All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

#dealtaku David Banner is believed to be dead, and he must let the world think that he is dead, until he can find a way to control the raging deals that dwell within him. More »

#openthread Blizzard may have shrugged off coordinated community discontent in the past, but this week, we weren't talking about LAN support in Starcraft II. It was, instead, the MMO maker's decision to put everyone's real name on their forum messages. More »

#legal Guarded doors, secret interrogations and broken promises are just the latest allegations laid out in the ongoing saga about the break-up between the world's largest game publisher and the people in charge of creating Modern Warfare 2. More »

Cave, famous for its insane bullet hell shmups, is taking full advantage of the reduced risk of self-publishing downloadable games. Following the worldwide iPhone release of Espgaluda II, Cave's Makoto Asada announced that the company is planning to release the 1999 shmup Guwange on Xbox Live Arcade worldwide. In a separate post, Asada showed some work-in-progress screens.

"The release date and price are not yet decided," Asada said, but the game will receive an English localization for the XBLA version. In the meantime, if you crave Cave, Deathsmiles is in American stores now, published (and put into a really big box) by Aksys.

[Thanks, dirtybeefz!]

The official Left 4 Dead 2 blog has posted the latest mutation to Valve's great zombie apocalypse simulation and it's ... swords. All swords, all the time. Hacking, slashing, slicing, dicing, piercing, thrusting -- you name it, you'll be doing it against the undead horde.

The post also has the results of the poll about players' favorite level finale, and Dark Carnival's Midnight Riders concert takes the win on Xbox 360, with The Parish's bridge traversal tying it for PC players. The worst? Unanimously, Hard Rain's boat wait is the pick (and we'd have to agree). Finally, the blog teases next week's mutation with the words "Hard Eight." That could only mean one thing: Get ready to star in an underrated Paul Thomas Anderson movie!

Better late than never, right? Gears of War ($20), Bioshock ($20) and Max Payne ($10) have been added to Games for Windows Live's Games on Demand service.

[Thanks, TheWeaponeer]

City Interactive has announced that a patch is headed to its recently released sneaky shooter, Sniper: Ghost Warrior. The patch is set to fix some GUI problems -- including multiplayer stats -- and will also fix some multiplayer bugs, like the ability to run outside the map. Multiplayer will also see the "Increased ability" for a player to hold his breath. Perhaps most importantly, the patch will fix a crashing issue on the PC version.

The patch is expected to arrive for both the Xbox and PC version of Sniper within the next two weeks. See the patch notes after the break.

Half-Life has proven itself to be a pretty popular universe for fans to set their fan films within -- but that doesn't mean we're not hungry for more. We recently got our fix from the trailer for Beyond Black Mesa, a short film chronicling the adventures of a small band of anti-Combine rebels.

#clips Brain Age isn't the most enjoyable of DS games played straight. Playing it through an emulator that lets you substitute answers for stupid doodles sure fixes that. More »

#tellusdammit Hello there! I love blueberry pie. You know what that means, right? More »

This Sunday, with the release of Dragon Quest IX, thousands of gamers will begin the time-honored tradition of slaughtering adorable Slimes, over and over and over again. Don't feel bad, that's what they're there for. But how did Akira Toriyama's cutest character design ever (take that, all Dragon Ball characters) come to be?

"I was really hooked on Wizardry the PC game, and that's kind of where I got the inspiration for the Slime," Dragon Quest producer Yuji Horii told MTV Multiplayer. "There's ... slime-looking characters [in Wizardry], so I got the inspiration from it. I was doodling the slime-looking character and I took it to Mr. Toriyama, who did the character design, and he made it the Slime we see today."

The Slime went on to appear not only in every Dragon Quest game, but also in its own games, along with plenty of adorable merchandise.

#cosplay If women on the covers of magazines can be photoshopped to within an inch of oblivion, then damnit, there's no reason why cosplayers can't as well. More »

Digital distributor Direct2Drive is offering a puzzling offer until August 6: purchase the Modern Warfare 2 bundle (which includes the game and both map packs) for $89.99, and get the original Modern Warfare for free.

#toys SOTA Toys have sent over the first images of an upcoming piece of Darksiders merchandise fans of the game might be interested in: a big sculpture of "hero" War, and his trusty steed Ruin. More »

#surfer In a recent interview with Surfer magazine, pro-surfer Bruce Irons proudly told the mag that he's a gamer, just not a World of Warcraft gamer. More »

It's time for another Good Idea/Bad Idea:

Good Idea: Blizzard's dream of accountability on its forums.

Bad Idea: Not taking account of how much forums hate accountability.

Learn more good ideas and bad ideas after the break. What's everyone playing this weekend?

#screens One of our favorite games of E3, Wii-exclusive Lost in Shadow, apparently has a residential section. Don't worry it's not nearly as boring as it sounds, especially if you're playing as a de-bodied shadow. More »

#offtopic So I've been on a big BLT kick lately, getting there thanks to my old editor from Jacksonville, N.C. waxing nostalgic lately about 'mater sammiches and remembering this heartbreakingly brilliant work of sentimentality from three years ago. More »

The results of a recent survey of iPad owners conducted by Resolve Market Research seems to indicate that the tablet is taking a notable chunk out of the handheld gaming industry share. According to Mashable, 28 percent of respondents claimed that one of their main uses for the iPad was gaming, while 23 percent said between the iPad, smartphones and portable gaming devices, the former is "the most enjoyable for playing games."

Most evidential of the iPad's effect on the market is a question inquiring what mobile device respondents had no interest in purchasing after owning an iPad -- 38 percent answered portable gaming device. Of course, these same respondents may have had no interest in buying a handheld before purchasing an iPad -- still, Sony and Nintendo are likely sweating these harrowing percentiles.

#parody Everyone knows the wildly popular flash game Super Mario Bros. Crossover, which just added Ryu Hayabusa to the Mushroom Kingdom. But for every successful casting there area thousand rejects, as this wonderfully brilliant video from Dueling Analogs reminds. More »

Though the gameplay video for Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded posted below is awfully lo-res (look how tiny the original version is!), it shows us what we need to know. There will be classic locations from the series first installment. There will be Heartless. There will be ... Cubes!

UDON is back with another prestigious compilation of the studio’s involvement with legendary developer and publisher of video games, Capcom Entertainment, Inc. UDON’S ART OF CAPCOM® 2 is a follow up to the studios’s original Art of Capcom book, and collects all of UDON’s Capcom artwork from the past three years. Beautifully reproduced images from Street [...]

Whoever first committed Mario to frosting may as well be sainted now that we’re all obsessed with video game-themed cakes. Join cake enthusiasts here at GamePro as we listen to former Kotaku Weekend Editor Flynn DeMarco tells us how the great video game cake craze first began and maybe tells us where it’s going. Host: Dave [...]

What side are you on in the StarCraft universe?