New Game Stories

Nintendo ships 100 millionth DS, Mario Kart DS tops 10 million

2009-03-12T21:33:00.000-07:00

[UPDATE] 83 DS games sell over 1 million, with Nintendogs, New Super Mario Bros, Brain Age, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, Brain Age 2, and Animal Crossing: Wild World going deca-platinum.

Nintendo's continued dominance of the game-industry landscape was further underlined today. This morning, the Kyoto-based company announced that sometime last week, the 100 millionth unit of its DS portable was shipped out to retailers. Last year, the platform surpassed the 81 million-plus international sales of its predecessor, the Game Boy Advance.

Today's figure--which covers shipments in all territories worldwide--includes all three versions of the handheld: The original DS (2004-2006), the DS Lite (2006-current), and the DSi, which launched in Japan last November. The new camera- and browser-enabled version of the device will be available in Europe on April 3 and in North America on April 5.

"Consumers have shown their love for Nintendo DS--100 million times over," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said with typical swagger in a statement. "We are grateful that people of all ages continue to respond to our products, and we will continue to look for ways to please current gamers and create new ones."

Nintendo's gloating didn't stop with DS hardware shipments. The game giant also announced that 83 DS games have shipped more than 1 million units, with seven games topping sales of 10 million worldwide. [UPDATE] Nintendo confirmed to GameSpot those titles are: Nintendogs, New Super Mario Bros. Brain Age, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, Mario Kart DS, Brain Age 2, and Animal Crossing: Wild World.

Army of Two prepares for The 40th Day

2009-03-12T21:26:00.000-07:00

EA's mystery project from Montreal will indeed be sequel to mercenary co-op shooter, due for Xbox 360, PS3, PSP this winter.

From the very moment EA gave advance warning that it was prepping a game announcement from its Montreal studio, most assumed it would be a new game in the Army of Two franchise. That belief was all but confirmed when the official Army of Two Web site was taken over by a teaser campaign last week, one that stated quite plainly in the page's source code that "the definitive third person shooter is back."

Finally, today, EA has made it official: Army of Two: The 40th Day is headed to the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PSP. A direct sequel to the events in the tepidly received 2008 original, The 40th Day takes back up with Salem and Rios as they head to Shanghai, China. Unfortunately for them, Shanghai is suddenly assaulted by a number of highly suspect catastrophes, and the mercenary duo must solve the mystery and, hopefully, survive.

Like the original, The 40th Day will deal extensively in co-op gameplay. EA Montreal has expanded upon the interactions available to Salem and Rios, promising a more tactical experience this time around. The 40th Day will also feature online play, though EA did not detail any particular modes.

Army of Two: The 40th Day is expected to arrive sometime this winter.

Pacific raises anchor May 12

2009-03-12T21:24:00.001-07:00

Eidos confirms deployment papers for WWII sea-and-air combat game on the Xbox 360 and PC.

In April, Square Enix expects to finalize its acquisition of British publisher Eidos Interactive. The following month, the Japanese publisher's newest subsidiary will officially release a game in which Allied forces pillory Imperial Japan's navy, as Eidos announced today that Battlestations: Pacific will wash up on US shores for the Xbox 360 and PC on May 12, with the European and Australian rollouts slated for May 15.

A sequel to 2007's well-received Battlestations: Midway, Pacific returns to the game's namesake theater, with players assuming command of the US Navy's fleet shortly after the decisive Battle of Midway. Players then lead the fleet to the Battle of Guadalcanal, through Iwo Jima, and on to eventual victory.

Battlestations: Pacific also presents an alternate-history campaign, in which players guide the Imperial Japanese navy through Pearl Harbor, eventually expanding the empire's circle of influence through Australia and the rest of Asia.

All told, the game includes 28 campaign missions and features a number of online cooperative and competitive multiplayer modes for up to eight. Players will have more than 100 units to command, including fighters, bombers, kamikaze planes, destroyers, aircraft carriers, and submarines. Battlestations: Pacific will also let players assume control of a number of experimental prototype units.

Wii stealth, PC hobbits, portable pets

2009-03-12T21:17:00.000-07:00

Gamers' wallets get a breather as the tide of AAA releases relaxes for a week; Sam Fisher sneaks onto the Wii, EA expands its Tolkien-inspired PC strategy game.

