Monthly Archives: July 2009

Dragon Quest selling well in Japan? Naaaah.

But somehow, that’s just what it’s doing. According to Famitsu (via andriasang), the latest installment in the ultra popular franchise continues its rampage around Japan, surely giving Godzilla a gray hair or two in the process.

The game has, as of July 26, sold a total of 3,217,502 copies. Can five million be far off?

We’ll give it until the end of the year. If it hasn’t reached the big five-OOOOOO by then, we’ll eat something. Not a hat factory, though. We already ate that.

Starbreeze CEO Johan Kristiansson has confirmed to VG247 that his company isn’t involved with the recently announced Darkness sequel.

“I heard that there were talks about a Darkness sequel, but Starbreeze is not involved in anything like that right now. We are busy on two projects together with EA,” he said.

Bummer. Here’s hoping Top Cow can find an equally skilled developer to handle the game.

Gamasutra has the full scoop on Atari’s first quarter earnings, and things are looking pretty good. Boosted by the strong sales of games like Chronicles of Riddick and Ghostbusters, revenues soared 30% up to €54.5 million ($77.78 million).

However, Atari isn’t popping the champagne and threatening to stop supporting the PS3 just yet. The future, unfortunately, may not be quite as bright.

“This performance in the first quarter is mainly due to a favorable game release schedule and should not be extrapolated for the remaining of the year,” Atari stated.

More through the link.

A sequel to Starbreeze Studios’ sleeper-hit The Darkness is officially in the works, says Newsarama. The news was announced during a panel at last weekend’s Comic Con.

The tentacle-tastic mobster drama’s story will be written by Paul Jenkins.

In addition, the first installment in the Darkness franchise has gone platinum, and will soon hit the $29.99 price point on both Xbox 360 and PS3.

Granted, this sequel was basically confirmed last year during — what else — Comic Con, but the news is still exciting nonetheless.

More hot tentacle-on-mobster action? Yes please.

No release date yet. We’ll keep you posted.

After an inhumanly long period of butting heads with partner Jakks Pacific, THQ has finally prevailed, according to Gamasutra.

The in-fight was waged over a contract dispute, which has now, obviously, been ironed out. An arbitrator gave the nod to THQ, saying that Jakks is now entitled to six percent of sales from WWE wrasslin’ games — a significantly smaller chunk of change when compared to the ten percent it received before the dispute.

With that out of the way, it’s all peace, love, and dove between the corporate tag-team partners, right? Nuh-uh. Jakks and THQ are now trading lawsuits over WWE contract extensions.

And that, children, is where videogames come from.

More through the link.

After silently releasing and then vanishing under mysterious circumstances, Resident Evil 4′s iPhone iteration is here to stay.

If another shot at Leon Kennedy’s no good, very bad day sounds right up your alley, just head over to the iTunes store. The game’s going for $7.99.

It’s RE4, but portable. Now evil can reside anywhere. How can you resist?

Thanks, Joystiq.

It’s the beginning of a new week, and you know what that means– wait! Come back! Cardgame collections and family friendly fare aren’t all you’re getting this week.

Oh sure, for you bloodless, fully clothed families of cardsharks, this week’s update brings an E-rated Three Musketeers swashbuckler, HB Arcade Cards, and Sudoku Student on the DSi. But there’s also Monkey Island!

Full info on each game is after the break.

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Sony Computer Entertainment America has confirmed that Fat Princess will finally a get a release worldwide this Thursday. Managing Producer for SCEA, Deborah Mars, made the announcement on the US PS Blog.

“Without further ado, we’re proud to announce that Fat Princess will make her royal appearance on the PlayStation Network this Thursday, July 30th for $14.99,” said Mars.

“Fat Princess will be released simultaneously worldwide in N. America, Europe and Asia. A Japan release is also in the works, and we’ll have more information on that in weeks to come.”

There you have it. More info at the link, where there is even a video interview with Titan Studios’ Chris Millar and Craig Leigh.

Forza Motorsport 3 has decided to try its luck in the godless (and gameless) wasteland that is the 2009 holiday season — at least, in North America.

The game’s coming on October 27, Shacknews reports. We’ve put in an email asking about a European release date, and will let you know as soon as we hear back.

More through the link.

Ubisoft’s announced it’s delaying Splinter Cell: Conviction and Red Steel 2 until Q4 2009, which normally tends to mean January – March 2010. The news comes from Ubi’s Q1 2009 financial report.

Q1 is suddenly the new Q4.

As well as them two, Ghost Recon 4 and I Am Alive have been delayed until fiscal 2010 – 2011, which means both games wont be released until April 2010 at the very latest.

“We are disappointed that we have to postpone the release of several major games but we consider that this choice is the best one in the long-term interests of Ubisoft,” said the company in a statement.

