Deniska has recently released a new build of the Jazz Jackrabbit game ported to the PSP that will now run on the Slim. That aside, the new build will also carry several updates. You can read about them over in the full article.


Download: Jazz Jackrabbit v0.02 (alpha) for Slims

Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney expressed his opinion on the flagging state of the PC gaming industry. In an interview conducted by TG Daily, he pointed out the different problems the PC marke t is facing as well as some possible solutions the industry can take if it wants to make some headway against its rivals. You can check out the rest of the interview by reading our full article, accessible through the "read more" link below.

Want a piece of Kratos? Well, you might get in a fight, but you definitely have a chance of winning one of 5,000 demo UMDs of Epic Games' God of War: Chains of Olympus in Gamespot UK's contest. It wouldn't hurt to try, right? Better head to the full article to know more about this.

Europe is all set to receive a double whammy of critically acclaimed titles as Midway Games and Sony Computer Entertainment Europe will be covering a joint event to herald the arrival of Unreal Tournament 3 for the PlayStation 3, as well as the promotion of  the upcoming God of War title for the PlayStation Portable with God of War: Chains of Olympus.

After he indirectly revealed and eventually confirmed Eat Sleep Play's latest project being Twisted Metal on the Sony PlayStation 3, David Jaffe announced on his blog that he'll be turning down interviews until his crew is ready to officially unveil its upcoming. He's willing to say "no" to the press the same way CliffyB suggested. Check out the full article to know what we're talking about.

Homebrew developer MK2k (known for his Sleep'n'Wake project) has released Heartlight PSP X-Mas Preview, a remake of the original Heartlight game for the PC from Epic Megagames. There are currently 20 levels in this preview, but if you check out the other features included in this release, they'll definitely make you wait for the full game's release. More details at the full article.




Download: Heartlight PSP X-Mas Preview
Visit: QJ.NET's PSP Development Forums

In this day and age of "next generation" gaming, it has become the driving factor of the giants in the game industry to push out as many gorgeous games as their money would allow. Only the really innovative games come from the those who grew up in the meager beginnings of the computer video game or from the independent game developer, who has nothing but creativity to slap into their new games.

Is it a matter of opinion or should games actually sport some sort of creativity, no matter what the excuse? In this blogger's book, game concepts and design should always entail something out of the ordinary - something new, something fresh and not just a visual upgrade that requires more muscle to achieve.

Let's take this into another perspective: if games continue on improving in the path of realism, once they have achieved absolute realism, what else is there to improve on? It doesn't take a double-digit IQ to tell that the path to realism already has one big dead end. Why pursue a race that's bound to end when creativity, thanks to the human mind, is boundless and never really meets a creativity road block?

Although it may be arguable that the game industry already hit rock bottom in their barrel of creativity apples and just can't think of anything new anymore, one could also attribute the direction of the game development aimed at a new type of gamer.

If you haven't noticed already, you might be able to identify a growing core of hardcore gamers who no longer cares about what games were like before and just want the best visuals to blow them away. And it might just be that you have become one of them, yourself!

Take for instance, Epic Games' Gears of War. It has defied any and all odds against creativity, and serves as a testament to all that there are a core of gamers out there that could care less about a story if the gameplay sets the game right. It was often the target of scrutiny with most game developers, one iconic moment entailed it being slapped with a "zero-innovation" concept label.

Many other games fit in this same category and there's hardly an innovative game that has rocked the industry like those in the old days. How many game designers do you know? How many of them have managed to develop a style and place it out there for people to relate with? For many gamers who have evolved to retro-gamers, we think you know what we're trying to point out here.

So we'd just like to ask, "Does creativity matter to you?" No, we mean, really...does it?

Midway, publisher of this year's most anticipated next-gen games, celebrated Midway Gamers Day 2007 last Thursday in Hard Rock Casino's main auditorium in Las Vegas. Among the highlights of their party were the trailers to the their upcoming games BlackSite: Area 51, LOTRO: Shadows of Angmar, Unreal Tournament 3 and Hour of Victory.

