#microsoft
From Ico to God of War to Sly to Beyond Good & Evil, the PlayStation 3 is currently being inundated by high definition ports of classic PS2 games. The Xbox 360? Notsomuch. More »
Man, we talked about The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask earlier today, but I didn’t even realize that the game is now 10 years old! I swear, I feel like the game just came out. I really, really need to sit down with this one again and go for another run. It [...]
The following information comes from a Nintendo rep dealing with the Poland area. If you do not see the subtitles, click on the direct link.
Does this rep know what she’s talking about, or was she simply mistaken? We won’t know for sure until NoA spills the beans…whenever that is!
Square Enix has been dancing around the prospect of bringing its supernatural survival horror RPG Parasite Eve to the PSN for a while now -- but at last, it seems the dance has concluded. The publisher recently announced that the series' debut outing will arrive on the PSOne Classics storefront on Nov. 4, while Parasite Eve 2 will arrive shortly thereafter on November 18. Both arrive before the December 22 launch of The 3rd Birthday -- but who cares about that one? You haven't played it before. Bo-ring.
Feel free to get excited about this news, but keep in mind that Square Enix's titles have an awfully difficult time with making their way from the Japanese PSN to the American PSN. (Here's looking at you, Brave Fencer Musashi, Einhander, Vagrant Story and like, a billion others.)
#clips
We know, Kinect is shooting for a market more familiar with the Wii than with Modern Warfare perks, but it's still a little strange seeing an Xbox 360 console pop up on the Home Shopping Network. More »
Created by first-year students at ENJIM, the Graduate School of Games and Interactive Medias in Angoulême, France, White plays on the classic FPS formula by asking players not just to shoot, but to: "Frag, Paint and Share." Designed in just four months, the game is, curiously, "based on both the player's violence and creativity."
You traverse a flat, white canvas, fragging multicolored "Calvis" -- chubby Pikmin-like creatures -- which bleed and burst into beautiful splatter (paint!). Get this: The logo pictured above is actually a bird's-eye view of the after-action gameworld, called a "Whitepaper." Players are encouraged to share these murderous works of art through the official game site.
White was released today for PC. You can download the game here -- it's free! Check out the launch trailer after the break.
#rumor
You may not think iPods are true gaming machines, but retail giant GameStop certainly does, as it'll soon be accepting Apple's handheld devices for trade-in. More »
#review
We want to be king, do we not? We want, at least, to try it, to reign wise and strong, loved, perhaps, or feared. Fable III is the video game that could let you learn which kind of ruler you might be. At least, that was the plan. More »
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed 2 is a desperate cash grab. For whatever minor improvements were made to the combat for this sequel -- and, boy, are they pretty basic -- the story is an insult to the original's award-winning narrative. While the first Force Unleashed tied up a compelling piece of Star Wars cannon in a nice bow, the sequel has no aspiration to be a major part of lore or to be nearly as epic. It simply cobbles together glorified fan fiction for what amounts to an unexceptional subplot as it abruptly ends in the second act screaming, "SEQUEL GOES HERE!"
The story begins with a revived Starkiller, locked up in a cloning facility on rainy Kamino, being told by Darth Vader that he's just the latest iterative test tube creation in some cloning plot ... or is he? No, really, or is he? We never find out. That's not so much a spoiler as it is the type of writing one should be prepared for. However, that's not the main plot. At its core, the story is about the shackles of love, as our sad clone (... or is he?) desperately tries to reconnect with his love interest from the first game, Cpt. Juno Eclipse.
You could make an argument that with his overabundance of power, Starkiller's character in the original Force Unleashed was a "Mary Sue," but the first story was handled with such respect and (at the time) finality, it wasn't a real problem. For the sequel, let that Mary Sue criticism fly proud: Our hero tosses TIE fighters like crumpled paper, survives an impossible fall in the wake of a starship's detonation and is basically the most ridiculously powerful user of The Force the galaxy has ever known. If Darth Vader had one of the highest concentrations of midichlorians ever seen, Starkiller is a midichlorian.
