A forecast revisions document reveals that all four titles will be pushed back to the company's 2010 fiscal year (staring in April, ending March 31, 2011) and spread out over all four quarters of the year. The document lists the reasons for the delays as follows.

・Avoid competing with the major titles that other companies plan to introduce
in the 4th quarter
・Preserve the value of Capcom's titles and maximize sales volume
・Expand the lineup of titles in the next fiscal year and afterward

No concrete release dates are listed in the document, but tipster Rory says "This corroborates rumors spread about Super Street Fighter 4's new release date of April 1st being confirmed in this week's Famitsu, due out Thursday."

Sound logic, sure. But sound business practice? We'll see.

Thanks for the tip, Rory!

During a presentation this week of Capcom's upcoming zombie-killing action game Dead Rising 2, game writers got to once more check out the game's four modes of multiplayer, robust mini-games that have gamers competing for cash as they work to kill the most zombies in creative ways.

But what is one to do without all of that cash earned in the games? Capcom wasn't saying yesterday, but they said there's more to those end-match cash totals than providing just a score.

In my time with the game I took on Stephen Totilo and two others in the game's four modes: Ramsterball, Headache, Pounds of Flesh and Slicecycles.

Of the four, my favorite was probably the first: Ramsterball. In this game your leather jacket and motorcycle helmet festooned player runs around in an over-sized metal ball, using it to crush hordes of zombies in an arena of sorts. Cash is earned based on how many zombies you kill.

The catch is that only one ball-runner can score at a time. While scoring the metal cage glows and if someone bumps into that metal ball they become the one able to rack up cash. Adding a bit more strategy to the game is the fact that you only keep the cash if you manage to slam the ball into one of the over-sized bumpers in the arena. So if you rack up a huge score and get tagged out before you hit a bumper you lose all of the cash.

Next up was Headache, which has you on foot grabbing buckets with drills mounted in them. You have to take these buckets and slam them on the heads of zombies. Again, you don't get points into you activate the buckets by hitting a big button on one side of the smallish play area. Once activated, all of those drills turn on and you bucket-headed zombies collapse in a shower of blood.

You can also use sticks of dynamite to blow off the buckets from nearby zombies, preventing competing players from scoring.

Kinda fun, but also kind of limited in scope.

My least favorite of the four challenges is Pound of Flesh, which has you using a Moose head's antlers to shovel or slam zombies onto a giant scale. Because this takes place on four separate platforms there's little direct interference from other players. And the mechanic is fairly simple.

At the beginning of the fourth and final stage the player with the most cash (in this case Totilo) gets a few second head start before the other players drop into the competition.

Slicecycles puts your character atop a motorcycle armed with blades in a huge arena. Gamers then drive through massive crowds of zombies racking up huge amounts of cash.

While the concept is neat, made more fun by the inclusion of "bonus" zombies, the motorcycle's handling wasn't as tight as I would have liked and the lack of a handbrake made pulling off quick turns a bit frustrating. I also wasn't happy with how the motorcycle behaved when it went up the curved walls of the arena. It didn't feel zippy enough to make it as fun as it could have been.

Once the game wrapped, and Totilo crowed over his success in soundly beating everyone present, the game showed the final score in cash. Cash that, Capcom seems to be hinting, will play a bigger role in the game.

Let's hope it's not just so you can buy new outfits and the mulitplayer experience fits more neatly in with what we've seen so far of the single-player campaign.

And, I'm still holding out for video capture in Dead Rising 2. Who's with me?

Dead Rising 2 gameplay [Gamereactor]

Capcom's Keiji Inafune took to the stage in a leather replica of the biking jacket worn by the game's protagonist Chuck Greene. He told the awaiting crowd that he designed the tight yellow and black jacket himself and then took it to famed leather works company Kadoya Leather Wear to have it made.

It took some convincing, he said. And there are only two of them in existence: One for Inafune and one for whoever won the night's multiplayer Dead Rising 2 tournament.

The jackets would be forever two of a kind he said. Though Inafune added that if there is enough demand he may have some replicas made. Those, though, won't be the originals.

Don't get me wrong. The stick thingy, wheelchair, and explosive footballs you'll find in the clips below all look...nice. It's just that they can't quite compare to stabbing a zombie with a rake, lifting him the air, and then blowing him away with the attached shotgun. I'm not even sure if there is a better feeling in the world, and if there is, it should probably be heavily regulated.

