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Develop 2011: Studio’s next game entirely navigable with voice; golf to have more than 300 voice command phrases.

There are “over 300 phrases” in the voice controls for golf in Kinect Sports Season Two, says Nick Burton of Kinect Sports studio Rare. In a session at UK-based industry conference Develop, “incubation director” Burton discussed the particular challenges in producing Kinect control schemes for the Kinect Sports sequel.

If only golf balls would heed voice commands as well.

The first Kinect Sports focused on games that could be mirrored and mimed most literally, said Burton, since Rare thought there were some sports “we just couldn’t do,” since they “couldn’t figure them out from a design perspective or a technical perspective.” In the Kinect Sports follow-up, though, Rare is including “most of the sports we thought we couldn’t,” apparently having overcome the design and technical difficulties. Kinect Sports Season Two features skiing, American football, golf, darts, tennis, and baseball.

Burton called golf “a particularly interesting [challenge],” in that players properly mirroring real golfers would have to look down at a pretend gold ball rather than at the screen, “which is kind of a problem if you’re playing a game.” Similarly, Burton said, there’s an issue with positioning and turning: if you turn your body to turn your avatar, you wind up not facing the screen head-on any more. “You can’t just mime golf,” he said.

Instead, Kinect Sports Season Two’s golf has players step left and right parallel to the screen in order to pivot their avatar left or right. Rare also turned to voice commands in place of a real golfer’s caddy to supply the player with clubs and to avoid forcing players out of the golf experience into a menu to pick new ones. Besides selecting clubs with spoken phrases, players will call “practice shot” to have the Kinect give them a practice swing, and so on.

“We’ve got over 300 phrases you can use,” Burton said, noting that the next largest implementation of voice controls in a Kinect game, Kinectimals, is an order of magnitude smaller, with just 30 voice phrases. The game’s entire user interface will also be navigable by voice. Rare is “pushing speech a hell of a lot with Season Two,” he said. At the E3 demo of Kinect Sports Season Two, stage demonstrators shouted calls in the title’s Kinect-enabled football game.

On the topic of advancements in the Kinect’s voice detection, Burton said: “The really neat thing about voice is that we’re starting to be able to tell who’s actually talking with skeletal tracking…Imagine side-by-side multiplayer [with two-player voice control].”

Kinect Sports Season Two is out on October 25 in North America.

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Street Fighter III: Third Strike Online Edition arrives on PlayStation Network on 23rd August and Xbox Live Arcade on 24th August, Capcom has announced.

As detailed on the Capcom Unity blog, the revamped brawler sequel will set you back 1200 Microsoft Points or your local equivalent of $14.99.

Originally released in arcades back in 1999, the new version adds online play, enhanced visual settings, unlockables, achievements, live replay viewing and a fistful of new game modes.

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Frank West-starring budget spin-off to last year’s zombie-action game gets definitive date for North America.

Capcom has finally gone on record with the release date for Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. The publisher’s latest zombie-action game will arrive in North American stores for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC October 11.

Frank may be All-American, but that suplex is strictly German.

The date shouldn’t come as a surprise to attentive zombie watchers, as it appeared on Capcom Europe’s blog and the publisher’s Facebook page late last month. Those postings were quickly taken down, but not before word of the release had spread like some sort of zombie virus.

Off the Record offers an alternate storyline to last year’s horror action game Dead Rising 2. Photojournalist West–the protagonist of the original Dead Rising–stars in the title, getting the scoop on a zombie outbreak in the Las Vegas-like Fortune City. In addition to the combo weapon feature introduced in Dead Rising 2, Off the Record will bring back the original game’s photography feature, where players gain experience for snapping pics that are judged for their horror, drama, brutality, and erotic content.

The game includes new missions, enemies, combo weapons, environments, items, and vehicles. The game will also feature technical improvements like reduced load times and better network performance for online play. Capcom is also promising “enhancements” to the save system and co-op modes.

For more on the forthcoming title, check out GameSpot’s most recent hands-on preview of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record.

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[UPDATE] Concept artist and Darth Maul designer Iain McCaig clarifies Develop 2011 comments, says time frame was a guess.

