velvet-assassin posts

Southpeak Games looks like it will be heavily promoting the upcoming WWII stealth action game Velvet Assassin. Today the publisher announced that folks who purchase the Replay Studios-developed title at Gamestop will get access to a digital comic book created by Peter Chung.

Chung is best known for creating Aeon Flux, which was adapted into an MTV animated series and later a really crappy movie starring Charlize Theron. The Velvet Assassin comic will tell a story of the lead character, Violette Summer, and her early years as a spy working against the Nazis. The game itself is scheduled to be released this spring.

It's been a little while since any updates have come for Velvet Assassin. The WWII stealth action game from developer Replay Studios was originally due out last fall from publisher Gamecock. They got bought out last fall by Southpeak Games and added Velvet Assassin to their list of upcoming games for release this spring.

Today Southpeak announced their official plans for this weekend's New York Comic Con, announcing that a playable version of Velvet Assassin will be among the games shown at the exhibit floor. In addition the "real" Velvet Assassin model. Melinda Cohen, will make an apperance at the show. Cohen, who also appeared at last August's Penny Arcade Expo, did the voice work and motion capture for the game's lead character Violette Summer. In the meantime Southpeak sent over four new screenshots of the game itself to look over

Southpeak Games will also be showing off other upcoming games from their line-up, including the action-fighting game X-Blades and the sci-fi shooter Section 8.

Yesterday we started our look at the PC games of 2009 with a ton of various upcoming action and FPS titles. But there are so many of these type of games due out in the next 12 months that we had to split that preview up into two parts. This entry not only contains a number of traditional action titles but also has some fighting games and flying action game titles as well.

Check back on Monday as we will next take a look at the various strategy-RTS based games due out in the next year.

Click on the picture above to read more on the 2009 PC Game Preview: Action-FPS Titles Part 2

The status of Velvet Assassin's publisher is a little up in the air thanks to the purchase of the game's former publisher, Gamecock, by Southpeak Games earlier this month. That isn't stopping the marketing of the upcoming stealth action game. Today we got some new screenshots that show off the titles heroine doing what she does best.

And you know what she does best, of course: KILLIN' NAZIS! Yep, this new trio of shots show off some of the game's impressive lighting effects and terrific art design but we know what we want in this title. HOT CHICKS KILLIN' NAZIS!. We don't think Velvet Assassin can be release soon enough.

The folks at Phillips have been promoting their game-oriented multi-media hardware amBX for some time and now the company is cutting the division's cords and letting it loose. Today Phillips announced that the amBX team (based in the UK) is now spinning off into their own stand alone business, amBX UK Limited.

In case you are not familiar with amBX it's basically a series of speakers, lights and fans that react with amBX enabled games like Brothers In Arms: Hell's Highway, Far Cry 2 and the upcoming Legendary and Velvet Assassin. This new business move will enable amBX to continue to expand to support more games as well as support films, TV shows and other media outlets

After founding the almost legendary Gathering of Developers and then seeing that publishing company sold off to Take Two Interactive, Mike Wilson and a number of other members of that original team reformed in early 2007 (with help from some still unnamed investors) to form Gamecock Media Group. As with the original Gathering, Gamecock was a publisher that concentrated mostly on original and sometimes innovative game titles and also staged some weird marketing moves, including holding a "funeral" for E3 and Wilson running a mock campaign president of the video game trade group the Entertainment Software Association.

However their first games got mixed results in sales and in reviews which is perhaps the reason why it was announced this week that another publisher, Southpeak Games, would be buying out Gamecock and ending the Austin, Texas based team's second major bid to be an alternative publisher.

Big Download managed to get Southpeak Games' CEO Melanie Mroz to answer a few questions about the new Southpeak-Gamecock deal and but as you can see there's still some unknowns that have yet to be addressed, including whether or not the Gamecock brand you see above will survive.

It looks like one of the games we were hoping to play this fall won't be making the party after all. Velvet Assassin, the upcoming WWII stealth action game, was scheduled for release this December but now Eurogamer is reporting that the title has been pushed back to January 2009.

The game's ship date has also shifted to a mid-January date on online game retailers so we are going to assume this is not a glitch in the system. The title, from developer Replay Studios and publisher Gamecock, has gotten some new media attention lately. You can check out a recent preview of the game right here at Big Download.

Tossing its hat into the stealth-action genre later this year is the GameCock published title, Velvet Assassin. Available only in eyes-on form at PAX 2008, Velvet Assassin is a story set in World War II and inspired in part by real life French secret agent Violette Szabo. Our short demo took us through a mission midway through the game where the lead character, Violette Summer, was tasked with destroying a gas line. Jump in for our impressions of Velvet Assassin.

Eidos is famous for hiring sexy English models to portray Lara Croft and then send them over to various game conventions and promotional events.They have been doing this for over 10 years now and have just hired their newest model, 23 year old Alison Carroll. However these models are strictly for eye candy; they have never actually participated in any of the Tomb Raider game development. They have never been the voice of Lara Croft nor handled any of the motion capture for the character.

That is not the case for actress-model Melinda Cohen, who showed up at Penny Arcade Expo last weekend to promote the upcoming Replay Studios-Gamecock stealth action game Velvet Assassin. Cohen was there as a booth model but she is also handling the voice for the character of Violet Summer (in both English and German versions) in the game itself. She's also doing motion capture work for the character in the game. all of which puts her several steps ahead of any Lara Croft model. Velvet Assassin is currently scheduled for release late in 2008.

[Via Destructoid]

While the game industry is beginning to understand that they can sell high profile games any time of the year the truth is that the time period between the first of September and the first week of December remains the biggest time of the year for new games to be released. 2008 seems to be no exception to this rule as PC gamers have a ton of new and promising titles to choose from this year.

So which games are we most looking forward to playing this fall? Well it so happens that we have created a feature gallery that has our picks for the PC game titles we most want to play in the next few months. That list include a long awaited MMO, a new expansion pack to the biggest MMO, an alternate history RTS game, a number of great looking first person shooters, a post-apocalyse RPG and a title that some are already declaring "the greatest game ever made." (in fact you can get a clue as to one of the games on our list from this custom case mode we saw at QuakeCon).

Our list of games is ordered by their scheduled release dates. Keep in mind while checking our picks that release dates can and do change at the last minute. Our picks represent the best info on these dates at the time of the posting of this article but if any changes are announced afterward we will report on them on the news site.

Click on the image above to continue reading "Most Anticipated Fall 2008 PC Games"