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Archive for the ‘COMPANY LIFE’ Category

Rant time: On reviewers setting price expectations for consumers

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

Rant: On reviewers setting consumer price expectations.

These days it’s a common thing to read quotes like “the game is overpriced for what it offers”, “the game should have a campaign, without it, I’m not buying it”, “really, only 50 levels?”.

Fine, no problem about this, WHEN TALK homer_rant ING ABOUT 50€/$ games!

Those quotes actually come from 1$ games’ reviews, and not only from the consumer themselves (who I don’t expect to be familiar with game development), but also from professional reviewers. I’m doing a fair bit of “everyone in the same basket” here, no offense.

I’m addressing this issue after reading this review of SHIFT Extended (PSP Minis) which states: “At 3.99, it is extremely over-priced, regardless of the number of levels available”… Now let’s consider that SHIFT Extended has gathered very positive reviews and is ranked high up there with the best PSP Minis games, offers around 4 hours of gameplay, took some months to produce and that…well, 3.99$ is less than the price for a movie ticket. (not trying to advertise SHIFT Extended, just making clear it is viewed as a fairly good game).

Is this a far-sighted advice to consumers from someone who is supposed to know how game development works?

Don’t think so.

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Posted in COMPANY LIFE, Rant | 7 Comments »

Fishing Cactus @ Global Game Jam

Wednesday, February 16th, 2011

It has been now three weeks that three cactus soldiers came back from one of a kind event in Antwerpen.

The concept of this event (or jam) created few years ago is rather simple:

Take a bunch of people interested in game developement.
Mix them all together
Give a theme they have to start with
Shake them for a whole sleepless week-end
And there you go, you have several games created that are ready to be played

Now multiply by the number of Jam organised which is 170 in 44 countries and this is what you get in 48 hours:

6500 people teaming up to create around 1500 games on the same theme!

So few guys at Fishing Cactus went. Here is our story:

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Posted in COMPANY LIFE | No Comments »

Shift Extended lands on EU & US PSN stores

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

Shift Extended PSP minis Shift Extended, a brand new version tailored for the minis and, of course, based on the successful Shift series, is now available on both EU and US PSN stores (available on both PSP and PS3 in the minis). It is available for 3.99$ / 3.99€.

It features unique set of levels (160 in total) as well as never seen game mechanics in the Shift series. If you don’t have an iPhone, are addicted to platform games and you have a PS3 or a PSP, this is a must buy!

Zallag, our publisher on this game did a great communication job and posted several trailers around the web. Here is the second one!

Tags: minis, ps3, psn, shift, shift extended, sony
Posted in Announcement, COMPANY LIFE, Game Design | 1 Comment »

Shift 2 iPhone featured and new Shift2QRcode

Thursday, January 20th, 2011

A nice achievement for Fishing Cactus and ArmorGames as almost all AppStores (US, BE and FR at least) featured Shift 2 iPhone.

With an average rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars and ranked #27 out of 100 on the paid AppStore, we can say that we are on the road for another Apple success. Not to say we moved our asses and brought some great values to the sequel (120 levels, 30 bonus levels, 35 achievements, leaderboards, challenge friends online) and I must say the level designers at Fishing Cactus did a great job when designing all those new levels! We are all very excited and proud that you, players out there, liked what we created.

And for those who are waiting for it, here is a new Shift2QRCode (use your camera to unlock a new level in the game):

And for those who don’t know what I’m talking about, this QR code unlocks a unique level in Shift 2 iPhone and if you get them all it will unveil something special. The question is: are you smart enough to discover the secret?!

For those who are still undecided here are some great reviews of the game:
- AppSpy (4/5)
- 148Apps.com (4.5/5)
- AppSafari (4/5)

You can download Shift 2 on the AppStore by following this link.

Stay tuned for more Shift news, we have some heavy work under progress we hope we’ll be able to share soon.

Tags: apple, iphone, qr codes, shift, shift2
Posted in Announcement, COMPANY LIFE | No Comments »

Fighters Uncaged played by 60 years old man

Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010

Fighters Uncaged for Xbox Kinect is coming soon. Time for some fun with this new video appeared on the Internet (and no this is not a marketing strategy from Ubisoft). Enjoy!

Posted in COMPANY LIFE, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Fishing Cactus represents at VAD EXPO 2010

Friday, October 22nd, 2010

As some of you may know, we were invited as guest speakers at the VAD Expo 2010 in Lille to talk about Advergaming on mobile devices, Motion gaming and ARG’s (Alternate Reality Games)

It was the chance to talk to industry leaders about the efficiency of games in Marketing and communication.

