David Perry, creator of the cloud streaming games service Gaikai, recently spoke on the tech to VG247 while at the Game Developers Conference Online Games Summit. While a more publisher-centric model of cloud streaming, allowing direct marketing of available titles through a straight publisher-to-consumer model, many inevitable place Gaikai as the sole rival to the E3-launched OnLive. The service is now fully complete, and expected to launch this December in time for the Holiday season.
Activision has confirmed today that one of the two remaining development teams at its wholly-owned subsidiary Raven Software has been laid off. In August 2009, another development team at Raven Software was already let go. With the current workforce reduction, only a single team of developers remains at the studio. Several unnamed sources have told Kotaku, that this remaining team focus its attention on developing downloadable content. Explaining the move, Activision stated that “with the recent completion of Singularity, Raven Software is realigning its workforce to better reflect the studio’s upcoming slate.”
Raven Software was founded in 1990 by Brain and Steve Raffel, who still remain with the studio. In 1997, the studio was acquired by Activsion. Games developed by Raven Software include Shadowcaster, the Heretic and Hexen series, the original two installments in the Soldier of Fortune franchise, Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, and two installments in the Star Wars: Jedi Knight series. This generation, the studio developed Quake 4, Wolfenstein, and Singularity, as well as multiple X-Men related games.
Konami and Marvel Entertainment have announced that they are currently preparing an 18-year old arcade classic for re-release on Playstation Network and the Xbox Live Arcade. X-Men Arcade, as this re-release is known, was originally released for arcade cabinets in 1992 and was simply known as “X-Men“.
The game features a set of six X-Men, including Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Colossus, and Dazzler, facing off against Magneto and members of his Brotherhood of Mutants in an attempt to rescue Professor X and Kitty Pryde. X-Men Arcade will feature upgraded visuals, leaderboards, and 4-player local cooperative play, as well as 6-player online drop in/drop out coop.
Konami, the original developer of the game, has not revealed pricing information or a release date for the game. However, it was indicated that the game would be released at some point in the current year. The port is being handled by Backbone Entertainment, which previously ported games such as Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 to current-generation consoles.
A set of screenshots of X-Men Arcade is included after the jump. (more…)