rubicon-development
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Great Little War Game heading to PS Vita via loaner dev kits
Sony certainly seems to be putting its money where its mouth is over this whole "we have to support indie devs" thing. In a recent NeoGAF thread, Rubicon Development Managing Editor Paul Johnson revealed that the studio has received 4 PS Vita development kits from Sony, free of charge. "I can confirm that Sony was generous enough to loan us some kit," Johnson said, telling Gamasutra that those kits are being used to port the indie's iOS strategy title Great Little War Game to the Vita. "They really do seem to have gotten behind smaller developers, based on my own experience and from talking with other small devs, and I think they should be saluted for it." Sony seems to be pretty aggressively courting indie developers, and if they can continue to entice small studios with loaner dev kits and the Vita's capacitive touch screen, we doubt Rubicon Development will be the only ones extending themselves from Apple's ecosphere to Sony's.
Shotest Shogi & Basement Pool coming to XBLA
Rubicon Development, the creators of the XBLA title Novadrome, announced that they would be bringing two new titles to the Arcade, Shotest Shogi & Basement Pool. Though XBLA already has a billiards game, Basement Pool thinks it can offer the Arcade something new, with the main selling points being the variety of tables, and the physics and graphics. The game will only ship with 5 game modes however, and Bankshot Billiards 2 is already on the Marketplace, and it has 9 modes. The Basement Pool website promises that we'll more game modes as DLC, but is that DLC likely to free? Doubtful. If the game can hit at the same price as Bankshot, with camera support (which is unknown at the time) then it has a chance. But otherwise, it seems as though it's being sent to die. Shotest Shogi on the other hand seems to have a good chance. Shogi as a game is as old as the hills, and is more popular in Japan than chess is in the west. As a chess variant, Shogi is actually a bit more complex than chess, and with a digital form of the game coming to XBLA, complete with tutorial, this could bring one of the oldest and greatest strategy games ever to an entirely new audience. Hey, we'll definitely be buying it.
