It's been rumored for years, but it looks like a Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic MMO is finally on its way.

The news comes from Joystiq, who reports that Portfolio.com has published an excerpt from their interview with EA CEO John Riccitiello, who says that one of EA's two MMOs in development is "in partnership with Lucas, coming out of BioWare," sparking excitement that the game could be a KOTOR MMO as Bioware was behind the first KOTOR game.

Joystiq then contacted N. Evan Van Zelfden, who wrote the report, who confirmed to them that the game in question is indeed an online KOTOR. Sounds good!

Following the news of NiGHTs into Dreams being re-released on the PS2 for Japanese gamers, more information has been gathered regarding the North American release.

According to reports, it appears that the game will not be coming stateside. Takashi Iizuka, the man handling this relaunch, has stated that "there are currently no plans for the PS2 version to be released outside of Japan."

On the upside, fans can take heart as the Wii title, NiGHTs: Journey of Dreams is set for release on December 18.

According to Famitsu, Nights will feature an art gallery and a movie playback option. There is no word of a North American release at this time.

Hit the link to view more images.

We just wanted to remind you that Knights of the Nine, downloadable content for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion for Xbox 360 and Windows, is now available.

The Windows version is available through OblivionDownloads.com or at retail stores, while the Xbox 360 version can be downloaded through Xbox Live Marketplace.

If you’re looking for another hack-and-slash title on the Xbox 360, Ninety-Nine Nights is a pretty mediocre offering at best. Players follow the story of a war between humans and goblins. You’ll battle it out with a variety of seven heroes who all have a different story to tell.

While it isn’t horrible, there isn’t much to write home about in Ninety-Nine Nights. One thing that is nice is the various players you are able to utilize. There are seven characters to play with and each one has a different story about their actions in the war. It’s neat to have this unique perspective on the game, but overall it doesn’t do enough to save what is otherwise a pretty poor experience.

One other nice touch to the lackluster experience is the soundtrack. An orchestral arrangement keeps it interesting and doesn’t get too repetitive. Sticking with the sound, the voice acting throughout is either missing or very poor.

Finally and probably the most impressive thing about Ninety-Nine Nights is the battle scenes themselves. The game does put you in the experience by showing an incredible number of enemies on-screen at one time. You’ll literally be surrounded by what seems like hundreds of enemies and it is a rather impressive sight to see as you have to slice and dice your way through them. On top of that, the animations of your characters various attacks are solid. The graphics in the game look good on the 360 especially the characters and environments, although both are ridiculously repetitive.

First and foremost, the storyline is poor at best. The story isn’t consuming, not that it has to be since the game is a straight hack-and-slash title. The problem with it though is that the gameplay is just bad. The game consists of you pushing two buttons for nearly the entire game. You simply are pounding on the X and Y buttons to hack at row upon row of enemies that come at you. Other buttons in the game do things including block, jump and dash, but none of them are that useful or necessary.

While on your way through the battle, enemies you kill will drop various orbs. This is about the only thing that gives the game any distinction because once you gain enough power you’re able to push the B button to perform a devastating attack. This is fun the first few times it happens, but quickly grows tiresome.

One other major problem in the game is the lack of interesting characters. Ninety-Nine Nights features pretty simplistic characters including a goblin, knight, mercenary and more. All of them have different fighting moves, but none of them require anymore attention since it still is just straight hack-and-slash. The one character that is different from the rest is the sorceress Tyurru, who has the ability to perform spells and water attacks.

Ninety-Nine Nights lacks any sort of replay value too. The game features few extras which include a special difficult mission, character art and biographies. None of these items are especially worthy of your time or effort, but at least they are there I suppose. It would have been nice if the developers considered versus or cooperative elements to the game.

To add insult to injury, N3 just doesn’t offer that much depth either. Each of the seven characters only have at most a half dozen battles to go through and each battle only takes approximately 15 minutes meaning you should be able to complete the game in under 20 hours; but that’s a good thing since you’ll probably never want to come back and play again.

On top of that, the actual battle experience looks good with a lot of ally and enemy forces on-screen, but their actions don’t really have any effect on the battle since they mostly are just standing around. In fact your allies more often than not just get in the way by obstructing your view and slowing down the action. Another aspect that drags the entire experience down is the lack of checkpoints. While the enemy A.I. is poor, you may find yourself losing a mission. If that happens you’ll be starting all over again losing everything you accomplished before.

