Media: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom - TV Spot

Given that the original version of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom was released exclusively in Japan over a year ago and how long we’ve had to wait to get our hands on a (much improved) domestic version, it’s hard to believe that the time is finally nigh. Anticipation seems to be at its peak for the title, and hopefully it will make a good showing for Capcom on the Wii.

And it looks like they’re putting a little extra spit-and-polish on their promotion of this one, giving it the full television commercial treatment and everything. Check it out:

From Capcom: “Our ad agency had the idea to create this stop-motion short (a la Robot Chicken) to celebrate the zanyness of the game. Since it wasn’t something that I recall any other video game publisher doing before, we jumped all over the idea. We tried to keep it as true to the heroes’ characteristics as possible, so you’ll see some signature moves in there. You can see the spot in HD glory on USA, SyFy, Adult Swim and more starting next Monday.”

I’m just thrilled that MegaMan Volnutt got such a prominent spot.

Don’t forget to pre-order for the special lenticular trading cards, or if possible, check out the festivities of the Nintendo World Launch Event.

Media: Halo Waypoint Trailer - Midnight in the Heart of Midlothian

Microsoft’s 343 Industries is shelling out some fresh Halo content to Xbox Live subscribers tomorrow in the form of a four-part series, Midnight in the Heart of Midlothian. A trailer for Saturday’s segment can be seen below.

Video Games | Halo Waypoint | Midnight in the Heart of Midlothian TrailerXBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

The series starts tomorrow, January 16th.

Media: Mass Effect 2 - Sci vs Fi Documentary Part I

With less than two weeks to go, Mass Effect 2 is sure to set the benchmark for role-playing games in 2010. In order to build excitement for the game, a video documentary featuring a number of big names in the sci fi business has made its way to GameTrailers. If this doesn’t excite the nerd in you, I don’t know what will.

Video Games | Mass Effect 2 | Exclusive Sci vs Fi Doc Part IXBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Mass Effect 2 launches on January 26th.

Reply to All: Hey, Remember the ’80s?

Something unfathomably horrible happened this week in Haiti, and the situation there continues to get even more horrible. I’m not one to lay guilt trips on others about charitable giving (comes from the heart, after all), but if you are so inclined, refer to Steve’s post earlier in the week listing the places you can contribute to. I’ll add another one here, Partners in Health, that has done substantial and valuable work in Haiti for years now. And props to Bungie for doing a special T-shirt fundraiser. If you can’t give anything or don’t feel compelled to, that’s quite alright. But this weekend might be one of those “thankful for where I am and what and who I got” times.

On a cheerier note…letters! Financial relief goes to those in need…comedic relief goes to webmaster@g4tv.com.

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Is it just me or does Liam Neeson in the beginning of the A-Team Trailer. Looks a lot like Big Boss walking through the cemetery at the end of Metal Gear Solid 3… — Thundrone

Liam Neeson. A great actor with a wicked throat chop (see Taken). However, I feel he’s horribly miscast as Hannibal in the new A-Team movie. Will this tarnish a potentially thrilling revision of an 80s TV classic? Is this even a real dilemma? Discuss. — Chris W.

I’m with you. The problem with The A-Team remake is that the four core characters of Hannibal, Murdock, Face and B.A. are still closely associated with the actors who portrayed them in the show — George Peppard and Mr. T especially. When I think of Hannibal and B.A., I can’t envision anybody else playing the roles. I like Neeson and Cooper as actors (Cooper’s probably the best casting decision of the 4, based on the trailer), but the problem is the material…rather, the era from which it originates. How have other 1980s revivals fared?

Knight Rider: Awful TV reboot that quickly fizzled out. Not even a Hasselfhoff cameo could save it.
The Dukes of Hazzard: Awful.
G.I. Joe: Try reading the plot description on its Wikipedia page and then remind yourself it’s 2010 and they’re being serious.
Transformers: Somehow manages to be enjoyably and impressively awful.
V: Flat acting, hurried writing, and heavy-handed preaching in its first six episodes. Not a great start.

I’m not condemning 80s television at all — some of the best memories of my childhood. But the updates don’t work because if you really look back at a lot of the stuff we watched and got emotionally attached to (which the studios try to manipulate to get us to see these things), a lot of these shows just weren’t very good. They were great at the time, definitely. But a show in 2010 about a talking car isn’t novel anymore…our cars talk to us now. Just like how government satellites and closed-circuit surveillance cameras would pick up a big black van with a distinguishable red stripe on it in a matter of days. Let’s leave all that — along with one-liners like “Sucks to be you, homey” — in the realm of beloved nostalgia.