“Lastly, we are having to adjust our full-year targets to take into account the fall in business over the first half. The excellent response to our games at E3, as well as the high buzz generated for titles such as Assassin’s Creed 2, Splinter Cell Conviction and Avatar, reinforce our belief that the company can achieve strong growth in the second half of the fiscal year.”

More at Kotaku.

A mysterious tweet from BioWare developer, Christina Norman, has seriously hinted at a big tech feature thats upcoming for Mass Effect 2.

“Working on the new “technology” feature for #masseffect2. It’s secret, and awesome! Don’t tell anyone.”

Whatever it is, it can stay secret for too long… right?

Game’s out in 2010 for Xbox 360 and PC.

Cant say we see this every day.

UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, has confessed that he is, in fact, a gamer. Speaking in an interview with The Mirror newspaper, the PM answered a question on how he’d be spending time with his children playing video games during the summer recess in Parliament with his family.

“He plans to do more “re-winning” of [his childrens'] interest as he watches the boys’ favourite TV shows and plays computer games over the next few weeks at the couple’s home in Scotland and on their holiday,” according to an extract from the paper.

Be sure to send us a friend request, Gordon.

More at MCV.

News Corp, owners of MySpace, have revealed that they are planning to turn the socialising website into a place for online video games. Speaking at Fortune Brainstorm tech conference in California, the company’s digital boss, Jonathan Miller, said the service will be a “major focus”.

“MySpace is and will be more in the future a gaming platform, a space for people to meet and play games,” said Miller.

“If you look at the big activities online, games right now is number three. Communications, search, games. So it’s clearly going to be a major focus.”

It comes as the site suffers dwindling numbers due to users of the site going to sites like Facebook or Twitter.

More over at GI.

Head of the newly formed 343 Industries, Frankie O’Connor, has said that the recently announced Halo Waypoint is meant to ”aggregate everything” that you’d expect from the Halo universe.

“We’re going to aggregate everything that you would want to watch from the Halo universe on that site,” said O’Connor.

“But it’s a lot more ambitious than that. It’s going to evolve in features and functionality to make it the prime destination for the Halo fan.”

O’Connor also mentioned a pricing stucture is still being decided for the service by Microsoft, although they are trying to make sure Gold and Silver members of Xbox Live try to get the same experience from the service.

“Certainly, if you’re a Gold member you’re going to get access to all of that experience,” he said. “We want everyone to have this same experience, but the question is, if there’s multiplayer features that are technically connected to Gold, it’s easier to deal with. There’s a lot of reasons that [tying it to] Gold makes sense.”

The service was announced last week at ComicCon. It’ll go live on Xbox Live this autumn.

From Kotaku, via Eurogamer.

The latest episode of Primetime 2.0 has confirmed that Command & Conquer 4 will be shown at GAMESCom in Cologne next month.

The first gameplay screens as well as first gameplay footage will be shown at the event, when it takes place from August 19-23 .

It’s a PC-only affair.

Via BluesNews.

Konami’s announced that its bringing over Metal Gear Solid creator, Hideo Kojima, to GAMESCom. The Kojima Productions boss is gonna be at the event to show off Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker for the PSP as well as demo Castlevania: Lords of Shadow for PS3 and 360 alongside developer, Mercury Stream.

Also coming is Team PES leader, Shingo Takatsuka, more commonly known as Seabass. He’ll be there to premiere Pro Evolution Soccer 2010.

Press release is after the jump.

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If you’ve been saving all your money for a Wii version of  Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, instead of the PC or Xbox Live Arcade version, we’ve got news for you: it’s coming today to WiiWare.

But only if you live in North America, sadly. However, Telltale Games have said that they will be sharing release plans for PAL very soon.

Well, if your American and have a Wii, why are you sitting here listening to us babble? Go check it out.

Famitsu’s put out ten brand new screenshots of Final Fantasy XIII, showcasing the silver-haired boy who was shown for the first time in the E3 trailer.

He’s now been named as Hope Estheim.

Catch them through the link. Game’s out in Japan this coming winter for the PS3 with a spring 2010 release elsewhere for PS3 and 360.

GameVideos has put up a brand new gameplay video of EA’s Dante’s Inferno from Comic Con.

It looks a lot like God of War with a hint of Dead Space from the footage: it has awesome written all over it.

Video is through the link. Game’s out next year for PS3, 360 and PSP. No PC version though, unfortunately.

Bethesda Softworks’ Ashley Cheng has said on his blog that only a few current publishers, including Bethesda themselves, could release Bungie’s new game.

“You can count on one hand the number of publisher’s around who can afford to publish Bungie’s next game: EA (via EA Partners), Activision, Ubisoft, Microsoft, and of course, Bethesda. I can only imagine how much it will cost to snag their next title,” said Cheng.

He then went on further to state that Sony could easily publish it as well, but thought it was “unlikely”.

“There is one more publisher who could get into the game: Sony. That would be interesting. Unlikely.”

Bungie said a deal was close on a publishing deal for the game on Friday. Development was confirmed at TGS last October.

Thanks, Videogamer.