Critical Mass

Valve to produce games for Macs

We likely won’t hear about this officially until the Game Developers Conference kicks off on Tuesday, but word is that developer Valve will be porting some of its hit games onto Macs in the near future. The speculation is that Portal , Team Fortress 2, Left 4 Dead and Half-Life 2 will all make the transition.

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IGF finalist Limbo coming to XBLA this summer

At last! Playdead’s gorgeous monochromatic platformer Limbo is to get an Xbox Live Arcade release this summer. First teased over three years ago (with the footage below), Limbo follows a young boy’s journey to discover the fate of his sister

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Splinter Cell delay “the best possible scenario” for Ubisoft

Speaking in an interview with CVG , game designer on Splinter Cell: Conviction , Patrick Redding, called the game’s delay from late February to mid-April “the best possible scenario,” which he said has allowed the developers more time to fix issues with the AI and add different challenge levels. “In some ways it was the best possible scenario for us because we were angling towards our original release date in February. You know, as is always the case, you develop this kind of laundry list and think: ‘Aw man if only we had an extra bit of polish time to really go after that and that and that, plus all the usual debugging, that’d be wonderful,’” Redding revealed

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John Carmack to receive Lifetime Achievement award

The 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards will be rewarding John Carmack — Doom and Quake developer id Software’s co-founder and technical director aka longtime code genius — the Lifetime Achievement award for his contributions to the art and science of games at GDC next month. The award recognizes “the career and achievements of developers who have made an indelible impact on the craft of game development” — something that, by being among the people who essentially established the first-person shooter genre and by developing the technology behind those first and many other games, Carmack is most qualified for. “It’s no exaggeration to say that John Carmack and id Software have had a monumental influence on all modern 3D games, but especially the first-person shooter genre,” says Meggan Scavio, Event Director of GDC

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iPhone App Devs Not Allowed to Use Geolocation Just for Ads

Apple has posted a news bulletin for iPhone developers, informing them they may not use the phone’s geolocation features primarily for delivering targeted ads. What that means is if you’re playing a game that doesn’t use geolocation for gameplay, and all it’s doing is tracking your location to serve location-based ads, it’ll get rejected. (Many media outlets have reported that Apple has banned location-based ads altogether, which is not the case.) Apple’s news bulletin reads: The Core Location framework allows you to build applications which know where your users are and can deliver information based on their location, such as local weather, nearby restaurants, ATMs, and other location-based information

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