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Quest For Glory II Is Back, Yo
Posted by Luke Plunkett at 11:20 PM on August 25, 2008
Quest for Glory II is the greatest adventure game of all time. That's not opinion, either. It's fact. Science. Only problem is, the game's from 1990, so it's also a little...rough. No more! Thanks to the team at AGD (who have also done fantastic restorations of the first two Kings Quest games), the game's "quaint" old VGA graphics have been updated, the timing of the real-time puzzles have been made easier and dialogue is now taken care of via menus, instead of having to guess via text input. Oh, and it's 100% free. In other words, the greatest adventure game of all time just got greater.
Quest For Glory II [AGD, via IndieGames]
Bionic Commando: Rearmed is a proper downloadable game. It's meaty — like a real game! Reviewers and players seem to be picking up on that. And for a downloadable title, the game's doing pretty good across the platforms. But how good? Over at the official Bionic Commando site, producer Ben Judd writes:
"A source close to Microsoft's marketing department" tells game site Xbox 360 Fanboy that a new $US 199 Xbox 360 Arcade bundle will be hitting later this year. But that's not all, the source goes on to say that the bundle will be packaged with the rumoured Xbox 360 motion controller as well as some motion controlled mini-games from developer Rare. The motion controller will apparently be bundled separatly and be sold with "an even more expansive list" of mini motion games. Supposedly this will be out for the holiday shopping season and would go head-to-head with the Nintendo Wii. Or something like that. All sounds a little too good too be true, but who knows. So yeah, consider all this a rumour for now.
Home's been with us as a concept for quite some time now. Since early 2007, actually. And here we are, in August 2008, and it's still not out. Will it ever come out? Yes. Will it be out this year? If you'd have asked us that last week, we'd honestly have said "eh, probably not", but now, the prognosis is a little more up-beat. Martijn Van der Meulen, a member of Home's development team, has told IGN "it is a 100 percent guarantee that Home will be released by the end of this calendar year". 100%? Dude seems pretty certain. There's no wiggle room in 100%.
What would a games show be without awards? We wouldn't know. Haven't really seen one without awards. Don't think the back-of-the-box art bullet point teams would stand for a show without them. So without further ado, here are the Best In Show winners from the Leipzig GC last week! Sure, none of them are new games, but they're still the best games the show had, so give them all a round of applause.
Another character enters the fray of Japanese arcade title Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. And it's a whopper! The newest fighter is Rock Volnutt (AKA Mega-Man Volnutt) from Mega-Man Legends game. He'll of course be joining the Capcom side, which currently has a roster that boasts: Ryu, Chun-Li, Morrigan and Alex from Street Fighter III among others. Hit the jump for a look at latest reveal. 
While 
Computer processing solutions company Advanced Micro Devices is working with three leading developer to bring AMD graphics and DirectX 10.1 support to their titles: Electronic Arts Phenomic Studio and its upcoming real-time online fantasy RTS Battleforge, SEGA and its real-time futuristic military strategy title Stormrise, and NHN Games and its 3D RPG Cloud 9. Says Microsoft Games for Windows Global Director Kevin Unangst:
Don't see how the two go together, really, but hey, I'm not an advertising guru. Fosters - who here in Australia brew Stella Artois under licence - have decided to form a sales team specifically geared at shifting more Stella. Which in a country where local beer is the breakfast of champions is a tough sell. So they figured they'd think outside the box, and give all fifty members of the team a limited edition Stella Artois PSP. It's got a Stella graphic on the back, came in a Stella pouch and has a Stella XMB theme. Looks nice! Won the acclaim of advertisers! Pity, then, that all it's going to do is make punters think the PSP tastes like diet cats piss as well.
If you are a gamer, living in a PAL territory can be heartbreakingly hard at times. There are so many languages, and it really takes forever for games to get released. But, chin up! Sony Computer Entertainment of Europe David Reeves is here, and he is ready to make you feel all warm and fuzzy about getting stuff last. According to Reeves:
We're not normally in the business of keeping you up to date on a company's routine paperwork, but since so damn many of you were bugging us about this, here you go: the replacement Okami Wii covers are, according to Capcom, shipping. Right now. And actually shipping, too, as opposed to the not-actually-shipping from a few months back. To compensate for the delay, everyone on their list will be getting all three covers. Got one? Let us know.
It seems like we've been talking about LittleBigPlanet for ages now. Same seems true for Home. Both look like they're going to really push the PSN and show exactly what the network is capable of. But here's the million dollar question: Are they somehow connected? Like, do they work together? Like Alex Evans from LBP developer Media Molecule tells game site Eurogamer:
Left 4 Dead was coming out on November 4. Was! Not is. Because it's had a slight change. In an interview with Gamekings, Valve's Gabe Newell has announced that the game will now be out on November 20. Doesn't have the "4" tie-in they were originally shooting for, but it is the tenth anniversary of Half-Life's release, so those hoping for some degree of sentimentality are still being catered for.
Want to give the latest game in the Midnight Club series a whirl? Rockstar has let us know that it's taking an exclusive pre-release demo around Australia (well, Sydney and Melbourne so far) to give fans and curious gamers a look-see. It'll feature the Saleen 302E, which I believe is a car.
