Not unlike Halo or Mario, I’ll eat up any scrap of news about a new Soul Calibur game. Here’s some more video, with lots of footage in engine.

New York Times reports from an interview with Daniel A. DeMatteo, the COO of GameStop, that they’ll be re-organizing their stores this fall to accomodate the massive influx of DS players, Wii Warriors, and Guitar Heroes.

In particular, he describes a whole rack just for music and rhythm games and more shelf space dedicated to family friendly games like Mario Kart, Nintendogs, LEGO Star Wars, and more. Frankly, I’d expect this from a larger retailer. I’m surprised a Target or Walmart hasn’t already done it. As a described “core” gamer by those who are catering to these “Casuals” I have to wonder how this will cut into shelf space for more refined titles like Bioshock and Assassin’s Creed, and even well known games like Mario Galaxy. I mean, there are now tons of old people playing Wii Sports and training their brains, but doesn’t GameStop owe it to themselves to turn these casuals into core gamers too? Putting up a shelf with nothing but music and rhythm games will mean for sure coverage with Rock Band and Guitar Hero, but will they also pull out older and lesser known titles like Elite Beat Agents?

Can the casuals and cores live together? Leave a comment.

Image from nataliedee.com

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.

One publisher’s game list for one trade show shouldn’t be a big deal, but as a fan of several dormant Sega series, I’m making it a big deal. Xbox360Rally has a list of games Sega will supposedly announce and display at Tokyo Game Show.
Stuff we’ll be happy to see again: Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio, House Of The Dead, and Sega Rally.
Stuff you never expected to see again: Shenmue I, II, and III, Fighter’s Megamix, Virtual Fighter Kids, and Chu Chu Rocket!

Full list after the jump [Read the rest of this entry…]

Gamers have long been demanding keyboard and mouse support for first-person shooters on the next-gen consoles. Today Epic Vice President Mark Rein made a rather epic announcement on the company’s official message board:

Folks,

I checked with Steve Polge and he said that YES we are supporting keyboard and mouse in Unreal Tournament 3 on PS3. He is confident we are doing it in a way that will be balanced without feeling “gimped” for either side. We’ll also allow people to choose whether or not they want to allow mixed controller vs. keyboard/mouse games or not.

I think you guys are going to love UT3!

More details to come later.

Still no word about KB/M support in the eventual Xbox 360 version of the game, but this news should make quite a few PS3 owners very happy.

While many have been planning on playing the newest installment of Grand Theft Auto this year, Take-Two has just announced in a press release that both the Playstation 3 and Xbox360 versions of the game have been delayed until the second fiscal quarter of 2008. The cause of the delay is apparently due to Rockstar requesting “more development time”. This may be a shock to many, however rumors were floating around that there have been technical issues developing both consoles. While purely speculation, this coincides with the rumors that Microsoft may be allowing developers make games with a hard drive requirement.

You can read the official press release here.

In 2004, there were 3 big first person shooter games; Doom 3, Halo 2, and Valve’s Half Life 2. Of the three, many gamers consider this to be the best, and for good reason. The game is second to few in terms of graphical quality, story telling, gameplay, and capability for modding. Built on a modified version of the Havok physics system, a large part of the game’s appeal is simply picking up objects laying on the ground and throwing them at people. A weapon known as the gravity gun allows players to use the physics system to make anything into a weapon. Players take control of series protagonist Gordon Freeman, as he is awoken from stasis nearly two decades after the end of the original Half Life. He emerges into a world overrun by the combine. Joining up with a resistance group, Freeman has to fight back against all odds, battling head crabs, police officers, and alien creatures with a large variety of weapons.

As mentioned before, another part of this game’s popularity has to do with the modding community. There are several mods ranging from new deathmatch maps to full game conversions. One of the more popular mods, “Gary’s Mod” allows players to simply spawn objects in a sandbox environment just to play around with the physics system. Another mod is an attempt at recreating the popular N64 game GoldenEye. Of course when you’re through with the main game, there is plenty of more material coming to keep fans occupied. Episode 1 was released this year, continuing Gordon Freeman’s quest. This fall will see the release of Episode 2, along with the source engine based Team Fortress 2 and Portal. Xbox 360 and PS3 gamers can grab a special “orange box” containing the main game, as well as all the extras mentioned above. Whichever way you decide to get it, don’t miss out on the chance to play one of the best FPS games ever.

System Requirements
Processor: 1.2 GHZ or better
OS: Windows 98 and higher (including Vista)
Internal Memory: 256 MB RAM
Storage: 4.5 GB
Graphics: DirectX 7 or greater
Internet connection required for verification
DVD-ROM drive (unless obtained from Steam)

After the success of LEGO Star Wars, the next game announced was to be LEGO Batman, but now out of nowhere we get a trailer for LEGO Indiana Jones!

I won’t complain about more LEGO games, but I was kind of hoping I’d get Batman first… Oh well, I can’t wait to see how the infamouse Nazi face-melting works on LEGO characters. Or ripping a LEGO heart out of a LEGO Chest.