Listen, you guys need to start getting okay with the fact that, pretty soon, you're going to have to proposition your Xbox Live friends if you want to get all the 'Cheevos tucked away in Fable 3. We suggest watching this dev diary to learn the proper etiquette when making said awkward proposal.
#crime
Wichita, Kansas police are on the hunt for Benjamin Redgate, who they suspect is partly responsible for the death of Luke German, the result of a disagreement over a "video football game on PlayStation 3." More »
#callofduty
Treyarch and Activision have been relatively quiet on the single-player side of Call of Duty: Black Ops. But it appears Alex Mason, the main protagonist of the next Call of Duty, will have a lot to say. More »
In a new English edition of "Iwata Asks," in which Nintendo CEO Satoru Iwata politely interrogates designers and employees about recent games, there's an interesting discussion regarding the difficulty of Kirby's Epic Yarn. Specifically, it's about how developer Good-Feel cut out deadly traps and objects in order to preserve the game's endearing, fluffy and fun atmosphere.
"As a team, we were extremely opposed to the idea of an action game where the game wasn't over when an enemy got you," said producer Etsunobu Ebisu. "We debated that for quite a long time." At first, levels in Kirby's Epic Yarn (formerly Fluff's epic yarn) were full of thorns, a thrilling contrivance that didn't sit well with the game's warm aesthetic. Later, however, "we thought it would be fine if we just made a fun game the way we're good at," Ebisu explained.
This led to the introduction of a different characteristic in obstacles, with failure to avoid them resulting in the loss of Kirby's collected beads. You can collect them once dropped, but the in-game currency -- used to unlock bonus levels, for instance -- acts as a strong measure of success at the conclusion of a stage. "When serious gamers play, they want to clear a level without any mistakes like running into enemies, so this game is made so you really feel regret when you run into enemies and a strong sense of achievement when you clear a level without any mistakes," said producer Nobuo Matsumiya.
Or, as Iwata succinctly put it: "As a gamer, it's humiliating to bump into an enemy."
Microsoft has released free DLC for Fable 3 on the Xbox Live Marketplace. The content includes two weapons: a war hammer (the "Bloodstone Bludgeon") and a rifle ("Gusket's Musket"). Neither will be immediately available; they're added to your "gift queue" and be unlocked as the game progresses.
#exclusive
In January, Dark Horse Comics will release Mass Effect: Evolution, a miniseries penned by Mass Effect 2 head writer Mac Walters. Check out some of the series' covers and a brand new Mass Effect webcomic. More »
And just like that, Doom and Double D Dodgeball are no longer available on Xbox Live Arcade. Noticed by GamerBytes, both titles were pulled with no warning. The games can still be played if they were previously purchased.
Double D Dodgeball's mention in this post is for the simple fact that it happened to occur at the same time as Doom's removal. Speculation as to why Doom was pulled revolves around rights issues involving id Software's acquisition by Zenimax and the XBLA title being published by Activision.
We're following up with Zenimax to find out what its plans are for the game.
#vvvvvv
Terry Cavanagh's wonderful VVVVVV is one of the best 2D platformers of 2010. But what if the gravity-flipping spike-filled interstellar adventure ventured into the third-dimension? It might look a little something like this. More »
Again, if you really want some of the fun spoiled for you, you can hit up the link below and learn the details of how to unlock Guybrush in Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. Wouldn’t it be more fun to hunt him down on your own?
Those of you waiting for the first hit of Civ 5 DLC khan get it right now for free. The Civilization and Scenario Pack: Mongols features Genghis Khan and his armies, and is a free gift to players. Also, the Babylonian Civilization (the Civ version of it, not the real thing) is available for $4.99.
Just a few weeks before Kinect's retail launch, Microsoft hosted an event in San Francisco to celebrate the much-anticipated new hardware. There we spoke with Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer not only about the hands-free camera peripheral, but also the company's success with the "Xbox 360 S" console refresh, Ubisoft's strong Kinect launch lineup and, of course, the PlayStation Move.
