via ign

Remember House of the Dead? Eidos will be unleashing its own take on that classic lightgun shooter with a completely independent, but certainly hugely inspired production called Touch the Dead. We got a chance to romp through the zombie-infested halls on the Nintendo DS today, and pun intended...we had a blast.

Touch the Dead has been in the works for well over a year at Nintendo DS development house Dream On Studio, originally titled "Dead & Furious." The project's been picked up by Eidos for a May release, and team's done a pretty decent job emulating the fun of an on-rails lightgun shooter using nothing but the touch screen and stylus.

The game begins with a comic book cutscene showing you, the lead character, thrown in prison. As you mull over your time, you're awoken by a loud sound -- the door of your jail cell swings open. Of course, you want to know why...and so begins the start of Touch the Dead. Without a weapon you don't have much to do but look around, luckily a pistol with infinite ammunition's been conveniently tossed on the floor in one of the rooms.

Touch the Dead automatically moves you through the corridors of the prison -- all you have to worry about are the seemingly endless number of zombies that are wandering your way to get their taste of fresh prisoner blood. A simple tap-tap-tap on the screen will fire your weapon to that specific location, and headshots seem to be the best way of taking out the undead. Unfortunately, while having a bottomless bag of bullets is certainly handy, you'll still have to reload after emptying your barrel. Dragging a new clip from one side of the screen to the other is a simple task, but it requires a quick swipe to do it, and that's precious time away from keeping the zombies back.

Later in the game you'll upgrade not just your weapons, but the ability to reload those weapons much more quickly. The D-pad is used to switch from one weapon to another, but you'll need to earn these guns before you can switch over to them.

Touch the Dead is a simple design that's not entirely original, but we were having a great time popping zombies in the heads with our revolver. The visuals might not be on par with, say, Resident Evil, but the game moves at a pretty rapid clip and allows for as many as more than a half dozen zombies to stumble after you in one cluster. Shoot a zombie in the head and their heads can pop off with a nice blast of red blood -- it's clear that the game will earn an M rating when it hits store shelves.

We didn't get a chance to experience the game's two player cooperative mode, but Touch the Dead will support the local wireless feature of the Nintendo DS so that players can work together to wipe out the zombie threat. ...

via ign

This summer, Eidos will unleash Escape from Bug Island, a US localized version of a little-played Japanese game by the name Necro-Nesia. In this quirky B-movie style action adventure, players wield the Wii remote and nunchuk to explore this creepy island and stomp and whack enormous bugs that get in the way.

Eidos knows that it's got a pretty campy story to work with in Escape from Bug Island, so it's cranking up the kitch level to over-the-top levels and letting the action speak more than the characters. The original game's introduction's been reworked with English voice over work, but once in the game the dialogue's toned down to simply text cutscenes. In all, Escape from Bug Island has about five minutes of spoken dialogue, and Eidos freely admits that the voice over work isn't going to win any dramatic awards. It's meant to be that way.

After the game introduces the three characters and gives the player a hand in a training mission where the Wii action controls are learned, the story begins: at its most basic, your weapon-happy buddy and your girlfriend go missing. Where'd they go? That's for you to find out. Escape from Bug Island has a bit of inspiration from Silent Hill and Resident Evil, but only in the sense that the game's creepy, moody, and hopes to squick you the heck out with horrifying images of bugs grown to abnormal proportions. There's an adventure focus where you'll have to explore the island and its specific locations, as well as find objects that will give clues to your next point on the map, but in all honesty this games all about squishing bugs. Tiny bugs that swarm all over you, huge bugs that tower more than twice your height...and everything in between.

Escape from Bug Island uses the Nunchuk/Wii Remote pairing, with players maneuvering their on-screen persona using the analog stick. To attack, players hold down the B trigger on the Remote and whip it. In our early playtest, we could create light and powerful combos by whipping the remote in a sort of rhythm, with the last hit either whipped normal or hard depending on if we wanted to add a little "oomph." Pushing back on the analog stick will attack low, forward on the stick will attack high. To roll out of the way waggle the Nunchuk for a left evade, waggle the Remote without the B button for a right evade. Players can hop into a through-the-eyes first-person view by holding the A button on the Wii Remote, and look around using the controller's pointing function. This ability comes in handy when you're trying to whack at bugs up close with your stick, or when you want to throw a rock at a specific target. Incidentally, if you "throw" the remote with a whipping motion while in this first-person mode, it'll toss a held item.

