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While that little con known as PAX is going on, there’s not such a huge influx of news– but we’ll try our darndest to make things interesting. Here’s the last Weekly News Roundup of August 2011!
Resident Evil: Revelations, Wii Kirby Dated
Rumors of Wii’s and 3DS’s respective death have been greatly exaggerrated as Nintendo and Capcom have dated two of their more anticipated offerings. Capcom’s Resident Evil: Revelations, the 3DS game revolving around series mainstays Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine that doesn’t involve any mercenary work, has been dated for early 2012, while the game formerly known as Kirby Wii has been renamed to Kirby’s Return to Dream Land, and dated for October 24, 2011. That latter game will be playable with Kirby Mass Effect Attack at PAX, along with a bunch of other games that should make any Nintendo fan happy. Here’s the list:
Don’t worry, Chris fans– he’s still buff as all get out.
Nintendo 3DS
Super Mario 3D Land
Mario Kart 7
Kid Icarus: Uprising
Star Fox 64 3D
The Legend of Zelda™: Ocarina of Time™ 3D
Pokédex 3D
Shinobi™ by SEGA®
Sonic Generations by SEGAWii
The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword
Kirby’s Return to Dream Land
Rhythm Heaven™ (name not final)
Fortune StreetNintendo DS
Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 2
Kirby Mass Attack
Source: Nintendo
iam8bit Heralded by Gamers, Adult Swim Alike
Maybe you’ve heard of a little something called iam8bit— it’s a company/boutique/publisher/lots of other things that’s managed to hodgepodge with everybody from Conan O’Brien to Microsoft, designing some awesome art and keeping true to their gamer/nerd roots while it’s at it. iam8bit recently produced an exhibit called SUPER iam8bit, at a gallery in downtown Los Angeles. Even if you don’t get a chance to go, though, there’s plenty of art available online, not the least of which are lovingly exulted in articles like this one from the folks at Adult Swim, who interviewed iam8bit Productions and discussed their art. Ahrens in particular mentions that “the graphics [of old games] were so bad that the artists kind of need their imaginations to fill in the missing pieces.” (We suppose that explains deviantart’s existence.)
MK Kalamari, by Jose Emroca Flores.
This kind of video game-inspired art has recently really come into vogue, which isn’t too surprising considering that the people who once played NES games back when they were modern have all grown up. Artists like Maré Odomo or José-Luis Olivares have made everything from comics to t-shirts, and the gaming populace just snaps it up– for good reason. While the video game art debate rages on (for better or for worse), there’s one thing for sure: it can certainly produce art.
Source: iam8bit, Adult Swim
RuneScape to Hit Consoles After Cross-Console Dilemma
So RuneScape— you know, that browser-based MMORPG everybody and their mothers played back in 2001– might just hit consoles soon enough, though this isn’t necessarily news. Considering multitudes of players still go online to RuneScape-dot-com every day, the game had to expand outside of the PC eventually. But Mark Gerhard, CEO of Jagex, the company who wants to ship RuneScape to Every Device Ever, is having some problems. He spoke recently at the Edinburgh Interactive Conference, noting that not only did console owners want to charge for RuneScape— something he called “crazy”– but they also refused to allow players to play across consoles. Gerhard’s reaction? These companies are “shooting [them]selves in the foot” by not letting players on Xbox 360 play RuneScape with players on Wii or iOS.
While playing across consoles isn’t impossible, especially looking at the success of games like Monday Night Combat or Final Fantasy XI that have made cross-console compatibility at least look like it’s worth working out, RuneScape is a special case considering that there’s no gaming advantage regarding playing on any of the consoles over another (so says Gerhard), unlike the obvious speed defects in FPS games like Monday Night Combat, which had to be carefully balanced. RuneScape‘s also an MMORPG, a genre which generally focuses on the idea of community and cooperation (even if it’s cooperation to kill other players). While Gerhard thinks that Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft will eventually liberalize their cross-console policies, there’s no sign of it yet.
RuneScape began as a Java browser game in 2001, and since then has been reincarnated as RuneScape 2 and RuneScape HD all the while keeping its structural roots. Since then it has garnered 10 million active accounts per month, and 156 million registered accounts. It is the most popular free MMORPG in the world, according to Guiness World Records.
Source: Develop
