Late Night Consoling
It's been a while since there's been anything to fill this time slot on a Thursday night, and while that won't be changing any time soon, I'm happy to report that at least for tomorrow, you can look forward to some console-related content here. As I mentioned before, I've been working on a review of the GBA Movie Player, and it's ready to roll for tomorrow night. If you're planning on taking the night off, the good news is that it's a surprisingly capable piece of hardware. The bad news of course, is that it doesn't have any on-board storage, which means if you don't already own a decent-sized Compact Flash card, the price goes up significantly. Anyway, check back tomorrow for my full review.
| Pandora Tomorrow Timed Exclusive Confirmed Just one day after the rumors that Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow would be a timed Xbox exclusive, official word has come down from Ubisoft confirming just that. Actually, this technically isn't an exclusive in the usual sense, it just represents the development team's decision to focus exclusively on the PC and Xbox versions, which will ship next month as planned, along with the GBA game of the same name. The PS2 and GameCube games will ship at an unannounced later date. |
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| Killer 7 Still GameCube Exclusive in North America? GamerFeed is reporting that Capcom has clarified their announcement about Killer 7 being released for the PS2. According to their news story, Killer 7 will indeed be released for the PS2...but not in North America. In this territory the game will remain a GameCube exclusive, while the PS2 version will be released in Europe and Japan. It's unknown if this is a permanent or timed exclusive, although the later does seem likely. |
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| Xbox2 Compatibility Article An article reprinted from Ziff Davis' industry newsletter titled The Price of Compatibility is up at 1UP tonight, and has representatives from ATI and NVIDIA, along with an independent analyst, weighing in on the possibility of backwards compatibility for the next-generation Xbox system. There's not much here that hasn't already been speculated, but it's certainly interesting to hear what NVIDIA has to say on the subject, as it's their hardware that might need emulating for this to work. |
| Fear Effect Movie in Production Uwe Boll, who is just overflowing with game movies (having already optioned Dungeon Siege, BloodRayne, Alone in the Dark and the craptacular House of the Dead), has purchased the rights to make a film based on the Fear Effect franchise. Jokes of the four good reasons why it would make a good movie aside (yeah, think about it...you know what I mean), I personally hope it does something to restart the franchise, as I was actually looking forward to Fear Effect: Inferno before it was canned. The two games that were released show a lot of promise, but never quite lived up to it. |
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| (Another) DoA Product for Perverts You know, you can't make stuff like this up...Team Ninja and Microsoft have announced that the upcoming Kasumi Blue Xbox Bundle that will be released in Japan will include a life-sized, "huggable" pillow featuring a scantily clad Kasumi. Look for a branded anatomically-correct blow-up doll to follow sometime this year. |
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| Updated Nintendo Release Dates Planet GameCube has posted some updated release dates from Nintendo. Newly dated are Mario Golf: Advance Tour and Mario vs. Donkey Kong for GBA (on 6/28 and 5/24 respectively) and Custom Robo and Wario Ware for GameCube (on 5/10 and 4/5). If you've completely forgotten about Mario vs. Donkey Kong (lord knows I had), it was shown at E3 2002, and is the weird game in which people design their own Donkey Kong maps. |
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| Sonic Team Interview As a sort of post-mortem on Sonic Heroes, 1UP has posted an interview with Takashi Iizuka of Sonic Team, who acted as director on the game (and has been on most Sonic games going back to Sonic 3 for Genesis). |
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| New DDR Ultramix Song Pack Available Microsoft and Konami have announced that a second song pack is available for DDR Ultramix. Like the first one, this will set you back $5, and contains five new songs for use in the game. |
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| Marvel Q&A HomeLAN has conducted a Q&A with Ames Kirshen, the new in-house games manager at Marvel Enterprises. Among other things, the interview deals with why Marvel decided to create the position, and what steps they're taking to prevent another flood of crappy licensed titles like the one we saw back in the 16-bit days (Acclaim, I'm looking in your direction). |
| Misc. Media/Previews | |
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| GameSpot goes hands-on with Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution, while IGN goes hands-on with Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes and GameInformer has new movies from MGS: TT. |
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| GameSpot has new media from Firefighter F.D. 18 and Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3, IGN has new footage from LifeLine and GameSpy has a new preview of Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest. |
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| New shots from Breakdown are up at GameSpot, GameSpy has a new preview of Colin McRae Rally 04 and both HomeLAN and Team Xbox have new previews of Breakdown. |
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| IGN has posted new shots from Metroid: Zero Mission. |
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| IGN has a whopping two new screenshots from Samurai Jack: The Shadow of Aku (GC, PS2, Xbox) and some shots from Fight Night 2004 (PS2, Xbox) and GameSpy has a new preview of Samurai Jack: The Shadow of Aku. |