The final problem that really puts Ninety-Nine Nights over the edge is the terrible artificial intelligence. The game basically features two kinds of enemies, grunts and bosses. The bosses are the only players that actually provide any sort of challenge, but once you knock them down the match is over.

While the graphics, animations and soundtrack are decent for Ninety-Nine Nights, little else makes the game worthy of its $50 suggested retail price. The gameplay is horribly repetitive relying on two buttons the entire game. Add to that the dull story, terrible enemy A.I. and the lack of a multiplayer component and N3 grows tiresome within minutes. Sadly the game had promise, but in the end isn’t worth your time or money.

The gameplay is miserable with simple repetitive button pushing.

Graphics of environments and enemies look good, but repetitive.

The music is pretty solid, but the voice acting is difficult to listen to.

N3 isn’t an enjoyable experience in just about every way.

It’s too repetitive to ever come back to; no multiplayer and the poor extras.

]]> Wed, 13 Sep 2006 18:10:00 -0500 The Gaming Horizon Archive http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_ninetynine_nights_3601 http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_ninetynine_nights_3601 http://www.gamebump.com/go/gh_preview_ninetynine_nights_3601# This preview was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Olly Dean.

While new Japanese releases for the Xbox 360 have been as thin on the ground as Japanese Xbox 360 purchases, this August seems to be bringing a veritable torrent of them. At the front of the pack is N3: Ninety-Nine Nights, the latest from Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s Q Entertainment, as a new take on the popular epic hack-and-slash battle genre with a high fantasy twist. Not a single giant enemy crab in sight. 

The game features seven playable characters, each with his own campaign, presenting his own perspective on the same main storyline. Their paths cross occasionally and encountering one of these hero characters will unlock them to play for yourself, and that’s the only time that the story is of great importance because it does little more than bookend each campaign and attempt to give some context to the carnage.

The story, however, is mainly an excuse to partake in colossal battles that borrow heavily from both the Dynasty Warriors series and developer Phantagram’s own Kingdom Under Fire games. The extra horsepower of the Xbox 360 is put to work by allowing a purported 5,000 enemies on-screen for you to mercilessly cut down, giving the skirmishes an unprecedented sense of scale.

The first thing to note is that your average enemy orc is going to be no match for you, equipped as you are with weapons and combos capable of taking out whole battalions. It’s in sheer weight of opposition numbers that the game will try to overwhelm players, but as you can also command your own, admittedly fairly useless, troops to give your hero some backup, laying waste to the enemy hordes becomes simple but gratifying fun.

Command over your troops is a much smaller element than in Kingdom Under Fire and thanks to some poor AI risks becoming more of an annoyance. The interface is thankfully fairly transparent but still comes off as unnecessary, as allies will sometimes be so inept as to be unable to kill a single enemy in the middle of their ranks or hit an enemy from a distance that it’s often easier to do it yourself - especially when you’re overpowered to such an extent.

Mashing of the attack buttons is often enough as to launch your character into some fairly spectacular combos, complete with lightning trails, aerial attacks, and energy balls fired into crowds of opponents. The characters level up as you fight with them, which increases their strength and adds new attacks to the repertoire, and also red orbs from the bodies of fallen enemies can be harvested and used to unleash super attacks. During this time it becomes even easier to decimate the enemy forces as you cut huge swathes through their ranks, especially as enemies killed by these orb attacks will in turn drop blue orbs to power up ultimate attacks that should certainly mop up anyone who survived the initial blitz.

In the early stages enemy groups are limited to around fifty troops, which don’t take long to balloon to over a hundred, and the engine handles it gracefully with a decent frame rate. Although most enemies look alike, character models are reasonably detailed and seeing hundreds of them come over the brow of a hill towards you really looks impressive, not to mention imposing. We’ll have to wait for the full game to see if it ever manages the 5,000 that Q has claimed – at least at a decent frame rate – but in any case it’s one of the best looking games in the genre.

The scale is what really qualifies Ninety-Nine Nights as a next-generation game, although individual character models don’t look like a huge leap beyond the best-looking Xbox titles. That extra processing power is used to deliver things on a much greater magnitude and all in high definition. Hundreds of enemies storm across the battlefield towards you; archers fill the air with arrows to an extent that we haven’t seen since Braveheart; and your attacks send them flying as if they were nothing. Fans of the genre who were disappointed with the quick and dirty port that Dynasty Warriors 5 recently received may find that this is more of the spectacle they expected.

