Giant Bomb Video Game News

If for no other reason than to spray something Modern Warfare-related across every inch of our website here, I will now share with you the box art and screenshots from the Call of Duty 4 port to the Wii, Reflex Edition.















Better late than never, no? Any interest in trying this thing out? The shots don't look half bad, honestly.

In addition to an unveiling currently going on in London (1UP has a live blog), Disney Interactive has finally sent out a bunch of new images and information detailing its big under-wraps Wii project from Warren Spector, Epic Mickey. I never would have envisioned Spector to go from System Shock and Deus Ex to Mickey Mouse, but hey, the guy's got the pedigree. 
 
Here's what you came for: the screenshots. 

 
Disney also put out some basic gameplay info and quotes from Spector. (Note: Entirely from the company's mouth.) 
 

Disney Interactive Studios today announced the development of Disney Epic Mickey, an adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements for the Wii home video game console.  The game stars Mickey Mouse who has been re-imagined for videogames by luminary game designer Warren Spector and his Junction Point game development studio. In Disney Epic Mickey, Spector, a life-long Disney fan, taps into Mickey Mouse's rich history along with the characters and worlds brought to life by Walt Disney to create an edgy and unexpected cartoon adventure.

"Mickey is an adventurous and rambunctious mouse," said Warren Spector, creative director and vice president, Junction Point. "I want to bring his personality to the forefront, place him in a daunting world and connect his spirited character with video game players worldwide. Ultimately, each player decides for him- or herself what makes Mickey cool."

In the game's fiction, a sorcerer named Yen Sid creates a beautiful, whimsically-twisted world where Disney's forgotten and retired creations thrive. Originally, the powerful sorcerer from "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" in Walt Disney's 1940 film "Fantasia" was nicknamed "Yen Sid" by Disney animators, although never named as such on screen. In Spector's game, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit - Walt Disney's first cartoon star created in 1927 - becomes the earliest inhabitant of Yen Sid's Cartoon Wasteland after Mickey Mouse is created. Oswald makes the Cartoon Wasteland comfortable for other retired characters as they join him in this magical land.  Years pass, and as Oswald dwells in the Cartoon Wasteland, he becomes resentful watching Mickey's popularity swell. When Mickey curiously stumbles upon Yen Sid's map, he makes an innocent yet terrible mistake and inadvertently devastates Oswald's comfortable world. Eventually, Mickey's mistake pulls him deep into the mysterious Cartoon Wasteland to face the destruction he unknowingly created.

Players use the Wii Remote to wield magical paint and thinner to re-shape the world around them. Paint's creativity and thinner's damaging effect give the player robust tools and empowers them to make choices about how they move through the world. Each player's decisions to use paint, thinner or both dynamically changes the world with consequences that affect the environment, interactions with other characters, and even Mickey's appearance and abilities.

"The core of this game is the idea of choice and consequence, and how that defines both the character and the player," says Spector. "By putting the mischievous Mickey in an unfamiliar place and asking him to make choices - to help other cartoon characters or choose his own path - the game forces players to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?' Each player will come up with a different answer."

Blurring reality and fantasy, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit's role is as significant in the game as it was in real life. The Walt Disney-created Oswald appeared in 26 silent cartoons between 1927 and 1928 for Charles Mintz, who contracted with Universal for distribution. At this time, Oswald was primed to be Walt's first big animated star. When faced with daunting production costs, Walt asked for more money to ensure the quality of the Oswald cartoons. When a deal could not be reached, Walt lost the rights to Oswald and with the rabbit went much of Walt's staff. Among those who remained with Walt was animator, cartoonist and long-time friend Ub Iwerks, and together they created a new character named Mickey Mouse.

The initial concept behind Disney Epic Mickey originated within the Disney Interactive Studios' Think Tank. The Think Tank conceptualized Mickey as a cartoon character thrown into turmoil. Spector expanded and refined Disney Epic Mickey's concept and built the game for a broad audience fully utilizing the Wii and Wii Remote for accessibility and engaging gameplay.     

There's also a ton of new concept art for you. Here are some environments. 

 

 
And... character designs! Zombie Donald Duck is pretty neat.
 


 
Am I a big jerk for wishing this wasn't just a Wii game? The artwork and designs going into this are pretty impressive--too bad we won't be able to play through them in high-def. What's your interest level for this one?

