Reforged Broken Sword 1 for Wii, DS

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Ubisoft has just announced a special edition version of Revolution Software’s Shadow of the Templars for Nintendo Wii and DS. According to their press release, this “Director’s Cut” comes packaged with new puzzles, a fleshed-out narrative and will take into account the unique control set of both consoles. According to Charles Cecil, the new plot elements will explain “…what happened prior to the start of the original game, and how it ties to later games in the series.” 1)http://www.revolution.co.uk/_display.php?id=87

The full press release can be read here. For adventure gaming enthusiasts, the most intriguing bit with this new edition is all-new character portraiture by Dave Gibbons – best known for collaborating with Alan Moore on the seminal graphic novel, Watchmen – who is to us better known for collaborating with Revolution Software on Beneath a Steel Sky.

Now, the question is, should we perchance read into this renewed Cecil/Gibbons collaboration as a veiled confirmation of BASS2 (long hinted at by Cecil, and the company even registered a domain for the project back in 2004), especially since GOG.com curiously just released free, repackaged versions of both BASS and Lure of the Temptress?

Though the company released both games as freeware years ago, GOG.com have repackaged the games with wallpapers, a proper manual and even the comic book that originally came with Beneath a Steel Sky. It never hurts to shed more light on “good old games”, and not everyone is familiar with ScummVM either.

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Hellgate Closedown

Martyn Zachary 6 Comments

Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander reports that Namco Bandai, the current co-publisher for Hellgate: London, has announced the game is going to be closed down on January 31, 2009.

Hellgate: London’s launch back in October 2007 was marred with several problems and even denials and gross exaggerations. Though the announcement does not come to us as a surprise, it’s very sad to see a game that was launched as late as October 31, 2007 being closed down so soon. Even Resident Evil: Outbreak stayed up for four years and RF Online for two (Earlier this month, Codemasters announced they had failed to renegotiate the US/EU publishing rights for one reason or another 1)http://www.rf-onlinegame.com/news.php?id=8020).

In an earlier Shacknews interview, Flagship’s Bill Roper said that

We’re working hard on how to end gracefully… I would do a lot of things really differently [in future efforts]. I think that maybe part of the silver lining in all this—and there isn’t a lot in a very dark cloud.

Summa summarum it would seem the story of Hellgate: London was nipped in the bud thanks to the concept of “release now, patch later”. Whether blame for the debacle lands on the developer or the publishers is hard to say, but it’s all rather sad, isn’t it?

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