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Small Arms Trailer
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Fighting, Xbox 360, Xbox Live Arcade, Xbox Live Marketplace,
This year at E3 many games were announced and demoed, and it is inevitable that some will slip through the cracks. Small Arms, a Smash Bros.-esque brawling game which will come to the marketplace near the end of the summer, is one of those titles. The game is being developed by Gastronaut Studios, an independent developer comprised of 4 people who focus on downloadable games. Recently one of the developers gave some new info and background on Small Arms in an interview with ThrillsKilla. Here’s a snippet:
‘Marky Kat’ is our cyborg cat character who sports a ‘chain gun’ as his default weapon. The primary attack is a rapid fire stream of bullets, while the secondary is a shotgun type burst shot.
This will be another awesome game on XBLA, and while Gastronaut Studios doesn’t view the game as a Smash Bros. clone, it should fill a nice void in the marketplace and in my gaming rotation.
Read More 
| K1llas Xbox Domain
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Immersion Announces Next Generation Force Feedback
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Corporate News, Hardware, PC, PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360,
Immersion corporation today announced the availability of their next-generation vibration feedback systems which they hope will result in better force feedback effects with better power consumption profiles. Some of the main points they address include compatibility with motion and tilt-sensing controllers; Nintendo users are already aware that Wii will support both motion-sensing and feedback, and perhaps this will give Sony the ability to add this functionality to their wireless controller. Overall, the new feedback system appears to be a more streamlined, better defined system for including force feedback in a console or PC. Hopefully, their work on the feedback APIs will make force feedback more prevalent on the PC. The effects in the few PC games that supported the force feedback mice from Logitech and Saitek were interesting, but never really gained acceptance in any significant way. If backward compatibility is really supported as well as Immersion suggests, then adoption of the new technology this late in the next generation console cycle won’t be an issue. With the Xbox 360 already shipping, and Sony pretty much leaving force feedback behind, this would seemingly only be a possibility in either the Wii console, or in third party controllers. And, it remains to be seen (or felt) how much better this new technology really is.
Full Press Release after the jump.
Click to continue reading Immersion Announces Next Generation Force Feedback
Mercury Titles Announced for Nintendo Wii
Posted by Josh Smith Categories: Nintendo, Release Dates, Strategy, Wii,
In a move sure to excite Wii owners to be, Ignition Entertainment has updated their release list to include two Mercury titles for the Wii. Previously Mercury was a Sony exclusive, and a great asset to the PSP catalog. The first installment, Mercury Meltdown, will be released in November followed shortly after by Mercury Type R, before the end of Q4. The Mercury series includes hours of stimulating puzzles in which you move a blob of mercury around an environment through various gates and around obstacles. The movement of your blob is controlled by tilting the platform that the blob is on, making the Wii-mote a natural choice. This is a strong launch title for the Nintendo Wii and signals more support by third party developers.
Read More | Cubed3.com
The first part of a six part series on the development of MechAssault: Phantom War for the Nintendo DS has been posted to IGN.com. While gamers have probably seen development diaries for more complex games on the PC and next generation consoles, the DS seems like an interesting platform to develop for; there are new technologies on the console, like the dual screens, and the touch screen, but a lot of the rendering hardware is limited in ways that hearken back to previous generations of non-portable consoles. So, this installment deals somewhat with the challenges of working with the limited 3D rendering power of the console, and the trade-offs that must be made to fit the content and graphical detail into smaller spaces than most developers are used to. It is interesting that the difference between the 512 megabit and 1024 megabit cartridge is not merely size, but also memory access speed. Hopefully, more of the technical challenges will be addressed in future episodes, giving gamers much more insight into the smaller end of console development.
Read More | IGN
Brandon Daiker of N-Sider has posted an in depth look at the Play! A Video Game Symphony concert in Stockholm Sweden. For those of you unfamiliar, Play! is a world tour featuring live symphonic renditions of music from various best selling video games, including Super Mario Bros, Halo, Chrono Trigger, World of Warcraft , Silent Hill and the Final Fantasy series. The atmosphere seemed to have been much more relaxed than that of a typical concerto, with fans cheering on their favorite compositions and becoming perhaps overly enthusiastic when the perennial fanboy favorite, One Winged Angel from Final Fantasy VII took center stage, prompting a three minute standing ovation followed by an encore.
Also of note are Daiker’s interviews with Yasunori Mitsuda (composer of the Chrono series and Xenogears/Xenosaga) and Nobuo Uematsu (composer of Final Fantasy and President of Smile Please), in which Uematsu clarifies that he will only be composing the main theme for Super Smash Bros Brawl and Mitsuda announces the release of a Chrono Cross remix album within the next year.
