#vivendi games

[badschmitt24071994]

Disruptor 1996 ps1

Disruptor is a 1996 first-person shooter video game developed by Insomniac Games and published by Universal Interactive Studios and Interplay Productions (Universal in North America, Interplay in Europe) for the PlayStation. It was the first game developed by Insomniac Games.[2] The game released on November 30, 1996 in North America and in December of that year in Europe. It received positive reviews from critics, but was a commercial failure, selling well below the company’s expectations.

[shinigami-striker]

Crash Nitro Kart | Saturday, 11.11.2023

Happy 20th anniversary to Crash Nitro Kart!

[ancestral-steppe]

[spoonbenders]

do the obscure ps2 game tumblr girlies know about cortex chaos. this was supposed 2 b a tie-in game to crash twinsanity that was vaguely pikmin-esque n centered around getting little dr cortex minion robots to march to their inevitable mass doom to complete tasks

the game was supposed to feature nina cortex more heavily than twinsanity did alongside a bunch of other evil scientist guys and a fuckton of ratchet and clank esque weapon upgrades

it never started production cuz vivendi universal said to "put it on the backburner for later" n then it never got brought up again. the more u know or whatever

[a-bluedream-posts]

Rayne Variation by vznnry

[found-in-retro-game-mags]

Die Hard Vendetta

"Action on Nintendo GameCube... Has just matured." (EGM #162, Jan. 2003)

[oktaviaslabyrinth]

Lisa Simpson’s Theme // The Simpsons: Hit & Run (2003)

[mvfm-25]

" The game is never far from a laugh, and amazingly the humour is almost flawless! "

PC Zone Magazine n122 - December, 2002.

[hardcore-gaming-101]

Top 47K - The Simpsons: Hit & Run

Join the HG101 gang as they discuss and rank a Simpsons GTA-clone that delivers on its promise.

[jam2go]

I was looking through the US Copyright Office to see who owns Spyro now (Microsoft) and I found this list of titles being renewed.

Between a bunch of Crash Bandicoot characters and Spyro is "Single heterosexual" (1996)

Does anyone know what game this is??? I want to play it.

Universal Interactive merged with -> Vivendi Games who merged with -> Activision who merged with -> Microsoft who now owns the rights to "Crash Bandicoot", "Single heterosexual", and "Spyro the dragon".

[askagamedev]

How do *you* feel about the Activision-Microsoft merger?

Mergers and acquisitions are normal in business. Over the course of my career, I've seen several large industry publishers merge or acquire other publishers, and dozens of independent studios get purchased by publishers.

Sega merged with Sammy Corp. in 2004 to form Sega-Sammy. Later they bought Atlus.

EA merged with Pandemic Studios + Bioware in 2007

Bandai and Namco merged in 2007

Activision merged with Vivendi Universal's games division in 2008 to form Activision-Blizzard

Bungie was purchased by Microsoft in 2000, bought itself out to go independent again in 2007, and was recently acquired by Sony in 2022.

Activision-Blizzard merged with King in 2015

Microsoft acquired ZeniMax in 2020

EA acquired Glu Mobile in 2021

Embracer Group bought Gearbox in 2021

Take Two bought Zynga in 2022

These kinds of behaviors are fairly normal in any major industry. Smaller companies fall on hard times and a larger company offers a rescue. Old leadership grows weary of running the company and someone offers them a big payday. Two like-minded sets of leadership decide that they would work better together.

In my opinion, the danger comes when too much consolidation happens and, instead of a market with plenty of competition, you end up with a cartel. It's not quite a monopoly with a single controlling company, but it's pretty close - a cartel is a handful of enormous organizations/companies that control the vast majority of the market and collude with each other in order to keep competition down and enrich themselves. In such a situation, they don't have to compete as hard anymore because they can take turns and help each other out. Any rising competition either gets bought or sabotaged by the combined might of the cartel.

Usually this happens because the cost for entering the market is really high - it's really risky to take that chance to compete with the cartel, which makes the newcomers much more vulnerable to cartel countermeasures. You can see this kind of corporate nonsense at work in many fields here in the US - there are only a handful of telecom companies, internet service providers, meat packing companies, train companies, cloud computing services, and so on. A big sign you're dealing with a cartel is when there aren't many options and none of them are particularly appealing.

I don't think that's happened in video games yet - we still have large independent publishers like Take Two, Steam, and EA, and we have medium-sized independent publishers like Capcom, Sega-Sammy, Bandai-Namco, Epic, and so on. But if the mega-corps keep buying up the bigger publishers, we'll probably end up in cartel territory and everything will suck.

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[wolfbuns]

I'm glad the tumblrinas have caught on to Goncharov because I've been meaning to talk about one of the most underrated games of all time: Goncharov the Videogame (2007) by Vivendi Games.

No one ever talks about this game. Sure, it was one of the many GTA clones of that era, and the driving and shooting sections were attrocious, but the atmosphere of this game was immaculate, and it did so many incredible things ahead of it's time. A build-your-empire game, where you play as Goncharov, showing you the behind the scenes of his rise-to-power in the streets of Naples, taking back territory against the Italian mafia. All the actors who were still alive reprised their roles, except for Pacino (they had to get the same impersonator who played him in the Scarface game), and they even did mocap for all the cutscenes, where they recreated key scenes from the movie from different perspectives.

