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- anticipates closing the fiscal year with net income totaling ¥30 billion ($293.6 million)
- this is down from ¥47 billion ($459.9 million)
- packaged (retail) game sales have been “sluggish”
- digital has been making up the difference

The game is being developed for iOS and Android and will release near the film.

These cubes of meat are making me hungry.

Like Limbo, but with a tiny space probe. Color me intrigued! Created by Mixed Bag Studios, Forma.8 will be hitting PS4, Vita, iOS, PC, Mac, Linux, Wii U and eShop later this year. Xbox platforms are a bit conspicuous in their absence, huh?Read more...

Orbital Gear? ORBITAL GEAR?!?!?! If you read that in a Solid Snake voice, you get a cookie. In reality, however, Orbital Gear has nothing at all to do with Metal Gear – except, I suppose, in the sense that both include mechs of some sort. But honestly, Orbital Gear has more in common with Mario Galaxy or Gravity Ghost than it does with Hideo Kojima’s quietly creeping fever dream. It’s a sidescrolling multiplayer shooter with an anti-grav twist. You and your opponents bounce around – right-side-up and otherwise – between planetoids while blasting away until smoking craters are all that remain. It’s still a bit early, but it already looks like high-flying, head-spinning fun. Trailer below. Or maybe above. I’m not really sure how it works anymore.

… [visit site to read more]

On this very special FREE edition of the Powerbombcast, the gang all recount their experiences with the newly launched WWE Network, and inevitably end up questioning whether they have the intestinal fortitude for watching terrible old wrestling. In addition, we talk Elimination Chamber, Wrestlemania, ill-gotten Ribera jackets, and the future prospects of NXT.

New promotional materials suggest an announcement may be around the corner.

Classified documents published by The Guardian reveal that British surveillance agency GCHQ surreptitiously gathered webcam images from more than a million Yahoo user accounts, while also evaluating the surveillance potential of the Xbox 360's Kinect peripheral.

"In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery - including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications - from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally," the Guardian reports, before noting that this operation (codenamed "Optic Nerve") was only one of the agency's attempts at biometric recognition via consumer camera technology.

A separate GCHQ project explored the possibility of gathering images from the Kinect peripheral. "[O]ne presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated 'fairly normal webcam traffic' and was being evaluated as part of a wider program." It's unclear if GCHQ ever attempted to intercept Kinect data on a large scale, but as The Guardian points out, the idea isn't entirely novel. Earlier documents published by the paper detail similar exploratory efforts by the American NSA. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

If you're into video games, you might also be on Twitter. But sometimes it can seem like there are too many people to follow. So much noise, so little information! Fear not, we're here to help.Read more...

- MC Mode originally required you to match your clothing according to a certain theme
- update allows you to pick your own coordinated style
- the MC will then judge your fashion sense
- new “Dream Boyfriend” mode, which takes place in your dreams
- create your very own ideal boyfriend
- go to all kinds of different places on dates
- change his appearance, if you feel like dating another dream boyfriend
- Daisy the florist will also be back to tell your fortune according to your dress coordination, once a day
- Teagan’s special effects AR studio lets you see all the characters you’ve encountered using your 3DS camera and AR cards
- visit the home of Emmylou, your former co-worker
- she gives you all kinds of advice on life and how to manage your shop
- updated version will be available for purchase via eShop in Japan on April 17
- if you already own the game, you can update on March 26th for free

Earlier this week we linked to a communal pool of 40,000 Wildstar beta keys. They vanished in an instant, swallowed whole by the swelling masses who want to play NCSoft’s new scifi MMO. Now we have 700 more keys to give away which are just for us and, if you’re fast enough, just for you. If you fancy playing the game this weekend, head below. … [visit site to read more]

Alfredo and Greg step out of their comfort zone and use weapons that they normally would avoid.

A portion of a NWR review...

I have real issues with the soccer-RPG mechanics, but once you get over the initial hump, it smoothes out a little bit. It's like how you don't play Metal Gear Solid games for the gameplay—you play for the crazy storyline.

Full review here

Coming from former RARE employee Lee Musgrave...

“We tried to figure out what to do with it (Donkey Kong Racing. We made a prototype version for Xbox, but because nothing else had been made up until this point, we essentially built it from scratch. For example, if you got knocked off your animal, you had to do a Track and Field-esque button-bashing activity to get back on it.

We decided to try and make it a bit more like Diddy Kong Racing in terms of it being an adventure game. Over the course of the next 18 months or so, it went from being a track-based animal racer to a more open-world game with Tamagotchi-style features, in which nurturing your animal became a key mechanic. It was such a wide game in terms of content, and the development went off into the woods a little bit. It took a long time to do, and at the same time we were trying to build engines for consoles we weren't familiar with.”

This eventually lead to the project fizzling out. Obviously, when it moved over to the Xbox, the game shared the ideas of Donkey Kong Racing, but didn't include Nintendo's character roster.

In the iconic fantasy adventure board game from Games Workshop, developed for PC by Nomad Games, you take on the role of a heroic adventurer, building up your strength, wisdom and wealth in a quest for glory. In a mythical world of dragons and sorcery, full of magic and monsters, you compete to claim the Crown of Command.

• Control 1 of 14 characters, from the heroic Warrior to the powerful Sorceress.
• Multiplayer modes for up to 4 players, online or local hot-seat, or play against AI opponents.
• 17 powerful spells to cast
• Based on the 4th Revised Edition rules of the board game.
• Designed to be extendable with classic Expansion and Character packs

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Steam's library sharing feature has left beta and is now officially available.

Put down your buzzers, turn off your engines, sheathe your swords: Four in February has come to a close. The great 4iF challenge brought the Joystiq crew to their knees over the past four weeks. Joystiq Community members, on the other hand, rose to the occasion. Our heroes over on the 4iF Facebook page played through literally hundreds of games, and while not all of them went the distance, they played well.

While a few members of the staff managed to dig into their lists, finishing off entries here and there, not one of us managed to complete all four selections. Richard Mitchell, Joystiq Reviews Content Director, toppled two big ones including Silent Hill: Shattered Memories and Risk of Rain on the maddening Monsoon difficulty. Danny Cowan completed Virtual Hydlide on Sega Saturn while 4iF founder Mike Suszek conquered Tearaway and Toukiden: Age of Demons (though Toukiden wasn't on his original list.) Xav de Matos, Jess Conditt, Anthony John Agnello, and others? Couldn't beat nary a one.

That's okay, though! In fact, failure is just another form of success in Four in February. The point isn't to beat all four, but to encourage diversity in your game playing palette. We all love video games. That's why we're here. Four in February is an event that reminds us of the vast creative richness waiting in the folds of gaming. It's easy to get caught up in the rush of all that's new. 4iF is a conscious effort to slow down and take in our surroundings, to explore what's out there we may have missed. Just playing the game means you've won, even if you didn't see four sets of credits roll.

Still, special honors go to these players. They came, they saw, they kicked four games in the butt.

This week, IGN Producer Tim Gettys takes control of our weekly Nintendo podcast.