Finnish gaming mag Pelaaja recently had a chance to visit Remedy for the first time in 4 years.

In the indepth interview we find out some new information that was still up in the air. Here’s a quick summary of it all:

- Alan Wake is not late. Before E3 2009, Remedy have never given a release date and all previous dates found floating on the web were made up by other sources. In fact Remedy have never missed a release date for any of their previous games and does not intend to with Alan Wake. Alan Wake will be released Spring 2010 for the Xbox 360.

- The original vision hasn’t changed but the way the game plays out has been experimented with along the development process. One of the major changes is that the game is no longer a sandbox type of game where the player can roam freely (ala Grand Theft Auto). Since Remedy wanted to focus heavily on having a compelling storyline, sandbox style gameplay does not mix well with what Remedy wanted to achieve. Remedy stressed that this does not mean the game will be linear and that you have to follow a set path throughout the game. “The player must not feel they’re being pulled from strings. The player must feel like they’re making the decisions themselves”.

- Throughout the game the player will be finding the missing pages from Alan Wakes new manuscript, however not all the pages will be found through the normal game’s missions. Similar to how Bioshock handled it’s audio logs, Alan Wake will allow you to roam freely around looking for manuscript pages.

- Remedy has said from the beginning that light will be an important element of the gameplay. Alan Wake’s most important weapons are his flashlight and other light sources found in the game world. The dark force can possess both the residents and animals in Bright Falls and make even lifeless objects attack Alan. They are vulnerable only in the light. (Just an addition to this. Light seems to strip the shield that the darkness adds and once that shield is stripped you can use conventional weapons, like a gun, to get rid of the enemy -ADM)

- Even though Microsoft is publishing Alan Wake, Remedy still own all rights to the game and Alan Wake is planned to be only the beginning of the story. Remedy arn’t covering the fact that they want to expand out into other forms of media as well. Although Remedy have yet to make any decisions on this.

- Perhaps the biggest surprise is that Remedy haven’t spoken about the PC version of the game yet and the release of a PC version is up in the air. When asked about it Remedy replied saying that both Microsoft and them are only speaking about the Xbox 360 version at the moment.

That’s about it. The rest of the article (which you can read here) talks about the demo that was shown at E3 and how it’s riddled with little details that we all love from a Remedy game.

Thanks to u233 from the Pelaaja site for the image. Also thanks to AnttiApina, Dennis and Ruutu from the Alan Wake forums for all the above information.

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Remember that Wii emulator that boosted the graphics up to 720p? Thanks to a recent update, Super Mario Galaxy is now playable on the emulator — known as Dolphin (get it?) — and we have to admit, it looks pretty gorgeous. Granted, Super Mario Galaxy was no graphical slouch in the first place, but the extra resomolutions certainly add to the overall experience, and it gives us an idea of what a Wii HD console would be capable of producing.Check out a video of the Super Mario Galaxy running in HD after the break (don’t forget to turn on HD in the player). It’s in HD. Did we mention that yet?

For all you negative Nancys out there who just couldn’t believe it when we told you that Halo Wars itself had revealed some upcoming maps, here’s some more proof for you. New achievements have popped up on the Xbox.com Halo Wars page in the UK, and they reveal — wait for it — new maps. The names of the maps just so happen to be the very same names we discovered back in May: Barrens, Blood River and Memorial Basin.

If you still aren’t convinced that new map DLC is on the way, you’ll just have to wait for the official announcement. The rest of us will just sit here and act smug for a while.

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A listing for “SOCOM 4″ for the PlayStation 3 at production studio PCB Productions might be a good indicator that somewhere, in some capacity, someone is working on another SOCOM game. Wouldn’t that be surprising?

After the listing was dug up by PS3 Center, the digital audio recording facility pulled the listing—but not before Google cached it—along with one for Syphon Filter 5.

Yes, the same rumored Syphon Filter we posted about in February, which must have lead someone to believe that Syphon Filter 5 was also in development at Sony Bend. Potentially another massive megaton that another entry in a very successful series of shooters would get another iteration.

PlayStation marketing honcho Peter Dille indicated to us way back in 2007 that the multiplayer-focused SOCOM Confrontation wasn’t the only entry in the series we’d see on the PlayStation 3. If SOCOM 4 is it, we’d expect a return to some of the single-player story driven campaigns seen in previous entries.

Of course, PCB Productions may have gotten the naming of these sequels off. That “in development” status could be old (see the “in development” notation for Frame City Killers). And how this entry could possibly be referred to as the fourth entry in the series is a bit confusing, since SOCOM: Combined Assault followed SOCOM 3. But we just work here.

SOCOM developer Zipper Interactive is hard at work on MAG right now, but if it didn’t have another SOCOM in development, you could knock us over with a feather.

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Eurogamer.es has had access to internal information about one of the secrets that Sony is now at hand. We refer to PSP2, but a hardware that has not yet been officially announced for PSP and should happen in the future PSPGo. With the data obtained could say that at this new portable graphic display could all the brute force of the first Xbox and counting at the same time with the most advanced Dreamcast.

Part of the information we have spoken of as an essential component in a video game system such as your graphics processor. In this case, based on a multicore version of SGX543 of Imagination Technologies, a provider, among other things, the graphics chips that fit the iPhone. Would have 4 cores and its internal code name is hydra. An approach to increase the peak performance of 133 million polygons per second, exceeding the original Xbox.

Pileup, we see that they have separate caches for data and textures, 8 PE ISP (Image Signal Processor Processing Elements) that significantly improves the fill rate, vec3 extensions / 4 in USSE (Unified Scalable Shading Engine) to double the actual performance vector shaders in the applications and will support OpenGL 2.0 and DX10.

