban sketching – something that should surely make anyone whose understanding of art history goes beyond yesterday scream in fear. And it exists in our world of gaming in a similarly berserk form. And so it is that Activision has closed down work on not-for-profit fan creation The Silver Lining.

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