All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

We're giving them away; want one?

#xbox360 Remember when Oprah handed out free Kinects to her audience, causing her audience to completely lose its collective shit? Well, Ellen DeGeneres can whip the ladies into a lather too, courtesy of Harmonix's Dance Central. More »

#screengrab As seen on TShirtLaundry, via Gamefreaks. More »

I am a terrible, wimpy gamer. At least, that's what Donkey Kong Country Returns convinced me of after stealing dozens of balloons (lives) away from my defeated ape. While my colleagues, James and JC, hinted at its difficulty during E3, they didn't detail how truly sadistic the level design is. James' conclusion that this is the return of old Donkey Kong Country was wrong -- this is Mega Man.

I also made the silly assumption that the mine cart level -- as they were in the past -- would be a breeze to get through. But, I was wrong. I started the level, doing just fine. The first long jump came as no problem, but then the deaths kept on accumulating: jumping for the letter K caused me to jump off the track to my doom, jumping over an enemy led me to a cliff, forgetting to duck while mid-air in a jump got me killed by spikes, jumping on top of an enemy got me killed by another pair of spikes, I didn't have enough momentum to make a short jump followed by a long jump, etc. etc. By the time I actually reached the end of the level, a Nintendo representative had to reset the demo, because I had managed to whittle down the dozens of lives down to... three?

#ps3 You can put a miniature Helghast helmet in your home if you purchase the deluxe edition of Killzone 3 for the PlayStation 3. But tiny space Nazi helmet replicas aren't the only goodies coming in Killzone 3 Helghast Edition. More »

Perhaps you've received Kinect and an early copy of Kinectimals? "Lucky me!" you might say to yourself, thinking of all the tiger petting you're about to get into. You plug in the Kinect, pop in the game tape, and the Xbox prompts you with an update. "Of course!" you say. "For this crazy camera thing I just got!"

Without thinking, you hit "Continue" -- and that's where everything goes wrong. You see, the update it pulls down isn't the most recent. After updating and upon signing into Xbox Live, your newly updated system will tell you that it needs to be updated again, but here's the catch: That update will fail (see above pic). Without that update, you won't be able to sign onto Xbox Live.

Since Kinect (nor its games) isn't officially available until next week, the latest Microsoft could publicly release the Kinect Dashboard update is November 4. This means you're stuck with an early version of the new Dashboard -- without Xbox Live functionality, not to mention Kinect -- until the update becomes available in the next week or so. Hopefully you like couch co-op!

We celebrate Star Wars' greatest villain in pixels and polygons.

We celebrate Star Wars' greatest villain in pixels and polygons.

We celebrate Star Wars' greatest villain in pixels and polygons.

We celebrate Star Wars' greatest villain in pixels and polygons.

There's a popular story that goes something like this: A boy asks a punk singer, "How can I be punk?" The singer looks at the boy, bites on his cigarette and kicks over a trashcan, grumbling, "That's punk."

"So if I kick over a trashcan, then I'll be a punk?" asks the boy. "No," says the singer. "You'll be a follower."

Despite its best efforts to capture punk skateboard culture, Shaun White Skateboarding gets hung up on kicking over familiar trash cans and somehow feels more derivative than its straightforward snowboarding predecessor.

#impressions Remember the time you first tried a PC gaming mouse mat? Not a mouse pad, a mouse mat. I remember it like it was half an hour ago. I tried one that was sandblasted for elite PC gamers. More »

#pullquote Of course this was pre patch.... right? More »

Ubisoft has announced that Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood is "gold" -- i.e., it's on the way to the factory where it gets turned into thousands of silver discs and shipped to stores, where it will go on sale November 16. To accompany the news, a new montage trailer is out. Hit the break to view it.

#blizzard As promised, Blizzard has opened up pre-orders for its next World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm, on Battle.net. Buy World of Warcraft: Cataclysm now, download it before launch date, then play one minute after the add-on officially launches. More »

For those of you that weren’t around when the original NBA Jam came out, you might not know why the re-envisioning from EA is such a big deal. Why do people seem so excited about NBA Jam, you ask? Well, it was one of the hottest arcade games of all-time, and then it [...]

This year's Team Fortress 2 Halloween special includes things that no man has ever seen in Team Fortress 2 -- indeed, things that most TF2 players will insist do not, and cannot exist. Like an NPC. For the first time in any Team Fortress game, your team will meet an AI boss character: the "Horseless, Headless Horsemann." He'll be waiting for you in the spooky new Mann Manor map, which would be a much more frightening prospect if your whole team wasn't overladen with giant guns at all times.

Other new updates include Halloween items in the Mann Co. store, a randomly dropping Haunted Halloween Gift, and Ghostchievements, which are like regular Achievements but scarier, obviously. You can now gift wrap items in the store, as well, but despite Valve's best efforts, we're not going to buy that as a Halloween-themed update.

#dlc The makers of this month's enjoyable Enslaved: Odyssey To The West will offer a $10 downloadable expansion to their game soon. It will let people play the game in 3D. And it will let us play as horny fatman Pigsy. More »

And avoid the midnight nerd-swarm,

More studio pics here - headquartered in a building called “The Soho” in Tokyo’s Odaiba area - Ikumi Nakamura is a director - staff of 35 - “Tango-chan”, the company logo, is said to be an apparition of Odaiba who refuses to go to into the ocean due to a weakness to salt. You can make Tango-chan grow [...]