Village Gamer

Burnaby – Electronic Arts Inc. announced today that the highly anticipated Fight Night Round 4 is now available in retail stores worldwide. Recently named the Game Critic Awards “Best Sports Game of E3 2009”, Fight Night Round 4 is developed by EA Canada under the EA SPORTS™ brand. Fight Night Round 4 is the latest entry from the critically acclaimed Fight Night franchise, and is the first title ever that will allow players to pit “Iron” Mike Tyson against “The Greatest” Muhammad Ali.

Designed with a revolutionary physics-based gameplay engine, Fight Night Round 4 replicates the sweet science to an unprecedented degree of realism. Witness gloves grazing off an opponent as he dodges at the last second, or watch as a vicious uppercut rips through the block of a boxer who turtles for too long. With realistic physics, height and reach become major factors in how each boxer approaches a fight. Shorter fighters, like Tyson, will look to weave inside and deliver punishing hooks to the head and body, while taller fighters, like Ali, will use their reach advantage to pump their jab while staying out of range of their opponent’s punches.

An all new career mode, titled Legacy mode, challenges you to move up the ranks from an upstart amateur to become the greatest of all time. Create a boxer from the incredibly robust create-boxer feature, or import your own face into the game using the Photo Game Face tool and bring your virtual self into the ring. Make rivals, challenge for and defend belts as you journey to cement your name among the greatest names in boxing.
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It’s not about gaming, but it’s still fun and educational

Britannia Beach BC – The BC Museum of Mining (BCMM) has launched an advanced new website offering a host of multimedia features and downloadable material. With online archival images and historical newsletters, BC Museum of Mining Online is the place to learn about the history and the future of BC Mining.

The new website was created to enhance communication with visitors, students and teachers, and history enthusiasts looking to learn more about the Britannia Beach community, current exhibits and collections, and mining in BC. The easy to navigate new site offers a searchable database of archives, calendar, press area, tour information, and links visitors to the Museum’s social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

Future plans will see the Museum offering further online activities to engage our audience, such as: The Curator’s Blog, high-resolution image library, video footage, additional archives, and new collections.

The Britannia Historical Society, the governing body of the British Columbia Museum of Mining (BCMM), is a non-profit society. The society was established in 1971 to preserve the material and social history of mining in British Columbia, and to educate the public about mining. It is a registered charity. The Society is essentially self-sufficient in its ability to earn revenues to maintain its operation.

Burnaby – Electronic Arts Inc. announced today that starting July 9 gamers can download and compete in Skate 2’s Maloof Money Cup Pack, based on the largest pursed event in the history of professional skateboarding. The pack will be available in the PLAYSTATION® Store for $3.00 and on Xbox LIVE® Marketplace for 240 points in North America.

“Skate 2 has been embraced by the gaming and skateboarding community across the globe, making it the perfect stage for the Maloof Money Cup’s videogame debut,” said Joe Maloof, President of Maloof Companies. “Now players everywhere can experience the world’s greatest skateboarding championship and revel in the high-stakes excitement of the competition for themselves.”

Skate 2’s Maloof Money Cup Pack will feature separate gameplay events both online and offline – freeskate, single player vert and street contests that put gamers against world class pros, and an online mode in which gamers will be able to compete against their friends in new activities and challenges for bragging rights. Xbox 360 gamers get an added bonus as there are 250 achievement points up for grabs.
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Montreal – Meridian4 celebrates its 5 year anniversary by offering gamers a gift of great savings on all of our titles. Celebrating their 5th year in business, Meridian4 has arranged specials with their digital distribution partners on all of their products in the coming months.

Joel Kinnunen, Business Development Director at Frozenbyte wished Meridian4 a happy birthday, saying that “We are thrilled to see Meridian4 thrive in this business, they truly deserve it. We signed our first game Shadowgrounds to Meridian4 back when they were just starting out and we haven’t regretted it. It’s rare to find a publisher whose goals seem to match those of the developer. Meridian4 is one of those publishers and the whole gang has been a pleasure to work with. If our companies’ paths cross again in the future I wouldn’t hesitate one bit to work with them again.”

