CD Projekt RED, the Polish developer of the original title for PC, let a few things slip in the past months. Starting from an open position in their development team for a skilled PS3 developer to interviews in which, whilst not owning up, they didn’t deny anything either.

The job advertisement has now disappeared from The Witcher website, which leads me to assume that the position was filled. Good news.

I never actually played the game because of my power-impaired computer but whenever I saw it running it just looked fantastic. Let’s hope a PS3 version comes out soon so that I can finally waste more hours of my life in the sadly pointless pursuit of happiness through a DualShock 3.

There’s more “evidence” to support the theory all over the internet. I found particularly interesting this news piece on Deeko:

We all had a feeling this was going to happen sooner or later, but it seems that by accident CD Projekt has let the cat out of the bag. Tomasz Jonarski, a CD Projekt employee, mentioned that he’s working on technology for porting The Witcher to next generation consoles: Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 at GoldenLine, a social networking website. The post was quickly deleted…whoops.

One final note. Being The Witcher a Windows PC game I’m terrified CD Projekt RED might take a shortcut and decide to port the game to XBOX 360 only. If that happens I’ll just go berserk and haunt Bruno’s place like the ghost of jealousy.

It’s tough to be a PS3 owner in this XBOX dominated world. I’m developing this irrational hatred for all XBOX and their owners.

Atari agreeing to purchase all rights that Interplay had to the franchise and canceling a $1 million promissory note.

I do hope this is the truth and that ATARI will put its newfound IP to good use ASAP. The world, and indeed myself, is in dire need of a worthy successor to the epic Baldur’s Gate saga.

ATARI’s last attempt, Temple of Elemental Evil, was absolute pathetic. Lets just hope for the best, shall we.

Tomb Raider Underworld (PS3) – November 21, 2008
I know it’s a sequel and sequels are bad by definition – The recipe hasn’t changed much and as far as I can see the most evident change is that Lara looks like Kate Moss after she’s inhaled some of that Colombian boon. Having said that I know of no other other action-filled title whose main character is a woman with massive f***k o** breasts out there – so go for it.

Valkyria Chronicles (PS3) -  Q3 2008 (UK)

Valkyria Chronicles combines strategy elements of conventional tactical role playing games with real-time action sequences. The game is set in a fictitious continent reminiscent of 1930s, Europe divided in two and ruled by the Empire and the Federation. The Empire has set its sights on invading a small neutral country called Gallia, which is situated in the middle of the two great empires. The game follows a hero named Welkin and his fellow soldiers of the Federation’s 7th Platoon that are fighting against the Empire, who is intent on unifying the continent under its power.

Silly though as this sounds I still love Japanese RPG and wouldn’t want to miss SEGA’s last creation.

Bioshock (PS3) – US: November 2008
I looked at this title when it first came out for PC. Needless to say I was very, very impressed. It looked fabulous and quite good fun. The fact that they have to give us inconsolable PS3 owners some additional goodies to make us feel special is quite sad, just release the ‘effing game at the same time with the rest of the platforms, don’t try to bribe us into forgiving you with some stupid additional maps.

Wipeout HD (PS3) – TBA 2008
Never really cared much for Wipeout. I’m very much built for realism not for insane futuristic speeds. This title, however, looks fabulous. I’d be happy to pay anything up to 50p to have it as a screensaver running on my massive HD tv.

Dragon Age Origins (PC) – TBA 2009
As a Baldur’s Gate fan I can’t help but follow everything Bioware does. Despite the fact that they basically sold their soul to M$ and lost their licence for D&D related games. Speculation on many blogs around has it that this game is the rightful heir to BG’s throne.

Other big announcements…

After months of pointless conjectures Bioware and LucasArts have dropped some hints as to what they might be up to. It all points to a Star Wars themed MMORPG. Exciting news – If you are that sort of person, the one who’s given up on his social life a while ago and prefer’s to go around in a virtual world waving a replacement penis around.
Bungie was supposed to have some big news to let loose on us. Didn’t happen. Publisher said no-no. Rumor has it that it might be yet another Halo related title. After all why would they ever stop producing something that sells like free hot-cakes at a student bar.

