SimAnimals, The Next Gen Black & White

Electronic Arts has announced SimAnimals, a game where you play the godlike hand and control the lifestyle of over 60 animals. In the game you’ll play the role of a disembodied hand which moves around and life animals, pick flowers and interact with the environment much like a past Lionhead Studios game: Black and White.

EA’s not exactly being the most creative with this Wii and DS game based on the sounds of it so far, as it clones a lot of the features in Black and White, including how “animals react” when you treat them a specific way. However, we’ve not had this style of game on the Wii or DS, both very “touchy” in methodology.

Black and White had the touch sensitive control scheme using tactile feedback with the mouse implemented with Immersion technology. This brings the style of gameplay to a new level, but nothing we’ve heard thus far makes us think originality. Cute and cool, perhaps but it’s nothing new. Of course, who said it had to be new?

We know old gaming concepts sell well at this point!

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Episode 255: The Darkness II ContestEpisode 255: The Darkness II Contest

Dan Quick returns again to cover for Paul Nowak, and this week, the Gaming Podcast is offering free copies of The Darkness II Limited Edition, which comes with the main game and some free DLC. The guys are giving away an Xbox 360 version and a PlayStation 3 version. To win, just listen to the podcast and post what your favorite scary movie is.

The game news this week includes:

  • Ex-SCEE senior VP Phil Harrison joins Microsoft’s European team
  • DOOM developer John Romero has “plans” for “old school” shooter
  • EA defends Mass Effect 3 From Ashes DLC data being on disc
  • Notch settles with Bethesda over “Scrolls” trademark
  • DICE: 2GB RAM won’t be enough for next gen consoles
  • Angry Birds theme park to open in Finland
  • GAME puts itself up for sale, GameStop interested
  • Diablo III release date announcement “in a few days“, no PvP in launch version

And yes, they know that the announcement was just made today – May 15th release date for Diablo III.

The contest to win either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 version of The Darkness II will run this and next week, with the winners announced in Episode 257.

Episode 333: Boss BattlesEpisode 333: Boss Battles

Paul returns to the Gaming Podcast, having doing the major work on the Facebook game he’d been helping develop, Team USA Pinsanity. The trio argue over boss battles, and this week’s Gaming Flashback is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Jordan also finally has a great Vita game to fawn over, Tearaway.

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  • Sony to make $250M entertainment cuts, “nothing too sacred”

The Question of the Week: “What is your opinion on boss battles?”

We Need Another Ikari WarriorsWe Need Another Ikari Warriors

In 1986 SNK released Ikari Warriors, it had all the makings of a classic title. Cool weapons, time strategies, two player action and a great challenge. We’re now seeing folks reproduce some of the essence of classic games by creating platformers like Little Big Planet and Mega Man 9, where is the love for the top-down scrollers?

Ikari Wariors was one of the first game titles to use a rotary joystick along with a directional system. Looking at the current generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 it’s plain to see the joystick is equipped with this design. We’ve seen Geometry Wars utilize the analog stick to create a 360 directional attack, so it’s possible to utilize this behavior for Ikari Warriors.

Given SNK is still alive under the name SNK Playmore the intellectual property must still exist to breath fresh life into an Ikari Warrior remake, with about six to eight months development time a classy title could be re-developed using old concepts brought to the current generation hardware.

Blast grenades, RPG’s, smart bombs, air strikes the options are limitless and the concept has been proven to work. Given the gamer demographic of 18-34 it’s plain to see old gamers of the Arcade and NES would recall and rebuild their love for the title while attracting younger audiences whom have never seen an Ikari Warriors title; if it worked in 1986 are we so adverse to it working again?

Games do not have to implement full 3D perspective graphics to be cool, we’ve seen proof in that with the Wii and the demand for titles like Little Big Planet. We neeed another Ikari Warriors.