That is according to Jeremy Bolt, who is Anderson’s co-producer on Resident Evil: Afterlife. Visiting that film’s set, the site ShockTillYouDrop.com says it spoke to Bolt, who “told us this morning that Paul W.S. Anderson is still circling video game adaptation Castlevania at Rogue Pictures and that they are waiting on a script.”

“Bolt added that he and Anderson would like to adapt Konami’s Metal Gear Solid for the big screen at Columbia Pictures,” ShockTillYouDrop.com added.

You can check out Paul W.S. Anderson’s filmography here but he ain’t no Bergman. Please note that none of this confirms Anderson has anything to do with the Metal Gear project.

Paul W.S. Anderson Still Circling Castlevania [ShockTillYouDrop.com]

A piece running on Yahoo! News Japan (translated by AltJapan) summed up the difference between Western and Japanese games: “There is a big difference in the way emotion is handled in Japan and abroad. Abroad, hero characters tend to be portrayed as powerful males, but in Japan squashed and cute little boys are the norm. The Japanese preference for see small-statured pretty-boys wielding big swords seems to be greeted abroad with a resounding ‘no way.’”

This paradigm does not hold true to sports game, the article notes. So when Japanese developers depict real teams and real players, the only option is to depict them realistically — and the vast majority of professional athletes are not small pretty boys!

Thus, Konami’s Pro Evolution Soccer franchise is a big hit in the West, and ditto for EA Sports title FIFA 10. Neither title carries the cultural baggage pervasive in other genre games.

Fantasy and Football [AltJapan]

I’m pleased to say that, for the first time since the PlayStation 2 era, significant changes have been made to Konami’s long-running series. But are they enough to help the genre’s former powerhouse win back some of the ground lost to FIFA over the past few seasons? Let’s find out.

Loved
Welcome To 2009 – Konami finally worked out that games released on current generation hardware need to look like current-generation games and have given the game’s graphics a serious overhaul. While animation is still a little clunky, the lighting, stadiums and especially player kits and likenesses have seen massive improvements to the point where they stand well ahead of FIFA’s.

Front And Centre – Another of Pro Evo’s more archaic elements — the game’s front end and menu system — has also been overhauled. It’s now simpler, more attractive, and most important of all, quicker. This means you can get in, make your necessary adjustments and get back into the action.

Online Play – Hooray! Online play now works. Die-hard Pro Evo fans will no doubt be both shocked and overjoyed to hear this.

Hated
Poor Man’s Game – You’d think by now that Konami would realise that one of the chief areas that they’re falling behind EA Sports is in securing the rights to use real team names and real team kits. Yet whether through lack of intent or simply a lack of resources, Pro Evo is still sorely lacking in official teams, particularly when it comes to international sides and, more importantly, the English Premier League, where only two teams — Liverpool and Man United — are available. Where five years ago it was “cute” going through and editing every team’s name and kit to reflect their actual real-world appearance, now it’s just a pain in the arse.

Stiff As A Board – While faster than previous editions, Pro Evo is still far too slow. And I don’t mean in the pace of the game, I mean in the pace of the players, who take far too long to take possession of the ball and take far too long to get rid of it. Football can often be a slow, methodical game, yes, but at times it also needs to be fast and fluid, something Pro Evo is still unable to really capture.

Be A Pro? We’re Trying… – Much like FIFA, Pro Evo has a mode where you can create a player and assume control over just that player throughout their career, playing games not as an all-seeing football God, but just one of the lads. In FIFA, it’s a joy to play, with constant feedback allowing you to both gauge your progress and revel in being a superstar. In Pro Evo, you’re dropped into your career and just… left there, rarely knowing if you’ve had a good game or not. Without those trimmings, the game mode is simply 1v11, and that’s no fun at all.

I like to think of the battle between FIFA and Pro Evo as being a battle between Liverpool and Chelsea. FIFA are Chelsea. Once also-rans, enough money has been poured into them over enough time to simply guarantee success. They’re brimming with talent all over the park, boast a large supporter base, and at the moment, are top of the table.

Pro Evo, meanwhile, are Liverpool. A series with a proud history and a willingness to compete, but in the modern era, they simply lack the resources to present the kind of depth and year-in, year-out challenge Chelsea can muster. Sure, in some areas they can pull level, and on the odd weekend (or even season) could overcome the Londoners, but overall, and in the long term, they’re simply no longer in the same league.

Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 was developed and published by Konami for the Xbox 360 (version reviewed), PlayStation 3, PlayStation 2, PC, Wii and PSP. Released on October 23, retails for $US59.99/$AU109.95 (Xbox 360 version). A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played all game modes in single-player, and several matches in multiplayer, both locally and online.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

According to analysts, the music industry will realign itself better with online distribution and “pick up speed”.

