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Here's a little something interesting for Resident Evil fans this morning. According to the latest podcast featuring Chris Kramer, Senior Director of Communication and Community for Capcom (I imagine that he handles the hate mail and forums), over at Major Nelson's place, it's highly possible that Resident Evil 5 will see release this year.

And I quote:


If you'd rather skip the radio-like melodrama you'll find the above comment at the 30.00 mark.

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The Game Developers Conference 2008, which is currently scheduled for February 18-11 in San Francisco, has published a list of featured speakers and topics under discussion for each. Here are some big names for the curious:

Peter Molyneux (Head of Studios, Lionhead Studios), on (surprise!) Fable 2 - The Big Three Features Revealed.

• Peter Molyneux's stated ambition as a designer is to make FABLE 2 a landmark game. In order to achieve this three big design features have been added. The inspiration and rational behind these features will be discussed along with their evolution throughout the development process. The wider context of their impact and influence on the RPG genre with also be examined as the ambition is also to evolve the genre itself. The talk will be supported by retrospective videos as well as live game examples.

Ken Levine (President/Creative Director, 2K Boston) on (bigger surprise!) Storytelling in Bioshock: Empowering Players to Care about Your Stupid Story (sign me up).

• Game stories can matter, even in first person shooters. But first we're going to have to give up a lot of our preconceptions about what people care about when playing a game. For too long, games (especially first person shooters) have been stuck in a "game sequence followed by story sequence" mentality. Ken Levine will tell the tale of how the BIOSHOCK took a pointy-headed idea about a pseudo-objectivist utopia and turned it into one of the most compelling and succesful game worlds in recent history. What were the tools used? What compromises had to be made? Where did the shooter end and the story begin? How did we make people give a crap? How did we use story and narrative to become perhaps the most talked about game at the super-crowded E3 2006? What does this all mean for stories in games? And must of all, what hell does "Mise En Scene" mean?

Chris Butcher (Engineering Lead, Microsoft/Bungie) on E Pluribus Unum: Matchmaking in Halo 3.

• The online multiplayer mode of HALO 3 features an automatic matchmaking system to place players into games. Players may join individually or with parties of friends, and are quickly matched into groups. This presentation describes the algorithms behind the peer-to-peer matchmaking model, and its implementation over Xbox Live. It examines the impact of matchmaking on the HALO online community, and provides techniques for shaping the player experience and discouraging cheaters. The tradeoffs of an automatic matchmaking system compared to traditional multiplayer game browsers will be discussed, and illustrated by some results from the first months of HALO 3's operation.

Cevat Yerli (Managing Director, Crytek) on Crysis in the Making.

• This session will offer a look into key areas of CRYSIS development that markedly depart from Crytek's first project, FAR CRY. Main topics include Nanosuit design and gameplay, creating a rich, destructible/non-linear world, and peopling it with dynamic, believable AI enemies that challenge and entertain the player.

You can view the full list of featured speakers here. If you're interested in the keynotes, however, you can find that here.

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The GameBump staff would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Merry Christmas. GameBump will resume updating tomorrow, December 26. Save us some turkey and ham!

In the meantime, be sure to check out our exclusive short story written by our very own Aaron Dunlap.

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Written by Aaron Dunlap. Story by Aaron Dunlap & Shiva Stella.

A month until Christmas. Plenty of time.

She'd set aside money for a while, whatever part of her paycheck didn't go toward food, house payments, or school loans was withdrawn as cash and tucked into a book on the bottom shelf of her bedroom's sparse bookcase populated mostly by tales of whimsy she hadn't had time to read or nonfiction books on finances, small-businesses, and self-motivation she couldn't motivate herself to open. There was no Christmas bonus at work, she was sure the doctors all got bonuses, and she even heard the RNs talking about theirs. Nothing for the nursing interns, though. No child support checks lately, either.

No matter, though, she had the extra $300 she wanted. Enough to buy the one thing her daughter wanted for Christmas: the whimsically named 'Wii,' a video game console by Nintendo.

Her daughter, Jessica, had seen the commercials over a year ago when she was just 10. She hadn't made much of a fuss, but her mother knew how badly she wanted one, whatever it was. She had tried to find one that Christmas, but they were impossible to find and too much money. This year she would be prepared, though. She'd tucked the money inside that book. This year Jessica would get her Wii, she would be happy again.

They were $250 still, she saw in a Target flier recently. For her $300, then, she could get the system and still have enough to get one game -- she wasn't sure which one, whatever a salesman recommended. Perhaps a Mario Brothers game, if they still made those.

She had to work on "Black Friday," the day after Thanksgiving, but she asked Gail, a friend of hers who was going sale-hunting to see if she could find a Wii on sale with the promise she'd pay her back. No luck. A few stores had them, but they were all gone within minutes.

Shoot. She'd hoped that the shortage from last year would have been sorted out by now. They usually are, the Ticke-Me-Elmos and Furbies were never a problem to find after the initial craze, her friends had told her.

Since then, she'd swiped the sales fliers from the Sunday newspaper each week, careful not to let Jessica see her pouring over each one, looking for a hint that the video game system would be in stock or, even better, on sale. The games were always there, brightly colored boxes priced between $30 and $50, but never any mention of the Wii being in stock.

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This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Brian Mohr.

In 1993, Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas came to theatres. Twelve years later, Capcom has followed up on the movie by coming out with a partial sequel for the Xbox and PlayStation 2. The game looks and sounds great, like another version of the innovative movie, but as far as a translation to games, The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie’s Revenge doesn’t completely make the cut.

In this game, players take on the role of our hero Jack Skellington one year after the events of the movie. Jack must not only save his love, Sally, but he also has to reclaim Halloweentown from Oogie and stop him from taking other holidays like Easter and Christmas.

 

The first thing you’ll notice in the game is that Nightmare stays close to its roots from the movie. This is wonderful as it really puts you in the environment with all the characters you’ll recognize. Some of the actual storylines from the movie were continued in the game and others were developed by Capcom, but either way they fit the game well.

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