Sleeping Dogs is expected for release in the second half of 2012 for PC, Xbox 360, and PS3. Players take on the role of Wei Shen, an undercover cop tasked with taking down the world’s fearsome criminal organizations. Promising martial arts, gun-play, and environmental takedowns, you might as well take it as your quintessential Hong Kong action flick.

“Working on Sleeping Dogs has been such a huge passion for the team at United Front Games and we’re really pleased to be working with Square Enix London Studios,” said Stephen Van Der Mescht, executive producer at United Front Games. “The extensive experience that both studios have in creating compelling open world gameplay and rich, rewarding combat makes for a perfect partnership. Working together we’re ensuring Sleeping Dogs is the most intense and immersive game it can be.”

The Creation Kit allows its users to create, upload, and share their content on the Skyrim Workshop via mods.elderscolls.com. In a nifty way to showcase the Bethesda-Valve partnership, the Creation Kit also brings the Space Sphere mod, allowing players to add Wheatley from Portal 2 as a companion as they traverse the vast tundra of Skyrim.

“Sanctum has been a huge success on Steam for Coffee Stain Studios, and bringing the next version to console players as well as the PC market is a great next step to share this unique experience. We all have logged quite a few hours with Sanctum and can definitively say that what Coffee Stain has in store for Sanctum 2 will blow the minds of Sanctum fans and new gamers alike,” said Ted Lange, executive producer of Reverb Publishing.

Sanctum 2 is expected for release on PC, Xbox Live, and Playstation Network, the latter two in an attempt to broaden its user base on the consoles.

More DLC promising to “enhance the narrative” of Final Fantasy XIII-2 including “key characters” will be announced at a later time.

David Jaffe clarified his post Twisted Metal plans. Jaffe will in fact leave the company, but will do so possibly three months after Twisted Metal releases Feb.14.

“I’m still on TM along with ESP [Eat Sleep Play] for the next months as we launch it and balance it in real time and make sure it’s a perfect game and continue to support it,” Jaffe said in his posts on Twitter.

Jaffe plans on opening a new studio in San Diego, California after he leaves Ea Sleep Play. “I will be opening a game studio here in San Diego because I really miss internal game development,” Jaffe said.

There is no particular type of games his new studio will work on, according to Jaffe.

“I have no idea what game we’ll make yet. Could be iPhone, could be next-gen console,” Jaffe said.

[Original story]
David Jaffe, co-founder of Eat, Sleep, Play will leave the company once Twisted Metal releases later this month. The news comes as the studio announces a round of layoffs, affecting eight staffers among the company.

Eat, Sleep, and Play will focus on mobile games and iOS development after Twisted Metal. Co-founder of ESP, Bruce Campbell noted, “It’s a platform that is in our pockets almost 24/7. It’s kind of the size and types of games we’re playing. You can certainly reach a lot more people. That’s pretty exciting for us.”

The studio’s first game, Twisted Metal, is due for release next week on Playstation 3.

“It’s being developed as an HD Remaster, but the visuals will be much more beautiful than before,” Square Enix’s Shinji Hashimoto said [via Siliconera]. “Please look forward to it!”

“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.’ It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we’d like to somehow honor.” [taken from VG247]

“Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction.”

With the existence of The Last of Us, clearly things did not pan out. However, Wells remarks that the studio could return to Jak and Daxter under the Uncharted team. But don’t hold your breath.

“Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future, so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy. But right now, we’ve got this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting,” he said. “I guess there’s a possibility the Uncharted team could move on to Jak & Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

Jak and Daxter fans, however, can look forward to the HD Collection featuring the first three games when it releases this week for Playstation 3.