A user over at Gametrailers uploaded the above video which gives us a first look at the gameplay of the upcoming Dead Rising: Chop ‘Til You Drop for the Nintendo Wii. Dead Rising fans will likely notice the lack of Zombie hordes and Frank’s camera first, then the gimicky waggle controls and greatly crippled graphics second. Aw, who am I kidding, anyone who has even seen the Xbox 360 version of the game in action will notice that stuff.
Sorry guys, but this just isn’t Dead Rising anymore. The Dead Rising faithful out there can only hope that the true sequel to the first title won’t end up being a Wii exclusive. Eek!
Did you hear that PS3 rhythm game fans? No more being forced to buy a certain publisher’s instrument controller just to be able to play their respective digital band simulator!
Yeah sure, it might sound like something that should have been done all along, but sadly the last generation of the rhythm game war had a ton of ups and downs in the compatability department that were never really sorted out. This go around however, things are going to be a little different (and a lot more consumer friendly). Via a post on the Playstation Blog, SCEA’s Director of 3rd Party Relations, Michael Shorrock assured gamers that their guitar and drum peripheral troubles will be ancient history come this October.
For the past several months, we have been working closely with Neversoft and Activision, Harmonix and Konami to ensure that PlayStation 3 guitars and drum sets will all feature a basic level of gameplay compatibility.
For the most part, this means that the titles with musical peripherals will work with the other’s software. A few specific examples include: Guitar Hero: World Tour’s guitars and drums will work with Rock Band 2 and Konami’s Rock Revolution software.
There you have it. PS3 owners can now utter a huge sigh of relief and rest assured that their one set of instruments will work with all three of these rockin’ titles.
There is no word on whether the Xbox 360 versions of the instruments will work across the board as well, but our guess is that they will. Check back for an update very soon.
According to this blog, we should be expecting the next installment in the Guitar Hero series on October 26, 2008. Apparently the game will have 85 soundtracks, including the 43 songs which appear after the jump that were announced early. If that’s not good enough for you Guitar Hero rockers, then the news that both the likeness and songs of Ozzy Osbourne himself will appear in the game definitely should blow you away. We’re talking Ozzy as a playable character, and “Ozzfest” as a venue. Check after the jump for the songs released so far.
Even though there was the very disappointing release of Star Wars: The Clone Wars this week, we can look forward to a demo for the Force Unleashed. The game is shaping up to be one of the most technically advanced games to ever be released, and it is already being touted as the most expensive game ever. Although the story sounds intriguing, I think it could be the falling point for a game that looks to be amazing. We get a chance to try it out on Xbox Live and PSN this week, so that question might be answered soon. The demo will allow you to play one level of the game at the TIE fighter construction facility and it may feature a Jedi fight at the end (against Rahm Kota). Just get ready to download the demo this Thursday (August 21st)
I think most people agree that this hasn’t been the best year for Atari, with a series of scandals ranging from getting their CEO to step down by paying him under the table to attacking a German gaming website for posting a negative review of Alone in the Dark. Many have been expecting Atari’s fall for years as they are now known for releasing lackluster games and many very unsuccessful games every year. Last year they posted an operating loss of 11.3 million. Atari’s bad year culminated when Infogrames finished buying them through an aggressive stock maneuver. (Note: the CEO that was paid to leave was the same one that oversaw this transaction)
But, things may be looking up for Atari. They have finally posted a yearly profit of $3.5 million. In reality, this is chump change for corporations, but we’ll overlook that fact when looking at last year’s losses. Atari cited great sales on Alone in the Dark (over 1 million copies) and Dragon Ball Z as the reason for the profit bump. Let’s just hope the old giant can keep this up.
The long rumored PSP 3000 has barely even been hinted at by Sony as of yet, but a recent FCC listing for the device confirms nearly beyond a doubt that it is in development. As you can see in the above image, no details involving the handheld’s new features have surfaced, so we will still have to wait for Sony’s announcement before we learn anything solid about it. What does that leave us with? A codename and a sketch, that’s about it.
Hopefully Sony will squeal about this one sometime soon, because these slow, slow developments always drive me nuts.