The year isn't over yet. December will play host to big-name releases like Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops for the PSP and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess on the GameCube. But for now, gamers are going to get a tiny breather and a chance to catch up on whatever backlog of November releases they might have, because this week sees a sampling of interesting titles arriving in stores but few offerings that really stand out.

On the PC, real-time strategy gamers who enjoyed Electronic Arts' The Lord of the Rings, Battle for Middle-earth II can get a second helping of the game with the release of The Rise of the Witch-King expansion. The game takes place centuries before the events depicted in the recent Lord of the Rings films and puts players on the other side of the conflict, in command of the forces of evil.

The Wii gets a trio of postlaunch releases this week, led by Ubisoft's latest Sam Fisher adventure, Splinter Cell: Double Agent. Wii adaptations of the computer-animated films Barnyard and Open Season also arrive this week.

Over on the portable front, the theme of the week is all creatures great and small as a veritable menagerie of animal-themed titles hit shelves in the coming days. EA has The Sims 2: Pets for the PlayStation Portable, while the DS plays host to Hamsterz, Horsez, Catz, and even penguins with a rare game adaptation of an Academy Award-winning documentary, March of the Penguins.

This week's new releases are listed below (list taken from retailer information--actual dates may vary).

NOVEMBER 28, 2006
Cartoon Network Racing (DS)
Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent (Wii)
Barbie in The 12 Dancing Princesses (PS2)
Hard Rock Casino (PS2, PSP)
Mercury Meltdown Remix (PS2)
Online Chess Kingdoms (PSP)
The Sims 2: Pets (PSP)
Hamsterz Life (DS)
Horsez(DS)
Lionel Trains On Track (DS)
March of the Penguins (DS)
Totally Spies! 2: Undercover (DS)
Xiaolin Showdown (DS)
DMZ: North Korea (PC)
Model Train 3D (PC)
The Lord of the Rings, The Battle for Middle-earth II, The Rise of the Witch-King (PC)
Superman Returns: Fortress of Solitude (GBA)

NOVEMBER 30, 2006
Barnyard (Wii)
Open Season (Wii)
Catz (DS)

DECEMBER 1, 2006
Cartoon Network Racing (PS2)
Shrek Smash and Crash (PSP)
World Championship Poker: Featuring Howard Lederer - All In (Xbox 360)
Great Invasions (PC)
Harley-Davidson Motorcycles: Race to the Rally (PC)
Heroes of Annihilated Empires (PC)

Rise of the Witch-King Review

2009-03-12T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Rise of the Witch-King is a fairly standard expansion that adds a brief campaign centered around one of the more enigmatic characters from the movies.

The Good

New campaign introduces interesting real-time strategy missions
improvements to dynamic campaign reduce tedium and add continuity to conquering Middle-earth.

The Bad

Some mission designs lead to frustration with difficulty level
Angmar faction is nice, but the expansion doesn't feel like it's set in Middle-earth's distant past
short amount of gameplay unless you're a big multiplayer fan.

Over the course of two Battle for Middle-earth games, EA has managed to thoroughly explore the events of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings novels, seen most famously in Peter Jackson's movie trilogy. The first game let you command the armies of good and evil, as well as re-create the events and battles of the movies, while Battle for Middle-earth II took place in and revolved around events in the north. With the Rise of the Witch-King expansion, EA mines uncharted territory by digging deep into the past of Middle-earth and centering the action on one of its most enigmatic characters. With the new campaign and new faction, The Rise of the Witch-King is a standard expansion pack.

For the uninitiated, the Witch-King is the dark lord Sauron's main lieutenant and the head of the Nazgul, the sinister black-robed generals of his army. The expansion is set after the epic battle that was seen at the opening of the film The Fellowship of the Ring. After Sauron was defeated by the alliance of men and elves--and his powerful One Ring was lost--the forces of evil were sent reeling in defeat. Centuries later, the Witch-King rallies evil once again. The campaign, which runs around seven missions, chronicles how the Witch-King stages a comeback by uniting the various evil factions of the north to form the kingdom of Angmar and crushing the ancient kingdom of Arnor in the process.

