You may have already heard about this and some of the other items to come out of the Destination PlayStation event, but Konami decided that they still needed to clear the air, and sent out a press release to reaffirm a few things about the Metal Gear Solid 4 release.
For starters, it’s set to arrive stateside (and the rest of the world) on Thursday, June 12th. Other than that, the game will include the highly anticipated Metal Gear Online “starter pack,” for 16-player online battles, and an added bonus for those of you who show Konami a little initiative via some preorder love: the Metal Gear Saga 2.0 DVD.
Hardcore and casual fans alike should enjoy the 20th anniversary retrospective that the disk includes, but we all know it’s the secret code for getting in on the Metal Gear Online beta test for this April that everyone’s really after. Still thinking about holding off on that PlayStation 3 purchase? It has to be getting pretty uncomfortable for you, by now.
Press release, after the jump:
Here’s a rare treat: NPD have released some sales charts for the PC games market, which list the platform’s 20 top-selling games for January. Of course, this doesn’t count things like digital delivery, but a compromised chart’s better than no chart at all, amiright?
1. World Of Warcraft
2. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
4. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
5. The Sims 2 Deluxe
6. Diner Dash
7. 15000 Games
8. The Sim City 4 Deluxe
9. The Sims 2 Teen Style Stuff
10. Crysis
11. The Sims 2 Bon Voyage
12. Half Life 2: Episode 2 The Orange Box
13. Battlefield 2
14. Warcraft III Battle Chest
15. Pirates Of The Burning Sea
16. Rock Tour Tycoon
17. Sim City 5: Societies
18. The Sims 2 Seasons
19. Age Of Empires III
20. Age Of Empires III: Asian Dynasties
Look at that Warcraft III Battle Chest go! For all the billions WoW must have raked in by now, Blizzard must also have made a tidy profit on people acquainting themselvs with the series’ RTS heritage.
The Top 20 Best Selling PC Games of January [IGN]
From guardian.co.uk:
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We speak to the developers behind Microsoft’s first batch of freely available community-developed Xbox 360 games. It’s the revenge of bedroom coding!
Meet ‘Walaber’, developer of JellyCar, Brian Cable, responsible for Proximity HD, James Silva of The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai fame and Jeff Pobst and Michael Austin of Hidden Path Entertainment, creators of Culture.
What sort of technical restrictions are placed on XNA developers? Are there things you’d like to have done that the dev platform won’t allow?
* Walaber: Well, the choice to go with C# brings with it some performance issues (particularly on the Xbox 360), which required me to do more optimization of my code than I would have initially expected, considering that the Xbox 360 is so powerful. Hopefully future versions of XNA will improve some of these performance issues.
* Brian: From what I hear, XNA is not quite as powerful as a graphics engine developed internally, but I’m just one person, not a company, and even if I spent several years perfecting a graphics engine the industry and XNA itself will likely have leaped ahead of me anyway, and I’d constantly be playing catch-up with my engine and not focusing on actually making games, which is much more fun and interesting to me anyway.
Also there’s no achievements, leaderboard support, or the camera support, and I don’t think you have full access to Xbox LIVE multiplayer either, but I haven’t looked too much into that yet. Achievements are understandable, though, or else you’d have everyone spamming five second non-games and releasing them to the service giving whoever played them max achievements instantly anyway. But of course, I would like access to all of these features, which is why I would love to someday release the game through XBLA.
* James: C# does slightly underperform versus native code. Personally, I’d rather be coding in C#, because I’m a rotten C++ coder. If I were in charge of things, I would market XNA with the tagline “XNA: Giving Hope to Rotten Coders.”
* Michael: There are some features (pointers, etc) turned off for security reasons, and while managed code can be convenient to use, it does run more slowly. For instance, every time you access a variable in an array, C# has to validate the index. In C++ there are no handrails, so you can shoot yourself in the foot, but it’s generally faster. The nice thing is that more and more heavy lifting is done by the GPU, and so the impact of using a managed language is less than it has been in the past.
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Full Story: guardian.co.uk(1) | guardian.co.uk(2)
Two new PlayStation 3 bundles are headed to European gamers, one containing Gran Turismo 5: Prologue and the other including Blu-Ray copies of Casino Royale, 300 and Spider-Man 3.
Both bundles will feature the system’s 40GB version, a single SIXAXIS controller and will retail for €399 ($601).
The Gran Turismo bundle is slated to hit European stores on Mar. 28, while the movie bundle is set for a Mar. 19 release.
So far it’s still unknown as to whether Europe will also receive the recently announced Metal Gear Solid 4 bundle that will reach U.S. retailers on June 12 and include an 80GB PS3, a Dual Shock 3 rumble-enhanced controller and a copy of the latest Metal Gear Solid.
New European PlayStation 3 Bundles Revealed [Gamasutra]
Most hardcore Diablo fans have accepted that the titanic success of World of Warcraft means there will likely never be a Diablo 3, but we have tried to sate our addiction with Diablo-clones. Titan Quest was one of these and was in fact fairly well received, earning positive reviews from multiple websites. Iron Lore Entertainment has posted an official statement on their homepage, which is excerpted below:
It is with great regret that we must announce that as of close of business Tuesday, February 19, 2008 Iron Lore Entertainment has ceased active game development. Several unrelated events occurred which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project.
