This And That: Wednesday News Roundup

Activision has issued another patch for Call of Duty, version 1.4, containing a new multiplayer map (Stalingrad), Punkbuster support, and various adjustments and fixes, detailed in the readme file. Apparently the patch will update all retail copies as well as versions patched to previous 1.2 or 1.3 patches, although you might want to hold off installing it if you can't find your COD box, because it will also ask for you to re-input the CD key. The patch weighs in at around 30MB.

Square's back catalogue of Final Fantasy has been well and truly mined for extra profit, with countless spin-offs, ports and the like already, but there is one exception - Final Fantasy III. That's Final Fantasy III on the 8-bit Famicom, which was only ever released in Japan and never appeared on the Western NES. Square later used the name for the Western port of Final Fantasy VI, but the original FIII has never been localised and released in the West. As you might imagine, it's something they're thinking about, with Square Enix producer Takashi Tokita recently mentioning it briefly in Japanese Nintendo Dream magazine. "We have not completely sealed away FFIII," he said. "It's just that we missed out on the right moment to release it." With GBA versions of FFI and II garnering a surprising amount of interest at the moment, however, Tokita reckons that could be set to change. We shall see.

DreamCatcher has announced that a multiplayer demo of the recently released FPS Painkiller will be released on May 3rd. The demo will contain the usual deathmatch mode and something called "voosh", in which players are given random weapons with unlimited ammo for a limited time. It sounds in keeping with the game's adherence to mindless violence over shooter strategy, anyway. Expect two maps, and all the updates and so forth that will be going into the forthcoming 1.1 patch for the game.