Carnival Games from Global Star Publishing literally is (well, are) carnival games. This trailer on GameTrailers will demonstrate that fact well: seems that the familiar bandit booths you see at any carnival are presented here.

Essentially a collection of carnival minigames, and while this may draw the ire of those who've criticized this movement of minigames on the Wii, it still is a suitable family-friendly title. Its carnival theme and atmosphere should help set the mood for those Sunday family nights in front of the Wii.

Ubisoft has recently announced a batch of casual games - and not just any casual games, but "games with real-life benefits" they will roll out for the DS and Wii later this year.

The lineup is called "My Coach" and like its name suggests, it will coach (or try to coach) you through various scenarios of life. It's just like Brain Training. Except, in the case of My Life Coach (DS, Holiday 2007), it's essentially one of those self-help personal well-being books. Developed with the help of a behaviorist, My Life Coach aims to help those concerned about their well being the willpower they need to change their habits the way they want in a motivating and fun way.

My Word Coach, on the other hand, is the walking dictionary. Okay, without the walking part. Word Coach works like a linguist (and was developed with their help), training both your verbal communication and vocabulary skills. Useful if you're in your school's spelling bee or oratory competitions this year, especially. Although it better be late in the year, because the game is coming Fall 2007, for both the Wii and DS.

In addition, Ubisoft has announced that the Petz will come to the Wii. No other details were given in the press release about this.

And thus a new chapter in the series rears its saiyan head, as Atari announced that it would be publishing Namco Bandai/Spike's Dragonball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 3 (or Sparking! Meteor in other regions) for North America.

As the teaser site shows some familiar faces, Atari confirms with their press release that over 20 new characters will be present in Sparking! Meteor, including never-before seen (in a DBZ game) Nail, King Cold, and King Vegeta, for a total of over 150 characters. Also in for the ride are over 20 day-and-night stages, with "the power of the moon in the night stages [giving] players additional ways to transform their characters and lets fans recreate some of their favorite memories from the show."

The PR slates DBZ: Sparking! Meteor for a holiday 2007 release - given what was said in the teaser site, we're thinking in time for Thanksgiving. Here's the first batch of screens for the game:

More screens spark at the full article.

Apparently the dual-SKU model ain't just for Warhawk, too. Talking to PALGN, System 3 CEO Mark Cale mentioned that the Epyx title California Games rumored to come to the Wii, is coming to the Wii. Twice. "You'll be able to buy it online," he says, "and you'll be able to buy it as a retail product, too."

Dang. Someone reevaluate the economics of what Peter Dille said about this dual-SKU thing.

And speaking of Peter Dille, Mark also confirms that California Games will be coming to the PS3 as well. Twice. He says it can/will be bought on the PlayStation Network and as a physical retail copy. Mark doesn't mention about any extra goodies for buying a blob of optical plastic (either the Wii optical plastic or the PS3 optical plastic), however.

At this, we can also suspect that the California Games coming to the Wii and PS3 isn't just a simple port of the original, Amiga-era Epyx title, but potentially a full-blown new-gen revamp (or else why dedicate blobs of optical plastic to the title?). Potentially, it could mean motion-sensing controls, high-def graphics (depending on platform), yada yada, but no concrete details have surfaced yet.

Cale did mention that the Wii version would be "playable online through the Wii," though. So there's online multiplayer, too.

Granted, the video game console is rapidly becoming saturated with the same genres: shooters, action, sports, sandbox. Innovation did happen, but a lot of it was stove-piped, locked within the genre rather than in the greater world of console gaming itself.

Brave is a title that bucks conventions and is willing to take risks. One more recent development was bringing the traditionally PC-centric real-time strategy genre to consoles, which until games like Full Spectrum Warrior and Battle for Middle-Earth II, were rather clunky and painful affairs. But now, we have Command & Conquer 3, and Ensemble is spinning Halo Wars up to speed.

In the same vein I'm taking another PC-centric game genre and looking at its chances in console gaming. Except this time, unlike RTS games, I'm less confident about its chances - not because it can't be done, but out of the fear that just like innovation, interests in console gaming are rather stove-piped as well. And for the most part, the console is locked to shooters, action, sports, and sandbox.

Pity, really. Consoles could be a potential breakout ground for the submarine simulator.

Thar she blows up, Cap'n. Appreciation - and cynicism - for console subsims after the jump.

Aeropause never clarified from what source this tidbit came, only to say it was "gossip". But their report notes that this "gossip" claims that the reason why the Wii version of Spiderman 3 sucked was because the review copy from Vicarious Visions wasn't supposed to be the copy delivered to the reviewers.

"It was an early version of the game that was never intended to see the light of day." If this rumor's true, then someone at the Vicarious or Activision mail rooms didn't get the memo. Or it's a case of the unintended old switcheroo (moral of the story: properly label your discs. For example: you do not want your... um, night-time recreational videos to land in the wrong hands).

The more cynical might suggest that this is only a lame excuse (or worse: a bone for the hungry hungry critics to chew on). Still Aeropause's suggestion was that a reviewer ought to buy a retail copy of the game and do a side-by-sider with the review copy he or she has. Of course, that negates the entire perk of being a reviewer - free games via review copies - but the interests of truth and being fair to the game, and the developers, does mean that sooner or later, there will be a followup to this lead, either from Aeropause (who will be calling Vicarious) or some other reviewer.

