Village Gamer

Vancouver – A brief reminder that the Women in Games Vancouver (WIGEH) Networking Event takes place tonight at the Wine Room, downstairs at the Steamworks Brew Pub. We invite you to join us at 7pm for an evening of socializing and information.  This event is open to both women and men, and we hope to see you there.

Ottawa – The Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI) has released its annual Knowledge-based Industry Survey. The study indicates that as of December 31, 2009, the number of companies in Ottawa’s knowledge-based sectors has increased by nearly half of one per cent while the number of employees has decreased by 1.3 per cent. The most current data, garnered from 13 industry sectors, indicates a slight increase of 0.4 per cent in the total number of companies to 1,857 up from 1,850 last year. The survey garnered responses from 88 companies whose primary business focus is in cleantech, contact centre/customer centre, convergent medical devices, defence and security, eBusiness, health and drug discovery, knowledge-based support services, photonics, semiconductor, software, telecommunications, wireless and digital media.

“We certainly expected 2009 to be challenging so we are not surprised by the decrease in employment but we also know that the best time to start a new business venture is during tough economic times. With 222 companies added to the database and a notable increase in employment for small and medium sized businesses we see that the support programs and tools available to new companies and entrepreneurs here in Ottawa are having a positive impact,” says Claude Haw, President and CEO, OCRI. “The entire city has rallied to provide support to help our companies become successful and there are examples of great collaboration all around us. Of course, we must continue to create an environment that is attractive to investors and actively leverages the various funding programs available for small and medium sized companies in order to fuel innovation and propel our economy forward.”

Ottawa’s cleantech sector demonstrated the greatest growth for the third year in a row, with several companies adding more than 50 employees to their staff base. This translates to a 25.2% increase in job positions for this industry sector. Also of note is Ottawa’s recent designation as one of the world’s top seven intelligent communities by the Intelligent Community Forum.

The OCRI report also points out the strength of the region’s digital media industry, stating that “the digital media sector has been gaining traction in our region. In October, Ottawa hosted the International Animation Festival, proving to many who weren’t already aware that Ottawa is a hotbed for digital media creativity. The cluster features 63 companies that have identified digital media as their primary industry and more than 120 others see digital media as their secondary industry. As a result, a formal digital media cluster, GENERATOR, was launched in December.”

Vancouver – Hive is a board game originally designed by John Yianni and released by “Gen Four Two Games” in 2001. Independent developer Lotusland Studios has developed Hive as a mobile game, and it is now available in the iTunes App Store for the iPhone™ and iPod touch®. Hive is categorized as an abstract strategy game and is highly unique as the pieces are simply placed on a flat surface without the limitations and constraints of a traditional game-board.

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Toronto – Which Canadian city is your favourite? Hasbro is launching a nation wide vote to find our nation’s 22 favourite cities that will be included on the new Monopoly Canada game board!

The voting began last night at midnight ET, with Monopoly fans casting their ballots for  their favourite Canadian cities to help create a new Monopoly Canada game board. Sixty-five great Canadian cities have been pre-selected for the top 20 city vote and Canadians are invited to cast their ballots for 3 of these great cities each day of the vote, which will be open until February 7, 2010. The city that receives the most votes will be placed on the highest rent property traditionally held by Boardwalk.

The 20 cities that receive the most votes will be part of Monopoly history as the first cities selected to be on the Canadian game board through a consumer vote. However, two spaces on the board will be reserved for cities that are nominated through a wild card vote, which means any city in Canada can be nominated for these property spaces. Once the top 20 city vote is complete, the top 10 nominated wild card cities will also be put to a vote and the wild card winners will occupy the low-rent property spaces traditionally held by Mediterranean Avenue and Baltic Avenue. The wild card vote will take place from February 8, 2010 until February 21, 2010.

“Monopoly is the world’s most popular branded board game and it transcends cultural barriers,” said Michelle Sinclair, Brand Manager for Monopoly. “More than 750 million people have played the game since it was first introduced 75 years ago and its popularity shows no signs of slowing down.”

“The final result of the Monopoly Canada Edition will be surprising and only time will tell how the vote will turn out. We hope that fans will vote early and often for their favourite Canadian city” added Michelle.

The 65 cities pre-selected for the nation-wide vote are:

Vancouver – Following IUGO’s massively successful Zombie Attack! games, ZA! and ZA! Second Wave, the indie studio has launched a free version of ZA! Second Wave titled Zombie Attack! Bridge Defense. As the titles suggests, the lite version contains the bridge map for users to sample kill a variety of zombies with cool new weapons. Second Wave features more maps and hordes of challenges in the full version. IUGO also recently unveiled their web site’s nice new design – head on over to check out its shiny awesomeness and all of IUGO’s titles today – and don’t forget to vote for IUGO and other great Canadian games, publishers and studios in our Reader’s Choice Canadian Video Game Awards – only one week left to vote!

At CES: Palm released details about their developer kit for webOS during their 3D gaming announcement at the Expo, where they introduced several graphics-intensive game titles for webOS, from leading game developers EA Mobile™, Gameloft, Glu Mobile and Laminar Research. Demonstrated at Palm’s CES event, the games will be available today in the Palm App Catalog for Palm Pre customers.

“We are very excited about the potential of webOS as a platform for mobile 3D gaming,” said Katie Mitic, senior vice president, Product Marketing, Palm, Inc. “This is a key application category, and we’ve worked closely with some of the leading game developers to deliver a great game experience for our customers.”

“Recent improvements to Palm webOS represent major advancements in enabling world-class mobile gaming,” said Travis Boatman, vice president of Worldwide Studios for EA Mobile. “These innovations have allowed us to quickly bring our best IP to the platform.”

The developers introducing titles today have had early access to the Palm webOS Plug-in Development Kit (PDK), which extends the Palm webOS Software Development Kit (SDK) with a set of tools, documentation and APIs that let developers write plug-ins for their webOS applications. The PDK lets developers easily integrate C and C++ code into their webOS applications, enabling new functionality, including immersive 3D games. A public beta version of the webOS PDK is scheduled to be available to all developers in March.

“The performance of the platform allowed us to create these great games in a limited timeframe,” said Baudouin Corman, vice president of publishing, Americas, Gameloft. “webOS allows us to deliver an outstanding gaming experience, and we look forward to bringing our best games to Palm customers worldwide.”“We expect the plug-in model to play an important role in the evolution of the webOS platform, just as plug-ins have with web browsers,” said Mitic. “And with this plug-in, we are making it super-simple for developers to bring the hottest games to webOS.” Read the rest of this entry »