Playstation Update

IGN has just posted The PS2 Games of 2006, a feature on games to keep an eye on in 2006. Looks like despite all the focus on PS3 development, there are some really good games in the pipeline. In case you’re too lazy to read the article, here’s the list:

• Ape Escape 3
• Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana 2
• Black
• Bully
• Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII
• EA Sports Fight Night Round 3
• Final Fantasy XII
• The Godfather
• Jaws Unleashed
• Kingdom Hearts II
• Mega Man X Collection
• Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence
• Okami
• Phantasy Star Universe
• Shadow Hearts: From the New World
• StarCraft: Ghost
• Superman Returns: The Videogame
• Tales of Legendia
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 4
• Ye Olde Side-Scroller

Good stuff here. Final Fantasy (two of these), Phantasy Star, Shadow Hearts, Kingdom Hearts, and Legendia. Plenty of good RPG’s coming your way. I’ll put Final Fantasy XII at the top of my list. Ah, Phantasy Star. I remember playing the original on the Sega Master System. (Yes, I’m that old).

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If you’ve had trouble finding an XBox 360 for Christmas, I have someone for you to blame: eBay scalpers. Games Digest reports that over 40,000 XBox 360 consoles have already been sold on eBay. This amounts to about a tenth of all systems sold in the US. Most of these have gone for $800 or more.

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Scheduled to be released in the second quarter of 2006, Pursuit Force should be a rockin good police chase game. It received the Gamespot “Editor’s Choice” award for the best PSP game at E3 2005.

In the game, you play a rookie cop in the fictional Capital City. Your job is to clean up gang-infested streets in the five districts of the city. The best way to get that done, of course, is with lots of interesting vehicles and large weapons. Cars, motorcycles, trucks, speedboats and helicopters will be available for your enjoyment. And what fun you’ll have with 25 different weapons to use to complement the vehicular mayhem!

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Sony announced recently that as of November 29th of this year, they had shipped 100 million Playstation 2 consoles worldwide. The breakdown looks like this:

• North America: 40.65 million
• Europe: 37.14 million
• Asia: 22.22 million

The PS2 accomplished this feat in a mere 5 years and 9 months. For comparison, the previous record was held by the original Playstation, which did it in 9 years and 6 months. No recent official figures are available from Microsoft or Nintendo, but estimates are that the XBox has sold 23 million units, while only about 19 million GameCube’s have been sold.

On the software side, about 6200 titles have been released for PS2, and around 7800 for PSOne. Total shipments of games is at nearly 1.9 billion. That’s a lot of games.

From Gamasutra.

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Square Enix has unveiled their first official Final Fantasy food tie-in: the “Potion”. It apparently has some nice relaxing herbs mixed in, to recover any HP you might lose during the course of an average day. It also reportedly tastes “mystical”.

It should be on sale March 2006 in Japan to coincide with the release of Final Fantasy XII.

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