Gamezine.co.uk just put up their first impressions of A Vampyre Story (perhaps they got a look at the game during the garlic-themed party described here, in which case I hope they brushed their teeth afterwards). Not much is revealed in the preview, except that the game shows a lot of promise. And that it will be released in September. Probably. Read and weep.

Mixnmojo.com reports that Paradox Interactive have signed a deal with Crimson Cow to publish The Abbey, Cycling Manager Evolution, and A Vampyre Story in the Nordic countries. In the press release, it is also mentioned that AVS will be coming out in that region in August.

As pointed out by The International House of Mojo, A Vampyre Story won’t be coming out in May after all, but it will come out this year. Says Georg Hach in this forum post:

A Vampyre Story wird aber nicht mehr im Mai erscheinen… ein neues Datum kann ich noch nicht nennen, außer: Dieses Jahr!

In the coming two months, you’ll get the chance to playtest both A Vampyre Story and The Abbey, provided you live in the surroundings of Hamburg. Details are to be found in this thread (in German). Even if you don’t live near Hamburg though, this is good news: apparently, AVS is in its final stages of development, ready to be played by testers.

Georg Hach from Crimson Cow has written a post over at the AVS forum, in which he reveals that A Vampyre Story will almost certainly get ported to consoles, if it sells well for the PC platform. Here’s what he says:

We’d LOVE to do console ports of “A Vampyre Story”. But right now, none are in production. This really depends on how well the game will be received on PC. But since I strongly believe that A Vampyre Story will be the best selling adventure game in 2008, I would not worry so much about it. For me, the question is “when” rather then “if”.

In the same post, he says that one can ‘play it on a very moderate PC’. This is in line with what we heard before - there’s probably no need to sell a kidney to upgrade your computer to play AVS.

Georg from Crimson Cow has announced, through the existing forums over at Adventure Europe, that Crimson Cow now have a community board as well. You can visit the AVS forums here, where you’ll be able to communicate with other vampiric fans.

GamersGate issued a press release (via GamersHell), stating that they have come to an agreement with Crimson Cow, to distribute the latter’s games digitally. Here’s part of the press release:

The first titles to be released for download include The Abbey, scheduled for a March release, and eagerly awaited A Vampyre Story, scheduled for a May release.

“We are very pleased to welcome Crimson Cow to our network of more than 50 publishers, said Theodore Berquist, CEO of GamersGate. We know that many of our gamers have kept an eye out for A Vampyre Story in particular and will appreciate instant access to it on the day of its release”.

So… things are looking good. We have a definite release month now, and the number of distributors for A Vampyre Story keeps increasing.

Bill Tiller has been posting on the official AME forums again, and has some interesting things to say. There is, for instance, this little piece of information about the release date for AVS 1:

“Bug fixing and scripting time is hard to judge, which is what we are doing right now, so that is why we haven’t committed to a final date, BUT IT WILL NOT BE as late as summer. We are NOT working on AVS1 in the summer, period. It will be out in the spring no matter what.”

Read more in the forums, where you can also read that AVS will almost certainly get a publisher in North America.

In other news, Jean-Louis Sirois joined AME as a part-time 2D artist, and Pedro Macedo Camacho, who composes the music for A Vampyre Story, has won an Independent Games Festival award for his work on the popular game Audiosurf.

The always observant LGH, of Adventure-Treff fame, has noticed an interesting thing on the website for The Abbey, which went up yesterday. As you may know, The Abbey is being published by Crimson Cow, who are delegating the publishing work to other companies in several parts of the world. The publishers for The Abbey can be seen here on the links page. As you can see when you compare the publishers on that page with the publishers on the AVS links page, you’ll notice that they’re exactly the same - minus the US publisher. Seeing how Crimson Cow usually sells The Abbey and A Vampyre Story as a package deal to publishers, it’s not outside the realm of possibility that A Vampyre Story may have found a US publisher as well, in Got Game Entertainment. Notice that The Abbey isn’t yet listed on their site, so an official announcement is likely to follow, in which we might also learn that AVS got a publisher for the United States of America.

In other news, fans have been wondering about a release date in this forum thread, where it’s been mentioned that Amazon.de now offers the possibility to pre-order the game. Also listed is a release date: May 31, 2008. GameStar are also reporting on this, but do keep in mind that an Amazon listing doesn’t mean that a release date is set in stone. It’s all just speculation for now, but hey, speculating can be fun, right?

GamersHell.com reports that Greek adventure game publisher hell-tech has acquired publishing rights for A Vampyre Story. This means that the game will be available this year in Greece, Slovenia, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, FYROM and Turkey. You can read the press release announcing this move here.