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Babycastles brings its indie arcade action to The Engadget Show (video)
The shuttering of New York's Chinatown Fair back in March marked the end of an era for the city -- a last vestige of a time when social gaming meant more than just logging on to Xbox Live. The arcade experience hasn't completely disappeared form the metropolitan map, however -- in recent years, a new crop of venues have remixed the concept of yesterday's arcades, places like Brooklyn's Barcade, a shrine to 80s gaming machines that does brisk business serving spirits to Williamsburg's 21 and up crowd. Launched in Ridgewood, Queens by game developers Kunal Gupta and Syed Salahuddin, Babycastles takes the re-invention a step further, offering up something between an arcade space and an art gallery.
EA buys Firemint, makers of Flight Control and Real Racing
Here's yet another big iOS developer picked up by a traditional gaming giant: EA has acquired Firemint, the maker of iOS hits Flight Control and the Real Racing series. This is a pretty big purchase, but not a big surprise; Firemint has done work for EA in the past, including a few ports of popular EA titles, and as it has just merged with Infinite Interactive and has a big new title on the way called Agent Squeek, Firemint seemed primed for a connection with a larger company. The last time I talked with Firemint's Rob Murry and Steve Fawkner back at GDC this year, they obviously didn't mention any plans to join up with EA, but they did hint to me that Firemint's future included more traditional console titles -- either versions of their current games for systems like Xbox and PlayStation, or new games entirely. Those plans may be put on hold, however -- EA's press release connects the Firemint acquisition with another purchase of a company called Mobile Post Production, which specializes in porting games across smartphone devices, and says it will use MPP's technical abilities and Firemint's creative skills to kick out high quality mobile games.
Australian developers still want their tax break
The Game Developers Association of Australia (GDAA) has followed up previous calls by writing to the Government's arts minister and opposition minister asking that the game industry receive the 40% tax rebate offered to the film industry. The GDAA says that the break would bring in an extra $5 million a year of investment capital in Australian developers." We have a commitment to ensuring that participants in the interactive entertainment industry are equally competitive with our overseas competitors," said Greg Bondar, executive director of the GDAA. The Australian request is similar to the tax breaks in Canada which have brought more investment into their country's game industry. Well, here's hoping for the tax break, because that'll be a g'day for GDAA. Oy, that was awful.
Give the gift of Unity
As the Unity team prepares a new 1.2 release with mondo new features, like full-screen graphic effects, and a drop-in FPS controller, just in time for the holidays (hopefully), consider giving the game development tool as a gift. In fact, the Unity site posted a how-to on creating your own boxed version. Just print the templates, grab some scissors and blank media, and voilá! Unity, and perhaps a book on game development, would make any wanna-be game developer in your family happy. Except that most game developers use PC's. And since Unity can only deploy games on a PC, not create them, you might need to pick up a shiny new Mac for that loved one as well. No, I don't work for Unity, but I am a big fan.
