Warp Zoned Presents
Most Recent: Retro
Blizzard ceases development on their Titan MMO and officially cancels StarCraft: Ghost
In an interview with Polygon, Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime has confirmed that the company’s upcoming MMO, Titan, has been canceled. Development on Titan previously hit a snag when Blizzard delayed it into 2016 “at the earliest” last year. This massive delay was due to Blizzard blowing up their work on the game to start from scratch. According to Morhaime, that wasn’t enough to save Titan:
“We didn’t find the fun,” Morhaime continued. “We didn’t find the passion. We talked about how we put it through a reevaluation period, and actually, what we reevaluated is whether that’s the game we really wanted to be making. The answer is no.”
Morhaime is unsure if the developer will ever try their hand at an MMO again, but he still has big plans for World of Warcraft. “My hope personally is that we’ll support it forever,” he told Polygon. And finally, after being “on hold” for years, Morhaime also confirmed that StarCraft: Ghost is officially canceled as well:
“It’s always really, really hard to make those kind of decisions. It was hard when we canceled Warcraft Adventures. It was hard when we canceled StarCraft Ghost. But it has always resulted in better-quality work.”
The decision to cancel Titan was definitely affected by Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, which just notched its 20 millionth player last week.
Posted in News, PC, Retro
Tagged StarCraft: Ghost, Titan
It Came From 19XX: Lethal Enforcers
The first time I encountered those twin blue and pink light guns, I was eight years old. The new school year had started, Sonic 2 was glued in the port of my shiny new Sega Genesis, and my parents and I were visiting some family friends. I honestly don’t remember who they were, but I would thank them if I could, because we somehow came home with their copy of Lethal Enforcers, complete with the famous Konami Justifiers. These oversized revolvers dwarfed the Nintendo Zapper both in size and coolness. Whether by gift or by accident, these half-remembered friends never saw the game again. (more…)
Jimmy Fallon and Pierce Brosnan play GoldenEye 007 on Tonight Show
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to play GoldenEye 007 against the real James Bond? Unlike most of the folks (myself included) who spent hours blasting their friends in the Facility with Proximinity Mines, Jimmy Fallon can actually make it happen.
Pierce Brosnan was on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon last night to promote his new movie, The November Man. As the interview was winding down, Fallon pulled out an N64 and got to live out one of his childhood fantasies by battling Bond in a deathmatch. As you’d expect (especially if you’re Auric Goldfinger), Brosnan is not an expert GoldenEye player and Fallon wipes the floor with him.
Duh, nuh, na, na, duh, nuh, nuh.
Posted in News, Retro
Tagged GoldenEye 007
See the first trailer for the Atari: Game Over documentary
Spoiler Alert! When Microsoft went digging in the desert this past April, they found the fabled resting place of thousands of Atari 2600 cartridges (including hundreds of copies of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial). Over the years, many people tried to pass off the mass burial as some kind of hoax or urban legend. But the truth was never really in doubt. Atari had trouble selling their games during the Christmas season of 1983 and trucked their unsold stock to a landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico.
So instead of focusing solely on the dig, Zak Penn’s documentary, Atari: Game Over, also looked into the culture of the company at the time and how the then biggest movie of all time could produce such a lousy tie-in game. This includes conversations with Atari executives, local politicians from the Alamogordo area, game historians, and the developer behind the infamous game, Howard Warshaw.
If you were in attendance at San Diego Comic-Con this weekend, you had a chance to see the premiere screening of Atari: Game Over for yourself. The rest of us will have to wait until this Fall, when it debuts on Xbox Live as one of the first (and last) Xbox Entertainment Studios offerings. For now, we’ll have to content ourselves with the trailer embedded above.
Posted in Etcetera, News, Retro, Xbox 360, Xbox One
Tagged Comic-Con 2014, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
Watch someone beat Super Mario Bros. in a world record 4 minutes and 57 seconds
This is just unbelievable. Someone named “Blubbler” has just set a new world record for an “Any Percentage” Super Mario Bros. speedrun. Are you ready for this? Blubbler was able to beat the game in four minutes and 57.69 seconds. I’ll say it again… unbelievable!
The previous world record was 4:58.09 by “Andrewg.”
Blubbler’s world record run required pixel-perfect movements and you can read up on some of these tricks and glitches at the Speed Demos Archive. Seriously, I am blown away. It’s just an amazing bit of platforming.
Posted in News, Retro
Tagged Super Mario Bros.
E.T. games recovered from landfill will be curated, sold
What was once a rumor became truth last month, when copies of the infamous Atari 2600 games, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, were recovered from a landfill in New Mexico. According to Polygon (who also posted that awesome image above in another article), 100 copies were given to Lightbox and Fuel Entertainment (the production companies producing a documentary on the dig); 700 copies will be appraised, certified, and put up for sale; and the rest will be distributed to local museums. About 1,300 copies in total were removed from the site, and not all of them were E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.
Susie Galea, the mayor of Alamogordo, said that the New Mexico Museum of Space History is going to help prepare the games for sale, which will include registering them and giving them a certificate of authenticity. The method of sale has not yet been determined. Galea also said this has been a boon for the small town, and that she hopes the city commission will turn the site of the dig into a tourist attraction.
There are still over 700,000 cartridges in the landfill, but those will not be recovered as Galea said they were too difficult to get to. Original estimates put the cartridges at 18 feet down, but instead, the dig team had to go to 30 feet. “We’re going to leave the remaining games as-is,” Galea told Polygon. “The hole has already been filled back in.”
What would you pay for a piece of video game history – living proof of the bungles of the great video game crash?
E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial Atari cartridges found in New Mexico landfill
While it was long suspected that millions of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial cartridges were buried in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill after the great “Video Game Crash of 1983” an Xbox-sponsored dig has finally proven that the failed console company did indeed bury a variety of unsold cartridges in the desert. Historical sources (such as The New York Times) stated the mass burial as fact at the time, but over the years, a number of former Atari executives denied (and occasionally, confirmed) that the cartridges had been discarded.
Today’s dig is part of a planned documentary due to be distributed through Xbox Live by the newly-formed Xbox Entertainment Studios. Zak Penn, the co-writer of X-Men: The Last Stand and The Incredible Hulk is leading the dig as well as directing the documentary.
Before the dig began, Penn told IGN: “Other than garbage and the truth, I have no idea what we’ll find. I think that’s what’s exciting, we won’t know exactly what’s down there until they start digging.”
Well, now we know (knowing is half the battle). One of video gaming’s great urban legends is a legend no more. It is truth. And that’s kind of awesome.
Watch This! Every Super NES title screen in alphabetical order
Do you remember that fantastic YouTube video that compiled the Start Screens of every NES game in alphabetical order? Well, YouTube user “NicksplosionFX” has created a sequel that showcases the Start Screen of every Super NES game ever produced… from 2020 Super Baseball all the way down to some unknown Japan-only release. Oh, and be sure to prepare yourself beforehand, the entire video runs nine hours and three minutes (a full six hours longer than the NES video).
I’ll say it again, God bless the Internet.