All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

What are you doing today? Out enjoying the warm weather that’s somehow taken over the country this weekend? Well, you *could* do that, but that’s tacit approval of global warming. And that’s evil :-)

Why not stay inside, away from the sun’s dangerous rays, and catch Dr. Richard Marks as he takes the Engadget crew through a behind-the-scenes look of the PlayStation Move, LIVE on today’s Engadget Show, which starts at 5:00 p.m. ET (2:00 p.m. PT). It’s streaming right here!

Once you’ve seen PlayStation Move, how about actually playing it? For those in the New York area that want to get their hands on the PlayStation Move, be sure to stop by our first New York meetup this Tuesday, March 23rd. RSVP for the event here and let us know you’re coming.

Oh, and we’ll also be in Boston this Thursday, March 25th, PlayStation Move in hand. Details and RSVP are right here. See you there!

We never thought we'd have to slap a spoiler warning on a post about downloadable content for the Left 4 Dead franchise -- and yet, here we are. The latest episode of GameTrailers TV revealed an intriguing plot point about the pair of new chapters for the original game and sequel. We respect that some of you might want to remain in the dark about the DLC until you finally get your hands on it. For the rest of you, check out the details just past the jump.

#paxeast Our PAX East party might be the convention's must-attend Friday night event, but what can you do on Thursday night? Why not get some hands-on time with the PlayStation move at Sony's PlayStation Blog meet-up? More »

#valve Valve's poster for Left 4 Dead 2's The Passing downloadable content finally gets a tagline: Nobody Survives Forever. And while the original survivors will be showing up at the beginning of The Passing, only three make it to the end. More »

He doesn't know exactly when the third Killzone game will be announced, but SCEA prez Jack Tretton does know that it's gonna happen. When pushed by GTTV host Geoff Keighley about a sequel to last year's Killzone 2 on last night's episode, the Sony exec openly answered, "You know, we own Guerrilla Studios, and uh, they did a great job on Killzone 1 and 2 ... I don't know when you'll see announcements about it, but I can promise you a Killzone 3." Pretty straightforward, Jack!

Though he didn't make any promises regarding Killzone for E3, he did additionally note that the news from Sony out of GDC was "the icing on the cake," referring to big announcements at E3 this year as "the batter." And if there's one thing we really, really like, Jack, it's cake batter. You've won this round.

#visionstatements I spoke to the men running the studio behind many of the world's biggest role-playing games a couple of weeks ago, to discuss a variety of things. I left with a bonus: The BioWare Vision Statement. More »

Greetings, PlayStation Nation! It’s time for a proper introduction. I’m Sid Shuman, and I’m the newest recruit of the PlayStation.Blog team! You might know me from my 11 years with GamePro, where I served as writer and senior editor covering my favorite topic in the world: video games!

In my new role with the PlayStation.Blog, I’ll be working with fine folks like Jeff Rubenstein and Chris Morell (a fellow partner-in-crime from my GamePro days!). My day-to-day focus will be updating and maintaining PlayStation’s official Twitter account (Follow us: Twitter.com/SonyPlayStation) and Facebook page (Facebook.com/PlayStation), as well as helping moderate and maintain our new PlayStation.Blog Share, where you can submit your own great ideas to the PlayStation team. We read every one of them!

I’m proud to be a part of a PlayStation team and, especially, to be serving you. So without further ado, let’s take a closer look at the week’s posts on the PlayStation.Blog. See you on the internets!

