News Show Notes from Episode 6!

1

Clip: Bioshock: Hunting The Big Daddy Gameplay
Every piece of new media I see for Bioshock makes the unbearable wait until August 21 seem even longer. In this clip, Content Producer Melissa Miller takes us through seven glorious minutes of Bioshock gameplay where we get to see the use of several different weapons and plasmids, Bioshock's instant genetic modification abilities. The highlight of the clip, as the title implies, is a battle with one of the old fashioned diving suit wearing Big Daddies.
The Big Daddy might certainly be scary, but the sight of that creepy little girl sucking juices out of a dead body with a giant hypodermic and then drinking them will haunt my dreams forever. Flynn De Marco

2

First HD South Park Episode Coming To XBLM
southparkanime.jpg
Chris Kohler over at Game|Life is reporting that the first South Park episode ever to be presented in HD will be an Xbox Live exclusive. Starting Tuesday, March 6, the episode, Good Times With Weapons, will be available on the Xbox Live Marketplace free of charge for the first two weeks. Then, from March 20 to April 3, Best Buy will be giving away free copies of the episode on HD-DVD with the purchase of an Xbox 360 or it's HD-DVD player.
In case you're like me and episode titles mean nothing to you, Good Times With Weapons is one where the boys acquire ninja weapons from the county fair. The bulk of the remainder of the episode is presented in letterbox format and animated in a great spoof of anime style. If you haven't seen it, I would highly suggest checking it out as it is (in my opinion anyway) one of the ten best South Park episodes ever made. You get ninja weapons, dead on anime style animation, Butters as Professor Chaos and Cartman's genitals. Who could ask for anything more? Flynn De Marco

3

New Heavenly Sword Footage On Last Mondays Heroes
Viewers of the NBC hit Heroes ("Like Any Parasite") will have one more reason to geek out, as brand new footage of the upcoming PLAYSTATION 3 game Heavenly Sword will be shown.
About 8 seconds of real-time footage will be shown of Ninja Theory's hack and slash action game, most of it focusing on the timed button pressing cinematic moments similar to Shenmue's quick time events or the boss battles in God of War. How's it look? From what I've seen of last night's early Canadian broadcast, pretty freakin' amazing. YouTube doesn't do it justice.

4

Fable 2's Big Thing: A Pet Dog
daritefeacherz - contributor
Published: 3 hours ago | Article | Xbox 360
Info Report
20
In an interview with Kotaku at at GDC 07, Peter Molyneux revealed some new details about Fable 2.

"I'm sitting in a small room with Peter Molyneux listening to him talk up Fable 2. There are, he tells me, three big things coming to the sequel to his role-playing game, but he only wants to talk about one of them today: Love.

Love, Molyneux says, comes in three general flavors in the game. There is the appreciation the wide world feels toward your character as he lives and fights in their world. There is the ability to make love and make babies. Yes, you can be both a man or a woman and if you're a woman, you can get pregnant. A first, he believes, for a main character in an RPG.

But the big thing, one of the biggest parts of Fable 2, will be the introduction of a dog to the game. Not just any dog, but your dog. The dog will be faithful to you and will have a deeply nuanced artificial intelligence so you won't actually control your dog at all. Instead your dog will act as a sort of living HUD. The game has no map, no other user interface on screen. Instead you will have to rely on the dog and what he sees and does.

You also will control the dog by your own actions. A great example. You come upon two bad guys and pull our your gun (yes, the game has guns) and the dogs knows automatically attack the closer targets."

5

Xbox 360 100 Percent Failure Rate
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And the crapped-out Xbox 360 frustrated consumer train continues! This time it's an employee at Texas-based Tek Republik, a full-service computer shop that also doubles as a gaming center. According to employee Chris_Tom:

Yes, every Xbox 360 I bought at launch is bricked with the 3 red flashing lights. Microsoft despite the widely reported policy of repairing hosed 360s for free that were manufactured in 2005 refuses to do so. That is pathetic. I have 4 hosed Xbox 360s sitting right here. I would gladly fix them if I could get an Xbox 360 motherboard from Foxconn. Believe me I would. Sorry, Microsoft wants to make even more money by forcing you to only be able to repair with them... Apparently only 4% of Xbox 360s have been faulty. My 100% rate must just be a statistical abberation beyond the mean. I doubt it. I've had statistics, and no other computer component I have ever owned has had that failure rate... This is a manufacturing failure of epic proportions. Perhaps one of the worst in history. This is right up their with the Atari ET game... I would prefer to just be able to buy a replacement board from Foxconn. Anyway, $140 a Xbox, half the cost of a core system to replace it. What a joke.

