Gaming News Round-Up: April 12th, 2005

Today's round-up includes new Electronic Arts game announcements, a debut for one of the big 2004 IGF award winners, as well as new feature interview on a remarkably small first-person shooter. - Electronic Arts has announced the game version of the fourth Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire, which will make the fifth major Harry Potter game the company has produced so far, with four titles based on the movies, as well as Quidditch World Cup. This game, to be released for PlayStation 2, PSP, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advance, DS, and Windows, will include all the locations and events from the film, such as the opening setpiece at the Quidditch World Cup campsite and all of Harry's Tri-Wizard Tournament challenges. Co-op play will also be available in some sections, with the other player controlling one of Harry's friends. The game, developed for consoles by Electronic Arts' UK studio, will be released alongside the fourth film in November 2005. - PlayFirst, a publisher of downloadable games, has released Oasis through Shockwave.com, with a release on PlayFirst's own site to follow shortly. Oasis is an ultra-accessible strategy game set in ancient Egypt, where players must prepare for a barbarian invasion by building up their population and forces. The game won both the Innovation in Game Design and the Seumas McNally Game of the Year awards in the Web/Downloadable category at the 2004 Independent Games Festival. - The next Need for Speed game announcement has arrived courtesy of Electronic Arts, with Need for Speed Most Wanted officially unveiled today. Building on the customization emphasis of the last two Need for Speed Underground games, NFS Most Wanted takes advantage of the popularity of 'urban'-styled racing by having players take their souped-up cars throughout a metropolitan area in an effort to outrace the police, while meeting goals to build up their rap sheet. Similarly to Harry Potter, the game is set for release on all systems, including PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Nintendo DS, Game Boy Advance, PSP, and PC. - Also updated on Gamasutra today (free reg. req.): Howard Wen interviews the developers of .kkrieger, an impressive 'demo-scene' created FPS game prototype that, astoundingly, fits into a file size of just 96 kilobytes. There are also newly advertised jobs from Atari, Datascope Recruitment, Linden Lab, Pandemic Studios, and Petroglyph.