The original Necro-Nesia game has been altered to improve the gameplay experience. The Wii motion controls have been tightened up, and elements such as secondary objectives have been added to give players more reward in swatting bugs. Unless you've played the Japanese game you won't even know that these elements have been added, but their inclusion definitely beefs up the production with more stuff to do and a more intuitive way of doing them. If anything, our early playtest didn't turn us off -- the game does have its quirks but it's still pretty fun.

Escape from Bug Island supports the Wii system's widescreen mode and includes support for progressive scan through component cables. The game doesn't look all that bad for Wii standards, pulling off a smooth framerate even when the environments fill with dozens of bugs or gargantuan insects that loom overhead. ...

via ign

Your stranglehold on brain-training games is over, Nintendo DS. Midway is about to start getting PSP users' gray matter in tip-top shape with Hot Brain: Fire Up Your Mind, a title packing five categories of mind-bending brainteasers.

Midway brought Hot Brain -- set for a June release -- into the IGN offices last week and put my mind through the paces in exercises testing logic, memory, math, language and concentration. I ordered numbers from highest to lowest, picked out misspelled words and matched images.

It might sound easy, but the key to Hot Brain is getting as many correct answers as you can in a limited timeframe. See, Professor Warmer -- voiced by Idle Hands star and Christopher Guest-favorite Fred Willard -- is running an institute in the game that studies the result of critical thinking on brain temperature. He says that when you're crunching an equation or word problem, more blood's flowing to your noggin and your mush mound is getting warmer.

That's hot.Each timed exam calculates your brain temperature based on how many problems you solve in a specific time period and how many times you screw up. You can practice the 15 exams all you want -- earning "calories" that unlock the game's three difficulties -- and try for the day's best score in Test mode. The mode grabs one exam from each category, calculates your overall brain temperature, records your daily high and plots it on a colorful chart to track the rise and fall of your brain functions.

Even if you stick with one difficulty in the practice mode, the puzzles are going to get tougher. As you get better, you'll get deeper and deeper into the levels and the challenges will ask more and more of you -- even my beloved "Musical Memory."

A member of the memory category, Musical Memory harkens back to the glory days of Simon and features four images that are each assigned a PSP button and sound. At the onset of the puzzle, the game runs through a sequence -- a duck quacks, a bird chirps, the duck quacks again -- and you have to duplicate it. The game was great at first, but the better I got, the longer the sequences got. Where I was once ordering motorcycle engines and helicopter whirls with ease, I was left to whimper as I tried to figure out if the seventh sound in the Professor Warmer series was Fred Willard groaning or laughing.

Of course, at least Musical Memory ramps up to being tough. "Back-Seat Driver" just made feel like an idiot from the get go.

Uh, is it brawn?The final test in the Logic category -- which features non-threatening, guard-lowering challenges such as creating shapes -- Back-Seat Driver shows users a sequence of arrows and then has them look at a top-down, grid map of a city. The player has to apply the arrows to a taxi's route and decipher where the cab will stop. Even on easy, it kicked my ass, and I ended the exam with an "Icy" brain temperature of 32 degrees.

Whenever you think you've honed your skills to a point that won't make you look like a fool in front or your friends, you can gather a group and take on two ad-hoc multiplayer modes. "Brain Race" pits two to four players in a competition to see who can get his or her brain "On Fire" first, while "Think Tank" has two to four team members working toward getting their collective brain "On Fire."

Although it was still using placeholder graphics in a few spots, the build we saw of Hot Brain was all but completed last week, played well and even allowed you to skip the Fred Willard excerpts if you wanted. It isn't a sure thing yet, but if you've been waiting for a brain-stimulating title on your PSP, Hot Brain might have your number this summer. ...

News from gp2xstore

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News from gp2xstore

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News from gp2xstore

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New GBA Homebrew release from Anders Hansson

I would like to make our GBA game The Old Well available for your readers. It's fully playable but was intended as a demo to attract publishers It is a quite clever puzzle/platform game that was originally inspired by the obscure Vic 20 game Bricks. The finished game was meant to have enemies of different behaviour but it still works as a game without them. Kind of like a reverse Mr. Driller.

It can be downloaded from www.athleticdesign.se/theoldwell. Instructions are inside the game. Dan Johansson programmed the game. Anders Hansson designed the game and made the graphics.

The demo was finished in 2004. With no interests from publishers, we began working on a PC-version instead, which unfortunately also was abandoned later. However, it was partly included as a level of my recently released PC-game Lighthouse Lunacy (www.lighthouselunacy.com) ...

