Resident Evil 5 Famitsu Interview with Jun - Takeuchi in English

Watch interview here on Capcom blog
Note: Capcom trailers before main video

Japan’s Famitsu magazine recently conducted a video interview with Jun Takeuchi, the producer of Resident Evil 5, and we now have the video complete with English subs for your viewing pleasure!

In addition to the interview, the video include a brief introduction into the history of the Resident Evil series, many first-ever shots of actual gameplay, and also includes some behind the scenes development sneak peeks.

Update: You can now download a high-res MP4 version of the interview by - clicking here

Wii Fit - Wii Balance board use it with Super Monkey Ball - Waverace - Mario Kart Wii - Jet Set games

After an amazingly successful debut in Japan, expectation and hype for Wii Fit and its accompanying Balance Board is slowly reaching fever pitch elsewhere around the world. With a game that will have millions of us up on our feet, helping to convince us that exercise can be fun, arrives hope and anticipation about the future potential uses for the Wii Balance Board. From ball-rolling to dancing, Nintendic suggests five of gaming’s most popular franchises to which the accessory could make revolutionary changes.

Super Monkey Ball: The Super Monkey Ball series has always, at its heart, been about absolute precision when it comes to directing the entrapped simian from start to finish across some of gaming’s most difficulty evil courses. Presuming the Wii Balance Board’s technology is up to it, SEGA could develop a Monkey Ball title in which players shift their weight to propel the sphere forward, backwards, left and right along the designated path. What’s more, the accessory’s weight-measuring abilities could tailor custom balls for each individual gamer, defining its movement depending on the bulk onboard.

Wave Race: Wave Race’s last outing was as a launch title for the Nintendo GameCube in 2001 and was criticised for being overly similar to its Nintendo 64 prequel. The implementation of the Balance Board could give the series just the boost it needs, thrusting it back squarely into the limelight. Imagine standing on the device, using the Wii Remote (and Nunchuck?) as your jet ski’s handlebars, and leaning to the left and right to cut sharply through the tight, watery courses. Throw in a variety of tracks, dramatic weather effects and an online multiplayer mode, and Wave Race Wii could be something very special.



Boogie: We wouldn’t be the first to claim that after a fair amount of positively-tinged anticipation, Electronic Arts’ dance-em-up debut for the Nintendo Wii turned out to be something of a disappointment; a title with the flair and charisma of a drunken uncle at a wedding reception. It’s characters to have a certain charm, though, and for that we think it deserves a second chance. With the Balance Board making interactive dance moves a possibility, if only the karaoke and shallow gameplay were sorted, we reckon EA could have a real casual hit on its hands. C’mon, the firm has to at least do something to make up for EA Playground and Ninja Reflex.

Jet Set / Grind Radio: Jet Set Radio (known as Jet Grind Radio in North America) is another franchise for which a return to the world of videogames is long overdue. Set on the mean streets of Tokyo, it saw SEGA Dreamcast (and later Microsoft Xbox and Game Boy Advance) players inline skating around the city, graffiti-ing tags, marking territory and avoiding the long arm of the law. While the Balance Board’s dimensions might make a skating action a little difficult, we’re sure SEGA could come up with something to make it work, especially since spray painting with the Wii Remote’s pointer would compliment said movement brilliantly.

Mario Kart: This is one of the simpler and more obvious ideas, and one that might have been perfect for Mario Kart Wii had Wii Fit and the Balance Board arrived a fair time beforehand: using the accessory’s pressure sensitive pads to accelerate and brake. Perhaps it wouldn’t be as comfortable as buying a ‘proper’ steering wheel and pedals piece of kit, but even if developers other than Nintendo added it as a secondary control option into their future software, it would make sure that the Balance Board wouldn’t be left languishing in a cupboard collecting dust - or being used as a sturdy marquee for an insects’ garden party. We can but dream.

We know that there are over ten Wii Balance Board-compatible games currently in development (including Rocket Company’s Wii Exercise and THQ’s All Star Cheer Squad - and of course Namco’s We Ski is due soon), but which of your favourite gaming franchises would you like to see given a Balance Board makeover? How else do you think the technology could best be used? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below.

Source: Nintendic

King Story on Nintendo Wii - new details and screenshots

Originally known as “Project O”, King Story is the English name given to the new life simulation game for the Nintendo Wii, with Yahuhiro Kimura (Harvest Moon) at the helm. It’s currently scheduled to arrive in the summer of 2008 in Japan, and today we’re treated to new details and screenshots.

King Story sees players inheriting the role of a timid little boy named Corobo Bred, who on finding a mysterious crown realises that it gives him the power to charm anybody he comes across into performing orders for him. As King of his Europe-based village, his task ultimately involves expanding his “empire”, keeping the residents happy and defending them from the attack of monsters.



Players will be put in charge of a number of key areas, including agriculture, construction and defense. A report from Famitsu also reveals that King Story will include time-sensitive events during the day and night cycles.

Looking very promising so far, if you ask us, especially in the vibrancy and spirited-looking graphics.