That said, who wants to shell out money for the Wii Spiderman 3?

 

CVG reports that Eidos has unveiled a new publishing label called SoGoPlay. Its mission: to bring the world of casual gaming to casual gamers, at very, very, very affordable prices.

Its targets: the PC, the DS, and in the future, the PS2 and Wii.

SoGoPlay promises "compelling gameplay", and yes, there is a growing market for casual games. On the other hand, and especially with the label targeting the Wii, there are fears - expressed in comments to the CVG article - that this might only reinforce the Nintendo console as a bastion of minigames. There may be no drought, but if this keeps up, there may very well be a flood.

Surprisingly, nothing is mentioned about potential exploits of Xbox Live or PlayStation Network as potential avenues to deliver SoGoPlay casual games to those platforms.

(Surprisingly, there is an existing SoGoPlay brand that delivers casual games. Whether this report refers to Eidos buying them out or getting their own SoGoPlay... if a lawsuit develops we'll let you know).

Gpara has a little preview of Harvest Moon: Tree of Peace (or Tree of Serenity, which is the literal translation from the Japanese of the subtitle, whatever they stick with, but it certainly isn't Heroes) that demonstrates how the Wiimote is green and a farmer's best friend. Now if only web translations weren't as hard as actually raising a profitable family farm without subsidies in the West in this day and age...

But the idea remains the same here as it does across a lot of similar Wii games. If you've sliced and sutured in Trauma Center, sautéd and shishkabobbed in Cooking Mama: Cookoff, then you should readily figure your way around a hoe in Tree of Peace. A lot of the descriptions in Gpara's preview revolve around shaking the Wiimote, though.

The preview also covers those minigames like fishing, for example, and also reveals that the fruit of your loins in the game will also have in-game roles. Children born to your character will also be able to help out in the field. Though when Google Translates it as "makes field work your own child help who grew also the system are added" the creepy subject-verb-object arrangement kind of evokes "Children of the Corn."

Fields work your own child? This farm is cursed, we tell you, cursed!!!

Just wondering: any of our readers actually old enough to remember this early-to-mid-'90's cartoon? (Or, anyone been watching Boomerang recently?)

For those too young to be sentient back in the rolling '90s, the premise of the Hanna Barbera "SWAT Kats: The Radical Squadron" has a couple of hotshot pilots turned vigilantes take down the unfriendly skies in an advanced aircraft which looks similar to an F-14 (duh, TomCAT). Taking Top Gun and the A-Team under its wing - or claws, the edgy, flashy cartoon scored surprisingly high in the ratings, although it sadly only lasted a couple of seasons.

Sigh. Those were the days. Still, the show, for all its unbelievable premise and camp (hard-edged casualty-filled camp, but camp nonetheless), resonates with its fans, though - you should see the IMDB forums. Or me. Where do you think I got my love for Ace Combat and Warhawk (besides Top Gun)?

It's got a megacity full of vicious criminals and their lemmings, it's got high-tech gadgets, sky-high dogfights, and street-dirty brawls - oh, for heaven's sake, this cartoon ought to be a game! Wait - it is! It was an SNES game! And, given that there were games like the flight shooter Turn 'n' Burn: No Fly Zone and the Mega Man X series which carried parts of the concept, and carried it well... the SWAT Kats SNES game by Hudson Soft ended up a fade-to-black generic shooter.

... Do you hear that? That must be the sound of ejection seats popping. Maverick is not pleased with his afterburn. (Okay, to be fair, the SNES game was a fair challenge, but still uninteresting in the end.)

Alright, so this article isn't going to be a RE-GEN; I'm just skimming here. Need more time to throw a SIXAXIS around before a full RE-GEN can be made out of this. Same principle applies, though: next gen power, next gen promise. And this time, full exploit of the show's premises and mechanics, no short-changing due to "limited processing power." Some of us kats would hate it if such a promising license was re-botched on the re-gen.

Speed of Heat after the jump.

Keiji Inafune may have implied, quite bluntly and painfully, too, that Clover Studio's primary failure was the bottom line. It was a failure of marketing, not of development. That (though not Clover) was the theme of an MI6 Conference workshop headed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and Insomniac Games marketing chiefs Torrie Dorrell and Ryan Schneider, Next-Gen reports.

If Clover and Capcom had done what SOE does, would the studio not have met its demise? Torrie revealed that in each of SOE's projects, the development head is "married" to a marketing head, and the two are expected to work together to get the game to market.

This means that we see less of, say, the very aggressive developer who pushes away everything that marketing says. But it also encourages marketing to understand the point of view of developers and the challenges they face. It makes the relationship much less adversarial.

Same thing at Insomniac: Ryan describes it as "bringing everyone together," an all-hands evolution. Sometimes it even involves outside people: Torrie mentions focus groups (no matter how devs may hate them for... cramping their style, like).

Does it really have to hurt development and creativity? Torrie points out that Marketing's job isn't to tell the developers what to do with their games, but "only to recognize the facts that we need to know to make the best game that we can and sell as many copies as we can."

Again this goes back to: with better marketing support, either insisted by Capcom or insisted by Clover, would Okami have been a bestseller that knocked everyone's socks off? Loved the game, but the sales don't do it justice. Perhaps the solution to bringing creative and inspiring games to market (and not just more clones) doesn't only lie in creative games production, but in excellent marketing as well.

Gaming is a business, after all. But who says business had to be stagnant?