Universal Music LLC is also on the table as a potential buyer, but insiders say Konami is the most likely purchaser. Victor Entertainment’s music catalogue features acts like SMAP and Southern All Stars, two of the biggest selling music groups in Japan.

Producing records since 1928, Victor Entertainment was the music business of Victor Talking Machine Company’s Japan branch and was spun off as a record company in 1972. It currently only has 7 per cent market share in Japan, behind Universal Music, Avex and Sony Music Entertainment Japan.

JVC Kenwood hopes the sale will help the company focus on its core audiovisual product business.

Konami set to buy Victor’s music business [DAILY YOMIURI ONLINE]

Not necessarily, but given Konami’s flood of WiiWare versions of Contra, Gradius and Castlevania, released under the ReBirth moniker, it’s clear the company isn’t afraid of looking backward. The recently announced HD remake of Rocket Knight Adventures also shows that Konami isn’t afraid of venturing into the more obscure.

But Jackal? The 1986 arcade game and its handful of console/PC ports didn’t quite share the same success of its Konami created peers. It was a decent game, but not the type of Konami revival some of us are pining for.

The images of what appears to be Jackal, identified by reader Adam, were from a developer’s production resume. It was the same developer who created the “Big Head Mode” papercraft head for a Halloween costume.

That developer, Eric Testroete of Vancouver-based studio Deep Fried Entertainment, doesn’t name the game as Jackal, simply referring to it as an “Undisclosed” and “Unannounced Project” for the Wii. It may never have made it past the prototype stage, but would be…interesting if it did.

We’ve contacted Konami to see if they’d like to comment. We’ll update if they do.

Undisclosed Project – 2009 [Testroete.com - thanks, Adam!]

Later this week, Konami is expected to announce its earnings for the April-September 2009 period, and the company expects a 22.5 percent drop in revenues compared to the same period last year. The companies net income is expected to plummet to $US24 million, an 81.6 percent drop.

Metal Gear Solid IV was released worldwide on June 12, 2008.

Even with the steep drop off, Konami does expect some sales growth during this fiscal year.

Konami projects 22.5% six-month sales slip [GameSpot]

Scary movies don’t creep me out nearly as much as scary games do. It’s one thing to yell at the dumb blonde on screen about how bad of an idea it is to go into that dark basement. It’s another to be the one controlling the character who’s about to go into that dark basement.

In Saw, much to my dismay, you don’t control a sexy blonde. Instead, you play as Det. David Tapp, a character from the first Saw film (played by Danny Glover in the movie but not the game), who awakens in an abandoned insane asylum and discovers he’s a piece of a deadly puzzle created by the Jigsaw Killer: After suffering a gunshot wound, Tapp was saved by Jigsaw, who removed the bullet and, in its place, embedded in Tapp’s body a key. Your goal is to solve Jigsaw’s puzzles and free each of six victims related to Tapp’s past, and then escape from the asylum yourself. Meanwhile, there are others trapped in the asylum, and, for them, the only way out is to kill Tapp and get the key inside him.

Loved
Jigsaw’s Puzzles: Being a puzzle game, Saw would be in trouble if those puzzles were bad. Fortunately, they’re not — well, not all of them, at least. The first half of the game keeps things interesting by throwing at the player a good mix of puzzles, the most complex of which occur at the end of each level, when you must save one of Jigsaw’s victims.

Some of these are unique — in one, blue and red vials are dropped into a succession of tubes that pivot left or right; you must use gravity-related logic to make sure each coloured vial ends up in its respective vat. (It’s easier seen than explained.) Other end-level puzzles are more complex versions of those that appear in other forms throughout the game. For example, one puzzle comprises multiple concentric rings, resembling a bullseye. Along the outer edge, pointing toward the centre, are two ends of a pipe. Inside each ring are various pipe pieces. The goal is to rotate each ring so that the pipe pieces connect to form one continuous path from one pipe end to the other.

To make things more interesting, these puzzles often have time constraints — Tapp is choking on poisonous gas, for instance, and must solve a pipe puzzle to shut the gas off before his health runs out. The majority of the end-level puzzles have such time constraints. What this means is you should get used to dying. A lot.

Plot: Fans of the Saw series will definitely get more from the game’s plot than non-fans. Speaking as a member of the latter category, I thought the story, which fleshes out some of Jigsaw’s background, held together fine, and I wasn’t too confused by the numerous obvious references to the original film. (I believe the story’s timeline falls somewhere between the first and second films.) The game also has two endings, chosen by the player — one of which reveals a twist and another that is far more disappointing.

