Empire Interactive has recently snatched up the rights to make Mensa-themed games for consoles, handhelds, PCs and Macs. While further details on these upcoming titles are scarce, the ultra-elite group of brainiacs assures us that these new games will "foster intelligence." Judging by that statement, and the group's taste in gaming, we'd say to expect a slew of Sudoku and crossword puzzles. As if the DS needed any more of those.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Smack Down Productions is doing its part to fill bargain bins with punny titles like Build-A-Bear: A Friend Fur All Seasons and Koh Lanta, a party game based on the French flavor of Survivor. Now the French developer is working on a pair of unspecified titles for the Wii, each based on "high-profile licenses" and built using Vicious Cycle's self-titled Vicious Engine. High-profile or not, middleware doesn't make the game. No other details on either project are known, though with titles like disturbingly-named Fatal Furries to the developer's credit we can hardly wait to see what Smack Down has in store. Hardly.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Bobby Kotick and co. got together for the Activision Blizzard earnings report this afternoon and dropped a few numbers on their investors, aside from confirming a mess of games that still haven't officially been announced yet. After reconfirming what we told you a few weeks ago regarding the $1 billion in sales of Guitar Hero III, Kotick went on to note, "In North America, Activision Blizzard was the #1 third-party console and handheld software publisher in dollars for the calendar year, according to The NPD Group."And how did the company fare during the holiday season? As you might expect, due to releases like Call of Duty: World at War, Guitar Hero: World Tour (which outsold Rock Band 2 at 2:1 in 2008) and a little expansion you may have heard of called Wrath of the Lich King, "Activision Blizzard was the #1 console, handheld and PC publisher in the U.S. and Europe, according to The NPD Group, Charttrack and Gfk." Unfortunately, during a recession like this, even being "the #1 console, handheld and PC publisher in the U.S. and Europe" wasn't enough, with the company losing $72 million in Q4, or 5 cents a share, and announcing a 2009 outlook that falls shy of Wall Street's expectations. Sometimes it's tough being the king.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Nintendo of Japan revealed a ton of new games at its fall media conference, and it's just now getting around to talking about some of them. Kensax was one of the many first-party games buried in the avalanche of news, with nothing released but three baffling, context-free screenshots and a few seconds of video.IGN has translated an article from the latest issue of Famitsu revealing the first information about Kensax, which, as it turns out, is about ... search engines? The minigames in Kensax all revolve around putting words into a search engine and using the resulting hit count as a measure of progress and as the focus of multiplayer competition.For example, "Battle! Search Panel 9" tasks up to four players with combining words from a "stock" with words from a 3x3 board to conduct search terms. The player with the highest hit count steals a panel from another player. At the end, the game tabulates the panels in each player's possession, as well as the total hit count, to assign a winner. In "Fastest! Search Shooter", players shoot moving words to create high-hit-count combinations with their stock words.Kensax includes 3,000 words and their estimated hit counts, but players can go online to bolster the game's vocabulary. Famitsu didn't offer a release date beyond "2009", and, of course, there is no word on a release outside of Japan. We hope to hear more about the other stealth Nintendo announcements soon, like Cosmic Walker.
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