Be sure to check out Crecente's hands-on with the game form the Tokyo Game Show for more things not as interesting as a rake taped to a shotgun.

In the 15 minutes or so that I spent running around inside a casino in Dead Rising 2 I manged to slice - both vertically and horizontally - club, shoot and mangle more than 300 zombies.

The sequel to zombie-killing Dead Rising has slicker controls that make running and gunning not only easier, but fun. Pulling the Xbox 360's left trigger switches to an aim view that allows gamers to pull off shots with a targeting reticule. This new aim view makes gunplay more satisfying and allows gamers to almost play parts of the game like a shooter.

While the machine gun I tried chewed through the zombies fairly quickly, the handgun required a surprising number of shots to drop a target. Though if you pull off a headshot it's easier to kill one.

I started my time in the game unarmed and surrounded by zombies. I manage to pick up a golf club and smack a couple of zombies down before being attacked. Moving through the casino, I came across a two-handed sword and used the X button to swing it at the horde. Tapping the button unleashed a three-swing combo that sliced zombies wherever they were hit, parting arm from body, head from neck and, a couple of times, slicing a zombie vertically from crown to crotch.

The sword eventually "wore out", forcing me to scramble for another weapon. This time I picked up a chainsaw. The chainsaw required a tap of the X button for Greene to start. Once running I tapped the X button to swing it through zombies. Unlike the sword, which seemed to attack in small arcs in one direction, the chainsaw laid down zombies in broad circles, quickly cutting them into bits.

After a bit of time, the chainsaw ran out of gas and chugged to a stop. Next I tried a pole that had chainsaws mounted on both ends of it. The chainsaws cut through the crowd like a hot knife through butter zombies. Racking up kills at a surprising rate. When the twin chainsaws died, I ran to a nearby bar where I found a machine gun.

Pulling in the left trigger I popped off some shots at zombies, blowing them to bits. When I let go the reticule disappeared, but the raw power of the machine gun made precise aiming unnecessary.

Once I was out of ammo I switched to a handgun, which did require more precisely aimed shots, something that the aim view made much easier to do.

Running around the casino I spotted a lot of odd object I could use as weapons, like a wheelchair, a roulette wheel, a crowbar. I also spotted at least one non-weapon that I could interact with: A mechanical bull. Pressing the B button, I mounted the bull and tried to stay on by tapping buttons. I didn't last too long. But the promise of non-killing mini-games has me intrigued.

When my pre-set time came to an end the game notified me that I had earned a prize for killing more than 300 zombies in the allotted time. It's unclear if this was just for the press build or the ability to unlock weapons through timed zombie-killing runs will be in the final release.

My prize? A motorized wheelchair with assault rifles mounted to its arms with duct tape.

The game gave me another couple of minutes to check out the new weapon. A tap of a button allowed me to drive the chair and then I used a thumbstick and trigger to steer and move. Holding in the right trigger the mounted weapons fired all together, shaking the controller in my hand and liquefying the masses of zombies in clouds of red mist.

As I turned around in the casino the bullets raked across slot machines, blowing out the glass and lights and flipped over chairs and tables. It was a powerful, addictive weapon.

The short time with the game, played locked in a casino packed with zombies, certainly didn't give me a taste of the campaign, but it allowed me to get a feel for this sequel. When I saw I liked, from the absurd destructive power of the new weapons to the better aiming.

Dead Rising 2 seems to be living up to its predecessor, promising a game that could push the franchise forward quite a bit.

After being rounded up and quarantined, these zombies are turned into fodder for this reality show. Things go horribly, and the zombie hoard penetrates the arena and spreads throughout casino town Fortune City. And it's up to motorbike enthusiast Chuck Greene from the reality show to save the day with a TV camera, a slew of weapons and duct tape.

Capcom's released a fresh batch of Dead Rising 2 screens. These are them. The game is being developed by Blue Castle Games for the PS3, Xbox 360 and the PC.

The first time I got a substantial look at the game, back in April, Capcom showed us how Dead Rising 2 lead Chuck Greene could ride a dirt bike to plow through a sea of zombies. Better still, the Canadian developers for the famed Japanese game also showed us how Greene could ride a dirt bike equipped with chainsaws on the handlebars.

What held the chainsaws in place? Duct tape.

