Late Night Consoling

Independent Darkwatch (PS2, Xbox) developer High Moon Studios announced yesterday that it has been acquired by Vivendi Universal in an undisclosed financial transaction. High Moon, based in Carlsbad, California, was previously an internal Sammy-owned developer known as Sammy Studios. When it appeared that Sammy was preparing to close the group down last March, studio president John Rowe along with an investment group purchased all rights to Sammy Studios and renamed it High Moon. Less than a year later, Vivendi has fully purchased the studio as well as its intellectual property rights such as the Darkwatch franchise, with which High Moon has expressed interest in developing further.

According to the press release, High Moon and Vivendi are currently working on "a soon-to-be-announced project based on a major entertainment license." Speaking to Shacknews, High Moon chief design officer Chris Ulm said that the studio has other original projects in the works as well, noting, "One of our core competencies in the studio is the creation of new worlds, concepts and characters, and I certainly expect this to continue in the future." In regards to the Darkwatch property in particular, Ulm said, "We've only scratched the surface of the Darkwatch universe. Stay tuned."

High Moon stated that details of the unrevealed projects should be expected sometime between GDC in March and E3 in May.

For months, Microsoft executives staunchly maintained that the company's Xbox 360 would be able to reach 3 million units shipped within the first 90 days of its lifetime. We're now about halfway to that deadline, and most recent estimates peg the machine at 1.3M units, not significantly higher than the machine's initial launch numbers. Despite repeated claims that the machine would be shipped to retailers on a weekly basis, demand doesn't seem to be close to sated.

Now, it seems that Microsoft has revised its earlier estimate to a new goal that's at least slightly more long term. Rather than 3M by the end of February, Microsoft is now aiming for 4-5.5M by the end of June.

The fact that Microsoft hasn't extended the goal date by all that much speaks to the company's confidence in the newest addition to its manufacturing chain. At the company's keynote at last week's CES, it was announced that electronics manufacturer Celestica has been brought on board to make additional Xbox 360 consoles.

Video Games Live, the nationally touring symphonic concert featuring video game music from throughout gaming history, was cancelled last year, but today the International Game Developers Association sent out an email to members announcing the first of what is hopefully a new run of shows. It will coincide with the last day of the Game Developers Conference on March 24 in San Jose. Pre-order tickets are on sale for GDC community members. General public ticket sales begin January 16.

A Bethesda developer has confirmed via The Elder Scrolls Forums that the Xbox 360 version of the company's upcoming The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (X360, also PC) will be contained on a single disc. There had been prior speculation that the game would require multiple DVDs due to the high amount of content and high resolution textures inherent to next-gen gaming. For example, From Software has stated that its upcomgin 360 RPG, [eM] -eNCHANT arM- (X360) will require multiple discs, though that is predominantly due to the traditional heavy use of pre-rendered CGI in Japanese RPGS. Many used this as a condemnation of Microsoft's decision not to use a next-gen optical disc medium in Xbox 360 as Sony is doing with Blu-ray in PS3.

According to MrSmileyFaceDev at the official forums, though, it won't be a problem for Oblivion. In response to accusations that the game would require four discs, he stated, "No, the game will be on one disk."

Last August, Ubisoft released some new maps for the Xbox version of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (PS2, Xbox, GCN, DS, PC) over Xbox Live. Unfortunately, it turned out they were horribly broken and Ubisoft disabled them. Finally, it seems that the maps are available again, but now that they're working on the Xbox, they don't seem to be working when the game is played on the Xbox 360. Microsoft's 360 backwards compatibility list added Chaos Theory in the last update.

Next Generation takes a stroll through the history of video game controllers, and works out the train of thought leading to Nintendo's upcoming Revolution.