At E3 I had a brief interview with SNK’s President
Ben Herman on the Samurai Shodown series.

UBS: Will we see any release of the Samurai
Shodown 1 to 3?

Ben Herman: We are not planning releasing
any of the older Samurai Shodown games.

UBS: Are their any plans to release a new
Game based Around the Samurai Shodown?

Ben Herman: We are planning on creating a
new Samurai Shodown game.

This was all the information I was able to get from Mr. Herman on the Samurai Shodown. It is unknown if the game will remain 2D or if it will follow the path of the new King of the Fighters games and make the move over to 3D. With SNK  focusing development on Nintendo Wii it could be possible it can become a Wii only game.

The ESRB stated: “The content causing the ESRB to change the rating involves more detailed depictions
of blood and gore than were considered in the original rating, as well as the presence of a locked-out art file or “skin” that, if accessed through a thirdparty modification to the PC version of the game, allows the user to play with topless versions of female characters.”

Currently the content is not accessible on the Xbox 360 version of the game, but the game will keep its current content description for Violence, Blood and Gore, Sexual Themes, Language, and Use of Alcohol, while the PC version will have an added content description for Nudity.

Bethesda commented on the ESRB Re-rating:

The maker of the pen and paper role playing games Rifts, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Robotech has fallen under financial trouble, apparently due to employee theft and embezzlement. They have estimated about one million dollars in losses to date. Kevin Siembieda, owner & President, has sold many of his personal collection in order to keep his company at float. Apparently Palladium’s writers and artists haven’t been paid in months and the company is seeking help from its fans.

Palladium is selling Limited Edition prints of “A Megaverse United” and Kevin Siembieda himself will sketch a pencil drawing with a key character from one of their books. That drawing will be an 11 x 14 black and white, piece of art. The prints will sell for $50 each plus shipping. Unfortunately the release of the game Rifts: Promise of Power for the Nokia N-Gage did not help Palladium’s current financial state; if any thing the game’s low sales, attributable to only being available on a very unpopular “game system”, might have added to their current problems. If you’re a fan of Palladium books and would like to help, visit their site for full details.

Intel will be developing Apple’s next processor. What will this mean? IBM is no longer developing the processor for the Big Mighty Blue Apple.  Apparently Steve Jobs feels that the IBM PowerPC is lacking the power and speed needed for the continued improvement of the Macintosh computer.  The reasoning behind this is likely IBM’s Failure to hit the 3GHz mark with the G5 and produce a low power G5 for laptop use. Will having an Intel CPU inside a Mac make it more like a PC or will it remain a Mac with a Intel Inside sticker? All that is known for sure  is that Jobs promises a two year Intel conversion, and that OS X will remain the Mac OS even on the new hardware.

I was walking by their booth at E3 and they asked me if I wanted to view a demo of their game. Next thing I knew I was walking into a game that I had never heard of. Their game demo started off with the character builder. If you thought Ever Quest or City of Heroes had the best character customization you will be shocked when you see Hero’s Journey. They take character generation to a new level with endless possibilities to create characters from any race or mix of races. In addition to Humans you also have Elves, Gnomes and a few others. You can customize your armor, hair, highlights for your hair, nose size, body type, eye color and many other features. The main purpose of this character customization is you will look the way you want to look.

Another impressive thing from this game is their quest system: they plan to have all quests take place in instances. What makes this stand out from other MMO’s is that the quests adjust to your level, unlike other
MMO’s where you have to wait to be level 50 to do a level 50 quest. For example, in a game where you are sent on a quest to destroy, say, a bridge or a boss, on a normal MMO this quest will be impossible unless you meet a level requirement of, say, 20. Well in this game, if you are level 1 the quest’s difficulty will adjust
to you level or if your level 50 this quest will have the difficulty of a level 50 quest. This aspect alone greatly broadens the array of available quests and quest types for characters to play with from the starting point of the game.

The best idea of this game is how they plan to add content. They are using a quest building tool which allows them to build new quests and content in matter of days with their Game Master building tools. By Game Master I do not mean customer support like in World of Warcraft and Ever Quest but more like the
D&D Game Masters who create the adventure. They plan on having over 100 GMs working on adding new quests and content around the clock.

For more info on the rest of the game there is a well written article at www.mmorpg.com that covers the demo in more depth on the first level.

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/setview/features/loadFeature/103/gameID/174

Leveling as a Gnome warrior was a little more difficult at the lower levels due to the lack of stats in Stamina and Strength. These stats are the most important for a warrior to have. Sadly,  the Gnome starts out with high intellect instead. This stat has very little effect for a warrior class. Gnomes start out with 18 strength, while all other races start at 23 to28 strength. This hurts a Gnome warrior for the first 20 levels, but once you’re past 20 your stats start to balance out with the help of items. Even with the help of more balanced stats and items the Gnome warrior is still at a disadvantage in leveling, but this allows the Gnome warrior to become a more challenging race/class to level.

In player vs player or dueling one may think the Gnome warrior will lose to other warriors at even or higher levels, but this is not necessarily true. I have dueled many warriors of other races and have won many of them. Overall, player vs player or dueling is based on the player skills more than the class or race they play. You can have the most powerful items in the game but if you don’t know how to play your character you will most likely lose the fight. This is true in many other games, not just World of Warcraft.

In essence the Gnome Warrior is a more challenging class combo than any other. Since one will always have the hardship of lower stats than the other races, plus not gaining many benefits from the Gnome racial traits
versus the other races available in the game. This makes the Gnome warrior difficult to play but also makes the game a lot more entertaining to me.