Phil Fish has been in the news lately over his views about the monetization of Let’s Play videos on YouTube. Whether he’s right or not is something that will be up for debate among lawyers, fans and the various content creators for a while still so let’s leave that point for another day.
The thing is that we haven’t really heard much from Phil Fish since he cancelled Fez 2 and left the games industry last summer. Well, he may not have completely vanished but we may never know because Phil Fish is only famous for being famous in the wrong way. The Phil Fish we know isn’t so much famous for being a games designer but being a media creation designed to generate page views
So just who is the real Phil Fish? Innuendo Studios attempts to figure that out.
IT BEGINS!
From now until the end of the month, many of the games you’ve been looking forward to playing will be on discount during the annual Steam Summer Sale. As usual, the sale will include the Daily Deals that run for 48 hours, Flash Sales that run for 8 hours and Community Picks that also run for eight hours. If you want to buy a game, make sure it falls into one of those three brackets or you’re spending too much.
By the way, Community Picks now come in four packs. You vote for the set you want to win rather than just the individual games. More discounts for everyone!
It wasn’t until very recently that I found out that there was a version of YouTube sensation Honest Trailers about video games. It features the same amazing voiceovers by Jon Bailey but these videos are under the Smosh rather than Screen Junkies banner.
So for the first honest video game trailer we run on etg, it’s Final Fantasy VII. The good news is that you’ll probably be able to buy it for cheap during the Steam Sale that starts today.
For all the talk that the E3 2012 teaser for Ubisoft’s Watch Dogs was a complete lie after the graphical downgrade for the game’s retail release, it turns out that it may not have been a lie at all. Well, at least not completely.
Watch Dogs hasn’t been out three weeks but an early version of a mod has been released for the PC version of Watch Dogs that reintroduces the graphical tricks that made the original Watch Dogs videos look so amazing. What’s the most shocking is that the files needed for the mod were included with the game all along.
While SteamOS and the Steam Controller have gotten a bit of interest from gamers and developers, the Steam Machines, Valve’s attempt at bringing Steam and PC gaming to the living room, haven’t exactly set the world on fire.
That may change with a new Steam Machine that was unveiled at E3. It’s definitely not your standard Steam Machine. The new SteamBoy is going to take your Steam experience out of the living room and on the road with this portable gaming device.
Last week was a busy week for employees of the gaming arm of Viacom Media. On Monday, right as E3 was getting started with the E3 media briefings, Defy Media bought Viacom’s gaming-focused websites, including GameTrailers. Defy ended the week by laying off a number of GameTrailers staff one day after E3 came to a close.
While we’ve heard plenty of good things about the PlayStation Now services and gotten a look at some of the games but one key component of PS Now that hadn’t been revealed during the closed beta was the pricing model. With the announcement of the PlayStation Now open beta starting on July 31st, Sony took the opportunity to reveal the prices of renting games on the service and it may not endear them to many gamers.
It’s not just the press conferences that have trailers. Developers and publishers have been steadily releasing trailers over the course of the week. Since we quite clearly didn’t get to all of them in our media briefing recaps, let’s try to make up for that with a few of the trailers we haven’t shown you on the blog yet.
In first showings on etg, we have trailers for Batman: Arkham Knight and Dead Island 2. A teaser trailer for the new Doom game was released with more info coming at QuakeCon. Gameplay trailers for EVE: Valkyrie and Mario Party 10 are included. And while we’ve shown you some trailers for them already, there are new trailers for Destiny, Dragon Age: Inquisition and Bloodborne already.
We’ll keep our eyes open for more trailers and include them in next Monday’s trailers roundup.
If you want to make a big wave in marketing your game at E3, you don’t take your game onto IGN or anyone else’s all-day E3 livestream or even make it a part of your media briefing. You take your in-development game to Conan O’Brien for a Clueless Gamer segment.
For his latest Clueless Gamer segment, Conan took at look at the upcoming Super Smash Bros. for Wii U.
Now that you’ve read about the Ubisoft keynote briefing, it’s time to watch most of it. While I’ve only got the five most interesting trailers from Ubisoft’s E3 presser, those videos still cover 23 minutes of Ubisoft’s one-hour presentation. While Ubisoft might not have had a lot of games to show off this year, they certainly went into depth on the games they did show us.
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