Playing through a section of Dead Rising 2 today, I couldn't help but notice it was duct tape that strapped two chainsaws to a wooden pole and that it was duct tape that held a virtual armory of assault weapons to a motorized wheelchair. Duct tape, it seems, is going to play an important role in Dead Rising 2.

We know from interviews with Capcom's Keiji Inafune that Greene will have another skill, one not directly connected to shooting or slicing.

With the increased presence of duct tape in the game I can't help but wonder if that new skill will be the ability to craft your own weapons by attaching things together with duct tape.

There's also a strong possibility, with recent news that at least part of the game will take place in a Running Man game show of sorts, that players may be able to capture video of game play.

My sources won't tell me if either of these guesses are accurate, but there was certainly a lot of eyebrow raising and chin rubbing when I asked.

[Giant Bomb]

"Our Capcom guys are not coming to E3 because of the Japanese government restrictions," said Capcom's Chris Kramer, Senior Director, Communications and Community. "The company is taking the advisory very seriously."

Japan currently advises its citizens to restrict international travel, but people can still travel if they want to. The government there reported Tuesday that they've had 191 confirmed cases of Swine Flu, more than in any other country other than the US, Mexico and Canada.

Kramer said the company, which is headquartered in Osaka, laid in a supply of surgical masks and hand sanitizers a month or so ago, to try and cut down on possible illness in the company. The country has closed more than 4,400 schools, colleges and kindergartens for the week. The first case of the flu in the country was reported in Osaka.

While Dead Rising 2 will no longer be at the show, all of Capcom's other expected video games will be there, Kramer said. The decision to not show Dead Rising 2 was driven by the fact that Capcom's Keiji Inafune and other developers based in Japan will not be making the trip.

While Canadian-based Blue Castle is developing Dead Rising 2, Inafune is the executive producer and keeps a close eye on the game's development.

"Dead Rising 2 is the only game we won't be able to showcase at E3, because it's at an early stage of development and the team is not comfortable having anyone else demo the code," Kramer said.

We are reaching out to other Japan-based developers to see if anyone else has decided to cancel their E3 showings, but we understand Capcom is the only developer taking that step.

In the interview I talk to Inafune about how the original game leaned so heavily on Frank West's character and profession to shape not just the story, but some of the game mechanics.

Inafune also talks about what other things Chuck Greene can do, specifically, he says there will some other specific thing that Greene can do that doesn't involve killing things to level up. Video work? Weapon crafting? He doesn't say.

You might notice that after the first question I go from sounding like Crecente to sounding like a large Russian man. That's because the interview was really set up for a large Russian man and they squeezed me in at the last minute. Because I sort of felt bad about taking up someone else's interviewing time, I told the other reporter I would only ask one question. The first one.

That's because the photography in the first Dead Rising was tied specifically to Frank West and his career as a photojournalist. He's covered wars, you know?

Dead Rising 2? It stars Chuck Greene, a motocross champion, Inafune told me, that means that he will be "damn good" on the motorcycle and get it to do some pretty amazing things. But Inafune hinted that Greene won't just be about the motorcycle.

"Based on his personality and the different choices he made he will have different skills," Inafune said.

Like what? Too early to tell, but not too early to guess.

High on the list, I think, is the possibility that Greene will be able to make his own weapons, or at least customize them. Watching the trailer and sitting in on the presentation, I couldn't help but notice that the chainsaws found in the game were often duct-taped to other things to crank up their killing power.

The bucket with drills attached to it, the nail-wrapped propane tank? There's no way you're going to just find those lying around. I think there's a good chance that Greene will have some hand in how these weapons come to be.

I also think, and perhaps this is entirely wishful thinking, that there's a good chance that while photography won't be in the game, video will. Why not give Greene a helmet cam? And what about all of the security cameras you find in a casino? And all of those security camera shots we see in the trailer?

What better way to one-up the photography of Dead Rising then by adding videography to Dead Rising 2?

We've known that the game would contain multiplayer since Mental Mill's Laura Scholl announced at the Game Developers Conference last month that Dead Rising 2 would support 6,000 zombies on screen at one time during multiplayer. Soon after, however, Scholl cleverly threw everyone off scent by ingeniously telling the gaming world that she meant to say "multiplatform" instead of "multiplayer".

So up until now we just assumed that the game would have 6,000 zombies on screen during multiplatform, which makes perfect sense. Now that we know for sure that there is multiplayer in the game, we can all get really pissed off when it comes out and doesn't contain a multiplatform mode.

