The good chaps at SEGA have just revealed brand-new, high-res packshots for The Conduit, announcing it via Twitter.
The scans are hosted for all to see here, but we’ll post it here for all you, because we’re nice like that.
The shot shows Mr. Ford wielding the De-Atomizer in one hand, and the All-Seeing-Eye in the other, with an ethereal blue glow being emitted from both. A Drudge soldier can be seen lurking in the background.
It’s got a bit of a bargain bin look to it, but it’s certainly better than the generic placeholder packshot that was floating around a while back.
Remember wasting whole days at the arcade playing Time Crisis and The House of the Dead? Of course you do. Remember shelling out £70 for Time Crisis 3 and a GunCon? Of course you don’t; light gun games on consoles never really took off like they did in the arcades – not everyone was willing to shell out for the expensive peripherals which would be used for all of the 3 hours it took to complete the game they were bundled with. However, with IR Tech already built in to Nintendo’s Wii Remote, the Wii seems like the perfect console to revive the lightgun genre.
Face it; we’ve all salivated at the idea of having all our favourite GB/GBA games with us on one console, on one memory card, legally, without the need for complicated emulators and ROMs - it’s a feature that many believed would, and should have made it to the DS lite. It didn’t. With the announcement of the DSi, the DSi Shop and DSiWare, it’s a wonder that Nintendo haven’t already offered up the service, but according to Kombo, they soon will be.
All these on a single SD Card? Yes please.
A special Club Nintendo event was held last Sunday in order to give members a hands-on playtest with Nintendo’s new DSi and its new features, such as DSiWare. Matthew Green of Kombo was able to make it to the event, and brought back an interesting piece of news with him:
Unless I missed it previously, then the big piece of good news to surface from this event is that downloadable Game Boy and Game Boy Advance titles are coming. I’ll just let that soak in for a minute. Finally, we may have a shot at playing some portable classics again, and without the hassle of gambling with eBay’s counterfeits or peeling stickers off of GameStop’s cartridges… which could also sometimes be counterfeits. - David Oxford, Senior News Editor - Kombo
Oxford also notes that the only games to launch with the service will be first-party Nintendo titles, but by us, there’s nothing wrong with that. Games will apparently be region locked, but can be saved to, and played off of an SD Card, a feature that’s not even available on the Wii yet, which begs the question - what’s taking them so long? Also, strangely enough, it looks like the DSi will one-up the Wii again; it offers support for SDHC cards of up to 32GB, whilst the Wii is capped at a mere 2GB, an issue which we hope will be eradicated in the next firmware update.
There’s no word on pricing or release dates, but we fully expect Iwata to elaborate more on the service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, so stay tuned.
A few preview scans from the latest issue of Nintendo Power hit the Internet today, including not only hands-on previews and screens of EA’s Grand Slam Tennis, but also the first info and screens on Monster Games’ ExciteBots: Trick Racing and the announcement of A Boy and His Blob for Wii.
The issue talks highly of both titles, and it’s got us anticipating the MotionPlus even more, with all its talk of angles and geometry.
“…the characters mimicked our exact movements in real time. The game recognizes whether you’re doing a forehand or backhand swing, how high you’re holding the racket, and even the angle at which you’re striking the ball. That means you can put topspin or backspin on your shot just as you would in real life, and ball placements depends not only on timing (as it does with the Wii Remote alone), but also on the angle at which you hold the controller and how you finish off your swing. The level of finesse made possible by Wii MotionPlus even allows for purely swing-controlled lob and drop shots, whereas playing without the peripheral requires you to hold down a button during the motion” - Nintendo Power
You can find the screenshots, hands-on playtests, interviews and new screens here.
Continuing the barrage of Wii news that has been hitting the pages of Hide and Geek recently, the ESRB have given an E rating to Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, specifying the console of release as none other than the Nintendo Wii. Originally confrimed for mobile phones in Japan, the question on all Final Fantasy fans lips was if the game would see the light of day outside of Japan, and indeed on what platfrom.
It’s assumed that the game will be made available through WiiWare, although SquareEnix intend to release another of their mobile phone games,Crystal Defenders, on XBLA and PSN too, so it’s likely that FFIV: TAY will follow suit.
In a somewhat underwhelming manner, Nintendo have announced what we can only assume is a spiritual successor to 2006’s Excite Truck. The game was briefly mentioned in Nintendo’s 2009 Release Schedule along with Punch-Out!! (May 18th)and a new Starfy game.
