Microsoft and Final Fantasy Creator Work Together

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi will work with Microsoft Game Studios to create two RPGs for the Xbox 2. Sakaguchi left Square Enix last July to form his own independent video game studio. It required ten months of negotiations to make the Sakaguchi and Microsoft collaboration happen. No information yet on possible game titles or release dates for the new RPGs. Xbox 2 is rumored to be released by the 2005 holidays.

Xbox Power Cord Recall

Microsoft is recalling 14.1 million Xbox power cords worldwide because they pose a fire risk. Less than 1 in 10,000 consoles are affected by this safety issue. If your Xbox was manufactured before October 23, 2003, you may want to click on this link to Microsoft's Power Cord Recall webpage for replacement information. Microsoft has stated that 30 console failures have caused minor injury (burned hands) and minor property damage (smoke, burned carpet or entertainment stands).

Even though the NHL cancelled their entire season, Take-Two Interactive and EA Sports continues their work on next year's NHL games. The difficulty now is figuring out which players will actually play and for what teams. A lot of Hall of Fame candidates may retire since next year's season may be cancelled as well.

EA and Marvel Coproduce New Comic Book Game

Electronic Arts and Marvel Comics have agreed to produce a new comic book with classic Marvel characters to go against a team of new superheroes created by EA themselves. The comic book will be released first, then EA will release the video game based on the comic book later. No info yet about a potential release date or what consoles this new comic book game will appear on, but the title of the comic book will be Marvel Nemesis: The Imperfects.

Ubisoft has announced four games for the Nintendo DS. The company plans to release Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, Bomberman DS, a video game version of Peter Jackson's new film King Kong, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory before the end of the year.

PSP Official Release Date and Price Tag

Sony has officially announced that the Playstation Portable will be released on March 24. The PSP will be sold as a Value Pack for $249.99, which will include the PSP handheld, headphones with a remote control unit, 32MB Memory Stick Duo, a UMD (Universal Media Disk) demo disk including non-game demos, battery pack, cleaning cloth, soft case and the UMD version of Spider-Man 2 the movie for the first one million PSPs shipped. Sony has not announced a cheaper, no optional equipment package like the company released in Japan.

Take-Two Obtains Full Exclusive Baseball Rights

At least from a third-party perspective beginning in spring 2006, Take-Two Interactive now controls all MLB rights, not just the player's union. Console manufacturers still have the right to produce their own baseball games (Nintendo will actually release Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball this April with Boston's DH hitter David Ortiz on the cover). So for the time being, EA won't be able to release a baseball game on their own. Electronic Arts will more than likely team with Microsoft to publish their MLB game as Nintendo has already announced their baseball game and Sony has the 989 Sports games.

So the next question is: who will obtain exclusive NBA rights and does anyone even want to make another NHL game?

Take-Two is eliminating the ESPN label from the cover of their upcoming Major League Baseball 2K5 game. While Take-Two still has the rights to the ESPN brand for this year, they do not want to advertise for Electronic Arts as EA's new deal with ESPN for their brand for the next fifteen years will begin in 2006. Take-Two will still include the ESPN content of this year's baseball game, however.

Finally, Activision has announced they have secured the rights to publish the next Shrek video game. Shrek 3 the movie is scheduled for a summer 2007 release.