Today's Gamasutra round-up includes Codemasters' announcement of a new portable
Cannon Fodder, and the latest weekly Xbox Live stats, as well as the latest GameSetWatch posts, Serious Games Source news, product news, and Gamasutra job postings.
- British game publisher Codemasters have announced the now-portable return of their classic
Cannon Fodder franchise, set to massively attack PSPs in the spring of 2007. Moving the series beyond its signature pixelated mayhem into more polygonal form, the series is also set to get mechanical upgrades, as well, with air strikes, radar sweeps, flamethrowers and sniper rifles all currently locked and loaded in the promised arsenal. Codemasters has also revealed the game will ship with multiplayer functionality including four-player link play in deathmatch as well as co-op scenarios.
- Xbox staffer Larry 'Major Nelson' Hryb has updated with the latest
weekly Xbox Live top-played stats. As usual, the unshakable
Halo 2 tops off the combined Xbox 360 and original Xbox lists, but the week's clear winner, thanks in large part to the free-play days that followed its Wednesday release, was the Live Arcade's new
Texas Hold'em poker title.
Hold'em ranked not only number one in the Live Arcade stats, but number three over all Xbox 360 games, only edged out by
Madden NFL 07 and
Call of Duty 2.
- The latest updates on Gamasutra sister weblog GameSetWatch include the latest
'Letter from the Metaverse' column, looking at the ghost world of
Second Life, the
hyperbolic manual art of the Atari 400/800's
Space Invaders, and the regular
'Parallax Memories' column, looking at gaming's 'B-Fighters'.
- Also updated today: Serious Games Source news, with
WILL Interactive's Generation Rx, an interactive gaming simulation aimed at addressing the national epidemic of prescription and over-the-counter drug abuse among children between the ages of 12 and 17, product news on
Di-O-Matic's latest lip-synching utility and
imageSynth's tiling plugin for PhotoShop, plus the
latest Gamasutra job postings, featuring openings from Blizzard, Guerrila, LucasArts, Pixar, Super Happy Fun Fun, Ternary, V-Com and Volition.
