Welcome to Beyond Co-Op, a weekly piece that talks about industry stories that may or may not be related to co-op gaming.
The stories for this week:
- Goodbye Bizarre Creations
- Telltale to Continue the Awesome: King's Quest Reboot Coming
- Danger Close Working on Medal of Honor 2
- inFAMOUS 2 Coming June 7, First Day of E3 Proper
- Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm Duke It Out This Week
Goodbye Bizarre Creations
Yesterday Bizarre Creations sadly closed their doors. I’m very surprised a company like Microsoft did not swoop in and purchase them. Yes, they already have Turn 10 that makes racing games, but Bizarre wasn’t just about racing games. There was the awesome Geometry Wars games and they had done a good job moving into third-person action games with James Bond 007: Blood Stone. It wasn’t the best Bond game ever made, but it was certainly competent.
Below is a fantastic farewell from Bizarre. You will be missed Bizarre Creations, but I also think a lot of your staff is going to be picked up quite quickly. I only hope some company was just waiting for the company to close down so they could hire on some or all of the workers for a far less price than buying the whole of the company. At least that is what I hope.
Source: me
Telltale to Continue the Awesome: King's Quest Reboot Coming
Along with making a new Monkey Island episodic game and bringing Back to the Future back into the gaming universe, Telltale also announced they will be rebooting the King’s Quest franchise and that details will come at E3 this year. No word on whether Activision sold the rights to the game, are going to be producers on the game or anything. Can I hold out hope that they do the same thing with old Sierra series like Space Quest, Police Quest, Quest for Glory and many others?
Source: Joystiq
Danger Close Working on Medal of Honor 2
I thought the Medal of Honor game that came out last October was pretty good, although I don’t feel it was up there with either DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 or Treyarch’s Call of Duty: Black Ops. Danger Close has announced that they are working on Medal of Honor 2. No word on when it will be due, whether DICE is working on the multiplayer aspect or anything. The DICE thing would be really interesting since it seems they have stopped development on anything they were working on except for Battlefield 3
Source: Medal of Honor Homepage
inFAMOUS 2 Coming June 7, First Day of E3 Proper
I loved the first inFAMOUS game and think it will be interesting to see what Sucker Punch does with the new one. Sony announced that the game would be released on June 7th which also happens to be the opening of E3 in Los Angeles proper. Now, there have been times in the past where a high-profile game comes out while E3 is going on and it ends up being a bad one. I certainly hope this is not the case here. The one bright spot is that Sony’s press conference will have happened and maybe they’ll show off a lot of it. Usually a game like this gets sent to reviewers early, but if it isn’t that could be a bad sign. Let’s hope not.
Source: me
Killzone 3 and Bulletstorm Duke It Out This Week
Relatively well-marketed or established games come out this week. Killzone 3 with its Move-capability and 3D possibilities come exclusively to the PS3. Early reviews have been generally good, but it sounds like it may be a step down from Killzone 2 in overall scope and execution. Epic via People Can Fly and distributed by EA bring out Bulletstorm this week. I think it is quite funny that most are pinning this game on Epic when really it is People Can Fly that worked on it. Should be interesting to see if the game is good or not, I’ll definitely wait for reviews unless EA is kind enough to send me a copy.
Source: me