Matsushita, parent company of Panasonic, has announced they will show the infamously rumored DVD player enabled Gamecube. It will be featured at E3, May 17. The price is expected to be about $300.
The Metroid game on the Gamecube will not be Metroid for but a prequel, predating all the other Metroid games on the NES,SNES, and Gameboy. The Metroid game on the Gameboy Advance will be Metroid 4. The expected title for the Gamecube version is Metroid Prime as the url's for Metroid.com/org/net have all been registered.
Sega has announced that they will release Planet Harriers on the Gamecube. A preview is expected to be shown at E3, on May 17. More details as they come.
Nintendo is promising to deliver the goods at the upcoming E3 expo and produce a grand unveiling.
"Nintendo's priority has always been to develop the highest quality hardware and software at affordable prices -- we will only bring out the very best, nothing less. This latest announcement out of Japan regarding Nintendo GameCube simply confirms that we are on-track for a US launch this fall as we have previously stated. The system is scheduled to launch in November, before the all-important holiday season. The Japanese launch date has been rescheduled for September to ensure that GameCube will launch with sufficient quantities of both hardware and great software. "
"We have already delivered over 600 GameCube development kits to outside developers and many of these games will be ready for E3. We have high hopes for the show and are confident the games will impress and astound attendees."(Nintendo Press Release)
Sega has announced that it its programming teams Sonic Team and Amusement Vision will be working on the Gamecube. Amusement Vision is responsible for such hits as Daytona USA and Virtua Fighters.
Famitsu.com has recently conducted a few interviews from different game companies such as Enix and Namco. Here is a piece of the interview from Namco's Executive Managing Director Yasuhiko Asada:
"In addition, we are very interested in Nintendo's GameCube as one of our target machines because it will have a strong influence in changing the current user groups -- and it means more things created by Nintendo."
Here is the other interview with Enix from their president Keiji Honda:
As for Gamecube and Xbox, we are still in internal discussions at the moment. For a long time, Enix has had the policy that, "we provide our games to the console that gamers chose as the best." As we still think that way, we are currently developing games with a focus on PlayStation 2 -- although we won't know gamers' final choice till both Gamecube and Xbox hit the market. Anyway, as you can guess from earlier comments by Mr. Fukushima (Enix's chairman of the board), our policy of "providing games to the most widespread console" won't change.
Retro Studios has announced that they are working on a new fantasy based RPG for the Gamecube. The project is extremely top secret currently. The lead designer of the game helped to create many games related to the Dungeons and Dragons series. The game will center around storyline, character development, and battles. The fighting in the game is expected to be real time.
Lost Boys Games is bringing a fantasy action game called Knights, to the Gamecube, Xbox, and PS2. The game centers around a hero saving a princess from evil doers.
In a recent interview, Hiroki Kikuta, a former Square employee who worked on Secret of Mana left Square because he believes the Playstation 2 is not the perfect piece of machinery it is hyped to be, while the Gamecube is showing some great potential. "If the Nintendo contributes a well made development kit to third parties at a really low price, GameCube will definitely become the next Super Famicom," Kikuta says. "It has a comfortable potential without a doubt."
It has been confirmed that Metroid for the Gamecube will be a FPS and not a third person shooter. The game was slated to be a third person shooter but the game was not living up to its expectations. The game is being developed by Retro Studios which has been undergoing internal problems for the past few weeks. The company layed off several workers and redistributed staff members among its different projects. Hopefully Retro will shape up and produce a game that lives up to everyone's expectations.
Sega has recently confirmed that they have received development kits for the Gamecube in an interview with Famitsu.com.
Nintendo's president, Hiroshi Yamauchi, spoke to Bloomberg of Japan on an array of topics. He first noted that there are already 2.7 million pre-orders for the Game Boy Advance in Japan currently and Nintendo plans to ship around 25 million worldwide. Yamauchi also commented on the apparent interest of Square in Nintendo's products. He stated that all the rumors were completely false and that the chance of Square signing with Nintendo were extremely low. Yamauchi also commented on Bill Gates and his entry into the video game world. Yamauchi said that Gates was a good business man but he "does not know games."Yamauchi also confirmed that Sega would be making games for the Game Boy Adavance but that Nintendo would not be buying out Sega.
