Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian may claim that the European game market is equal in size to that of North America, but for Ubisoft, it’s even larger. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz at the Leipzig Games Convention last week, Ubisoft’s CEO Yves Guillemot explain that, thanks to the strength of the pound and euro, Europe is a larger market than the U.S. by more than 5%.

First, our money – the pound or the euro – is very strong and because of that the turnover from those countries is heavier than they used to be. So for Ubisoft turnover Europe is actually more important than the US now, and by more than 5 per cent. It’s become a very strong market for us.

I think there are lots of customers that want to play – because in Europe we love to play – the only problem we had was that the games were becoming more and more difficult to play. Now that there’s more accessibility, some accessories that are helping people to have fun, I think this market has no limit in the growth it can have if we can make sure that the people that are coming in are staying.

A game like EndWar, for example, which you can control by voice – it’s totally changing the industry because it gives you the opportunity to command what’s happening, and to have a quick answer to the orders you give. And it’s the same for a lot of other games, like the party games you can play – the games with guitars are also helping things to increase the fun, and bring more people. Because when you have fun with your family on the game, you take them into more games with you.

While Guillemot didn’t mention it specifically, you can’t help but think he’s referring to the Wii (and DS) when talking about there being “more accessibility.” Nevertheless, it’ll be interesting to see if the current economic predicament that the U.S. is in will result in other publishers finding greater percentages of their revenue coming from other territories.

Ubisoft has has sent out the word that Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X will feature photo realistic satellite images thanks to GeoEye. GeoEye’s IKONOS satellite system will provide the high-resolution imagery to create incredibly realistic flights through 16 international territories including Rio de Janeiro, Cape Canaveral and the Middle East.

“High-resolution satellite imaging is moving from the black world of intelligence to the white world of commerce and Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X will bring that reality to gamers,” said Mark Brender, vice president, corporate communications and marketing at GeoEye. “With video game graphics becoming more realistic, the use of high-quality photographic ground textures in H.A.W.X adds true photo-realism to the air combat experience.”

It seems that the 3D imagery of Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X will assuredly be spectacular. Lets hope that control and camera issues can keep up with the graphics.

Ubisoft revealed its new Petz Rescue series for the Wii and DS at Games Convention 2008. These new titles move beyond simulating taking care of pets by letting players save, nurture and heal endangered animals. Ubisoft hopes to encourage environmental awareness and teach players about animal conservation. Here are the first few titles in the series courtesy of the Ubisoft press release on Business Wire:

Petz Rescue Wildlife Vet, available for Nintendo DS and Wii, players live an amazing adventure as a young vet who cares for domestic and exotic animals, and investigates the cause behind the local animals’ illnesses.

Petz Rescue Endangered Paradise for Nintendo DS allows players to become members of an environmental rescue team whose mission is to save the wildlife on a beautiful island that has been threatened by pollution.

Petz Rescue Ocean Patrol for Nintendo DS puts players in the role of Greg or Mila, who must help their uncle save endangered marine life on a secluded island.

I think it’s reasonable to assume any kid who loves Go Diego, Go would be good candidates for any of these games. The values Ubisoft claims to be espousing may be very altruistic, but might rub off on players just the same. You’ll find these Petz Rescue games in Stores this October.

Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway comes out next month, and if you’re planning to get the game on PC, Steam might have the best deal going right now. From now until the game launches in September, anyone who pre-orders the game through Valve’s download service will receive a copy of Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 for free. That should let you get your tactical World War II shooter fix for the next few weeks. I’m still not sure how I feel about Hell’s Highway. I played some of it at E3 and was fairly unimpressed, but at that moment it was being easily eclipsed by some much more high-profile titles.

Via Steam

In last week’s Zero Punctuation review, Yahtzee Croshaw made a small aside about how he thought the Prince of Persia trilogy was the best game series of the last console generation. And that’s perfectly alright; the man’s entitled to his own opinion and…oh, right, this is the internet. Apparently he was deluded with so many comments and e-mails from people about that one statement that he decided to put together this little retrospective about the whole Prince of Persia series and somewhat explain his rationale. I still don’t know if I agree with him, but he still brings his usual wit and humor to the mix.

