One of the things that videogame fanatics look forward to on the release of new games is the free demo. However, Cevat Yerli who is known as the CEO of Crytek is offering his views on these traditional free game demos. He says that he admires popular videogame company EA for charging consumers for pre-released games.

According to Yerli, the videogame industry is perhaps the only industry that offers the luxury of a free demo—a luxury that cannot be found in other fields, such as film. He says that the tradition of free demos has been around for so long and this is why people are protesting when game developers plan to scrap it.

Yerli admits that this plan to do without game demos has to have a better explanation if companies do not wish to meet protesting gamers. For instance, a lot of gamers have already expressed their belief that EA is only out to make profits off gamers with their paid demos. Yerli says that with the ceasing of free demos, companies will have a better chance of getting back their investment without taking advantage of gamers.

These statements by Yerli are leaving many people wondering whether we will be seeing a free demo of Crysis 2, an issue to which Yerli replies that the team has yet to make this decision.

South Korea is a country known for its intense gaming industry. This is why when news leaked out about a possible E-sports scandal, you can bet that many of the citizens took serious notice. A report is surfacing about how certain gamers are involved in illegal betting and that some gaming competitions are being rigged.

The suspected gamers are yet to be named but A-list gamers such as Ma Jae Yoon, more popularly known as sAviOr, is expressing his disappointment with the scandal.

According to the reports, some of the competitors have been losing their matches on purpose and also leaking their own team’s strategies to various gambling organizations. Those who have been confirmed to have committed serious gaming crimes are being banned from the industry while those under investigation are undergoing intense investigation.

Apparently, the shenanigans began in 2006 when game players started being contacted and asked about rigging their matches. The perpetrators behind the cheating are none other than employees from the industry—players, coaches, match announcers—most of them already retired.

The organizers of the E-sports attempted to solve the problem but this only led to the illegal operations thriving underground. There are even reports that claim how the official organizers considered working side by side with these illegal gamblers.

Currently, a list of popular gamers continues to be investigated.

The Nintendo DS game Mean Girls was recently released but gamers, among many audiences, noticed something missing in the cover of the Lindsay Lohan-starrer movie. And that is the absence of, well, Lindsay Lohan herself.

The game box only featured the three other mean girls which were Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert. According to Samit who is part of the team behind the Mean Girls videogame, Lohan was not technically one of the Mean Girls, or The Plastics as they were called in the movie. Samit apparently did not give a hoot whatsoever if Lohan was the movie’s main character or biggest name for that matter.

Some are seeing Lohan’s elimination from the game as another bump in her already very bumpy career. As of late, the actress has been garnering fame for her hard-partying ways rather than her acting skills. In fact, it seems to be ages since Lohan was even in a movie that didn’t go straight to DVD—or anything at all for that matter. The downfall of Lohan’s acting career has been quite public around Hollywood. Very few producers and directors are still willing to work with the former child star now that she has a reputation of extreme tardiness and overall rep of being unprofessional.

But enough about Lindsay, why is there even Mean Girls Nintendo game in the first place?

Those of you who have been eagerly awaiting the release of The Last Story now have plenty of reason to get excited. An illustration was recently released featuring what the director confirms as the game’s main characters: a man, a woman—and a tiger!

Wii’s latest RPG game from Mistwalker has pretty much been shrouded with a lot of mystery. In fact, even the director who talked about the illustration is yet to be identified. Although it’s not yet clear whether the tiger will be playing a major role in the game, many fans are already excited to know if they will be able to use the tiger as a character to fight in the game’s battles.

The director also dropped some clues about the plot of the game. He says that the main story will revolve around the conflicts that stand between the two main characters. Aside from this main plot, the story will also have several sub-plots that will include a father who went out on a boat and was never seen again, an accomplice who betrayed his or her friends, a leader making critical decisions and the escape of an archaeologist from prison.

The director claims that all these stories will be sewn together in the gameplay in order to create a powerful narrative. Sounds brilliant.

The videogame MadWorld is one that has garnered opposing views. Some players love the old school, brutal brawls while some believe that the game did not realize its potential. Sega, who published the game, deduced a reason for the game’s disappointing sales. The company claims that it might have been a mistake to put MadWorld on Wii.
Mike Hayes from Sega talks about the report. He says that although the game was a critical success, its commercial performance was much less than the team was expecting. He feels that the game was a bad match for the audience of Wii. Hayes feels that since MadWorld was an M-rated game, it should have been designed for PC, PS3 or 360. Yet the team doesn’t regret taking the risk.
He also praises Platinum Games for being one of the cutting-edge developers in the industry today. He also talks about how Platinum has been designing for its usual consoles like the 360 and PS3. The successful games Vanquish and Bayonetta were examples of its successes. Hayes was thrilled when the developer wanted to extend their reach with Nintendo, even though the plan did not quite pan out.
So why are Wii players not digging M-rated titles anyway? This could be a crying shame especially now that there are some awesome games in the works.

