remedy-entertainment posts

Gunshine.net, a newly announced browser-based action game, is looking to be something a bit different than the normal browser game that caters mostly to casual gamers. The game comes from Finland-based Supercell Corp and has some team members that previously worked over at Remedy Entertainment.

The top down shooter allows you to get three of your friends to battle online against the forces on the artificial island of Dawnbreak City. The game has three basic character classes and lots of options to let players create their own characters. You can even play the game with AI versions of your friend's characters if they are not online at the time. According to the game's web site, " the AI will emulate their playing style while you decide their their overall tactics."

Gamasutra reports that the game has an investment from London Venture Partners, a UK-based venture capital group that has former Atari execs Phil Harrison and David Gardner as part of the group. Gunshine.net is currently taking beta sign ups for closed beta testing. You can check out a trailer of the game in action after the jump:

One of the founders of Remedy Entertainment, Petri Järvilehto, has decided to leave the Finland-based game developer to join another Finland game team, Rovio Media. Yep, that's the folks behind the hugely successful mobile phone game Angry Birds.

At Remedy, Järvilehto helped to develop the first two games in the Max Payne action game series along with last year's Xbox 360 exclusive game Alan Wake. In his new position at Rovio, he will be the company's new Senior Vice President of Console Development. As we reported last month the PC version of Angry Birds has been released via Intel's AppUp program.

Last week Steam had a big week long sale of Rockstar Games' titles. That included Max Payne 2, the second game in the third person action game series from developer Remedy. However there is evidence that the version of Max Payne 2 on Steam may have come from a PC game pirate group rather than directly from Rockstar.

A post on Steam's message board forums shows what the poster claims is a screenshot of Max Payne 2 under a decompiler. It shows a "Myth" logo in ASCII which is a signature from a PC game pirate group. While it's possible that the original 2002 game had this symbol put into the code its perhaps more likely that Rockstar, in providing the game for Steam users, simply decided to find a pirate version of the title. We have emailed Rockstar to see if they have any comment on this issue.

[Via Blue's News]

Alan Wake may have begun its life as a PC game but now its publisher Microsoft has apparently confirmed that the long awaited action title from Remedy Entertainment will now be an Xbox 360 exclusive with no plans at all to bring the game to the PC.

An official statement from Microsoft, posted at Strategy Informer, states that the publisher felt that the game was best suited to be played "from the couch in front of a larger TV screen". Alan Wake was first announced as a PC game by Remedy in 2005. In 2006 Microsoft bought the publishing rights to the game, saying it would appear on both the PC and Xbox 360 consoles. After that the game's development went into an extended stealth mode until 2009 when Microsoft finally started promoting Alan Wake again but as an Xbox 360 exclusive. Last July Remedy said the decision to make the game for the PC was up to Microsoft.

It's been a crappy 2009 for 3D Realms. The Dallas-based game developer let go of its internal development team and got into a still ongoing lawsuit against Take Two Interactive over the 12 years (and counting) development of their first person shooter Duke Nukem Forever. Yet the company's CEO Scott Miller claims that their main Duke Nukem franchise is still very much alive.

Shacknews has posted up some new info from Miller (taken from the first print issue of a new game magazine called Gamesauce) where he says, "There are numerous other Duke games in various stages of development, several due out this year." Miller still insists that Duke Nukem Forever is not dead saying, " . . . yes, we released the internal team, but that doesn't correlate to the demise of the project." Even a long-in-development Duke Nukem movie is still in play with Miller saying, " the Duke film is making steady progress."

The article goes into specifics on how 3D Realms was able to stay in operation for so long without releasing Duke Nukem Forever. For example, Miller claims that they made $30 million with sales of Max Payne (which they worked on with Remedy) and made another $48 million selling the franchise to Take Two.

Given the massive library of PC games, it only stands to reason that many venerable titles have yet to receive sequels. Sometimes that can be a good thing. Many are the developers who churn out half-baked sequels in an obvious attempt to cash in on a preceding game's success, only to burn out their fans who view the anticipated sequels as nothing more than petty patch updates running $50 or more.

Max Payne and Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne, are not two such games. Since autumn of 2003, the brooding cop and his popular noir tales have sat dormant despite audible pleading from fans for a third installment. Rumors of Max Payne 3 have flown for years, leaving fans searching out the best in user-developed mod to sate a void only a virtual painkiller can truly heal.

Enter Mona: The Assassin, a new mod for Max Payne 2 that, while not a true sequel, successfully captures the paced action and gritty atmosphere that made Max's two official forays successful enough to... well, to warrant such a frothing demand for a true sequel.

Now that the Max Payne movie is out in theaters and apparently bringing in decent box office receipts, one of the people instrumental in bringing the original game to life has said some rather critical things about the movie adaptation.

In speaking to Edge Online, 3D Realms head Scott Miller (who helped to develop the original game with the team at Remedy) stated he "could go on and on" talking about the issues he had with the Max Payne movie, from story points to character development to narrative structure. Miller says, "A big problem with the film is that we do not really know what is driving Max until we see the flashback scene showing him coming home and finding his family murdered. In the game, we put this scene right at the front of the story for a reason! Saving this scene until mid-film is a narrative blunder, because the audience needs to empathize with Max in order to like him and understand what drives him."

Even though the movie got mostly poor reviews from critics, movie goers still wanted to see Max Payne make the transition from Remedy video game to Twentieth Century Fox feature film. According to BoxOfficeMojo.com the film topped the US box office in its debut weekend, earning a solid but not spectacular $18 million.

Max Payne's revenues beat out Disney's Beverly Hills Chihuahua who had been atop the box office for the past two weekends in the US. It's main competition, the Oliver Stone docudrama W., only managed to make $10.5 million for the number four spot. Max Payne's credit sequence sets up a possible sequel but the question is will the movie's $18 million debut be enough to justify a follow-up?

Anyone who had hopes that the film adaptation of Remedy's Max Payne action game series would break the usual "crappy video game movie" formula is likely to be disappointed yet again. The film has apparently been kept from viewing by the nations movie critics until the last possible minute by its studio Twentieth Century Fox (it's due in theaters Friday) but some early reviews are not encouraging.

The Hollywood Reporter's review says the film is more style and substance, saying, "For lovers of cinema, however, the title reads "Maximum Pain.'" Variety's review is a little more charitable but ultimately says, "it's not nearly as much fun as actually playing the game." Aint It Cool News is especially harsh on the movie, saying, 'The damn thing's 85 minutes and you swear you've been in there for about two and a half hours by the time it's over. "

While Xbox 360 and PS3 users have worked themselves into a veritable tizzy over downloadable content, PC users have been accustomed to having the lifeline of their favorite games extended far past their in-the-box values since the days of Doom - and even before that. What's more, we're used to downloading new levels, weapons, characters, and new episodes absolutely free of charge.

Big Download understands that a five-hour game can be extended by hundreds of hours via total conversions, brand new monsters, and weapons you've always wanted to see in your favorite title. In the spirit of extending a title's longevity beyond mere out-of-the-box expectations, MODmonday celebrates the best modifications for games new and old. Half-Life, Half-Life 2, StarCraft, Diablo II, Doom and more will all be represented here, ensuring a wide spread of mods available across every possible genre of PC gaming.

This week's MODmonday modification is Max Freeman, a mod for Max Payne that incorporates several elements from the original Half-Life into the original Max Payne.