Sega and Nintendo have recently been discussing licensing fees for Sega in order for them to produce games for the Game Boy Advance. In addition, Sega is speaking to Sony about the PS2.
Second party developer, Left Field Productions, has announced that they are working on a couple of Gamecube games. The first being a sequal to NBA Courtside as well as a snowboarding game. It is unknown whether the snowboarding game will be a direct sequal to 1080 but it seems like a strong possibility as Nintendo has already "loaned" Metroid to Retro Studios and Wave Race to NSTC.
Camelot Software of Japan has stated that they are no longer making games for the N64 but are concentrating their efforts on the GBA and Gamecube. The company has stated that there is already one GC game in devlopment and it could be released as early as July 2001 in Japan. Curently, Camelot is working on a GBA role playing game titled Golden Sun.
Nintendo has shipped over 500 development kits to developers. The kits are complete and are running at full capacity.
EA of Canada has recieved Gamecube development kits. They have performed some benchmark tests to check out what the Gamecube can handle.
All effects: slightly above 5 million polygons
4 effects on texture and all other effects: Approximately 14 million polygons
4 effects and 4 HWlights and all other effects: Approximately 17 million polygons
Working Designs and Clockwork games have shown increased interest in developing for the Gamecube
Take2 Interactive has announced that they will release two games at the Gamecube launch. This serves to strengthen the idea that there will be increased third party support for Nintendo announced that the Gamecube will have 10-15 games at launch.
THQ, Take-Two Interactive, and Platinum have announced that they will produce games for the Gamecube as well as the X-Box and PS2. Platinum stated that they will make exclusive games for each console.
Nintendo has been planning a conference in Seattle, Washington for all developers interested in creating games for the Gamecube. A specific date has not been set but it will most likely take place in November. Nintendo hopes to show the fully completed development kits and emphasize the ease of development which will eventually convince the other devlopers to create games for the Gamecube. Whether or not this will work is yet to be seen but if differs greatly from Sony's game plan which included shipping incomplete devlopment kits to companies.
Philip Holt, director of development at Volition, Inc. stated that there are plans for Volition to produce games on the Gamecube and PS2.
It has been reported that the Gamecube's CPU will be able to outpace the X-Box and PS2. The 405MHz copper gamecube CPU has a peak performance of 13.0 GFLOPS, which for now is faster then any other chip for any console. The X-Box will be running with a 32 bit chip while the PS2 and Gamecube will run with 128 bit processors.
Several companies have requested devlopment kits from Nintendo for the Gamecube. The list includes: Namco Capcom Hudson Konami Atlus Epoch Kemco Koei Media Factory
Konami and Universal Interactive have signed with the X-Box, PS2, Gamecube and Game Boy Advance. The titles for the Gamecube are Jurassic Park III, The Thing, and Crash Bandicoot (strange isn't it).
