atari-2600 posts

Publisher Atari is once again going back and reviving another of its classic games from its 2600 days. GameSpot has the first word on the new version of Star Raiders which in its original incarnation featured first person space battles combined with a large (for its time) tactical map.

The new version of the game is being developed by Incinerator Studios and will have much of the core gameplay design of the original combined with modern graphics, an episodic storyline, customizable space ships and online multiplayer modes. The game is currently due for release on the PC via download and other platforms in early 2011.

It looks like the various online rumors that a new Neverwinter Nights game coming from publisher Atari and developer Cryptic Studios was in the works have been proven to true - kind of.Today Atari officially announced that game, which is simply called Neverwinter.

The game, due out in the fourth quarter of 2011, is oddly enough not being called an MMO but a "co-op role playing game" where players can pick from one of five Dungeons and Dragons-based character classes and then team up with friends or with AI-controlled characters to form five-player teams. The game will also have support for user-generated content via a new system called Forge, much like how the Neverwinter Nights games developed by BioWare also had such tools.

While the game isn't due out until late 2011, the fictional backstory behind it will be launched on October 5 by author R.A. Salvatore in the novel Gauntlgrym. It's due out on October 5 and is the first of a planned trilogy of novels based on Neverwinter's world and storyline. Dungeons and Dragons owners Wizards of the Coasts also plan to release a Neverwinter-based tabletop RPG game. More info on the game is revealed on GameSpot in an interview with Cryptic co-founder Jack Emmert.

With only a few weeks to go before its planned September 21 release date, Atari has announced that its big 2010 game release, Test Drive Unlimited 2, won't make that date after all. In a note on the game's official web site it was announced that the title has been pushed back to sometime in the first quarter of 2011.

The note announcing the delay stated that while the open world racing game "is fun and could be launched shortly" Atari and developer Eden Studios felt "with a few extra months of polish it could be even better." Last May Atari started taking beta sign ups for the game. Today note stated, " We will be announcing the new Beta dates shortly, as well as revealing exclusive Beta tester rewards, as a thank you for their patience and continuing support."

If you own the first game in developer CD Projekt's The Witcher series and made it to one of the fantasy RPG's many endings, you might want to keep your save files from the time. In a new video dev diary for the upcoming sequel The Witcher 2 on IGN it's revealed that there will be a way to import those save files from the original game into the sequel.

According to the video, the imported save files will affect how some of The Witcher 2's characters deal with your lead character depending on how you completed the original game. Hopefully we will learn more about how this will work at E3 later this month. In the meantime you can check out the full video after the jump.

Earlier this week one of the worst kept secrets in PC gaming was finally admitted as developer CD Projekt announced their fantasy RPG sequel The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. This week the developer released a couple of new videos promoting the game. One of the videos is an example of an in-game engine cut scene from the trailer that shows off some of the game's storyline and a couple of its monsters.

The other video, which you can see after the jump, is the first developer's diary for The Witcher 2 as the dev team (speaking in their native Polish but with English subtitles) go over their goals in the making of the game.

Download HD The Witcher 2 Real-time Cutscene (152 MB)
Download HD The Witcher 2 Developer Diary (197 MB)
Check out all The Witcher 2 downloads

It's a bit anti-climatic at this point but today developer CD Projekt finally and officially announced they were indeed developing The Witcher 2. The sequel to their hit fantasy RPG is currently scheduled for release in the first quarter of 2011. The developer has already admitted it was working on the game after a video showing the game's development leaked on the net several months ago.

The press release reveals that The Witcher 2 has already signed a number of publishing agreements including Atari for the North American market. The press release hypes up the sequel's new graphics engine which CD Projekt developed from scratch this time (the original Witcher game used BioWare's Aurora engine as its basis), The first English preview of the game can be read at GameSpot (be aware there are some story spoilers in the preview).

Long before there were home consoles or Flash-based and downloadable games accessible via the Internet, the only place to get your gaming fix was the venerable video arcade. For those of our readers who may be too young to remember the arcade boom of the 1980s, these were spacious, sometimes dimly-lit buildings filled with games housed in large cabinets; some later games were contained in sit-down, glass-topped tables. These spaces were home to the grand, seminal casual games that have become enshrined within gamers' memories as the first great games of our time. Titles like Space Invaders, Asteroids, Pac Man, Joust, Dig Dug, etc., and the gameplay they embodied, have been the basis for all games that have followed since.

However, as home console systems became available, and their game libraries grew both in size and complexity, the once-ubiquitous video arcades dwindled in number from thousands country-wide to perhaps tens per state, and even that figure might be optimistic. With the focus of electronic entertainment switching to the home, gamers also left the arcades en masse, in favor of playing at home alone, or at best, with one or two friends who didn't have a system of their own. These players might not have known it then, but soon they would subconsciously realize that they were missing something integral to the gaming experience that wouldn't return for years.