Last month you may recall that some PC specs for Ubisoft’s FPS Far Cry 2 were leaked along with a supposed tech-demo for the game, which turned out to be a fake demo released by a Chinese site. Today, however, Ubisoft has released the actual PC specs for Far Cry 2 and while gamers were crying foul over how over the top the “leaked” specs were – the official ones are not that different in some respects. You will still have to have a decent system to run the game, but not a “super duper” gaming system like what was previously suggested.

Minimum Requirements:

CPU: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better

RAM: 1 GB

Video card: NVidia 6800 or ATI X1650 or better; Shader Model 3 required; 256 Mb of graphic memory

Media reader: DVD-ROM

Hard drive space: ~12 Gig of HD space. (TBD)

RECOMMENDED:

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo Family, AMD 64 X2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better

RAM: 2 GB

Video card: NVidia 8600 GTS or better, ATI X1900 or better; 512 Mb of graphic memory

Sound: 5.1 sound card recommended

SUPPORTED VIDEO CARDS: NVidia 6800, NVidia 7000 series, 8000 series, 9000 series, 200 series. 8800M and 8700M supported for laptops.
ATI X1650 – 1950 series, HD2000 series, HD3000 series, HD4000 series.

Now remember, these are just the recommended specs. The game will still run on your system if you have only the minimum specs instead of the ones suggested. It probably will not look as great, but you will still be able to play it – and in the long run that is what matters most.

Far Cry 2 is the sequel to Ubisoft’s legendary shooter featuring the Dunia Engine which was specifically built for the title. Amongst the new features in the engine are more realistic destructible environments, real-time night-and-day cycle, and a dynamic music system. In this sequel players are placed in war-torn Africa where the mission is to kill the mysterious character, “The Jackal.”

The game is expected to hit retail shelves on December 15 for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

Thanks: VG247

Ubisoft has filed a lawsuit against Us-based Optical Experts Manufacturing which is the company they hired to reproduce discs for the PC port of Assassin’s Creed. The lawsuit has a monetary worth of over $10 million and sites breach of contract, negligence, lawyer fees, and an undisclosed sum for damages due to copyright infringement.

The lawsuit stems from allegations of an OEM employee taking home a copy of Assassin’s Creed and uploading it onto the internet six weeks before the game shipped in April 2008. Ubisoft has accused OEM of ignoring a number of security protocols which would have prevented this leak, which led to over 700,000 pirated downloads of the title, as well as claiming the breech caused “irreparable harm” to its reputation.

If this was not enough, according to GamesIndustry, Ubisoft also claims that “a bug which was purposely introduced to the unfinished code (which was what was pirated) caused the game to crash partway through – but that this bug found its way into some reviews” which as we are all well aware, caused may a negative review of the game. The subsequent reviews, according to Ubisoft, called into question the reliability of the game thus causing gamers to not purchase the game.

We will be sure to keep you up to date on the progress of Ubisoft’s lawsuit against OEM as more information becomes available.

A group of political activists, Direct Action to Stop the War, is taking their protests to the streets over Ubisoft’s America’s Army game. On the Direct Action website the party accuses the U.S. Army of recruiting teens and condemns the videogame for violating international law.

“America’s Army” is a game developed by the U.S. military to instruct players in “Army values,” portray the army in a positive light, and increase potential recruits. The “game” is the property and brainchild of the US Army, which admit freely, and with pride, that it is one of their principal recruitment tools. The game has been granted a “teen” rating, allowing 13 year olds to play.

The military recruitment of children under the age of 17, however, is a clear violation of international law (the U.N. Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict). No attempt to recruit children 13-16 is allowed in the United States, pursuant to treaty. In May, the American Civil Liberties Union published a report that found the armed services regularly target children under 17 for military recruitment. The report highlighted the role of “America’s Army,” saying the Army uses the game to “attract young potential recruits . . . train them to use weapons, and engage in virtual combat and other military missions”, adding that the game “explicitly targets boys 13 and older.”

The game is having an effect. An informal study showed that 4 out of 100 new recruits in Ft. Benning, Georgia credit America’s Army as the primary factor in convincing them to join the military.

