Fast on the heels of Dracula X Chronicles, that has a scheduled release date of November 13th, series producer Koji Igarashi seems to feel the need to pump out even more Castlevania for fans to digest in the coming months. Two new games have been announced as in production, one for the Nintendo DS, and another exclusive to cellphone gaming.

Castlevania: Order of Shadows has been announced to be a cellphone-exclusive title to the series and will be released in September to most of the major service providers, including AT&T and Verizon. The game is to be a side-story in the series, and will feature the protagonist stylings of Desmond Belmont, and his sisters Zoe and Delores. (where they though these would be good names for Belmont’s is anyone’s guess….narcotics may have been involved) One can only attribute this Konami’s sudden change from consoles and handhelds to cellphone-exclusive gaming to other games of it’s ilk, such as God of War: Betrayal. Whether or not this game will be inducted into the series storyline as canon has yet to be determined.

The other Castlevania game in production has been confirmed by Iga as being again for the DS handheld system, and promises it “will not be a remake like Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles and will be all new“. Any other information as of right now is shoddy at best, and any other solid leads as to what kind of game this will be will most likely be unveiled at Konami’s Spring Gamer’s Day. So, we have a good deal of time before anything substantial is released.

A final note is Iga’s mentioning of a future Castlevania title being released for the Xbox 360, and possibly the PS3 (if it’s sales pick up). Nothing other than this teaser has been mentioned, and won’t probably until after the release of the future DS game. We all can only hope that this long-awaited jump into the next-gen consoles means either a high-quality 3D game in planning, or a grandscale 2D game that would hopefully be the next Symphony of the Night. One can only dream.

This is the final segment in GameTrailers Metroid Retrospective, constructing the events of the 10 games in the Metroid series into a timeline and also mentioning the few cameos hero Samus Aran and her enemies have made in other games and media. You can see the entire series here. Its a nice refresher course to prepare for Metroid Prime 3, which has just been released and will be stocked on shelves in stores everywhere this week.

Above is the final round of Penny Arcade Expo’s Omegathon, where this year’s contestants faced off on the final build of Halo 3, complete with a new map, Guardian, and lots of new weapons. The second part is embedded after the cut.

Games Convention in Leipzig, Germany wasn’t left out. Gamersyde has an extensive look at the third level of the Halo 3 Campaign. and by extensive I mean huge and long. 1.3 gigs of video in high definition.

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Don’t get too excited by the photo above. These are not the actors to play Beaker and Dr Bunson Honeydew in a live action Muppet movie. They are Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, the creators of Penny Arcade. This weekend they’re in the middle of the Penny-Arcade Expo in Washington, and they’ve issued a new trailer for their first game.
Its some big news that the game, titled “On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One” will be hitting Xbox 360 in addition to Mac, Linux, and Windows.
Wired Magazine also offers a profile, declaring “This is the story of how two douches from Spokane, Washington, became the most powerful players in the videogame industry.”

Before this game came out, I never considered myself much of a sports player, and save for various college sports games, I still don’t. Now sure, I got a few chuckles out of Mutant League Football and Ice Hockey, and I played Baseball Stars to death, but other than that, sports games were too complicated for me. That’s why me, and millions of others, enjoyed this game. While it wasn’t as complex as Madden or NBA Live, the fact that it was so easy to pick up and play made it a lot more fun to play.
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A while back when I featured Silent Hill 4 in this column, I expressed my desire to see an actual FPS Silent Hill game. The fear factor, the atmosphere, and the fact that anything you run into can kill you would make it a unique experience more than any other survival horror or FPS game. Sega’s Condemned, one of the first games announced for the Xbox 360 and one of the system’s best launch titles, is a great example of what such a game would look like. Not only that, it’s a fine game on its own merits as well.
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Well Quebec actually wants more games in French, which I’m all in support of, but the method they’re using to make such things happen is something which I’m not too wild about.

Le soleil reports that the French language police has decided that all video games sold in Quebec must now have a French translation.

This is a huge slap in the face to all Quebec gamers who will have their video game selection cut down considerably. As little as 36% of games released in Quebec are currently bilingual or French. While it’s already the case that new games in Canada come with bilingual packaging and instruction manuals to have the actual game include a full French translation is a much more involved change requiring a considerable amount of work on the development side to implement.

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Before Bungie jumped through Halos with Microsoft, they ran the Marathon on Macintosh. Even before creating the instant Xbox seller, Bungie was innovating the first person shooter. Released in 1994, the first installment of the series introduced complex storytelling. Later installments would involve time travel, alternate universes, and Artificial Intelligences going insane. With Halo 3 hitting stores next month, now is a good of a time as any to take a look at Bungie’s other FPS series.

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