New GBA Homebrew release from Anders Hansson

I would like to make our GBA game The Old Well available for your readers. It's fully playable but was intended as a demo to attract publishers It is a quite clever puzzle/platform game that was originally inspired by the obscure Vic 20 game Bricks. The finished game was meant to have enemies of different behaviour but it still works as a game without them. Kind of like a reverse Mr. Driller.

It can be downloaded from www.athleticdesign.se/theoldwell. Instructions are inside the game. Dan Johansson programmed the game. Anders Hansson designed the game and made the graphics.

The demo was finished in 2004. With no interests from publishers, we began working on a PC-version instead, which unfortunately also was abandoned later. However, it was partly included as a level of my recently released PC-game Lighthouse Lunacy (www.lighthouselunacy.com) ...

via DSLink

2007-4-15
DSLink software 2.00 ver.
English kernel update 2.00 ver.

1.Enhance superpower NDS Cheat's functions
　
This new developled Cheat function is released by cooperating with the Cheat software EmuCheat that prevails in the simulator. So far there are 282 CHT cheat files. This new realized cheat functions follow the former Cheat's excellent functions on GBA. We try our best to make it perfect on functions and operation interface. Each item of Cheat can be started and setted seperately on NDS, which really make it do as you like. Parts of Cheat functions of DSLink can be charactered like this:



(1).Support Cheat management functions on PC. User can browse, add, delete and modify Cheat data, correspond the new added Cheat with ROM, etc.





　　(2).Each item of Cheat can be started and setted seperately on NDS. It supports multichoice when select Cheat on NDS. It supports multivalue on each choice, such as tools, weapons in the RPG games. More powerful functions, make it really do as you like.
　　
Operation functions key on NDS:
Direction key: move cursor
L/Y: move to top or bottom quickly
A/B: select Cheat item forward or backward
X/Y: start or quit all Cheat quickly
Start: run the game

(3).Correspond Cheat with ROM automatically. When adding ROM, only you select Cheat function, software will automatically check out the corresponding Cheat file, without finding it amony hundreds of files manually, which makes it really smart operation.
　
(4). Update Cheat files of new game conveniently.No need to wait for software update, for new game, user can copy Cheat file from internet to the corresponding folder anytime. After adding the new Cheat file, it will automatically rebuilt the index file of Cheat when open DSLink software.
　　
(5).Support Chinese operation interface, which is more convenient and easier. The selection interface of Cheat on NDS can show English, Simplied Chinese,Traditional Chinese and Japanese, convenient for view.
　　
(6). Support to set the original start state before enter the game, and also support to start to quit Cheat anytime while in the game. Default use L+R+START: Start Cheat, L+R+SELECT: Quit Cheat.
　
(7).Cheat start hotkey supports free defination. Select it in the setting of PC end software, but be attention to avoid the confict with soft-reset key and other hotkeys.
　
(8).Cheat data of DSLink adopt the prevail CHT format(EmuCheat), Cheat data sufficient, and conveniet to add the new game's Cheat. Number of Cheat data files of current version are updated to 282.
　　
(9).Cheat data supports EmuCheat's random address format, compress format, more powerful function.
　
(10).NDS Cheat interface supports key-press sound effect, set to start or close in the system.ini of TF card, the default setting of it is close.
　
(11).NDS Cheat interface supports personal setting, such as changing the background picture.

Note:
　　
(1). Although Cheat function can lock hundreds of address one time, the quantity of Cheat selected is limited. It will show the quantity of Cheat selected on the bottom screen title while select Cheat data on NDS. If the quantity surplus 0x800, it will be red color, means that limitation surplus. We will solve this limitation problem step by step for the later version.
　
(2).Some special game will occur the hanging problem while using Cheat function, when this happens, please quit the Cheat and rewrite the ROM into game.

(3).Thanks for the friends who develop the EmuCheat, WDPQU,YDMIS,VicenteFox...

　　2.Support to show wheather the game supports Cheat or soft-reset function on the file list. This function will also be selected to start or close, which can be setted in the system.ini of the TF card. Support to change this sign icon, which format is 24 bit may of 16x16. Support the icon background to be transparent, file names of which are icon_cheat.bmp and icon_reset.bmp in the Skin folder of TF card.

　　　　　　　　　　
3. Solve the problem of 0876 that it can not run while in white screen.
　
4.Solve the saver problem of 0928.
　
5. Solve the black screen problem of 0856.
　
6.Solve the problem that error occurs sometimes when automatically add the number of ROM.
　
7. Solve the problem that sometimes interface is hanging when open the software.
　
8.Solve the error in ROM processing model2.
　
9.Game Chinese and English name library is updated to : NDS:1000. which is developed by Aiying.

Simplified English game name library:

DSLink software game name library kernel ...