Late Night Consoling
| Sega Restructures Sega today announced their restructuring plans, and all the details are up at GamePro.com. Here's the quick and dirty version: Sonic Team and United Game Artists will merge to form a new studio to develop games "for casual users" (I think it's safe to say they mean Sonic here, and not Deer Hunter), Hitmaker and Sega Rosso are merging to create a new studio for "new forms of gaming", Wow Entertainment and Overworks are merging to create games for "the standard of the next generation", Amusement Vision and Smilebit will merge to create "movie-like" games, Sega-AM2 will stay as-is, and concentrate on fighting games and other hardcore titles, Yu Suzuki will form a new development team, and former developers from Smilebit and Amusement Vision will create a new sports gaming division. All of this is being done with the intention of doubling their console game sales in five years, and they intend to have "several launch titles" for the next batch of consoles. |
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| F-Zero Incompatible with Freeloader? According to a report from import shop NCS, the Japanese version of F-Zero GX has some issues when played with the popular Datel Freeloader boot disc on North American and European GameCube systems. There are specifics available at their site, but interestingly they also mention that the game runs without issues of any kind on modified GameCube systems, suggesting that it's only a software glitch with the Freeloader disc. |
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| Phantasy Star Online III Offline Details Sonic Team has released new details on the offline modes in Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution, which can be found at Gamers.com tonight. It sounds like there's going to be better offline mode than the last time around, with two different story modes (separate "heroic" and "dark" side quests). There will also be new offline content posted periodically for download, although presumably you'll need to have a paid subscription in order to access it. |
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| Ubi Soft's New CGI Studio Ubi Soft announced today that they have formed a new internal studio to develop CGI cut-scenes for their various games. The first game to utilize this studio will be Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and the pre-rendered sequences in the game will be rendered using the professional software package Softimage/XSI. |
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| Updated GameCube Kiosks Soon You can't buy it, but nonetheless GamerFeed is reporting that Nintendo is shipping a new GameCube demo disc to retailers. New in this one are playable demos of F-Zero GX, Pokemon Pinball and the delightfully wacky Kirby's Air Ride, along with non-interactive movies from a few other games, including Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (which you may recall was just bumped back into 2004 in this country). |
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| Still More Xenosaga A few more tidbits from Xenosaga Episode II are up at Video Fenky, which were culled from interviews in this week's batch of Japanese magazines. There's not too much here, but it does say that the reason Shion isn't wearing glasses anymore will be explained in the game and that battles move much faster in the sequel. And for even more Xenosaga, check out this update at Games Are Fun, which has the first screenshots from Xenosaga Episode I Reloaded the special edition remix of the game that's coming out in Japan this November. While the game hasn't changed too much, the costumes for KOS-MOS and MOMO have been tweaked a bit (MOMO looks even creepier, if that's possible). |
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| Misc. Media/Previews |
Console Game of the Evening: Rush 'N Attack for the NES. "Your mission: Go alone behind enemy lines to destroy their secret weapon. There are hundreds of them armed with machine guns and flamethrowers. Here, take this knife." (submitted by her0d).
