All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Take on the role of one of mankind's elite defenders in this gritty sci-fi title now coming to Windows PC.

Netflix just became a lot easier to use on the PS3. No, you still need a disc (for now), but the application has been stealthily upgraded with the ability to search for and watch videos from the entire Instant library. For example, typing the letter "A" quickly revealed Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Unfortunately, the Xbox Live and Wii versions of Netflix don't appear to have been updated with this feature yet. Xbox owners will have to wait until November.

[Thanks, Rusty Jack!]

#clips You drooled over the news that Capcom and Namco Bandai had teamed up for Street Fighter X Tekken this weekend, now listen to the cheers of fans as they watch the game's first battle unfold. More »

Nintendo's unique action title gets a sudden release this week in Japan as a WiiWare game.

This year's Super Bowl celebration has just about everything you could ask for. Fresh direct-feed included.

#ps3 In theory, the PlayStation 3 controller is a complicated mechanism, a device with too many buttons for the average person to understand. In theory, the better control mechanism for interactive drama is a good old remote control you can wave. More »

#jailbreaking Librarian of Congress James H. Billington today reveals new exceptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that address the legality of jailbreaking your Apple products, unlocking your cell phone, and bypassing computer game digital rights management systems. More »

During the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 Comic-Con panel, LucasArts producer Haden Blackman led a gameplay preview for the assembled crowd, showing off some new elements of the sequel which again stars fallen Vader apprentice Starkiller. The demonstration built on last month's E3 preview, with plenty more scenes of messy Stormtrooper cleanup -- it's a tough job, but somebody's gotta do it.

As he showed troopers sliced, diced and Forcefully obliterated, Blackman noted that the development team has worked to diversify enemy AI. Player feedback from the first game criticized the different types of enemies for all acting the same, so LucasArts has created separate AI behavior for almost all of the enemies in the sequel. Of course, this also goes for the new enemies, of which Blackman introduced a giant walker equipped with a shield and a Carbonite gun. To defeat the menace, Starkiller must first use his Force power to rip off the shield, and then take on the vulnerable walker while dodging its freeze ray blasts.

Producer Yoshinori Ono says next big announcement could come at next year's Captivate.

#ps3 I have finally played PlayStation 3 games in 3D. Three of them. I was impressed; I felt ill. More of the former. Some of the latter. More »

Curt Schilling's 38 Studios has finally announced the title of its first game at Comic-Con, and while details on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are still sparse, you can't argue that the game's already got potential. Fantasy author R.A. Salvatore has been working on the game's world and story, comic artist Todd McFarlane is designing the art, and Big Huge Games has teamed up with Elder Scrolls veteran Ken Rolston to put the title together.

That's Schilling's gamble -- as an experienced gamer himself ("I've got five 70-plus" characters in World of Warcraft, he says), he's trying to make something that thrills him. On Thursday, the team held a Comic-Con panel and teased a mix of "deep quest narrative" and "combat that keeps you doing combat." Todd McFarlane jumped up on his chair to show off how big his characters' motions were and promised that "we will kill some people better in this game than anybody kills anybody."

But can this talented lineup pull it off? I sat down to chat with Schilling, Salvatore, and Big Huge Games' lead designer, Mark Nelson, to see if they could share anything beyond what the short trailer and the screenshots revealed.

Classics by AC/DC, Ozzy Osbourne, Guns N' Roses and more highlight new edition of 'Most Influential Soundtrack in Videogame History.'

Toy Story 3 buzzed up four spots to take the top of Chart-Track's UK sales All Formats chart this week, due in no small part to the film's release and subsequent success as the second-highest grossing opening weekend for a Pixar film in the region. Red Dead Redemption rode up two spots after putting the spurs to sales, and Ubisoft's Dance On Broadway keeps high-kicking the charts in third place, maintaining a long-term career like its predecessor, Just Dance, which is resilient in eighth place.

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies debuted in ninth on the charts as the only new title to break the top ten. Also, in a plummet akin to jumping off the Agency Building, Crackdown 2 sales dropped 59 percent, taking the game from the top spot last week to tenth. Check out the UK top ten after the break.

