TOKYO–It appears Konami is working on a new installment in its Suikoden role-playing series. News of the development leaked Thursday in the online diary of veteran voice actor Makoto Terada, who mentioned clocking studio time for a Suikoden game. “At noon, I recorded voices for a game named Suikoden (Konami). In the evening, I worked on an anime named Erementar Gerad, which will be starting in April,” Terada wrote in his blog. Terada, who currently works under the pseudonym Mugi Hito, is known for his voice contributions to anime like Grappler Baki, where he voiced the character...

The chip that will run the next version of the PlayStation video game machine will have nine processor cores and run faster than 4GHz, the chip’s designers revealed Monday. Engineers from Sony, IBM and Toshiba revealed those and other specifications for the Cell processor during a press conference at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference, where technical papers on the Cell design will be presented this week. The three companies have been working on Cell for several years, promising to deliver a high-performance chip optimized for multimedia applications. Test production of...

Retail sales of video games tallied just over $9.9 billion in 2004, according to figures released today by industry research firm the NPD Group. That figure, which includes all portable and console hardware, software, and accessories, represents a decline of less than 1 percent when compared with $10 billion in 2003. While dollar sales were down, overall, unit sales were up 4 percent, said the research group “Sales remained strong, thanks in large part to the console software, portable game software, and portable game hardware categories, which saw dollar sales percentage increases of 7 percent,...

LONDON (Reuters) – Reality TV, meet virtual reality. Electronic Arts, the world’s biggest video game publisher, is considering an interactive TV show that would let viewers control the actions of the characters as in its popular game “The Sims.” “One idea could be that you’re controlling a family, telling them when to go to the kitchen and when to go to the bedroom, and with this mechanism you have gamers all over the world ‘playing the show’,” said Jan Bolz, vice president of marketing and sales for EA Europe. The proposed show, which might...

Nintendo might have had a big handheld holiday with their DS, but Sony has started the New Year off with a bang by unveiling a ton of new info for their upcoming PSP system at the Consumer Electronics Show not one week into 2005 boasting processing power that rivals the PS2 and a set of features that makes your new cell phone look like a Fisher-Price reject, the PSP is obviously packing a lot of punch in its slender frame. But all the spec lists in the world don’t tell the whole story, which I will attempt to do in one simple phrase: The screen rules. I’m not kidding. The 4.3 inch LCD...

So what do I care if some french company named Titus goes bankrupt you may ask youreself Well, if you must know, Titus Interactive is the parent company for Interplay, wich we all of course know for the superb Fallout games (if you do not know fallout you do not deserve to call yourselve a gamer (< -- just a joke that) too bad they sold the game to someone else :( Although Interplay still has a number of licenses it could sell, including Kingpin, the Baldur’s Gate-free Dark Alliance, and the rights to a Fallout massively multiplayer online role-playing game, the question remains as to...

Sega and SNK Playmore are bringing back the classic NeoGeo arcade stick for Sony’s popular home console. TOKYO–Sega and SNK Playmore have announced today that they will be bringing a modern version of the classic NeoGeo Joystick to the PlayStation 2. The joystick, named the NeoGeo Stick 2, will be produced in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the King Of Fighters fighting game series. The NeoGeo Stick 2 will be released in Japan on February 17 at the price of 5,800 yen ($56). While the original NeoGeo joystick for the AES (Advanced Entertainment System) only featured 4 buttons,...

It has been rumored that commandos would try a new genre but only for ps2. Instead of the usual top view camera and strategic gameplay it would have a first person camera. That would mean it will become a Fps(first person shooter) but not like say….. Doom3. It would the first commandos to combine Strategy, real time gameplay and first person shooting. More news hopefully to come. Source: Opm2 – The Offical Dutch PS2 Magazine