Ninety-Nine Nights is a fun game, for sure, but it’s not without problems. The levels can be fairly long with no ability to save halfway through, meaning that death near the end of a stage can lead to playing the last half-hour all over again. It’s a silly thing to overlook but when it happens to you it can be immensely annoying. Reports from Japan where it has been out for some time also suggest that the game is short with no online play at all, meaning that even those out to get every achievement could do everything over a long weekend.

Ninety-Nine Nights is a break from the usual Q Entertainment oeuvre and looks like some good mindless fun. The main problem is the ‘mindless’ part; like so many of these games there’s not a lot to it beyond slashing through crowds of anonymous enemies while getting incrementally more powerful the more you do it. Whether or not the full story and different characters will add significantly to the game remains to be seen, but from early impressions the game seems like more of a rental: fun for a quick blast and an impressive technical display but lacking the depth and content required for long-term play.  ]]> Tue, 01 Aug 2006 16:24:10 -0500 The Gaming Horizon Archive http://www.gamebump.com/go/first_look_at_konamis_lunar_knights http://www.gamebump.com/go/first_look_at_konamis_lunar_knights http://www.gamebump.com/go/first_look_at_konamis_lunar_knights# In an E3 interview with Konami today, the company shed some light on its upcoming action-RPG title for the Nintendo DS, Lunar Knights. Similar to the Boktai series on the Game Boy Advance, (which was also helped along by Hideo Kojima), players traverse a top-down environment "in a desperate world ruled by vampires," as the game's opening trailer describes.

Like Boktai, weather is a central part of Lunar Knights. Between hours of vampire- and demon-slayin', players will have to pay attention to the local forecast, as the DS's top screen provides a real-time view of the sun and moon cycles throughout the game. As the sun rises or the moon is eclipsed by clouds, the characters will be affected, though Konami didn't specify how.

A company executive did mention that switching between the game's two characters (Aaron the gun-wielding sharpshooter, and Lucian, the melee specialist), will play heavily into the light-scheme, as one character excels at combat during the day, and the other in the evening. Likewise, we know that the environments that the player can access and the monsters you'll encounter change as the sun and moon drift about the sky.

Look for more news in the coming months on Lunar Knights, as Konami specified a probable November release.

What else is there to write when the title says it all? I'll take a stab at it, anyway.

Per the title, yes. All of us gold-box-playing, old school geeks are going to have to wait a little bit longer for the sequel to BioWare's virtuoso performance. Originally scheduled for a late September release, NwN 2 is now being pushed back a month, to late October - although no official release date is yet confirmed by Atari.

Touting great improvements to both the single and multiplayer experiences as well as 50-60 estimated hours of playthrough time, a small delay shouldn't come as any surprise. Besides, it will serve to give all you really hardcore nerds that much more time to finish the storylines and encounter charts for your digital magnum opus. Sharpen those #2's and get cracking!]]> Wed, 19 Jul 2006 07:47:00 -0500 The Gaming Horizon Archive http://www.gamebump.com/go/ninetynine_nights_will_see_us_release http://www.gamebump.com/go/ninetynine_nights_will_see_us_release http://www.gamebump.com/go/ninetynine_nights_will_see_us_release# This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Certain formatting, imaged, and embedded content may have been lost in the transition process.The original author is Evan Lahti.

After releasing in Japan on April 20, Microsoft announced today that American gamers can expect Ninety-Nine Nights to hit native shores in August.

A collaboration of former Sega producer Tetsuya Mizuguchi's studio Q Entertainment (whose recent efforts include portable puzzlers Meteos and Lumines) and Korean partner Phantagram, Ninety-Nine Nights is a blend of action and strategy similar to the Dynasty Warriors series, featuring "seven playable characters, and epic-scale battles that include hundreds of on-screen enemies," according to Microsoft.

The game should be a welcome addition to a summer Xbox 360 lineup that already includes Prey, Chromehounds, Dead Rising, and Madden/NCAA Football 07.

Look below for images of Ninety-Nine Nights in action, or click here to view a promotional trailer. ]]> Fri, 09 Jun 2006 10:33:00 -0500 The Gaming Horizon Archive http://www.gamebump.com/go/akella_unveils_e3_2006_lineup http://www.gamebump.com/go/akella_unveils_e3_2006_lineup http://www.gamebump.com/go/akella_unveils_e3_2006_lineup#

While it does sound true keep in mind that no official announcement has been made and as such, KOTR 3 remains little more than a hope. If we hear any new rumors on this popular Star Wars title we'll let you know.