Newspost for 01-25-06
Industry and multi-console news:
- Unreal Tournament 2007 has been renamed Unreal Tournament 3 and is now coming to the PS3, PC and 360.
- Square Enix has licensed Unreal Engine 3 for use in its next generation games. It's not currently known which games it will be used with.
- Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan thinks Majesco could be on its way to recovery thanks to the success of games like Cooking Mama. If you'll recall, Majesco got out of the big game biz and went back to budget titles after Psychonauts and Advent Rising sold poorly.
- Newsweek asks whether virtual guitar heroes will want to bother becoming real ones. Yes, clearly playing an old KISS tune in front of fake people is a perfect replacement for real world guitar proficiency.
- ABI Research estimates that revenue from micropayments will reach $833 million by 2011.
- Firing Squad has tried to dig up as much information as they can on unannounced titles currently in development.
- Pointless retro trivia: If you play Castlevania X: Rondo of Blood on the PC Engine CD with the wrong system card, this is what you get.
PC news:
- Despite Ritual Entertainment's acquisition by MumboJumbo, SiN episodes are still coming. Though they're being kind of vague about it.
- Armchair Arcade looks at what defines a CRPG.
Nintendo news:
- Nintendo says that 3.2 million Wiis and 35.6 million DSes have been sold worldwide so far. This puts them short of their goal of 4 million worldwide by the end of the year; oddly, they say they did manufacture 4 million, but only 3.2 were "sold and delivered."
- The Wii News Channel should debut Saturday, and will feature news articles and photos from the Associated Press.
- Racketboy lays out the best undiscovered N64 games.
- A game designer from Maxis will be talking about GDC about the conversion of the Sims to the Wii.
- Prima Games is selling a You & Wii guide explaining the Wii, its interface, and how to use it. Presumably it's aimed at the Wii buyers who are not gamers.
- A post on the IGN forums lists Twilight Princess easter eggs.
- Sears.com has non-bundle Wiis for sale.
Sony news:
- Phil Harrison will be delivering a keynote at the Game Developers Conference.
- Tetsuya Nomura recently named five games coming from Square in 2007, and FFXIII wasn't one of them. This would suggest that Final Fantasy XIII may not be released until 2008.
- Gameplay footage has been released for Crush, a new puzzle/platformer PSP game in which you contract and expand a 3D world to 2D and vice versa to get around. It's very hard to explain, so just watch the video.
- Popular Mechanics is still working on their PS3 blinking issue, with Westinghouse now saying that the problem is with the PS3, not their TVs.
- Sony's PSP video download site accidentally used a screenshot of Project Gotham Racing 3 to represent Gran Turismo HD.
Microsoft news:
- Rather inexplicably, Gears of War is number 7 on Japan's top ten sales chart for the week.
- Bungie has another one of those military documents up, this time detailing Halo 3's spike grenade.
- Bethesda notes that they wanted to do a retail version of the Shivering Isles expansion for the 360, but "the console simply can't do that yet ... we've been told that it would take a lot of extra work by the folks at Microsoft to get that option available.”
- All media related to ZootFly's 360 Ghostbusters game have been pulled from their site and from YouTube at the request of Sony Pictures. Negotiations to the game rights are still ongoing.
- An Ohio school was shut down after a 13 year old boy told someone on Xbox Live that he was going to bring a 9mm to school.