Just like we expect the changing of the seasons, we can expect that each game creator Hideo Kojima finishes a Metal Gear Solid title he'll say that's it, no more. It's been this way since MGS2! And his latest title is no exception. What's his deal? Can't he just make up his mind? He tells website Kikizo:
I didn't even know a PSP version was in development. Not any more! Along with the latest Ubisoft release schedule came the news that the game has been canned. Not sure why, maybe it didn't do so well on the Wii and DS. 
Huh? Since when was Spore set to launch on Sept 11? At least, that's what the 
A year can go by crazy quick. Imagine a rocket strapped to a second, bigger rocket. Now, stick that in an Acme-brand slingshot. That's how fast years go, if giant cartoon slingshots existed and enormous liquid oxygen-propelled apparati were easy to come by.
Big week for new releases to take advantage of the Labour Day weekend shopping. Tuesday, Tiger Woods 
Dontcha just love it when top execs start commenting on someone else's financials? Opinionated Acclaim chief David Perry ain't above it, in fact he used his keynote address at the Games Convention Developer's Conference to declare that Sony will never make real dough off the PlayStation 3, 10-year plan or no. 
A simple and scaled-down strategy game (it was an entrant in the 'Java4K competition,' where entries could not exceed 4096 bytes), FkConflict is still a lot of fun and good to while away a chunk of time that you probably should be doing something else with. The mechanics are pretty simple: pick your territories; territories get turns each round in random order; first player to get all territories on the board wins.
The magical Games Convention adventure has come to a close, and the Kotaku Mike Brigade have gone their separate ways, McWhertor travelling deeper into the wilds of Germany while I myself am only 13 hours worth of layover and a 9 hour plane ride away from U.S. Customs, which means I might get home by Friday if they don't open my luggage and discover I've replaced most of my clothes with gummi candy and beer.
We've been a little nostalgic the past couple of weekends, which included a look back at 
Digital artist Douglas Edric Stanley requested that his interactive installation Invaders! be 
Whoops! Hey, we missed TUD on Friday because of all the hoorah with GC 2008, so looks like I am the temporary caretaker of the giraffe this weekend. I got a question you can answer one of two ways. Or two questions and you can answer one. Or both. Who cares, here it goes.
Gamasutra has a nice five page interview up with David DeMartini of EA Partners, the Electronic Arts division that has released games like Rock Band, Crysis, The Orange Box, and, uh, Hellgate: London in the past year. It's a pretty wide ranging chat, from discussions of the challenges the come with working with Japanese studios, to acquiring new titles, to the relative disaster of Hellgate:
In the dimly lit recesses of the back of Hall 3 at the Leipzig Convention centre is a testament to the games we've been excited about of years passed. I call it the promo statue graveyard, where the eye-catching photo opportunities of the past gather together to remember the good old days, when ripe young men from throughout Europe would crowd around them, getting their picture taken while hugging, kissing, or dry-humping them. Ah, those were the days. The current booth adornments bow their heads as they pass, because they know that one day they'll be in the promo graveyard too.
Xbox 360 Fanboy, citing "a tip from a source close to Microsoft's marketing department", says the price cut to $US 199 for the Arcade system is meant to position that bundle against the Wii. So it'll get a huge family-friendly marketing push and title support. And in the fall, it gets a motion controller with some motion-controlled mini-games developed by Rare.
Epicenter Studios (Critter Round-Up, Real Heroes: Firefighter) cofounder Bryan Jury sent us a heads up about an interview he did with GameCritics.com's Brad Gallaway. While I found his email references to himself in third person a little odd, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt since the interview was pretty good. He described it as "a former Call of Duty producer-type from Activision, talks about starting up an independent studio, kind of trashes Gears of War in an answer about games being art, and explains how they got their first game deal", which more or less hits the nail on the head. On 'games as art,' he's got this to say:
Alright, if you bought Madden '09 for Xbox 360 and want to participate in the new Online League feature with me and your fellow Kotaku-ites, here's your chance. I've set up a 32-team league on Xbox Live, and I'm taking one of the slots, plus we have three others I've invited to the league on board too. That means there are 28 first-come first-served slots available. The password for getting membership into the league is on the jump, followed by some house rules.
After his recent 
Penny Arcade's 5th annual PAX, beginning Friday, is the newspeg for a 1,500 word feature in this morning's Seattle Times. The paper chronicles the 10-year history of the webcomic, from creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins meeting in a high school journalism class, up to its present-day gargantuan commercial impact. It's a success story that seems equal parts happenstance and just making the correct decision when the opportunity arose.
Ian Bogost has a short little note on a 'serious game' called 
Games Convention in Leipzig isn't all about having fun, cosplaying, and trying out upcoming video games. There are also plenty of traumatic events going on as well, such as the poor folks at SouthPeak Games, who came to the show this morning to let people sample their fine DS lineup only to find that all of their DS systems had been stolen. I was so shocked at the news I had to go outside to get a cigarette. Yes, I know I quit a few months ago, but this is me from a past when I am still smoking, having jumped to the future to warn myself about the screaming Asian man, only it was too late.
Some idiot in Utah wrecked his so-called "bullet bike" into an SUV carrying a family of four. Everyone's alive, including the no-shirt, no-helmet cyclist, but of course vidja games are the cause. I swear, there must be a check-block for it on police investigation forms: