It’s still sinking in….wild.

gizmag Article: Nintendo reveals new controller for Revolution game platform:

Nintendo will break with more than 20 years of video game history by abandoning the traditional controller held with two hands and introducing an all-new freehand-style unit held with one hand for the next generation Revolution game console. Nintendo claims the new pioneering interface is highly intuitive and will allow players to run, jump, shoot, steer, kick and score far better than with the previous controller. Unveiled in his speech today at the Tokyo Game Show, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata said, “the feeling is so natural and real, as soon as players use the controller, their minds will spin with the possibilities of how this will change gaming as we know it today.”

This is totally a rumor factor 5 right now - but it’s fresh of the press and it’s very exciting news. The 2K line of football games might yet have fallen off this green Earth.

Information was mistakening leaked that hints a football release from 2k games by the end of this year. The news was supposed to be a suprise announcement in early October.

Also IGN recently posted a story about an animation company called ‘Natural Motion’, that has demoed their animation technology using a movie with various football players tackling each other. Hmm.. what could this new technology be used for? Natural Motion is tight lipped about their current customer (EA has confirmed that it’s not Madden - EA doesn’t use their technology), but they plan on making a title announcement soon.

No Secrets.

The story is on Console Sports.net, and here’s a link to the Natural Motion article.

I’m not quite sure how the game would work if this news proves true. EA owns exclusive rights to the NFL Player and Team names. Maybe 2k will release a have a system to customize rosters and team names. It would only take so long before an ‘official roster’ is dupped. Cross your fingers.

PLEASE!!!! JUST ONE GOOD GAME!!!! PLEASE!!!!!

TGS 2005: Katamari Damacy rolling onto PSP - PSP News at GameSpot:

Katamari Damacy rolling onto PSPNamco’s popular PlayStation 2 franchise will soon be ballin’ on Sony’s portable. Together with new game announcements for the next-generation consoles, a number of surprising titles for Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS have been reported by this week’s Famitsu. One of them is Boku no Watashi no Katamari Damacy for the PSP by Namco, which, as the title suggests, is a PSP spin-off of the hit PlayStation 2 Katamari Damacy franchise. It is the first officially confirmed version of the game, although a DS version has been widely rumored.

I tend not to write about games that suck. It’s depressing to reflect about mediocrity when there’s so much good in the gaming genre these days. At the same time I feel it’s probably unfair to only spend time on the games that are great — Gaming sites tend to polish over the blemishes of demos and beta builds as they write their previews in a hope that the developer has enough time to clean up the game before release.

But after playing demos and betas for years and years and years, I’ve begun to sniff-out those games that have obviously missed their potential. Starship Troopers is one of those games.

I played the demo of the FPS shooter last week and all I can say is - meh. The terrain feels plain, the weapons feel plain, the feeling of movement is just plain.. plain (clever huh?). Your assualt rifle has a grenade launcher which is all fine and good - except the grenade is this OpenGL white sphere that shoots random colors out the back as it lobs through the air in a standard unform openGL arc. The grenade doesn’t bounce around upon hitting the ground - but just explodes in a non momentus fashion. Bullets similary lack oomph or any sort of visual impact that would lead you to believe you’re firing a futuristic super-powered assault rifle.

The bugs look cool but they don’t do much else but run straight at you. This makes the gameplay 100% “back up and shoot”. After 5 minutes with the game I began to wonder who sat down at the design table and thought this would’ve been cool.

It’s a shame, too. I liked both the novel and the movie (and enjoy each for what they are). I also liked what I saw of the original Starship Troopers game way way back in 1990-something. At that time it incorporated the powered suits described in the novel, complete with jump jets and tactical nukes. But between now and then, Starship Troopers the game has been scrapped twice… and probably should have been started over a third time. Ooof.

PS. Whatever you do, don’t EVER see Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation — even if someone dares you to. I like bad movies (Ishtar!), but this one is baaaad.

Brought to you by G4’s “Attack the Show”

The title pretty much speaks for itself. There’s A Video of Kevin Pereira and Kevin Rose using the controller to play “co-op” Mario.

