singularity posts

The Writer's Guild of America has been offering an annual award for the past few years for "outstanding achievement in videogame writing." This year is no exception as the combined East and West versions of the guild (who also honor TV and movie writers) have offered up their nominees for the 2010 edition of the award.

Nominated this year are five games that either have or will come out for the PC: Fallout New Vegas, Star Wars The Force Unleashed 2, Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands and Singularity (God of War III was the other nominee). The winner will be announced on February 5 in ceremonies held in both Los Angeles and New York. You can check out the full list of nominees and the writers credited with the games after the jump:

Developer Raven Software is rumored to be back to work on a stealth-based James Bond action game for its owner and publisher Activision. The rumors come from the James Bond fan site MI6.com which, via unnamed sources, claims the game is back in development following the approval of the bankruptcy plan of the owners of the James Bond movie franchise MGM.

Raven Software, once one of the biggest of Activision's internal development studios, has lately suffered from its games not selling as well as anticipated despite mostly solid reviews. It has suffered from two separate layoffs, one in 2009 and another earlier this year. In addition to the James Bond game Raven is also rumored to be working on map packs for Call of Duty Black Ops. So far Activision has not responded to these new James Bond rumors.

[Viia Shacknews]

Reports from web sites like Shacknews and Kotaku are stating via unnamed sources that Activision's internal game developer Raven Software has been hit with yet another round of layoffs. The new reports claim that 20 to 40 team members at the Madison, Wisconsin-based developer have been let go, reducing the dev teams at Raven to just one. Activision's official statement admits that "Raven Software is realigning its workforce to better reflect the studio's upcoming slate" but does not give the specific numbers of workers that are affected by this latest move.

Activision previously laid off a number of Raven Software's team members in August 2009. Today's move come after Raven released its latest first person shooter game Singularity last June which got positive game reviews for the most part but suffered from poor sales and not much of a marketing push from Activision. Kotaku claims that Raven will now be working on downloadable game content but specific game titles have not been officially announced.

This patch updates Singularity to v1.01. It addresses the texture streaming issue and fixes a network connectivity problem that caused the game to get stuck on the "Finding Best Match" screen in multiplayer. Patch notes can be found after the jump and the full game review can be found here.

Read the Singularity Review
Download Singularity v1.01 Patch (24 MB)
Download Singularity v1.01 German Patch (24 MB)
Check out all Singularity downloads

At a time when military themed shooters dominate sales, it's refreshing to have a sci-fi action game like Singularity come in to offer up some variety. The game literally puts the power to twist time in the palm of your character's hand with the Time Manipulation Device, TMD for short. Not exactly the most creative name for a device, but it can be used to pull off a variety of spectacular moves, most prominently aging objects or reverting them back to an original usable state. But even with the power to distort time at the player's disposal, they'll still need to rely on old fashioned firepower to fight back enemies. In that respect, there's very little that distinguishes the game from most other shooters.

Check out all Singularity downloads

The Raven Software-developed first person shooter Singularity is due for release in the US this week but it's already out in the UK and according to Voodoo Extreme there's a big issue in the PC version of the game that's been discovered. According to the site the bug is causing the high-end textures in the Unreal Engine 3-based game to take several minutes to load for each level.

The site offers up some partial workarounds to get the high-end textures to load faster but its a fairly complicated procedure. Hopefully Raven can up up with a patch that will fix the texture streaming bug before the game ships in the US.

The last week of June sees quite a few PC games heading to store shelves this week including a game that was first announced way back in 2005. After this week is over there's a pretty major dry spell in terms of major new PC game releases until mid August with the big exception of StarCraft II which is due on July 27.

All Points Bulletin (APB): First announced five years ago, developer Realtime Worlds finally ships this first person shooter MMO this week, combing a persistant urban action game with lots of customization options for your character, car and even music.

If you thought Singularity was all about time manipulation in single player, this developer video will set you straight. The main multiplayer mode comes down to being a turf war between human soldiers and the mutant creatures running around on the island. Each soldier and creature comes with special abilities and offer a unique gameplay experience. Players will have a chance to test them all out when the game releases next week on June 29th.

Download HD Singularity 'Multiplayer' Developer Video (409 MB)
Check out all Singularity downloads

We have seen time manipulation in PC games in the last like Timeshift and in some of the Prince of Persia games. Now we are getting a new interpretation of that kind of gameplay in Singularity. Announced by publisher Activision nearly two years ago the Raven Software-developed title is now close to being released on June 29. The title mixes shooting, temporal powers and a storyline with a Cold War bent.

Big Download got a chance to ask some questions to Dan Vondrak, Singularity's project lead at Raven Software. He reveals how the game came about, some of his favorite features and more.