(All that being said, I’ll still put it on my Netflix queue.)

How much longer do you think it will be until we see a Nutty Professor-esque game in which Nolan North voices every character? — Wozman23

I think that’s a great idea. — N. North

Team Conan or Team Leno? — KnuxSonic

As far as the Conan vs. Jay (vs. Dave vs. Jimmy vs. Craig) issue, I think that Conan needs to go back to late night when he’s still funny, while Jay Leno needs to go away because he has sold out and isn’t funny at all. besides everyone knows that Craig Ferguson is the funniest of them all.

Also a good recipe for quick cheap food. Heat up some pasta sauce, mix in garbanzo beans, basil, and lots of cheese and serve over noodles. — Stefan

Team Conan, all the way, since the very beginning of his Late Night run. Now that it seems that next week is his last week of hosting The Tonight Show, I’m sad that he won’t get his chance to shine in the brighter spotlight. But I’m also not too worried about it, as the significance of that spotlight isn’t what it once was, and a guy with Conan’s sharply absurd comedic sensibilities will excel in many other arenas in the years to come. It probably won’t be late night, as he’ll have a difficult time booking A-listers against both Leno and Letterman, but there are other options.

I also second your pick of Craig Ferguson, who is highly, highly, underrated as a talk show host. Like Conan’s Late Night run, he’s got the benefit of being in the later time slot where you can get away with more things, but I’ve got to respect his off-the-script interview style. Both he and Jimmy Kimmel haven’t backed down in this whole brouhaha, which has just been fascinating to watch unfold in public.

(Obvious disclaimer: G4’s parent company Comcast is in the process of purchasing NBC. Contrary to Internet rumors, I will not be guest murdered on Law & Order. Though I may pitch them on a Circus of the Stars revival. “What about your whole thing about 80s remakes?” Yeah yeah, I’m a hypocrite, I know.)

And thanks for the simple, classic recipe. That should be much easier to stomach than…well…

In last week’s mailbag, I presented Timbo D’s recipe for Chocolate Chip Grilled Cheese. I was initially disgusted, but that slowly evolved into intrigue. So much so, that I had to know for myself. So on Wednesday after work, I stopped at the grocery store and picked up some mild cheddar and off-brand chocolate chips for my experimental dinner. The recipe called for plain monterey jack cheese, but I had a fresh brick of pepper jack in the fridge, so I called the culinary audible.

There’s still time. You don’t have to do this.

I was skeptical up to the point where I had everything ready to fry. Chocolate can go well with spicy things, and if it’s melted all together, it could chemically combine into the most delicious concoction my taste buds had ever experienced…

Don’t be a hero, man. There’s no shame in walking away.

Instead, it tasted like fish.

The sweetness of the chocolate hooked into the saltiness of the cheddar and created a lingering aftertaste entirely too reminiscent of salmon (which ironically was my original choice for Wednesday night dinner). Out of due diligence, I ate the entire thing, which my body interpreted as an act of war. I’ve been paying the price ever since.

So thank you, Timbo. That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever eaten.

You were warned. Now you face the consequences.

One of the benefits of gaming as opposed to other forms of entertainment, is that the player controls the on screen action. Unlike a film (which you sit and watch for a couple hours) or a book (in which you read maybe a couple chapters a day), video games allow the participant to influence the world rather than passively observe. With Heavy Rain arriving shortly and Modern Warfare’s 2 "airport scene", do you believe more developers will take advantage of the medium and present situations to us we’ve never experienced? Will we see a WWII game in which we play as the Nazis? Are we going to have a Vietnam game that deals with the My Lai Massacre and it’s aftermath? — JTHMROCKS

We definitely could see those games, but how are you going to market them? “No Russian” had to be hidden from view before MW2 came out (even though it managed to escape any notable mainstream criticism), and Heavy Rain, while unique, has a very narrow appeal. Six Days in Fallujah got dropped — and as far as we know, still hasn’t been picked up — by a publisher.

But really, with the way that so many developers and publishers treat a story as something they “need” to have rather than something they “want” to have, do you really trust them to handle sensitive topics like My Lai with skilled and careful pens? To me, it seems like any sort of philosophical, ethical, or political statement or situation needs to be Trojan Horsed…and even then, the element of interactivity in those scenes has to make sense and justify their inclusion. Otherwise, it’s just shock fodder.

