Capcom certainly has ambitious plans for their fledgling zombie franchise, Dead Rising, with head of global research and development Keiji Inafune voicing hope that Dead Rising will replace Resident Evil as the company’s number one zombie series.
“The goal for Dead Rising 2 is to replace the Resident Evil franchise and become number one IP within Capcom,” said Inafune in an interview with Eurogamer. “As a creator, the sales and marketing part aside, unless you have a big goal to strive for you can’t create a good game.”
My initial reaction is that Dead Rising, though a hell of a lot of fun, is just too silly to ever claim the undead crown from Resident Evil, but then again we’re talking about a series where members of elite police squads fight the surging tide of walking dead in miniskirts. Both are silly, but Resident Evil creator Shinji Mikami’s brand of silly has sold more than 40 million games spread over 63 titles and counting, and that’s not even touching all the novels, comics and movies. Meanwhile, Dead Rising tips the scales at all of two games, three if you count Case Zero, the Xbox Live Arcade-exclusive prequel. If there’s one thing zombies have taught us, it’s that there’s strength in numbers.
Nothing sours the mood of a controller-free party faster than the arrival of the most annoying of party crashers, input lag. But according to Microsoft, latency will be one less guest invited to Kinect’s first birthday bash, with the company claiming 1:1 response times that are “as fast as pushing a button.”
“We already have the 1:1 stuff working really well and the response time is just as fast as pushing a button or making a gesture,” said Microsoft’s Kudo Tsunoda in an interview with Xbox360Achievements. “We’ve done tests back at the office where we have a TV, flash a light on the screen and we’ll have a controller, and have someone there hitting a button, and someone with Kinect clapping as soon as they see the light on the screen, and both things go just as fast as one another.”
This is good news for Dance Central, Harmonix’s launch lineup rythym game, where delay-free dance moves will make or break the experience. But dry your tears input lag, that Playstation Move evite might still be on the way. Just kidding! Go ahead and break out that suicide note you started drafting last Christmas Eve.
On October 1, Persona and Shin Megami Tensei publisher Atlus will be merged with mobile phone content provider Index, according to an official announcement from the two subsidaries’ parent company Index Holdings.
Before your ability to feel love solidifies, crumbles to dust and blows away on a tear tainted wind, you should know that although the Atlus name will no longer appear on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the Atlus brand will continue to appear on game releases, like the upcoming HD release Catherine. Representatives from both Index Holdings and Atlus have confirmed that the impetus behind the merger is to more effectively and efficiently utilize resources between divisions, specifically when it comes to adapting Atlus’ intellectual properties for the mobile phone format. Atlus just recently announced Persona 3 Social, a new mobile-only title coming to Japanese cellphone-based social networking service Mobage-town.
“Atlus is not becoming a mobile games company. This is purely a corporate maneuvering so that Index, which is a mobile games company, has easier access to Atlus IPs,” assured site administrator Inzaghi on Atlus’ official message board. “Don’t worry, guys. This is just some corporate organizational maneuvering and won’t affect anything we do.”
Playboy magazine will soon be peddling more than flesh, having announced plans to start its own game label.
Launching in late 2010, the label will offer “a wide variety of high-quality online video games [to their] ideal gaming audience – avid, online men between the ages of 18-35.” They must be serious about this venture, and I don’t say that just because the press release managed to resist mentioning “coming” and “release” in conjunction with the label’s launch. The adult entertainment juggernaut has already partnered with German web-browser based developer, Bigpoint, to distribute select titles through their website, starting with an All Points Bulletin and Grand Theft Auto clone, Poisonville.
The free to play MMOG will thrust gamers, pun definitely intended, into a fictional metropolis “where crime and corruption rule the streets,” allowing them to compete in various car-jacking, gun-running heavy scenarios that simulate gang warfare. The Playboy connection? Throughout the game, players will encounter “beautiful, Playboy-caliber women.”
In other words, Poisonville‘s hooker population will also be trained in basic patient care?
Harmonix has raised the roof on a new trailer for their Kinect-enabled, body-tracking, controller-ditching rhythm game, Dance Central, along with some new tracks at this week’s Gamecom in Germany. Now in addition to its 650 moves and 90 routines, Dance Central boasts 10 more beats to awkwardly bump and grind in your living room to from Basement Jaxx, Nelly Furtado, Rihanna, Cascada, Technotronic, Kylie Minogue and even 70′s pop-funk fiends Kool & The Gang.