Coming off of big hardware sales across the board in June, last month’s numbers are looking a little Skimpy. While Nintendo met expectations by remaining on top of the sales chart, Sony surprised analysts by shipping about 20,000 more current-gen units than Microsoft. On the software side, NCAA Football ‘09 for the Xbox 360 managed to crawl to the top of the heap, while Wii Fit had to settle for second place.
Here is the hardware chart for this month:
Home Consoles
Wii – 555,000
PS3 – 224,900
Xbox 360 – 204,800
PS2 – 155,500
Handheld Consoles
DS – 608,000
PSP – 221,700
Check out the software numbers after the jump.
1. NCAA Football 09 (Xbox 360) – 397,600 2. Wii Fit (Wii) – 369,600 3. Guitar Hero: On Tour (DS) – 309,700 4. Wii Play (Wii) – 284,000 5. NCAA Football 09 (PS3) – 242,500 6. Soulcalibur IV (Xbox 360) – 218,900 7. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 174,500 8. Rock Band Special Edition (Wii) – 165,800 9. Soulcalibur IV (PS3) – 155,800 10. Sid Meier’s Civilization Revolution (Xbox 360) – 147,600
Crysis Warhead was announced as a game that is for a person that doesn’t have a $2000+ gaming rig. Theoretically everyone thought that would mean much more lenient system specs, but that might not be the case. See for yourself. Here are the Crysis original system specs:
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista), Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista), AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or better
RAM: 1GB (1.5GB on Windows Vista)
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or better
After a big announcement a few weeks ago when Xbox Japan posted an outstanding price tag of 1800 MS Points ($22.49) for Castle Crashers, Behemoth’s new XBLA game, the internet went crazy at this highly priced game. Microsoft and Behemoth quickly responded against the rumors and said that the price was still under discussion and that there is no official number out yet. Today, they released an official price tag of 1200 MS Points, which is $15. A pretty standard amount for a big game like Castle Crashers and it will undoubtedly be worth it. Now we just have to wait until next Wednesday. Come back to this page for the flash counter above.
For those of us that don’t remember or don’t know, Nvidia bought up the company Ageia a couple of months back. Ageia is the creator of the PhysX cards, which are stand-alone PCI cards that were meant for processing the physics in games. The cards were gaining some momentum, but developers weren’t really catering to the cards because of the lack of market penetration. But that might soon change: when Nvidia bought Ageia, they announced that they would then be using their GPUs as physics processors also. This effectively means that anyone with an Nvidia card would also ‘technically’ have a PhysX card if speaking on broad terms. Aside from giving Nvidia cards more value, it also dramatically increases market penetration of these cards and will hopefully lead to more developer support. There were some worries that graphics performance would slow down because the GPUs would also be processing the physics, or that Nvidia might try to increase their prices. There is still no word on the former, but the latter seems to have proven false. The video above is some of the first footage of the Nvidia cards rendering particle physics and they seem to do a very good job. This is a very basic demo and although I would have liked to see some much more complicated rendering situations, this will have to do.
Nvidia has also released firmware for all 8-series, 9-series, and 200 series cards to gain PhysX support. They are all available for download here. And here are a list of games that support PhysX cards. Interestingly enough, Xbox 360 is listed as a platform insinuating that the 360 should be receiving an update that would let games use PhysX cards as they do have Nvidia graphics cards. Interesting.
At E3, a new Xbox Experience was announced which basically boiled down to a new version of the Dashboard. This was pretty controversial with the hardcore Xbox 360 fanboys, who had come to love the Dashboard. The videos and screenshots that have popped up off this new Experience have showed a much less fluid, empty space. This could just be a dummy look until the final version comes out, but there is a much anticipated feature in this new update. The update will feature the ability to install games from discs onto the hard drive. This is great for two reasons: the load times are much faster, and the fear of scratching a disc is gone. There is also a video, check it out.
Everyone that was disappointed that Call of Duty 4 shipped without any co-op can rejoice now. Call of Duty: World at War will feature a heavy co-op component. The game doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement over Call of Duty 4, but it does seem different. Decide for yourself with the following co-op footage of the game.
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