Total Video Games has a great B&W 2 Preview

Back in the days of the new Economy and Dot-Com Era we celebrated anything that seemed slightly innovative. Around the begining of 2000 previews of Black and White (a spiritual successor to Great Game Populous) painted an awe-inspiring picture of a God Game powered by an incredible graphics engine, a relatively non existent interface. The game had AI driven Creatures that were personifications of the actions you’ve taken to create the world. If you were good to your creature and your populace would shimmer with angelic brilliance. If you were evil and malicious then your lands would grow dark, your creature would grow fangs, patchy fur, his eyes would glow dark red, and he’d learn to go out of his way to torture your loyal subjects ( fear keeps people in line ). In the year 2000 this sort of game sounded A-Mazing (actually it still does).

But Black and White proved to be such a huge letdown. The graphics engine rocked as promised, but your creature required too much babysitting. Your worshipers also required extensive supervision to: feed, keep their faith, to construct their civilization’s infrastructure, to repel severe attacks of raining brimstone from the evil God “Nemesis”, to protect from swarms of hungry wolves, to .. well, you get the idea. Your people were wusses, not the hearty folks of Human history. They were always forever hungry and pleeding ‘why won’t you save me Lord? ‘ Gaw… it was such a headache.

The free-form sandbox gameplay the game promised had turned into a 1920’s operator’s switchboard in practice– it took too much frenetic work to accomplish anything worthwhile. I made it ~3 maps deep until the enemy’s evil Wolf creature beat the snot of my virtuous pet lion. I was stuck in the game and generally not enjoying myself. So I gave up (maybe I just sucked).

And now 5 years later we have Peter Molyenux again working his pre-release magical hype machine. I’ve tried to put Molyenux’s smiley/happy face on the back burner of Dave’s strategy game to-do list. But then the screenshots began to pour in, and the game’s ideas were tossed around msg board forums. I finally heard enough great gameplay design decisions that I eventually perked up my ears.

Still I kept my readings private - I’ll never fully trust that Peter Molyneux guy no matter how many fantastic preview movies I watch. Mr Molyneux - your charismatic smile and exotic name is no match for my cynicism. Still these “official movies” do look good. His ideas are more focused on executing-on the flawed ideas of the first game, and not about birthing a new game genre from scratch. Do I trust him, no, but the game does sound very interesting.

Instead of going into all-things that should make B&W 2 great, I’d rather simply link to an article written by someone who is seemingly as skeptical as I am. The normal mainstream gamesites like Gamespot, gamespy, etc.. aren’t trustworthy. They seemingly cover their lenses with vaseline to avoid insulting publishers with their previews. But TVG’s Black and White Preview seems like a frank and well covered article. The first two pages talk a lot of the setting of the tutorial, which I care very little bit about, but Page 3 is where the article gets into the meat and potatoes of gameplay design.

You should read it if you ever thought the original Black and White would have been a good game ‘only if they had…’. I think B&W2 will fill-in the rest of that thought.

Gamespy Tells about GTA on the PSP

So i’ve had my PSP for some time now, and to be honest, short of Wipeout, and a little bit of Untold Legends, I really haven’t played it much. Why you ask?

Becuase these are the only two games that I’ve enjoyed. Sure many have acclaimed Lumines, and even Mercury, but the puzzle games just dont keep me interested the way i want.

I have my eyes set on Infected, but now I see the first details on a game I’m SURE will find a permanent home on my PSP.. and that’s GTA:Liberty City Stories.

Well, the details are sounding good, this is not going to be some simplistic remake of GTA 1. This is going to be what we have been clamoring for, a cutting edge GTA game… in my pocket.