Angmar represents the only new faction in the expansion, because Arnor is basically a recycled Men of the West faction with a handful of new units. Angmar is a troll-heavy faction, so instead of horse cavalry, you get to stampede the enemy with formations of trolls. There are sorcerers who cast powerful spells, though they must sacrifice followers to power that magic. And then there are thrall masters that can summon a variety of different units to the battlefield instantly, such as wolf riders and spearmen. Angmar can also summon a powerful and huge spectral wolf, which is sort of the equivalent of the balrog, as well as huge avalanches that bury enemy battalions. When you get down to it, Angmar is a very powerful and hard-hitting faction.

Though relatively brief, the campaign deserves some credit for veering away from the standard real-time strategy mission design of having you sit back for 30 minutes and build up your army before crushing the enemy. For instance, in one mission, you're in a race to recover shards of a broken palantir crystal, which means you're trying to desperately build up and defend your base from attacks while intercepting enemy units that have recovered crystals. In another, you have to basically conquer and hold as many burial mounds as possible to allow your sorcerers to corrupt them. These new missions offer a fresh change of pace, but they also pack a fair amount of frustration. For example, in the burial mounds mission, the victory objectives require you to hold the mounds long enough for your sorcerers to corrupt 1,000 souls before time runs out. It's a challenging objective made harder by the fact that the game does the cheap trick of constantly spawning enemy formations all over the map. But even worse, you might manage to reach the objective with seconds to spare only to discover that it turns out you need to accomplish the mission with a couple of minutes to spare because there's another objective that's never listed, which must be achieved to advance. So you've got to replay the mission over with that in mind.

Siege weapons and siege warfare remain clunky in the expansion as well. It's not much use to build walls because catapults can knock them down in a couple of hits. And siege weapons are so overpowered that they can pretty much level everything and everyone. In fact, much of the strategy revolves around building siege engines, protecting them with battalions of other units, getting them in range to do their thing, and then repeating the process again until you win. This is exactly what you do in the last mission, which is a long, drawn-out battle that reverts back to the traditional real-time strategy mission design and is basically 90 minutes of slowly grinding the enemy down.

It's a bit hard to distinguish that this is all supposed to be taking place in the distant past of Middle-earth. The Angmar faction doesn't look or feel all that different from the existing evil factions in Battle for Middle-earth II. The men and elves that you battle against are also almost the same as before. Meanwhile, the graphics, while still pretty, haven't changed much. If you were hoping for a more epic feel to the gameplay, you'll find that the scale remains the same. You command armies that consist of battalions of a dozen or more units each. This is in line with the previous Battle for Middle-earth games, though nowhere near the scale of the battles seen in the movies.

The War of the Ring dynamic campaign, which lets you try to conquer all of Middle-earth as one of the factions, has been improved to eliminate some of the issues found in the core game. For instance, armies can now move twice per turn if in friendly territory, which helps eliminate some of the tedium of moving armies around the map. There's also some persistence between the real-time battles and the turn-based strategic campaign; you can transfer units created in battle to the map, provided that you have enough money to support them. This helps address one of the biggest issues with the original campaign because there was a very sharp disconnect between what you did in battles and what you did in the strategic campaign. Still, this isn't a particularly deep campaign when compared to some of the turn-based strategic layer found in something like Medieval 2: Total War. For example, the scale of the overall campaign isn't that large, considering the number of provinces and the fact that there are only two or three build slots in each province. The campaign does offer a dynamic single-player experience, and you can play a number of War of the Ring scenarios (based on the events of the movie) or the historical Arnor campaign, which features Angmar, men, and elves.

The single-player skirmish mode lets you pit all the factions against each other, and you can play with up to seven other artificial intelligence factions. Multiplayer supports online skirmish for eight, and that's certainly where the bulk of the action will be found. Battle for Middle-earth fans will appreciate the Angmar faction and what it brings to the skirmish table. The addition of dwarven heroes and other units for the existing factions helps balance things out even more. Meanwhile, the dynamic campaign remains playable in multiplayer as well, though the amount of time required makes this an option for only the most serious and dedicated of players.

If you enjoy playing Battle for Middle-earth II online and want to keep up with the rest of the multiplayer crowd, purchasing the expansion is a no-brainer. For casual fans, this expansion is purely optional. For single-player fans, there's nothing here that's particularly compelling, unless you're a huge fan of Middle-earth.