• Wakeboarding HD Coming to PSN March 25 — If you love Jet Moto, Hydro Thunder, SSX, or Crazy Taxi, you owe it to yourself to check out this gorgeous hi-def PSN title. Dodging sharks while busting monster wakeboard trick combos: yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s a win.
• ModNation Racers Release Date, Pre-Orders and Box Art! — Zoom, zoom, zoom! I played this nimble kart racer at GDC 2010 for the first time, and was pleased by the tight controls (epic drifting!) and the adorable character designs. Better yet, the track creator is one of the best user creation tools I’ve ever seen. This one deserves your attention.
• God of War III Launch Special Tonight on SPIKE TV + Midnight Launch Events! — The Game To End All Games is (finally) here, and the midnight launch festivities couldn’t have been more epic. Catch up on the Spike TV special, too, hosted by GameTrailers’ Geoff Keighley and featuring a special appearance by God of War III director Stig Asmussen.
• PlayStation.Blog God of War III GDC 2010 Meetup Recap — Epic game + epic fans = epic community meetup. San Francisco will never be the same after our record-shattering God of War community event, featuring a blistering Challenge of the Titans competition, countless raffle prizes, and a special God of War III play session. Intense!
• Coming to PSN this Week: Patchwork Heroes — In this charming PSP game, you carve pieces off gigantic airborne battleships using a saw. Epic AND cute: what’s not to like? The theme song deserves extra points, too.
• God of War III Out Today! — The wait is over: Kratos will have his revenge. The first level alone is enough to take your breath away. What are you waiting for?
• New Limited Edition Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker PSP Entertainment Pack — This limited edition PSP Entertainment Pack is a killer deal. Fully loaded with a 2GB Memory Stick, free PSN movie voucher (US only), exclusive DLC, plus the slick “Spirited Green” PSP-3000. And, of course, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, the latest chapter in Hideo Kojima’s powerful series.
• Meet The Tester Cast Members Luge and Doc in PlayStation Home Tomorrow — Regular viewers of The Tester might have wondered whether Doc and Luge had “a thing” for each other. If you made it to our in-Home meetup with these popular contestants, you’d have gotten the chance to ask them for yourself!
• 3D Dot Game Heroes Walkthrough — If you’re elderly enough to remember the 8-bit and 16-bit generation, 3D Dot Game Heroes will be right up your alley. It’s both a tribute to, and a parody of, the Golden Age of Gaming. Let Atlus’s Aram Jabbari give you the full tour!
• Introducing PlayStation.Blog Share — Since starting with the fine folks of the PlayStation.Blog, Share has been a near-obsession of mine. The concept of fans contributing fresh ideas to PlayStation, and voting on them, is a powerful one. Have you Shared today?

This Week in PlayStation Home: Twisted Metal, Resistance, inFAMOUS Content + Musicality Apartment, PlayStation.Blog Meetup and More!!! — Home gets hotter with a slew of content updates. And in another first for the PlayStation.Blog, Chris, Jeff, and I held a virtual meetup in the Central Plaza and Theater to meet and greet fans and give out sweet exclusive items. We hope to make these Home meetups a more frequent event — stay tuned! UNCHARTED: Eye of Indra Motion Comic Bundle, Rika and Pinkerton Skins Launch on April 1 — Readers have long clamored for access to the Rika Raja and Daniel Pinkerton skins for Uncharted 2’s multiplayer mode. The wait is over! Read how to claim the booty in this blog written by Arne of Naughty Dog! echoshift Add-on Levels Free Through April 1 — There’s still time to grab seven free add-on levels for this brain-twisting PSN puzzler, but only if you act fast. make.believe: thatgamecompany — thatgamecompany is famous for introducing Flower and flOw to gamers worldwide. But where did this innovative independent game studio come from? How did they get started? All secrets are revealed in this short, beautifully shot documentary video. PlayStation Comics Store Update — Comic geeks, rejoice! The PlayStation Comics Store grows ever-larger: highlights include Dragon Age # 1, Star Trek: Nero # 3, and The X-Men (1963) # 6 through #10. Remember: reading is fundamental! The Tester – Episode 5 Available Today — With only three episodes left, The Tester is heating up! If you’re a newcomer to the show, there’s never been a better time to check it out. There’s only three episodes left! No spoilers! PixelJunk Racers 2nd Lap Coming to PSN this Spring + PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe on UMD — Dylan “Mr. PixelJunk” Cuthbert gives the skinny on eagerly anticipated updates to the smash-hit PSN game series. With PixelJunk Monsters Deluxe hitting the PSP on UMD for only $20, and PixelJunk Racers 2nd Lap getting a beefy upgrade on PSN, now’s the time to dive into this celebrated retro-styled series. First MAG DLC free, coming next week — Zipper Interactive wasn’t kidding when they said their support for MAG had only just begun. Rejoin the fight with potent new Flashbang Grenades, new Light Machine Guns, and a double-XP weekend starting March 25th. All hail MAG! PlayStation.Blog Moves East next week. Come Meetup with us! — Meet Jeff and the PlayStation.Blog team in Boston and New York next week! Of course, we’ll have cool prizes and gaming swag to hand out. But the real attraction will be hands-on sessions with PlayStation Move, our state-of-the-art motion controller coming later this Fall! PlayStation Network Video Content Update — Lots of scrumptious new video content to peruse this weekend on the PSN Video Store, including Twilight Saga: New Moon, Ninja Assassin, Universal Soldier: Regeneration, and my personal favorite History Channel TV show, MonsterQuest (This week: Sasquatches!). No April Fool’s Joke – Heavy Rain Taxidermist DLC Available April 1 — Gain a different perspective on Heavy Rain’s storyline with this standalone side story set in a very bad part of town. Can you evade certain death while hiding in an urban den of horrors? ModNation Racers: Redesigning Kart Racing — Building a Better Kart Racer: Get a better ‘handle’ on ModNation Racers’ controls and feel with this informative new video. Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake Trailer and Interview — Learn more about the exclusive new content planned for the PSP version of this team action-RPG, including new modes, new maps, and a beefier (cakier?) story mode. Viva la girthiness! LittleBigPlanet: Sack It To Me – The Hedgehog Edition — Holy crap! Sonic the Hedgehog is hitting LittleBigPlanet and we’ve got the full scoop straight from the developers.