We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who has helped us in the last seven years – our team who moved mountains to create such great games, our publisher THQ who has been a great partner through three product development cycles, and most of all our customers and fans. We owe all of the success we’ve had to you, and our greatest satisfaction has come from creating games that have given enjoyment to the community.
Oh well. Now Diablo addicts will have to turn to Mythos for their hack and slashing needs, which is not so bad since its pretty much the spiritual sequel to Diablo anyway as far as the feel of play goes. Farewell Iron Lore, we hardly knew ye.
[Via Eurogamer]
Rejoice! The Wii FreeLoader has become reality, bringing region-free gaming to Nintendo’s great white hope. Similar to its GameCube predecessor, the Wii version of the FreeLoader lets gamers enjoy worldwide titles, regardless of what region for which they were intended. European and Australian gamers may benefit the most, especially if that rumor that Super Smash Bros. Brawl doesn’t ship to PAL gamers until fall has any merit, but ex-pats and import enthusiasts may want to snap up a copy just in case.
The Wii version of FreeLoader is only £9.99 (about $20 US), a decent price for gamers looking to avoid modding their consoles. It is, of course, 100% unofficial, so buyer beware.
Wii FreeLoader [Codejunkies]
No, we’re not talking about your brother-in-law who is always hogging your Wii… we’re talking about the disc that allows you to play any game for the Nintendo Wii, or GameCube.
According to the Wii FreeLoader site at Code Junkies…
Wii FreeLoader is really easy to use. Simply insert your FreeLoader disc and load it in the usual way. When the drive stops, eject the Wii FreeLoader disc and insert the game, which then loads and plays just like it would on its own region of Wii. It’s as simple as that!
Wii FreeLoader is 100% unofficial, but as it requires no modifications to your console, it does not invalidate the warranty. As well as letting you play Wii games from all regions, Wii FreeLoader also works with imported GameCube games when played on your Wii. It won’t work in a GameCube console, though – for that, you need Freeloader for GameCube, also available from Codejunkies…
Those interested in the Wii FreeLoader disc, it will set you back £9.99.
From next-gen.bi:
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Seven years after the introduction of its first console, Microsoft is waging a new war with Xbox 360 - against itself. Phil Spencer, the general manager of Microsoft Game Studios Europe, believes the war can still be won.
Wondering just how big or small a part of Microsoft the division is? That total revenue of $5.53 billion was part of a $30.3 billion (£15.2 billion) total revenue in the same period, so some rough-as-they-come beer mat sums would tell you it’s about 18.25 per cent - a proportion that, even allowing for the varied products contained in the division, puts to rest the sneery idea that Microsoft can simply afford to throw money at the brand. And sure enough, the 360 has hit Microsoft’s business targets: in particular, Bill Gates’ E3 2006 prediction that the console would sell 10,000,000 units by the end of 2006 was surpassed by nearly half a million.
But think about the figures for a moment. If 1.5 million 360s were sold by the end of 2005, 10.4 million by the end of 2006, and 17.7 million by the end of 2007, then the Xbox 360 sold significantly fewer units in 2007 than it did in 2006. The bad news doesn’t stop there: 2007 saw its head start battered aside by the unstoppable Wii, with little chance of redress, and the PlayStation 3 reaching the 9.5 million unit mark worldwide. The only territory in which it outsold the PS3 was North America, and without the sales spike around Halo 3 things would have looked considerably worse.
It seems strange that this is the case. After all, with its obvious attributes and its late-2007 software lineup, why didn’t the Xbox 360 dominate the year, and the Christmas period in particular? Microsoft began 2007 with a huge unit lead, its biggest game properties due to arrive on the shelves, plus a significant marketing spend, and in the event managed to sell less hardware than the previous year.
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Full Story: next-gen.bi (4 pages)
Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment recently announced that it has ceased “active game development.”
A posting on the game’s web site cited “several unrelated events occurred which resulted in Iron Lore being unable to secure funding for its next project” as the reason for the shutdown.
The post goes on to thank “everyone who has helped us in the last seven years,” in particular publisher THQ, “who has been a great partner through three product development cycles,” and of course “our customers and fans.”
Iron Lore is actively pursuing recruitment opportunities for its staff, as well as licensing opportunities for its “powerful and flexible engine and tool set.”
ILE Closes [Iron Lore]
The Podcastle, Destructoid’s one and only Euro-flavored podcast, is recording in just over an hour. We’d have had this post up way sooner, but I was so busy masturbating and crying that I forgot. Tonight it will be myself, Atheistium, Wardrox and some guy called Wilbo. Wilbo sounds like a tramp’s name, so I am assuming he’ll just drink Special Brew and flash his knob at passing schoolchildren before being moved on by the council.
According to Wardrox, who now tells me what to think and feel and sometimes has to wash me, we’ll be discussing importing and piracy. The piracy bit was my idea. As ever, we hunger for your discussion input and question. Although we’re recording in an hour, we’ll be checking out reader input during the break, so you still have a good amount of time. Hop to it!