Late Night Consoling

Japanese publisher and developer conglomerate AQ Interactive recently announced its upcoming next- and current-generation lineup at a Tokyo press conference.

Most of the details were regarding Xbox 360 games. Even with Mistwalker apparently working on three upcoming Xbox 360 games and a DS game, studio head and Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi is also working on an Xbox 360 action RPG entitled Cry On for developer Cavia. Cavia is the studio behind games such as Drakengard (PS2) and Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (PS2, PSP). Cry On is the story of a girl named Sally who is friends with a giant named Boggle, part of a race of underground giants that serve as war machines for humans. Longtime Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu will handle the game's music, and Drakengard's Kimihiko Fujisaka will handle character design.

Cavia is also working on an Xbox 360 action/adventure called Bullet Witch. Set in 2012, the player controls Alicia, a witch out to free humanity from the shackles of a demonic race that has enslaved her people. Alicia is apparently able to manipulate weather phenomena in her quest. The game is set for a Spring 2006 Japanese release.

Artoon, the studio behind the Blinx (Xbox) series and Yoshi Topsy-Turvy (GBA), is developing an action/adventure for PS3 and Xbox 360 entitled Vampire's Rain about a special forces vampire hunter named John Lloyd. The game will feature online versus play and, thankfully, online cooperative play. It has a Japanese release estimate of Winter 2006.

AQ also announced several other games, some of which do not yet have a name. For Nintendo Revolution, AQ is developing "A game based on a major comic book" and "Original action game" (exciting!). For PS3 they're working on "Major 3D game" (nice!). DS is getting "Edutainment game" and "Adventure game" (whoa!). PS2 will see "A game based on a comic book for female audiences" (okay!). In the works for PSP are "Original RPG" and "Jitsuroku Oniyome Nikki." Finally, a name! That latter PSP game is based on a popular Japanese blog by a husband who was being abused by his wife. It was a very popular blog. The name translates to "Devil Wife Diary." Don't be surprised if we Westerners don't get our hands on that one.

Square Enix has announced that a beta copy of the Xbox 360 version of Final Fantasy XI (PS2, X360, PC) will be included with the next issue of Xbox 360: The Official Xbox Magazine in the USA, UK, France, Italy, and Germany. The beta servers will be completely open for an unspecified limited period. To play the game on Xbox 360, users will need a hard drive and broadband internet access. It is not clear whether Xbox Live is required.

Three owners and employees of the Los Angeles-based ACME Game Store have been charged with copyright infringement for selling modified Xboxes loaded with pirated games. They sold the consoles at prices ranging from $225 to upwards of $500 depending on what kind of modifications and how many games were included. Federal investigators managed to purchase an Xbox with a mod chip and 77 preloaded games for $265. Whoops.

More than two months after the initial complaints that Madden 06 for PSP causes random crashes, loss of save game data, and other problems, EA is offering replacements. In an announcement made via the EA forums, a moderator stated that "while we know the workaround we provided earlier works" (users who actually tried EA's fix said it didn't work at all), the company is offering a new game disk along with a $15 EA Store coupon to those affected by the problem. Just send in your defective disk, wait 10 business days, and hopefully you'll be all set.

Ubisoft sent out notice today that Michel Ancel's game based on Peter Jackson's recently released King Kong remake has an alternate ending. "I wanted the game to be able to take the audience a bit further than what the film could," said Jackson. "And the final climax of the game gave us an opportunity to do something that the film could not do, which was to have an alternate ending--obviously everybody pretty much knows how King Kong ends." So, if you'd like to see Kong back on Skull Island rather than dead at the end, you can. It does seem to somewhat defeat the film's message, but it is after all a video game. To achieve the new ending, beat the whole game, then start over and achieve what is an apparently easily obtainable 250,000 points.

Joystiq also points out that the three current-gen console versions of the game have had their prices dropped from $49.99 to $29.99, making them fully half the price of the $59.99 Xbox 360 version. If you were looking for an excuse to pick it up, there you go. The movie apparently didn't do quite as well at the box office as its studio was hoping, and the game may be suffering a similar fate. Surely that wouldn't be great news for designer Ancel, whose last project, the excellent Beyond Good & Evil (PS2, Xbox, GCN, PC) was met with critical acclaim but lackluster sales. Show him you care.

Official Xbox 360 Magazine UK has posted a rumor that the classic button-mashing button-masher Track and Field might be coming to the Xbox 360 over Xbox Live Arcade. It's an extremely unsubstantiated rumor, but it should come as good news to button-mashers who love to mash buttons.

Edge Magazine has a rather extensive interview with Microsoft's J Allard, the new head of the company's Experiences and Design for Gaming and Entertainment Group. He has a lot to say about Sony, describing the company as "alienating," and somehow manages to avoid saying anything about Nintendo Revolution despite there being two questions mentioning it.

GameSpot has a developer interview on Reflections' Driver: Parallel Lines (PS2, Xbox).