The Select and Start News Report: 06.02.08
Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 06.02.2008
Worst company ever continues to grow, kids making Grand Theft Auto look bad, trouble at Square Enix, Valve announces Steam Cloud, Beyond Good and Evil is getting a sequel, and more.
So over the weekend I recieved my copy of Fire Pro Wrestling Returns from eBay for about $9. My first impressions right now is that the controls are somewhat awkward as someone whose never played a Fire Pro game before, so they really take time getting used to. The Edit mode however (the stuff where you create everything) is so jam-packed with stuff to make that I might spend more time on that rather then the actual game. So for a $9 used game, this is more then worth the price.
Big News WHO ARE BUYING THESE GAMES?! [credit: GameDaily, Gamasutra]
Data Design Interactive, the UK developer behind such crapstatic Wii games Ninjabread Man, Anubis II, and Rock n' Roll Adventures, are now opening up a new studio in the United States. Not only that, but apparently they're going to hire even more people for their UK offices because they and their publisher Conspiracy Entertainment have been doing great business for a while now.
You know what? One of these I think I'm going to start working for this company. I mean, they put little to no effort into making their games, and yet somehow they're able to make more money then the people behind Clover Studios, who made many great games that didn't sell as well as Capcom wanted them to. It's like a guaranteed easy payday.
13-YEAR-OLD THREATENS TEACH WITH KNIFE, WANTED MONEY FOR GTA:SA [credit: Destructoid, GamePolitics]
A 13-year-old middle school student in Framingham, Massachusetts pulled out an 11-inch knife on a teacher and demanded $20 so he can buy Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. After the teacher refused, he lowered his demands to $1, then the teacher was able to get the knife out of his hands. The student had originally asked his mother but her mother refused, hence this incident.
Is it me or are teenagers really stupid these days? I mean it's bad enough that they post their criminal acts on YouTube and MySpace, but are now threatening teachers with knives just to get $20? And then he dropped his offer to $1. I can make $1 picking up loose change in the street. This kid is an idiot.
G4 COMES TO XBOX LIVE [credit: GameDaily, Gamasutra]
G4 and Microsoft have announced a new digital distribution deal that will see some of G4's shows being avaiable to download on Xbox Live. The three shows announced right now are Code Monkeys Season 1, The Block, and Attack of the Show. Whether this will be for free or not wasn't specified.
Assuming you're going to have the pay for these shows, here are my quick recommendations:
Code Monkeys Season 1: YES. This is one of the best shows on G4 right now.
The Block: PASS. Unless you're really into the whole snowboarding stuff.
Attack of the Show: MAYBE. This show isn't so bad but I probably wouldn't pay for episodes of it.
SQUARE ENIX HAS BAD FISCAL 2007; LOSS OF JOBS TO FOLLOW? [credit: Gamasutra, GameDaily]
For Square Enix's full year fiscal report ending March 31st, net sales were down 9.8% to 147.5 billion yen ($1.43 billion) while net income decreased 20.9 percent to 9.2 billion yen ($89 million). Operating income was down 17%, offline games fell 19%, online games fell 11.4%, and mobile phones net sales fell 15.3%. Square Enix says it expects to rebound in the coming year, with fiscal 2008 sales of 160 billion yen ($1.5 billion), and profits of 12 billion yen ($116 million). With a bad fiscal 2007, rumors are now going around that the higher ups at Square Enix are not happy with the companies performace, citing that the company makes too many games for hardcore players and not enough mainstream games. If Square Enix doesn't change it's direction, job cuts will occur.
Not good news at all for Square Enix. I blame trying to rely too much on Final Fantasy VII. Give us something that's actually new SE! Or maybe they should just start making crappy budget games like Data Design. I can't believe those people are actually making money!
HEAVILY BELOVED CULT CLASSIC IS GETTING A SEQUEL [credit: GameDaily, Gamasutra, GameSpot]
Just about anybody who has played Beyond Good and Evil will tell you it's a damn shame that such a great game didn't sell well and that hopes for the next two games (as originally planned) were diminished. But WAIT! At Ubisoft's "UbiDays" event, they announced their line-up of upcoming games, which include a sequel to Beyond Good and Evil! So far the only thing revealed for this game is that teaser picture you see above.
