Now this is turning out to be my favorite news for the day. Actually, this kind of news used to give me a boner when I was young, stupid, and believed that all Japanese high-school girls are virgins, horny, and that they will relentlessly give me multiple blow-jobs just for the fact that I look so awesome.



Alone in the Dark. We all know what came of it, sadly. I do not want to be the herald of bad reviews here, so just browse your internets for some results on the matter - the point is, we had a game with extremely good and solid concepts, but with such a poor execution, that even Jack Thompson would refuse to sue this game for his (need of) violent issues.

But wait. WAIIIT! We still have the PS3 version on the way, and Atari decided that it is time to re-invent the wheel. At least to fool people into believing that. How? First of all, shamelessly stamping a new name on the poor game, which will be known as Alone in the Dark: Inferno and which, according to certain statements, will be completely revamped. Improved inventory system. Ok. Free camera movement. Ok. Plus certain tweaks and “fixes”. Ok.

Long before there was Heroes of Might and Magic, there was a little game called King's Bounty - a strikingly similar turn-based strategy, that had also been created by the late New World Computing five years earlier, in 1990. Fast forward 18 years, and today we finally have the chance to see first-hand how the sequel King's Bounty: The Legend turned out, thanks to the demo version released by publisher 1C Company, hot off Katauri Interactive's work benches.


The FTP link that came with the press release is pretty useless right now, as it's being hammered down to a crawl, so you might want to try your regular download website of choice. Like WorthPlaying or something. The 700ish MB demo includes the first city in the game, all three character types, multiple quests and dozens of spells. Now if you'll pardon me... let's see what we have here.

Update: After 8 hours of playing the demo, all I can say is... win. Pure win!

Heh, what do you know, so the stupefying rumour was true, after all. Phil Harrison, the former president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, has exchanged one presidency for another, like a dirty pair of corporate socks. Very, very expensive socks... As announced last night by Atari's parent company from France, Phil has become the new President and Directeur Général Délégué of Infogrames Entertainment (thank God for copy-pasting, those accents are killers), while also joining the company's Board of Directors.

The genuinely surprising move follows shortly after the appointment of David Gardner (ex-EA executive) as CEO of Infogrames, and now the two white-collared buddies are promising to "form the basis of a transformational leadership team at Infogrames that will grow the Atari brand into a leading online game company". Phil's daily duties will range from "reinforcing [Infogrames'] franchise portfolio of products, developing its new packaged and online games, and strengthening its internal and external studio capability through attracting world-class design and development talent to the organisation". Sounds like... umm... fun. So how does Phil feel about all this? (...)

 Continue reading 'Phil Harrison, From Sony To... Infogrames'...

Great week so far, with plenty of games revealed out of the blue, like Red Alert 3, a new KotOR RPG or, by the way, a new Lord of the Rings game in the works at Pandemic (probably something more action this time). And the list goes on, as we learn from Eurogamer, with some new titles included in Atari's quarterly earnings report. And then some!

First off, there's a new expansion planned for Obisdian's RPG sequel, Neverwinter Nights 2. The second add-on should be relased between this April and March 2009; or to narrow that down a bit, let's assume it comes out in October - one year after the first expansion Mask of the Betrayer (which in turn came out one year after the original NWN 2).

Also during the next fiscal year, Atari intends to release a certain PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 game called Airborne Rangers. Right, like the classic "action simulation" game by MicroProse. That was two decades ago, so I don't think anyone would mind a shiny remake, or something.

There are several other gamelings listed in Eurogamer's story which don't sound worthy of our time, and they say Atari also has one or two "hardcore" projects which were not mentioned in the report. All of these will start getting proper announcements in the weeks to come, the publisher promised. Great, that should give me plenty of time to forget about this, and fake getting excited all over again.