Dance Central will initially ship with over 30 songs, with almost limitless song library potential should it prove successful enough to follow in Rock Band and Guitar Hero‘s DLC footsteps. I just hope it’s successful enough to at least inspire a couple of real life West Side Story moments, ’cause if there’s one thing the world needs it’s more spontaneous, synchronized dance offs in the line at Starbucks.
Basement Jaxx – “Rendez-Vu” Nelly Furtado – “Maneater” Benny Benassi – “Satisfaction” Nina Sky – “Move Ya Body” Cascada – “Evacuate the Dancefloor” Pitbull – “I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho) Fannypack – “Hey Mami” Rihanna – “Pon de Replay” Kool & The Gang – “Jungle Boogie” Technotronic – “Pump Up the Jam” Kylie Minogue – “Can’t Get You Out of My Head”
Previously announced Dance Central tracks: Beastie Boys – “Body Movin’ (Fatboy Slim Remix)” No Doubt – “Hella Good” Bell Biv DeVoe – “Poison” Salt-N-Pepa – “Push It” Lady Gaga – “Poker Face” Snoop Dogg/Pharrell – “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Lipps Inc – “Funkytown” Young MC – “Bust A Move” M.I.A. – “Galang ‘05”
No offense to Warner Bros. Interactive’s shaolin/superhero mash-up Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but I like my interdimensional martial arts tournaments strictly Earthrealm-ian against Outworld-ian, no space orphans in form fitting spandex required.
If you share similar affection for the Mortal Kombat of your coin-guzzling youth, you’ll be equally pleased as I was to learn that the nextMortal Kombat game to hit store shelves might be an arcade compilation. Though as yet unannounced, a listing has appeared on ShopTo, a United Kingdom-based online videogames retailer, for a Mortal Kombat Arcade Compilation on the PlayStation 3, ostensibly along the lines of the one released on the PlayStation 2. This is not to be confused with Mortal Kombat 9, which is still scheduled for release sometime in early 2011.
Could be a case of a lazy listing writer, or it could be an accidental reveal of Warner Bros. plans to prime the fatality pump for the next numbered entry into the long-running series. Personally, I’m hoping for the later. Maybe babalities will finally be cool in high definition.
Zombie Cow’s STD-shooting side-scroller, Privates, was release for free on PC last week chock full of bugs, and I’m not talking the discharge-oozing denizens of slutty people’s private parts that comprise a majority of the game’s cannon fodder.
The Britain-based developer has already released an update to take care of the performance problems, but just to be safe – ’cause safety’s what this game is all about – they’re running a promotion through the weekend giving away their entire game catalog to anyone who can find a bug in the latest version. Describe the details of the bug on the studio’s blog comments, along with a valid e-mail address, and you’ll be sent a link to download every game in the developer’s short but oh so sweet game-making history, including Cruxade, Gibbage, Ben There, Dan That! and the ever excellent Time Gentlemen, Please.
Rocksteady’s Batman: Arkham City is dipping into John Carpenter’s story well according to the upcoming issue of Game Informer, which reveals the story behind Gotham’s prison without bars.
For the upcoming sequel, the UK-based developer has fast-forwarded a year from the events of the first game, with Arkham Asylum warden Quincy Sharp now the mayor of Gotham City. And what better way to earn the love of his constituents than to purchase a huge chuck of the city’s slums to house all the criminally insane prisoners left homeless by Joker’s Titan-enhanced escapades, leaving them to fend for themselves Thunderdome-style within its guarded walls. Come next term, his opponents’ political ads will write themselves.
In addition to the new setting, Arkham City will feature a slew of villains fresh from Batman canon. Two-Face will join “other key villains” fighting Joker for control of the inmates, with evil shrink Doctor Hugo Strange heading the facility and feline fatale Catwoman serving as love interest and sometimes ally to the Caped Crusader. Batman will also be getting help in the form of new gadgets (Bat Claw for grabbing hard to reach goodies) and new moves (projectile counter for bitch slapping thrown knives and pipes), which he’ll need to combat the more varied enemies, more complex Riddler puzzles, and more numerous side quests.