Last week I got a delightful hour of hands-on time with New Super Mario Bros. Wii. Oh, you didn't read it? It's cool, I'll wait for you. Please, go ahead. 
 
I only urge you to read my hard work because, after feasting your eyes upon these new assets Nintendo has released for the game, you might not bother reading at all.  

 
  
 

 
Seriously, the preview makes a nice companion piece to these assets! Validate my hard work, won't you? 
 
While you're at it, how are you feeling about this game? It's only a month away, hitting retail on Nov. 15 in the U.S. and all.

As much as I enjoyed the original New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, with its return to traditional 2D form, I couldn't help wanting a little more. Some new suits for Mario to power up with, the ability to fly, perhaps a return appearance by Kuribo's Shoe. Something. The game hewed to Mario's simpler platform beginnings, but at least it was a good blueprint for a new era of 2D Mario games.

Enter New Super Mario Bros. Wii, which Ryan and I just got back from playing several new levels of. Nintendo's Bill Trinen gave us an in-depth look at the main story mode--I use "story" loosely here, since the story is "Hey, rescue the princess!"--to give us a better sense of how the game will work in between the up-to-four-player shenanigans that will occur in each action stage. I think it's fair to say that both of us started getting a distinct Super Mario Bros. 3 sort of vibe from the game after just a few minutes.

What would make me namedrop that most revered of all games? There are a lot of little elements in NSMB Wii that make it seem like a more robust Mario adventure than its DS predecessor. Like NSMB DS, this one operates with a simple world map that you navigate to get from stage to stage, but this time there seems to be a lot more side activities going on in between the actual stages. Remember in Mario 3, how you could go into mushroom houses to get new items? Or you'd run into enemies on the world map from time to time and had to fight them? All that stuff is in here, and it works with all four players. For example, we tried a four-player tile-matching game that let us reap all the items we were able to match before we matched the wrong cards and got booted out.

Then there's the suits and power-ups. There's more of 'em! Nintendo showed off the propeller and penguin suits at E3; the former lets you get lift with your helicopter head, and the latter gets you more traction on icy surfaces and gives you a belly slide maneuver. Then there's this other new one that we got to see today. (At least, it was new to us.)

Allow me now to turn your world upside down, as mine was.

Ice flower. Ice flower.

I know, right? How did it take so long for them to come up with that? It does pretty much what you'd expect: you throw ice balls with the same bounce as a fireball, and those encase any enemies they touch in a big block of ice. Then you can pick that ice block up and throw it, or use it as a stepping stone. They'll even float to the surface of water, so you could ice some cheep-cheeps and then use them as stepping stones to reach a higher platform.

Also like Mario 3: this game is tough. There's a certain amount of controlled chaos that goes in on multiplayer games, mainly because the player characters have collision detection with each other. So you might jump on somebody's head at the wrong moment and send them straight down a pit, or fling a careless koopa shell right into your friend and kill them. Even in single-player, though, the game is pretty tough--I encountered some really tricky jumps involving big, rotating gears and a bunch of lava just in the castle at the end of world one.

Still another throwback: Koopa kids! Those eight troublemakers introduced in SMB3 are back to cause trouble with their pops again, and I fought one of them at the end of that first castle. I think it was Lemmy. Or maybe Iggy. He had crazy hair and a magic wand, and man, it was a nostalgic trip to be fighting a Koopa kid at the end of a castle again. I jumped on him three times and he died. Some things never change.

Perhaps you've noticed, but I'm pretty excited there's more to New SMB Wii than it seemed back at E3. I had a sense there that the game was, well, the DS game with four-player action crammed in, but it's clear there's plenty of new mechanics and a wonderfully nostalgic vibe about this game. It looks great, too, with lots of little touches in the animation and special effects that give the game character. They're the sort of things that are hard to describe but instantly make sense when you see them. And you'll get your chance to do that when New Super Mario Bros. Wii ships on November 15.

Nintendo says a new video of all this business is on the way next week, so stay tuned for that. Meanwhile, here's an old one! 