Nintendo take action against Mario Kart Wii Cheaters

Mario Kart Baby Mario

Owners of Mario Kart will have noticed recently that some people have been exploiting some bugs and cheats to give them unbelievably great times in time trial mode.

Thankfully, it seems Nintendo have listened to these complaints and have dealt with them.

Nintendo have deleted the insane times from all records and have removed the cheating methods.

Whether or not said players have been banned from uploading time trails to the server is not yet known (but I doubt it very much), but at least it's a step in the right direction.

Source: Nintencast

Gran Turismo 5 Prologue - review drive you wild?

On the PlayStation (long before it became the PSone) Gran Turismo was a revelation. Rather than approximating a driving experience a la arcade centric games like Ridge Racer or even TOCA, it unblinkingly stared into the face of the motorsport industry and delivered an authentic experience. Where other game had long been marketed a life-like driving experience, Gran Turismo was the first that could truly say it was a real Driving Simulator.

As such it became a game more about relationships than about horsepower and traction control (stay with us here). Picking up a gamepad to play, the player slowly developed detailed interactions with both cars and circuits. Here they would spend hours fine tuning their skills on certain cars, and memorising every twist, camber and turn of each track. Apart from the real life renderings of other games (Laguna Seca for example) there are no tracks that come anywhere close in my memory to the heady delights of Grindwald.



Since the original release, and the franchise's establishment at the top of the driving game scene, it has seen numerous iterations. Such is the obsessive attention to detail of Polyphony Digital that they are often forced to release early samples of their games to keep fans happy. These entries usually go by the name of Prologue, and although should be quickly followed by the full game, history teaches that they often precede it by a good year. Today is just one of those moments - where publisher and fan pressure has squeezed an early release form the developers, and where we likely have another year to go before the full release.

More from: Play

Battlefield - Bad Company review of the latest in the series from DICE

The latest in the phenomenally successful Battlefield series, Bad Company is something of a departure for developers DICE. Not only is it the first in the series to be designed specifically for consoles but it'll also be home to the strongest single player campaign element found in the series so far. However, for the purposes of this preview we're going to be focusing on the area the series is famous for, online multiplayer.



It's becoming almost expected now for high profile shooters to offer some kind of multiplayer beta and Bad Company is no exception. For those lucky enough to have access codes the beta offers a tantalising look at one of the game's multiplayer modes, Gold Rush, and two of the maps.

There are five classes of soldier on offer, Assault, Support, Recon, Demolition and Specialist. They all do pretty much what they say on the tin and come complete with their own set of upgrades and unloackables to add extra spice to proceedings as you move up the ranks. Moving up said ranks involves earning in-game points, the more you earn the higher rank you earn and the more goodies you're able to get your hands on. As console gamers found in CoD4 this kind of experience based promotion system works well and it's nice to see a similar system in play here.

Into the game itself and the one mode on offer, Gold Rush, is a variant on the traditional Capture The Flag game that thankfully does more than simply replace the flag with a pile of gold. Players are divided into two sides, attackers and defenders, and pairs of chests holding gold provide the focus of each side's task. It's not all quite that simple though, a couple of twists make things a whole lot more interesting. First up is the idea of respawn tickets, the attacking side has a limited number of these and once they're used up it's game over, victory to the defenders. Defenders meanwhile have to worry about being pushed back through their territory. As the attacking force claim a pair of chests a new area opens up containing another two chests and pushing the defending team deeper into their own terrain. If the attacking team claims four sets of chests then it's their turn to dance a victory jig.



It's a simple set of changes to the formula yet they prove to be immensely enjoyable giving the action a real sense of ebb and flow. Last gasp stands in the final area against a dwindling attacking force give a much more urgent feel to the end of games than a simple flag or frag counter could ever do.

The two maps that come with the beta are both impressive in their own way. The first, called Ascension is based around a rural village while the second, Oasis, takes place in a much more open desert environment. As you'd expect the village offers more in the way of close quarters street and building based combat while out in the desert snipers come into their own with less cover and smaller buildings making the game more open.

All the clever modes and pretty maps in the world mean nothing however if the thing plays like a dog, thankfully this is far from the case here. It may seem faint praise but the best thing about Bad Company is that it all simply works. Weapons feel perfect, aiming is fast and accurate, the maps are well designed and everything flows like a well oiled machine. There's no noticeable lag and there's more than enough people on the servers to have given them a damn good test as well as keep things interesting at all times. If I has one grumble it would be that identification of enemies can be hampered a little by the colour coded gamertags that float above player heads sometimes taking a few seconds to kick in which led to some comedy moments of shall I/shan't I but no doubt will be fixed come release.

Graphically things are looking very impressive with little or no slowdown even in the most frenetic fire fights. Not only do the environments look beautifully realistic and come complete with some well implemented physics, but they're also highly destroyable which always adds to the fun. Who needs pin-point accuracy when you can just blow the side off a building after all?



