All Topics Gaming older than one year ago

There's a lot going on in the latest Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood developer diary. It covers everything from the Templars to Desmond's mission to new VR training exercises. Anyway, we're sure you don't need us to give you excuses to watch it. In fact, you're already watching it aren't you?

Just click the icon of the demo you want to see, and that video be loaded right up for you!

Call of Duty: Black Ops will soon be at retailers everywhere! Join in the fun this Monday night by attending a Midnight Opening on the night of November 8th. Several retailers have announced their plans for midnight openings, but to makes things easier, head to the Midnight Opening Locator (here) to find your nearest [...]

#consoletaisen Sony's recent slashing of the PSPgo's price worldwide has had a noticeable effect on sales of the download-only device, at least in Japan. The regularly triple-digit selling PSPgo just had one of its best weeks ever overseas. More »

Right now (check the exact time on your NES cartridge clock), you could be using hard drives, CD cases, soap, and even NES systems shaped like NES cartridges. Now, thanks to Unconventional Hacker, you can even camouflage a wireless router among your pile of extra Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cartridges. You do have a pile of extra SMB/Duck Hunt cartridges, we're sure.

The site offers a step-by-step guide to cramming a wireless router inside a NES cartridge, and even adding a snazzy custom label. Next up: an Instructable for how to deal with your insatiable urge to make things look like NES carts!

Don't act like you haven't thought about it.

When God of War 3 director Stig Asmussen recently revealed that "we cut less" from the PS3 game than from its PS2 predecessors, he wasn't kidding! As PlayStation Blog has unearthed, God of War 2 has the entire "lost" city of Atlantis buried in its design history.

In the video after the break, level creator Jonathan Hawkins guides us through the blueprint. This was his first "big chance," recalls Hawkins, who says "knowing what i know now, it cracks me up how all out I went." He reckons three to four months were spent on the intricate Atlantis level before it was eventually scrapped as the game's story evolution went in a different direction. (Kratos does take care of unfinished Atlantis business in the new Ghost of Sparta PSP game.)

"As a designer you have to have tough chops and, you know, roll with the punches," Hawkins warns with a chuckle about the unsentimental creative process. "I wish you guys could have played it."

#nascar The flaps go up to keep Jeff Gordon from going airborne in this new batch of screenshots for NASCAR 2011: The Game, due next year from Eutechnyx and Activision. More »

You can safely add Fallout: New Vegas to the list of open-world titles which completely endorse the doctrine of complete and total pacifism. NeoGAF user Water_Wendi recently posted a screenshot featuring some braggable statistics after completing the game's campaign and nearly all of its quests: zero people or creatures were killed during the proceedings.

Well done, Water_Wendi! We can't imagine how hard it must have been to suppress the gamer's natural instinct to constantly murder. Now that you've completed this challenge, why not move onto one of these equally arduous goals?

• Beat the game without talking to anyone
• Beat the game without picking up any items at all
• Beat the game without moving
• Beat the game without encountering any bugs, glitches or crashes

Choose a response and redefine your world.

#wii When Nintendo's Super Mario Bros. collection comes stateside next month, it will come in a pretty little package for Wii owners. If you're a fan of Mario, you're probably going to want to grab this slick limited edition package. More »

Earlier this year we got our first glimpse at fan-created Half-Life film "Beyond Black Mesa" ... and it made us kinda freak out. Knowing that more was coming, you'd think we'd have prepared ourselves, but we couldn't have been ready for the sheer excitement that resulted from watching the latest trailer -- it picked up our expectations for the film with a gravity gun and fired them into space, in so many words.

Beyond the fact that the action is blistering and the feeling of Half-Life's world is spot-on, Gordon Freeman's infamous crowbar makes an appearance. Sure, we realize it's a bit bizarre to have our heart rates increase after briefly glimpsing a crowbar, but, well ... okay, we don't have a logical explanation. We just love Gordon Freeman. How could you not?!

Following the departure of creative director Stuart Black, the Bodycount team at Codemasters is losing more high-profile talent, this time Codemasters Guildford GM Adrian Bolton, according to Eurogamer. Also out: Bodycount's original spring 2011 release date, replaced by "early summer."

CEO Rod Cousens said that the delay wasn't necessarily related to the outgoing developers, but instead is about quality concerns with the game. "He's left, but I don't think the company centres around one person. If I left I don't think the company falls over," Cousens said, noting that "someone will fill the void." The delay happened due to Codemasters' unwillingness to "compromise the game."

Sorry, "horrifyingly awkward news bloopers," you've been surpassed by our new favorite YouTube search term: "Kinect with night-vision goggles." When viewing your living room through the lens of NVGs (like the ones included in the Prestige Edition of Modern Warfare 2), you can see the beautiful galaxy of pinpoint sensors projected by Kinect's obsidian eyes.

Check out some videos of this phenomenon after the jump, and contemplate the fact that by buying Kinect, you're not only purchasing the controller-free controller of the future -- you're also getting a funky-ass invisible disco ball.

