Village Gamer

Toronto and Vancouver – StyleTap Inc. and Techneos Systems Inc. today announced the completion of an OEM agreement which allows Techneos to integrate StyleTap® Platform with its Entryware™ mobile survey application. The resulting Entryware 6.4 system enables customers to seamlessly obtain the benefits of the world’s most powerful and flexible mobile survey software on inexpensive and readily available devices running Windows Mobile™.

Entryware running on StyleTap

A primary benefit of the integration of StyleTap Platform and Entryware is the elimination of the need for separate installation and licensing of the two products. Although existing versions of Entryware execute on StyleTap Platform, Entryware 6.4 was enhanced to recognize the StyleTap environment and to take advantage of device-specific capabilities, such as high-resolution screens and support for cameras on Windows Mobile smartphones.

“Many of our key customers were already using our product with StyleTap Platform,” said Dave King, CEO of Techneos. “This integration makes it easier and faster to deploy Entryware on a wider range of devices, while maintaining a consistent user experience regardless of the hardware manufacturer. And for many of our global customers, the ability to use inexpensive devices that can easily be obtained in their local markets is essential to their use of our software.”
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Ottawa – Corel Corporation today announced that Kris Hagerman, who joined the Company as Interim CEO in May 2008, will assume the role of Corel CEO on a permanent basis effective today.

“We are delighted that Kris is joining Corel as its permanent CEO,” said Alex Slusky, Chairman of Corel’s Board of Directors and Managing Partner at Vector Capital, the Company’s majority shareholder. “Since joining the Company, Kris has been actively engaged in advancing all aspects of Corel’s business strategy, while steering the Company through a very challenging economic cycle.”

“I’m excited about joining Corel on a permanent basis and by the opportunity to drive the future of the company with a longer-term outlook,” said Hagerman. “In my time at Corel, I’ve been impressed by the quality and commitment of the team, and I’m excited about what Corel can accomplish in the years ahead as we look to leverage the many strengths of the company, including its vast customer base, the depth and breadth of its product portfolio, its reputation for innovation, quality, and value, and its global distribution channels.”
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Montreal – Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment and Ludia Inc. today announced a deal to create and distribute videogames based on the hit reality TV dating shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, from Warner Horizon Television and created by Mike Fleiss. The worldwide licensing and distribution arrangement will launch the videogames across multiple platforms following the conclusion of The Bachelor’s 14th season in 2010 on the ABC Television Network.

“The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are extremely popular on television and we are looking forward to bringing the properties into the videogame space,” said John Quinn, Executive Vice President, Worldwide Operations, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. “These games are meant to engage fans of the show and the wider public beyond television, enriching the overall entertainment experience around the brand.”

“The Bachelor and The Bachelorette are first-rate licenses in reality TV’s dating genre, which is a hugely popular category with television viewers,” said Alex Thabet, Ludia’s founder and CEO. “We see great potential for the segment within the context of video games, and look forward to our collaboration with Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment to deliver a true-to-show game experience on a wide variety of platforms.”
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Montreal – Starting at noon EST on Friday, July 31, MEGA Brands Inc. is offering Halo Wars© fans an exclusive opportunity to receive a limited edition Mega Bloks UNSC Steel Spartan or an ultra-rare UNSC Active Camo Spartan miniature figure at halowars.megabloks.com.

Mega Bloks UNSC Steel Spartan

Ten thousand limited edition Halo Wars figures will be given away to fans on a first come first serve basis: 9,900 Limited Edition UNSC Steel Spartan and 100 randomly inserted, ultra-rare UNSC Active Camo Spartan miniature figures. Each 1.75” tall figure will include its own weapon and an exclusive camouflage effect block.

Spartans are the most powerful soldiers in the history of the Human race. Their dominance of the battlefield was absolute until they met the Covenant. Their training allows these super-soldiers to wield any weapon and master any combat vehicle. The Limited Edition UNSC Active-Camo Spartan has an advantage over the UNSC Steel Spartan. It can become invisible when in combat to hide from its enemy, the Covenant.

“With the successful launch of the Halo Wars video game and the new Mega Bloks authentic collector’s series, we wanted to offer collectors a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get their hands on limited edition Halo Wars figures,” said Vic Bertrand, Chief Innovation Officer of MEGA Brands. “The Halo franchise has a massive following and now fans can grow their collection with new Mega Bloks building sets.”

This exclusive online offer is only available through the Halo Wars Mega Bloks website in the United States and Canada, and is not available in stores. The quantities are limited and certain conditions apply.

