The guys over at Mad Catz kindly extended us an invite to go head down to Super vs Battle 2010 and interview Daigo Uemara, Super Street Fighter IV World Champion and key member of ‘Team Mad Catz’. As a fighting game fan myself, I could hardly pass up this opporunity, and so headed down to see what was going on at what is now the UK’s largest fighting game tournament.

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We were on the E3 floor this year checking out Ignition Entertainment and Zombie Studios’ Blacklight: Tango Down, and managed to spend some time talking to the game’s lead level designer, Michael Schorr, who was gracious enough to take a moment out of his time time to answer some of our questions.

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No More Heroes 2 will soon be released in Europe (way to drag it out Rising Star Games!). The first No More Heroes was a very unique title offering up some hard hitting social satire as well as taking a bulldozer to the fourth wall. But don’t expect a third installation any time soon.

In an interview with Cubed3, Suda51 confirmed that Travis’ story was completed in No More Heroes 2. Yet we might see Travis again sometime.

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While being interviewed at GDC 2010 regarding Final Fantasy XIII, Motomu Toriyama shared some interesting facts about the future of the Final Fantasy series.

What may be the most interesting piece of the interview was when Toriyama was asked which Final Fantasy game he would like to remake.

“That would be Final Fantasy VII! If we had the manpower and the time to work on a project, if we were to remake Final Fantasy VII with the quality of Final Fantasy XIII it would become a tremendous project. If we can get the number of people we need by all means that would be the one I would really want to remake.”

As if anybody expected any other answer.

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During an interview with Kotaku, Yoshio Sakamoto, the co-creator of the Metroid series, shared some good news for Metroid fans. Sakamoto’s biggest and probably most important claims about Metroid: Other M is that even though Team Ninja (known for sexing up games to the point that you don’t care about the plot as long as you see more blood and boobies) is developing the game, they’re keeping the game canon with the rest of the series.

So not only is Metroid: Other M going to be completely canon with the aid of Sakamoto, but that Other M will tie together several loose ends from past Metroid titles.

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In a recent interview with Jason Green of Black Rock Studios, we learn some new details about Disney Interactive’s upcoming title Split/Second.

One of the biggest concerns with Split/Second is that the game will get boring quickly. From what we already know about the title, the premise is to race other cars and blow things up. Which, right there, is a pretty solid concept as it is. However, it does raise the question “How many times can you blow the same things up before you get bored?” Check out Jason’s answers to these important questions after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

“And as soon as you see that you think: ‘Oh my God. What a talentless bastard I really am.’”

What’s Molyneux talking about? Well, an interview at CVG showed the Lionhead boss that more than half of the people who played Fable II used and understood less than half the features of the game.

“How can I have made a game in which people actually understood less than half of its mechanics? It’s like making a film that makes people think: ‘It looks quite cool. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but it seems quite cool.’ You know, that’s just wrong,” he went on to say.

Last week at X10, Molyneux said that his announcements for upcoming game Fable III would “piss off” people.

Molyneux has managed to piss zero people off so far.

After the reveal of Microsoft’s Project Natal at E3 this year, a lot of gamers were sceptical to what sort of games it would be compatible with. Driving games, rail shooters and point’n'click games seems like an obvious choice, but it was agreed upon by many that FPSs didn’t seem compatible.

Okay, so maybe it was only me, but Rare has their hopes up that this will change. According to Rare”s design director George Andreas, shooters do work with Project Natal. You just need to approach it differently.

“To take a shooter, as an example, you would just have to rethink the way a shooter works,” admitted Andreas in an interview with VideoGamer.

Shooters work the way they do at the moment because they’re based around the original Xbox 360 controller. You throw that away, you throw that interface away and here’s a completely different interface – now how do we create a shooter for this? Does it mean that you have to run, strafe, turn, throw grenades in the way that you’re used to? Maybe not. Maybe there’s another way of doing shooters.”

According to Andreas, Rare has been working with Natal for a while now and are learning new stuff about Natal every day. Hopefully they’ll be able to bring back their a-games after the abysmal Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts. Or maybe that was only me as well?

Sales of Wii consoles have been a bit lacking lately, with a 40.1 percent drop in overall sales. This totals a 60.6 percent drop in profits for the three months ending June 30.

Many gamers chart this up to the Wii being merely a fad, but according to Nintendo president Satoru Iwata, the games just aren’t good enough:

“Consistently, big time titles will be released in the marketplace for this hardware. When that stops, to reinvigorate the console, or to put it another way, I think the current decline in hardware sales is due to the fact that there aren’t many big titles (at the moment).”

There you have it, straight from the horse’s mouth.

While I’ve long been a staunch defender of the Wii, I’m actually inclined to agree with Mr. Iwata. Actual good Wii games are few and far apart.

Developers from the East and the West sides of the planet tend to be two negative sides to a magnet. Neither can really get a hold in the other’s market place, with few exceptions.