The magic that usually include Imagination Technologies to exponentially increase the performance of its chips this time is given by the tile-based rendering, supported by this family of graphics chips and optimizations in the use of texture cache to reorganize the memory function their place in the final rasterizado. It also includes an old acquaintance of the users of Dreamcast, the now so fashionable Deferred Rendering. Recall that a solution to alleviate complex scenes eliminating overdraw not draw the geometry that is hidden in the final scene.

This information, of course, come from a project that is still under development, and that Sony has not yet confirmed or denied anything. Sony should not be delayed much beyond the end of the year to announce this new brand itineración portable Playstation.

Yes it does smell of BS, but Eurogamer is a highly respected site, but at the time of posting, this news was not on the main Eurogamer.net site.

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One of the major players at Sega and Sonic Team, Yoshihisa Hashimoto, left the company about a month and a half ago, according to the technical director’s LinkedIn profile.

The profile, which was captured and sent into us by serpx via our News Tips system, claims that Hashimoto left Sega late in April of this year, and resurfaced at Square Enix in a similar technical director role in May.  Though we received a screenshot, TSSZ News checked out the information on LinkedIn pages to verify, and that information is accurate.

Hashimoto brings with him to Square Enix twelve years of experience from working within Sonic Team.  His career at Sega began in 1997.  His work was seen within several Sonic titles; he programmed enemies in 1999’s Sonic Adventure, and programmed the Chao engine for Sonic Adventure 2, working his way up to the Director role for all console editions of Sonic Unleashed.  For the XBOX360 and PS3 edition of the game, Hashimoto also served as Lead Game Designer and Hedgehog Engine Technical Director.

If Hashimoto was one of the key brains behind that engine, one has to wonder whether it will ever be used again in a future title.

Hashimoto also was a programmer on Sonic Advance and Sonic Advance 2, according to the Sonic Retro wiki.

Doubters do have a nugget of evidence to try and claim illegitimacy on this story.  Hashimoto’s public LinkedIn profile includes a website link to the Japanese Sonic Unleashed website.  Though in his native country, Unleashed is known as Sonic World Adventure, he notes the website link as “My Project (Sonic Unleashed)”.  Despite this catch, at this time it is not enough for TSSZ News to thrust this story into the rumor category.

The news of Hashimoto’s departure is potentially devastating to a team that has searched for structure, leadership, and consistency in the wake of Yuji Naka’s departure in 2006–and the subsequent bomb release of the 2006 Sonic the Hedgehog.

TSSZ News will attempt to learn more details of the circumstances surrounding Yoshihisa Hashimoto’s departure from Sega and the Sonic Team.  Any new information we receive will be on this site at once.

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Sony has finally revealed the answer to its LittleBigPlanet-related teaser question, “Who ya gonna call?” It turns out that it was the Ghostbusters. You are gonna call the Ghostbusters.

The PlayStation Blog revealed a poster of a Sackboy wearing a white, hooded sweatshirt, which makes the LBP avatar resemble the ghost character from the Ghostbusters logo. While it doesn’t answer all the questions we have (is this a downloadable costume? Is it free? Will there be Ghostbusters-related levels? Is the “no” symbol part of the costume?) the latest update on LittleBigPlanet suggests that some Ghostbusters-related content is on the way. We think.

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Epic Games’ distinguished design director Cliff Bleszinski believes that RPGs will mould the future of the shooter genre.

Speaking to Develop, Bleszinski said: “I had a conversation with Harvey Smith – one of the lead designers on Deus Ex – and said to him the future of shooters is RPGs. He said he completely agreed.”

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Originally announced to be in development for the PC and Xbox 360, Alan Wake’s PC release is now looking uncertain.

Alan Wake from Remedy Entertainment is a cinematic psychological action thriller starring a suspense author suffering from writers block. The game will concentrate on finely crafted storytelling in a realistic, interactive environment, where an episodic narrative will create an escalating level of action.

Pelaaja magazine managed to visit Remedy Entertainment’s studios where they found out a few new details on the game. First off, Alan Wake isn’t as open-world as it once was, mainly due to the fact that Remedy wanted to tell a compelling story which they didn’t feel was possible in an entirely open sandbox. However, the game will not be linear, since “the player must not feel they’re being pulled from strings. The player must feel like they’re making the decisions themselves.”

Secondly, the game’s PC release is currently up in the air, with Remedy being reluctant to talk about this version. We’ve not actually seen a PC demo of the game since 2006, and Remedy has further opened up speculation by telling Pelaaja that they only want to talk about the Xbox 360 at this moment.

What this could mean is that Alan Wake is a timed-exclusive for the Xbox 360, which is a common occurrence for games published by Microsoft’s Studios, in a similar manner to Gears of War. Though it could be even worse, with no Gears of War II for PCs at all.

As soon as we learn more, we’ll let you know.

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Last month, at a remote disused air-defense base outside of Leningrad, upwards of 300 Russian Fallout fans recreated post-apocalyptic California in a live-action role-playing game based on Fallout 2.

All of the information we have on the event is translated from Russian via Google, so it could be completely wrong. From we understand, a workshop group called Albion organized the event, securing the setting and providing technical, medical, and rescue support. Around 300 players participated, creating their own costumes and modifying fake weapons until they looked as if you just plucked them from a freshly-killed raider’s hands. The game followed a basic plot, which the organizers would change on the fly according to how the players reacted.

Say what you will about live-action roleplaying, or LARPing, but this actually looks like a great deal of fun. Unfortunately it also looks like a lot of work, so you won’t catch my lazy ass participating in something like this anytime soon. Hit up the link below for even more pictures.

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