Now that the Packers are out, what do you envision as the perfect finale to the NFL season? And no wishing death upon Favre, even if he’s now dead to the State of Wisconsin. — Sterling McGarvey

The perfect finale to the NFL season is me checking out minor league prospects and planning a trip to Arizona for spring training. What a brutal way to end not only the season, but the last two Green Bay playoff games (the other one was the Favre Interception in the 2007 NFC Championship against the Giants).

I started out this year with the belief that it was only a matter of time before the Old Man falls apart, either physically or mentally. The brief bickering between him and Childress got my hopes up, but that seems to have been settled. I won’t deny turning on the guy when he donned the purple jersey (I actually turned on him when he went to the Jets), but after all this time, maintaining a grudge of that magnitude just becomes exhausting. If he wins it, he wins it. My Minnesota cousins will give me grief for it, but I’ll just remind them that they just built a baseball stadium in Minneapolis without a roof on it. Have fun with that in April.

Does the grandfather paradox apply to Lost? — Patrick Klepek

It’s 7:12PM on Friday night…I can’t even start thinking about this. Will get back to you.

I have an original PS3 60 GB system, and I’m worried I might get the dreaded yellow light of death. I’ve been researching it online, but when it comes to the net you don’t know what to believe. I’ve read of rumors it is happening mostly with COD MW2, due to an update of the game. Can you tell me if it’s true, and what are the chances of it happening to me? What is being done about it? Is it safe to keep playing MW2? — Dave

The “Yellow Light of Death” is the PS3 version of the infamous Xbox 360 “Red Ring of Death”, but according to Sony, the error light can refer to a multitude of various problems with the machine.  The BBC did a report on this purported phenomenon back in the fall, but Sony claims that the rate of failure is within “acceptable” limits (without, of course, disclosing exactly how often it’s happened). If you’re noticing that it’s associated more with Modern Warfare 2, I’d probably attribute that to  the substantial number of people frequently playing the game when their system goes south.  As they say, correlation does not equal causation. Could it happen to you? Well, yeah, but I wouldn’t lose too much sleep, er, sorry…playing time over it.

Hey guys, just wondering if you would be able to recommend a good game to play on the Wii. I recently picked up RE: The Darkside Chronicles, and it was very good. Also looked at The Conduit, beat the campaign and tried the multiplayer, the story was good, not the greatest multiplayer though. I like the shooting genre, and just wondered if you guys could recommend some others. — Jordan

The Wii’s not known for being an FPS powerhouse, but it has carved out its own little niche of interesting rail shooters. Along with the highly-recommended Metroid Prime 3: Corruption (not on-rails), you’re going to want to look at Dead Space: Extraction, RE: The Umbrella Chronicles, and House of the Dead: Overkill. Oh, Red Steel 2 comes out next month, and that looks pretty spiffy.

WEBMASTER HATES YOU

hi…
I have a DELL laptop of inspiron series 1525…
I wanted to reinstall the windows vista by DVD…also partiotin the hard disk
but it requires Change The Boot sequence …
to do so Bios Password is required…
I have never set any of the password to the BIOS…
Can You help me?  — saurahb

4 8 15 16 23 42. — Webmaster

 

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Next time: the stuff I promised I would get to this time. Send your correspondence to webmaster@g4tv.com, and enjoy the 3-day weekend (if you got it).

Music DLC Round-Up — Week Of Jan. 11

Vampire Weekend Track Pack

“Holiday”
“Cousins”
“The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance”

Price: $5.49/440 Microsoft Points/550 Wii Points for pack, or $1.99/160 MSP/200 WP per track

Click through to see new tracks for Rock Band, DJ Hero, SingStar and Lips.

Pack

Alice In Chains Track Pack 02

“Grind”
“Heaven Beside You”
“Last of My Kind”
“We Die Young”
“Your Decision”

Price: $8.49/680 MSP for pack, or $1.99/160 MSP/200 WP per track

No new releases

No new releases

Tracks

Anita Ward – “Ring My Bell”
Death Cab for Cutie – “Soul Meets Body”
Wilson Pickett – “Mustang Sally”

Price: 160 MSP per track

Hudson Dev On Mature Wii Titles: Focus On Passion, Not Platform

Despite challenges for mature games on the Wii, if a game is well-designed, the audience will come, says Kazufumi Shimizu, director of Hudson’s upcoming Wii horror title Calling. Comments from major publishers like Sega and Capcom in recent weeks have directly questioned the wisdom of developing mature content for the Wii, and Shimizu acknowledges the challenge. “When we started developing Calling, it was with the knowledge that the Wii marketplace might be a tough one …

