Konami’s E3 press conference was held yesterday, and we here at The Gaming Vault thought we’d give you a quick rundown of the biggest announcements.

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Konami’s David Cox posted via Twitter that the new Castlevania game, Lords of Shadow, won’t feature any specially rendered cutscenes–all the cutscenes will use the game’s engine and all the screenshots to have surfaced so far have been actual in-game footage.

The tweets were as follows:
All cut scenes are done using the games engine

Castlevania LOS is a CG free zone. Everything we have shown, including, the trailers is in-game and rendered using the game engine. Official!!

Sounds good, especially seeing how well the game is coming along.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow will be seeing the PS3 and Xbox 360 later this year.

Fans of the old school Castlevania games, like me, can start rubbing their hands with excitement. Destructoid has been kind enough to reveal that Hudson is bringing Castlevania: Rondo of Blood to Virtual Console. The game has been rated T by the ESRB so it should be making it’s way towards the Wii any time now.

Rondo of Blood is the tenth game in the series and was originally created for Japanese PCs. The game was ported to the PSP in 2007 as Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles.

Fun times. I hope the voice acting is as cheesy as in Symphony of the Night.

Those of us who are already excited about Castlevania: Lords of Shadow will most likely be doubly excited after witnessing the new trailer revealed at gamescom this week.

Developed by mercurysteam, in association with Kojima Productions, Castlevania is shaping up to be vastly different than the old school 2D side-scrollers, with ambitions of being the first actually good 3D Castlevania game.

Some parts of the trailer is footage we’ve already seen, but others reveal more combat footage, as well as various ways protagonist Gabriel can use the combat cross. There’s still no details on whether or not Gabriel is a Belmont, but the Belmont name is mentioned in the title, by a character voiced by Jason Isaacs. Could he be the one playing Dracula? Only time will tell.

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It’s been a while since we’ve seen a video game movie that didn’t flat out suck, so it’s time for yet another adaptation to be made.

The movie adaptation of the Castlevania franchise has been in the works for a while now, with Paul W.S. Anderson of Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil fame attached to write and direct, before settling on simply producing it. Since then the movie has been in development hell.

Now it seems the movie is ‘on’ so to speak, with James Wan, known for his work on the SAW franchise, hired to direct. Wan tells Bloody-Disgusting.com that he’ll be working on the script with a non-specified writer, but also mentions he’ll be giving a new spin on the franchise.

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The Konami press conference was naturally going to be an interesting one, simply due to the universal love for Hideo Kojima, and the hope that we would hear more about the previously announced Metal Gear Solid: Rising and Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. There was also hope that we would find out about the mysterious MASK project, which had unsurprisingly fell under the radar with the Metal Gear hype machine chugging away.

The press conference started a bit late due to the number of press in attendance. People had spotted Kojima about so the general feeling was that it was to be a good conference. After a brief montage of what we were going to see today (which included stuff we had seen before, but also some new releases), the Executive Vice President of Konami came up on stage.

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During Konami’s press conference at E3, Hideo Kojima took the stage to talk about some of his upcoming games. Obviously Metal Gear Solid was a huge part of the update, but a few surprises were in store as well.

First off it seems Metal Gear Solid Rising isn’t going to be Xbox 360 exclusive as it was initially assumed. Kojima said Rising is for next-gen consoles, meaning 360, PC and PS3. MGS Peace Walker was also mentioned, but nothing new other than what we saw at Sony’s press conference. Kojima wrote the entire game himself and the MGS4 team is heavily involved in the creation of the PSP exclusive.

Metal Gear Solid Arcade was announced and is being built on the PS3 engine. The game will come with special 3D goggles and features an online component so gamers can compete across arcades. Seeing as arcades aren’t as big in the West as in Japan, it’ll be interesting to see if it will even make it to our neck of the world.

Finally, Hideo Kojima’s “mask game” was revealed, and I am definitely excited about this one. A debut trailer narrated by none other than Patrick Stewart showed off Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. The trailer was full of incredible fights, huge bosses and gothic locations. Lords of Shadow is a re-imagining that’s not connected to the other games in the franchise. LoS tells the story of Gabriel, voiced by Robert Carlyle, who’s looking for “revenge and retribution”. According to Kojima, Konami found that the world audience “demands bloodthirsty action with men that wield crucifix-whips”. Could this be one of the few good 3D Castlevania games?

Lords of Shadow is being released 2010 for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Joyous news indeed, Silent Hill fans. Konami has finally announed announced a European release date for the fifth instalment of the Silent Hill franchise, Silent Hill: Homecomiing Homecoming.

The title will be released in Europe on February 27th next year, for both Xbox 360 and PS3.

Hey, better late than never, right?

Konami also announced that Wii fighter Castlevania: Judgement will also be released in Europe on February 27th… but nobody really cares about that, right? If we try to pretend it doesn’t exist, maybe it’ll vanish out of existence.

We can only hope.

CVG, those awesome, awesome people have added a plethora of gameplay videos from the upcoming Castlevania: Judgement, a free roaming fighting game for the Nintendo Wii.

All to be found by clicking here

Details on this one are slimmer than a prom queen on a diet a week before her prom, but reliable sources have informed us that Konami has been showing off a teaser for a new Castlevania title at its Tokyo Game Show booth.

So what’s the big deal, you ask? The big deal is that this has nothing to do with the horrendous Wii fighting game that nobody wants to see released, and it won’t be another 2D Castlevania for the DS either (though that’s never a bad thing).

It’s a next-gen Castlevania, due for release on the PS3 and 360… at some point.

[UPDATE] Someone had to smartness to sneak a camera into the event and grab footage of the trailer for benefit of us fine folks on the internet.

If that’s not Alucard, I’ll eat my blood stained hat.

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