Late Night Consoling

The latest issue of Nintendo Power magazine had a few tidbits on future titles and it confirmed that a port of Age of Empires II and GoldenEye: Rogue Agent will be coming to the handheld, both set for release later this year. However, much more surprising is a listing for Katamari Damacy under a list of upcoming Namco titles. No details on that title were shared.

Majesco Games officially announced a game based on the comic series The Darkness. It will be a next-gen title and is being developed by Starbreeze, the same team behind The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay. No concrete details were made available, but it's expected to ship in 2006.

It wasn't terribly clear how many 500,000 PSP Value Packs would be available first day of sales, but Sony confirmed that a million will be in stores on Thursday and the company is prepared to react swiftly if the initial demand is overwhelming. In this Bloomberg article, Sony is looking to the the PSP to revive the company's sinking worth.

GamesIndustry.biz has learned that select UK developers now have their hands on development hardware for the next-generation PlayStation. GI was able to wiggle out of one source, "they're more advanced than the PowerMac kits [Microsoft] has given us [for Xenon] - they're still prototypes, but they're closer to what'll be in the final console... The graphics chip isn't there, say, but we can get a pretty good idea by taking an NVIDIA 6800 and saying, okay, it'll be like this but faster." The source did say that a hardware update from Microsoft is forthcoming.

Capcom set some more definite dates for three of its titles, GameGossip has learned. Capcom Fighting Evolution, which features fighters from five Capcom series, will release on the Xbox on May 3. Resident Evil Outbreak File #2 was pushed up to April 12 and Haunting Ground, the chick and dog happy-go-lucky team-up, will sell on May 10.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has an article that details an unusual situation over in Redmond, Washington. Nintendo has proposed to the city the acquisition of 550,000 square feet of land for future development in an attempt to prevent Microsoft from gobbling up all the available space, as the company has its own expansion plans. Now the city, which has placed a development cap on the area to ensure proper growth for all companies in the area, has to work with the two companies to settle the matter.

IGN talks with a writer on Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects, Greg Pak.