Metal Gear Solid: The Pizza Walker? [Screengrab]

A Liverpool pizza parlor has a very familiar logo . As seen by reader Rob.

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Metal Gear Solid: The Pizza Walker? [Screengrab]

The Lost Characters of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom [Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars]

It all started with fond childhood memories. “The anime that Tatsunoko makes is well known in Japan,” said Capcom producer Ryota Niitsuma . “Even now, looking back on them they had a lot of good stories and were really fun. I think a lot of adults in Japan have fond memories of those.” So when the anime studio approached Capcom about making a game based on characters pulled from there five decades worth of work, Capcom jumped at the idea. The result was 2.5D fighter Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars . The hardest part of making the game, it seems, was figuring out which characters to include from Tatsunoko’s more than 80 cartoons, and then getting the company to OK their choices. “We started by sitting around and deciding what characters from the anime we would like to see in a fighting game,” Niitsuma said. “Then we had to consider licensing issues. Once we had that list we had to figure out how to make a balanced fighting game. On top of that we wanted a good balance between male and female characters. “We mainly plucked the main characters from the anime we used, and not too many villains.” But not all of Capcom’s choices were approved. “One of the main anime we got more requests for than any others was Samurai Pizza Cats ,” he said. “There were a lot of people who wanted to see that. I wanted to see that, but we couldn’t reach an agreement.” Another set of characters shot down by Tatsunoko were the transforming-motorcycle riders of Genesis Climber MOSPEADA . “They told us what we could and couldn’t use,” he said. “If they said no we cut them. “We weren’t privy to a lot of their decision making process. They didn’t share a lot of reasons with us. When they said no and we asked why, they wouldn’t tell us, but would give us another suggestion.” When Capcom decided to bring Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom to the U.S. as Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars they added a few more characters to the game. If it does well enough, Niitsuma says that they may consider releasing even more characters for the Wii game as downloadable purchases. And Niitsuma hopes that Capcom isn’t finished working with Tatsunoko. “On a personal level I am so happy I was able to make this game and I hope I can continue to work with them and adapt more of their anime for games,” Niitsuma said. Bringing Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom Ultimate All-Stars to the PS3 or Xbox 360, though, is much less likely, he says. The game was developed for the Wii because Capcom wanted to have a fighting game on all of the current platforms, but to bring the game to the other consoles would require an enormous amount of work, he said. “We would have to change our development schedules around,” he said. “The work involved would be pretty insurmountable.”

Excerpt from:
The Lost Characters of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom [Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars]

Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi Join Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing [Sega]

Two of the newest contenders in Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing may not be as familiar to gamers who weren’t Sega fans during the glorious Dreamcast era, but Space Channel 5’s Ulala and Crazy Taxi’s B.D. Joe are welcome additions. The two newest racers join Sega all-stars like Sonic the Hedgehog, Ryo Hazuki from Shenmue, AiAi from Super Monkey Ball and former stars Alex Kidd, Billy Hatcher and Beat from Jet Set Radio. Ulala sports a sweet future hovercraft, with B.D. Joe driving his signature taxi, presumably sprinting his way toward a Pizza Hut or KFC. The first appearance of these two new Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing drivers is after this.

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Space Channel 5, Crazy Taxi Join Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing [Sega]

Cooperative Multiplayer with the Devil You Don’t Know [Mutliplayer]

New Super Mario Bros. Wii released a week ago, and even its lighthearted cartoon environment and four-player cooperative mode still manage to bring out the worst in multiplayer behavior – if you don’t know your partner, that is. “Being granted the opportunity to be friends or adversaries, games allow us to act out the worst of human pathologies and encourage behaviors that would get us yelled at, arrested, or killed in the real world,” writes Jamin Brophy-Warren for Slate. This is hardly a news flash. But it’s depressing to consider that, in a Mario’s return to a 2D platformer after 20 years, we still haven’t progressed much further than adolescent brothers taking advantage of the game to antagonize each other. I’d argue that the reason he had a bad experience with it is because he didn’t know his co-player. That made the guy completely unaccountable, and his provocations would stand unless and until the writer called him on his bullshit, which would be more uncomfortable to do face-to-face to a stranger in a “fun” environment than just walking away. Brophy-Warren ponders why multiplayer is an inherently brutish or uncouth pursuit, and I think he answers it in his last paragraph: When you game with people you know and respect, you’re more likely to actually cooperate. Otherwise, “Most cooperative games lie in a vast middle ground, however, a no man’s land between altruism and gaming Darwinism that offers up a host of ways to misbehave.” Et Tu, Mario? [Slate, Nov. 13] Jesper Juul, a video-game researcher and professor at NYU’s newly minted Game Center, argues that multiplayer games give us three things to balance. Players want to win and they want the game to be fair, but they also need to navigate whatever relationships they have outside the game-that is, if you shoot your friend in the head in Call of Duty, you’ll have to answer for that in the offline world. My brother and the jerk from E3 were solely concerned with winning. I mostly cared about the game being fair. None of us, though, sat down and talked about the third factor-what we were planning to do during our journey as in-game teammates. This planning comes up most frequently in massively multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. In that game, players create guilds and go on quests in pursuit of gold and weaponry. Defeating an enemy yields goodies that guilds must choose how to distribute. In a perfect world, everyone would work together to give the appropriate items to the most deserving players. There is a breed of WoW player, however, known as the “loot ninja” or “greeder,” a scoundrel who steals items from fallen comrades or takes more than his share after a battle. (There are also more flagrant modes of sabotage. In the infamous Leeeroy Jenkins video, an overexcitable player decides to take on a difficult boss single-handedly, sabotaging his guild’s meticulous plan. The results are predictably surreal.) This type of stuff was happening long before World of Warcraft. In side-scrolling brawlers such as the early-1990s title Streets of Rage, power-ups appeared along the way that could heal your wounded party or give players special abilities. Bleeding-heart video-game liberals like myself would argue that health packs should always go to the weakest member of the party. This would often lead to discussions about who “deserved” the triage, which begot a lot of petty bickering, which begot fistfights. This Photoshopped box art for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II-which includes the tagline “It’s My Turn to Get the Pizza You Asshole I Need it More!”-is a perfect encapsulation of the phenomenon. Part of the problem (and the joy) of playing games is that such behavior isn’t explicitly condoned or condemned. Looting and friendly fire aren’t forbidden by most games, which leaves us to figure out our own rules. This is the right decision: Good game designers allow players to be whoever they want and trust they’ll come to their own consensus about what constitutes “fair play.” That’s why the New Super Mario Bros. Wii was more enjoyable when I played it as God intended-with a good friend and copious amounts of beer. There was no back-stabbing, and no one’s feelings were hurt. – Jamin Brophy-Warren

