Impatient with the slow trickle of titles for the Wii’s Virtual Console service? Perhaps you’re philosophically-opposed to purchasing a downloadable game when you already own the original cartridge. There’s a brand-new product on the market to set your troubled mind at ease. It’s called the FC Twin, and it contains full chipsets for both the NES and the SNES. With one console of still-dubious legality (the claim is that since Nintendo’s patents on the two systems have expired, there’s nothing wrong with the FC Twin’s use of materials) you can play all your old collection of titles for Nintendo’s machines. More details are sure to surface, possibly along side angry letters.
Armchair Empire has a wonderful original piece up right now that remembers fondly Hideo Kojima’s Sega CD title Snatcher. It’s always a fun challenge to deconstruct Kojima’s pop-culture influences, and the Empire has a fairly comprehensive (and occasionally obscure) list of those materials which informed Snatcher. Really, I’m just posting this because I hold out hope that Kojima’s secretive Project S is a return to the Snatcher fiction.
Providing me a smooth link between paragraphs, Kojima Productions has released a nice trailer for their DS title Lunar Knights, which will be available this week. IGN has the footage here. It has a good style to it; hopefully it’ll catch a little more interest than Boktai did.
Oh, you lucky UK gamers. You get the PS3 soon, and an outrageous price and miniscule supply; but wait! there’s more good news. Multimedia retailer HMV is making available pre-orders for the console, reports GamesIndustry.biz, but in order to secure your piece of Sony’s pie you also have to commit to purchasing a PSP bundle, bringing your total damage to 675 GBP. That’s like eight hundred million pesos. What if you already own a PSP? You could sell it at a loss and put the earnings toward purchasing this fantastic deal. It’ll be fun, kinda like a low-level emulation of Sony’s business practices. This bundle is limited to 5,000, and other pre-orders will be taken afterward, but placed below those with the deeper pockets in priority.
Good news, everyone! Nokia’s N-Gage isn’t dead, yet! Joystiq is reporting that Nokia is announcing an expected September release date for the phone/handheld/brick. Don’t scoff yet! It’s different this time around. This time not only is Nokia tacitly competing against Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s DS, but also having to face down Apple’s iPhone in the same consumer mindspace. Sometimes it’s fun to cheer for the underdog, but they react so much better when you laugh at them. EA and Gameloft are the only two developers currently confirmed to provide content for the Little Handheld That Couldn’t.
Konami’s Gamer’s Day has come and gone, with one notable title absent from their happy list of 2007 releases. Where’s Silent Hill: Origins? Rumors (and confirmations) of troubled development have snuck around the usual channels, and this seems to confirm that if the game isn’t canceled then it is at least severely delayed. I was really looking forward to playing a trucker stranded in the foggy little town. Where former Silent Hill protagonists Harry and James were largely clueless, I was hoping Origins’ protagonist would just beat the hell out of everything with a tire iron — preferably before the expository dialogue sequences. "Eat lug socket! Wait— What was that about a cult?"
Let’s finish things off with a little slate of things that you probably can’t buy yet but should be able to soon.
Cross Platform:
Winning Eleven: Pro Evolution Soccer 2007 (PS2, DS, PSP, 360)
PC:
The Sims: Life Stories
War Rock
Sam & Max: Episode 3 – The Mole, the Mob, and the Meatball
UFO: Afterlight
PS2:
AR Tonelico: Melody of Elemia
Romance of the Three Kingdoms XI
MVP 07 NCAA Baseball
DS:
Diddy Kong Racing
Lunar Knights
PSP:
Capcom Puzzle World
GBA:
Final Fantasy VI Advance