Star Wars in Soul Calibur 4, 16gb Pro Duo and More MGS4 News

January 11th, 2008

Theres been some fairly significant news to hit the streets of the gaming industry in the last few days. So I have sifted through and selected some articles that I wanted to share my thoughts about.

Yoda and Darth Vader in Soul Calibur IV
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Namco has recently announced that it will be continuing the trend of cameo characters in their Soul series. But unlike Soul Calibur II which featured (mostly) video game cameos this time Star Wars is the theme of the show. With Darth Vader (PS3) and Yoda (Xbox 360) coming in as new additions to the series.

darth vader soul calibur 4 playstation 3

Unfortunately I see this as a big oversight by Namco. Yes, playing as Star Wars in the Soul franchise is indeed awesome but why not stick to video game cameos? Because video game cameos are much more appealling to video game players than Star Wars characters, surely. Theres also a lack of justification for choosing Star Wars characters over game characters, there hasn’t been a new movie or anything to back this up. I guess we can forget about the rumour of Kratos and Master Chief as playable characters then.

16gb Memory Sitck Pro Duo
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Although its a little off topic, Sony have recently confirmed a new 16gb Memory Sitck Pro Duo. The Pro Duo is the stick used for the PSP as well as Vaio notebooks, Sony digital cameras and other Sony branded products.

This article grabbed my attention because this size of memory card is almost unheard of. Although it will definetly be a costly item its a real trump for the PSP mod and homebrew scene. I don’t think that I would need a card that size for the PSP and I wouldn’t use it over my 2gb compact flash card for my Sony Alpha A100 SLR (Pro Duos write too slowly and require an shell to fit inside the card slot) but its awesome in anycase.

MGS4 on the Home Stretch

2 new articles have come in from IGN about my most anticipated game of 2008; MGS4. The articles weren’t ground breaking but the following quote pricked my ears:

on CES ‘Dual Shock’ Demo

“Another thing that we noticed is that the game looks absolutely stunning. Everything is rendered in fine detail from the war-torn middle-eastern city that the level took place in, right down to the individual hairs on Snake’s ‘stache. When we asked whether or not the game will be able to run at 60 fps at 1080p, Konami said that the resolution and framerate were still being optimized and they can’t promise anything, but things were on the right track.”

This is very reassuring as I’ve been a litte worried about the game’s graphics. Obviously they look brilliant but it didn’t look like there was much variance in the colour schemes used judging by the video I’ve seen. Strangely when I look at the sceenshots it looks much more colourful than the video.

I’m not too fussed if it is run in 720p because my monitor is only fairly small so the difference between 720p and 1080p isn’t as significant than say on a 42” plasma. I would much prefer it to run at 60fps even if it was in 720p. There really shouldn’t be any games that run at 30fps anymore.

metal gear rex mgs4

See the screenshots looks vibrant

These facts suggest that MGS4 is indeed taking advantage of the Playstation 3’s to quite an extent so I guess this decreases the chance of that Xbox 360 port.

The second article summarises some more information about the release of the game. Stating that they are basically on the home stretch, that all of the content is finished and they are just squeezing out the last few bugs. More importantly though its been restated that MGS4 will launch almost simultanesous in all territories. Which is fantastic news. ^_^

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