#3d Those who dug out their 3D glasses for the last post, my attempt to show you Madden's 3D mode fell flat. Here to save the day is Operation Sports' MessenjahMatt, with a 3D presentation of Michael Jordan in NBA 2K11. More »

Darkspore's been introduced to us as "Spore meets Diablo," and seeing it in action reinforces that early pitch -- the game has six abilities on a bar across the bottom, and health and mana bars on either side, while characters that appear as if they were generated in Spore hack and slash their way across the screen. But what EA really wants to do with Darkspore, says Michael Arsers, software engineer on the title, isn't just clone an action RPG with Will Wright's funny toys. They want to answer that question everyone had after Spore originally released.

"A lot of the criticisms on Spore," he told me recently, "were that there were a lot of cool tools, but where's the game? And that's what we were trying to get at here." So you might be forgiven for thinking Darkspore is the product of some weird genetic mashup of game genres -- it basically was. "The team that started this production was a very core gamer, WoW arena/DotA kind of crowd, and so we really wanted to take the creatures from Spore and put them in a hardcore game," Arsers said. "We have this great Creator technology, so how can we leverage and make a core game with that?"

We've already heard a bit about the singleplayer side of the title, but no true hardcore game is complete without some player-versus-player (PvP) action, and so Arsers was excited to show off the PvP Arena mode that he and the team are working on.

#madden Last week, Madden NFL 11 slipped in a 3D presentation mode through a promotion with Doritos. It's the old-school red-and-blue 3D, and if it's not entirely free, it only costs a bag of chips. Is it worth even that? More »

Shinji Mikami is putting that Zenimax money to good use, adding three new members to his Tango Gameworks team. The biggest name among the new acquisitions is Masafumi Takada, former Grasshopper Manufacture composer, and the man behind the soundtracks for Killer 7, God Hand, No More Heroes, and recent Platinum Games releases Infinite Space and Vanquish.

Environmental artist Naoki Katakai and programmer Shinichiro Ishikawa, both of whom worked on Resident Evil games with Mikami in the past, have also joined the team. You can read bios of all the new staffers, and see drawings of them with nosebleeds, here.

Tango also opened an art blog, which currently features the grisly image seen above -- a possible first look at the studio's new game.

#gameinformer Master Chief, Nathan Drake, Alyx Vance, The Boss, GlaDOS — just a small selection of the 30 video game stars that the newest issue of Game Informer names as the video game characters who "defined a decade." More »

Of course, that emulator and the games included are not endorsed by Nintendo or other third parties included. I don’t know how much more illegal activity you can cram into this. Nintendo, Sony and third parties all have reason to sue the people behind this thing!

Out of the 43 bajillion or so games on the App Store, we can't say we've ever come across one that features as startlingly rendered an environment as the Unreal Engine 3-powered castle in Infinity Blade. Of course, sight seeing is not the reason to load up this Retina Display showcase on your iOS device of the moment -- stabbing the crap out of giant monster bosses is! How predictably Epic is that?

GameTrailers has posted the debut trailer for Infinity Blade -- "coming soon" to iPhone 4, iPad and iPod Touch. Check it out after the break.

#xbox360 Kinect game reviews, good and bad. Kinect stress tests. Kinect photographed near a can of beans. A video diary of nine days with Kinect. A tale of two re-arranged living rooms It's all here in our definitive Kinect article round-up. More »

On November 9th you will finally have your opportunity to infiltrate the dark under belly of the city streets and fight your way through merciless opponents that will stop at nothing to keep you from being the top bare-knuckle boxer in The Fight: Lights Out.

Only with the power and precision of the PlayStation Move can you truly unleash uppercuts, elbows and even vicious dirty moves like the Bullcharge, Double Hammer and Elbow Hook with true 1:1 game play. But don’t take my word for it, PlayStation’s own Executive Producer, Kyle Shubel gives us a quick jab to the gut when he reveals what you’ll expect the moment you first plunge into The Fight: Lights Out in the video above.

Keep an eye out for Danny Trejo. He’s Duke, your trainer in The Fight: Lights out. Jeff interviews him, and it’s pretty great — stay tuned for that video next week.

In a month where, after almost a two-year hiatus, we see two new Bond games thrown at us, PS3 and Xbox owners can't help but feel a little jaded when they see the re-vamped GoldenEye headed solely to the Wii.

"They got the new GoldenEye with a fancy new controller and all we got was another rip-off 3rd person shooter!" the masses say, clutching their well-worn N64 controller, wracked with guilt over not playing Quantum of Solace in 2008 or, worse, having played GoldenEye: Rogue Agent in 2004.

Allow me to squelch your rage with four simple words, angry mob: Blood Stone is fun.

Giving out Kinect to a studio audience just seems like the classy thing to do these days. Oprah did it, and now Jimmy Fallon is doing it too. Last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, after demoing Kinect Sports and Dance Central with Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda and Harmonix's Naoko Takamoto, the affable host announced that everyone in the audience would be leaving with an Xbox 360 Kinect bundle.

We're happy for the audience, but the event was overshadowed by another occurrence. It was something rarely seen on the mortal plane, something more precious than a unicorn: Kudo wasn't wearing sunglasses. Jimmy and Kudo actually discussed the missing eyewear before staring their play session, and it turns out he took off the shades for his mother. Say it with us: Awwwwwww.