  
 
When DJ Hero was first announced, it seemed like a bad idea. Applying the Guitar Hero tactics to what was, at the time, sounding a lot like a hip-hop-focused game just didn't sound like a great fit. Sure, you'd get a popular genre of music into video games, but, really, how many modern rap tracks even have a turntable in them? When renders of the game's controller were released, the idea looked even worse. Buttons on the turntable? It looked like some kind of horrific toy. The whole thing looked like a cash-in. But still... I couldn't help but find the whole thing at least a little intriguing.

Hearing that it'd be focused on both hip-hop and dance music made it start sounding interesting. As a fan of the music, it's been rough seeing it go so underrepresented in rhythm gaming. Adding insult to injury, most of the attempts have been pretty bad. But more than just wanting this style of music to get its due, seeing the game in motion made the whole thing click. For me, that happened back at E3, where I got to see the game played in front of me and get a sense of what, exactly, you'd be doing in the game. You can watch the video I shot of this demo, if you like.

After seeing it in motion, I was pretty much on-board. The game seemed like much more than a simple Guitar Hero clone, and the folks working on the game seemed like they were going after some really solid music. Plus, the concept of mashing up two dissimilar songs (which has sort of been played out) ends up working a lot better when the mixes are actually made from the masters, rather than just bootleg DJs with instrumentals and acapellas. This means the tracks can get more complicated than you might think. No one's just dropping Beyonce vocals over Nirvana instrumentals here, these are all proper mixes, with plenty of cuts back and forth between the records and other things that make them more interesting, both from a listening and a gameplay perspective. But since I hadn't played it for myself, there were still a few question marks. I got a chance to play a final version of the game at an event last week, and came away impressed.

I'm impressed with the way the game eases you into the action. Working the turntable and the crossfader in DJ Hero feels very different than slinging a guitar controller over your neck and slapping out a few notes does. There's a lot going on, and a lot for you to keep track of. So it's incredibly smart that the game's tutorial takes things step-by-step, working you through the basics and getting you up to the advanced features. The tutorial, narrated by Grandmaster Flash, is a must for anyone looking to get the most out of the game, and you won't get very far without at least some kind of instructions, be it from the game or from a friend who already knows what's up. From there, you can dive into the music at one of several difficulty settings. While the easy mode is incredibly simple, it's also so stripped down that I can't really imagine anyone having fun with it. After completing the tutorial, I dove directly into medium, which employs the crossfader, all three buttons on the turntable, and, of course, the turntable itself. It's a good medium, letting you use all of the features of the controller while still acting lenient enough to keep you from getting savaged on your first few times out.

But hard and expert is where the game really starts to get exciting, mostly because of the way scratching changes at higher difficulty settings. On medium, the scratching is really indiscriminate--as long as you're holding down the right button and rubbing the record, you're good. But the scratches get directional and more realistic on the higher settings. So arrows on the scratch markers let you know when and how to move the record, which more closely matches the music than the medium difficulty. I managed to get two stars on a song on expert... it's definitely no pushover, but it also doesn't seem totally out of reach, either. You don't really need to worry about failing, either. The game is in some kind of permanent no-fail mode, so the music never stops... of course, if you aren't doing well, you aren't earning stars, so you aren't going to make progress in the game's career mode if you don't play well.

The game groups songs into tiers, sort of like Guitar Hero. But instead of having you play through each song one at a time, the tiers in DJ Hero work as a setlist that you play in one sitting, one after the next. It would have been pretty cool if the tracks blended into each other, but instead there's a brief pause between songs. If you tire of the game's preset tiers, you can also create your own sets.

On top of all that, the game looks really nice. But you can watch some gameplay videos to get a feel for that. The most important thing is that once you give DJ Hero a try, it all falls into place and quickly becomes a ton of fun. Now I'm just curious to know if the fun lasts... but we'll have to wait for review time before we can figure that out.

Here's another excellent trailer from No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle's promotional campaign, this one showing off returning character Shinobu--who's now playable in the sequel.  

 
   
 
In other No More Heroes news, Ubisoft put out video of some of the new 8-bit minigames coming in the sequel, just in case you were wondering if this game would in fact be weirder than the last.  

 
   
 
   
 
I think that question is now answered.

Perhaps you've heard there are new characters coming to the U.S. version of Capcom's over-the-top Wii fighting game, Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom? One of those new characters has been revealed at the Tokyo Game Show: It's none other than Dead Rising's hardened wartime photojournalist, Frank West. Here's video proof! (Also look for some action starring stalwart anime robot guy Tekkaman Blade, another new character in this version.)  

