Late Night Consoling

According to reports out of Nintendo Power, Bizarre Creations' well-loved top down shooter franchise Geometry Wars will be seeing entries on Wii and Nintendo DS as Geometry Wars: Galaxies. Apparently, Galaxies will veer away from the quick-play arcade roots of the original Xbox and Xbox 360 games, and will be "a full-fledged game with an extensive single-player campaign" as well as multiplayer modes. Unsurprisingly, Galaxies will feature some sort of motion control and stylus-based control on Wii and DS respectively. For gamers who prefer the old-school take, the original Geometry Wars and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved will be included.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies is being developed by Kuju Entertainment, the studio behind the Battalion Wars franchise on GameCube and Wii, as well as the multiplayer component of Arkane Studios' Dark Messiah of Might & Magic (PC). No publisher was announced. Previous Geometry Wars games have been published by Microsoft Game Studios, first as a free game by Stephen Cakebread included with Bizarre's Project Gotham Racing 2 (Xbox) and then as an updated version sold separately via Xbox Live Arcade for Xbox 360 and later as a downloadable game for Windows Vista.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies is expected to be released for Wii and Nintendo DS this fall.

According to European media outlets reporting on Ubisoft's Paris Ubidays press event, the publisher has acquired the video game adaptation rights to Robert Zemeckis' upcoming film adaptation of the legendary epic poem Beowulf. Zemeckis (Back to the Future series, Forrest Gump, The Polar Express), will direct a screenplay written by Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction, Silent Hill) and Neil Gaiman (Sandman graphic novels, Mirrormask).

Surprisingly, the action/adventure game is being developed by the team responsible for Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, which likely refers to a team at the Ubisoft Paris studio.

"This game should reinvent the hack-and-slash genre," said Ubisoft EMEA executive director Alain Corre, according to GamesIndustry.biz. No major details regarding the game were shared.

Last year, German developer 4Head Studios announced a video game based on the original epic poem. It is not clear if this project, which is unrelated to the film, will be affected.

Following the completion of the Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) countdown begun last week, the game's official site relaunched with a few new bits of information and quite a few menu items not yet active. Though the site did not consist of the megaton for which some internet denizens had hoped, it did confirm that the game will be released in 2007.

Also of note is the ludicrously long list of composers who will be contributing to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Including Smash Bros. series composer Hirokazu Ando, the total list of musicians listed as being involved with the project numbers no less than 37.

Among the composers contributing from within established studios are names such as Nintendo's Koji Kondo (Mario series, Zelda series) and Kenji Yamamoto (Super Metroid, Metroid Prime 1-2); Konami's Akihiro Honda (Metal Gear Solid 2-4, Zone of the Enders series); Procyon Studio's Yasonori Mitsuda (Chrono Trigger, Xenogears, Xenosaga, Luminous Arc); Grasshopper Manufacture's Masafumi Takada (Killer7, God Hand) and Jun Fukuda (Killer7, Contact); HAL Laboratory's Shogo Sakai (Rampage, Super Smash Bros. Melee, Mother 3); Game Arts' Takahiro Nishi (Grandia series, Project Sylpheed); Tokioheidi's Tomoko Sasaki (NiGHTS into Dreams); and Ancient's Yuzo Koshiro (ActRaiser, Streets of Rage).

Independent composers working on Brawl include Noriyuki Iwadare (Grandia series), Shota Kageyama (Luminous Arc), Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts series), and Kenji Ito (Romancing SaGa series, Children of Mana).

According to Smash Bros. series designer Masahiro Sakurai, the composers were asked to choose their favorite Nintendo music and compose arrangements for the game. "To have so many of these individuals providing music for a single work may very well be an historic event in the history of video-game music!" exclaimed Sakurai on the site. "It's almost unthinkable!"

For the much longer full list, head over to the official site, which also includes an excerpt from Brawl's iteration of the Smash Bros. theme, as arranged by Golden Sun series composer Motoi Sakuraba.