It's fair to say that we'd kind of expect the multiplayer aspect of a Battlefield game to be pretty hot, so there's little surprise to be proven right by this beta. What will be more interesting will be seeing how they've forged the single player campaign and story when the game gets released in the summer. However, if the other multiplayer modes and maps prove to be half as much fun as the content found in the beta then there's every chance Bad Company will sell on the basis of its multiplayer alone despite the apparent single player focus.

Source: Play

First drive with Mario Kart Wii and the WiiWheel on Nintendo Wii

I was thinking what to initially write about Mario Kart Wii because the game is explained in a single sentence: Mario Kart with motion control and Nintendo Wi-Fi play. I’m fairly certain people who read Siliconera are familiar with Mario Kart and Mario Kart Wii doesn’t deviate from the formula. Nintendo even took the time to specify where the racetracks in Mario Kart Wii originated from. Did I just buy the same game again? (I’m joking.)

There are some tweaks to the core in the form of motorcycles and extra items. The giant mushroom power-up from New Super Mario Brothers makes a debut and it makes your character grow large enough to trample other drivers. The POW Block makes all other racers spin as if they hit a banana peel and drop their item. The thundercloud places a smiling ball of water vapor above your racer. You have a limited amount of time to “pass” it to another racer by touching them. If you don’t handoff the jovial cloud it shocks you.

Motorcycles are an alternative to go karts, but besides parameters bikes use the same controls with one exception. You can do wheelies by tilting the Wii Wheel or the remote in the nunchuck/remote control scheme. Wheelies give you a speed burst, but temporarily remove steering while your front tire is airborne. I guess the other advantage bikes have is squeezing in between cars, but the tracks are so wide you probably won’t need to do this often.

More from: Siliconera

Prototyping The Sims 3

You're in charge of the second most popular videogames franchise in the western world in recent years. Your studio produces a game so big - both in terms of sales and in terms of cachet - that it's actually become a label in its own right within the world's biggest third-party publisher. In total, it's sold 95 million pieces of software in twenty-two languages since its inception, and come to think of it, it's the only PC gaming property that's actually bigger than Blizzard's Warcraft juggernaut.

Nobody is denying that Rod Humble, the man in charge of EA's Sims studio in sunny Redwood Shores, is in a rather enviable position. The veteran developer, who moved into EA - and the Sims unit - after a long stint working on the EverQuest franchise for Sony Online Entertainment, is at the helm of a franchise whose success runs so deep as to defy description.

No game whose audience is 62 per cent female and only 21 per cent under 17 - with a heavy bias for the over-45s - could comfortably be called "hardcore". Yet equally, can a game for which hundreds of thousands of pieces of user-created content have been uploaded, with four million active online users on the community site every month, really be called "casual"?

The Sims, then, is a phenomenon - one which defies conventional analysis as a videogame. Which means that for all that Humble's position is enviable, it's also challenging - because when it came to creating the next instalment in the series, he and the team at Redwood Shores were facing questions about game design that no other game had ever posed.

More from: Games Industry Site

Watch the BBC on Nintendo Wii as the BBC iPlayer announced for Nintendo Wii

BBC snubs Sony, Microsoft for Nintendo Wii deal

Owners of the Nintendo Wii games system will be able to stream the last seven days worth of TV shows with the bBBC's iPlayer online service.

The BBC has announced its iPlayer online TV catch-up service is being made available for the Nintendo Wii.

Wii owners will be able to stream the last seven days of BBC shows on their TVs through the internet channel on the Wii main menu.

Erik Huggers, the BBC's group controller for Future Media and Technology, announced the collaboration with Nintendo UK at the annual MipTV-Milia conference in Cannes.

Huggers said in a statement: "The BBC's catch-up TV service can now be accessed on an increasing number of different platforms—from the web and portable devices to gaming consoles. It will shortly be available on TV."

Once the iPlayer service for Wii is live a message will be sent to all web-connected Wii consoles in the UK.

NOTE: The service is only available to UK licence fee payers.

Sony PlayStation 3 is inviting trouble with mod support, says XNA boss

Chris Satchell, XNA group manager at Microsoft, has said that companies like Sony, Nintendo and Apple are "inviting trouble" if they don't have XNA-style security measures in place to protect against malicious user-generated content.

"I think there's a potential risk on any platform where you're allowing...where you're running in what we call native mode, where you're writing straight to the metal, not a sandbox layer like XNA, and then that runs a script engine and you let people do that in that script engine,"

Satchell told Eurogamer in an interview published today.

"Any platform that let's you do that, and doesn't have the right security measures in place - whether it's Sony, whether it's Nintendo, whether it's Apple, whether it's anyone - you're inviting trouble, because sooner or later someone will want to prove they can do it,"

he added.

Satchell was responding to a question about whether the peer-review system used to help weed out inappropriate content in XNA community games could be put to other use. He admits it could be, but obviously mod support isn't on the immediate agenda.

The XNA group's boss also talked about the possibility of XNA community games being allowed to use Achievements, saying that Microsoft will "need to see how the community works" before making a decision.

Source: Games Industry