Eurogamer

While Pandemic's "own money" cursed it. Former employees of Ensemble Studios and Pandemic Studios have blamed the developers' demise on their own company cultures, rather than the publishers that owned and closed them, Microsoft and EA. Speaking at GDC, Paul Bettner, who worked at Ensemble for 12 years, refused to blame Microsoft for the studio's closure. "The reality is that every single game we shipped took twice as long as we said it was going to take, and cost twice as much to make. "Microsoft is a public company, they answer to their shareholders, and we were simply too expensive." Read more...

WipEout? SSD? MotorStorm? Maybe... Sony tech wizard Simon Benson has confirmed the first batch of 3D games for PlayStation 3 will be available this summer. Speaking to Eurogamer at the Game Developers Conference, Benson said, "Basically, we're launching our TV range around June, I think, so it should be somewhere around then." During his GDC session, Benson showed demos of WipEout HD, Super Stardust and MotorStorm: Pacific Rift. When asked if these games will be playable in 3D this summer, he replied, "I don't know if we've formally announced what we're doing for launch. But there is certainly going to be a good range of content - there probably won't be any unusual surprises, let's say."a Read more...

Plus WiiWare and DSiWare treats. Nintendo's Hanabi Festival returns today, making NeoGeo game Iron Clad and NES game Lode Runner available in Europe for the first time. That's so brilliant that Nintendo has bumped up the price, raising Iron Clad from 900 to 1000 Wii Points (£7/10), and Lode Runner from 500 to 600 Wii Points (£4.20/6). On WiiWare today is Military Madness, a moon-based, turn-based, hexagonal-grid strategy game that requires three hyphens to describe. This costs 1000 Wii Points (£7/10). There's a website. Read more...

Mysterious BioWare leaflet points to date. BioWare has singled out 2nd February 2011 as a significant date for the Dragon Age series. The numbers "02.01.2011" were printed on a leaflet inside the US Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening retail box, above a familiar blood-red dragon. 1UP took a picture. There was no accompanying explanation, but this appears to be the "Dragon Age Title TBA" mentioned in EA's Q3 financials in February. Read more...

Thinks Sony wand may be "for the core". Peter Molyneux has told Eurogamer that he doesn't think PlayStation Move is the same kind of step forward as Microsoft's Project Natal, but admits he fancies a crack on Sony's new magic wand controller. "I have seen some of it. We're not really surprised, are we? I mean at E3 last year we saw they were having a wand, and that's kind of what I expected. It looks like they've taken a step forward but it's not as big a step as something like Natal, I don't think," Molyneux told us in an interview at GDC. "This is purely me talking personally, but I think maybe it's slightly more a device for the core than it is for the casual market, because I think it's quite precise. Read more...