Information Update // Noticias Nuevas - Nintendo 3DS & PSVita

Information Update - Nintendo 3DS


1.- GAME, the popular but troubled UK retailer, has put itself up for sale in an effort to avoid administration. GAME has put itself up for sale, as it desperately tries to raise cash to pay a quarterly rent bill which is due in a fortnight, according to the Sunday Times. 

 

More After the Break...

As I reported earlier in the week GAME is currently having a huge fire sale to get rid of stock, and there’s apparently quite a few bargains to be had.

 

Sony UK VP and MD Fergal Gara recently spoke to the official PlayStation magazine about Sony’s Wii Remote clone, the PlayStation Move. Gara admitted that Sony hadn’t done a good enough job supporting the hardware with quality titles, and suggested that the PlayStation Move hardware is best relegated to the causal market.

“What I’m thinking is that it’s better suited towards the casual market, certainly, but we also are pretty clear that we could have done a better job on the titles we’ve had and we’ve brought to market for the PlayStation Move. As you’ve said, great tech, probably not so great applications so far. So there’s a job for us to do on the strength of games, and having seen what’s forthcoming gives me great hope that we can do a better job with Move as we look forward. So we’re certainly not forgetting about it.”

2.- Epic Games vice president Mark Rein says that the impressive Samaritan tech demo, that made its début at GDC last year, looks like crap compared to the games it has running on its next generation Unreal Engine 4. Epic is due to show off the engine to the public sometime later this year.

 

This year’s Samaritan demo, however, was highly optimized and according to Epic’s Mark Rein, it could be running on a laptop next year or a smartphone the year after. This is where Rein pointed out that the UE4 demo will make the Samaritan look feeble by comparison and will generally be crap next to what they show off for the next generation engine, saying “Imagine if that were a piece of crap, what would the next thing look like?”


Online gaming publication Revo Gamers spotted Monster Hunter Tri G at Media Markt, and they are apparently accepting pre-orders for July. Edge magazine previously mentionedthat the game is coming to Europe and North America this year, though Capcom has yet to confirm anything. Capcom’s Captivate event is just around the corner, so I’m sure we will hear confirmation of a Western release then.

3.- Note: The following news might be old, but I couldn’t find traces of it being mentioned elsewhere (maybe because no one cares about it?), so I figured I’d mention it anyway.

The website for JB Hi-Fi (a popular retailer down here in Australia) has been updated with a page to preorder the Wii U. There is no price provided and the release date is only listed as “coming 2012″, but if you’re keen to secure your system and live down under, this is your best shot. You could preorder from EB Games, but with regards to the price (and even in regards to the customer service), they’re not the best pick. A preorder might be premature at this point though. I’d suggest you wait until E3 2012 before you make your decision. While we wait, you’ll have to visit the store if you want to preorder the Wii U. There’s no option to preorder online.

And in case you missed the link mentioned earlier in the article (it’s one hundred and twenty words before these brackets), this is the promo page on JB Hi-Fi’s website. But there’s nothing we don’t already know to feast our eyes on. Still, you can admire the not-that-good graphics work (not that I’m any better).

There are two versions of Michael Pachter. At times he says things you’d expect from an anonymous rant on a forum, but he can take the fairer, well-reasoned approach. The video after the break, surprisingly enough, is in the latter category. Because while he believes the Wii U may be Nintendo’s equivalent of the Dreamcast, he admits it’s impossible to make a judgment without the price and feature list. Only time will tell, of course.

 

In case there was any doubt, Two Tribes has re-confirmed that Toki Tori 2 is “definitely” coming to the Wii U, and they’re “pretty sure that it’s going to happen really quickly after launch”. It might even be available at the launch of the system, but that does depend on Nintendo’s plans. Still, the line-up for the launch period looks quite nice already, and I hope me saying that doesn’t jinx it.

4.- There’s ten minutes of footage from Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge that you can find after the break. It’ll be a while before we see Wii U-specific footage, but I think most multi-platform titles won’t look that much better on any system in particular. I’d expect there to be a balance between them.

Koichi Hayashida, the director of Super Mario 3D Land on the Nintendo 3DS was asked what interests him about the potential of the Wii U. He said that if he had to pick one idea from personal experience, “it would involve when [his] family is watching TV together”, explaining that:

 

If I want to play games on the Wii I can’t, but if I had a Wii U I could use that smaller display to play a game while they watch TV. That’d be really good for someone with a family like me.

I don’t think it’s a feature I’ll use a lot myself. I usually hook my video game systems to a computer monitor anyway, but I can definitely imagine a younger version of myself would have found this very useful.

5.- I’m going to leave this here so we can channel our collective jealousy toward Japan, thereby having zero impact on anything but still making me feel better considering these Kid Icarus: Uprising-themed chocolates won’t be released anywhere else in world. 

 

Of course, the chocolate’s probably not that good. But it’s the principle of the matter. How can I survive if I don’t have my sweets wrapped in promotional material for the video games I’m interested in?

-------

Mister Gaga