 
   
  
In honor of Frank's occupation, here's some photographic evidence of his appearance.  
 

If you were really paying attention, you've probably already seen a zillion scans of retailer fliers showing that a Wii price drop was in the works. Nintendo has made it official today via a press release. The offering will feature the same package that is currently on shelves, giving you one Remote, a Nunchuk, and a copy of Wii Sports to go with your friendly white game device.

The company also took the time to reiterate some bits about its upcoming games, noting that Wii Fit Plus is out on October 4 and that New Super Mario Bros. Wii will be available on November 15.

"and you wonder about Guitar Hero 5 disgusted? welcome to my NIGHTMARE. yeah well sue activision this is disgusting, but theres alot MORE"

That's just one of the tons of messages that Courtney Love has posted on Twitter, and one of several that "discusses" the appearance of her deceased husband, Kurt Cobain, in Activision's Guitar Hero 5. Here's another:

"now theyre just LIQUIDATING kurt and IM THE DEVIL? I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH GUITAR HERO I LOATHE IT AND FIND IT ODIOUS KURT WOULD HAVE TOO"

She also compared the Foo Fighters to Creed and Nickelback in there, somewhere, but let's try to stay focused. Here are a few more:

"ucking nmegafraud and youve got to show for it Kurt LUNCHBOXES< CONVERESE SNEAKERS AND ACTIVISION SMUGLY BOASTING OF RAPE"

"BRAGGING about this insane thing, fucking RECALLL and proper PR on this now. BRAGGING.activision gets DICK!"

"i cannot allow this to stand what next he fucking sings "Borderline" this is BANANAS!!Lunchboxes?fucking GUITARHERO?NOTtaking it"

Love goes on to claim (in her own special way) that her only interaction with the project was a request to see a better-looking avatar, something she says was just a form of dragging her feet on something she had no intention of ever approving. But apparently she isn't the only one with the ability to approve use of Cobain's likeness? We'll have to wait and see if anything concrete develops out of this, but I will say that I can't imagine Activision putting out a game like Guitar Hero 5 without ensuring that it was legally using all of the assets involved. 
 
[UPDATE] Activision has responded to this mess, and in a statement given to Joystiq, states that Love gave permission to use Cobain's likeness in Guitar Hero 5 in a "written statement signed by Courtney Love." Yep, that sounds about right. So, what do you think? Think she didn't realize what she signed, or do you think she's acting faux-outraged now that there's been some uproar surrounding the way the game uses Cobain's likeness? One weird side-effect of all this is that it really makes me want to play some Guitar Hero 5. So I'm going to do that.

Giant Bomb User of the Minute skrutop posted this video of Guitar Hero 5 on the boards this morning. It's a bunch of footage of Virtual Kurt Cobain doing a bunch of stuff that Real Kurt Cobain would have probably needed two shotguns to cope with. 
 
   
 
On one level, this is kind of hilarious, and it's definitely a testament to the graphical quality of Guitar Hero 5 that seeing V-Cobain sing a Bon Jovi song, or seeing him make rap poses while mouthing Flavor Flav's words seems so absolutely wrong on so many different levels.

I suppose a lot of this has to do with me being "of a certain age," such that I distinctly remember the whens and wheres of Cobain's suicide. While I never worshipped the dude like some of my peers did, you could certainly elevate him to some kind of "voice of a generation" status. And it's the near-mythic legacy he left behind and the way the Nirvana catalog has been protected from commercial interests over the years that makes this stuff so harsh. Blame Courtney Love, I suppose, for not continuing to protect that legacy. His appearance in the game seems fine, but perhaps the business deal should have prevented Neversoft from using that model in anything other than Nirvana's tracks? Or, in lieu of the license holders not caring enough about Cobain's likeness to place meaningful restrictions on its use, maybe the developers should have shown a little restraint? I wonder if there was even any discussion on this topic during the game's development...

I don't know. Like I said, it doesn't really bother me, and I'm certainly not outraged or anything, but it definitely struck me as completely crazy. Way crazier than all the other dead musicians who have appeared (or will be appearing) in music games. Three Kurt Cobains with invisible instruments, performing a Megadeth song! What? Too soon?