All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Experience Super Monkey Ball like never before with AiAi and friends using the Wii Balance Board.

Quantic Dream's risky storytelling pays off with an experience that'll leave you begging for more.

Grand prize winner to receive $10,000 and chance to design one of the colorways of Kobe Bryant's signature shoe.

Turn 10's Forza 3 has managed to attain double platinum status -- dubs plat in "cool kid" speak. Microsoft announced that the game sold over two million copies since its October release. The racer took just over a month to surpass one million sales, and has clearly been doing laps around the money pit ever since.

And hey, if you're wondering what you're missing in all of this hot pedal-on-metal action, there's a demo on Xbox Live right now.

Let's be honest. Between Diablo III, Stacraft II and the new World of Warcraft expansion, we're all going to be pretty heavily embroiled in Blizzard's games over the next couple of years. That's why we were thrilled to see this recent update on the new Battle.Net, which has been renovated by Blizzard from the ground up to offer a Steam-esque cross-game platform for players of all Blizzard's titles.

A recent post on the StarCraft II blog reveals the three pillars of the service: Achievements for in-game deeds (which, in turn, unlock avatars and emblems for your profile); a beefy competitive ranking bracket and auto-matchmaking functionality; and social networking features available for everyone playing one of Blizzard's games online. It looks predictably slick -- check out some screenshots and a video of the interface on Blizzard's official blog.

Crack open a fresh copy of Mass Effect 2, The Saboteur or Dragon Age: Origins and you'll see it: A code to download some piece of game content that those suckers buying used will have to pay for. It's not just coincidence that EA is shipping so many games with these bonuses/punitive measures (depending on your perspective). It's what CEO John Riccitiello calls "Project Ten Dollar," a bid to take back a portion of revenue from the estimated $2 billion in annual used game sales. That and the rest of Riccitiello's strategy to to make EA more reliant on digital content is detailed in a new BusinessWeek report.

All we know is, with a 25 percent decline in revenue for Q3, the company needs to find some way to fill the gaps sooner rather than later. Though Riccitiello seems convinced the digital strategy will patch the hole, some remain unconvinced. Former EA consultant Eric Goldberg told BusinessWeek, "While it's possible EA can make the extremely difficult transition from providing a shiny disc in boxes to [leading] in digital, history suggests it's rather unlikely."

Marvelous Entertainment, faced with low sales and financial trouble, is turning to a relatively low-cost source of new material to publish: Western WiiWare games. The publisher just started a new label, World Game Parade, to release localized Japanese versions of some WiiWare games originally developed and published outside of Japan.

In March, World Game Parade will release Zombie in Wonderland (called Zombie Panic in Wonderland outside of Japan) and Bit Man!! (Bplus's Bit Boy!!). Katamuki Spirits (Equilibrio) and Rakugaki Hero (Max & the Magic Marker) will follow in April. WiiWare sales figures aren't normally released, so we may have to wait until Marvelous's next earnings report to determine the effectiveness of the plan. We can confirm right now that the logo is adorable.

[Via Andriasang]

Blizzard reveals the big changes coming to its online service.

During the same event in which Level-5 CEO Akihiro Hino teased new Wii and PS3 games, he also suggested that the company may be setting up operations in the US. According to our own imperfect translation of 4Gamer's summary of statements, "Mr. Hino, in order to release software overseas, spoke about a plan to establish a new company in America," describing his intention to expand the company's activities from its current home of Fukuoka to the world.

This new enterprise would be the second new office opened by the company for this purpose -- it recently established an overseas-focused office in Tokyo. Perhaps we'll see self-published Level-5 games soon. Perhaps that way we can get timely Professor Layton releases!

[Via Siliconera]

In what's becoming the rule rather than the exception for EA games, Battlefield: Bad Company 2 will receive day one DLC. Speaking to Worthplaying, senior producer Patrick Bach said, "We have an in-game store where you get free content or you can buy new content to the game, so it's a very integral part of the game that we will have a long post-launch campaign. I think people will be thrilled to see what's in that already. On day one, you will get some really cool stuff."

It's still not clear if that "really cool" stuff will be free, for-pay or both -- in the case of EA's usual in-the-box DLC strategy, it would be free to new buyers and sold separately for used copies of the game. You'll remember that during the release of the first Bad Company, EA was actually threatened with a boycott for its (soon abandoned) strategy that would have created an in-game gap between players that spent extra money and those who didn't. Hopefully EA and DICE will be a bit smarter about things this time around.