BioWare is not one to shy away from some lesbian action in their games. Not only are female players given the chance to frolic with their fellow women but also with their fellow women from another species. However, players and critics alike have perhaps noticed that despite the abundance of girl-on-girl action, the game is lacking in boy-on-boy shenanigans.
Casey Hudson, the developer behind the game, was asked about this issue. She explained how Mass Effect 2 was still considered somewhat of a PG-13 movie and that acknowledging homosexual behavior may take away from this image. Hudson also says that they had to take a moment to evaluate the game’s content and draw the line somewhere. She related how the love interests are an integral part of the story that can help players care about their characters more deeply. But the team still had to keep the love interest parts light.
But seriously, how light and PG-13 are you really when the game is already popular for its interspecies lesbianism?
So those who are doubting Commander Shepherd’s sexuality until now—yes, he is completely straight. Ray Muzyka insisted that this decision to exclude male homosexuality does not take away from BioWare’s commitment to providing players as much choice as possible.

If you like your DS games to be bloody and brutal then you may be up for some disappointment. It was just reported that the hugely popular Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars had poor sales, contrary to what Rockstar was expecting. However, despite the lousy sales, Chinatown Wars still made up half of the DS games sold with an M rating.

If you’re a hardcore DS game fanatic then you probably know about the six other games that are M-rated. These games are Dementium: The Ward, C.O.R.E., Touch the Dead, Ultimate Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil: Deadly Silience, and Theresia. If you combine the sales of these six games, Chinatown Wars would still have sold better. Pretty sad, huh?

According to Bed Feder who is the CEO of Take Two, the culprit for these poor sales is none other than piracy. More than a year ago when the Chinatown Wars was launched, it was almost a sure thing that it will be having huge sales. After all, not only is DS a very popular game console but Grand Theft Auto remains to be one of the best and famous game franchises ever. Not to mention the fact that the game was a critical hit in Metacritic.

However, despite these credentials, the last 12 months brought nothing but bad news for Chinatown Wars. This news has left many critics wondering if the Nintendo DS is a good place for mature-rated games.

Sony and Nintendo continue to lunge for each other’s throats as Sony prepares to launch its Playstation Move this year. Despite the fact that many gamers and techie critics claim that the Move is just out to copy Wii, Sony continues to bash Nintendo by saying that the Wii does not do motion control justice, and that the Move may just be able to do something about that.

According to Sony’s Peter Dille, despite the success of the Wii, the fact remains that it is still fully dependent on the wand which limits its ability to provide a good experience. He then boats that not only will the Move feature no wand or controller but that it will only have a single camera so the body of the player can be used as the interface itself. Sony calls this camera the Playstation Eye which will be able to track the motion controller through a light.

Dille also claims that the hardcore gamers have been looking down on motion gaming due to lack of challenge and precision and the fact that it focuses more on sociability. Sony plans to come up with games that can be enjoyed by the entire family, maintaining motion games’ “social” aspect. At the same time, hardcore games will also be released which will use a motion device that has been experienced before. However, Sony is yet to decide about the game that will become the face of the Playstation Move.

Despite the hype that Dille is directing toward the Move, many gamers still remain unconvinced. First, there are already rumors about the lag time of Move. And it is way too obvious how Sony just wanted to rival the successful Wii by suddenly coming up with a “better” console.

As if the machismo in videogames wasn’t already a common complaint against game developers, the much-anticipated game Crackdown 2 has just announced that it won’t be having any female characters.
Billy Thomson who is the creative director for Ruffian Games talks about the report. He says that although female avatars were present in the first third-person shooter game, technical issues have made the team cut these characters out for the second installment. Thomson says that the production of Crackdown 2 already consumed a lot of memory and that the addition of female characters would’ve forced the team to cut back on the other aspects of the games, such as the animation and the texture.
Thomson also explained that the second game has much more content, and that although girls (and boys) won’t have the chance to select female characters for themselves, they can customize the existing male characters as much as they want.
However, James Cope who is the producer of Crackdown 2 tried to appease fans by saying that the game will have a significant female character. This character would not just be significant in the gameplay but also in the entire franchise of Crackdown. However, this character will not playable as of now, but Cope assures that one never knows what changes there might be in the future.

Bad luck for Atomic Games last weekend at the PAX East show: during the last day of the event, one of the attendees of the event apparently stole the game’s codes to Breach. After downloading the code, the thief stealthily made his way out by getting lost in the crowd. Fortunately, watchful members of the studio managed to spot and catch him. The suspect’s computer was confiscated and the codes were quickly found.

David Tractenberg who is the spokesman for Atomic Games commented on the incident. He said that the thief did not try to deny that he tried to steal and get away with the game’s codes. However, he did claim that it “wasn’t a big deal” and explained that he only wanted to play the game with his buddies.

According to Atomic president Peter Tamte, the thief only managed to download about 14 MB of the game codes to his laptop before he was spotted by the staff. Atomic Games is not just your average game studio, the company actually does some work for intelligence groups and the military. This is why Tamte and his team take data theft very seriously. Tamte also says that he is glad they caught the thief before the stolen game was transferred to the Web.

One might remember that this is not the first time some hackers tried stealing game codes. Valve’s Half-Life 2 was also pirated by hackers online. Fortunately, FBI Cybercrime Task Force caught the suspects in time.