-’…GrimGrimoire arrives right on cue to offer gamers a magical world of sorcery, strategy and a mysterious tale…’

It’s official: GrimGrimoire has been dated for Europe. Koei today announced that the co-developed title by RPG specialists, Nippon Ichi and Vanillaware, will offer a spellbinding blend of sorcery and time travel, when it lunches across Europe, on September 28th, for the PlayStation 2. The publisher has revealed a bunch of details on the game too. Here they
are below:

GrimGrimoire follows a young girl called Lillet Blan on her first few days at a prestigious yet mystical magic school, says Koei’s description for the game. Having awoken on the fifth day to find everyone at the school has mysteriously vanished, she then finds herself returned right back to the first day of the term with her memories intact. Now she has an opportunity to relive the past five days all over again and discover just what happened to the school’s inhabitants and maybe prevent this terrible tragedy from happening all over again. (more…)

- ‘Bourne’ is the only thing the video game ‘adaptation’ borrows from ‘The Bourne Ultimatum’ movie

In case no one broke it to you, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” starring Matt Damon, grossed $69.3 million in its first weekend, delivering the biggest August opening ever, according to Nz.entertainment.yahoo.com. Wikipedia says something about $70.2 million, but given that the numbers are pretty close, I think it’s safe to say that it’s almost record breaking. Whenever this happens with a movie, game developers become restless and want to do a game based on that movie (naturally). No one seems to be “rushing” into this one though…

Except Vivendi Games that is… But as I said, they’re not rushing into doing the movie adaptation, but actually a game going by almost the same name, with a totally
different plot. According to the previously mentioned website, “…the one that Vivendi Games has up its sleeve for a mid-2008 release on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 is no ‘movie game,’ its developers insist.” (more…)

Popular Japanese series taps out North America.

You probably haven’t heard of Fire Pro Wrestling, but that doesn’t lessen its importance. This series is to wrestling games in Japan what WWE games are here — the king of the ring. Amazingly, though, the Fire Pro Wrestling series has only made its way to North America in the form of a obscure Game Boy Advance game.
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Hardware shifting at the house of Microsoft continues, as Shacknews confirmed with Microsoft emerging Internet reports that Xbox 360 Premium SKUs sitting on shelves right now have HDMI ports in them. There appears to be no indication of the HDMI addition on the box, but retailers are replacing the updated hardware as the old units are moved out — the recent “price break” is probably helping that out.

“Yes, we are offering an HDMI port for Xbox 360 simply as another choice in Xbox 360 owners’ games and entertainment experience,” a Microsoft representative told the website. “Retailers are gradually introducing HDMI-enabled Xbox 360s into the channel to meet demand.”
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