"ATI is contributing to Nintendo's upcoming Gamecube. As you may recall, graphics company ATI acquired ArtX, the company slated to create the graphics component of the game console formerly known as Dolphin. With ATI rival Nvidia developing the graphics chip for Microsoft's Xbox, will ATI use its new Radeon technology for the Gamecube? According to Greg Buchner, ATI's vice president of research and development, the answer is no, the chip won't be a refrigerant-cooled Radeon engineered with space alien technology. The custom-designed processor the company will use (currently named Flipper) is impressive in its own right, though. ATI has wisely left the ArtX team responsible for creating the Flipper unaltered by the acquisition. "A lot of those folks also worked on the previous console, the Nintendo 64. The bulk of ArtX came from Silicon Graphics in the past, and worked on that console, so we've got good experience and know what it takes to ramp into high-volume production. So that's really what we're in the middle of right now," Buchner told Gamecenter. "The chip itself is a 0.18-micron 202.5-MHz [part]," Buchner said. "We have about 3MB of on-chip memory [2MB of which is used for the frame buffer and 1MB for texture cache], which is called 1T-SRAM, which is a technology from a little company in the [San Francisco] Bay Area, and effectively it's like a pipelined SRAM. It gives us very low latency random access memory. And it's very, very small in terms of die area." The chip has only three megabytes of RAM? "It's TV. One of the benefits of consumer electronics is that you really get to know your display. Unlike the PC world, where displays are constantly ratcheting up, TVs really haven't changed, but [a] six-year old kid getting [a Gamecube] is not going to get a [$2,000] or $3,000 TV; he's gonna get the hand-me-down. So they're focused on what's gonna sell in high volume--they have made something that's a game console, not an everything box like PS2 tried to [be]." The embedded 5ns RAM will have an amazingly low latency bus, to the tune of a 12.8GB/second bandwidth peak. Besides the embedded memory, Buchner said, there will be two other RAM stores: a 24MB 10ns 1T-SRAM bank of main memory, with about a 3.2GB/sec transfer rate peak, and a 16MB chunk of higher latency 100-MHz DRAM. That latter is called A-Memory, and, according to Buchner, it's "used partly by the audio DSP and is also under programmer control to use for other things. There's already some very good uses of that memory. [It's commonly used] to offset the problems of having a disc [as opposed to the N64's ROM cartridge]. The latency is way up, so if you can kinda preload to the slower speed memory, it's still much faster than the disc, and [it can be used] to emulate a ROM." And the results of all that architecture? "Nintendo is, I think, tickled to death with what we've created for them. Developers are also very, very pleased...every developer that's gotten their hands on it. Most of [them] have also had PlayStation 2 development kits and real hardware, and hands down they're very happy with Gamecube vs. PS2. The PS2 is very hard to program, and it's very hard to get one-twentieth the performance [that Sony claims is possible]. "Achievable numbers are far, far greater than PS2, and that's really what matters--big numbers. What you achieve for a game is what matters, not some tidbit benchmark numbers," Buchner said."
Courtesy Game Center
Peter Main of Nintendo of America has recently commented on the state of the Gamecube. He has absically stated that there will not be much news concerning the Gamecube until the Entertainement Expo in Los Angeles. He is quoted as saying that "the demos were of course phenomenal, but the games are even better." Nintendo is planning a huge showing of the software and hardware at the Entertainment Expo but as a precautionary measure, Nintendo is keeping shut on any more aspects concerning the Gamecube in an effort to make sure that their competitors do not try to steal their ideas
Click on the link above to see a huge interview with Shigeru Miyamoto. It provides some great information on the Gamecube, Nintendo's long term plans, and the Game Boy Advance.
Konami Computuer Entertainment Osaka(KCEO) recently announced that they are bringing International Superstar Soccer to the Gamecube. The game is already in development for the Playstation 2. Executive Vice President and General Manager of KCEO, Katsuya Nagae said, "We haven’t received any development tool yet, but [there are plans to bring ISS to Gamecube] because this is one of the strongest titles for Konami KCEO. So we will definitely have ISS for Gamecube." He then went on to say, "From the information we have got, Gamecube sounds fantastic - at least from what Nintendo has promised so far."
The news is good so far for the Gamecube as many third party developers have signed on with Nintendo. There has been no news of Metal Gear Solid 2 coming to the Gme Cube though.
At Spaceworld, representatives for Square and Enix were there to scope out the Game Cube. Enix in particular showed interest in Nintendo's business model for the system. It is rumored that Nintendo is in negotiations with both comapnies. As of now Nintendo and Square are not commenting on their realtionship but it will be likely that Square is waiting to see the systems in its entirety before making a decision. This is a positive step for Nintendo that they are trying to get both Enix and Square to develop since Nintendo has started to realize that they need third party devlopers in order for their system to succeed.