So how about this for a universe-breaker: Square-Enix is taking a traditionally Japanese franchise, completely changing the genre  to appeal to western audience, and going as far as working with a western developer to make sure the job is done right.

Short of a teaser trailer, and some basic details people have gotten from previous games in the Front Mission franchise, there wasn’t much going around. All we knew for sure was that this was supposed to be a much different game from previous entries, and western developers Double Helix would be working with Square-Enix on its creation.

We sent our man, Alex Donaldson, to get more information from E3, and he delivered in style. Below is his report on a small conference between himself and representatives from Square Enix and Double Helix.

Representing Square Enix is producer Shinji Hashimoto, and representing Double Helix is development director Jeremy Lee.

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Gametrailers was recently updated with a massive Heavy Rain gameplay blowout, providing gameplay details from one of the levels from the game, as well as two interviews with the game’s director David Cage. The gameplay video introduces one of Heavy Rain’s four main characters, Norman Jayden, an FBI agent investigating the origami killer.

Just like Quantic Dream’s previous title Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy to you Yanks), the emphasis of Heavy Rain is on story. According to Cage this game is “an adult experience based on interactive storytelling. You make the decisions and these decisions affect the story”. Cage goes on to explain that all characters will each have their own strengths, skills and weaknesses. One of Jayden’s strengths is his ARI glasses, or “Added Reality Interface”. This device analyses his environment in real time and reveals hidden clues like tire tracks, blood, washed away paint, etc.

Those who have played Fahrenheit will obviously be curious to know if Heavy Rain features the same amount of Quick Time Events. The answer is a bit of a maybe. Instead of an obvious scripted outcome of each sequence, you can choose what happens in each sequence. Unlike most QTEs in current gen games, the player is often given more than a single button prompt, all of which offer different outcomes. Cage promises you will always be in control of your character.

Interesting to note about Heavy Rain is how it treats the deaths of its various characters: “In Heavy Rain we wanted to get rid of that, because it goes against the idea of interractive storytelling,” says Cage in an interview with GT, “A story is something that cannot go back”. In Heavy Rain the story will continue in spite of a character dying, and when a character does die it’s never because you did something wrong. It’s because you put that character in a death-only situation.

The videos are not pre-rendered, the game is currently in a playable Alpha-stage and will, according to Cage be on time.

Move over hardcore gamers, because the Wii has been given official approval by the godfather of video games; Nolan Bushnell.

Bushnell, known for developing the arcade hit Pong (based on Ralph Baer’s “Ping Pong” for the Magnavox Odyssey) and founding Atari in 1972, said in an interview with Kikizo that he is a big fan of the Nintendo Wii.

“I’m a big believer in the Wii. I love the physicality of the Wii controller, and how you can get the feeling of throwing a bowling ball or swinging a golf club. Those are the kinds of games I really like,” he said.

“I would be playing first-person shooters with my kid, except that those are games in which you have to have such fast circuits. My kids just whack me, so it’s no fun – I hate to lose. I like games where you can use stealth and guile.

“As you get older, it’s like the difference between playing squash and racketball. Squash is an older man’s game, because if you’re stealthy and wily, you can beat a better-co-ordinated and stronger, younger person.”

Since video games first arrived, they have always been associated as a guy’s medium. New technology in general, coming out from the computer industry, has mostly been a guy’s thing, as guys have always loved working with their hands, getting them dirty in the process.

Enter the computer age, and the same guys went from working on cars and machines, to building computers. In fact, one of the first computer games, Spacewar, came to be when creator Steve Russell experimented with computer equipment he already had in his lab at M.I.T.

When we fast forward a couple of years, we find that 43% of all gamers are, in fact, women. There are also more female gamers over 18, than there are male gamers under 18. The stigma that only 15 year old boys sitting in their bedroom all day play video games isn’t the case anymore… if it were ever the case to begin with.

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In an interview with Kikizo, Kevin O’Hara of SOE announced that the MMO Shooter The Agency will not use a monthly subscription payment model.

He isn’t sure of the exact way the game will bring in revenue but it sounds like it might be a combination of micro-transactions such as premium items and companies paying for in-game advertisements, which are not all bad if they feel part of the games setting.

“We’re acutely aware that shooter players are not used to paying monthly fees, so I doubt we’ll go for an outright $15 a month … So we’re checking out Free Realms to see how they’re going to do with their micro-transactions, and we might incorporate some of that. We’ll definitely have some ad revenue models.”

For the entire interveiw with Seniro World Designer of The Agency, click here.

Recently, a member of the Gaming Vault forums brought up a significant topic: what’s going to happen with the games industry in today’s financial crisis?

Shigeru Miyamoto, known to most as the “godfather of gaming”, told Channel 4 news that he believes the games industry will live through the crisis.

“We need to eat in order to live – that’s our first priority – but entertainment and the enrichment of our souls must come in second place.”

“Nintendo’s mission is to take advantage of improving cheaper technology to create reasonable and affordable entertainment. It’s very good value,” the designer said.

You can find the full interview at the link below.

Miyamoto Channel 4 interview