Creat Studios is rumored to be working on a wakeboarding game for the PlayStation Network simply titled Wakeboarding HD. It appears the very first footage of this PS3 game has found its way online via a rather unusual source: a random posting on the Gamespot forums. A look at the thirty seconds of gameplay seems to suggest that this is indeed Creat's next PS3 game, with gameplay and graphics that resemble its last PSN game, Smash Cars.

Embedding has been disabled for this video, so check it out on YouTube. After watching the video, is this something you'd like to play? Let us know in the comments.

[Via PSN Stores]

If you bought Mass Effect 2 and you like being on the winning "team" when it comes to game trends, high five. According to DFC Intelligence, BioWare's latest spacefaring adventure sold an estimated 1.1 million copies (of the Xbox 360 version) in January -- six times the sales of any other game. Estimating game sales based on GamerDNA activity, DFC also believes that there was a significant uptick in play of Mass Effect as well, "likely supported by the ability to transfer a save file from a completed Mass Effect game into Mass Effect 2 where several key player decisions in the first game could be carried over into the second game."

The other leading Xbox 360 sellers in DFC's estimate include Darksiders (150,000), Bayonetta (170,000) and Army of Two: The 40th Day (175,000) -- with Dark Void somewhat of a surprise bomb (22,000).

The soldier of tomorrow must rise to meet these new threats.

Check out more screens and the commercial here (click the buttons marked ‘NEW’)

The online multiplayer portion of Cyan Worlds' Uru: Ages Beyond Myst has had about as troubled a past as video games can have. It never made it out of its beta stage when Uru first launched in 2004. Three years later, GameTap opened up servers for the game -- but a lack of subscribers led to them being shut down after just one year. Earlier today, the developer proved its persistence by re-launching the game once more; this time, as a totally free-to-play MMO.

So, once more, with feeling -- you can download and sign up for Myst Online on the game's official site for zero dollars. After that, you and all your friends can start running around, touching glyphs and magic books to your heart's desire.

[Via Big Download]

Marvelous is looking to make a name for themselves in WiiWare titles. They’ve started off a ‘World Game Parade’ label that includes the company bringing North American/European WiiWare to Japan. We’ve already learned that Bit Boy is heading to Japan as Bitman, but now Marvelous has announced 3 other titles that are getting [...]

A portion of a DSiWare review… Those who just barely eked their way through English class may want to skip this one, but anyone with a decent grasp of vocabulary should be more than able to get their 200 points’ worth out of this time-waster.

- due out Feb 27th in Japan for ¥1,200 (roughly $13.40 US)

This game never actually saw the light of day on the SNES. It was canned in favor of a Playstation version that was named ‘Punky Skunk’.

One with WiiSpeak or one without WiiSpeak…both the same price. Man, the decision is so hard! Thanks to Kolma for the heads up.

There are hundreds of thousands of YouTube videos uploaded every day, many of them about video games. This particular feature is one that will certainly make you think more than the usual fodder you’ll come across. Agree or disagree, at least it will have you thinking. Direct link here (thanks Jonny_Boi!)

Konami has opened up an official Japanese campaign site for LovePlus +. What’s the point of this campaign site? Once again, Konami is allowing consumers enter in their names and nicknames, all in the hopes of having them chosen for recording in the final game. If your name gets chosen and you [...]

While the big fellas struggle to figure out how to make digitally distributed content profitable, smaller dev houses like RedLynx are handily succeeding. The Trials HD developer claims to have moved 1.5 million digital units worldwide (of all of its games) in 2009, though, as RedLynx itself points out, "most RedLynx games have also free promotional web versions available, bringing the company's key titles to an even wider audience."

Aside from putting out the Summer of Arcade XBLA release Trials HD last year, the Finnish company also made Monster Trucks Nitro on PC and a couple of iPhone games, assuredly assisting that 1.5 million statistic. CEO Tero Virtala looks forward to the coming year, saying things look "even better," and adding that RedLynx is "bringing 8-10 new games to market." We really, really hope the company brings more copies than that if it wants to move past 2009's sales. Come on, guys -- simple math!