The new main character is also a girl. Probably...
After recent rumours of a new DS Castlevania, Konami have finally announced what we all already knew; A new DS will be making its way to the DS by the end of the year. Titled Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia, the game will introduce the new Glyph attack system. What that actually means is a complete mystery for now, but from the sounds of things it will involve combining something to do special attacks, with over 100 different possible combinations.
Order of Ecclesia will also include far more outdoor environments, ranging from Forests to Oceans, as well as the traditional areas of Dracula's castle. As you can expect the game will also include the usual insanely large weapons, and legions of dead/undead/living creatures for you to destroy, and the team seems to have gone back to the more traditional Castlevania artstyle for the character designs.
I just thought I'd bring this to the attention of anyone on Warehouse8 who doesn't yet know what the 2008 Game of the Year will be. In the words of the press release, it's "an all-out battle to protect 50 Cent’s assets". I present to you, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand.
It's been rumoured from the day the bad news was broken, but Codemasters have now confirmed that they have with immediate effect acquired SEGA Racing Studio which was announced to be closing a couple of weeks ago.
Codemasters are calling the move one that will "accelerate growth for Codemasters Studios." The historic but recently lacklustre UK company has a history in racing simulations with the Colin McRae and TOCA series, and are heavily pushing the upcoming middle-of-the-road Race Driver: GRID.
After several weeks of extreme indifference on my part, some releases I can actually be bothered to cover. Grand Theft Auto IV is out Tuesday next week. I can't actually remember the last high profile game that was TOO IMPORTANT for Friday [Apart from Halo 3... thanks Graeme]. Etailers are allowed to post on the Monday and no earlier, but they'll no doubt be extremely eager to 'allocate' and charge your card before you can cancel and break into Argos on Saturday night.
But that's not all, you might be looking forward to Wii Fit...
And there's plenty of DS shovelware as usual. Apparently many the DS bandwagon-jumpers are loosing shed loads as retailers simply don't bother stocking a lot of the crap due to lack of shelf space and lack of interest. I've even seen it described this week as a "High-risk Market". In other gripping DS retail news, last week's The World Ends With You seems to have had distribution problems with a lot of places not even having it yet. So that may as well be out this week as well. I've played it and think you'll love it... if you're a self-professed 'scene kid'.
Some of you will remember a bizarre PC game called Pathologic which I and a few others on here delved briefly into a while back. It was an extremely ambitious, interesting and unique high-concept Russian arthouse game, sadly put together without the necessary resources to make it more approachable in a way that one would a normal game. Read more about it here.
Well, the developers of that game, Ice-Pick Lodge, are it seems very close to releasing their second game. Tension is another conglomeration of genres, some kind of surreal action adventure with... dating elements... in which you draw symbols with coloured stuff to make stuff happen, under constant resource scarcity (a big parallel with Pathologic).
It's out in Russian this month, and from what I can tell is due to be released in English at some point, so I'll be keeping an eye on it. For now, here's a selection of information and images and videos which will not increase your understanding of the game very much...
