Xbox Addict

Weekend Stuff!

Dead or Alive 3 Interview
DOA 3 creator, Tomonobu Itagaki, spoke very openly with the Gamespy guys during a recent Tokyo visit where they visited some local arcades to check out the competition, mainly Tekken 4 and Virtua Fighter 4. What resulted was some good smack talking..

Tekken 4 is a piece of shit," says Itagaki, "one of the worst things about Tekken 4 is the concept planning. It’s really half-ass. Tekken 4 attempts 3D environments, like I did in DOA 2, but they failed miserably.

What about Virtua Fighter 4? "I have to be careful how I say this," explains Itagaki, "VF4 is a very well-made game. The biggest problem is that it’s old. They only were partially able to catch up with what DOA 2 was doing."

*New* New Legends Media
THQ has opened its Official New Legends Web site and, in the process, has released nine new screens from the game. Click here to view the shots.

Sega Updates Xbox section
The official Sega website has been updated to include the ever important Xbox section with a few tidbits of info on their upcoming Xbox titles. Listed were Jet Set Radio Future (with old screenshots), Gun Valkyrie, NFL 2k2 and NBA 2k2. Also worth mentioning were two articles which sported a developer profile of Takayuki Kawagoe, Production Manager and Producer of Smilebit Corporation, and a feature on the happiest development house on the planet itself. Thanks TXB.

Weekly Halo Update!
In this weeks update, community whore Matt Soell breaks the bad news as to the end coming for Weekly updates *sniff*. Here’s the whole scoop supplied this week from the crew over at Battleground: Halo.

Folks, I gotta be honest with you: I am rapidly running out of Halo Update material. Not because nothing is happening ­ in fact too much is happening ­ but everything we’re working on is either a fix for existing content or new stuff (mostly cinematics) that I can’t discuss without ruining a couple key surprises. In the very near future we’re going to cross that magical line in the sand where we stop adding new stuff and concentrate entirely on bug-fixing and playtesting. At that point there won’t be much at all for me to say in these Halo Updates...and that’s GOOD because that’s when the REAL interesting stuff will begin.

Here’s what I can tell you this week:

- We’re balancing difficulty levels, trying to find that equilibrium between "a little too easy" and "a little too hard" ­ which is sometimes a hard call to make. Jason Jones has been spotted in five to ten-minute battles with individual Elites while using the tougher difficulty settings.
- We’ve changed the Ghost physics in a way that makes it much more fun for the player to fly and less easy for the AI to accidentally obliterate themselves.
- The AI units have a new vision system; now it’s harder for them to catch sight of you when you’re being sneaky.
- Multiplayer is much more stable than it used to be. Testers can play for hours at a time ­ as all Halo players must.
- Adrian devised a lovely "visual gravy" effect to replace the load progress bar. Not much point in seeing a bar since you won’t have much time to look at it ­ thanks to our mad caching skillz, load times are shorter than ever.

Unreal Championship Media
The boys from VoodooExtreme snagged 18 new "nudies" and a 40 second vid from Digital Extremes/Infogrames upcoming title, Unreal Championship all of which can be yours for just a single click right here!. The video is a 10mb .mpg file of which can be grabbed from good ol’ Fileplanet (please form a single line) right here.
Source: http://www.bunchasites.com/