Courtesy of Jeremy Dunham

• MAG Free DLC and Extended Double XP March 25 – Flashbangs are coming.
• Patch Alert: MAG v1.04a – We’ve updated the Syr Daria Uplink map and nerfed spawn campers!
• SOCOM 4 and PlayStation Move Reactions – The video game media’s thoughts on our game and new peripheral.

Courtesy of Arne Meyer

• Eye of Indra Bundle with Rika and Pinkerton skins to be released in North America – Covered in full detail on the PlayStation.Blog, the Eye of Indra motion comic bundle will be available for purchase on April 1 in the US, Canada and Mexico. You can get the Rika and Pinkerton multiplayer skins by purchasing the bundle and we’ve made sure that anyone who has purchased all the individual episodes also get the skins.
• Player spawn point updates being rolled out – Over the past couple of weeks we noticed that our spawn points needed some tweaking. We announced this week that we’re rolling out updates to UNCHARTED 2 over time to our multiplayer maps to alleviate unfair player spawning during matches.
• UNCHARTED 2 wins 4 awards at the GAME British Academy Video Game Awards – Evan and Christophe were on-site at the awards ceremony in London, United Kingdom, to accept four BAFTA awards for Action, Original Score, Story and Use of Audio.
• The Art of UNCHARTED 2: Among Thieves – out in April 2010 – Ballistic Publishing, SCEA and Naughty Dog are pleased to reveal the upcoming 272-page art book of concept art, production art and character models. The art book will come in three flavors for collectors of all kinds. You can pre-order now, and there’s even a limited release pre-order bonus – a 15 minute video walkthrough of 3 concept pieces.

If you can't be bothered to wait before getting your hands on Paradox Interactive's Team Fortress 2 meets Tombstone shooter, Lead and Gold: Gangs of the Wild West, Steam's offering pre-orderers a chance to beat the (gold) rush. A press release has announced that the full game will hit the Steam store April 8, and that anyone who pre-orders the game will have access to a beta which will run right up to Lead and Gold's launch.

Haven't been keeping tabs on the title? Check out our write up from our brief time with the game at GDC -- and try to be more diligent with your news consumption. We won't always be here to hold your hand, you know.

#clips Rather than tiptoe around our nightmares, the fine folks at Artificial Mind and Movement have decided to just tear through our darkest childhood fears like so much tissue paper with their latest Naughty Bear video vignette. More »

#screengrab As seen on Halolz. More »

The onslaught of great Naughty Bear media doesn't let up in this new trailer, which does a good job of creeping us the hell out. It's a parody of that scene from Ridley Scott's Alien and continues Naughty Bear's unending goal to present itself as one messed up game. Have you read our impressions yet? Denmark is a super rotten place in A2M's latest.

It's a pretty neat trailer but, frankly, we think Mel Brooks' take on the whole Alien thing was way better. You can't win them all.

Stardock CEO Brad Wardell will take a "sabbatical" after shipping Elemental: War of Magic later this year. It's not unheard of to take some time off after shipping a major product in the industry (horrible example), but Wardell isn't traveling the world. No, instead he's having a full-on geek out: he's goin' modding.

Wardell explained to Joystiq, "It's more than a vacation. For the past year I've been doing multiple jobs at once -- running Stardock, managing external game development, coding on Elemental, building a house, and writing a book. I typically start work at around 8am EST and work until around 11pm and do this every day -- seven days a week -- though recently I've been getting in some Starcraft 2 time. But it has averaged around 80 hours a week overall."

The executive explains that he wants to mod Elemental to make all kinds of other games and get as much out of the Kumquat engine (the company's new game engine) and Impulse Reactor as possible. Then take those lessons and show it to other developers. He also plans to work on Civilization V mods, which uses the same mod program as Elemental. Wardell expressed the time off "won't affect Stardock's product scheduling at all," he'll still be working on stuff. A lot of that stuff just happens to be modding.

[Via Big Download]

The official Nicalis blog has another featured artist interview - check it out here! Also worth noting, their appears to be a lot of thought put into the Classic Controller button layout. This info comes from the Nicalis Twitter feed… Little trivia, Pixel chose the button mapping for the Classic Controller on Cave Story. I’m pretty sure [...]

Figure out who that is supposed to be? It’s none other than Hideo Kojima from Metal Gear fame! What’s the big deal about this art? Well, the drawing was actually done by Masaki Yamanaka of Platinum Games. You have to love game devs showing appreciation for one another! Thanks to [...]