Just did a search around the Tek Republik's site, and they advertising having two Xbox 360s. If this is true, who's to blame: Microsoft or this dude's rotten luck? Brian Ashcraft


6

58.9% Of US Homes Don't Have Consoles
consolesunderTV.jpg Results from a recent Nielsen report show that 41.1% of American households have a games console nestled somewhere underneath a TV. Which means 58.9% of Americans don't.
I know, 41% is a big number, and it's getting bigger all the time (the stats are up from 39.1% in 2005 and 35.2% in 2004), but it's still less than half. That's a lot of homes without consoles, and a lot of people who don't play games. Around 150,000,000, in fact, if you go by Nielsen's figures that 148.4 million Americans have access to (note: not necessarily play) a console.
Some other findings from the report are after the clicky-clicky.
There were 4.4 million homes with a console connected to the internet at the time of the report, which being "Q4 2006" means the PS3 and Wii weren't taken into account. That number should double real soon. Access to a console jumps when you're an 18-34 year-old male: 2/3 of all guys in this age group have access to one. At any given minute of any given day, 1.6 million Americans are using a video games console.
So many numbers. Time for a lie down. Luke Plunkett


7


Rachet and Clank PS3 game image. WOW dood i must say












8



GDC07: Blue Dragon Lands In August, Lost Odyssey Holiday '07
LOST ODYSSEY WOOOOWe had a chance to sit down with Mistwalker's Hironobu Sakaguchi this morning to get an update on the current state of the man's two RPGs, Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.
Sakaguchi walked us through one of Blue Dragon's boss fights, a mainly hands-off experience, plus one of the three on-rails shooter segments. The Blue Dragon North American release looks like it will be happening this August, with three separate pieces of downloadable content, described as "huge", released over a three to four month time period after launch. English voices were in place, but players who prefer Japanese dialogue are in luck—we were told that the original voiceover work will remain intact as an option for the US release.
The Final Fantasy creater then moved on to his more Western tailored RPG Lost Odyssey, previously demoed at the Tokyo Game Show.
While Sakaguchi prefaced his non-interactive demo with a warning about the early state of the game's lighting, the Unreal Engine 3-powered game still looked gorgeous. According to Sakaguchi, Mistwalker is "working to produce a level of graphics greater than Gears of War." Are they successful? I'll stand by a firm "umm maybe?"
We were shown an extended real-time cutscene, one that involved the male lead, Kaim Argonar, and his female compatriot meeting with their newest partner who just happens to be a womanizing drunkard. The animation and lip-synching was mostly spot on in the early demo. Sakaguchi let us know that the game would be originally voiced and synched in English, with a Japanese dub or subtitle treatment to follow for Lost Odyssey's native release.
Beyond Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey and the upcoming Nintendo DS RTS title A.S.H. (Archaic Sealed Heat), Hironobu wouldn't say what else he was working on. Sadly, Sakaguchi declined to answer my request for a Rad Racer III. Michael McWhertor



9
SONY INFO!

We have to talk about Sonys HOME thingie. I have the info in my head :p

llink to video is in GameTrailers.

info is here in case i forget tho lol


As you read this Phil Harrison is standing in front of a packed auditorium at the Game Developers Conference unveiling what I think is a pretty damn cool new, free application for the Playstation 3.
Playstation Home is essentially a living world inside your console. It's probably a flawed analogy but think of it as Second Life meets the PS3.
The free service, which will go into beta this April and hit consoles this fall, will become a new menu item in the cross media bar.
When you select it you will be dropped into a virtual world peopled by life-like avatars. From what we saw during a press screening, customization of these avatars is incredibly flexible, allowing you to create something that looks as much like you as you would want.
Home starts you out in a central lobby. You use a virtual PSP in this world to access features, but can also just walk around. The main lobby we saw included dynamic advertising on billboards, games you could just walk up to and play, like bowling or pool and even a mini arcade that featured some cool little arcade titles.
You can communicate with others in the lobby by talking, typing, using motions or pre-written phrases.
After walking around inside this home lobby for a bit, Harrison jumped his avatar to his private apartment


9b

March 72007
GDC07: We Saw The Real Killzone Last Night
I WANT YOUR EXPECTATIONS ON THE GROUND, SOLDIER!Despite telling enthusiast press outlet IGN that "No, Killzone won't be GDC at all" in February, Sony did show Killzone last night. Following the official announcement of the PLAYSTATION Edge developer software�an RSX profiling tool named GCM Replay and a set of lightweight, highly optimized libraries�Phil fired up a new look at Killzone, one of the Sony Worldwide Studios games to benefit from Edge.
However, before he rolled film, he extended one caveat to the press. "I need to kind of couch this first. This is to show you the technology, not to show you the game. So please don't be thinking about the game too much, I just want you to be looking at the imagery and how we've constructed some of the scenes and how complex some of the scenes are."


9c



Clips: LittleBigPlanet in Gametrailers.com
This is the same level keynote attendees were shown during a live play session with Phil Harrison and the LittleBigPlanet team. Both real-time demonstrations we watched played out a little differently and the GDC keynote crowd exploded when the game was shown.
This is the biggest thing to come out of GDC07. Hyperbole? Yes, probably. Is the game worth it? Yes, probably. Michael McWhertor