Gaming News Round-Up: December 9th, 2004

Today's round-up includes a little more sass from Nintendo over the 'handheld wars', or lack there-of, a new UK gaming poll from The Guardian, and John Romero's attempt to ensure that the memory of Daikatana will never ever die. - After much protestation from both sides that Nintendo's DS and Sony's PSP were not in direct competition with each other, it appears that the war of words between the companies is nonetheless continuing: in the latest salvo, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata commented, in remarks to the Tokyo Foreign Correspondents Club reported by the Associated Press: "I believe the PSP is built on the belief that the old formula for success is still viable, although we do not think so. Although we have no intention of fighting over the market share with Sony, we will make our utmost efforts to help people understand that our approach is right." This comes following earlier news that the Nintendo DS is sharply raising its shipment plans in both North American and Japan. - The Guardian, a well-respected UK newspaper has released the results of its reader poll for the best games of the year. Voting was done in three categories: console games, PC games, and finally, mobile games, which covered both game-specific handhelds like the Game Boy Advance, as well as mobile phone games. The nominees were obviously listed to games released in Europe, which rules out some of the U.S.'s heavy hitters this season; that said, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas got the number one spot on consoles, while Zelda: The Minish Cap and Half-Life 2 took top honors on mobile and PC, respectively. The full list is available at the UK Guardian's website. - John Romero, firebrand co-founder of the Ion Storm studios, has posted an interesting addition to the section of his personal homepage dealing with Daikatana: along with anecdotes and images from the history of the ill-fated project, Romero has posted a pre-alpha build of the game. "It's nothing awesome," says Romero, "but it's a snapshot of our game in development at the very beginning with a team that had only two members survive the development process: myself and Shawn Green, who became the fifth and final lead programmer on Daikatana." See what the game looked like after just two months of work by getting it from Romero's site and trying it out for yourself.