N3: Nightly News Narration – Ducktales Remastered, StarCraft Sales, & More

Capcom revealed some interesting plans at PAX East, this past weekend. One of the most beloved games of my childhood, Ducktales, is getting a high definition remake in Ducktales Remastered. Developed by Way Forward and coming to Wii U, PSN, and XBLA for $14.99, the new game is set to release later this year.

Ducktales Remastered will feature the original voice cast and have new hand drawn sprites. This will not be a simple port of the original but a reimagining of the franchise for a new generation. Also, if you have ever wanted to swim in Scrooge McDuck’s Money Bin, you will be able to!

You can see the reveal trailer below:

Speaking of reveal trailers, you can learn more about the upcoming Dead Island: Riptide in this trailer that spoils the end of the original title. You can view it below:

StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm is off to a great start as the game has sold over 1.1 million copies during the first 48 hours of availability. This number includes both retail and digital copies Activision Blizzard is reporting. The original StarCraft 2: WIngs of Liberty sold 1.5 million copies during its first 48 hours of availability. Diablo 3, on the other hand, managed to move 3.5 million copies during its first 48 hours.

While the newest release isn’t breaking Blizzard’s records, the game is off to a very solid start. Look for our full review coming soon.

Level 5’s White Knight Chronicles and White Knight Chronicles 2 will lose the servers for all online features effective June 18, 2013. This generation has seen a rise of more and more online features. But as the games as and companies no longer feel the need to pay server costs, these games are seeing servers shut down.

No details were given for the specified reasons for the servers being taken down. The single player portions of the games will continue to function past the June 18, 2013 shutdown date. This only impacts the co-op features.

Retailers have been seen slashing the price of the Wii U by $50 in the US and overseas in the UK and Europe. While Nintendo has not officially slashed the price of the console, Nintendo is not moving many units. Retailers want the price to come down to encourage further sales. Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and others have been offering money off or gift card incentives for a Wii U purchase. Check your local retailers until Nintendo is expected to officially drop the price at E3 2013.

So why all the fuss over a price drop? CNN Money has reported that Nintendo has roughly $228.00 in parts to make up the WIi U console. This is much less than the $299.99 and $349.99 price points Nintendo is selling the Wii U consoles for. However, these figures don’t take into account advertising costs, packaging and labor, or R&D costs. Nintendo has historically always sold their consoles for a profit. They first ran into problems with this with the 3DS price drop. For the first time, they were actually selling a console at a loss. This has impacted their financial numbers and they haven’t recovered from it since.

Sants Row: The Third is still set for release on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC later this year. However, the game will not be a launch title for the PS4 or Microsoft’s next rumored console. Jim Boone, Producer at Volition, reflects on this by looking back on their PS2 launch title Summoner.

“Summoner was, far and away, the most brutal game I had ever worked on. It’s incredibly difficult to do a launch title at all, never mind an RPG launch title. It was really crazy of us to do it. But, we felt like we learned some lessons there – while we were happy with Summoner and people liked it, we knew that it could have been a much better game if we hadn’t tried to force it to be a launch title. When Saints Row 1 came along, we didn’t try to target a next-gen launch, because we wanted to give it the time and make it the best it could be. We kind of used the same principles here with Saints Row IV. Because of the timing of this game’s release, [if we had attempted next-gen] it would have essentially had to be a launch title for PlayStation 4 and whatever else comes next.

We didn’t want to try and force this thing into being next-gen. We wanted to be able to take the time to add in a lot of crazy new things, like super-powers and aliens and things like that. And honestly, I don’t think we’d have been able to do any of that if we had to build all of this new technology to work with next-gen.”

EA and Insomniac Games have set the North American release date for the upcoming Action Platformer, Fuse, to May 28, 2013, with Europe following on the 31st of May. The third person title will appear on both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 platforms.

Fuse has seen a number of changes since it was shown off at E3 2011. The changes include a complete art-style change, name change, and several different release dates. The game appears to be finally coming together and will hopefully continue Insomniac’s string of impressive titles to end out this generation of software.