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May 14 2008
MadWorld, a title that was conceived in a deal between Platinum Games and Sega a few days ago, has appeared in the Japanese gaming mag Famitsu. As promised, it’s a black and white comic-styled game with enough blood to spare if any person or persons are in need of a transfusion. Don’t get too anxious, though, this game is rumored to be hitting shelves next year.
May 14 2008
One of my favorite features of the Nintendo Channel, and I’m sure many of yours as well, is the ability to transfer and play DS demos from your Wii. This past Monday the program was updated with six new games: Brain Age, Iron Man, Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney, Eco-Creatures: Save the Forest, My Word Coach and The Spiderwick Chronicles. Here’s to hoping they update the DS demo area every Monday like they’ve done w/ the Virtual Console since its inauguration.
May 14 2008
The latest issue of Game Informer has the scoop on the upcoming Guitar Hero IV; including how their newly added peripherals will look. At first glance you’ll notice only three pads, but if you look a little above there are two “cymbals.” They look a bit awkward to me, but they had to compete with Rock Band somehow. This begs the question, again: how do they expect one to fit all of these plastic instruments in their rooms?
May 14 2008
My friends and I just had a related discussion last night after a profanity laced four player romp through Coconut Mall. Why does Mario Kart have the undeniable ability to bring horrible language from the most placid of individuals? Xkcd’s comic states it very well. The incident that incited my worst personal curse-fest after the break.
May 14 2008
In case you’ve all forgotten, the Wii is home to what was a highly anticipated title in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. The game has been out for months in Japan and North America, where it has all but fallen off the radar in terms of hype and buzz. No cause for concern, though, as it’s still high on all the sales charts in those regions… but not in the PAL regions.
Luckily for those of you Down Under, the rumors have held true: Europe will be the last major region to receive Super Smash Bros. Brawl, now that Nintendo Australia has confirmed the game’s June 26th release date in Oz. Smashing news, isn’t it?
You know what would suck? If both the European and Australian launches are plagued with faulty discs and faulty drives just like the Japanese and North American launches were, pushing back your ability to play the game for another couple of weeks. …but we don’t even want to think about the possibility.
May 13 2008
Sheesh. With all these VC games and now, WiiWare titles, we are going to soon be dry of our precious internal memory. Sooner or later it’ll be on the black market ala moonshine during the days of prohibition. We must learn to ration our space until Nintendo releases a first-party storage device or unlocks the SD Card slot. Hit the jump for the games and the amount of space they take up to help you manage your available memory.
May 12 2008
Not to be outdone, Activision is rumored to match their predecessor Harmonix’s Rock Band by adding drums and vocals to the next installment of the Guitar Hero franchise. No surprise there, right? What IS worthy of attention is the report in the latest issue of GameInformer suggesting the game will include some type of creation mode allowing you to make and customize your own songs. You create the “guitar” parts. The “drumset” parts. The album cover. You’ll then be able to upload and share your songs online.
No in-game songs were confirmed, but Van Halen, The Eagles, Linkin Park, and Sublime were all confirmed as bands. Also reported in GameInformer is that the new guitar peripheral will include a new mechanic, still to-be-patented, that will change how you play Guitar Hero in the future. What features could be so amazing that they don’t want Harmonix/MTV Games to even think about stealing?
May 12 2008
Take the fact that we’ve already seen Wii revivals of NiGHTS, Samba de Amigo, SEGA Bass Fishing, and have heard rumors of Space Channel 5 making its return, this rumor should be no surprise. Word on the street is that we could be getting an announcement for Skies of Arcadia 2 from Sega as soon as this year’s Tokyo Game Show.
Sega’s presence in the RPG arena has diminished, and it makes perfect sense to bring back the franchise in the form of a new game for the Wii and PS3 as rumored. Any SoA fans out there hoping for this one to be true?
May 12 2008
Speaking with Gamasutra, lead programmer Fumiaki Shiraishi and producer Toshihiro Tsuchida over at Square Enix touch upon WiiWare, their popular title for the service Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, size limitations and how the limitation actually helped improve their title.
BS: I’m curious to know how difficult it was, or if it was a welcome challenge, to fit that game into a small file size. Was it challenging? I know when people saw the screenshots of the game for the first time, they were like, “How did that happen?”
FS: It actually wasn’t that difficult. I think we designed the game to fit in the memory space. It wasn’t so much that we had a game and had to squeeze it down. If anything, I think the size restriction helped us. I don’t think we would’ve had this game design idea if we didn’t have the memory restriction to begin with.
Once we had the restriction, we had… all our artists are veterans, so if you tell them the size, they’ll hit it right on. And once we started making it, in the beginning, a lot of people didn’t think we could fit this game in the given size, but we were actually quite a bit under. It uses a little bit of compression, and a little bit of techniques. You can fit a lot of game in a small size.
With my short time spent with Lost Winds, you couldn’t even tell there was a size restriction; the game is gorgeous. How games turn out will basically come down to how skilled developers and artists are. Now the Wii’s internal memory limitation, that’s a different story.
May 12 2008
As many of you might have realized, I’ve been MIA for a few weeks. School has been pretty hectic lately, but at least I have a new movie to share with everybody! This one doesn’t have a strict videogame theme, but the band in the movie plays a certain game that you might be familiar with (I don’t want to ruin any surprises).
Just a quick warning- this movie is somewhat NSFW and there is one joke that might be offensive to most of America, but if you are open to a small amount of foul language and a joke or two with bad taste, then you will love this video. Enjoy!