The 5th Anniversary celebrations kick off on Steam with a 50% savings on all of Meridian4’s games and packs, including Shadowgrounds Survivor and Indie titles Obulis and Space Trader, as well as the Meridian4 Complete Pack with 14 games for only $24.99. The sale begins June 29th and continues until July 6th.

Toronto – Wicked Interactive, a leading North American MMO publisher, today announced that it will launch a series of summer events for Yedang Online’s popular free to play MMORPG Priston Tale.

The Summer Events will consist of seven unique events during the month of July. Each of the events will begin on each Tuesday in July and will last for two weeks each. Priston Tale players will also receive increased experience rates throughout the month of July.

“We are excited to launch the Priston Tale Summer Events,” said Garvin Yeung, CEO of Wicked Interactive. “We hope that our players will enjoy and take advantage of the free fireworks and other great events we have lined up while they enjoy their summer playing Priston Tale.”

Event #1: Free Fireworks
The Summer Events will kick off by lighting up the night skies with free fireworks for all players of Priston Tale beginning July 1st to celebrate Canada Day, Independence Day in the U.S. and the beginning of summer.
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Burnaby – We attended the AI Grad Presentation last Friday night, and once again we were reminded first hand just how many talented young people are ready for careers in game design, animation, audio design, film and VFX. We spent so much time talking to students and viewing projects that we weren’t able to make it around to everyone – which brings to the forefront the one challenge many of the students said they had problems with during their tenure at AI  – time management. This seems to be a problem wherever we go – perhaps there needs to be a study done about the phenomena and why so many people have difficulty with the issue.

Pritika Prasad

We were pleased to meet the team behind TikiWiki, the 2009 PopVox Award winner for Best Student Project. The tribal sports game was developed on the Unreal Engine and uses team play to collect stone tablets and score points.

All of the students present were well spoken about their projects, and quick to acknowledge any assistance they received from others, as well as to recognize members of their teams on class projects. It was also promising to see so many talented female students in this graduating class, in particular Environment and Prop Modeler Pritika Prasad (right), whose work is very impressive and very professional.
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Mississauga – There’s a new texting champion in Canada and her name is Kathy Spence. Today LG Electronics Canada crowned the winner of its 2nd Annual LG Canadian Texting Championship at the competition’s finals, held earlier this afternoon at Toronto’s Yonge-Dundas Square. Kathy, who is from Scarborough, received $25,000 in cash and prizes from LG’s Pat Button.

Kathy Spence

Today’s event marked the culmination of over three and a half months of preliminary trials across the country, as well as online competitions and Facebook challenges, which saw the participation of more than 20,000 Canadians. A final group of 12 texters participated in today’s finals, with
Kathy coming out on top.

The event, hosted by Nicole Arbour, and featuring a performance by chart-topping band, The New Cities, attracted over 1,500 spectators over the noon hour. Contestants competed on a variety of LG’s QWERTY phones including the LG Dare, LG Keybo, LG Reveal, LG Rumour and LG Voyager as well as new phones, the LG Rumour 2, LG Neon and LG Xenon.
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Burnaby – This past Saturday we took in the Vancouver leg of the annual Canary Foundation’s soapbox derby, the Canary Derby. We sponsored Brenda Bailey of Deep Fried Entertainment, who was representing Women In GamesVancouver as part of the Wired Woman team. While the Wired Woman team did finish in the top ten, they didn’t make the trophy round. That said, the whole team had a great time and raised a total of $2,355.00 for the Foundation. Many thanks to our “Silk Spectre” driver, Sanaz Jahanbakhsh. You can check out our photos of the race in our Gallery. In total, over $ 113 000.00 was raised at the Vancouver version of the Canary Derby. I have not yet found a total for the Victoria race which ran yesterday.