#research OK, we are done with the tangible stuff. The machines you own, the games you play. To finish off our census, we're going to dig a little deeper. More »

We've recently seen augmented reality used in some pretty clever ways in the gaming space, but Sony subsidiary ConnectedED has come up with a way to turn real-time graphical overlays into an educational tool. Using a PSP equipped with a camera, the "Second Sight" technology allows tags embedded in textbooks or magazines to cue relevant audio or video clips directly on the PSP.

The program can also create interactive 3D models which the user can examine by changing the orientation of the PSP. Check out the video after the jump to see a video demonstration of what we're talking about, and then imagine how awesome school is going to be in like, fifteen years.

[Via Siliconera]

#pennyarcadeexpoeast So all of the neat things you find out when reading Kotaku on a Friday night? Take for instance news that we'll be hosting our own open-bar party at Penny Arcade Expo East in Boston next week. More »

#clips As we mentioned earlier this week, GDC got some class this year with some pole-dancing, clothes-on erotic dancers. More »

The latest episode of PlayStation Network's Pulse revealed the top ten downloaded PSP games for 2010 so far. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Square Enix's classic PSone RPGs have topped the list in the first quarter of the year. Only one mini makes it into the top 10: Tetris, whose steep $10 price tag apparently hasn't scared everyone away.

1. Final Fantasy VII (PSP/PS3)
2. Final Fantasy VIII (PSP/PS3)
3. Tetris
4. God of War: Chains of Olympus
5. Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories
6. LittleBigPlanet
7. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories
8. Madden NFL 10
9. Gran Turismo
10. Resident Evil 2 (PSP/PS3)

It's official: Aksys Games is localizing BlazBlue: Continuum Shift for North America. Continuum Shift, the sequel to Arc System Works' high-resolution 2D fighting game, will be released on Xbox 360 and PS3 this summer. Like the Japanese release, this updated version adds new characters.

It also adds new modes, including a Beginner Mode, which simplifies the control scheme, a Challenge Mode with specific missions for each character, and Legion Mode, a mini-strategy game in which players fight enemies to gain control of a map.

"If you're not on the hype train this time, you're missing out on the latest greatest 2D game from Arc", Aksys marketing director Gail Salamanca said in a quote we can't help but pass along, "GET HYPE, CHOO CHOO!"

#hollywood I've been slowly reading through a draft of the big screen adaptation of IO Interactive's Kane & Lynch today, the movie set to star Bruce Willis as Kane, Jamie Foxx as Lynch. Screenwriter Kyle Ward has done some... interesting things. More »

If our comprehensive video preview of Fat Princess for PSP whet your appetite for more, you'll be glad to know that the full experience isn't too far away. Fistful of Cake will be appearing on both UMD and PSN on April 27, promising "new game modes, new maps, a new extended storyline for single player." And although the single player options have been greatly expanded, multiplayer remains a big focus for the game, with 8-player Ad-Hoc and Infrastructure support.

The PlayStation.Blog features a Q&A, a new trailer (posted after the break) and box art. Curiously missing from the announcement, however, is a price. An SCEA rep told us the price has yet to be "100% confirmed," and that an announcement would be forthcoming.

No, you can’t go into 7-Eleven and trade in your games, but you can certainly by a couple pre-owned titles. As we stated a few days ago, 7-Eleven signed a deal to get into the used games business, and here we see the proof. Both used and budget games sitting right at the counter, ready [...]

Get with it, Nintendo! You think your DSi XL is so big? Check out how fans have trumped you for years now! Check out more big Nintendo portables here!

[Brandy Shaul]

Ahhh, grammar school -- there was nothing quite like trying to hide that GBA under the desk in fear of Mrs. Rosencrantz confiscating our portal into Pokémon Fire Red. Back then, handheld games were little more than an obvious distraction in the eyes of our ruler-equipped teachers, but Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto plans on changing all of that. Speaking with the Associated Press in an interview recently, the legendary game developer explained his latest devotion: bringing the Nintendo DS and Wii into schools. He said that the DS would be making its way into "junior high and elementary schools in Japan starting in the new school year" (beginning this April).

Miyamoto didn't get too specific on how his company's consoles would help Japanese students with their education, only detailing it as part of Nintendo's initiative to expand the audience for gaming consoles. We have to imagine that the kids won't be using them to decide whether or not Resident Evil 4 on Wii is the best version (besides, we all already know that it is). Thankfully for our unborn children, Miyamoto didn't mention any amorphous plans to bring gaming consoles into North American schools just yet. Presumably they'll have to play it fast and loose like we did -- keeps 'em sharp!