PS3 selling like hotcakes, outselling Wii, 360 globally

In a long-awaited turn of events at this year’s GamesCom, the company behind Playstation announced it’s new form factor for the Playstation 3, and with it came a new, much cheaper, €299 price tag.

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An Interview with Ryota Niitsuma: Producer of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom

So back at Gamescom Maikel and I got the exclusive opportunity to have an interview with the producer of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom Ryota Niitsuma, as well as Mao Sugiyama who translated for us and provided us with information regarding the game. We just have to say right now, this interview was awesome. Great experience unlike any we’ve had before, and was a lot of fun. Read more

Engine Software at Gamescom

Engine software is a small game development company from a city in the eastern side of the Netherlands called Doetinchem. They pride themselves in being the oldest game development company in the Netherlands, having been founded in 1995.

The company began as a partial developer for other companies and projects, and as they constantly produced quality and performed well, they quickly gained a reputation of being a good, reliable company. Because of this, they were finally able to take on complete projects on their own, rather than only taking part in a piece of the development. This day and age, they are very well established, and are working on getting some new IPs to work on using their own technology. At the moment they’ve worked on over 80-90 commercial titles.

Engine Software is known for making portable console games, and more recently the DS to be precise. They have been known in the past to make many titles based on existing licenses and franchises, such as Spongebob Squarepants, Wolverine and Barbie (talk about diverse..). The in-house development team consists of roughly 25 employees, and they typically work in teams of 5 or 6 on a project, meaning they usually have about 5 different projects running at a time.

Engine Software has developed an interesting platformer engine for the DS, and they have had a lot of practice using it; their platformers on the DS are top-notch.

Though they work mostly in license titles and franchises, from what we saw, they mentioned that they have been trying for quite some time now to have brainstorming sessions twice a month to come up with new IP to develop; so they are planning on getting their own projects and concepts running sometime soon, and considering the level of quality they seem to produce, we look forward to what they come up with. Perhaps an interesting IP to use with their platforming engine?

If you want to know more about the games Engine Software has recently released (or will release soon), feel free to read up on them

Just Sing!

MegaMindy

Aliens in the Attic

Gamescom: Ankama part 1

As far as I’m being told, at the E3 in 2004, Ankama had an extremely small stand in the very back of the expo. Located in France the company had 50 employees and were working on an MMORPG called Dofus. NiSuTe felt some kind of connection with the company and in the next five years we remained close contact. I am a Dofus player myself. Dofus keeps growing and growing and growing. But seeing this enormous stand of 200 square meters went beyond my wildest dreams. The company has almost 450 employees now and keeps getting bigger and bigger. Read more

Tatsunoko vs Capcom at Gamescom

Tatsunoko vs Capcom… Capcom’s been known for taking on some pretty big franchises, such as Marvel and SNK, but Tatsunoko? Now, I’m not one for anime, so excuse my ignorance when I heard of this title and had no clue who Capcom’s new challengers were. After some research, however, I realized that, since Tatsunoko is only the most influential anime producer in Japan, I should be ashamed of myself.

Tatsonoko and Capcom does sound like a match made in heaven for fighting games, and seeing the brilliant control and combo systems in the game, it’s not only a great matchup, but brilliant execution. Unlike the other Capcom vs games, this one is in full-fledged 3D, and with its cell shading, it looks and feels like the previous titles, only brought into the here-and-now.

The game has been released a while ago in Japan, but due to licensing issues it has taken a year to make it to the West. This downtime has also led to some improvements and additions to the original release of the game, and it is very likely that it will be re-released in Japan with the cool new content. Due to the licensing problems, one character from Tatsunoko, Hakushon Daimaō, had to be removed, but five new characters have been added from the original roster of the Japanese release.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom will feature online play, though we are uncertain of whether or not it will be region based. The creators speculate that this is the case, but because the Wifi is what’s keeping them busy on the title for another half year, they weren’t able to say with any certainty. There will be latency either way, as always, so be prepared for a slightly rough ride.

One thing that’s quite disappointing about the game is the fact that the roster consists of about 20 characters, in comparison to Marvel vs Capcom 2’s 56 character roster. There are however two extremely large mechanical characters to choose from, which really pack a punch. They aren’t as fun to play as the normal-sized combo-machines like Ryu, Ken the Eagle, and Megaman, but it provides a funny contrast to the core mechanics of the game; and Lost Planet 2 fan boys (Maikel) are definitely going to love fighting in a PTX-40A (the Super VS).

It is meant to be played with the arcade joystick peripheral, but unfortunately they are quite hard to come by. The control on the Wii remote can be  semi-random, so you’re definitely gonna want to play it with a Joystick. There are also no plans to package the game with this peripheral, so you’ll have to find one on Play-Asia, ebay or Amazon. Good luck.