As for why Dead Rising 2 contains multiplayer when the previous title sold fine without it? Inafune explains.

"We're at a point in game history that you need to have some form of multiplayer component in a game"

Because they have to. Excellent.

Dead Rising 2 does have multiplayer [Eurogamer]

The original Dead Rising may have been a technological breakthrough, a wonder of body count and open-world exploration, but what really sold it for me, and for many, was the game's heart.

It had personality, most of it packed into gruff photojournalist lead Frank West. So when the curtain was raised on Dead Rising 2 last week, I was hoping for a glimpse at the game's soul. What we got instead was a detailed run through of its engine.

Dead Rising 2 wasn't built on the shambling corpse of Dead Rising. Instead, Canadian developers Blue Castle started from scratch creating a new engine written specifically for the new game.

"What we are showing you today is something completely new," said Dan Brady, CEO of Blue Castle Games. "It is not based on the engine used in Dead Rising one, this is a completely unique and original engine written specifically for Dead Rising 2."

Brady said that making a sequel for Dead Rising had some interesting challenges, most of them fueled by gamer expectations. They knew that people would expect that any sequel would not only deliver the ability to use any and everything as a weapon and fill the screen with zombies, but that it would have to one-up the original title.

Brady opened the demo with a view of the center of Fortune City, a typical small town casino. The game's new lead, Chuck Greene, stands in a yellow motocross racing jacket under a giant Fortune City sign that stretches across a wide road. The road is teeming with zombies. The zombies mill about, hundreds of them.

There are, Brady says, currently 1,000 zombies on the screen, or double what you could have in the original game. He picks up a bat and Greene home-run swings into a small clutch of the undead. The fidelity of the zombies are also significantly higher than in the original, he says as he picks up a guitar from the ground and starts slaying.

In the original Dead Rising, he says, the idea of density was explored. You could also go in a place and have access to anything and everything, it was really a hallmark of the game.

Brady picks up a chair, throws it at a zombie, and then, now inside one of the casinos, dislodges a roulette wheel from a table and slaps it into a couple of enemies.

The thing is, he says, the access to everything in the original game was sort of an illusion, because you couldn't really use everything on screen as a weapon.

In Dead Rising 2 they have an "awful lot more props and an awful lot more physics." The items, at least during the demo, are all marked with a little icon, so you know you can go and pick them up by pressing the B button. As he talks, we see Greene use furniture, a cash register, bats, a dice stick and even a moose head as a weapon.

"Being that we are a Canadian developer we had to include a moose head," Brady says.

Greene plops the head on his head and then charges through the crowd of undead killing them. He stops and swings his head back and forth sending zombies flying with the antlers.

"As a western consumer, I like guns a little more than Capcom likes guns," Brady said. "Capcom has a history of maybe not spending as much time as they should with guns."

Brady has Greene pluck a machine gun from the ground and starts emptying it into the wall of seething zombies. Blood sprays everywhere. While holding the gun there is a large targeting reticule on the screen and Greene can strafe as he fires.

"Guns are not the prime weapons of Dead Rising 2," Brady says. "It's a sandbox game about playing the game your way. If you are a gun fan, we have some big surprises for you."

Brady moves Greene over to a propane tank sitting on the ground, it is wrapped in nails. The character swings it around killing zombies with it. He throws the tank into the crowd and shoots it, there's a startling explosion and a wave of light roils out, embedding and killing zombies with the nails.

As Brady works his way through the demo and the crowd of zombies I notice the kill number rolling up in the bottom right corner of the screen. The top right corner shows the weapons. Greene's level is displayed and, to my surprise, so is a number for how much cash Greene has.

Brady works Greene over to a samurai sword lying on the ground. Dead Rising 2 will introduce procedural cutting o the game, he says as he slices a zombies arm off, and then turns and neatly cuts another in half, vertically. Another he chops horizontally, a fourth he cuts half of their head off.

The zombies, I notice, seem to disappear within seconds of hitting the ground. I count, it's about five seconds. Despite the zombies that fade and vanish before your eyes, the screen is still littered with bodies. I'm not sure if this is a trick of the demo, or a permanent plan for how death in a zombie filled casino town will be handled.

"What you are looking at right now is roughly 2,000 zombies, four times than what was in Dead Rising One," he says.