What would sylvia say: I thought you were working when I was doing supermarket shopping for us!! -.- (Who is Sylvia)

A lot is being said about how sterile the environment looks and the desertedness of the city where Faith does her First Person Parkour (FPP) stunts. The gameplay video, surely enhances some of these worries. Nevertheless, I am truly excited about this game and for a very superficial (or maybe not) reason: Its bright and sharp art style. The setting is a futuristic city with buildings painted in white and bright, near-fluorescent colours brought to life by a crisp clear sky, with a brightness that can only be seen in cool, early summer, Sunday mornings. Those mornings when the four wheeled smog generators are parked either because their owners are vacating in some island far away or because they are too hungover even to roll out of their beds. Yes, that crisp.

Worry not, you will not be stuck in this squeaky clean morning time since the days cycle as usual. But it is the first time that I have seen light captured in such an accurate way in a video game. Even the in-door scenes have this immaculate looking light that diffuses from every surface, as if it were ray-traced, giving consistency to the entire game from an aesthetic point of view. It is very good to see that game artists are beginning to come to grips with the possibilities provided by this generation of consoles.

As you can tell, I am really looking forward to experiencing that environment. Lets just hope that the developers don’t screw up the game play.

It would be a damn shame to waste such an amazing (to me) art style.

Now this is all good and well but can’t this people come up with some new idea? How about some evil platypuses from outer space?

In all those revelations there are only two items that make me really excited in a nerdy sort of way:

• 16X10 aspect ratio is now supported at 1680×1050 over VGA — Finally I will be able to play properly scaled games: this was particularly annoying for me with driving sims, where cars tended to look too tall in my Dell 2407WFP.
• Full game installs to the hard drive — This is the end of the industrial vacuum cleaner experience in my living room while playing. I don’t mind having a cup of tea and biscuits while a game installs just to experience the luxury of quiet that PS3 owners have had from day one. It will still not be perfect silence, but hey… at least I don’t have to make the whole building shake just do drown down the jet noise!

That live update can’t come too soon…

The trailer looks stunning and just about as dark as it gets. My only complaint is that there’s no console version of the game in the works (apparently) and I really don’t fancy upgrading my PC.

On the bright side this title is going to be published by EA whose greed might just turn out to be useful this time as it would probably ask Bioware to develop the game for as many platforms as possible and not just the usual Xbox exclusive.

This is the Kotaku crew reaction when the bomb dropped at the end of Microsoft’s conference:

12:01
McWhertor – A massive warship flies through the clouds…. transforming
12:01
McWhertor – it’s FINAL FANTASY XIII
12:01
McWhertor – coming to Xbox 360
12:02
crecente – !
12:02
McWhertor – so much for exclusivity
12:02
Leigh Alexander – HOLY SHIT

It seems that the 360′s install base has some serious leverage after all… I wonder if they have not been developing it on the 360 as the main platform all along.

UPDATE: And here is the preemptive reaction for all the fanboys of this earth:

Well I do. I loved those games. I remember playing Screamer 2 on a Pentium 120 MhZ that could barely run it in low res.

Once the development of Screamer was completed, Milestone – the Italian developer – moved on to great things and started working on the official Superbike games for EA. I bought the first one when it came out in ’99 and it was just great. Unfortunately many people around the world didn’t agree with me and the game was eventually dropped after an even more unpromising sequel.

Milestone is back.

They have been hard at work on the new chapter for a long while and this time EA is not involved so we might just see a decent game.
When two weeks ago HMV’s website reported that the game was going on sale in just one week an unduly excited Stefano presented himself at a store in Oxford street ready to plunk down some of his cash to grab a copy.
It just wasn’t there. I searched and searched, People must have thought I was going mental as I kept walking along the same shelves over and over again.

Where the hell is my effin’ game!?

Yesterday night I finally took the time to check a few sites. I’m sad to report that there seem to be some confusion on the release date of the PS3 version.

Amazon.co.uk: September 30, 2008
Amazon.com: Game doesn’t exist
GameStation (high street store): Game doesn’t exist
HMV.co.uk: 1-8-2008
Play.com: 26/09/2008
Game.net: 01/09/2008

As far as I can see the official distributor for the game in Europe is BlackBean. Also, as far as I can see, BlackBean is completely useless and wouldn’t be able to organize a piss-up in a brewery.
Additional evidence to BlackBean ineptitude is provided by the fact that a patch for the game is available on the official website while the PC version has not been released yet, at least according to amazon.co.uk.

Let’s just hope that some bright spot in Italy or wherever BlackBean is picks up my case.