via IGN


Sony is giving Japan the gift of new colors for both the PS2 and PSP later this summer. The company anounced today a red PS2 and a blue PSP, to be available in limited quantities in July.

The blue PSP, officially "Metalic Blue," will come in two forms: as part of a Value Pack and as part of a 1seg Pack. The Value Pack includes a pouch, strap, cloth, 32 megabyte Memory Stick, and D cable and will sell for 23,800 yen. The 1seg pack includes a 1seg tuner and stand, a pouch, strap, cloth, and a 1 gigabyte stick. It will sell for 29,800 yen.

The PS2 option is much simpler, with just one new color, Cinabar Red, in the standard 16,000 yen package.

Sony is scattering the releases a bit, pushing the PS2 out first on 7/3, with the PSP to follow two weeks later on 7/17. Both revisions are said to be limited, so those who want a unit should check with their favorite import shops in advance. ...

via IGN


Sony is giving Japan the gift of new colors for both the PS2 and PSP later this summer. The company anounced today a red PS2 and a blue PSP, to be available in limited quantities in July.

The blue PSP, officially "Metalic Blue," will come in two forms: as part of a Value Pack and as part of a 1seg Pack. The Value Pack includes a pouch, strap, cloth, 32 megabyte Memory Stick, and D cable and will sell for 23,800 yen. The 1seg pack includes a 1seg tuner and stand, a pouch, strap, cloth, and a 1 gigabyte stick. It will sell for 29,800 yen.

The PS2 option is much simpler, with just one new color, Cinabar Red, in the standard 16,000 yen package.

Sony is scattering the releases a bit, pushing the PS2 out first on 7/3, with the PSP to follow two weeks later on 7/17. Both revisions are said to be limited, so those who want a unit should check with their favorite import shops in advance. ...

via Computer and Video Games


Several images and some new details on Capcom's Spyborgs has been leaked online, confirming that it's a Wii title being created by Bionic Games.

The game is a sci-fi brawler crossed with an episode of Ren and Stimpy, according to the blokes at Joystiq.

It's the first title from startup Bionic Games and is helmed by Mike Stout, lead multiplayer design for Resistance: Fall of Man.

The screens look... interesting. We expect some more information on the title later on today, which'll hopefully clear things up in our head a bit.


Screenshots ...

via Eurogamer


Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono spoke to Eurogamer about Seth, one of the boss characters in Capcom's upcoming beat-'em-up, last week, and hinted that he will be playable.

"Seth is indeed a new character and a boss. Seth is a really interesting character because he has connections to some other important characters in Street Fighter IV. You may have noticed of course that M. Bison is back. At the end of Street Fighter II everyone presumed that Shadowloo had been destroyed and Bison presumably had been killed. He's a hard guy to kill and he's once again returned.

"What we need to figure out as players looking at the story is why are Shadowloo back, how did that happen, how and why did Bison come back, and what is Seth's connection to that, and he's very much connected to it," Ono told Eurogamer in a video interview you'll be able to see in a Captivate 08 EGTV Special soon.

"If you look at him he's got a kind of expressionless face and a strange skin colour, he has some sort of device embedded in his stomach. He's a unique-looking character, he's clearly not an ordinary human being - there's something going on with this guy."

Seth's story will be explored in some part by the arcade version of SF IV, due out in arcades this summer, but the home version - for PS3, 360 and PC - will go into much greater depth with him, Ono said.

Interestingly, Ono told assembled hacks that Capcom would be unlikely to include any fully-animated characters without letting players control them. When pushed about this and how it relates to Seth, Ono laughed but quickly hushed up. "If people express a desire to take control of Seth, we might see a movement in that direction at some point," he said. "I certainly don't want to say much more than that - I've already said too much!" ...

via Computer and Video Games


More wicked and gritty Gears of War 2 screenshots have cropped up on the internet, this time showing off areas of the game a little less vague than before - namely multiplayer action and a 'ruddy great flamethrower.

In the shots (which come in all sorts of sizes) you can clearly see the napalm weapon alongside a new riot shield, which could turn cover standoffs in Gears 2 well and truly on their head.

The player count for multiplayer games has been upped from eight to ten, with five-on-five gameplay options.

New modes include Wingman, which sees ten players face off in teams of two, and Epic's own take on CTF, 'Meatflag', where the flag is a (presumably CPU-controlled) character who runs around the map trying to defend himself. Sounds good.


Screenshots ...

via Eurogamer


Dark Void creator Airtight Studios has said that it chose to partner with Capcom on its upcoming cover-based third-person shooter because the publisher allows developers to innovate.

"A lot of other companies are like, 'Make it just like the last game that came out because it sells well worldwide'," lead designer Jose Perez told journalists at Capcom's Captivate 08 event in Las Vegas last week. "Capcom is known for innovation...and I just want to see their logo come up before our game."

An interesting side story in Dark Void's creation is that it sees a family of figures who worked on Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge for Microsoft Game Studios brought back together nearly five years after the game shipped on Xbox.

Airtight Studios was founded by members of the Crimson Skies team at FASA Interactive, along with Ed Fries, who helped build Microsoft Game Studios, and soon after Capcom signed Dark Void the publisher's US arm installed another former MGS figure, Scott Baylis, as its US development head.

"Scott came from Midway and before that EA, but before he was at EA he worked for me at Microsoft, and worked with Crimson Skies. In a way it was like this homecoming - all these people coming back together," Fries explained.

Fries himself became part of Airtight because, he joked, he had ruled out including on-foot gameplay in the original Crimson Skies and had promised the development team that he would be let them do that in the next game - only to leave in early 2004 after 18 years with Microsoft.

Given the group's history with the Xbox platform holder, we wondered why they had turned to Capcom with Dark Void rather than go 'home' to Microsoft.