Montreal – Ubisoft® has announced the development of a video game based on Universal Pictures’ upcoming action-comedy, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Co-written and directed by genre-smashing filmmaker Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead), the film stars some of Hollywood’s leading young talent, including Michael Cera (Juno, Superbad), Kieran Culkin (Igby Goes Down), Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Live Free or Die Hard), Chris Evans (Fantastic Four series), Brandon Routh (Superman Returns), Mae Whitman (Nights in Rodanthe), and Jason Schwartzman (upcoming Funny People). The game is being developed by Ubisoft Montreal through a licensing agreement with Universal Partnerships & Licensing and is expected to launch worldwide with the film’s 2010 release.

The live-action Scott Pilgrim vs. the World film is based on a series of award-winning graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley. The series has earned numerous awards including: Entertainment Weekly’s Independent Comic of the Year, Wizard’s Indie Book of the Year and the Harvey Award for Humor in Comics. Published by Oni Press, the sixth and final volume in the series is set to debut in 2010—also timed to the film release. In the film, Scott Pilgrim (Cera) has just met the girl of his dreams (Winstead), but the only catch to winning her is that her seven evil exes are coming to kill him.
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New York – The Games In Education Symposium, being held this August 5 and 6 at the Hudson Valley Community College campus in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center in Troy, NY offers free attendance for all bona fide educators. While we don’t often post industry news from outside of Canada, we feel that this symposium would be of great benefit to the many Canadian educators. Even if you aren’t able to attend this year, you can always mark the date and website and then plan to attend in 2010.

The third annual Games in Education Symposium, two days of workshops and presentations about the use of computer and video games in the classroom, will take place August 5th & 6th on the Hudson Valley Community College campus in the Bulmer Telecommunications Center.

The symposium is FREE to educators from early childhood to post secondary education interested in the use of games and technology to promote learning in the 21st century. This year’s symposium will explore the practical application of interactive technologies like video games, social networks, blogs and other media to inspire and promote learning in this generation of “digital natives.”

Leading educators and experts from across the nation will discuss how they have applied video games to all curricular areas, and offer teachers a glimpse into new and exciting ways to reach their students, many of whom thrive on this technology outside of the classroom.

“We are living in a technological age in which even the very youngest of our children are being exposed to technology at home and in school at an early age,” explains Professor Nancy T. Cupolo, whose Teacher Preparation Department at Hudson Valley Community College is hosting this year’s event.
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Waterloo – Research In Motion today announced new and enhanced tools for developing web applications for BlackBerry® smartphones. The tools include the new BlackBerry® Web Development Plug-in for Eclipse and the BlackBerry® Plug-in for Microsoft Visual Studio version 1.2. These tools are part of a complete portfolio of BlackBerry® developer tools for web and Java development and a rich set of APIs that enable developers to easily create a wide variety of mobile applications that connect BlackBerry® smartphone users to the information they care about. The BlackBerry application platform also incorporates significant advantages, including real-time push technology, unmatched security and highly efficient data compression and network bandwidth utilization, allowing developers to deliver optimized applications on the most powerful, secure and efficient platform in the industry.

“The BlackBerry developer tools portfolio aims to bring together the best of Java and web development for the creation of web applications that are integrated with core BlackBerry smartphone functions for a seamless, intuitive and robust user experience,” said Alan Brenner, Senior Vice President, BlackBerry Platform Group at RIM. “The evolving portfolio of web development tools for the BlackBerry platform allows developers to work in familiar development environments to create, debug, profile, test and optimize their web applications for BlackBerry smartphones.”

The BlackBerry Web Development Plug-in for Eclipse is a new plug-in that allows developers to create web applications and content for BlackBerry smartphones within the familiar Eclipse 3.4 environment. Using this plug-in, developers can debug and profile Internet/intranet web pages displaying HTML and CSS content in addition to more complex rich internet applications using AJAX, Silverlight, PHP, ASP, Ruby on Rails, JSP, and Python.
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Canada – Just announced late last night, Vancouver independent game designer and consultant Adrian Crook has been signed to design a console game for a new movie IP. Congratulations Adrian, and I am definitely looking forward to more details when they are released. This will be Adrian’s second freelance console game project.

Vancouver’s Annex Pro will be attending SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans to promote several of the products they carry, including Vicon Boujou v5, PipelineFX Qube, Pixologic ZBrush, EyeonFusion, HP, Chaos Software V-Ray for Maya and the wide range of Autodesk titles, as well as StudioGPU with MachStudio Pro at the AMD booth. Please contact Kerry for a product and booth tour at the show.