Direct Action is marching today to raise awareness of these alleged violation of human rights.

Ubisoft is not the only South Park neighbor engaged in the development of the game, Gameloft is working on the cell phone application and Secret Level was a designer on the 2005 Xbox version… This August 6, on the 63rd Anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, come out and ask the producers and developers of America’s Army to stop helping the Army recruit children.

According to GamePolitics, Direct Action sent a letter of protest to Ubisoft CEO Laurent Detoc. The group claims that Detoc sent them a response indicating that Ubisoft will no longer be producing America’s Army.

Ubisoft has already planned not to make any further games of America’s Army, that they may announce that decision in the future and he discouraged us from continuing our Hiroshima Day action… If Ubisoft’s claims are true, why have they not publicly announced the end of the work for the Army’s recruitment videogame, and why have they not ended their contract with Army, set to expire in 2015?

The organization claims that the game violates United Nations protocol and international law, specifically the U.N. Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict.

Having read up on the protocol in question, I wonder whether Direct Action bothered to read it themselves. The U.N. optional protocol states that “conscripting or enlisting children under the age of 15 years or using them to participate actively in hostilities in both international and non-international armed conflicts” is a warcrime. The protocol also has specific guidelines for governments that allow children under the age of 18 to voluntarily opt for recruitment.

States Parties that permit voluntary recruitment into their national armed forces under the age of 18 years shall maintain safeguards to ensure, as a minimum, that:

(a) Such recruitment is genuinely voluntary;

(b) Such recruitment is carried out with the informed consent of the person’s parents or legal guardians;

(c) Such persons are fully informed of the duties involved in such military service;

(d) Such persons provide reliable proof of age prior to acceptance into national military service.

As stated in 10 Steps to Joining the Military on Military.com, “You must be at least 17 years old (17-year old applicants require parental consent).”

All the votes are tallied for the Game Critics Awards: Best of E3 2008. Fallout 3 took two wins out of the three nominations it received including Best of Show. LittleBigPlanet was the only other game to win two categories and took Best Console Game. Here’s the official Game Critics Awards Winner’s Circle for 2008:

Best of Show
Fallout 3
(Bethesda Softworks for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Best Original Game
Mirror’s Edge
(DICE/Electronic Arts for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 36)

Best Console Game
LittleBigPlanet
(Media Molecule/Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 3)

Best PC Game
Spore
(Maxis/EA)

Best Handheld Game
Resistance: Retribution
(Bend Studio/Sony Computer Entertainment for PSP)

Best Hardware/Peripheral
Rock Band 2 Ion “Drum Rocker” Set
(ION Audio/MTV Games for Xbox 360)

Best Action Game
Gears of War 2
(Epic Games/Microsoft Game Studios for Xbox 360)

Best Action/Adventure Game
Dead Space
(EA Redwood Shores/EA for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Best Role Playing Game
Fallout 3
(Bethesda Softworks for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Best Racing Game
Pure
(Black Rock/Disney Interactive Studios for PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Best Sports Game
Madden NFL 09
(Tiburon/EA for All Systems)

Best Fighting Game
Street Fighter IV
(Capcom for Arcade)

Best Strategy Game
Tom Clancy’s EndWar
(Ubisoft Shanghai/Ubisoft for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360)

Best Social/Casual/Puzzle
LittleBigPlanet
(Media Molecule/Sony Computer Entertainment for PlayStation 3)

Best Online Multiplayer
Left 4 Dead
(Valve/EAP for PC, Xbox 360)

Interestingly enough only one of the winning games, Madden NFL 09 will make it to the Nintendo Wii or the DS. Far be it from me to suggest that it could have anything to do with Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata’s declaration that E3 is no longer the appropriate venue for core games.

It’s all too common for someone to recreate a level of a game using another game’s engine. It’s far less common for someone to recreate a level based on only a brief live demo of another game. But that’s exactly what modder “EvilWeevil” did when he crafted this level in Portal after the E3 live demo of Mirror’s Edge shown at E3. Who needs fancy acrobatics and death-defying leaps when you’ve got a portal gun and metal braces on your legs?