#clips Come August 9, North American Wii owners can no longer complain that their console lacks a game that involves rubbing a topless woman's back, when Microforum Ltd.'s Enjoy Your Massage finally hits WiiWare. More »

#pullquote Comic book mastermind Grant Morrison, says his new comic, Batman Inc, is "an attempt to do a comic influenced by the storytelling structures, images, senses of scale, movement and perspective and so on that I've absorbed from games." Morrison knows what he's doing and elaborates splendidly at IGN. [SDCC 10: The Corporate Batman, art from Batman #700] More »

Gangsta' Zombies sweepstakes winner to receive one year of free videogames.

Make America yours.

"Everyone Needs to Try Kane & Lynch 2" public demo for PlayStation 3, Windows PC and Xbox 360.

Street Fighter IV producer Yoshinori Ono expects Street Fighter X Tekken to be released in two years, with the Capcom-developed fighter debuting first in the proposed two-game deal. Speaking to Famitsu (via Andriasang), Ono added that Tekken X Street Fighter, under development at Namco Bandai with long-time franchise producer Katsuhiro Harada, is being developed completely separately -- and the two teams aren't actively sharing information. Are they locked in battle, trying to see who'll make the better game? Place your bets now, ladies and gentlemen.

Ono claims the next major announcement for the crossover won't occur until Capcom's Captivate conference, which will likely be held next April. In the meantime, check out the SFXT reveal at Comic-Con after the break -- along with some serious hootin' and hollerin'.

We suppose the Sims franchise has a few elements in common with the role-playing genre -- after all, it's about character improvement and, more often than not, all of the characters are startlingly, impossibly attractive. Still, it seems Maxis is getting a helping hand on Darkspore development from a more experienced RPG developer -- according to Gamespot, the studio's Comic-Con panel revealed that fellow EA studio BioWare is helping out on the project.

The capacity of this help is still unknown, but based on BioWare's strong roots in the genre, we strongly doubt they've been brought in to offer backrubs to weary programmers. We've contacted EA to find out more about this partnership, and to find out whether we can expect Darkspore to contain any romance sub-plots leading to tastefully directed sex scenes.

Treat yourself to another encounter with the final frontier.

#xbox360 Platformance: Castle Pain is a $1 game that was just released on the Xbox 360's Indie Games channel. You jump through the castle, die a lot — as I did — keep reviving at the nearest candle. Beware the ghost. More »

We suppose the Sims franchise has a few elements in common with the role-playing genre -- after all, it's about character improvement and, more often than not, all of the characters are startlingly, impossibly attractive. Still, it seems Maxis is getting a helping hand on Darkspore development from a more experienced RPG developer -- according to Gamespot, the studio's Comic-Con panel revealed that fellow EA studio BioWare is helping out on the project.

The capacity of this help is still unknown, but based on BioWare's strong roots in the genre, we strongly doubt they've been brought in to offer backrubs to weary programmers. We've contacted EA to find out more about this partnership, and to find out whether we can expect Darkspore to contain any romance sub-plots leading to tastefully directed sex scenes.

New Game Downloads Deliver Good Times by Air, Land and Sea

You're not going to believe this. We had to double-check, in case we read it wrong or in case it was an egregious typo or something. But ... there's a Virtual Console game this week.

Though EA continues to dance around a version of NBA Jam for consoles beyond Wii, the United States' ESRB is the latest ratings agency to announce the game for Xbox 360 and PS3. The German USK listed the cherished basketball game for high-def consoles earlier this month.

We're -- once again -- following up for official comment from EA. We know the ratings boards can't be the only ones looking for the game on more systems.

#starcraftii Today is July 26. But tomorrow is July 27. You know what July 27 is, don't you? More »

#screengrab He feasts on the flesh of the living (mushrooms). By mrksaari, via Game Informer. More »

#starcraft Maybe it was because of the beta, maybe it's because of Korea, but with Starcraft II due out this week the game's singleplayer campaign still isn't getting much love. More »

Whisperings point to LA setting for next game.