Tuesday August 26, 2008

Left 4 Dead Delayed

Valve has announced that they have postponed their release date to coincide with the anniversary of Half-Life. The game will come out on November 20 for PC and Xbox 360.
Doug Lombardi mentioned that the game could be ported to the PS3 since the console finally has a bigger number of them in home living rooms.

Harry Pitfall Jr. is Back

One of the most successful games from Activision for the Atari 2600 back then, Pitfall subsequently got some pretty good 2D sequels. The forays into 3D however, are not as fondly remembered.
In any case Pitfall: The Big Adventure has been announced on the Wii. Wait and see as they say.

EA & Take-Two Part…….

The two continue their mating dance but in a more private fashion. EA has stated that they are not going to publicly give any offer and that from now on everything will be negotiated privately once Take-Two is ready to sit down and make a deal. Which probably will not be until after GTA IV is released for the PC this fall.

This Week in RPGs

The numerous RPGs coming out this week will either have you jump for joy or cry at the amount of time you wish you had to play them….or, most likely, both.

• Disgaea 3: Absence of Justice for the PS3 came out this Monday
• Ys Book I & II on the Wii VC came out this Monday as well
• Tales of Vesperia for the Xbox 360 comes out today
• Infinite Undiscovery for the Xbox 360 is coming out Friday

Battleforge Delayed

Phenomic has changed the release date from End 2008 to a mere 2009. The game is a mix between an online strategy game and a card game, offering 40 maps for up to 12 players to battle on.

Thursday August 7, 2008

Ubisoft Sues Contractor for Leaked Game

The French studio contracted a company to print the PC version of Assassin’s Creed and the game was subsequently downloaded more than 700,000 times six weeks before the game’s release.
Sales of the game on the PC barely reached 40,000 units as of June according to the NPD whereas the 360 and PS3 version has sold more than a million copies.

Screens for Heavy Rain

Quantic Dream is a somewhat lesser known (and French!! Yay!) company that keeps putting out very high quality titles. The company was founded in 1997 and their first game was Omikron: The Nomad Soul which was released in 1999 for the Dreamcast. The game had an amazing ambiance and soundtrack with some help from David Bowie himself!
Their next game is called Fahrenheit (known in the U.S. and Canada as Indigo Prophecy) which received worldwide critical acclaim even before it came out in 2005.
Since then they have been working on Heavy Rain (as well as Omikron 2!) which garnered interest with an amazing trailer that aired at E3 2006. It has been 2 years and we finally get a few screenshots with updated graphics (courtesy of Ripten) that simply look stunning.
The game was set to be released on 360 and PC at first but seems to now be a PS3 exclusive.

Dates, Dates and Dates

• GTA IV for the PC on November 18 in the U.S. and the 21st in Europe. The game will feature expanded multiplayer mode.
• Fable II confirmed for October 21 in North America and November 24 in Europe.

Grim for Grimm

So I recently reviewed episode 1 of the American McGee’s Grimm and said that each episode would be free on the day of its release. Well there’s a catch, I was going to play episode 2 (The Little Red Riding Hood) today but I found out that the free version is only for the online, Gametap hosted, version of the game. You cannot download the stand-alone at all for free. Now this would be fine if Gametap was compatible with Vista 64 but it simply isn’t.
So I will wait for a potential shelf release next year…or not. As a result I won’t be reviewing the following episodes. Sorry.