Of course, with video games, things always find a way to become funny and, honnestly, it’s for the best!

See what our friends from Adictiz found the time to do at the Expo:

Posted in COMPANY LIFE, Presentations | No Comments »

Fishing Cactus presents R.O.G.E.R, the first Medical Kinect Serious game

Thursday, October 7th, 2010

Together with the support of the Microsoft Innovation Center and a cluster of 4 therapists, we have created a prototype Serious game dedicated to patients who suffer from a lack of logic and organizational skills
(typically post-stroke patients, Alzheimer, hemi-negligent patients,…)

We have been getting a lot of press and attention about this project since we are pretty much the only studio in Belgium and maybe Europe who master the technology to build this game, the reason is that we have used Kinect Technology, a controller less movement recognition camera.

This allows our game to be piloted by any generation, and especially non digital natives who have never used a game controller or keyboard and mouse (very good indeed since most patients with those symptoms fall under this category).

The scenario for this prototype is simple, we have created a photo-realist environment running directly on the X360 composed of a bedroom, bathroom and a dressing. Each room has a certain amount of inventory spaces in which representations of objects are placed.

The therapists can task the patient to do his luggage for a specific destination (the mountains, the sea, a city-trip,…) and can observe how the patient reacts to the environment and the type of objects he gathers in his luggage. It helps the therapists to analyse and observe if patients are disorganized and see where they have lost their common sense and focus on those points in therapy. Of course we create several pertubating elements to make them lose focus (phone ringing, radio and so on).

The game is evolving and the 2 year goal from here is to have a very innovative and collaborative project.

Posted in Announcement, COMPANY LIFE, Game Design, Programming | 3 Comments »

Fighters Uncaged Kinect trailer

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Fighters Uncaged Kinect Some of you already figured out (check last posts if not) but Fishing Cactus has been quite involved in the development of Fighters Uncaged, a Ubisoft title developed by AMA Studios (Fishing Cactus closely collaborated with the AMA team).

Fighters Uncaged is planned as a launch title for Kinect next November so be prepared for an overwhelming number of posts on the blog as the release date is getting closer.

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Posted in COMPANY LIFE, Game Design | 1 Comment »

Fighters Uncaged previewed on Destructoid

Wednesday, October 6th, 2010

Fighters Uncaged on Destructoid Destructoid did a first preview of Fighters Uncaged, a Kinect launch title on which Fishing Cactus collaborated with AMA studios (game published by Ubisoft). You can find the complete preview here:http://www.destructoid.com/impressions-fighters-uncaged-185701.phtml

In a nutshell, here’s what Ben Perlee says about the game: “I can say that Fighters Uncaged could be a novel alternative to the swarms of sports titles coming to Kinect. It’s not outrageously violent, but it is certainly different from the swarms of candy colored games ready to hit the market. Between the recognized long kicks and short punches, it’s clear that the game is putting the device through its paces in recognizing different moves, and that in itself is a step up from other motion controlled fighting games.”

Posted in Announcement, COMPANY LIFE | No Comments »

4 new team members join FC

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

There has been a lot going on with the internal team recently. In the last 2 months we’ve welcomed Benjamin, Samuel, Jef and Fabrice at Fishing Cactus. Please let me introduce them to you.

Benjamin has been in the game industry for almost 12 years and is a versatile, polyvalent, 3D/2D artist who will bring a lot to the team expertise and its various projects. Favorite sentence? Tic-Tac…

Fabrice is a talented, multi-task, coffee-drinker (this is mandatory), programmer with already a long career and proven track record. His first experience in the game industry lasted 5 years when he was working at Larian. After that he went to Hydravision for a little while. He worked on a wide range of projects and consoles and is already tackling some serious iPhone stuff involving physics. Wow!

Samuel has joined Fishing Cactus initially as a game and level design intern from Supinfogame. For instance he’s the one behind some of the craziest levels you’ve seen in Minim and in the upcoming Shift projects. He loves so much Fishing Cactus that he decided to stay with us a little bit longer and to join our creative team permanently (he’s sleeping in the cellar!).

Jef has been recently graduated from the Howest Kortrijk Univerty College and he is the lastest one to join us as programmer (actually yesterday). After a first experience at Larian, he decided to join Fishing Cactus for the awesome projects we have in the pipe. And yeagh, he brought some biscuits for his first day of work. Well done Jef, you know how to make friends!

OK guys enough for the flowers, let’s get to work now!

Posted in COMPANY LIFE | 3 Comments »