Fatal Inertia team facing troubles with Unreal Engine 3 for PS3 too!

Fatal Inertia Screenshot

We brought you news of Silicon Knights throwing a lawsuit at Epic Games not long ago. To summarize, they claim that Epic gave them faulty versions of the Unreal Engine 3, that it does not do what it is said to do, that it has problems working on the PS3, that Epic did not help them figure out how to use the Unreal Engine 3 and that Epic stole their lunch money.

Using Silicon Knights’ lawsuit as cover, Fatal Inertia developers Koei have gone public with the statement that they are having problems with the Unreal Engine 3 as well. Koei announced that the Unreal Engine 3 is not functioning well under the PS3’s highly-acclaimed hardware. The game is “not running well enough” to be released for the PS3 yet.

This means that Fatal Inertia for the PS3 has officially been delayed. Since they find it silly to hold up the Xbox 360 version because of troubles with the PS3, Koei has decided to release the Xbox 360 version without a delay.

[Via Games Radar]

Far Cry 2 announced, teaser site launched

Farcry 2 Logo

Far Cry was one of those games that ushered in the new era of video gaming, which encompassed everything with glossy graphics, overused bloom, hackneyed plots and large corporations. Of course, there were lots of good things too, like advanced AI, realistic graphics and so on. While Crytek, the prodigal developers are busy working on Crysis, Ubisoft has announced the sequel to Far Cry.

There was already info and some screenies floating around the internet about this game, but yesterday, Ubisoft laid it down and hard. Apart from the game’s title, Far Cry 2, we know nothing more about the game. Well, not much at least. It is being developed by the Ubisoft Montreal studio and is scheduled for a Spring 2008 release, but we know how that goes. It will be coming out for the PC only, as of now.

Ubisoft has also released a teaser site for the game. The site, being a trailer, doesn’t show much. What it does show is an awesome Savannah backdrop, which hints at the game’s next exotic setting. The next explosive screen shows the game’s logo, as well as lots of jungle music in the background.

It should be noted, that during the transition of screens, a presumably African man can be heard saying “Dawa ya moto ni moto!” According to “Claws_The_One” from the game’s official forums, it means “The remedy to fire is fire”. As you can guess, it is a proverb from the language Kiswahili, spoken in some parts of Africa. If you didn’t get it, replace it with “An eye for an eye.”

And to finish off, we’ll give you something from the press release:

“Far Cry marked the beginning of a new era for shooters. An era of gorgeous graphics and of advanced artificial intelligence,” declared John Parkes, EMEA marketing director at Ubisoft. “We are confident that Far Cry 2 will have the same impact again on the FPS genre landscape.”

While I would have preferred Crytek handle it, this looks great!

World of Warcraft: The Comic Book.

Comic Book Cover

Right, if you really want to, you can click the image above to get a jumbo-sized version of the same.

Now then, it appears that the guys at Blizzplanet were intrigued by Jim Lee’s name being listed at the San Diego Comic Con 2007 schedule. After some thorough digging, they foundthecomicforums.com, where a user (under the name ‘thefreakytiki’) posted that he found a free comic sampler at a local comic store. The credits for the sampler included Jim Lee as a cover artist.

Further digging found the scan you see above. This is going to spur thousands of webcomic jokes, I’m sure. That cover looks awesome to me, and I’m guessing it is for real. Lee will be making an appearance at the upcoming Blizzcon on August 3rd, 2007. So whatever happens next, happens there.

[Via Blizzplanet]

Bully goes back for seconds on Wii and 360

Canis Canem Edit

Today Take Two entertainment announced that their critically praised game Bully, Canis Canem Edit(dog eat dog) in Europe, is getting the mulitplatform treatment. The game will be released on the Xbox 360 and Wii, presumably at the same time. While the specifics aren’t mentioned, Take Two says both will feature unique new content, whether this means each will have it’s own console specific features such as waggle controls and DLC for the 360 it’s definitely a great thing to see the games on more consoles.

Personally I’m quite excited. I rented Bully and beat it on my PS2, and just thought to myself how all of the side quests and such in the game could make for some awesome achievements on the 360.

Keep your eyes and ears open for Bully: Scholarship Edition’s release this coming winter.

[Via Take Two Games ]

Too Human’s problems is Epic’s fault?

too human

Today Silicon Knights, the development team behind the original Legacy of Kane, Eternal Darkness, and the upcoming Too Human title, has file a lawsuit against Epic games because of their Unreal 3 Engine. According to the suit they have failed to provide a working game engine which they paid over $75,000 for.

Silicon Knights claims that Gears of War used a superior version of the Unreal 3 with a half-assed copy sent to Silicon Knights amongst other developers. An adequate, working version of the engine was not made until Epic altered the engine for Gears of war, a version they failed to release to other license holders such as Silicon Knights. Furthermore the suit claims that, after Silicon Knights had numerous problems with the engine Epic games failed to fix the engine, and were unwilling to do so. They had tried, for a year’s time, to resolve the issue with Epic games, but because of Epic games they have had to indeed file a lawsuit.

Silicon Knights has since abandoned the Unreal 3 engine to develop their own engine for Too Human. The title is still tentatively scheduled for release later this year on the 360.

[via GameDaily]

Halo 3 to NOT have online coop.

Halo 3

A few days ago an article for an upcoming EGM article on Halo 3 was leaked. In the article pieces about new weapons, vehicles, and such was shown, but one of the most significant pieces of the article was the part regarding online co-op for the game.

According Bungie’s Frank O’Connor the addition of online coop might not make it to the final product due to the single player level layouts. The levels are so vast that it would be possible for each player to be miles apart from one another at certain points in the game which would cause a major problem. They have ways of restricting this problem, but it would affect the gameplay in a way that would effectively ruin the game’s experience.

So, while it could happen, chances are all online coop modes, not just the rumored 4 person online coop, will not be included in the shipped product. Rather it’s more likely that a patch at some point after the release will add this particular mode if it’s released at all.

[Sources: 1 and 2]