housemarque-games
Latest
Dead Nation's expansion gets an expansion today with 'Arcade'
Dead Nation's expansion pack, "Road of Devastation," is about to get a bit less devastating with the addition of the "Arcade" game mode. As the "Road of Devastation" was about surviving against impossible, zombie-filled odds, "Arcade" is about modifying those odds in your favor. That plays out in-game via checkpoint-based revival and the ability to choose a difficulty level (other than "devastating," of course).The Arcade modification appears to be a free update to Dead Nation, but we won't be sure until PlayStation Network updates later today and the content goes live. The "Road of Devastation" content, however, costs $3.99.
Housemarque explains tech behind 3D Super Stardust HD
3D gaming isn't entirely new, but will be a big focal point for Sony this year -- and what better way to show that than by turning one of 2007's bright spots into a full 3D experience. Super Stardust HD is undergoing a HD facelift right now and during an interview with Digital Foundry (via Eurogamer), engine lead Seppo Halonen and creative director Harri Tikkanen talked about adapting the game to 3D and some of the technological leaps and bounds made by Housemarque Games. What makes SSHD different than other 3D experiences -- specifically, Avatar and other 3D games like Invincible Tiger -- is that it'll be running at a native resolution of 720p at 120 frames per second, 60 frames per each eye, and doesn't use low-res buffers to create the effect. Housemarque accomplished this by having the engine render everything twice, added stereoscopic cameras and moved the vertex processing from the GPU to the SPU. This took up about 50 percent of the SPU's resources, leaving them with enough to pre-process a lot of the game, allowing things to render much faster than before. As for future Housemarque games on PS3, don't necessarily expect those titles to be in 3D. Tikkanen says that because some titles "lend themselves better to 3D than others," all future 3D compatibility will be decided "on a game by game basis."
