All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

Putt-Putt your way to the top with the new PlayStation Move motion controller on Planet Minigolf.

The plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies room.

Minerva's Den is the final piece of BioShock 2 DLC you'll ever get. Taking place in parallel to the main story of the game, this $9.99/800 MS Point add-on puts players in the huge, metallic boots of Subject Sigma, another Alpha-series Big Daddy who just isn't having a great day in the underwater metropolis of Rapture. Instead of dealing with Sophia Lamb, Sigma has his own nemesis to contend with: Reed Wahl.

You see, Reed Wahl holds the keys to the kingdom of Minerva's Den, which itself houses one of Rapture's greatest assets: The Thinker. It's a gigantic super computer unlike any other controlling the Rapture Central Computing district. Aiding Sigma is a character you may have forgotten about, because she kinda just disappeared at the beginning of the game: Brigid Tennenbaum.

2K Marin has finally revealed the launch date for BioShock 2's final DLC offering, Minerva's Den. On August 31, the DLC will launch on PSN and Xbox Live simultaneously for $9.99 and 800 MS Points, respectively. Games For Windows Live users will have to wait until "a later date" for the DLC.

Minerva's Den adds three new areas to explore in the titular level and runs parallel to the main story, meaning players need not complete the BioShock 2 campaign before struggling with whether they'll decide to harvest or adopt the six new Little Sisters peppered throughout. 2K Marin also revealed that, as an added incentive to those who picked up Protector Trials, players will be given access to the Master Protector tonic in Minerva's Den, which simultaneously increases the harvest times for any Little Sister you're chaperoning and the ADAM they collect. This tonic can be accessed via any Gatherer's Garden.

Be sure to read our preview of Minerva's Den, which includes impressions of a new weapon, an all-new Plasmid and the new Big Daddy type, the Lancer.

Free-to-play MMORPG releases new and improved community and guild features.

The Elyos foothold in Balaurea.

Psychically moving objects in the buff makes for a good time.

Get nail'd in Seattle.

Get nail'd in Seattle.

#murder Detectives in Seattle look to Dungeons and Dragons Online for answers to why, according to police, an 18-year-old high school student choked a 16-year-old developmentally disabled teen girl to death last Tuesday. Warning, the details of the crime are disturbing. More »

It looks like the "opportunity" Best Buy saw in the used game market has become "reality," as the company is now accepting used game trade-ins at nearly 600 stores in the US (with more stores on the way). Those who trade in games at Best Buy will receive a Best Buy gift card of equivalent value that can be used on anything in the store. Before long, Best Buy will begin selling used titles as well.

Don't bother looking for some fancy, computerized trade-in kiosk either. In most stores, trades are accepted at the customer service desk, while "select locations" have a "dedicated Trade-In desk" inside the games department. If all that human contact is a bit much, you can also trade in games online at Best Buy's pre-owned games site. Gift cards will be mailed within two weeks. Also, "select titles" are eligible for an extra $20 credit.

The website has a handy estimator to calculate the value of your used games. We're not quite sure what the basis is for trade-in value though, considering Alpha Protocol clocks in at $27 while Mass Effect 2 snags you just $8. If any of you out there take advantage of Best Buy's new program, be sure to let us know about the experience in the comments.

Get nail'd in Seattle.

#music DJ Hero 2, set for an Oct. 19 release, will include 105 songs remixed into 80 different mixes, Activision said today. More »

#preview The first chapter of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is broken into five parts, parts that tour through reinventions of some of PlayStation's best exclusive games, from God of War to Uncharted to Shadow of the Colossus. Gradually, it's also a fine Castlevania. More »

#rumor Hollywood rumor mill ShowbizSpy says sources indicate movie star Brad Pitt is first in line to play John Marston in a big screen adaptation of Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption. More »

It's going to be a good day, and you don't even know it yet. See, Activision just released the full list of songs that will be featured in some spliced manner in DJ Hero 2, meaning you're probably going to spend all day listening to the fresh, fresh songs you don't recognize, and then imagining the fresh, fresh manner in which they'll be blended. We've spent the past half hour envisioning a world where Snow's "Informer" could somehow be married to Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor," with a splash of Tiesto to boot. It's been a pretty great half hour.

You can come on this journey with us by checking out the full list of songs posted after the break.

Tale of Tales update first iPhone app and release a free version for your browser.

Dragon Age Origins - Ultimate Edition has yet to be officially announced, but it has now been rated by Australia's OFLC. Previously popping up as a GameStop listing with a $60 price and an October 12 release date, the re-release once again prompts us to blankly stare in EA's general direction until it confesses like a mage in the Chantry. We've sent couriers off to EA for official comment.

It's not quite the "Dragon Age Molybdenum" edition, but one can safely speculate that this "Utlimate" package would include all of the Origins DLC, along with the recently announced "Witch Hunt" add-on. With Dragon Age 2 half a year away, it really is time to wrap up Origins in a nice bundle.

