Late Night Consoling
Today's a holiday here in the states, so it's a pretty slow news night around these parts. There wasn't any regular mail, but UPS was still making the rounds, so my Resident Evil Outbreak beta arrived this morning. I've only spent a short time with it, but so far it plays well...exactly like every other Resident Evil game, for better or worse. That means it has all the issues I've had with the series over the years, including that painfully annoying control scheme. On the plus side however, I think Outbreak is a real sign of things to come. It's an online game that has none of the usual online trappings: no server browsing, no lobbies to navigate, all you do is press start and poof, the game is off and running. If there aren't enough actual people, the roles are played by A.I, and you don't know until the game's over which were controlled by actual people and which were not. With the next generation of platforms sure to be online from day one, I think we're going to see quite a bit of this, and it does open up all kinds of cool gameplay possibilities. Unfortunately I think Outbreak's shortcomings will prevent me from fully enjoying it, but it is cool nonetheless.
| EA Publishing Burnout 3 According to gamesindustry.biz, Electronic Arts has acquired the publishing rights to Criterion's upcoming Burnout 3 (the first two were published by Acclaim). What, if anything, this will mean for the game is unknown, although Holesinswiss dropped me a line about this, speculating that this pretty much rules out any hopes for Xbox Live support. |
| Sammy Acquiring SNK IP? From Teh SUPAR BIG RUMOR department comes this lengthy news update at Snk-Capcom.com, that says "an official announcement has not been made yet" but that Sammy has purchased SNK Playmore's arcade intellectual properties (thanks insert credit). As any Neo Geo fan will tell you, SNK owns a lot of big-name arcade franchises, including King of Fighters, Metal Slug, Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting among others, so this is A Big Deal Indeed, although it's not entirely clear if this is just a far-reaching licensing agreement for arcade games or a flat-out purchase of the franchises. |
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| Maximo 2 Q&A HomeLAN has conducted a Q&A with Beau Smith, the well-known comics writer who was brought in by Capcom to flesh out the storyline in Maximo vs. The Army of Zin, which ships to retailers this week. |
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| WRC 4 In Development There's really nothing to report here, but hey, it's a slow night. An update over at the official Evolution Studios site confirms that World Rally Championship 4 is in production at the studio. Yeah, that's all I got. |
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| Video Tour of Polyphony Digital GameSpy recently took a trip to Polyphony Digital, the developers of the Gran Turismo franchise, and they have posted a video tour to give you all a taste of what they saw. This is GameSpy, so you'll need to use FilePlanet to download it, with a high-res version available only for subscribers. |
| Misc. Media/Previews | |
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| IGN has a walkthrough of the kooky card battling system in Phantasy Star Online Episode III: C.A.R.D. Revolution. |
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| The Magic Box has some new images from Samurai Warriors, CVG goes hands-on with Richard Burns Rally, and we've got a new trailer from R-Type Final up at FileShack. |
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| New media from Tenchu: Return from Darkness can be found at The Magic Box, 1UP and Team Xbox, GameInformer has a hands-on look at Silent Scope Complete and 1UP has a new Rallisport Challenge 2 preview. |
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| 1UP has a new preview of MVP Baseball 2004 (GC, PS2, Xbox) and Team Xbox has a new look at Fight Night 2004 (PS2, Xbox) and new shots from DRIV3R (PS2, Xbox). |
