Last week Nahu posted information on HVS upcoming title, The Grinder. Ben Kuchera from Ars Technica sat down with the development team and Mark Sheppard, voice actor and front showman for The Grinder, during E3. With an expected release of late 2010, the game is still in its infancy stage, but the playable demo looks very impressive for being made in 2 months and the final release may contain support for the WiiMotion Plus. The Ars post highlighted an angel investor is funding High Voltage, leaving them to develop and innovate (which it shows) and not stress about finding a publisher. HVS is producing at least two other titles, The Grinder and Gladiator AD, building on the same technical innovations used in The Conduit (to be release June 23rd).

Not wanting to raise my expectations too high, how this developer is leveraging the Wii technology is raising my anticipation for their releases. You can expect a thorough review of The Conduit later this month.

[ArsTechnica]

The Wii is getting some really great news still a week before E3. High Voltage Software, the studio behind The Conduit, announced two new titles for the Wii this week. The first title is Gladiator AD, a roman-era fighting game that, while visually impressive for the Wii, it’s still a pretty generic fighter as far as we know. The second title is called The Grinder and this one will really get you excited.

The Grinder, in few words and many generalizations, is Left 4 Dead for the Wii. A multiplayer first person shooter where you battle against hordes of zombies, vampires and werewolves with a sadistic AI that directs every move of the horde. The game is shooting for a grindhouse movie style very much in the vein of movies like From Dust Till Dawn which should mean over-the-top characters and gore everywhere. As with The Conduit, High Voltage Software has put the Wii’s hardware limits to the test and so far it looks pretty good.

There is however one big problem I have with this game, and with L4D for that matter. There seems to be no plans for split-screen multiplayer, only online. What happened to actually playing with your friends in the same room? Enjoying co-op fun without having to lug around your console and a screen to play on wherever you go used to be the norm. Now more and more it seems to be the exception. Dear Gaming Industry: some of us still want to play local co-op with games that don’t force you to operate toy music instruments.

EDIT: While finishing up this post I found out the game DOES feature split screen multiplayer. I swallow my words, they are delicious.

[IGN]