Late Night Consoling

Speaking to Gamasutra, Julian Eggebrecht of Lair (PS3) developer Factor 5 indicated that the independent studio is doing concept work on a new entry in the classic Turrican series of sidescrolling action games. "We've been concepting quite a bit internally," said Eggebrecht. "That's another universe creation thing. I was looking at Metroid Prime's reinventing of a franchise that had been out there for quite awhile, and we're facing the same thing with Turrican."

Factor 5 was responsible for the Amiga ports of Manfred Trenz's original Commodore 64 games Turrican and Turrican 2. The company then fully developed a Genesis game in the series, Mega Turrican (Turrican 3 on Amiga), and two Super Nintendo games, Super Turrican and Super Turrican 2.

During its Nintendo 64 era, Factor 5 was developing a spiritual successor to the Turrican series, entitled Thornado. Development of the reportedly ambitious game was eventually moved to GameCube but was officially cancelled.

"There's aspects of the old games where people will feel betrayed if we don't transform them into the next generation," said Eggebrecht in this week's interview. "On the other hand, there's other stuff which is simply cheesy, let's face it. I don't think gamers will accept those things anymore. It's a fine line to balance."

Eggebrecht did not give any indication of a target platform for the potential new Turrican game, though on many occasions--including this Gamasutra interview--he has spoken very positively on the PlayStation 3's SPU-based architecture.

Following constant rumors and essentially official statements regarding a PSP version of SCE Santa Monica's God of War franchise, SCEA has launched an official site for the game, whose title has been confirmed as God of War: Chains of Olympus. Currently, the site contains only an offer to obtain a free "special edition demo" of the game delivered by mail on UMD for PSP. There is no indication as to when the demos will be sent out or how many are available.

Though the official site hosts no screenshots or videos, a short trailer has surfaced on the internets, consisting of cutscene and gameplay footage. It reconfirms that the developer on the project is Ready at Dawn Studios, which created last year's Jak & Daxter followup Daxter for PSP.

Prior to the release of Realtime Worlds' superpower-tinged action game Crackdown, the studio promised downloadable content for the game but declined to elaborate as to the nature of that content. Today, a community manager at the official Crackdown forums gave the first visual hint as to the contents of the...content, which apparently includes "a new game type and a new type of vehicle." Depicted in the screenshot are four gun-equipped dune buggy-like vehicles, one of which is awkwardly situated on top of another.

According to the forum post, the content will be delivered "soon." There was no word on whether it would fill in Crackdown's 100 missing Achievement points.