The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth

2009-03-12T21:05:00.000-07:00

This game guide to Electronic Arts' newest real-time strategy game includes tips on each of Battle for Middle-earth's four factions, walk-throughs for both the good and evil campaigns, and multiplayer tips.

Command the forces of Gondor, Isengard, Mordor, or Rohan and recreate some of the most exciting sequences from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies in The Battle for Middle-earth, a real-time strategy game from EA. Can you hold off the armies of Isengard in defense of Helm’s Deep? Can you breach the defenses of Minas Tirith before Rohan Rohirrim trample your orc hordes? The Battle for Middle-earth features two huge campaigns and four sides with unique units and heroes straight from the feature films. This extensive game guide will aid your quest to destroy--or recover--the One Ring.

This GameSpot game guide to The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth includes:

General Strategies: This section offers some general strategies for completing The Battle for Middle-earth’s single-player campaign.

Gondor: Check here for general tips on using Gondor’s units and structures.

Isengard: This section provides general tips on commanding Isengard’s Uruk warriors.

Mordor: This section offers strategies for leading Mordor’s orcs into battle.

Rohan: Look in this section for tips on using Rohan’s Rohirrim and other units.

Good Campaign Walk-through: This section covers the walk-through for The Battle for Middle-earth’s good campaign. The walk-through reveals all missions and their benefits, provides complete strategies for story missions, and offers general tips for the optional battles.

Evil Campaign Walk-through: This section covers the walk-through for The Battle for Middle-earth’s evil campaign. The chapter lists all missions and their benefits, offers complete strategies for story missions, and includes general tips for the optional engagements.

Multiplayer Strategies: This section provides multiplayer strategies for The Battle for Middle-earth and includes a rundown of Evenstar and One Ring powers and each side’s heroes and their abilities.

General Strategies
Gondor
Isengard
Mordor
Rohan
Good Campaign

World Map and Optional Missions
Moria and Lothlorien
Amon Hen and Eaves of Fangorn
Helm's Deep and Isengard
Northern Ithilien and Osgiliath
Shelob's Lair and Minas Tirith
The Black Gate

Evil Campaign

World Map and Optional Missions
Isengard and Fangorn
Amon Hen and Edoras
Helm's Deep and Near Harad
Southern Ithilien and Osgiliath
Cirith Ungol and Minas Tirith

Multiplayer Strategies
Evenstar and One Ring Powers
Heroes and Abilities
Map Control, Troop Management, and Four Sides

Warner Bros. lording over Rings IP

2009-03-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

Variety reports film studio's game arm now has control of Peter Jackson fantasy film license long held by Electronic Arts; parties involved decline comment.

When The Lord of the Rings: Conquest arrived on store shelves in mid-January, it faced a tepid reception. In the wake of lukewarm reviews, the game saw only 170,000 units sold domestically through the end of January, according to figures from the NPD Group. It fared particularly badly on the PC and DS, selling less than 6,000 units in the US on either platform during its first two weeks of release.

Today, Variety aired a possible reason for Conquest's poor reception--namely, that the game might have been rushed to release. According to the Hollywood trade, Electronic Arts' license to make games based on director Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films expired on December 31, 2008--just two weeks before the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC game shipped to stores.

Variety reports that after the new year, rights for the Rings films reverted to movie studio Warner Bros., an assertion neither EA nor Warner Bros. would comment on. If true, though, the move comes just almost exactly one year after New Line Cinema, the semi-autonomous studio that produced Jackson's multibillion-dollar-grossing Rings trilogy, was folded into Warner Bros. by the pair's corporate parent, Time Warner Inc. (Turbine's massively multiplayer title Lord of the Rings Online is based on the original novels by author J.R.R. Tolkien and is not covered by the EA-Warner deal.)

The expiration of EA's game license also makes sense, given Warner Bros.'s increasing push to become a game-industry player. Four years prior to New Line's absorption, Warner Bros. relaunched its games arm, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. The past two years have seen Time Warner pour more resources into the division, which has shifted from merely overseeing licensing game IPs to codistributing such games as Tomb Raider: Underworld and self-developing games like the just-released Watchmen: The End Is Nigh. The publisher also owns developers Monolith Productions and Traveller's Tales, makers of F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Lego Batman, respectively.