Wii Gaming News

While some Hollywood film studios busy themselves with adaptations of games that no rational person would tell you have any Earthly business being adapted into a movie, it turns out that New Line Productions (now a division of Warner Bros.) optioned the rights to one game that makes a lot more sense: Heavy Rain.

Superannuation picked up on the filing for the option rights, but an intriguing fact to note is this filing was made back in 2006 and then, apparently, re-filed again in 2007 — so New Line has been the owner of adaptation rights to Heavy Rain for some years now.

Of course, this doesn’t mean they’ll ever actually exercise their option on the property, so this is far from a confirmation that a Heavy Rain film adaptation would ever be made. But the game has been met with strong critical praise, and if sales prove to be strong as well, it could certainly up the likelihood.

Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker is instituting a few intriguing new ideas for the MGS series, and according to recent tweets from Hideo Kojima (yes, Hideo Kojima is tweeting now), they may be the precursors to what could eventually be another new Metal Gear Solid game on a different platform.

“It’s not that PSP is the main platform for the future MGS series,” Kojima wrote (via Andriasang). “Peace Walker is a test to see what type of expansions are there if MGS is brought to a portable. We’re not just rising vertically with development on next generation systems, but also horizontally, trying to expand gameplay.”

So no, Kojima never out-and-out says it, but the implication is clearly that new ideas in Peace Walker may evolve into a new MGS possibly on current-gen hardware (or maybe they’ll end up in Metal Gear Solid: Rising, which we still no so very little about?). Among Peace Walker’s more intriguing new features is four-player co-op, where gamers can give each other various kinds of support by “synching” their characters together (check out our last preview for a more in-depth explanation).

During the latest episode of their “BlizzCast” podcast, StarCraft 2 producer Chris Sigaty revealed some good news for long-patient StarCraft fans: It’s still Blizzard’s intention to release StarCraft 2 in the first half of 2010…even if that means shortening the beta more than they originally planned.

“We were targeting three to five months for the beta, we’re really at a three month period of time for the beta at this point. We are still targeting the first half of this year… [for release],” Sigaty said during the podcast (via Shacknews). Their original time-span for the beta would have put the release of StarCraft 2 into the second half of the year at the earliest, but with three months (counting February, perhaps, as the first month), that would have it ending by around April, and leave May and June to institute any tweaks, balancing, or bug-fixing and have the game out on store shelves.

StarCraft 2, if it’s even humanly possible to recall, was first announced way the hell back in 2007. But hold tight, folks — it looks like the wait is indeed almost over. Or if you had $300 to burn for a beta key, it could be over right now. Just sayin’.

It’s coming out in 2010! Not necessarily! Yes it totally is! No, it so totally may not! Nintendo has certainly played with the hopes of fans over the last few months about whether their new Wii Zelda would actually release this year, and now Nintendo of America executive vice president Cammie Dunaway is the latest to very nearly confirm it will.

Speaking to Wired during the Nintendo Media Summit earlier this week, Dunaway seemed to suggest Zelda is indeed scheduled for release this year while touting Nintendo’s strong lineup for 2010. “If you compare the first half of 2010 with the first half of 2009, it’s night and day,” Dunaway said. “And from some of the things that [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has talked about, and that we will talk about at E3, like Zelda, you know that we’re going to have a good back half of the year, as well.”

Moreover, when Wired’s Chris Kohler — who evidently wagered Mario, Metroid, and Zelda would not all release in the same year — jokingly asked if he would owe Dunaway “a steak dinner” soon, her response was, “I think you do.”

It seems that Naughty Dog has truly arrived. With the massive success of Uncharted 2, the studio is moving to a “bigger, better kennel.”

“We’ve built out our new studio from a raw and open floorplan to a killer new studio that provides us with more flexibility in space, layout and adjusting to fluctuating staffing needs – not to mention there are some significant upgrades to help us keep developing cutting-edge, award-winning games,” a representative posted in the official blog.

Naughty Dog has included a few shots of the new space over on Flickr. It’s still pretty rough, but no doubt they’ll whip the new place into shape in short order.

Dead or Alive: Paradise is not softcore pornography or degrading to women, director Yoshinori Ueda says, responding to criticism of the upcoming PSP game. Instead, it’s all about “beautiful women.”

“From our perspective, we’re trying to make beautiful women, that has been the focus – we want our characters to be beautiful. The DOA characters are strong and that they look the way they do is based on trying to bring out the beauty of women,” Ueda told Eurogamer.

“We’re certainly not trying to degrade women. They have beautiful bodies. We’re trying to show off the beauty of their bodies but we’re not trying to be degrading about it – we’re trying to show that they are beautiful characters.”

The first details for NCAA Football 11 have emerged, along with an early screenshot. Seems like EA Sports is focusing on graphics this time around, because many of those details are cosmetic.

ESPN has the game’s first image, which you can see above. New visual details include dynamic helmet numbers, different sleeve lengths, hand warmers, knee braces and on-field officials who will jump out of the way of the action. In addition, if a team switches conferences, the logo on the field will change.

Small details, to be sure, but every little bit helps when it comes to presentation. As for the gameplay, EA has tweaked the gang tackling and reintroduced formation substitutions.

If you haven’t tried out Dragon Age: Origins yet, Electronic Arts has a nice new deal running at their official store. The publisher has launched a pre-order incentive for the upcoming expansion, offering deep cuts on the full game in exchange for plunking down your digital dollars early.

Pre-ordering the PC version of Dragon Age: Awakening will get you 40 percent off on Origins. That’s about $70.00 for the whole package.

Dragon Age Awakening is a full-scale expansion featuring five new characters, new dungeons and a new origin story. You can read our full preview here.

The Assassin’s Creed II PC DRM sparked controversy last week when it was revealed that a constant connection to the Ubisoft servers are required to play. Ubisoft is forging ahead though, with a representative confirming that the system will be present in Splinter Cell: Conviction as well.

The representative told PC Gamer, “It’s hard for us to say, yes, from now until the day that we all die all of our games are going to include this, but most will.”

The system was also confirmed for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Silent Hunter 5: Battle of the Atlantic and the upcoming Ghost Recon sequel. Looks like we can expect to see this in new Ubisoft releases for the foreseeable future.

When I think of a video game featuring motion controls, sword movements always come to mind. And in my experience, Wii Sports Resort is the last game to utilize it well. Sadly, the sword-play only exists in mini-game form, and didn’t provide me with enough swinging satisfaction. But from what I experienced so far, Red Steel 2 fulfills that desire by making sword combat its primary focus. And mixing the gameplay with a first-person shooter seems to go hand-in-hand for this “Japanese Western.”

First and foremost, Red Steel 2 is a sequel only in name. It’s deprived from sharing any other relation to its predecessor — and for the better. As an exiled (and nameless) member of the Kusagari group, you return to town and find that nearly every original occupant is gone. All that’s left are your enemies, who call themselves “jackals.” As the story progresses, the protagonist is constantly acquiring new skills or enhancements. Specifically, I discovered new katana moves, and upgraded (or purchased) guns in order to match the opposition. Thanks to this, the action feels pretty fresh and demanding. And given the array of enemies (so far, I’ve seen rivals with pistols, katanas, armor, and large mallets), specific new moves are necessary to provide a fighting chance. It’s definitely harder to win if you spam the same moves — you can’t always fight these ever-evolving foes in the same way.