Monthly Archives: April 2009

Ubisoft has announced Rabbids Go Home. As the name suggests, players will be charged with returning the Rabbids to their alien home.

Slated for a holiday release, the game runs on a new engine specifically designed for Wii.

More information is expected in the May issue of Nintendo Power.

Read on for the press release.

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SCEE’s confirmed that the EU PS Blog will launch this summer, after announcing yesterday that Three Speech is to close later this month.

“The blog will be launched in English first, with French, Italian, German and Spanish versions to follow soon after,” said a rep.

“There will be a period between the closure of ThreeSpeech and the launch of the EU blog. During this time please check PlayStation.com and the official forums for news and updates on all that is going on in the world of PlayStation.

“We’ll keep you posted with more information about the blog as soon as we have it.”

Sooner the better.

DC Douglas, the actor who played Albert Wesker in Resident Evil 5, has told Destructoid that working on the game was as good as his gig on the NBC sitcom Boston Common.

When asked if games provide the same amount of prestige as TV and film, he readily agreed that it’s a medium that’s come of age.

“Are you kidding? I am getting just as much response from fans AND industry folks regarding RE5 as I did when I was a recurring on NBC’s Boston Common in the mid 1990s,” he said.

“VG has arrived. Now actors just have to get some residuals for our work like we do with films and TV.”

Funnily enough, he never mentioned if his small stint on the campy soap Passions caused the same stir.

Player levels for Noby Noby Boy have dropped from an initial 60,000 to 1,000, meaning GIRL’s trip to Mars will take over 2,000 days current levels, says a website designed to track her progress.

Daily activity for the game sits around 1,500, rarely reaching 2,000 and almost falling below 1,000 occasionally, and while 300-500 new players are trying Noby out on a daily basis, people are also leaving the game.

Keita Takahashi has said that it would take 820 years for GIRL to connect the entire solar system.

Lofty goal there.

Via DarkZero.

Peter Moore has told M16 that he wants EA Sports on par with other brands like Nike and ESPN.

Moore’s grandiose plan is based on “personal access to the emotion of sports,” he said. Gaming is changing, and therefore he feels it’s a good time to explore other forms of brand-usage never tried by the firm’s marketing team, like free-to-play and social networking.

He added that EA needs to appeal to a different consumer for such marketing to succeed, while still appealing to the core.

More through there.

Those who pre-order inFamous through GameStop will get an exclusive in-game power not available elsewhere, as you can see D’toid.

When you reserve your copy, it will come with a code that unlocks the “Gigawatt Blades Power” which is essentially blades extending from the wrist, allowing a single blow to enemies.

Apparently it allows you the option to tickle as well. Strange that.

The game’s out in June.

Good thing we follow Geoff Keighley on Twitter. He’s just confirmed that there’ll be two minutes of actual gameplay footage from BioShock 2 on GameTrailersTV tonight.

Here is the full tweet:

“Tonight on GTTV we world premiere Bioshock 2 – two minutes of real gameplay! 12:30 on Spike”.

Gotta love the golden age of social networking.

Crysis Wars is free to play from now until April 17.

All modes and all of the game’s 23 maps are available, so you really may as well. It won’t cost you a bean.

EA and Crytek are to release a Crysis Maximum Edition in May, including all the Crysis game for £30.

Details after the break.

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Majesco has announced Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian for Wii, DS, PC and 360.

The game will launch alongside the movie’s release on May 22, and includes a pixelated Ben Stiller. The actor lent his voice to the game.

Stilleriffic.

Read on for the full press release.

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This Kotaku story has revealed Big Huge Games’ now-canned projects as God: The Game (Wii) and an RPG called Ascendant (PC, PS3, 360). There’s screens, art and a rough trailer through the link.

THQ is now looking for a buyer for the studio in lieu of closure, so the games have been whacked.

Thanks, Blerk.

Lionhead boss Peter Molyneux has told VG247 that it would be “pretty poor” if upcoming Fable II DLC See the Future didn’t relate to the next Fable game.

“Well, while it’s not easy for me to absolutely confirm that, it would be pretty poor to say ‘See the Future’ if it didn’t have some connection, wouldn’t it? It would be kind of, ‘See the Present,’” he said when asked specifically if the content had anything to do with the next Fable title.

He added: “If we were doing a piece of DLC, why not use the DLC to say something about the future? Why not? Rather than doing one of those trailer things. Why not?”

Molyneux dropped a not-so-subtle hint that fans should be watching Theresa in See the Future for hints on Fable’s… future.

“While it’s hard to be specific about it, we do have an idea of what the Albion world is about, and, for the fans that care about the Theresa character, I think she’s a really interesting character, and certainly playing the DLC will tell you more about that world and more about Theresa.”

