Video Game News

The upcoming Playstation port of the Saturn/Dreamcast isometric strategy RPG Black Matrix, will replace the original anime FMV scenes with new CG rendered movies, feature re-drawn battle maps, and offer new multiple endings.

In addition to the upcoming Wonderswan and Playstation games, Seikaiden Houshin Engi will also get a GameBoy Color strategy RPG in September.

Source: The Magic Box

Nintendo has finally decided on a release date of August 11 for Super Mario RPG 2. The game’s name has been changed from Paper Mario to Mario Story, and the title will be released for the standard N64, rather than for the 64DD, as originally planned. The American version of the game is still currently titled Paper Mario, although the game still has no tentative American release date.

Source: Gaming Intelligence Agency

Nintendo is expected to unveil a new design for the N64 console at a press conference in Kyoto, Japan, today. The re-designed system will come in yellow and blue colors and will have images of various Pocket Monster characters actually pressed into the system. This new console design will be released in Japan later this year and has already been confirmed for distribution in, at least, Europe.

SNK has already begun shutting down its Western operations, and will revert to focusing only on the Japanese market by the end of the week. All of the American SNK employees are being laid-off. Aruze, a Japanese gambling entertainment company mainly involved in the pachinko game industry, which invested heavily in the financially unstable SNK, decided to pull out of the Western market after consideration of SNK’s overall financial condition. In the future, the only hope for seeing SNK games in Western markets will be through third party publishers.

Japanese RPG developers Ubisoft, currently known in the US for their Dreamcast RPG series Evolution, are at work on a Dreamcast 3D adventure/RPG titled Dragonriders: The Chronicles of Pern, based on the popular fantasy novels by Anne McCaffrey. The game is due out sometime this winter.

Source: GameSpot