Atomic's game news roundup

This week: major developer business deals, more information about PhysX and Sam and Max hit the episodes.

It’s been a big week on the business side of the gaming world.

Although online distribution is making it easier for small studios to compete in a global marketplace, there’s still a lot of value in being under the wing of a major development house. With this in mind, Vivendi Games has purchased Secret Lair Studios and Studio Ch’in -- pending approval by the Government of the People’s Republic of China -- to give its Sierra Online division more clout in Xbox Live Arcade.

Although they aren’t blockbuster hit-making studios, they will re-enforce Vivendi by catering to casual gamers. Vivendi’s developer arsenal includes Blizzard (which is left largely to its own devices thanks to its success with World of Warcraft and its back-catalogue) and Massive Entertainment, the company behind Ground Control.

Atari has this week sold off Shiny Entertainment -- creators of Earthworm Jim, MDK and more recently the Matrix games -- to Foundation 9 Entertainment.

Foundation 9 is a development house that owns several studios, including The Collective -- makers of Star Wars: Episode III, the banned Marc Ecko’s Getting Up and who are guilty of unleashing the Da Vinci Code game upon us -- and Digital Eclipse, who specialize in platform emulation and release budget ports of old classics, like Midway Treasures.

The reasoning behind the sale of Shiny is to complete “the final phase of [Atari’s] strategic restliructuring”. Translation: Atari was getting too bloated for its own good.

The first episode of Sam and Max will be available through GameTap on the 17th of October. On the 1st of November, it hit Telltale Games’ site. Episodes will be released monthly, and the two week staggered release across the two services will continue to try and encourage the use of subscription services. Episodes from Telltale will cost US$8.95. You can buy the entire season from Telltale for US$34.95, and get the option of paying the shipping cost to have a CD of the first season sent to you. Of course, you’ll have to wait until all the episodes have been released online.

For those of you with a PhysX card, you’ll be pleased to know that the newest SDK, version 2.6, has been released to developers. It adds support for Windows Vista and Linux, and adds deformable objects to the toolset of PhysX programmers. “…the car body can now be realistically damaged in a collision so that it retains the shape of the impact. This collision can then affect the car’s dynamics, and dramatically impact game play.” Nice.

The Codemasters team and Australian game developer IR Gurus are planning to release Heatseeker in early 2007. It’s for consoles only, specifically the PS2, PSP and the Wii. Heatseeker uses a modified version of the Heroes of the Pacific engine, but the game itself focuses on modern air combat. We know it will feature the F-22 Raptor, the F-15 Eagle, the F-35 Lightning II, and the Russian SU-47 Berkut, and a third person view of your missile launches will kick in whenever you decide to forcibly remove the enemy from your sight.

If Heroes of the Pacific is anything to go by, it should be very arcade-ey, and certainly won’t herald the re-birth of the combat flight sim genre. But (and this is one almighty hell of an understatement) we are looking forward to dogfights using the Wii controller.

Finally we have some screenshots to share with you from Delta Force Black Hawk Down: Team Sabre. Enjoy!