Guilty Gear Developer Making a New BloodRayne Title

Around a decade ago, the BloodRayne franchise was a pretty hot commodity. For those of you who missed the series, you played as a scantily clad female vampire and basically went around and hacked up a bunch of Nazis. There were only 2 games in the main series... but it took on an odd life in other markets. There were several horrible films made by the king of horrible video game movies, Uwe Boll. Rayne was also the first video game character to "pose topless" for Playboy (I can hear those google image searches launching now).

The original developer of BloodRayne, Terminal Reality, went on to make a pretty good Ghostbusters game... but then was shut down. The rights still belong to Majesco and they pushed out a pretty bad 2D BloodRayne: Betrayal action game a couple years ago. That game bombed and the series seemed to be dead again.

Meanwhile, over in Japan, Arc System Works has cemented themselves as a solid developer. Any fan of fighting games knows their Guilty Gear series, and in more recent years their BlazBlue series has really taken off. Arc is also quite good at licensed games, having made great fighting games based on anime like Fist of the North Star, and more recently a fighting game adaption of Atlus' Persona RPG series. In fact, around the same time BloodRayne: Betrayal was stinking up Xbox Live, Arc released the kickass prequel to Konami's Contra: Hard Corps called Hard Corps: Uprising.

This morning, those two world collided via a teaser site. In a week we'll have a full reveal of the game, but the speculations are running rampant. Arc's bread and butter is definitely the fighting game genre, but they've proven competent in other genres as well. They've also proven they can pull off amazing cel-shaded visuals on the Unreal Engine with the just released Guilty Gear Xrd (which is coming to Sony consoles later this year). Majesco's stock has fallen so low in recent years that it's on the verge of a de-listing, so publishing a BloodRayne game that looks like this is a pretty damn good idea.