Illustrator and concept artist Iain McCaig, whose past projects include Terminator 2, Secret of Monkey Island, and Star Wars: Episode I, is designing characters for Respawn Entertainment, the studio founded by former Infinity Ward heads Jason West and Vince Zampella. Speaking at UK-based games industry conference Develop, McCaig said he is “having the most fun working with Respawn Entertainment right now, but I can’t show you, and I won’t be able to show you, until 2015.”

Respawn teased its first project with blurry game art.

McCaig, who designed Darth Maul for The Phantom Menace, said he had been invited by a friend and former student to work on character designs for the Respawn project, about which little is known so far. The studio has multiple ties to the movie concept artist community; Respawn art director Matt Codd similarly draws experience from the art departments of Hollywood blockbusters.

On the topic of games and movies, McCaig said, “The whole entertainment industry is blending into one,” though he admits to not really playing video games, saying: “Somehow computer games just don’t involve me yet. I think as AI improves I’ll get [more involved].” The Respawn project is far from McCaig’s first exposure to video games, though. He has produced art for several games; notably, he worked on lauded 1990 graphic adventure Secret of Monkey Island, drawing 256-colour character portraits with a mouse while waiting to work on Terminator 2.

Besides a staff list that includes Iain McCaig and Matt Codd, there is little known about Respawn’s first project. Respawn.com launched in late June with a blurry piece of art from the game by way of a teaser.

[UPDATE]: McCaig responded to GameSpot’s request for clarification on the 2015 time frame with the following statement: “2015 was just my wildest guess as to when I would be able to show my artwork, which is usually 12 months or more after release. I have no real information on the release date of the game.”

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From “Do a barrel roll” to “I can’t let you do that, Star Fox,” Star Fox 64 has spawned several memes that just won’t die, even 14 years after the game first released. It’s a true testament to the game that over a decade later it is still remembered so very fondly. With Star Fox 64 3D, now even younger gamers, or gamers who missed out on Fox McCloud’s adventures the first time around, will have their chance to do a barrel roll on the Nintendo 3DS this September…

Side-scrolling action game set in the Alien universe in development at WayForward.

It’s been over 30 years since the crew of the Nostromo first answered that deep-space distress call, yet the xenomorphs have yet to be eliminated from the universe–or from store shelves, for that matter. Sega today announced Aliens: Infestation, a side-scrolling action game set for release on the DS this September.

Welcome back, little guy.

Infestation will allow players to recruit and play as 19 different marines and investigate famous locales from the Alien films, such as the Sulaco and the moon LV-426. Comic artist Chris Bachalo, known for his work on such franchises as Sandman, Shade, and Generation X, is working on the game’s character designs, which will include an upgrade and collectibles system.

The project is the work of developer WayForward (Batman: The Brave and the Bold, A Boy and His Blob) in collaboration with Gearbox Software (Duke Nukem Forever, Borderlands). Gearbox is also working on its own Aliens title, Colonial Marines, set for release on multiple current-gen platforms. During E3, Colonial Marines was confirmed as being prototyped for Nintendo’s Wii U hardware, though its release on the system has not been finalized.

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UPDATE:Joystiq has managed to pull what seems to be the full roster of new fighters directly off the Capcom site.

If the information is correct, the 12 new additions are: Strider, Firebrand, Vergil, Frank West, Phoenix Wright and Nemesis for Capcom; Ghost Rider, Dr Strange, Nova, Rocket Raccoon, Hawkeye and Iron Fist for Marvel.

ORIGINAL STORY: Capcom has officially announced Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3.

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Long-rumoured sci-fi action title Aliens: Infestation will launch on DS this September, Sega has revealed.

Outed in a post on the company’s official Twitter feed, this is the first we’ve officially heard of the game from Sega.

Despite this, rating listings from both the ESRB and it’s Aussie equivalent pointed to the game’s existence as far back as May.

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God of War Master Collection will bundle all the PlayStation 2, PlayStation 3 and PSP games in Sony’s action series into a single release, according to a listing on Amazon Germany.

As spotted by CVG, the page indicates a 16th September release date for the set. That’s the same day as God of War Origins Collection hits the stores, which offers HD PS3 versions of the two PSP releases.

We’ve asked Sony for clarification and will update if it chooses to respond.

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