A game offering some of the most unique course designs that I have ever seen is reportedly on it’s way to the XBox. IGN’s XBox site has a interview with the creators of the game and some info on Crazy Car Championship.
IGN Xbox: How will you support the game online once it’s been released? Will you offer new downloadable tracks and cars for example?
Rik Heywood (technical director): We’ll support downloadable tracks and game mods, and we’ll also be releasing dedicated game servers so people with fat connections can host multiple games. There should always be a new game to join and we want to make it easy for players to find them.
IGN Xbox: Is this a one-off, or the beginning of a franchise?Karl Wickens (art director):Well we’ve designed the world of Crazy Car Championship as one that can support sequels, and even games of a different genre. The demand that is being placed on the quality and quantity of content generation in games means that it’s starting to become impractical to throw everything away and re-invent the wheel for every game that is developed.
I am a little anxious to see where this title is heading. Here are a few screenies courtesy of IGN.XBox.
As you can see the tracks float in the air. It kinda has a mechanincal/fantasy look to it.
A blurb in a NY Times article has XBox gamers worried. The article is about Floxtronics, the company that will produce the XBox for Microsoft. The article mentions the possible production cost of the machine and it seems a little on the non-”competively priced” side.
Although the powerful home computers will come with a Microsoft label, they will be built by Flextronics. Mr. Marks is now putting the finishing touches on two new factories, one in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the other in Tab, Hungary, where 16 assembly lines could churn out as many as two million of the $400 systems this year.
It should be noted that most hardware manufacturers take a hit on the sale of console hardware and make it up in licensing for software.
Note: According to Daily Radar the price was given by the writer of the article and not a Flextronics rep.
cube.ign.com reports that the Cube version of Metroid is going to be a First Person shooter instead of the Third Person Action Shooter previously expected. According to the article, the game was originally planned as third person action, but “product evaluators at Nintendo were allegedly not overly impressed with the direction Metroid was headed in and forced a change of genre to first-person shooter.”
Retro Studios has apparently built quite a team to convert this classic game to a new genre.
Word on the inside is that the game looks absolutely beautiful and that its team has worked hard to polish camera problems so often associated with first-person shooters. It is not known, however, if Metroid will feature a third-person view that can be toggled by the player (a la Jedi Knight).
Sega and Nintendo are reportedly working on a RPG together according to this post on Cube.IGN. Here is a snipped of the interview between Gameweek and Sega of America’s Vice President of Marketing and Corporate Communications, Charles Bellfield.
Peter Main, one of the big men at Nintendo reportedlyt “smirked” when asked a similar question previously.
Here is a snippet from the interview:
GW: Charles, can you confirm or deny the existence of this so-called “top-secret RPG” being worked on by Sega and Nintendo?
CB: (long pause) I’m trying to recall? Tetsu Kayama talked about a number of things last week and I would normally refer back to what he said, but… Let’s put it this way: whatever he said, the answer is “yes.”
GW: You know, Peter Main had the same suspicious grin when I asked him this question two and a half months ago…
CB: Did he really? Yes. (another long pause) We’ve got a great content line ahead. (smiles)
I’d have to agree with the Cube.IGN writer on this one. “As each day goes by, Sega’s withdrawal from the hardware business gets sweeter and sweeter. Life is good.” Life is good and it just keeps getting better.
I had some other posts in GM, but while trying to fix one problem, I accidently wiped them out. I’ll see if I can add most of them from a copy of that main page. The Archive pages are giving me a little trouble and I don’t have the menu links working yet, but I hope to get them updated and running soon. I’ve got to convert my old pages over to my new format, but hopefully things will fill out here soon. Let me know if you think I should change anything, but understand one thing…
IT’S STILL MY SITE
Heh. Sorry.
The Matrix is on it’s way to a console near your according to FGN.
Interplay and Shiny have officially announced that they have an agreement that grants them rights to publish games based on the sci-fi series on both current and future platforms.
Welcome Mr. Anderson…
Well, Smikwily.com has moved from Blogger to Greymatter. It is a pretty sweet piece of software and is pretty powerful. It is a little overkill for my little site, but it has plenty of room to grow. Let me know what you think…
