Up and Comming

[Josiah]

There is going to be a new LoZ for the Wii, but very little has been said about it. There's been one piece of concept art (same style as Twilight Princess) and Miyamoto says it's probably going to make heavy use of motion sensing (possibly similar to the sword and bow shooting in Wii Sports Resort) and may require the WiiMotion Plus.

[Doodleshark]

Trailer of a new Bethesda game called Brink... Wonder if it will be as good as Fallout 3.

[NabMaster]

Dissidia's release date got bumped back! It was supposedly slated for the October-ish region, but now it's set for the end of August!

[Doodleshark]

OMG OMG Castle Crashers is going to be on the PS3 and its gonna be aaaaaaawwessooooooooome!!

[Doodleshark]

Bioshock 2 just got delayed. Boo!

[Stevenson]

Meh, delays just means they're working harder to make the final product better. I mean, if they didn't delay it, it would probably be all glitchy and rushed. You know, like The Force: Unleashed (which is excellent despite it's glitchiness, I'm not trying to start a fight here).

[Josiah]

In most cases, you're right. And I believe that's the reason for the Bioshock delay. However, there are other times when a game is delayed because they think it will do better if launched during a certain time of year. For example, the US release of Bayonetta recently got delayed until early next year because Sega wants to make sure that it doesn't get lost in the holiday shuffle when sequels to so many established series are going to launch.

[NabMaster]

Not to mention the fact that Blizzard has said that they'll be putting out Diablo 3 OR Starcraft 2 this year - I guarantee it's so they can get maximum sales, but knowing Blizzard whatever game doesn't come out this year'll probably get bumped a ton before it comes out.

[Josiah]

The time between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a great time to launch new games because of all the Christmas shopping...but quite a lot of that shopping is done by people with little knowledge of games with well known names tend to stick out much better than something completely new. Not to mention that, since so many games are released during the holiday shopping season, some tend to get lost in the shuffle. Smarter companies also try not to launch games around the same time as a more popular game of the same time is released. For example, launching an epic PS3 RPG the same week as Final Fantasy XIII is released would be a really bad idea since most of your potential market (PS3 owners who like RPGs) will be buying FFXIII.

Of course, some games are from such well established series or developers that they're somewhat immune to this. For example, series like Metal Gear and Halo and companies like Blizzard and Square Enix have large dedicated fanbases that will buy their stuff no matter when it's released, but a poor launch time will still cost them sales to less hardcore gamers.

[Doodleshark]

Holy S***. Holy S***. At Blizzcon yesterday they just announced a NEW WORLD OF WARCRAFT EXPANSIIIIIIIIIIOOOOOOON!!! Yes, I know I haven't played or mentioned WoW in a while (Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead are just too damn fun). but this has still instantly shot into my Top 3 Games-I-Need-In-The-Future. I will now asplode with excitement! *Asplodes.*

[luquos]

Doodle, that new cyborg class looks brilliant, doesn't it? (If you don't get this joke, go read the last couple of Ctrl-Alt-Del sillies)

[Cheezdude]

The Beatles: Rock Band. And less excitingly, Scribblenauts.

[luquos]

Galaxy 2 should be amazing. Scribblenauts looks very good, especially for such a small developer.

[shauni]

Another WOW expansion? It already takes two days to install the rest of it in one go

[NabMaster]

The final battle of "The World"...

.hack//Link's release date has been set in Japan to this February, so we should be seeing it here in the next year or two, depending on how long it takes to translate everything. There will be 33 allies from the different .hack areas (Kite and Haseo from .hack and .hack//GU, Tsukasa and Subaru from the .hack//SIGN anime, Albireo from the .hack//AI Buster novel, etc.) and each one will have a Personal Act (ie: if you're low on health, Tsukasa will summon the Guardian to decimate the enemies). The playstyle will differ from the other games only in that when before you would have a party of yourself and 2 allies, now it's you and 1 ally.

This will be the grand finale to the .hack series, and CC2 is saying they plan on making 2010 enormous - releasing the final movie, manga, trading card game, anime, and game all in the same year for the fans.