Alan Wake developer Remedy Entertainment is unfazed by criticisms of long development times, and has hinted that it will take just as long on its next project if necessary.

Remedy has in recent times been subjected to criticisms for taking noticeably prolonged amounts of time developing its most recent title, Alan Wake.

Yet Oskari Häkkinen, Remedy’s head of franchise development, told develop in an interview published today that the prolonged dev cycles can often be a necessary procedure to ensure quality.
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Sex scenes in upcoming role-playing shooter Alpha Protocol are "satisfying" but "tasteful", developer Obsidian has said.

Speaking to VideoGamer.com, Obsidian programming producer Nathan Davis confirmed no gameplay elements will be involved.

Video game sex is currently in vogue, with US RPG developer BioWare in particular happy to include sex scenes in its games.

2007’s Mass Effect allowed player characters, male and female, to have sex with computer-controlled male humans and female aliens, without showing full-frontal nudity.
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After Vivendi’s game division merged with Activision last year a lot of titles got cut by Activision. Among those titles was the action packed shooter WET from developer A2M. During an interview with Dutch website Gaming Only at an event for the game in Amsterdam today, the game’s Creative Director Patrick Fortier, told a different story. He says that after they heard that Activision would not be publishing all of Vivendi’s titles, A2M took matters into their own hand and bought back all the rights from Vivendi. Fortier said "we (A2M) did not have enough faith that WET would be at the right place with Activision". He also added that they did not want to wait to find out if the game was still going to be published by Activision or if it would be dropped.

When talking about new publisher Bethesda Fortier said "we are really happy with Bethesda Softworks, they haven’t limited us in any way". During the time WET did not have a publisher A2M had several parties that were interested in publishing WET. They chose Bethesda, because they felt best at home with them according to Frontier.
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Developed exclusively for Xbox 360 by acclaimed developer Bungie, Halo 3: ODST is a new, stand-alone expansion to the Halo saga that lets players experience the events leading up to the epic story told in Halo 3 through the eyes of an entirely new character the ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper), as they search for clues leading to the whereabouts of their scattered squad and the motivations behind the Covenant’s invasion of New Mombasa. The game adds a new dimension to an all-encomp…
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Acclaimed developer Infinity Ward brings you Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to the best-selling shooter of all-time, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare.

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Buy Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at Amazon

Sega has announced via release that their upcoming action title Bayonetta will be given the full treatment at this year’s Comic-Con, including game demos, developer panel, a live action model and more.
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Codemasters, the developer and publisher of acclaimed videogames including Colin McRae: DiRT and Race Driver: GRID, was honoured at the 2009 Develop Industry Excellence Awards winning the coveted Grand Prix Award. The ceremony was held last night in Brighton, UK, as part of the Develop Conference 2009.
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Dave Jones has quite a resume in the gaming industry, having worked on a variety of franchises from Lemmings to Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown. Speaking at the Brighton Develop conference, the designer said how he is a big fan of users creating their own experiences.

He is, in particular, proud of what Realtime Worlds achieved with the original Crackdown. "We developed the city to function as a platform game, where anything you could see you could climb or jump to," he said. "It had other aspects, too, such as light RPG trappings, but we began to realize that our main innovation was our drop-in, drop-out multiplayer that managed to be successful in an open world."

Still, despite the game’s almost unexpected level of success, the return on investment wasn’t high. "With Crackdown we sold about 1.5 million copies, but even at that we pretty much only managed to break even," he said. "It was due to the amount of factors that were out of our control as the developer, influences such as GameStop’s amazing used-game sales; we know 1.5 million new copies were sold, but it’s likely there were 2.5, three million sold when you include used."
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APB developer RealTime Worlds has said that the online market still has a lot of untapped potential and can offer new creative and business opportunities for developers.

Speaking at the Develop conference in Brighton, RTW boss David Jones said the company has assessed all the growing areas in the videogame market – including social, iPhone and Wii gaming – but it became clear that next-gen technology and online opportunities are where "the big dollars are".

"One of the reasons we want to go into the online space is because it opens a wealth of opportunities," said Jones. "Online, as far as I’m concerned, is very, very much untapped. It’s kind of like winding the clock back ten or fifteen years. There’s a huge amount of scope of online for innovation and for forging genres to really set a bench mark in many different areas."
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Alpha Protocol has a unique pre-order bonus item promotion – you’ll get different weapons depending on which retailer you pre-order with – but developer Obsidian says that people who don’t pre-order at all won’t be getting the short end of the stick.
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