It’s unclear whether ExciteBots will take on the same fundamental gameplay as its predecessor, but it’s safe to assume that it will. According to Nintendo, it’ll be a game “that builds on the Excitebike and Excite Truck franchises”. The game will feature the same dynamic terrain from the original, and, less interestingly, will let “everyone in the family use the Wii Wheel”.
With a touted release date of April 20th, ExciteBots probably holds the record for ‘Shortest Time Between Announcement and Release’ at just 52 days. The information released with the Press Release is minimal, and doesn’t even mention the developer of the game; we’ve fired an E-Mail the way of Monster Games to try to get some confirmation. For now though, we’ll just sit here, baffled by that name.
Other notable releases included in the schedule are The Conduit, The Legendary Starfy, Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 10 (featuring MotionPlus), Overlord: Dark Legend, Boom Blox Bash Party, EA SPORTS Tennis (working title), Klonoa, Nintendo’s extensive New Play Control! range, Virtua Tennis, Let’s Tap, and, of course, the highly anticipated Garfield Gets Real.
Strangely enough, despite several titles on the schedule taking advantage of Wii MotionPlus, there’s no sign of Nintendo’s own Wii Sports Resort, which is slightly concerning.
It seems that gamers have settled in one of two camps regarding Dante’s Inferno; those that welcome another God of War take on the action genre, and those that, well, don’t. EA’s hellish take on Sony’s flagship title was going to have to do a lot to prove itself, and getting attention from under Kratos’s shadow would take some doing. For me at least, this new trailer has done just that, but see what you think, and set up camp.
We learned a few days ago that Climax are working on a Konami-related title for the Wii and PSP. Climax aren’t exactly the most well known developer, but they’ve got a pretty decent track record from what we’ve seen; they’ve worked on Silent Hill Origins for the PSP, and they’re currently developing Overlord: Dark Legend for the Wii that looks genuinely stunning.
Climax recently put out a job listing for a new Wii title, and considering the dev’s background, it seems to point towards a Wii iteration of Silent Hill.
“Climax are one of the leading creative lights of independent games development with a great history, but our future is even more exciting with awesome titles such Overlord: Dark Legend for Codemasters, our stunning and refreshing take on the horror genre and our original ground breaking next-gen game for the PS3 and the Xbox 360. “
So with the developer’s history, and Konami’s involvement with the game, it’s looking more and more likely that we’ll be seeing Silent Hill for Wii in the near future.
If you’ve been holding off on pre-ordering a DSi because of its rather high price-point, then you might want to consider the trade-in offer that GAME will be running to coincide with the DSi’s release this April.
If you trade in a DS Lite, a Wii, an Xbox 360 or a PSP 3000, you’ll be able to get your hands on a brand, spanking new DSi -in black or white- for £74.99.
GAME announced the deal as an added incentive for consumers looking into purchasing the new console in an attempt to generate more interest at the console’s launch on 3rd April.
“Our customers are very excited about the launch of the DSi, and all of our stores are fully geared up to take pre-orders and help customers understand all of the innovative features of the new machine.
We’re working closely with Nintendo to organise a huge launch, which is perfectly timed for the Easter holidays.
As always, we’ll have plenty of stock and some fantastic launch offers to give customers the best possible experience. ” Robert Quinn, operations director - GAME
We knew that Dead Space was coming to Wii 2 weeks ago, but EA have only just Officially confirmed it. The title will be known as Dead Space Extraction, it’ll be a Wii exclusive, and, most interestingly, it’ll be an on-rails shooter.
We have every confidence that EA will do a great job of the game, but we’re not too sure if an on-rails approach is the right one to take; will the game still retain the same element of suspense and tension of the first one? It remains to be seen, but we’re still rather sceptical.
You tell us, EA
The move seems evermore odd when you look back to last week; a video was posted up on GoNintendo that showed the original build of Dead Space which was initially in development for the Xbox. Now, we’re no technophiles, but we’re fairly confident that the game could’ve been brought over to the Wii in its present state. So, we believe that EA could’ve given the Wii the full-fledged third-person shooting action that you can find on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, meaning that their decision to go on-rails is certainly a design choice EA felt would benefit the game in some way, rather than a choice made in the name of technical limitations.
All this aside, the game, which is a prequel to the original game, features a new female character, and actually looks like one of the Wii’s prettier games.
“We could not be more excited to extend Dead Space into an experience exclusive to the Wii. Nintendo has a wonderful history in the horror genre and we are thrilled to build on that tradition with Dead Space Extraction,” - Glen Schofield, VP and General Manager of EA Redwood Shores studio