NPD: Wii, DS Titles Command December 2009 Top 20

Nintendo platforms had a commanding presence on NPD Group’s U.S. retail top 20 video game software sales chart for December, made available to Gamasutra this morning. Seven of the top 20 games were available on Nintendo Wii, while six were for Nintendo DS, for a total of 13 Nintendo platform games on the list. Four Xbox 360 games and three PlayStation 3 games made the list. Nintendo was the publisher with the most titles to …

Saling The World: Just Dance Heads Wii Sales in U.S. and UK

Gamasutra’s weekly column, “Saling The World”, covers the top five sellers for every available platform in the United States, Japan, and Europe, providing an important update of sales patterns worldwide. This week’s charts, with data taken from January 14th, 2010, find Ubisoft’s Just Dance leading Nintendo Wii software sales in North America and Europe, while Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep tops multiplatform sales in Japan. Data for “Saling The World” comes courtesy of the public …

Nintendo Not Looking at a Hardware Update Anytime Soon

With Microsoft coming out at CES 2010 and saying that there’s no need to launch a new console, Nintendo has decided to quickly followed suit. Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime, in an interview with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, said consumers shouldn’t expect a new console or any other hardware updates for that matter in the coming months.

For months, pundits have speculated if Nintendo would release a high-definition version of the popular family console, but it doesn’t look like that is something Nintendo is focused on as we move into the annual Game Developers Conference.

In a move to make the Wii into a home entertainment platform – much like its Xbox 360 and PlayStation competitors – Nintendo is allowing its owners to stream Netflix movies and TV episodes to their television via the Wii. Nintendo isn’t the only company taking inspiration from its competitors. Both Sony and Microsoft are jumping on the motion-control bandwagon, hoping to see the same success as Nintendo has. Do you think Nintendo will up the ante even more and announce a high-def Wii by year’s end?

What Capcom Learned From Making Wii Games In 2009 — Brands Really Matter

Look at the top-selling Wii games in December: New Super Mario Bros., Wii Fit Plus and Wii Play. Nintendo has turned Wii into a brand you can trust and Mario — well, he’s Mario. Capcom failed to get an original Wii franchise off the ground last summer with Spyborgs and Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles hasn’t proven nearly as popular as its predecessor, Umbrella Chronicles.

At CES, I spoke with Capcom’s VP of strategic planning and business development Christian Svensson about the company’s lessons from Wii development in 2009. Capcom has been an avid, aggressive supporter of Wii development, but 2009 wasn’t the stellar year they’d hoped.

"One of the things we’ve learned is that known franchises matter a lot to a Wii consumer," he said.

Spyborgs, for example, was not a known franchise. Capcom was trying to make it one.

"I would say Spyborgs was a challenge for us," said Svensson. "We knew it was high-risk [investment] in terms of doing new IP with a ‘gamer game’ on the Wii and it disappointed us, candidly. At the same time, we do have some bright spots here and there."

Those bright spots were Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, a port of the popular Xbox 360 zombie action game. Critics were especially harsh on Chop Till You Drop, a point that Svensson admitted without question, but the game "did not do badly sales-wise." Additionally, while Resident Evi: Darkside Chronicles is proving a slow burn, "it’s not a disappointment, either."

Svensson made it clear Monster Hunter Tri is one of Capcom’s big Wii hopes for 2009. The series has experienced trouble gaining traction here in the US, despite the rabid popularity in Japan. Monster Hunter Tri, however, introduces a long-missing feature: online multiplayer.

"We’re hoping to use Tri to grow the brand overall in the West," he said. "We’re making a major investment both in marketing and in partnering with Nintendo on it. We’re cautiously optimistic that we’re gonna have some success there."

Unlike Monster Hunter Tri, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom already has notable buzz for Capcom. The latest in Capcom’s long-standing versus fighting titles pits anime characters against some of Capcom’s greatest combatants. Svensson said fighting fans have rallied before the game.

"I fought tooth and nail to bring it over," he said. "But we did so with very conservative forecasts [for sales]. Slowly but surely, the hype train kept rolling along and rolling around and our forecasts kept slowly, slowly, slowly kept climbing up and up and up and it’s now…the forecasts are now — everything is relative — relatively high from where we started."

"What we through we were gonna do [in sales] is now three to four times what we thought we were gonna do," he continued. "It’d be a moderate hit for us if we managed to do those volumes. Again, the fighting game community has been exceptionally supportive of what we’re trying to do there."

So, tell me. How interested are you in either Monster Hunter Tri or Tatsunoko vs. Capcom?

Have something to share? Sitting on a news tip? E-mail me. You can also follow me on Twitter.

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