Burnaby’s Acting Mayor presented the speed award to Aquatic Informatics, whose cart managed to hit speeds of up to 46km per hour (in a 30km zone), with a final run time of 16.50 seconds from the upper starting line. Finishing in second place was the Rogers Wireless cart, followed by Webnames.ca and BCTIA. Other teams we saw still in the race included Wired Woman, SalesXperts Closers, ACL Systems Ltd., Clearly Contacts, FinCAD, and 6S Marketing. At least three other teams unfortunately succumbed to accidents in the earlier trial runs. Cisco Human Network received the Bent Wheel Award for their crash – hopefully their driver is recovering from his dislocated shoulder.

6S Marketing took home the Style Award with their very stylish and musical Mario Kart – driven in Saturday’s race by Princess Peach herself, while Mario helped out on the crew. The Princess’ royal kart managed to hit speeds of 32km per hour, despite those who tried to sabotage her run by throwing banana peels in her path.

Congratulations are also in order to the Webnames.ca team for winning the Top Fundraiser Award. Canary Foundation Chairman and Founder Don Listwin presented the trophy to Cybele Negris, COO and a co-founder of Webnames.ca for raising $11,476.10. Cybele was also the winner of the event’s Volunteer Award.

The Canary Derby is an outstanding and fun event, raising funds for research in early cancer detection, something which will undoubtedly save countless lives in the future. Congratulations to all of the organizers, volunteers, sponsors and participants for an exciting day at the races.

Village Gamer is already planning to participate next year with the Women In Games Vancouver – Wired Woman team, and we challenge all of our local associations, game, VFX-CGI and software developers to get involved – along with all of the post-secondary schools and peripheral corporations who support the digital and new media industry.

Chicago – SIGGRAPH 2009 announces the addition of a special Production Session as part of this year’s Computer Animation Festival that will detail the behind-the-scenes production of the much anticipated Fight Night Round 4 and Gears of War 2. Fight Night Round 4, as many of you already know, was developed in Burnaby at EA Canada.

The session, “Big, Fast, and Cool: Making the Art for Fight Night Round 4 & Gears of War 2” will explore the making of the art of these games, and how these processes have exploded the boundaries for what is possible with real-time rendering graphics. This Production Session will take place as part of the special focus on videogames and Real-Time Rendering during the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival program.

“So much of what makes today’s videogames so great are the responsive graphics and the stories that unfold during game play,” stated Evan Hirsch, SIGGRAPH 2009 Real-Time Rendering Chair. “This year’s sessions will offer a rare perspective into how animation and graphics can really enhance and impact game development and the user experience and investigate the future of gaming.”

SIGGRAPH 2009 expanded its programming focus this year to showcase more Games content than ever before. The Games programming will include a Keynote presentation by famed videogame designer, Will Wright, creator of Spore™ and The Sims series, innovative Game Papers, demos and galleries highlighting the best work in experimental game art direction during The Sandbox, and a dynamic new game development competition, GameJam!

Vancouver – 2K Sports today announced a free demo of The BIGS 2, developed by Vancouver studio Blue Castle Games,  is now available for download through PlayStation Network, and a demo on Xbox LIVE ® Marketplace was released last week. The demo will support two players, local only, and offer fans the exciting opportunity to experience the new Batter’s Wheelhouse, thrilling power ups, and incredible player models in a three inning game as either the American League All-Stars or National League All-Stars. Fans will also have the chance to smash home runs into building windows and neon signs in the return of the hugely popular mode, Home Run Pinball, in an all-new Las Vegas venue.

The BIGS 2, available on all major video game consoles, has been elevated to new heights this season with amazing visual effects and a variety of newly added modes including the fan requested Season and Become a Legend. With improved player animations and pick-up-and-play controls, The BIGS 2 is guaranteed to deliver an action-packed MLB videogame experience. Scheduled to be in retail stores on July 7, 2009, the big leagues just got BIGGER with The BIGS 2.