See the Future releases in May. Details here.

Company of Heroes add-on Tales of Valor has shipped, THQ said today.

Awesomely, it’s already been patched. Updates for both it and Opposing Fronts are now available.

Patches 2.500 and 2.501 add a number of changes and fixes, the full lowdown of which can be found here.

Thanks, Blue.

Good news, alien sex fans. Remember the “porn” scene from Mass Effect? The one pop psychologist Cooper Lawrence claimed contained “graphic” shagging? The one that actually didn’t?

BioWare’s promising more “emotionally engaging moments” for Mass Effect 2. We know because Steph asked BioWare co-founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk at GDC.

VG247: Anything controversial this time? In the same regard as the…

Greg: The big over-reaction?

Ray: We don’t shy away from emotionally engaging moments. We try to make them contextually appropriate. They’re not gratuitous for the sake of gratuity. We put them in to actually drive an emotional response, but the journey you’ve gone through to get to that point in the game, it has to feel like that is a real point, a real outcome that makes sense to the player to get that point. They’re not there for shock value.

If there’s surprise and delight in the emotionally engaging moment then that’s great too, but they have to feel contextually appropriate. We just make games with great stories and characters and, just like in real life, some of the interactions are emotionally charged between some of the characters. There could be all types of different emotions. And even the experience itself, we strive for emotion… We’re not shying away from it.

So there you go. Mass Effect releases in early 2010.

Eidos marketing boss Jon Brooke had told MCV that Batman Arkham Asylum is “close to perfect”.

“We expect Batman Arkham Asylum to not only be the biggest game of the summer but one of the stand-out games of the year,” he said.

“It’s as close to perfect as we’ve ever come. It looks amazing, plays beautifully and has a rich, twisting storyline with enormous replayability. I’m confident enough to say that it will set a new benchmark for licensed games and it’s going to establish itself as one of our best games ever.”

It’s out later this year for PC, PS3 and 360.

Riiflex, a set of dumbbells for the Wiimote and Nunchuk, is now available for pre-order.

You can purchase two-pounders for $34.95 or the four-pounders for $39.95. Pre-order and you save 30 percent.

Should add a bit of extra punch to your Wii Fit routine, at any rate.

Via Engadget.

The Halo 3 Mythic Map Pack is now live, Microsoft just confirmed.

Blurb:

The long-awaited Mythic Map Pack drops into Xbox LIVE Marketplace. Investigate Orbital’s abandoned hallways – before it was evacuated, the Quito Space Tether was heralded as the “Civil Engineering Monument of the Millennium.” Witness Assembly, where Scarab hulls loom overhead, being decontaminated in preparation for the city-sized Lekgolo colonies that will breathe life into the massive metal husks. An excavation site surrounded by deadly Forerunner defenses, the mysteries of Sandbox are hidden high above, deep below, and right before your eyes.

It’s 800 MS Points to you, Mr Chief.

Some screens after the break of the iPhone version of Silent Scope, announced yesterday.

Unless memory’s failing, it looks exactly like the 1999 arcade game.

We may buy an iPhone and sign up to a crippling contract just to play this on the odd occasion we leave the house.

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Ubisoft’s decided to drop its Ubidays event this year, instead spreading its product reveals over 2009′s three major trade events.

“With regards to Ubidays, with the E3 event in the US, the GamesCom in Europe and Tokyo Games Show in Japan, we think that we’ll have great outlets to present our creativity and innovation to a worldwide audience and will therefore reconsider our plans,” a Ubi rep told MCV.

“There won’t be a Ubidays this year.”

Ubidays saw Ubisoft’s brands shown off to 1,000 journos in Paris last year, and included a Beyond Good & Evil 2 reveal.

Never more. Roll on E3.

Wii’s peaked in Japan. There’s no denying it. Even Nintendo president Satoru Iwata’s admitting it.

“The Wii is in the most unhealthy condition since it hit the Japanese market,” he said, speaking at a Japanese press conference today.

“The current condition in the Japanese market is not the one we want.”

Iwata said at the same conference that there was no chance of a Wii price cut.

“A price cut in a difficult economy cannot really excite the market and drive up sales,” he said.

“As of now I really don’t think that a price cut is a good option for us.”

Nintendo confirmed a June release date for Wii MotionPlus in Japan today.

From ABS-CBN, via Kotaku.

BioWare’s opened applications for beta testers for its Dragon Age toolset, as you can see in the press release after the break.

If you can see yourself sinking hundreds of hours into making RPG levels for the game – you know who you are – hit this.

It’s out for PC, 360 and PS3 later this year.

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