That's going to make a lot of gamers happy.
ACCESS YOUR SAVE FILES FROM STEAM ANYWHERE [credit: Evil Avatar, Gamasutra, The Escapist, GameSpot]
Valve announced that in the latest Steam update, a new feature will be implented called "Steam Cloud." What Steam Cloud does is save your data and configuration files online and then lets you access these files from any PC that has Steam installed. The service is currently being used for Valve's own games, including Half-Life, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2, with Left4Dead being one of the first new games to use Steam Cloud. The service is free to all players and developers.
That's awesome, and these days with consoles picking hard drives over memory cards, I hope this is something they start doing sometime in the future.
Tidbit News
-Ever heard of this weird RPG called Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure? Basically, it was a standard RPG only with lots of singing in it, and some of the songs were REALLY horrible. Well, it was recently announced that the game is getting ported to the Nintendo DS. Earplugs not included. [credit: Cubed3.com]
-Even though Metal Gear Solid 4 is the last MG game Kojima will be directing, he will still be involved in the Metal Gear series. Probably because he doesn't want his highly praised series to go the way of Guitar Hero. [credit: GameDaily]
-Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, is now the third fastest Xbox Live title with 16,500 downloads. Not bad for a game, which according to advertisements, really sucks and anybody who likes Penny Arcade sucks. [credit: GameDaily]
-Take-Two officially announced that October will be the month PS3 gets Bioshock. Plus the PS3 version is getting new features and content that aren't available on the PC or the Xbox 360. [credit: GameSpot, Gamasutra, GameDaily]
-Capcom has announced that Street Fighter IV will be coming to the PS3, Xbox 360, and PC. Wii fans? You're screwed. [credit: GameDaily]
-The MMO game Age of Conan has only been out for a week and it already has 400,000 players. The AoC website also has had over 2.2 million unique visitors from last week. [credit: GameDaily, Gamasutra]
-The SITE Intelligence Group was said to have mistaken a screenshot in Fallout 3 where the Capitol Building is destroyed as an image created by Al Qaeda according to newspaper the Telegraph. SITE claims that this was entirely false. [credit: GamePolitics]
Gaming Calendar
June 3rd - Ninja Gaiden II (X360) to be released
June 10th:
Dragonball Z: Burst Limit (PS3, X360) to be released
Blast Works: Build, Trade, Destroy (Wii) to be released
June 12th - Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) to be released
June 22nd - Rock Band ported to the Wii
June 23rd:
Battlefield: Bad Company (PS3) to be released
Top Spin 3 (Multi) to be released
June 28-29 - Blizzard's Worldwide Invitational convention to be held
June 29th - Guitar Hero: Aerosmith (PS3, X360) to be released
Q2 2008 - Heroes of Might and Magic Kingdoms (PC) to be released
July 8th - Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon (Wii) to be released
July 15-17 - E3 Media & Business Summit to be held
July 22nd - Final Fantasy IV DS to be released
August 1st - EA Land (PC, formerly The Sims Online) will close down
Summer 2008 - Air Traffic Chaos (DS) to be released
September 7th - Spore (PC) to be released
September 16th - Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen (DS) to be released
September 22nd - Sim City Creator (Wii, DS) to be released
September 2008 - TNA iMPACT (Multi) to be released
October 2008:
-LittleBigPlanet (PS3) to be released
-Bioshock ported to the PS3
October 3-5 - E for All 2008 to be held
October 9-13 - The Tokyo Game Show 2008 to be held
November 2008 - Gears of War 2 (X360) to be released
Fall 2008:
-Resistance: Fall of Man 2 (PS3) to be released
-MySims Kingdom (DS, Wii) to be released
Nexon's Combat Arms
Nexon, the people behind Maple Story and Kart Rider, recently launched the closed beta of Combat Arms, they're latest free-to-play online game. Combat Arms is an FPS game that looks and plays a lot like Counter-Strike. So far the only things to do in the beta is 8 vs. 8 Deathmatch and "Search and Destroy," in which you find a target and blow it up with a bomb. Unlike Counter-Strike though, BOTH teams have a bomb and both can win by either activating their bomb, defusing the opponent's bomb, or just killing everybody else. From what I've seen with my brother playing it, this looks to be a really fun game and a nice alternate to the cartoonish looks of Maple Story and Kart Rider. Can't wait for the open beta so I can get a shot at this game.