Midway announced to their guests the sheer amount of time and resources they have invested into next generation console game development, with nothing shy of US$100 million and up to 700 employees all put into the production for games for the XBox 360, PS3, Wii and PC. It was here that Epic Games' VP Mark Rein announced the name-change for Unreal Tournament 2007 to Unreal Tournament 3.

It was changed not to highlight that it was an exclusive for the PS3, but to underline the fact that it is running "the next generation of the Unreal franchise, based on the Unreal 3 engine." On the contrary, Epic announced here that the newly renamed UT3 is going to be released also for the XBox 360, erasing yet another title from the PS3 exclusive list.

The last of many highlights to be shown was Stranglehold, Midway's adaptation of the John Woo's 1992 Hong Kong movie Hard Boiled. Other shows included the Wii edition of Mortal Kombat: Armageddon, Touchmaster DS for the Nintendo DS, Hot Brain for the PSP, TNA iMPACT! for the XBox 360 and The Wheelman - a film-game crossover project starring (and executive-produced by) none other than Vin Diesel.

Quite the year Midway had last year. It looks to be even better this year.

Today would probably be a good time to start making reservations for a flight to Australia, as there are apparently several good reasons to be there once March comes around.

One of the biggest reasons is probably the appearance Hideo Kojima is scheduled to make at the GO3 Electronic Entertainment Expo 2007 at Perth. That's right, MGS director and creator Kojima is scheduled to speak at the two-day expo, and to be specific, his talk is slated on March 31, at 4 p.m., so take note of your schedule if you're planning to listen to what he's got to say.

In the meantime, other guests that are expected to make appearances at the Expo include personalities and representatives from the likes of NVIDIA, Q Entertainment, Midway Games, Epic Games, Sony, and Microsoft.

It's common sense that "what goes up must come down," but you need specific formulas if you're going to send a space shuttle into space. In other words, you need solid data and clear numbers.

So we appreciated the data we found in a Gamasutra article about BrandIntel, a market research company out of Toronto, and BrandIntel's "Top 50 Video Games Report." The study took data from both "online and human analysis from January 1, 2006 to October 31, 2006 for over 1,200 titles" - including those that have only been announced. "The games were broken down in terms of audience interest and sentiment score, and then subsequently ranked."

The results. So which games got the most audience (customer) interest?

1. Gears of War
   The game is from Epic Games and Microsoft Game Studios is unstoppable. (We had to use Tim Buckley's Ctrl+Alt+Del comic take on it from ctrlaltdel-online.com.)
   
2. The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
   Any "hardcore gamer" should be willing to show respect for this venerable franchise steeped in gaming tradition from Nintendo EAD. *bow your head and ask for Miyamoto's blessing* LOL
   
3. Madden NFL 07 (with versions for the Xbox 360, for the PS3, and for the Wii)
   If you've been reading QJ comments, you'll see people's interest vary depending on the platform. Some versions for some consoles are ridiculed for bugs and because EA Sports has lost its touch, but some versions are praised for innovations.
   
4. Halo 3
5. Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (with versions for the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii)
   
6. Fight Night Round 3
7. Call of Duty 3 (with versions for the Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3)
   
8. Assassin's Creed (with versions for the Xbox 360 and PS3)
   
9. Resistance: Fall of Man
   
10. Tony Hawk's Project 8

The research took "online consumer communities such as message boards, discussion forums, blogs and other internet social communities," as well as "over 670,000 raw search results, of which 48,000 consumer mentions on next-gen video games were used in compiling the data."

The trends. According to the study, there are some trends: moving away from World War II shooters and moving towards futuristic shooters, action adventure got discussed because of "open-ended game play and highly-interactive environments" but sports games got discussed (dissed) for "inaccurate and unrealistic" gameplay.

That makes sense to us: it's easy to diss a sport game because you play the sport in real life or watch it on TV. You don't usually have to deal with aliens or monsters unless you went to snooty high school, so a futuristic shooter will tend to make us notice (in a positive way) the atmosphere and effects and gameplay.