I’d also like to send a shout-out to the folks at dimeRocker and Overinteractive Media whom I finally had the pleasure of meeting in person at last Friday’s Unity 3D Vancouver Users’ Group launch at District 319. It was a great event, and Unity 3D looks like a great development tool. In addition, and in support of Unity 3D’s Summer of Code initiative, dimeRocker would like to offer free office space for a lucky Vancouver candidate who receives support from Unity for their project. You will be surrounded by like-minded Unity heads, given a desk and chair in a cozy corner for you and your laptop as well as access to our humble amenities, including coffee throughout the week and beer on Fridays.  Those lucky individuals chosen by the gang in Copenhagen can forward their resume and brief description of their Unity-supported project to J.Joly at Overintactive Media. Thank you to Kerry Corlett of Annex Pro for the introduction to Micah Groberman, Executive Director of Vancouver’s Somatone Interactive Audio studio, and to Carolyn Carnes of Flash Fire Communications for bringing Corey Rollins of Shogun Gamer to our attention.

I also had the pleasure of meeting Ted Nugent, President of Genius Factor Games. His studio has a new title coming out in just a few weeks which will join their previous title, Gravity Well in the iTunes App store. Also keeping busy are developers John Warner, Mitch Lagran and writer Steve Waldman, all keeping busy at Greener Grass Games on “a free to play, full 3d, episodic, browser-based game that centers around environment exploration and features a compelling, mysterious story line.”

Just a reminder that we are holding a contest to give away a copy of PROTOTYPE for the 360. Entries close tonight (late entries not penalized, we just wanted to see how many people could make deadline), and the winning name will be randomly drawn by Kelly Zmak and Dave Fracchia over at Radical’s studio this Thursday afternoon.

Splinter Cell fans will have to wait a bit longer for the next title in the series. Ubisoft announced yesterday that Splinter Cell: Conviction™ and Red Steel® 2, whose releases were previously planned for the third fiscal quarter, will now be released in the fourth fiscal quarter. Ghost Recon® and I am Alive™, which were previously scheduled for release in the fourth fiscal quarter, will now strengthen the line-up for fiscal 2010-11. Read the rest of this entry »

Vancouver – Thank you to Adrian Crook for reminding me about the announcement last week from Telefilm and the Canada New Media Fund naming the successful programme applicants. This announcement happened while I was away at Casual Connect, and while I’m a tad late in publishing this, a little extra promotion never hurt anyone – especially when the news is good – plus I wanted to take the time to look up each company and provide links to their sites so that readers can easily visit them – with the exception of the few I could not easily find sites for, which is not good for those who wish to grow their corporate presence.

With such a wide range of projects receiving funding, this programme once again puts the spotlight on our Canadian talent and innovation in digital media. According to the CNMF press release, “independent websites and applications designed for mobile devices (iPhones and PDA’s) received the majority of support in the Western region; console or handheld-console games and independent websites fared very well in Ontario & Nunavut; regional funding in Quebec focused on console or handheld-console games and independent websites; and in the Atlantic region console or handheld-console games and applications for mobile devices received the most support.
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Burnaby – Electronic Arts Inc. today unveiled the full soundtracks for Madden NFL 10, FIFA 10, NHL®10 and NBA LIVE 10. This first-ever quadruple announcement represents the sounds of this fall’s four sports franchises and affirms EA’s standing as the leaders in worldwide videogame music and marketing.

“Each EA SPORTS game is unique to every gamer that picks up the controller, we wanted to make sure the music matched each of those unique experiences,” said Steve Schnur, Electronic Arts’ Worldwide Executive for Music and Marketing. “With the big songs and huge bands in Madden NFL, bringing back the Soul of the Game to NBA LIVE, tapping into the hard hitting metal tracks of NHL and the international flavor of FIFA, this year’s EA SPORTS soundtrack line up aligns with each of the game’s unique styles.”

NBA Live 10 Trax

NBA LIVE 10

Long recognized as the premiere showcase for diverse and innovative new music, NBA LIVE 10 features more than 80% exclusive tracks, including reinvented classics from Afrika Bambaataa, Dead Prez and Snoop Dogg, along with ground-breaking collaborations by indie-rockers Matt & Kim with the legendary De La Soul, and newcomers Mickey Factz & B.o.B. The soundtrack also spotlights never-before-heard songs from Beastie Boys and Wyclef Jean.
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