Late Night Consoling
My connection's a bit flaky tonight, so hopefully I'll be able to get this up before it drops off again (thank you, Time Warner Cable!) and I'm forced to use my flea-powered Bluetooth connection. Anyway, the reactions to last night's new LNC icons were certainly mixed. I think there were some misunderstandings about the planned uses for them, which may have been at the heart of the problem. For the most part, these icons are not replacing the existing ones. They're meant to be used in different circumstances. The company-specific icons will be used when talking about general industry news and older systems that don't have their own icon (like tonight's NES story), and will not be used in place of the current PS2 or GameCube images. Hopefully that clears things up a bit. haiku did do some changes to the Nintendo icon last night, although that apparently wasn't enough for most of you. It's a shame, because I did really like that big red N, but the crowd has spoken, and tonight you'll see a new one featuring the decapitated head of Mario. A similar icon has been made for Sega, and we're still brainstorming other options for Sony (here's one attempt, although I don't like this one much). With Sony, the problem is of course that there's no mascot, but I think if we can't come up with anything, we'll just go back to using the icon we've been using for PSOne, which is actually the real PlayStation brand across the board anyway. But I do like the four symbols, so maybe we'll find a way to pull that off somehow. As always, your feedback is appreciated, even if it is a bit extreme at times.
| Halo 2 Documentary Released Film Oasis, the company that produced that Xbox documentary for the Discovery Channel, has released a six minute making of Halo 2 documentary. This is the same movie that can be found on bonus discs being given away at Best Buy (and other places), and is in Quicktime format. |
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| Ninja Gaiden, DOA Online Release Dates Proving that it's possible to make a non-story into a week of empty headlines, Tecmo today confirmed the new Japanese release dates for Ninja Gaiden (February 26th) and Dead or Alive Online (sometime in March). Of course, we still haven't gotten an official release date for the North American release of Ninja Gaiden, but if you're still holding out for a December release, you're clearly quite delusional (especially since 1UP claims to have confirmed the delay). Update: IGN's news item about the delay is nicely timed to coincide with their new media from the game. |
| ESPN Baseball Announced I could have sworn this was announced ages ago, but I guess not, as Sega today announced ESPN Major League Baseball, the third entry in their ESPN Sports lineup. The game will ship in the spring for PS2 and Xbox. |
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| Fable Chat Tomorrow The first official chat with the developers of Fable will be conducted tomorrow night at 6:30 GMT on Quakenet in #fable. If you go, you might want to ask about those persistent rumors of a PC port of the game. Speaking of Fable, Team Xbox has proudly posted their exclusive box art for the game. |
| Everyone's Making Money A story on Reuters today reiterates the news that Nintendo sold a crapload of systems last week, but also mentions some other notables, namely that Sony sold 1 million PlayStation 2s in November, and Xbox sales were up 7% last week. As for Halo, the game apparently saw a 435% rise in weekly sales after the drop to $30. Thanks Slashdot Games for the tip. |
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| Does Resident Evil: Outbreak Rock? According to Computer and Video Games, the latest issue of the Japanese magazine Famitsu reviews Resident Evil: Outbreak, and gives it a high mark indeed, with all four reviewers giving it a 9 out of 10. Considering that most people I've spoken with have had fairly lethargic reactions to the game, this is actually quite surprising. |
| No North American Release for VF: Cyber Generation? This is probably a misunderstanding, but regardless, GameInformer is reporting that the North American release of Virtua Fighter: Cyber Generation may be in question. Actually they base this on being told "The title is not currently scheduled for North American release," which, well...means absolutely nothing. Of course, whether or not anyone over here actually wants to see it released over here is another issue entirely. |
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| NES Endings Revealed The almighty FARK today linked to this exhaustive collection of endings from NES games. Pretty much everything's here, from 1942 to Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, and you can see just how crappy some of these endings were. It should be pretty obvious, but just in case, consider this your spoiler warning. |
| Misc. Media/Previews | |
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| New shots from Custom Robo are up at The Magic Box tonight. |
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| IGN has shots from the Sega Ages remakes of Fist of the North Star, Outrun, DecAthlete and Virtua Racing and new previews of Gran Turismo 4 Prologue and Cold Winter, The Magic Box has new shots from Sengoku Musou (Dynasty Warriors Japan) and CVG has new shots from Siren. |
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| GameInformer has a hands-on look at Dinosaur Hunting. |
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| GameSpot has a new preview of NBA Ballers and new shots from DRIV3R (both PS2, Xbox), and IGN has new stuff from Sonic Heroes (GC, PS2, Xbox) and new shots from James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing (GC, PS2, XBox). |
