Welcome back to Jetsetter, Digital Trends’ weekly column exploring the ins and outs of the international world of video games. As the summer quarter wrapped up this past week, game makers around the world reported a mix of good and bad news. Japan’s Sony is struggling, but it’s already preparing for the future with the PlayStation 4 and even possibly readying the PlayStation 3 for release in China. On the other end of the spectrum, the global indie community grew as Kickstarter brought its game-friendly crowd funding service to the United Kingdom.
Japan and the UK are very much the focus of this week’s Jetsetter. Let’s get to it.
* EA lashes out at British show Watchdog over FIFA 13 criticism.
Consumer rights program Watchdog called out Electronic Arts this past week, highlighting glitches and problems with the company’s breakout hit FIFA 13. EA responded to claims of mass player complaints of glitches by saying it’s doing the best it can. “We have received reports from our fans of rare occurrences where the ball in the game does not appear. Our team continues to investigate these rare events and we will communicate directly with our fans once we have information,” reads EA’s statement to the BBC, “We understand that some fans may wonder why we can’t fix all the known issues at once. That’s a fair question and the answer isn’t quite as simple. We are delivering improvements and fixes in such a way to ensure that millions of people playing FIFA 13 do not experience undue or overly lengthy network/server outages, that title updates and other improvements are done to a high quality, and that that we’re confident the changes will improve the FIFA 13 experience for everyone.”
A question: Why did Watchdog call EA out for glitches when it could have called them out for pawning off old games as new ones?
* PixelJunk jumps from PlayStation 3 to PC.
Studio Q-Games is a unique entity in video game development. The studio’s based in Japan, but its founder Dylan Cuthbert (creator of Star Fox) is British. The studio’s PixelJunk series is also unique, a series of loosely related genre explorations like PixelJunk Shooter and experiments like PixelJunk 4am. While the series has jumped to other platforms like Facebook in the past, its home has always been on PlayStation 3. The next game, the unnamed PixelJunk 1-6, will not be on PlayStation at all but Valve’s Steam. A console game is possible if there’s demand, but Steam is the future home of the series.
* Japan’s Treasure, creators of Gunstar Heroes, working on new 3DS game.
Treasure, the studio behind cult classics like Silhouette Mirage, Guardian Heroes, and Mischief Makers, has been quiet since 2010. A couple years back, it released one of the Wii’s best games, Sin & Punishment 2: Star Successor. Since then, though, it’s been lying low. In a new interview with gamesTM magazine (via Nintendo World Report), Treasure CEO Masato Maegawa said his company is working on a brand new exclusive for Nintendo. “We are making a new game on Nintendo 3DS now. Not multiplatform, but exclusive to 3DS.” Knowing Treasure, there’s only one thing we can be sure of: It will be weird as hell.
