For real? In a new year where Nintendo's WiiWare project draws dozens of mainstream and independent developers and where former mainstream developers unite to erect new indie studios, is the independent developer scene still as cut-throat as it was last year? Ninja Theory's Nina Kristensen, co-founder and chief developer, believes it is. More at the full story.

Telltale's Sam & Max series of episodic content has been getting a lot of attention lately. If you've ever wondered what made the game's episodic marketing model pretty successful, head on over to the full article where Telltale's CEO Dan Connors spoke about just that.

It's a little late for a Halloween bash, but Sam and Max are back with us again for a frightful third installment of their episodic game series. This latest adventure brings us to the territories of Europe, where an undead scourge threatens to take over the world.

Will our favorite anthropomorphic pair somehow beat the odds, or will this case prove to be the Dawn of the Dead? Find out in our game review via the full article!

 While it's already been announced by JoWooD that seeing Sam & Max on the Nintendo Wii is something we all can expect, Telltale Games says otherwise - saying that as for now, the existence of a Sam & Max title on the Wii is up in the air. Puzzled? You're not the only one. See how the entire story plays out in the full article.

 Feeling a little chilly from Sam and Max's previous icecapades in the North Pole? You'll be warming up soon enough, as we let you guys in on our recent review for Sam & Max: Moai Better Blues.

This latest caper has our favorite anthropomorphic dog and hyperkinetic rabbity thing tackling the likes of the Bermuda Triangle, volcanic eruptions, and malevolent sea monkeys. Head on over to the full article for our review!

Ubisoft announces today that Xbox 360 and Wii owners, as well as those with a Nintendo DS and PlayStation 2, will be able to enjoy a new CSI video game this coming Fall 2007. The new game will be known as CSI: Hard Evidence and is being developed by Telltale Games. The PC version ships with the console versions.

Staying true to the CSI franchise, Hard Evidence continues on the crime-solving brand of experience the public has first come to love on TV. The game itself follows the story of Gil Grissom, Catherine Willows, and the rest of the Las Vegas crew in solving crimes with the help of sophisticated lab equipments and realistic techniques. Other features are:

• More Crime-Solving Action: Break down the evidence and bring suspects to justice in five all-new, bizarre crimes. Unravel longer cases, search bigger crime scenes, and uncover hidden evidence in unique locations like never before.
• Go Deeper into the Evidence: Master new forensic tools and find more evidence than ever. Use the new Garage Lab to examine large pieces of evidence like cars and trucks. Recreate gunfights with ballistic lasers, uncover shocking secrets with video analysis, and much more.
• The Ultimate CSI Experience: Experience your very own CSI episodes as you piece together clues with the real CSI actors. Take part in dramatic interrogations, create grisly crime reenactments, and explore atmospheric crime scenes inspired by the show.

There is still no mention how Wii players will be able to use the motion-sensing controllers but Ubisoft has mentioned that CSI: Hard Evidence has been made compatible to the Wiimote and Nunchuk. What we have below are screenshots from the Xbox 360 build and the trailer video for all versions.

See the game's video after the jump!

In league with Blast! Entertainment's Sean Brennan's views on steep development costs, even TellTale Games, makers of the hilarious Sam & Max episodes, agrees that game development just got too big for itself. Sean Brennan, CEO of Blast!, spoke at the Northern Exposure 07 conference and said the high costs were just due to "ego tripping and copycat mentality."

 

Kevin Bruner, executive of TellTale Games, also shares this view with Brennan. "We believe that games are too expensive right now. A lot of not only episodic games but games in general are not priced appropriately. We also think that games are too big," Bruner said.

In his speech entitled "Why Episodic Gaming is Good for Developers," Bruner explained at the Nordic Game Conference the advantages of diving into the episodic business model, much like what Valve Software adapted for the Half-Life franchise. For developing a single title each month, TellTale requires a smaller budget, short term goals, smaller overhead, and gains the ability to interact with customers regularly.

"I think the industry is creating one type of content, which is the thousand-page novel. If you went into a bookstore and every book was a thousand-page novel - not everybody wants that," he explained. He also added that if a game company takes two years to create a game and "screws up," there's no way to correct the mistakes - developers just move on.

To him, it is becoming apparent that the game industry is steering toward one type of game: "the 50-hour first person shooter type thing." Games have become too restrictive and too costly, giving a narrow selection of games for customers to choose.

Bruner believes the Nintendo Wii and casual gaming is cluing the game industry that gamers are looking for something different. TellTale Games focuses on telling stories than marketing action, and he thinks if customers were offered games of similar caliber, they would respond more favorably to such games.

GameTap members will be able to get exclusive access to the highly-anticipated Sam & Max: Season 1 finale, "Bright Side of the Moon". Yep, six months and six episodes later, the first season of the game that "truly defined episodic gaming" draws to a close.

"Before we embarked on this experiment with Telltale, 'episodic gaming' was a concept that no one had ever put terms around," said Ricardo Sanchez, GameTap's vice president of content. "We structured Sam & Max: Season 1 in the TV model because it’s a form that people are already familiar with. In the end, it has been a phenomenal success for us both."

In the final episode of Season 1, Sam & Max head to the moon on a mission to save the earth from a horrifying fate: an eternity of perpetual bliss. For the past five episodes, Sam & Max have been fighting a wave of bizarre hypnoses that infiltrated the media, the mafia, the United States government, and even the Internet. Now, Sam & Max must destroy the mastermind behind these mind-control schemes once and for all.

After launching Episode 5: Reality 2.0, the rabbit and dog duo is back! Telltale and Gametap have unveiled the first details of the season finale of the PC game Sam and Max. The finale is entitled - Sam and Max: Season 1 Bright Side of the Moon. After dealing with a viral video game which hold its players hostage, Sam and Max discovered that the local mind control scheme has grown to global proportions - the media, mafia, the U.S. government, and the worldwide web are now linked to it.

The duo would now have to storm a weird lunar paradise and come face-to-face with the plot's mastermind. The question now is, will they succeed? Well, we here are rooting for the good guys to finish first. Anyhow, we have here six screens of Episode 6, plus a teaser video. Feel free to check them out.

The dog and rabbit crime-fighting duo is once again headed to retail stores worldwide beginning in August 2007. Sam and Max Season 1 gives us another peek at the six-foot tall mutt with a love for justice and that hyper-kinetic rabbit with an uncanny taste for violence. Sam and Max may be the Freelance Police, but they do get rid of the scum.

Anyhow, Telltale Games is of course the people behind the episodic games and now JoWooD Productions is helping out with the distribution chores. According to Albert Seidl, JoWooD's CEO, "We are excited about working with Telltale. Sam & Max is a strong franchise and fans across Europe, and the world over, are highly anticipating Sam & Max: Season 1... The worldwide retail release will allow us to bring Sam & Max to a wider audience since the game will be available in the five main languages."

In the meantime, we'll be expecting more screens and trailers from them.