Read More | N-Sider
Phil Harrison On Sony’s E3
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Corporate News, E3, PlayStation 3,
Following up on last week’s interview with Satoru Iwata, today, Edge Magazine’s interview with Phil Harrison of Sony is published. Overall, while Sony showed some great games at E3, their exclusive press conference left a little to be desired. Harrison admits as much; when asked if there was a letdown after the previous year’s showing, he states, “Yeah, I agree with that, and I don’t quite know why that is. I guess, um, when something is new and exciting and heard for the first time, that elicits a certain reaction emotionally, compared to when you’re just confirming something that people already know.”
Certainly gamers would be glad to have the old Playstation-style controller back, but when your large controller innovation is “motion-sensing” which had already been announced by Nintendo, then this strongly gives the impression of someone that is a follower, and not an innovator. Add to that the fact that despite their justifications of the dual SKU market, it does appear that Sony went back on their word. Harrison’s explanation, that “he PlayStation 3 format is exactly the same between the two SKUs. Our competitor has a different format between the two SKUs - one with a hard drive, one without - but all PlayStation 3s have a hard drive” rings a little false when there are clearly differences between the hardware, and there is no upgrade path between on PS3 SKU to the other. On the Xbox 360, at least, if the gamer wants to add a hard drive later, this is possible, but to this day, there has been no announcement of a way for the lower priced PS3 SKU to get HDMI support; while this may not impact games at the beginning, the higher picture quality promised by HDMI 1.3 all but ensures a different experience between the two PS3 tiers.
The pricing of the PS3 on its own probably would have acted as a buzzkill, but combined with the apparent aping of its competitors and the backtracking of several promised from the 2005 E3, it is easy to see why the announcement was less successful.
Read More | Next Generation
Quake Wars Pre-Order Details Announced
Posted by Matt Haselton Categories: Action, First Person Shooters, PC, Release Dates,
While the release date for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars remains “sometime 2006,” Activison has announced that some retailers will begin accepting pre-orders at the end of July. The cost of reserving a copy wasn’t mentioned, but some of the perks were; most notably, players will be able to call dibs on their favorite username before the game’s official launch. There’s also the promise of receiving “advanced strategies and gameplay tactics,” though it’s doubtful such information will remain exclusive for any longer than it takes to copy-and-paste into a public forum.
Read More | IGN
How Much Power Does Your Console Use?
Posted by Christopher Sasaki Categories: Hardware, Nintendo Gamecube, PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3, Xbox, Xbox 360,
Just in case anyone was wondering how much power a console draws when it is in standby, and when it is running games, DX Gaming has the rundown. They compare several consoles, including the original Playstation, Playstation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360, Gamecube, and the Dreamcast, to determine how much power the consoles utilize when off, when at the “dashboard,” and when in use. It will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the Xbox 360 power brick that that console was the biggest eater of energy, but there were some other interesting data points.
First was that the Playstation 2 in standby consumes as much power as the Xbox 360 in the same state, 2 watts. When powered on, but running no games, the Xbox 360 is the pig, pulling 145 watts, followed by the Xbox at 61 watts, and the Playstation 2 at 23 watts. While running games, the order of the console’s power hunger doesn’t change. The Xbox 360 boosts up to 165 watts, the Xbox jumps to 70 watts, and the PS2 runs up to 30 watts.
DX Gaming also runs some numbers to try and determine the average cost of a console over a year’s time, as well as the watts drawn per cycle. Gamers might have some issue with the estimate of 14 hours per week, and then the Xbox 360 causes problems in the watts per cycle measurement, since it operates a multi-core CPU, the numbers depend on whether one considers the megahertz rating additive, or in parallel. Still, the numbers are interesting, and give some insight into what might be expected from the Wii and Playstation 3 consoles.
Read More | DX Gaming
Nintendo Registers New Wii Trademarks
Posted by George Hatzidimitriou Categories: Nintendo, Rumors, Wii,
Nintendo of Japan has registered three new trademarks relating to the Nintendo Wii today: Wii Pointer, Wii Culture and !!M. Although the meaning behind these trademarks are unknown so far, speculation is widespread among Nintendo fans online. The first, Wii Pointer, could very well be a finalized name for the Wii remote, while Wii Culture might be the name of the Wii’s online service that was announced. Finally, !!M, which looks very much like an upside down version of the Wii logo, is theorized to be an instant messaging client due to its striking similarity to the acronym “IM”. Keep in mind that the above are simply rumours and nothing more at this point, but we’ll keep you updated as more information is revealed.
Read More | GameFront
Gamespot has the results of a reader survey up about your favorite NES game. The survey includes almost 12,000 votes and is a well rounded list. I can remember playing almost all of these in my neighbor’s basement for hours on end. The editors provide some good commentary on each of the top ten games and pull in some honorable mentions at the end. We’re looking forward to playing some of these classics on the Wii later this year.
The List:
10. Ninja Gaiden
9. Duck Hunt
8. Metroid
7. Mega Man 2
6. Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!
5. Contra
4. Final Fantasy
3. Super Mario Bros.
2. The Legend of Zelda
1. Super Mario Bros. 3
Read More | Gamespot
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