Of course what people remember the most about this is the incredible mid-game twist. As you know there's not that many action setpieces in the movie, so after the 5 assassinations where does the game go? Well, as you know from the movie, Goncharov dies, but after the funeral scene, and a fake-out credits sequence, there is a 20 year timeskip and you now control a grown-up Gonchivetta, and you set out in a journey of revenge to reclaim your father's empire and clean up his honor. Of course in order to unlock Gonchivetta's story you needed to max out your affection with Katya before Assassination 3, a mechanic that was not properly explained anywhere in the game, and so the second half of the game remained mostly undiscovered for the next 15 years, with many of the low scores citing the seemingly short play time.

However, the final nail on the coffin was when nearing release of the game Matteo JWHJ 0715 was asked about the game in an interview and went on a 15 minute-long tirade against the entire gaming industry, fully denouncing the production of this game for not sticking to his vision, and claiming this was just a cash-grab set up by Warner Bros., who owned the licensing rights of the movie at the time. Many people cancelled their pre-orders and started boycotting the game, many gaming forums even having dozens of threads dedicated to discussing the ethics of purchasing the game after Matteo's declarations. Scorsese even had to make a statement for several gaming magazines asking people to support the game, but it was too late, and the game was a financial failure across all platforms.

Still, this game is fantastic, and I think it fully deserves a re-release or a full-on remake on current gen consoles. Activision just needs to settle with JWHJ 0715's estate and come to an agreement on the licensing. Maybe they can even include the Wii versions' improved aiming and vehicle driving, and the 2 extra missions and 15 songs for Gonchivetta's story that were added in the Xbox version. Maybe they can even get some of the talented people from Katya Team, the guys who are working on Goncharov Definitive Edition, the extensive fan patch aiming to fix and modernize the incredibly buggy PC release.

[shinigami-striker]

Japanese Spyro | Tuesday, 01.09.24

Answer me this:

Was Spyro always like this in Japan with these design changes for several games he's appeared in back then?

[theothermaidoftarth]

Writing Patterns (Tag Game)

Rules: list the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there's a pattern!

Thanks for tagging me @gwenllian-in-the-abbey! Another really interesting tag game. Looks like I’m gonna have to delve into my ff.net fics for this one (I have far more fics posted there than I do on ao3 currently).

Broke the rules a bit to post the first few lines of some of my fics and there certainly seems to be a pattern — I start in media res, in the middle of some sort of action half the time, or there’s an introspective thought kicking things off (or both somewhat, in the case of Song for Evermore).

“You sing to your dragon?”   

“Yes, I — yes.” Daeron thought he was alone, save the dragons and the last vestiges of his song, echoing back to him. She startled him. His eyes took her in, from boots to breeches and studded jack.

Song for Evermore (House of the Dragon)

The young heir to the Iron Throne was racing like the wind, following the winding river of the Wendwater through the kingswood.  The Favoured (HotD)

It should not have been possible for a child to slip past the guards again, out into the night, but all was in shambles in the castle of High Tide. 

Sorrow (HotD)

It has been two years but they still look at them out of the corners of their eyes, even when their house colours are not visible. They look at him askance for his accent and what they think that makes him (Paddy, fenian); they look at her askance for the colour of her skin, the fall of her long braids, her full lips, and what they think that makes her (darkie, golliwog).

Modus Vivendi (Harry Potter)

She was crying in the orchard—silently, tear tracks running down her round cheeks. His stomach twisted; he hated it when she cried. Teddy knelt in front of her, ran a hand over her tight curls. Roxanne jerked away from him and he frowned.

Half-Blood (HP)

Luna liked to take the time to enjoy the world, to see everything her mother couldn't and never would again. So even after five years at Hogwarts—and even though her mum had been a Beauxbatons alumni, not a Hogwarts one—Luna took the time to admire the views from certain windows. She took the time to stop and greet ghosts and portraits that she knew and liked—and even some she didn't; who knew what she could learn from them, after all.

Of Second Chances and Burgeoning Friendships (HP)

Edmund hated being second-best. He always had before coming to Narnia, and, of course, immediately after his arrival. He thought that feeling had abated with the White Witch's death and his concomitant absolution. Apparently not.

His Brother's Woman (HP / Chronicles of Narnia crossover)

If there was one thing that could be said about Charlie Weasley, it was this: he loved his family.

Honest, he did.

Only sometimes they got on his nerves. Like today.

The Life of Charlie: The Second Son (HP)

There were few things that Hermione Granger was uncertain of.

One thing she wasn't uncertain of was this: Luna Lovegood was quite the oddball. Ginny Weasley agreed. And the younger Gryffindor wasn't the only one. Now, if Hermione could just get Harry to see that, then maybe he'd stay away from the straggly-haired, protuberant-eyed Ravenclaw.

A Slip of Conscience (HP)

When Ron was young - about six or so - he used to think that he'd been put on the Weasleys' doorstep as a baby. Maybe even swapped at birth with their real son; there were evil fairies that did that - someone told him that once.

Beneath The Surface: The Sixth Son (HP)

Tagging: @bohemian-nights, @pebblume, @emilykaldwen, @aifsaath, and whoever else wants to join in.

[unofskylanderspages]

With the beginning of the development of Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure, Toys for Bob was given the opportunity to revive a Vivendi franchise, and they chose the Spyro the Dragon franchise. It was mentioned by Toys for Bob that attempts to revive broad-audience mascot franchises haven't seen predictable success in the game industry. 'Just creating a new Spyro game after the traditional fashion was unlikely to work', says Paul Reiche. And reinventing the character as a "really gritty, strange otherworldly Spyro" didn't seem like a promising idea. Spyro needed a radical new idea. Reiche says he 'had considered integrating technology with toys and games for a while, and it was the kind of concept that was so outlandish that it was the most promising idea the team sketched out for the brand.'

[mermaidinthecity]

Vivendi Universal Games E3 Kickoff Party at Avalon Hollywood - May 11, 2004