Some amusing anecdotes about the game:
1. Players seem to be calling each other noobs a lot anytime they make mistakes. Keep in mind that this was happening when the game was released for about 3 hours! People, NOT EVERYBODY PLAYS AND MASTERS COUNTER-STRIKE!
2. Somebody is already hacking in the game and ruining the fun. Players solution? Turn on friendly fire and immediately kill the hacking bastard. Hacker soon went away.
Videos of the Day
Guitar Hero On Tour: I have no problem with this game as long as it turns out to be good, but for the love of Freebird, this tutorial video about how to play the game is so awful and corny it reminds me of those preview videos I used to get years ago for games like Starfox 64 and Diddy Kong Racing.
ParticipACTION: This Canadian non-profit group is running a commercial telling kids to get more active or else they'll get old. I'm feeling old remembering those VHS tapes of Starfox 64 and Diddy Kong Racing.
I order you to read these other guys (except maybe Mark)
Posted By: Mark Salmela (Registered) on June 02, 2008 at 12:05 AM
I think someone loves Ninja Gaiden...
Posted By: David R (Guest) on June 02, 2008 at 12:34 AM
"The Edit mode however (the stuff where you create everything) is so jam-packed with stuff to make that I might spend more time on that rather then the actual game."
I do the same thing in every wrestling game that has a create mode. It always ends up more fun to try to create the 'perfect' guy than to actually play him. As soon as I step in the ring, I figure out something I want to change.
Square is in trouble? Maybe if they released a game once in a while...
Played the NG2 demo quite a bit. I didn't think the initial cutscene (inengine) was that impressive, but when the game started...wow. The violence is off the charts, and the controls are impeccable.
Posted By: Rod Oracheski (Registered) on June 02, 2008 at 01:41 AM
Fire Pro Wrestling Returns wasn't that expensive from the beginning. I think I picked it up NEW for like $15. I guess that six dollars is worth it to you because of the price of gas. :-/
Anywho, most AMERICAN wrestling games don't allow you that level of control (looks at the Smackdown vs. Raw series). You can create certain wrestlers, but you don't usually have the same level of options from the step-1.
Fire Pro Wrestling Returns has a bunch of characters based off of TNA, WWE, K-1, UFC guys. You can edit the characters to allow them to appear correctly (they just changed the name). I was stoked to see the Canadian Destroyer in the game. The version of the Cattle Mutilation (not Bryan Danielson's) made an appearance, as well.
There is little to no story mode. The game allows you to create wrestlers based on their real life counterparts. The mechanics are closer to actual wrestling (i.e. Japanese Wrestling or American wrestling from the 70's). The game is about ring psychology. SvR lacks this.
Posted By: David R. (Guest) on June 02, 2008 at 10:35 AM
Kotaku reported a while ago that Ubisoft says that Beyond Good and Evil's sequel will also be "easier because they have to think of the casual gamers who don't want hard games"
Posted By: Travis (Guest) on June 02, 2008 at 01:34 PM
Shouldn't Don King Prizefighter be one of the games getting released in June or has it been delayed? ;((
Posted By: TWilliams (Guest) on June 02, 2008 at 03:32 PM
Yes it is. I just didn't list it.
Posted By: Vincent Chiucchi (Registered) on June 02, 2008 at 08:32 PM
Maybe it is a good thing that prize fighters was delayed. :-/ You wouldn't want them to rush out a half-baked game. If it still turns out to be crap, I think we should look to take the developer's heads as just payment.
Posted By: David Redkey (Registered) on June 03, 2008 at 08:36 PM
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