Gamescom: judgement time

The crew of NiSuTe arrived a few days ago on Tuesday at the Gamescom just to find us up to our necks in work. Struggling to get to all developers in time since the place is huge and having the hardest time to even find the time to write about it, the whole team pushed the boundaries of overtime (working from 7:00 AM to 3:30AM, YES that is only three and a half hours of sleep and that for 5 days in a row!) It was almost getting the better of us with people falling asleep while writing, but this all meant nothing in the face of so many games to conquer. Blizzard, Capcom, and Sega were most definitely the best interview partners this event, with the bringing of great games for us to write about. All in all a great start for a first time event. We are looking forward to going next year.

What the crew thought about Gamescom: Read more

New DJ-game announced with Armin van Buuren

Foreign Media Games, a Dutch publisher, were so kind to give us a presentation of the alpha version of an upcoming game called “In the Mix”. World’s Best DJ Armin van Buuren incorporated with the publisher to create  this.

Business Development Manager Vincent van Diemen explained where the idea came from: “Real DJ’s sometimes use wiimotes during their shows to make their shows even better”.

Another game at the gamescom DJ-hero is of course a big concurrent for In the mix: “we know we have a big concurrent, but Dj-hero is more of a party game where you can improve yourself in. We don’t want to call In the mix this way, but it is a kind of “simulator”. It’s a pretty realistic environment where you actually have to please the audience by mixing, sampling and posing”

The game has a big career mode in which players can start from scratch and work their way up to the top. Real festivals where DJ’s perform were asked if they would participate in this game as part of the adventure. Surprisingly, a lot of these organisations rejected the offer. “of course it’s a problem of ego, the big party’s don’t want to come in the beginning of the game, because they would look smaller then they actually are, or they want to choose their own spot. It makes it hard to work together. At this point, 20 existing locations approved though”.

The career mode has 7 hours of music. “A lot of songs have 12 minutes of length. We want to prevent too long songs and decided to make each song 3 minutes.” The mode will have 30 gigs and 2 songs (or more) pet gig. In the game, your manager will book the gig, and the DJ decides which music he plays. “sometimes there are a lot more older women, or younger kids in a venue. You will actually have to choose your songs to optimalize the environment. It sounds harder then it seems, don’t worry, you will be helped in the game”. As the title says, a lot of music is made bij world greatest DJ Armin van Buuren. “We talked to a lot of DJ´s without immediatly take a desicion, but it was pretty clear that we would work together with Armin.”

Foreign Media Games also works together with Pioneer. “you can collect money after each gig to buy new equipment. We use actual pioneer equipment in the game”. The new equipment is really functional since you can equalise much better with better headphones. the crowd will also get more excited by better sound, speakers and light.

The interaction with the audience can also be improved by taking poses. The nunchuk and the wiimote can be used to clap, beat or make cool poses. If you do it at the right time, you will build up the excitement and you will get more points.

The game also has a tutorial mode for starters. A party mode is also available where you can actually sit down on the couch and have fun with your friends. Van Diemen: “It’s not multiplayer. it’s really hard to make multiplayer for these kind of games, but we are still trying to make it.” A studio mode is also available, where you can make, mix and save your own songs.

We were really curious if the Wii Motion Plus will be used in the game. “We have it in mind to use, but it’s not priority. If we can add that quick, and if it’s actually useful, we might consider it”

Development for In the Mix started in the start of 2009 and is planned for release in March 2010. The game will be €50.

Hideo Kojima talks about an unmentioned title.

Hideo Kojima, the man behind the Metal Gear Solid series said a few words during Gamescom that Kojima Productions is working on a few unannounced titles, including one that is very close to his heart.

The game is not based on an existing series, but it’s a completely new title, further information is not available at this time.
Kojima said: “There is a new title that we have not yet announced, but this is one I wanted to make for a very long time. [...] When it comes to the other games, it could be something you always wanted. That’s possible, but it could also be something completely different”.

Kojima being Kojima, he is as cryptic as ever, the next Tokyo Game Show is likely going to be place for a more concrete announcement.

Gamescom: Sega wins award

Sega just won a prize for their game Mario & Sonic at the olympic wintergames; Best of family entertainment. NiSuTe Europe would like to congratulate Sega on this achievement!

The game is the follow up of the 2 year old prequel. The concept remained the same, the games are of course new. It’s possible to bobsled with your wii balance board and do more official olympic games.

There are also unique original games included called Dream games, which include snowball fights, snowboarding in mario kart style and much much more.

There is also a DS version of the game which do has an improvement. Sega stated: “The multiplayer mode is barely used in the prequel, so we didn’t want to keep the concept the same this time. We kept the multiplayer but improved the singleplayer with a story mode”

Prison Break Videogame announced at Gamescom

The new prison break video game was announced today at the Deep Silver press presentation at the Cologne Gamescom 09. At first we had been teased with the info that an unannounced game would be shown. This game turned out to be a full-fledged Prison Break video game that ties into the first season of the popular TV series!

Our first impression was a good one, as the whole thing looked very nice graphically. The only real thing that stood out to us on the negative side were the body and facial animations, which needed some work, but with a planned release in Q1 or 2 of 2010, there is plenty of time left to get that sorted out and put a very interesting title on shelves for fans of the TV series. Read more

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