Video Games Daily News Digest

New Brink gameplay footage has arrived (via G4), depicting a game that’s being described by some as part Mirror’s Edge and part Borderlands. It offers a quick tour of the “Smart Freedom of Movement” system, which Splash Damage says will give players more freedom than ever before.

As in Mirror’s Edge, the player will be able to hop over or slide under various obstacles, which Splash Damage hopes will put players in a more tactical mindset. They suggested that Brink won’t be “on rails” like other shooters, and repeatedly stressed that the players won’t simply be entering canned animations.

It seems that Croatian developers don’t like taking breaks. Not even a week after Serious Sam HD was released on Steam, developer Croteam has announced that Serious Sam HD: The Next Encounter will be released in early 2010. The game will be released on PC and “home consoles” according to the press release, which would leave the door open on a possible PS3 port that the first game was lacking. The game will also feature a co-op tournament mode, but no other details were given.

I haven’t gotten the chance to play the HD remake, but I played plenty of Serious Sam when it first came out, and if you’re a fan of things that are absolutely bonkers, these games are right up your alley. Second Encounter was superior due to the totally nuts level design (trampoline rooms filled with kamikaze bombers), so this is great news in my book.

Too Human developer Silicon Knights’ new game could be called The Box, the CV of an ex-employee named Zhang Shao-yong reveals. The CV states that Shao-yong was with the Canadian developer from June 2005 to April 2008 and that he worked on both Too Human as well as a project called The Box, and that he was responsible for producing “visual effects, such as the application of particle and material performance of explosions, smoke, water, fire, weather and so on.”

The Box is marked down as an “Xbox [360] and PS3″ game on the CV but beyond that, there’s no information about it. Though whatever it is, it could be “fresh” if Silicon Knights’ bossman Denis Dyack is to be believed, and if he is in fact talking about this particular game in the following quote.

“The next game that we’re going to announce, not including the sequels to the [Too Human] trilogy, it’s nothing like anything else we’ve ever made before,” Dyack said in an interview last year as CVG points out. “We want to continue to do that to keep fresh. That’s really what’s important, and making sure that we continue to make new IPs but also continue to innovate in the genres that we try to… create content in, I suppose is the best way to describe it.”

Update: Activision has just announced that Classic will head to PlayStation Network this week as well — on Thursday for $14.99.

Original story: Infinity Ward’s port of the original Call of Duty, titled Call of Duty Classic, is this week’s Xbox Live Arcade offering, Xbox Live’s European community manager Graeme Boyd tweets, also confirming the previously rumored 1200 MS Point price point which should scare those who bought the pricier editions of Modern Warfare 2 into looking for that redeemable code that’s tucked away somewhere in their editions. The arrival of Cpt. Price’s well-aged mustache is also confirmed by Larry Hryb from the other side of the pond.

Ubisoft has announced a €78 million operating loss, in line with expectations, as part of its financial results for the six month period that ended September 30, 2009.

The operating loss has been attributed to a €130.5 million decrease in gross profit and a €14.5 million reduction in R&D expenses “due to a smaller number of games launches.”

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A new $1.99 iPhone app has been released that allows you to sign into the service securely using your existing Xbox Live credentials.

According to the firm behind the app, the program has been designed for hardcore Xbox 360 gamers and iPhone owners. The app retrieves your friends Xbox Live stats such as their gamerscore, online status, gamer pictures, avatars, latest games and achievements. You can also send and receive messages using the app.

The full set of features reads:

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If you thought the iPhone needed more games featuring zombie alpacas, you’ll be pleased to learn that artist Roman Dirge is hard at work on Vampire Puff Puff, a new iPhone game starring vampire-cum-ragdoll Ragamuffin. And yes, zombie alpacas.

His first foray into videogames, Vampire Puff Puff will take place in the same universe as the Lenore comic books, with the eponymous star kidnapped by Pooty Applewater. It’s up to her loyal blood-sucking sidekick to brave 23 different baddies and 15 unique zombies through five different levels to rescue her, armed with such weapons as the Bragun, which turns cows into a shotgun blast of sausage, and the Poe Poe Gun, which shoots ravens and weeps when out of ammo. Basically, it sounds like Dirge has a chance of realizing his dream to make “the most unique and entertaining side scroller shooter ever.”

“It’s been my dream for a long time to see what I could create videogame wise, and I’m pretty proud of what I’ve come up with,” he shared on his blog, adding that though the game is currently only iPhone-bound, releasing it on other platforms like Xbox Live is possible if it proves popular enough. If nothing else, Dirge hopes enough fans will rally around the iPhone release to warrant all the new additions he’s already got planned. “I have TONS of updates planned for it if it makes the investor’s investment money back, like achievements, new weapons, an outfit store, multiplayer, rideable characters, going on rides in Spookyland, etc…For the first time ever, I’m asking for help and support in this endeavor just so I can add the updates to make this the full game I envision.”

Sure, Princess Zelda has been imprisoned in crystal, the land of Hyrule overun by monsters, and the very fate of the world threatened by the power-hungry machinations of the evil lord Ganondorf, but it’s not like those chickens are going to catch themselves.

After being available at industry events since E3 earlier in the year — where it impressed the hell out of some Dennis guy — some actual footage from Splash Damage’s Brink has finally been released for the internet crowds. The video doesn’t reveal much though; it’s a simple walkthrough by CEO and Game Director Paul Wedgewood who’s just showing off a bit of the SMART movement system in an abandoned airport setting. Seeing how things are going though, it wouldn’t be surprising if the we see the first proper gameplay trailer air during the VGAs next month.

The game also seems to have been pushed back a little bit, from Spring to Fall 2010, the end of the video shows.

Serious Sam caused something of a murmur when it burst upon the FPS scene back in the early 2000’s. Even back then, the FPS genre had backed away, bit by bit, from the balls-to-the-wall insanity of early genre heavyweights like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D and was easing its way into the sophisticated world of Half-Life and System Shock 2. Serious Sam, with its brightly colored, mow-’em-down ethos unexpectedly evoked the zeitgeist of an era long past, and tapped into an undercurrent of adrenaline-fueled gameplay that had been lying dormant in gamers’ twitchy index fingers.

So developer Croteam must hope it will go, again, with the series’ latest release: Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter. This budget-priced update of the original Serious Sam title features revamped graphics, a new co-op online mode, and a whole lot of old-school ass-kickin’ for the greater glory of mankind. And while the new visuals go a long way in toward moving the series into today’s world of bells and whistles, at its core, Sam HD is very much from the “old school.”

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