There are certain genres that some people think don’t belong on consoles. One of those genres used to be first-person shooters, until Rare proved the naysayers wrong with GoldenEye for the Nintendo 64. Now, it’s the real-time strategy genre that’s struggling. Games like EA’s The Battle for Middle Earth and Command & Conquer 3 have given RTS games on a console a bad rap, and deservedly so. But Ubisoft thinks they can change the minds of gamers with Tom Clancy: EndWar.

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Shorah,
Who wants more rearrange-able runes and Sumerian names with apostrophes in them?

Pulled around between Ubisoft, Cyan Worlds, and Gametap, Myst Online: Uru Live has been given and deprived of life more than once over the past few years. The most recent development: Myst Online is coming back, currently going by the name “Myst Online: Restoration Experiment.” With their work force diminished, Cyan Worlds told the Myst explorers that “the roadmap does not involve any new content from Cyan at this time. The plan is to start to move the content creation - the ‘Art’ - to you.”

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Brothers Rand and Robyn Miller, as we know, dreamed up the mythos of Myst. But how much was only a dream? The adventurous duo loved trekking through the woods and along the coasts of the Pacific Northwest. Even the Cyan Worlds headquarters, located in Spokane, WA, sits between the forested foothills of two mountain ranges.

Last week, I somehow found myself trudging along a path of moss-splotched pieces of wood winding through the forests of the Olympic Peninsula, rimmed with sixty miles of undeveloped coastline. I remembered what I’d heard over the dinner table the day before, confirmed by the blogs of strangers: this place inspired Myst.

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Most Americans have probably done it at work or while they were in the bathroom at least once. Heck, I know a guy who got fired from his job because of it, and another who does it at least once a week on the throne. But Americans aren’t the only ones killing time at work or in more…private areas, by playing video games. Quite a few of our northern neighbors in Canada also like to answer two calls at once.

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Far Cry and Crysis, both developed by Crytek, are growing up and parting ways. Far Cry 2 is now being developed by Ubisoft Montreal, while Crysis Warhead is remaining with Crytek and will be the first game released from Crytek’s Budapest studio. Each game will run on different engines: Far Cry 2 will run on a Ubisoft-developed engine called Dunia, which means “earth” in many languages. Crysis Warhead, on the other hand, will run on a revised CryEngine 2, and will be much more lenient on system requirements. The graphics for both games are stunning, but graphics aren’t everything these days.

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You know those warnings that pop up before many console games and are on the first page of nearly every video game manual? It’s about four paragraphs long and talks about photosensitive seizures. The warning you have probably scanned once or twice and then decided it wasn’t interesting enough to actually read. Well, since last May, a mother in Britain has been going after the British Parliament to change the law to force manufacturers to test if their games induce seizures, as opposed to simply displaying this sort of “voluntary warning.”

Gaye Herford, a mother of four, began her quest after her 10-year old son had a seizure while playing Ubisoft’s Rayman Raving Rabbids on his Wii. She did not know that video games could cause epileptic seizures and that children and teenagers are especially susceptible to such fits.

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According to Pauline Jacquey, executive producer of Games for Everyone, Ubisoft is developing games not just for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, but also for the iPhone and iTouch. In an interview with CasualGaming.biz, Jacquey said “At the minute, we’re only showing DS and Wii games, but we’ll be working on all other platforms. We don’t want to keep it too narrow.”
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Ubisoft, one of the world’s most prolific video game publishers, announced last month that it has acquired Gameloft’s development studio in Pune, India. The studio, established at the end of 2006, currently has a team of 120 developers and testers, with a goal of 200 within 12 months and 500 “in the coming years.” They will be concentrating on porting Ubi’s titles to handhelds and strengthening their testing teams.

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