“We want to top everything that we did in the last game,” director Sefton Hill told the magazine. “We didn’t want to do an Arkham Asylum 1.5. We want to make the same jump we made from nothing to Arkham. We want to make that same jump again for Arkham City – the same level of ambition.”
Thanks to Siliconera‘s mad sleuthing, we’ve learned that Kingdom Hearts creator Tetsuya Nomura is interested in making a sequel to the DS’s power pin-tastic RPG, The World Ends With You.
“I’m really happy that the game was so well received in North America,” said Nomura in an interview with Nintendo Power. “I definitely want to make a sequel. I’m very busy working on other titles right now, but when the time is right, I would love to make another installment of The World Ends with You.”
Despite its dramatic departure from Square Enix’s standard fantasy formula, with its modern-day Shibuya setting, The World Ends With You managed to become the top selling DS title in North America the week of its release, inspiring nationwide stock shortages and even gamer-organized tours of the real Tokyo shopping district. So it comes as no surprise they’re talking about a sequel, rather that they’ve taken this long to start talking about a sequel.
Move those other titles to the back burner and give us our puck-passing pin battles!
According to a patent filed by Microsoft, Kinect has the potential to give voice to deaf and mute gamers, converting American Sign Language into speech.
“Where the user is unable to speak, he may be prevented from joining in the voice chat,” explains the patent. “Even though he would be able to type input, this may be a laborious and slow process to someone fluent in ASL. Under the present system, he could make ASL gestures to convey his thoughts, which would then be transmitted to the other users for auditory display. The user’s input could be converted to voice locally, or by each remote computer.
“In this situation, for example, when the user kills another user’s character, that victorious, though speechless, user would be able to tell the other user that he had been ‘PWNED’. In another embodiment, a user may be able to speak or make the facial motions corresponding to speaking words. The system may then parse those facial motions to determine the user’s intended words and process them according to the context under which they were inputted to the system.”
The technology could do more for disabled gamers than improve their griefing prowess, as the patent goes on to outline the skeletal mapping system’s ability to distinguish between various bones, joints and even facial features of the human body, from the twitch of a player’s toe to the blink of a single eye. At this point it’s more proof of concept than anything else, as there’s been no confirmation of the sign to speech feature in the finished product. But it’s exciting to see even a small sign that the industry is considering accessibility for all gamers in the development of new technology.
Ahoy all ye scurvy game-stealing dogs who downloaded Machinarium for free, Amanita Design is granting ye a chance at redemption with their Pirate Amnesty Sale. Through Thursday, the developer is selling the latest Win/Mac/Linux version of their critically acclaimed puzzler and soundtrack for $5, a quarter of the usual $20 asking price.
“We released the game DRM free which means it doesn’t include any anti-piracy protection, therefore the game doesn’t bother players with any serial codes or online authentication, but it’s also very easy to copy it,” said Amanita’s Jakub Dvorsky. “Our estimate from the feedback is that only 5-15 percent of Machinarium players actually paid for the game.”
“If you decide to buy the game, you can be sure you’ll support directly the developers, not any big publisher or distributor.”
Despite prior claims to have “maxed out” the PlayStation 3′s graphical capabilities in the eye-poppingly picturesque Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Naughty Dog thinks they can still squeeze some more performance out of the hardware.
“It’s very clear to us that there are still more ways we can optimize our engine and introduce new technology innovations,” said Naughty Dog’s Community Strategist Arne Meyer in an interview with PlayStation University. “There are still engine-related projects that some of our programmers didn’t get around to working on or implementing [on Uncharted 2]. There’s definitely a good number of ways left for us to make really cool things happen on the engine level.”
Just to refresh your collective memories, the first Uncharted utilized an estimated 30% of the PlayStation 3′s processing power, a figure that skyrocketed to 90% for Uncharted 2 thanks to Naughty Dog’s revamped version of their original game engine. Uncharted 2 managed to fill all 25 GB of its substantially-sized Blu-ray disc with the most stunning graphics ever showcased on the system. I still get goosebumps remembering that moment when Nate’s race across Nepal’s terrace rooftops is suddenly halted by the stunning panoramic view of the city, from the sun-dappled domes of the temples all the way to the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas.
Imagining the sights and sounds that Naughty Dog can create for Uncharted 3 with that extra 10% has my heart beating faster than the thought of Nolan North in a diamond studded speedo.
