Mike Bracken's blog

Gamescon has brought us some interesting gaming news this week–but most of it has been mainstream gaming news and not horror gaming news. Despite this, I've managed to pick up a few odds and ends for my survival horror-loving brethren.

Here's the newest promo trailer for Ju-On: The Grudge—the video game adaptation of the popular Japanese horror film franchise. The game is headed to the Wii this October and maybe, just maybe, it'll finally give me a reason to turn my Wii on.

The trailer features the usual dingy visuals and moody music, but it also highlights some of the ways the Wii-mote will be used in game (it's a flashlight) and reveals that the game will score players on how calm they remain during the game's numerous scary moments.

Have a gander at the trailer and see what you think. Apparently, the game is set to retail for a mere $30, which should make it more appealing to gamers on the fence about whether or not they want to play it.

Usually when I bring you release date news, it's a movie shifting it's release date farther away. Such is not the case with today's news about Resident Evil: Afterlife.

Comingsoon.net is reporting that the fourth film in the popular franchise will now hit theaters on August 27th, 2010. This is a shift forward of several weeks. As reported before, Paul WS Anderson will write and direct and Milla Jovovich will be back as Alice.

Please mark your calendars accordingly.

With the September release date inching ever closer, Atlus is starting to really dole out the goodies when it comes to their PlayStation Portable re-imagining of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. Earlier in the week we saw website updates (with more promised) and now we've got a lengthy video highlighting how the game has been upgraded, what's been added, and how the experience has been streamlined from the original PlayStation version from the '90s.

Some of the best gaming news I've heard this year revolved around the fact that Atlus is bringing the original Persona game to the PlayStation Portable. One of the earliest RPGs on the original PlayStation console (and the game that basically introduced most western audiences to the Shin Megami Tensei universe) is getting a port to Sony's handheld—along with a much needed facelift (we'll all finally be able to play the Snow Queen chapter).

If you swing by the game's official site (found here) you'll not only get a look at the game's packaging, but various other updates. Among these new additions to the site are: three new character profiles, two clips in the story section, clips of the Speedy Battles system, clips from the Snow Queen chapter, and two sample tracks from the game's soundtrack CD (a 2-disc add-in that will be available with every copy of the game).

If that (and the fact that this is a modern day occult RPG where you recruit demons to fight alongside you) doesn't get you off the fence on this game, then I don't know what to tell you. Atlus promises even more goodies for next week, though—so maybe something there will convince you that you need to play this game.

Persona hits the PSP in September of 2009.

I don't own an iPhone. I have an aversion to Apple products for some reason—but if I did plunk down my hard earned cash for something from Steve Jobs' technological empire, it would be the iPhone—the gaming possibilities alone make me lust after one.

I was fairly skeptical when it was announced that Dexter was coming to the iPhone as a game. I'd love to see a Dexter title (the show is great and certainly lends itself to becoming a game), but I didn't think this was the right platform. Give it to me on the Xbox 360 or PS3, and I'd be happy.

It's still too soon to tell if this adaptation will work or not, but these four new screenshots (courtesy of Games Press and available after the break) have me optimistic. The title looks like a PSP game at this stage—which is better than I expected. No firm release date has been set, but Dexter should be available for purchase later this year.

Dead Space was one of the better games of last year—an atmospheric blending of Event Horizon and Alien that gave me hope that maybe game developers can still come up with compelling original properties instead of just churning out sequels.

The game's already spawned a comic book, an anime movie tie-in, a sequel game and a on-rails offshoot title for the Wii—all this on top of the feature film version we’ve been hearing about for some time now. 

It looked like the big screen adaptation of Castlevania was basically dead in the water not too long ago. Director Sylvain White was gone and all signs pointed to the film spending a lot of time languishing in development Hell. Turns out that's not the case at all, actually, as Bloody-Disgusting has got the exclusive scoop that director James Wan (one of the co-creators of the Saw franchise) has come on board the project as a director and co-writer.

Production Weekly is reporting that the newest Resident Evil film, titled Resident Evil: Afterlife is set to begin shooting this September 28th in Toronto. No real details have emerged yet (although the film is currently slated for a September 17th, 2010 release date). We do know this much—the newest outing will take place in Tokyo. I figure it's safe to assume that Milla Jovovich will return, but that's not official at this point.

 

 

If you didn't get a chance to play Resident Evil 5 on your Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 earlier this year, but you own a gaming rig, then this may be good news for you.

Capcom has announced the official release date for Resident Evil 5 on the PC. North America can start slaughtering zombies on September 15, while Europe has to wait three extra days.

The big selling point for this PC version comes in the form of 3D. Gamers will be able to experience all that Resident Evil 5 has to offer in Nvidia's GeForce 3D technology. Infected people will come right out of the screen, apparently. Even the cutscenes will be presented in 3D. The only bad news here is that you'll have to shell out for some of those fancy 3D PC glasses separately.

If you're curious about this whole 3D thing, you can download a benchmark and tech demo for the game here (you'll need all the 3D vision hardware for this to work, naturally…). If you don't have a 3D ready video card, you can still play the game in the standard mode.

Bad news for anyone hoping for another trip to the underwater utopia of Rapture this year. Shacknews is reporting that BioShock 2 has been delayed. The title has shifted from its original November 3rd street date to a much more vague "sometime in the first six months of 2010".

Once the wave of initial disappointment wears off, this might actually be for the best. Releasing Bioshock 2 in November makes sense (it's out in time for the holiday rush), but as we all know that's a window where there are too many games and not enough time to play them all. Moving it to sometime after the holidays (or even to June of 2010) gives gamers a triple A title to look forward to during what is the biggest gaming drought period of the year, and it pretty much guarantees that Take Two will sell more units as there's not much in the way of competition. Metal Gear Solid 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV released in a similar fashion and both did well. There's no reason to expect that BioShock 2 won't reap the same benefits.

That being said, it's still a bummer. I was really looking forward to duking it out with Big Sisters this November…