Gamespy has the juice:

“We got a chance to check out several of the missions, beginning with one called “The Trouble With Triads.” It seems that Don Salvatore was expecting a delivery at one of his warehouses, and he wanted Toni to go pick it up. Like the previous games, this was all explained during an in-game cutscene, and it was evident from the beginning that team had worked hard to make sure that the game looked almost as good as (and in some cases, better than) its console-based cousins. The graphics engine was built from the ground up to look great on the PSP’s wide screen, and we were amazed to see that even the framerate was locked in at a solid 30 FPS. “

…

“One of the biggest hallmarks of the GTA series is the ability to hop in just about any vehicle and take it for a drive, and Liberty City Stories gives players as much freedom as they’ve come to expect. Actually, scratch that. The game actually gives you more options, since you can now use two-wheeled vehicles in Liberty City (there were no bicycles or motorcycles in GTA III). The developers actually made a number of subtle changes the landscape we all know and love, but they were all for the better. Now, there are more steep hills and hidden ramps, perfect for all of the wannabe Evel Knievals who want to get some serious air under their tires. Other than that, the driving mechanics appeared to be the same, although we were told that there will be a lot of new vehicles. ”

Yeah.. I can relax.. it may take longer than the DS did to warm up.. but for the PSP… everything is going to be all right.

DHTML Lemmings™

Damn. Came across this from Boing Boing. An entirely DHTML remake of Lemmings. Quite impressive.

Source: Ars Open Forum Thread

I haven’t found these patch notes on an official site yet, so please take the following with a grain of salt. Still - the only thing that sticks out as unbelievable is that Wake Island (the most popular Battlefield 1942 map ) will be in the next BF2 patch. Did they really add the new ship models to BF2? Seems like a misappropriation of Development time - shouldn’t they be working on map pack or something?

BF2 patch 1.03
. Alpha - 2 Sept
· Beta - 19 Sept
· Final - 23 Sept
· CQC/ECG Sub - 28 Sept
· Release - 3 Oct

Wake Island· In a surprise move, forces of the People’s Liberation Army have attacked and captured Wake Island in a bid to threaten US lines of supply. USMC forces have been short-stopped from their deployment in Manchuria to respond to this new threat. The airbase on Wake Island is the lynchpin of the Chinese air threat, however it is highly susceptible to ground attack from either the northern

Compare Feature· By clicking the COMPARE button in BFHQ, you can search for another players name and load their current stats into BFHQ. Using the arrow buttons next to the name in the top-left corner of the menu, you can toggle between your stats and their stats. You can also load a player’s stats by double-clicking on their name in any leaderboard.

Favorites/History· There is a new tab in the MULTIPLAYER menu that holds a list of the last 20 internet servers you have connected to, plus a list of servers you have selected as favorites.

BF2 Account Tag · You can add a 6-character prefix to your account nickname which will be displayed in-game next to your nametag in the scoresheet, in game messages, and above your player. This prefix does not change your account name or statistic information (e.g. the prefix does not appear next to your name on the leaderboards). You can change this prefix at any time at the account login menu.

Server Reserved Slots· Server admins can define a list of player BF2 account names which will reserve VIP slots on the server.

Engineer/Helicopter· Modified the rate at which engineer can repair a helicopter while sitting in the helicopter. It now takes longer for the engineer to repair the helicopter.

Vehicle/Control Point Capture· Only one person in a vehicle counts towards a control point capture. If passengers want to increase the rate of the flag change, they must disembark from the vehicle.

Vehicle/Soldier interaction· Improved physics of vehicles against soldiers so that soldiers are not as easily killed by moving vehicles.

Auto Balance· Auto team balance no longer moves the commander or squad leaders to the other team.

Rank/Awards· Criteria for gaining ranks and awards has been changed.

Supply Drop· The commander’s supply drop now has an icon on the minimap and a 3D-map icon in the world

The changes to the helicopter/engineer duo and the vehicle passenger flag capture rate are some of the best news of the patch. No more uber Helicopter runs in Mashtuur City. Man I hated those.

MCV: Microsoft: ‘We’ve been killing PC gaming’

There are announcements afoot that Microsoft is going to revitalize the PC gaming scene. This topic also has some coverage in the latest edition of the PCGamer podcast.

It seems that MS is going to step up branding, marketing, and basic overall presence of the PC gaming scene. Naturally this is tied with Vista (the new Windows) and also even with the XBOX 360, as the new 360 controller is supposed to literally be plug and play with your PC.