The rumor mill has been running overtime this week, with patents, trademarks, and offhand developer mutterings flying everywhere. You’d think that with BlizzCon only just passed and PAX coming in hard on its heels there’d be other things to talk about. However, I suspect that the gaming press has a deep-seated need to manufacture news.

At least the gossip is succulent.

From the “I wish they’d make my pet game” desk, we have two tidbits. The first is that Capcom has trademarked “Okamiden.” Okami was the lupine Zelda clone whose critical acclaim didn’t really drive the sales it deserved. When developer Clover bit it after two consecutive flops at market, everyone wrote off the series as dead. Zealous pattern-matchers will have already noticed that Okamiden sounds an awful lot like a contraction of “Okami” and “gaiden,” or “Okami story.” Mashing words together is actually a longtime Japanese tradition (Capcom, for example, is short for Capsule Computing), so there may be some credence to the rumor. However, there hasn’t been anything so official as an announcement as yet.

The second rumor is that a Final Fantasy VII remake isn’t out of the question. When Sony teased an updated CGI render for Final Fantasy VII as marketing for the PS3, it whipped gamers into a such a froth that they formed soft peaks. However, subsequent inquiries into that possibility have always been met with silence or denial. However, according to VG247, a translator described producer Yoshi Kitase and Motomu Toriyama as, “..talk[ing] about it on a personal level, like, ‘If we did it it would be like this or like that.’” It’s incredibly thin, even for a rumor, but evidently still newsworthy enough for 1up to pick up the story and share it with the world.

Ok, rumor mill, it’s time to let this one go. Square-Enix is too busy making shovel-ports of FFVII to PSN and other legacy titles to every console ever to invest the epic development money into remaking a 3d game for a current gen system. Even though FFVII: Again would probably sell out on day one, spending those development costs on a new game means that a decade down the road, Square Enix will be able to shovel port the new game in addition to the original version of Final Fantasy VII to the PS4. If you were a business, which game would you make?

Finally the WTF files have word that Nintendo has patented a Football controller for the Wii. Rather, they’ve patented a football enclosure for the Wii Remote that will allow the user to simulate throwing, running, and dodging. Evidently Nintendo is dissatisfied with gamers accidentally breaking their TVs with Wii remotes and is instead encouraging them to do it on purpose. I suppose it’s possible that this is could really be a public service act from Nintendo, and they really intend to squat on the patent so that no short-sighted entrepreneur tries to make something so stupid. Come to think on it, that’d be the best use for patent squatting that I’ve ever heard. Yay Nintendo!

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Tags:   1up · Capcom · Clover · Gamasutra · Nintendo · ps4 · Square Enix · WiiNo Comments

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