Wii Titles Confirmed for 2007 Release, in Japan

Many AAA titles have been confirmed for a 2007 release in Japan, while it isn't clear if some will make it out in North America and Europe this year it is more than likely Metroid Prime: Corruption and Super Mario Strikers will.

The rest of the list is as follows:

• Donkey Kong Taru Jet Race (DK Jet or DK Bongo Blast, US) - June 28, 2007
• Wii Health Pack -- 2007
• Disaster: Day of Crisis - 2007
• Mario Party 8 - 2007
• Project H.A.M.M.E.R. - 2007
• Wii Music - 2007
• Super Mario Galaxy - 2007
• Super Smash Bros. Brawl - 2007
• Battalion Wars II - 2007
• Forever Blue - 2007
• Mario Strikers Charged - 2007
• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption - 2007
• Mario and Sonic at the Olympics - 2007

Looks like Japanese Wii owners are going to have their hands full for a good few months, thats at least enough AAA titles to keep most people going for a year.


VIA IGN

Burnout 5 - 'Burnout Paradise' Officially Announced!

Head over to Criterion games and find this loverly press release, a trailer and a bunch of screenshots have also been released.

Bioshock Water

Bioshock's water effects have not only met peoples expectations but have left behind any game that would like to claim to have the best looking water in the dust.







It makes Half-Life 2's water look like pre-Quake 2 era.

Firearms 2 Mod is a No a-Go-Go

I can in part imagine what the Firearms team think and feel, after years of developing a mod it was snatched away from them by a bunch of over zealous 'fans' and now using the Firearms name are making a sequel to a mod they never created but stole.

The same can't be said for the Firearms 2 Team, who kicked off their mod in August 2005 by hijacking the Firearms Forums, FTP, and servers using back-door access supplied by our server provider, ReconGamer. Every single team member and most of the forum admin/mod staff were banned, and we lost all of our art source and personal files stored on the server. As a result, this website was rebuilt from archived sites. The server takeover didn't affect the domain names, so the FA Team still controls those. For a while, they redirected to the site of our follow-up mod, World at War.

Full Story

The developers of the original Firearms mod don't want to remember this gross past, (understandably so) they are moving on and making World at War, a Half-Life 2 mod.

What I don't understand is how the gaming community can allow this sort of behavior and even support it (yes people do support Firearms 2). While Firearms 2 may turn out to be a good mod it was stolen no less, if we took all legalities out of the equation and said that Sony stole Bungie and plans to release a second rate knock off on the Playstation 3 would anyone agree much less support Sony in that move?

Is it different that this is the mod community? Shouldn't it be even more aggravating to the community that such a mod is in fact profiting off the name of another teams entire efforts, even the original creator didn't like the idea of giving Firearms 2 to another team:

During this period, Zerk [creator of Firearms] consulted with the DICE legal team and learned that, despite having signed a contract, no legal action could be taken against the theft of intellectual property online.

I don't see how people can be shallow enough to say 'yes we support this mod because it looks cool' despite it being a complete ripoff of someone else's work, better or not it's stolen and if we continue this line of thought we could see more of this happening - more startup mods having their thunder snatched from them due to such and such glory hogs who think they know better.

Games Killed the PC

Any real hardcore PC gamer will tell you PC games are almost dead, with the number of dumbed down franchises that are multiplatform being released it no longer at all makes sense to own a PC, unless you are still into RTS gaming.

For me it all started with the release of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. Now I'm not denying the game was really fun to play but damn well the game was not Ghost Recon, not the Ghost Recon I know, and I would too, I played the original Ghost Recon.

What happened to the intense moments of hiding in foliage wondering if you should move two steps foward or two steps back? What happened to commanding four or five squad mates to run across an open field as you covered them with a sniper? GRAW completely took all that away, it no longer was 'Ghost Recon' it was 'Rhino Recon', charge in, charge out. Gee, Ubisoft, so long as you're wrecking these great franchises (for us die-hard gamers) you could at least do it right - GRAW on the 360 was definitely more fun with the third person mode and cover system.

Other franchises have also fallen into the trap and games are also being less and less optimized for the PC, why are game specs for PC's increasing disproportionately to graphics in games? They are all console ports, thats why.

It's no secret developers are getting lazy, Ubisoft claimed it was too difficult to make 'Double Agent' run in PS 2.0 because of special features behind PS3.0 that wasn't backwareds compatible, the truth is in the Directx documentation under 'Shader Model 3',

Vertex shaders and pixel shaders are simplified considerably from earlier shader versions. If you are implementing shaders in hardware, you may not use vs_3_0 or ps_3_0 with any other shader versions, and you may not use either shader type with the fixed function pipeline. These changes make it possible to simplify drivers and the runtime. The only exception is that software-only vs_3_0 shaders may be used with any pixel shader version. In addition, if you are using a software-only vs_3_0 shader with a previous pixel shader version, the vertex shader can only use output semantics that are compatible with flexible vertex format (FVF) codes.

Yeah it's just what we all expected, Ubisoft got lazy.

With every new generation of consoles you get the people who say it's over for PC's because of the power of the consoles, this isn't the case, whats killing the PC now is poorly ported games based on bastardized and streamlined franchises purpose built to hit a market mainstream, a mainstream mostly centered around consoles.

For me the PC died, it died with Ghost Recon, that was the final straw, Half-Life 2 played life support for a while but that doesn't justify owning a PC, the only reason I keep it is because of the great RTS games that are released on it and the few remaining games that are truly complex.

In my mind two things killed the PC as a serious gaming system, piracy and lost franchises I owned a gaming PC for.

Playstation 3 - Medal of Honor, Black Exlcusivity?

EA's boss Gerhard Florin claims despite the inflated price point the Playstation 3 can only be judged fairly in two years and claims like a Sony rep that EA will 'need' CELL for games like 'Black' and 'Medal of Honor'.

He added more online oriented games will be released on the Xbox 360 but gave no word on Medal of Honor or Black being released on it.

Does this mean no 'Black' or 'Medal of Honor' lov'n for the Xbox 360 in two years time? WHile it is far fetched to believe if you allow yourself to believe Sony's hype machine then it may turn into a reality, of course Gerhard is boss of EA which made the mistake of tying itself down to the Playstation 3 and is now playing 'catch up' with the Wii.


VIA Game Industry

Taiko Drum Master Coming to Nintendo DS

It may turn into the Guitar Hero of the portable market, Namco Bandai have announced Taiko Drum Master for the DS and yes it will let you drum to the Super Mario Bros theme.

Controls are still a secret (we still have our imaginations) and Namco still hasn't revealed any screenshots of the lower screen of the game. The game will feature four player multiplayer with drummer personalization features (you can dress up your drummer).



Current song list:

J-Pop:
Natsumatsuri (Summer Festival)
Won't Be Long
Mata Aimashou (Let's Meet Again)
Dance2 Featuring Soy Sauce [Pocky Chocolate Commercial Song]

Children's/Folk Music:
Mori no O-Kumasan (Bears in the Forest)
Inu no O-mawarisan (Dog and the Policeman)

Game Music:
Super Mario Bros.

Classical:
Beethoven's 7th (partial)
William Tell Overture
Heaven and Hell (Offenbach)
Flight of the Bumblebee (Rimsky-Korsakov)
Classic Medley (Wedding Songs)

Namco Originals:
Kimi ni Touch!
Mojipittan Medley
Kagekiyo
Pachi O-Sensei

VIA Wired