SCENE Two pals catch the new Halo: Reach ad "Deliver Hope" on CBS, NBC, FOX, MTV, Spike TV, Comedy Central, SyFy, ESPN, F/X, TNT, TBS, Discovery Channel, G4 or another network. One is a gamer; the other clearly not ...

NOT (surprised) Wow! Was that an ad for a video game...?
GAMER (confidently) Uh-huh. The new Halo.
NOT The graphics look incredible! Man, these games really are starting to look real.
GAMER (angrily) That wasn't the game. It was a live-action short by the guy who directed that Smart People movie -- and a buncha other like famous people who helped out.
NOT Oh. That sounds expensive.

#clips Forget the civilian bickering, the standing around in the dark, Halo: Reach's game-setting live-action videos have suddenly gotten very real, very explodey. More »

Recently released kill-em-up Shank has split critics - 1UP says it's the "freshest, most unequivocally rewarding beat-em-up game to come along in almost a decade" while Gamespot claims "style can't quite overcome the lack of substance in this fun though shallow brawler" - but surprisingly it's also caused a fissure in the console world. So while the PS3 version continues along, with no problems in sight, the Xbox 360 release suffers two issues on certain systems.

First, users who played the Xbox Live trail and then - eager to continue their kill-a-thon - purchased the title to start earning some of those sweet Achievements ... well, we've got bad news. Klei's Jamie Chang writes on the game's site that "if you unlock the Trial on the 360, there's a chance that the first two achievements are not unlocked." The good news: the team at Klei has "already got a fix for this" so you'll get your 'cheevos just as soon as that's rolled out.

The other, and less significant, issue: chugging cinematics. Cheng notes that "older Xbox 360's have slower disc access rates, so the opening cinematic chugs, and loading between levels takes longer." This never came up in testing and doesn't actually affect the gameplay in any way, but that's got to be doubly annoying. Slow load times off a hard drive?

The good news is, we're hearing about this is on Klei's site very soon after complaints started appearing on message boards, and Cheng and Co have already pledged to address the issues. And, as a sort of strange, machete-themed penance, they're offering the above image in wallpaper format. We imagine it's metaphorical: Shank is Cheng, and each machete is for one of the aforementioned bugs ... or it's just a picture of Shank. You could interpret it either way, really.

#retro Hironobu Sakaguchi created Final Fantasy. Yoshio Sakamoto co-created Metroid. And in 1987, both worked together on a game with this lady, Miho Nakayma. More »

#screengrab 1987's Test Drive had five cars. 2009's Need for Speed: Shift had more. And at the other end of the spectrum, we have GT5 and its 200 "premium" cars and its 800 standard cars. As seen on Pixel Counterrr. More »

#clips Most signs point towards the future being a place free of clumsy plastic instruments with our video games. On the off chance they are still around, though, we hope Rock Band plays a little like this concept clip by Freddiew. More »

A fact sheet for Epicenter's zombie-murder/guitar music mashup (why not?) Rock of the Dead now presents the title as coming only to Xbox 360 and PS3, with a date of October 5. A Wii version was previously planned, but seems to have fallen away like the walking dead after a sweet solo. In fact, when it was first announced, the game was for Wii only!

We're checking with UFO about the absent Wii game. You can see what could have been (and, on Xbox and PS3, what will be) in two new trailers after the break.

UFO also announced a set of three apps for various iThings to support the release of the main game. Rock of the Dead: Zombie Pong, a free two-player Pong game with musical and undead themes, is available now for iPad. It'll be followed by Rock of the Dead: Zombie Survival, a miniature, top-down iPhone version of the "real" game, and Rock of the Dead: Whack-a-Zombie, which is exactly what it sounds like, also for iPhone.

Shank demo/download tooled up and ready to go.

#screengrab As seen on Ript. More »

#figurines This ToHeart2 figure looks like the work of the devil. Relax, because the company that released it apparently isn't around anymore to frighten you. More »

Mac coming to Steam was a huge deal when first announced and, since launching in May, Mac users have become five percent of Steam's total audience. That's damn significant -- back in January, Steam reported it had 25 million users, so you do the math.

That five percent figure comes via the latest Steam survey, which analyzed the digital distribution platform in July 2010. It's down from 8 percent in June, but that spike was likely thanks in large part to free Portal. Interestingly, almost 47 percent of the folks on Macs who accessed Steam during July did so using a MacBook Pro.

Also good to keep in mind: back in July, only a small fraction of the games on Steam were available for Mac users. Since then, an ever-growing catalogue of Mac-compatible games has recruited even more Mac users into the army of bloodshot-eyed fun seekers.

#mmo I'm willing to give this game a chance, because when you put the whole religious side of things in a box, the Old Testament - with its plagues and pestilence and pillars of salt - is pretty badass. More »