A company can be as hush-hush as they want, but someone who doesn’t know the score will let something slip, or forgets to update an announcement scheduling on Xbox Live’s dashboard. This time, a modest musician who licensed a song to Sony for use in LittleBigPlanet 2 didn’t get the memo that he had to suppress his excitement.

As a result, the musician known as Ochre made a now-deleted tweet: “Pleased to announce the licencing of ‘Infotain Me’ to Sony for Little Big Planet 2 on PS3.”

As if this announcement would surprise anyone, though. I don’t get the impression Sony’s keeping knowledge of the game’s future existence all that close to the chest. Odds are it won’t be such a secret after E3 rolls around.

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Next to reconfirming that the series will stay on an annual release schedule, Activision today once more indicated that the Call of Duty franchise is headed towards a subscription-based model.

“Our strategy continues to be to annualize our key franchises. We’ve indicated before that Call of Duty is on a two year development cycle given the content and work that needs to go into a high-quality game experience,” Activision Publishing president and CEO Mike Griffith said during the company’s financial reports call today. “We also have new business models potentially for the franchise in the future and we’ve been building capabilities on both the business development side as well as the studio side of it.”

Making things a bit clearer is Activision CEO Bobby Kotick. “If you think about the success that we’ve had in other product categories on subscription, you can get a sense of the direction that we want to take that franchise,” he said of the series.

Last time we heard of something like this was last November when CFO Thomas Tippl said Activision plans to integrate additional monetized online services into their games, Call of Duty among them.

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During an acceptance speech at the Japan Media Arts Festival this past weekend, Shigeru Miyamoto casually referred to unannounced Nintendo hardware and at least one new Wii project he’s working on, which uses the MotionPlus peripheral. Of course, since Miyamoto wasn’t making any formal announcements, that’s all he said on those fronts, according to Andriasang’s summary of a 4Gamer report.

Miyamoto was onstage accepting a Special Achievement Prize when he revealed that, in addition to Zelda, he’s working on an unspecified number of other projects that use MotionPlus. While unconfirmed, the “Special Achievement” might have been awarded for Miyamoto’s work in the field of vague announcements.

[Via Andriasang]

Miyamoto mentions new hardware, new MotionPlus games originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Will Battlefield: Bad Company 2 be taking a step back to 1943 for awhile? That may be the case according to a rating summary found on the ESRB website. While the summary mentions the expected offerings of the upcoming modern shooter such as references to its four known multiplayer modes, it also points some vital information about the game’s single-player, “In single-player mode, players conduct missions on an unnamed Japanese island during World War II and then move into the modern day through jungles, deserts, and snowy terrain.”

Whether or not these missions are tied to the overall story remains to be confirmed. Regardless, considering the Thompson and M1 Garand are weapons available for online play in Bad Company 2 it would be nice to know that they were included because of the connection between single-player and multiplayer rather than pre-order incentives.

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Will Battlefield: Bad Company 2 be taking a step back to 1943 for awhile? That may be the case according to a rating summary found on the ESRB website for Bad Company 2. While the summary mentions the expected offerings of the upcoming modern shooter such as references to its four known multiplayer modes, it also points some vital information about the game’s single-player, “In single-player mode, players conduct missions on an unnamed Japanese island during World War II and then move into the modern day through jungles, deserts, and snowy terrain.”

Whether or not these missions are tied to the overall story remains to be confirmed. Regardless, considering the Thompson and M1 Garand are weapons available for online play in Bad Company 2 it would be nice to know that they were included because of the connection between single-player and multiplayer rather than pre-order incentives.

View full post on That VideoGame Blog

What goals did you have in mind when developing Record of Agarest War?

Sugano Kenta, Director: It wasn’t a goal per se, but our focus had been always how much of its originality can be expressed through the game during the development process. Since our development process fell on the period when next-gen consoles started to hit the market, we were expected to create a high-end game, but our focus was rather the playability as a RPG game.

What inspired the Soul breed system?

We had always wanted to create a game in which we can express passing of eras, but we figured it’d be more interesting to add a concept of generation changes where a main character has a child and the kid has his own child when he grows up and so forth, which has developed into the current Soul Breed System.

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