Archive for the ‘Microsoft’ tag
Chillingo Acquired by EA for $20 Million Dollars [Updated x2]
The Wall Street Journal's All Things Digital regarding a potential acquisition of Chillingo by the hand of gaming giant EA. Neither company needs any kind of introduction around here, and it's really amazing to see all these huge multi-million dollar deals flying around lately over iPhone games. Price estimates of the purchase range from $80 million to $200 million, and there apparently are a number of companies interested in Chillingo ranging from DeNA, Activision, Gameloft, and oddly enough, even Microsoft's gaming unit.
We're waiting for comment from both Chillingo and EA.
Update: is reporting the sale price to be $20 million, but the full details have yet to be made public.
Update 2: We just heard from Chris Byatte, General Manager (former President) of Chillingo and got a brief comment on the buyout. In his words, "The acquisition will allow us to marry our expertise in identifying and cultivating the ideas of independent developers with the publishing power and reach of EA mobile. It is going to be BIG!"
We expect to get more details soon, as both Chillingo and EA seem to be inundated with requests currently. An official press release explaining the acquisition can't be too far off.
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Yoot Saito’s ‘The Tower iPad’ (SimTower Sequel?) Coming Soon
It seems that even though Apple rejected Yoot Saito's first attempt at an App Store game for being "unpleasant", Saito is ready for another go, but this time for the iPad. According to sketchy information from his blog in poorly machine translated Japanese, it appears The Tower iPad is coming soon.
Yoot Saito is known for innovative game design. His first major game was and it's sequel which was later remade for Gameboy Advance, and the Nintendo DS. Wikipedia describes the original SimTower:
SimTower: The Vertical Empire is a construction and management simulation computer game developed by OPeNBooK Co., Ltd. and published by Maxis for the Microsoft Windows and Mac OS 7 operating systems. It was released in November 1994 in the United States. The game allows players to build and manage a tower and decide what facilities to place in it, in order to ultimately build a five-star tower. Random events take place during play, such as terrorist acts that the player must respond to immediately.
Here's a video for The Tower DS (in Japanese):
And that's all we know so far. We'll keep an eye out for it, and hopefully we'll see an international (not just Japan) release.
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Got Gyroscope Envy? The ‘Perspectiverse Engine’ Might Just Cure It.
With the release of the iPhone 4 less than a week away, many readers are surely counting down the days until they can call Apple's most powerful pocketable device their own. The iPhone 4 boasts hardware enhancements that will allow for more sophisticated applications of every sort — but especially games. Its "Retina display" packs four times as many pixels as the current iPhone into a display of the same physical size, yielding a 326 pixels-per-inch, razor sharp display that makes jaggies a thing of the past. The 1GHz Apple A4 processor, which is currently used in the iPad, will allow for more complex games with improved physics and AI. And, finally, there's the gyroscope which will allow for incredibly accurate in-game motion tracking.
During the WWDC 2010 keynote, we saw Steve Jobs demonstrate the new iPhone's gyroscopic capabilities in a Jenga-like demo app. It was an impressive display of motion-tracking tech that went beyond what we had previously seen from the iPhone. After all, you need a gyroscope to pull off that kind of control, right?
Developer Vishal Srivastava of might beg to differ.
As , Srivastava, formerly with Microsoft, has created what he calls the "Perspectiverse Engine" that allows the iPhone 3GS and iPad to track motion in a fashion that yields seemingly impossible results from a device lacking actual gyroscope hardware. His system allows the user to manipulate their body in the physical world and see corresponding motion in the virtual world, making the iPhone or iPad feel quite like a window into that world.
According to the developer,
[The engine] uses a combination of device sensors to constantly align the game world with the real world. No matter how you orient your phone, north in the game universe is the same as north in the real world, south is south, up is up, down is down, and so forth. This allows you to interact with that game universe as if you were in it.
And, I can tell you, it works far better than you're probably guessing. If you've got an iPhone 3GS or an iPad, you can give it a try right now with Srivastava's [App Store], a Universal entertainment title that allows you to paint a 3D easter egg by moving around it in virtual space. (And it's on sale for $0.99 through this weekend.) The effect, even in this rather basic application, is pretty amazing.
The developer will soon be releasing a rather more interesting game title called Gyromaniac (previously known as Colonoscapade) in which you move your body around in order to find your way through a human colon and various other internal systems. A demonstration video shows the app in action (and gives one much appreciation for the trials of poor ).
Srivastava began work on his Perspectiverse Engine long before we knew that the iPhone 4 would sport a gyroscope (it was put together last July, in fact). So, is he daunted by the news that came in the iPhone 4 unveiling? Not at all. The physical gyroscope will improve the accuracy of his engine on new hardware, while on supported devices which lack a gyroscope, the engine will do its thing to simulate one.
And for other developers that like what they see in this system, Srivastava tells us that he is definitely open to the possibility of licensing the technology for use in others' apps, but his first order of business is to build a range of apps on top of the engine that showcase its capabilities on current hardware.
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