Hideo Kojima listen up: Sony has declared war on your beloved franchise! The company has announced that it expects Killzone 2 to match if not surpass the sales of Metal Gear Solid 4 when it ships next month.
A Sony spokesperson had this to say: “It would be a lie to say Sony has not invested heavily in Killzone 2 and each individual at Guerilla games has worked even harder to satisfy any expectations kept by the company and their loyal community. I do see the game breaking a barrier with a huge variety of groups and expect it to see sales as good as Metal Gear Solid 4 if not beyond it.”
Well, Sony has surely been hyping up the game for quite some time now, but it can be pointed out that the MGS franchise is a rather old one and its fanbase is much larger than that of Killzone, the first of which flopped.
Going by a release schedule from Sega’s European branch, it appears Gearbox’s Aliens: Colonial Marines will be released within the next three months. The game was originally set for release late last year, but was delayed to sometime this year.
The game was rumored to be cancelled amidst layoffs at the company, but Gearbox head honcho Randy Pitchford quickly shot it down. Sega has remained unusually quiet on the highly anticipated squad-based shooter that goes back to the formula of classic AvP games.
Sega and Gearbox are yet to confirm the release date.
While one can normally assume that we hopefully won’t be seeing any more of BioShock beyond the upcoming sequel, 2K Games president breaks all assumptions by suggesting that we could actually see up to five sequels, though he notes that the company is taking care to ensure it won’t “cash in” on the franchise.
“If we spin [BioShock] the right way and get the right twist of innovation, we can make six parts of it, as Star Wars did,” said 2K president Christoph Hartmann. “Look at Star Wars. It’s a fight between good and evil, just like BioShock.”
“But we have to be careful not to cash in,” he added. “Because [BioShock] is so story driven, the question obviously arises: how long can you do it without turning into The Matrix? The first Matrix was great, the second one was weird and the third one, you thought: ‘Who [making this] is on crack and who isn’t?’”
The second entry – Sea of Dreams – is due out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 later this year.
Confirming what is already known; EA today announced that a downloadable demo for Skate 2 will be available on Xbox Live tomorrow. What about PS3 gamers? The PlayStation Store won’t be getting until next Thursday, January 15.
The publisher promised the demo would offer a sample of the single-player portion of the game, as well as two online modes: Hall of Meat where players attempt to rack up the most injuries, and Spot Battle that focuses on scoring major points.
Skate 2 is due out in North America on January 21.
Shifting from its earlier long-term focus, Sony has stated that it is now emphasizing a short-term focus on turning the PS3 into a money-making machine following a holiday season at the bottom of the charts and mounting losses throughout the company.
“The most important thing for us as a company in the very short term is for us to start making money,” said SCE Europe president David Reeves. “Once we have alleviated that specific pressure, we can move forward at a rate of knots.”
The PS3 sold less than half the units of the Xbox 360 Microsoft sold in November. In fact, according to one survey, the original Xbox beat out the PS3 in terms of gaming hours.
In related news, Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg has gone on record to say that the company expects a price drop for the PS3 any day now.
“We absolutely expect the PS3 price drop to happen in the next couple of months,” he said in an interview to Edge. “We’re frankly surprised it’s taken this long… I would expect they’d have to move on price, sooner than later, for sure.”
You know what’s happening these days right gang? It’s CES and Macworld and we’re trying to find from the distance the best products to be released yet. As we said before, gaming-wise Logitech is a company to keep our eyes on. And it looks like other people are also monitoring Logitech’s performance. As a matter of fact Logitech won seven CES Innovation awards for excellence in design and engineering. The Logitech G13 won the Best of Electric Gaming award and the Harmony 1100 advanced universal remote won the Best of Home-Theater Accessories award. Wait a second there… Logitech has won seven awards last year at CES. And it looks like they just wanted to show them off this year too. You’ll find below the weird press release from Logitech. It starts telling us the company has won seven awards in 2008 and then it continues talking about 2009 CES awards. What do you think happened there with Logitech PR department? READ ON »
It shouldn’t be that surprising that everyone wants to be related with only the best gaming console sold last year. SanDisk for example has announced a new 2GB SD card made for the Wii and for those playing Rock Band on it. The card will cost just $13 and probably SanDisk will sell zillions starting this Spring. The SD will also be compatible with any other device that knows how to handle an SD card so go ahead and get one of Rock Band is your all time favorite game.
On a long plane ride with a dismal selection of in-flight movies nothing saves your sanity quite like a portable gaming system. Many travels flew by thanks to my brick-sized Gameboy as a child and now my daily commutes to work are made bearable by the tag-team duo of the DS and PSP. Unfortunately when traveling with friends and family it’s often a bit too antisocial to submerge oneself into a game while others page through a magazine or twiddle their thumbs.
When traveling with non-gamers it gets even more difficult, because on a trip with a fellow gamer you can often get some wireless action going on- navigational interference be damned. EA is giving you another option thanks to Hasbro’s Family Game Night line. The company is bringing the classic crossword game Scrabble to both the DS and the PSP. The games are planned to release in March for the USA and Canada and will of course feature some new gameplay modes to keep things interesting for seasoned veterans.
Get any group of avid gamers together and inevitably the conversation will turn towards favorite games of the past and present. Of course every now and then while most of the group is riffing on the merits of a particular title, one of the group will meekly bow their head and admit to never playing the title. One of the biggest multiplayer sensations when I was younger was Tribes 2. Sadly I never got to play the game, and last year Sierra shut down the dedicated servers for the game.
For anyone unfamiliar, Tribes 2 was released by Sierra in 2001 and was made free in 2004, although they stopped distributing CD keys for the game, making online play difficult. For anyone who sits in their basement at nights staring at a blank monitor and reminiscing over the game, there’s a bright shining hope rising. An online service is beginning called TribesNext. They’ve recreated the net code and are allowing gamers to use this service completely free of charge. The service has done away with cd keys and is currently in the open beta stage. Go here to get yourself back into the world of Tribes 2.
The Famitsu Marketing Data Service revealed some troubling news for the Japanese gaming industry. For the year 2008 in Japan, sales have dropped 23.5% since the year before. Furthermore, the year 2007 went down 15% from the year before. Software sales have gone down by 7.9%.
It is to be noted that Japan is currently in a recession, which can be blamed on the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Year by year, things are not going good for the Japanese market.
Read (Edge)