"When we got together as a company Microsoft had just recently cancelled Crimson Skies, so we didn't feel like it made sense for us to go back and pitch Microsoft again on a title that had a lot of similar elements to it, and certainly the original pitch was more like Crimson than where we ended up," Fries told Eurogamer.

The original pitch was an action game that would see players fighting their way out of a pyramid, hopping onto a motorbike, flying a plane and shooting it out with a gigantic boss character all in the space of one level, but Fries said that despite the ambitious prototype, produced in four months, the developer ended up with a good demo but no one element that stood out from the crowd.

Capcom felt the same, but saw something in Airtight anyway and decided to fund development - a reaction that left the team with mixed feelings. It wasn't until subsequent meetings back at the studio that Dark Void started to take shape. The concept of vertical cover-based combat, which applies the gameplay of something like Gears of War to ascending a cliff-face, was what got things back on track.

If Fries is bitter about Microsoft's decision to ditch Crimson Skies though, he wasn't showing it at Captivate 08, and he believes that Dark Void will justify Capcom's faith, hoping to achieve a "95" rating on aggregators like Metacritic and Gamerankings. "I think if we took Dark Void back to [Microsoft now] they'd probably be pretty interested," he told Eurogamer. "But it really took somebody betting on us early when the IP was pretty unformed to get to where we are today." ...

via IGN


Capcom's rebirth of the Bionic Commando franchise arrives this fall in the form of a 3D action game on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360. This just in: You won't have to swing alone. At its 2008 "Captivate" event, Capcom finally gave some details on the multiplayer component in BC, though only single-player was demoed.

The multiplayer in BC is set prior to the events of the single-player campaign. Gamers play as test subjects giving a revolutionary new grappling weapon a go in various combat arenas. Not only does this give some context to the BC single-player storyline, but it also allows developer GRIN to alter some of the game mechanics to fit multiplayer. See, this way they can say, "Hey, this is what the prototype was like." According to GRIN, the single-player gameplay just didn't quite fit multiplayer and has undergone some tweaks.

Don't worry, you still get to swing around with a grappling hook. But it's combat functionality will be slightly different than in single-player. Rather than having a fully replaced bionic arm like BC hero Nathan Spencer, multiplayer has players in colorful powered suits.

Expect the standard set of multiplayer modes, including Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. The difference, of course, is that you get to swing around -- something we haven't really seen in a multiplayer game before. In fact, there are going to be some cool tandem moves for those willing to experiment in team modes. If your buddy is swinging, you can attach your bionic arm to him (don't ask where) and swing off him, allowing you to get a greater arc and therefore greater loft to get to otherwise unreachable places.

There will be boundaries to arenas and places where you can fall to your death. In fact, if you get knocked off a platform, you will have one shot to hook your grapple or it's bye-bye for you.

GRIN promises that multiplayer is "a lot of fun." It certainly has that potential. But we won't know for certain until we get our hands on MP, something that will likely occur at E3 2008 in mid-July. ...

via Eurogamer


Bionic Commando producer Ben Judd has told Eurogamer to expect elements of the re-imagined XBLA, PSN and PC game, Bionic Commando Rearmed, to fill out the back-story of next year's 3D game.

"We intentionally put in some nuggets in the story that later tie into the 3D version," Judd told Eurogamer.

"You'll talk to some characters that will ask Spencer about his wife and he'll say, 'my wife left me, I don't why she left me - maybe she just couldn't handle a military man and that lifestyle'.

"So the user is going to play that game, and certainly a fan of the original is going to play that game and go, 'Wait a second, that wasn't in the original game,' so they'll be curious and wonder what that's about. And later you find out more about it in the 3D version."

Judd said that the team behind the 3D version had to work hard to produce a story that would satisfy fans.

"When you think about the original game, it was NES, very limited words and dialogue, so it really is a very thin story, so there wasn't a lot to go off of, so trying to find enough to build out into a real-world serious story that was on multiple levels, versus the original game but yet still have enough dialogue in there that fans would appreciate," he said.

"Trying to find that perfect blend was not easy."

In the end the team went for a shades-of-grey story of a bionically enhanced super-soldier who has to hunt down terrorists driven to act against society by their government's decision to try and strip them of their life-giving bionic enhancements.

"We wanted to drill it down to technology. For us, there's a lot of technology that's good, but it carries a heavy price," Judd explained.

"We wanted to blur the ethical line for the government, because they blur the ethical line a lot [in the real world] when it comes to weapons technology." ...

via Games Industry


Future US has announced an agreement with Sony to produce a monthly digital program for the PlayStation Network, which will debut on June 5.

Produced by Future's magazine and website editorial staff, Qore will be an interactive games show in high-definition, downloadable directly to PlayStation 3 consoles.

"We couldn't be more excited to extend our partnership with SCEA to the PlayStation Network," said Jonathan Simpson-Bint, president of Future.

"This is an opportunity to create a branded media environment unlike anything else in the world and an example of how Future is uniquely positioned to create powerful integrated media solutions for readers and advertisers."

Future has retained advertising rights for the show, which has already gained the patronage of Burger King, Universal Pictures, Activision and Codemasters, among others.

"Qore is a uniquely targeted product, reaching gamers in the interactive, high-definition environment of the console itself," added Future's publishing director Simon Whitcombe.

"For consumers it is a relevant and compelling new format for media, and for advertisers it's a pipeline straight to the game-playing audience."

The program, hosted by Veronica Belmont, will have an introductory price of USD 2.99 for the first episode or an annual 13 episode subscription of USD 24.99. Subscribers will have special access to game demos, betas, add-ons and other downloadable and game-related content.

This comes off the back of the announcement that Future UK has entered a partnership with Tesco to produce and distribute a free new magazine in its stores. ...