One of the most popular weapons in the original Dead Rising, it turns out, was the simple bucket. Blue Castle decided to improve on the bucket's design in Dead Rising 2. Now it features a bunch of drills and when slapped onto a zombie's head, they go to work.

Brady demonstrates. The bucket snaps over the zombie's head, the drills kick in, loudly, blood begins to shoot from under the lid, eventually the zombie falls to its knees and then topples on its side.

"Zombies are about a force, a pressure, almost a raging river," Brady says, They are not, he points out, about taking down individual enemies.

What better way to deal with a raging river than with a paddle saw? Greene picks up a paddle with a chainsaw duct taped to either end of it. He starts the saws and then starts cutting his way through the living river. The kill count is now at 202.

"Our guy is wearing a bike jacket," Brady says. "Chuck Greene is a motorcross guy. We plan on making vehicles a much bigger part in this game."

Greene hops onto a dirt bike and guns it into the crowd of zombies, working his way up the crowded street. When he hits zombies they fly into the air. It's an amazing spectacle to witness: A man on a dirt bike parting a sea of zombies.

At the end of the street, Greene does some impressive donuts, sending more zombies into the air, and then turns and comes back down the street. The kill count is now 410.

"The user is going to have fun playing in this sandbox world," Brady says. Next he shows off a dirt bike with chainsaws duct-taped to its handlebars. Hopping on, Greene tears through the crowd, cutting zombies in half as he goes. Blood splatters on the screen.

There are now 7,000 zombies on the screen, the game and its new engine's max.

Greene drives through them at full speed, bodies and body parts fly everywhere, it's just absurd, a solid wall of zombies. He cuts through them as if they were grass. When he hits the clearing, the kill count is now at 1,646, and he's at level 22.

"This game is about more zombies that it has ever been before," Brady says.

Inafune says that the original idea for Dead Rising 2 was to make maybe two or three times more zombies than in the original game.

"Capcom has pretty good technology, I didn't think they would be able to make any more than that number, " he says. "And you saw the end result here."

He said that Capcom was also worried that Blue Castle would have to lower quality to hit the high numbers, but says that they actually managed to raise the quality for each mode.

"It's not just about if you make a lot more zombies it will be instantly fun," Inafune added, "But with that many zombies on screen the sort of experiences you can have, the variety, will increase."

And what about the game's heart, the personality?

Inafune promises that what we saw last week was only the tip of the undead iceberg.

"What you saw here today is only a very, very small fraction of what will be in the game," he said. "There are things like the story, characters, bits and pieces you don't know about that will also be in the final game as well. "

Inafune wrapped up the presentation by apologizing that the game wasn't yet playable to the gathered press.

"I've played it myself and I really like it," he added.

Now watch the first full trailer, complete with a girly drink, a moose head and a chainsaw motorcycle. Oh, there's what looks like gameplay footage, too.

Embedded version in the link below.
Dead Rising 2 - Trailer (2:29 min) [Inside Gamer Thanks, Thomas!]

According to the upcoming issue of Famitsu, the character's name is Chuck Greene. That's right "Chuck". We're already putting in our short and punchy naming recommendation for Dead Rising 3: "Jack".

As with the previous title, Dead Rising 2 is built around a 72-hour time based formula. Unlike the previous title, it's not being developed 100 percent in-house. Capcom has partnered with Vancouver-based third-party Blue Castle Games for the title. The developers announced at GDC that for DR2 they were planning on having 6,000 characters.

The game's character art lead, Izmeth Siddeek, is quoted as saying, "Dead Rising 2 deal[s] with the rendering of the greatest number of characters ever seen in a video game... Everything else needed to be subordinated to this requirement."

It was Laura Scholl (from tech company mental mill, who are helping with the game) who, last week, said Dead Rising 2 could feature up to 6000 zombies on screen at any one time during "multiplayer". Turns out that was a slip of the tongue, and she meant to say "multiplatform".

In my 'During the Dead Rising 2' presentation at GDC this past Friday, while I was describing how Blue Castle is using mental mill technology in character development, I mistakenly referred to the game as multiplayer instead of multiplatform. I apologize for the confusion.

Bummer!

Then again, don't be too bummed. This isn't a denial that the game features multiplayer, just a denial that she said anything about it at GDC.

Dead Rising 2 Multiplayer Confirmed [IGN]