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Cooperative Multiplayer with the Devil You Don’t Know [Mutliplayer]

Halloween sale for Pizza Morgana Episode One.

Play Pizza Delivering Daemons, Monsters and Vampires this Halloween at Pizza-morgana.com

TEL-AVIV, Israel – October 20th, 2009 – Pizza Morgana is a game that lets you play the charming tale of a young girl who is accidentally teleported into a magical dimension filled with monsters, vampires, faeries, and daemons, which all just happen to be employed as pizza delivery guys and what a better holiday to have it on sale than Halloween?

Starting today, and until Oct 31st, Pizza Morgana Episode One – Monsters and Manipulations in the Magical Forest will be sold for 50% off its price.
Just use the coupon code ”Halloween2009” during checkout to get episode one for HALF THE PRICE.

So get in your Jackie Costume and go play Pizza Morgana at http://pizza-morgana.com !

About Pizza Morgana
Based on the popular comic series of the same name, Pizza Morgana is a 2½ D point and click episodic adventure game that lets you play the charming tale of a young girl who is accidentally teleported into a magical dimension filled with monsters, vampires, faeries, and daemons, which all just happen to be employed as pizza delivery guys. And they all work for an arch wizard (and chef), named Morgan! Corbomite Games is delivering the episodic adventure series directly to consumers through digital distribution from the game website at: http://pizza-morgana.com
Monsters and Manipulations in The Magical Forest also features voice acting by famous Hollywood actors, Mia Alon as Jackie, Claudia Christian as Abbie Positive, and Robin Atkin Downes as the Watcher. Among their many onscreen and in-game appearances, both Claudia Christian and Robin Atkin Downes are Babylon 5 alumni, and veteran voice recording actors in the game industry.

About Corbomite Games
Founded in 2006, Corbomite Games is a game development studio focused on episodic adventure games aimed at the casual game and girl games markets. Corbomite employs an ace team of industry veterans, including comics creator and mini-celebrity, Uri Fink. A group of talented writers, artists and software engineers with years of experience in computer and role-playing games, round out the team.

Corbomite Games currently has two episodic comedy adventure game series in production, Zbang, and Pizza Morgana. The studio is led by Oded Sharon, an experienced game maker with a passion for adventure games and MMOs. For more information, please visit:
http://corbomitegames.com

Contact information:
Corbomite Games
press@corbomitegames.com

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New casual PC game from Xing Interactive: Pizza Deliciozo

Dutch/Indonesian developers and publishers Xing Interactive are proud to announce the Q4 2009 release of their latest casual PC game title “Pizza Deliciozo”. The title will be released to online channels early December just in time for Christmas.

Pizza Deliciozo is an addictive match-3 type of game with a twist. There is a time management element in play and the objective of this game is to serve Pizza pies to your hungry customers as quickly as you can. You have to combine ingredients by matching them together on the ingredient-board. This is not just pairing up 3 of a kind but you can rotate 4 ingredients at once in order to match 3 or more. This guarantees much faster and more dynamic gameplay then other games in this genre.

If you are interested in licensing or distributing Pizza Deliciozo or any of Xing Interactive’s other 100+ PC casual games then please contact our sales department at sales@xinginteractive.nl. For more information about the company and its products please visit www.xinginteractive.nl.

MAJESCO ENTERTAINMENT RELEASES ‘SWEET’ NEW SCREENS FROM ‘COOKING MAMA 3: SHOP & CHOP’

EDISON, N.J., October 16, 2009 – Everybody recognizes Mama’s moxie with meatloaf, her prowess with pizza and her gift with Gazpacho. But many players have not seen her deftness with doughnuts or her competence with candy apples. To give them a peek at what delectable desserts Mama has in store in Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop, Majesco Entertainment Company (NASDAQ: COOL) today released some “sweet” screens showing a few of the Nintendo DS™ game’s tasty treats. Scrumptious desserts are just a tiny portion of the 80 new mouthwatering recipes available in the latest addition to the popular cooking simulation series that has sold more than 5 million copies.

Mama is back in the kitchen whipping up 80 new recipes – including mushroom quiche, tulip chicken and more. Players use the stylus as an all-in-one cooking utensil to chop, grate, roll, slice, spread, sprinkle and more through over 200 manic mini-games. Eight gameplay modes allow them to shop for fresh ingredients, create custom culinary concoctions, compete with up to three friends in timed challenges and more. Additionally, players can send friends items they grew in Gardening Mama and use them to make meals in Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop!

Developed by Cooking Mama Limited, Cooking Mama 3: Shop & Chop for Nintendo DS™ is rated E for Everyone and will release October 20th for the SRP of $29.99. For additional information about the Cooking Mama line of video games, please visit http://cookingmama.com/.