I’ve done a fair amount of trying to debunk this one. It keeps coming up at forums and I keep saying “No guys, this is just an early April Fools” because frankly we’ve heard this talk before.

Official Nintendo Magazine (which is the like the Nintendo Power for England) published this teaser on the last page of their April issue. The image of the stars could easily imply a lot of things, but the most direct conclusion was an update of the Sega Saturn game NiGHTS Into Dreams. Many blogs ran this image as truth, many ran it as rumor, and most ran it as a joke. I, on the other hand, wasn’t going to run it at all until we had better evidence.

Now we’ve got some. Chandra from ONM has come out and said “This is not April Fool” but also won’t confirm what it actually is becuase, hey, they still want you to talk and buy the mag when it comes out.

So with a new NiGHTS game coming further into the realm of reality we have to deal with the next big hurdle… the fact that Sonic Team hasn’t made a good game in several years.

A new box set was recently released for this movie which is based on the ever popular Final Fantasy VII PlayStation video game and it even includes the rare Final Fantasy VII Advent Rising anime special. Is it worth getting? Check out what Cloud has to say in this review to find out if this set’s right for you.

Buy the DVD set from Amazon

Check out some scans of the box art and exclusive postcards after the jump. [Read the rest of this entry…]

It would be fair to say I’ve been mean to Sony in the past year. It would be more fair to say I’ve been mean to them for the 5 years before that. Ever since the PS2 killed my beloved Dreamcast, Sony has been on my bad side. But something changed.

Theres always been a slew of games I’ve wanted to play on Sony systems. Though I picked up a GameCube and an Xbox, it was pretty clear I was missing a LOT by not grabbing the other console. With the PS3 losing exclusives and the Xbox 360 so far ahead this time, I thought maybe I’d made a solid choice and wouldn’t be missing much. Now it looks like I’ll be missing a lot.

Watch the trailer for Ratchet & Clank. Even if graphical advances are all Insomniac has to offer in their newest game, the advances are significant. And it just looks fun.

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Note: Despite the similarities in gameplay (the charging attacks and command ring menu system among others), this game is not in any way related to Square’s Seiken Densetsu series (speaking of which, I featured the third game on last week’s column), nor is it meant to be any kind of sequel or spin-off to Secret of Mana. However, those who played the game will discover that there are plenty of differences which will make this game stand out on it’s on, even if it isn’t mentioned in the same breath as Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana.
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The Legacy of Kain series was one of last generation’s most prolific franchises. Ever since Blood Omen on the original Playstation, gamers everywhere enjoyed the exploits of Kain, the nobleman who was unjustly killed and turned into a vampire. Being able to kill enemies by drinking blood and using an array of evil powers provided a refreshing change of pace from usual action games of it’s time. However, each succeeding entry in the series, from Blood Omen 2 to the Soul Reaver games, would have a few little things holding it back from being on the level of Castlevania and Mega Man in terms of gaming franchises. 2003s Defiance went a long way to addressing these problems.
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Xbox Live Arcade is on a roll. This week was TMNT. Last week was Worms. Before that we had Alien Hominid. What release could possibly trump 3 of the best games to hit the service so far?

Oh yeah. Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. This classic from the 32bit era allows you to literally go medieval as you smash through giant bosses and explore the finer pits and dungeons of Romania.

Unlike your standard NES Castlevania where you took the role of one of the Belmont clan and brandished a whip, Symphony of the Night lets you use knives and stabbing weapons from the hand of Dracula’s own son, Alucard (which just happens to be “Dracula” spelled backwards!).

This is the biggest Live Arcade release yet, coming in at a whopping 96 MB, so make sure you’ve got your hard drive ready, this ain’t fitting on your 64MB memory card. All that space is of course taken up by the lovely English voice acting (“Die monster! You don’t belong in this world!”)

GameScore Blog Press Release

In the realm of webcomics there is no bigger name than Penny Arcade. So when they announced they were making a game, we cheered at seeing our favorite game critics become game characters… and then of course, feared that the game would be the type they’d normally criticize.

From this short preview, theres very little actual gameplay, but it looks promising. It appears to take place outside of the normal “Tycho & Gabe” world in one of their stranger made up worlds. Oh and theres the Fruit Fucker.

Something that is for sure is the game is being simultaneously released to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. So anyone who can read the Penny Arcade comic can play the game! It’ll be episodic, but hopefully not episodic like S.I.N., which was cancelled after one installment or Half Life, which has its second release now over a year late.

Get all 59 seconds of the preview in quicktime, wmv. or HD. Oh and of course, if you didn’t know already you can read Penny Arcade the comic strip 3 times a week here.

Pokemon Battle Revolution is due June 25 on Nintendo Wii and it will be the first online multiplayer title for the system. Already released in Japan, it supports the dreaded “friend code” system that makes pairing with friends and keeping track in game much more difficult than in the firmware available for Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

That may change now. GameSpy, who not only are a video game news site, but also a middleware developer for online games, have been charged with turning the Wii’s online capabilities into a full functional network. They developed the software that governs existing DS WiFi titles, but promise something more robust for the console. Full press release after the jump, but I’ll spoil it for you right here with the important parts

• Friends Lists
• Ranked Matches
• Matchmaking

Of course, all of those have been in place since Mario Kart DS became the first Nintendo online title, but the promise of keeping a list using the console’s identity rather than each game’s is enough to give us hope for the future. Launching 7 months after the Wii’s debut and a year and half after the Nintendo WiFi service launched on DS, they’ve had plenty of time to get this right.

Still no word if this GameSpy middleware is being sent to 3rd party developers.

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