Hated
Repetition: There are actually two complaints here. The first is that certain puzzles are thrown at the player over and over, seemingly for no other reason than to make the game longer. The pipe puzzle, described earlier, is one of these. Another involves circuits, in which each square of a grid contains either a red node, a piece of wire or a power source. The goal is to rotate the squares—and the corresponding node, wire piece or power source—so that all the nodes turn green, meaning they are connected by an unbroken path to the power source. I wasn’t counting, but there are easily a dozen of these puzzles.

What complicates matters is the second part of my complaint: time constraints. Apparently, it’s not enough that these puzzles occur multiple times over the course of the game. You also have to suffer death after death each time you come across one and fail to complete it in time. With the circuit puzzles, it’s even worse — the pattern of circuitry changes each time, so memorisation won’t help. (At one point, I was so frustrated that I actually thought the game itself was some meta-puzzle where Jigsaw was real and was trying to make me kill myself.)

Combat: Forget the survival-horror plot — here was the true nightmare. What a mess this was. There are various weapons lying around for you to pick up — pipes, baseball bats, table legs. Press one of the face buttons for a normal attack, a different face button for heavy attack. Each weapon will degrade the more you use it, except for things like hypodermic needles, which have one-time uses. That’s about it. Oh, wait, I forgot something: Turns out you don’t really need a weapon, because your fists seem to do as much damage, and they don’t break! The pistol is useful, but the problem is that, unlike practically any other game that uses a gun, you don’t use the right trigger to shoot. No, the right trigger is used to place traps, which you can build using items you find and corresponding schematics. So when an enemy would come charging at me, my instinct was to shoot him with the right trigger, but instead, I would inexplicably place an exploding trap at my feet, causing us both to die in a fiery blaze. One more thing: There are locked weapons cases in some rooms, and the only way to get to the weapon is to solve a puzzle involving gears, which you find in desks or file cabinets. In some instances, I would solve the gear puzzle, open the case and find…a baseball bat. Which I could’ve picked up in, oh, a million other places in the game. Thanks.

Other Annoyances: Despite the multiple ways you can die in Saw, I doubt any of them will be from simply running out of hypodermic health needles. Combat is too easy to worry about it, that’s for sure. No, a much bigger concern are the tripwires, which are attached to shotguns that blow the heads off anyone who triggers one. Often, they’re not really noticeable unless you walk around looking at your feet, so I grew accustomed to seeing Tapp’s head disappear in a cloud of red mist. (You can disarm the trap, lure an enemy toward you and then quickly re-arm it, so they do come in handy.) Also, Tapp is shoeless throughout the game; walking on broken glass will cause him to lose health. This is explained in one of the game’s first scenes, in which a shoe-wearing enemy taunts Tapp. In fact, just about every enemy Tapp kills in the game has shoes. You know what would’ve made a cool puzzle? ONE THAT INVOLVES TAPP TAKING SOME DEAD GUY’S DAMN SHOES.

As you can probably guess, Saw is not the game that turns me into a fan of survival horror. Yes, it has compelling puzzles, but, in the context of the game, it wasn’t nearly enough. Perhaps it had to do with how relentlessly dark and violent the game is, but playing it just filled me with a sense of unexplainable dread. Then again, maybe that was the point. (It didn’t help that the theme of Tapp’s questionable morality is pounded into the player, so much so that I wondered whether the game should be called Hammer.)

Finally, one more reason against recommending Saw: Unless you’re an achievement whore, there’s virtually no replayability. I finished the game in about 13 hours, although I’ve seen some claim to have completed it in as few as eight. That’s the definition of a rental if I’ve ever seen one.

Saw was developed by Zombie Studios and published by Konami for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on October 6. Retails for $US59.99/$AU109.95. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Finished the game on the Xbox 360 on normal difficulty. There is no online mode.

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Sure, they’re tiny, but at least they’re better than blurry mobile phone pictures of Famitsu magazine.

Yes, the almost-classic time travelling murder mystery adventure is coming to the PSP, with Shadow of Destiny pencilled in for a 2010 release on the PSP. What else did Konami have to say about the “brain stretching experience”? Not much, other than mentioning that it’s “soon to be available” on these shores, which hopefully means a speedy localisation.

Here’s a nice screenshot!

As we detailed earlier, Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth will colourise and modernise the 20-year-old outing of Christopher Belmont in his quest to kill Dracula for Konami’s third downloadable retro “ReBirth” effort.

There will be new enemies, new traps and various other improvements such as rearranged music.

Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth is priced at 1000 Wii Points.