Over at that big ComiCon in San Diego, ABC and Ubisoft released this short teaser for the LOST video game. Don’t see much, but it looks like its all in-engine, not some pre-rendered tease video. Analysis for LOST freaks after the jump.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

Hey, wasn’t this series supposed to end with the third installment? I guess Capcom either forgot, or wasn’t done milking it yet. Either way, I’m not complaining. This is one of the greatest franchises of last generation, and it’s always great to see another installment of Capcom’s demon-killing samurai saga rather than another Street Fighter 2 remake. It also takes the formula and makes some nice changes to it, while still keeping what makes the series so enjoyable to begin with.
[Read the rest of this entry…]

From the LA Times

I never thought I’d see the day. Tony Hawk, Transformers, Spider-Man, and especially Guitar Hero have propelled Activision into the top slot among the highly competitive world of third party game publishers.

It won’t last of course: EA will launch Skate to takes sales from Tony Hawk, a new Medal Of Honor to go against Call of Duty, and Rock Band may be the upstart to finally slow sales on Guitar Hero. Oh yeah, and EA Sports will have Madden on shelves and Peter Moore at the helm this fall.

Well, its good to know that there is another contender for the top slot.

The Hollywood Reporter says that Mainframe’s TV classic CG animated series ReBoot will be brought back as a trilogy of feature films.

Mainframe was acquired by Rainmaker Animation last year, and they will produce the movies in house.

The story isn’t finalized yet, its something that will be up to fans. Zeroes2Heroes will be putting up pitches and samples from 5 writing teams on July 26th and fans will choose which direction the new ReBoot will take.

Something that isn’t clear in the article is if this will be a sequel, another story set in the same universe, or a flat out remake. Rainmaker seems to have some respect for the fans, so hopefully the tone will remain true to the original, and the original voice talent will be brought back on to reprise their roles.

Here is 26 minutes of Hideo Kojima, Shinji Mikami, and Suda 51 talking. Why is that important? Because they’re the creators of Metal Gear, Resident Evil, and Killer 7; respectively. Arguably the most influential minds of the playstation generation. Next year’s biggest games will no doubt be Metal Gear Solid 4, Resident Evil 5, and No More Heroes, so these guys will only get more influential.

In the early 90s, Final Fight style beat em ups were a dime a dozen. Few managed to separate themselves themselves from the pack. However, there was one that managed to make itself into something classic. Taito’s Sonic Blastman began life in the arcades as a punching game which used two large punch pads and specialized gloves to complete certain minigames. It was bought to Super Nintendo as a beat-em-up. You bashed your way from the city streets to outer space as you fought off hordes of villains. The arcade minigames came to the SNES game as bonus levels. A sequel was released a few years later adding in two extra characters (your prerequisite slow strongman and fast woman, with Sonic Blastman being the balanced team leader) and a two-player simultaneous mode so you and a friend can take on the forces of evil together. Sure there are many beat-em-ups, and many games about superheroes, but there were none like Sonic Blastman. Hopefully we can expect a Virtual Console release sometime in the near future, since Taito already has the not nearly as awesome Legend of Kage available on the service.

Entertainment Weekly pimps coverage of ComiCon with a new image of Robert Downey Jr ready to fire some repulsor rays.

With Nintendo’s Wii and DS, the features that make them standout (the stylus and motion sensing control) also turn out to be their biggest liabilities. Developers often feel obligated to make use of them regardless of how well it can be implemented. As a result, we end up with games with mediocre playability due to the fact that the developers shoehorned Wiimote/stylus functionality into what would have worked just as fine (if not better) without it. This is why we should be thankful for games such as Mega Man DX, as it proves that DS and Wii games don’t necessarily have to make extensive use of fancy new features to be good.
[Read the rest of this entry…]