Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
It’s that time again, the time to be festive and jolly – it will soon be Christmas and our favourite Ensemble-lites are busy working away at Robot, Zynga, Windstorm and GRL Games. 2011 is sure to bring lots of excitement; I expect we will see glimpses of Robot Entertainment’s secret Game 2.0 project next year, perhaps at PAX East. Windstorm Studios is also sure to release further information about Dusty’s project. Graeme Devine’s newest venture GRL Games will be in full swing with the release of Clandestiny for Mac OSX. Read more
Microsoft to take over Age Community
Unfortunately, the time as come for Robot Entertainment so sign off on Age Community and hand over day to day support for community operations to Microsoft Games Studios. The transition starts today, with Ryz0n 
taking the reins as community support moderator. Ryzon commented:
The folks here at MGS are transitioning into supporting the AOE community. Along those lines, I’ll be working on forum administration, account support, and generally keeping everything running as well as possible. Our goal, as we move through the transition period, is to make the user experience change very little and have the service chug along without any issues into the foreseeable future. I’ll be coming up to speed and working with Robot on the community, server issues, and support for the titles. Read more
Graeme Devine’s GRL Games working on “Clandestiny” port to Mac OSX
Graeme Devine’s newest venture, GRL Games is off to a flying start quickly announcing its first title after revealing its formation a few weeks ago. Kotaku has reported that GRL Games is working on a port of the classic 1996 game “Clandestiny” which was developed by Trilobyte a studio founded by Graeme Devine many years ago! Clandestiny is a puzzle game in the third person with a classic cartoon artstyle. You can get a feel on the port by checking out the below video. Read more
Robot’s heading East!
Robot Entertainment have recently announced that they will have their very own presence at next years PAX East in Boston from March 9th to March 12th 2011. PAX East is a festival where video game developers from all over come together for exhibitions and to show off some of their latest work. With a bunch of Robot’s heading up to the festival we could see some brand new work from inside the Robot factory. Based on the contents of Robot’s latest blog it would seem Robot may have its own independent stall and not part of Microsoft Game Studios which means they may be free to potentially talk about projects other than Age of Empires Online – in other words there could well be some news about Game 2.0! Read more
Graeme Devine leaves Apple to start his own game development studio
Ensemblite spotters all over the world may remember that after Ensemble Studios closed, passionate game developer Graeme Devine who was part Lead Designer / Lead Writer on Halo Wars went on to work on a mystery project at Apple. Details about Graeme’s work at Apple has been scarce and it still very much remains a mystery. Read more
343 Industries reverses decision to shut down Halo Wars stat tracking
A few weeks after the shocking announcement that 343 were planning to completely shut down the Halo Wars community website, forums and stat tracking which resulted in fury from Halo Wars fans and press coverage it would appear that 343 Industries have hit the gear into reverse. Cocopjojo has today announced on the Official Halo Wars forums that 343 no longer plans to remove stat tracking and the forthcoming title update will not remove this feature from the game. Cocopjojo announced as follows: Read more
