Monthly Archives: August 2009

If a listing from Play.com is correct, a Gears of War 2 GOTY edition is on it’s way.

There is no new details on the game itself, just a standard synopsis on the game as it is. But the page does have a date for the game – September 18 2009.

It comes as details emerged last night that a Fable II GOTY edition was on its way. We’ll contact Microsoft about this, see if this is true.

Thanks, Fragland.

SCEA are big teasers, aren’t they?

They revealed overnight that a massive LittleBigPlanet announcement is due today: possibly during SCEE’s press conference in Cologne.

When answering a reader’s question, after the announcement of a LBP GOTY edition overnight, SCEA’s Mark Valledor said:

“Don’t worry…wait until tomorrow for “bigger” announcement.”

But what could it be? Well, MM’s Mark Healey and Kareem Ettouney were legging it for Mexico when we asked them if they were making LBP2. Of course, it may not be, but it’s fun to speculate anyways.

SCEA‘s announced that the PlayStation Network will be down today from 9am PST to 11am PST, that’s 5pm BST to 7pm BST tonight.

At that time, you wont be able to play games online, wont be able to sign into the PSN and you’ll see a maintenance page for whenever you try to access the PSN at all.

This must be linked to the SCEE conference in Cologne tonight: most likely for new PSN features and/or the EU PSN video store that’s been long overdue. We smell a rat, a big one at that.

We’ll most likely find out tonight why it was down.

We’ve got a crime on our hands, and it looks like it’ll stay that way for the foreseeable future. Speaking with Siliconera, producer Motohide Eshiro was quite blunt.

“Right now, we have no plans to make ports for any other hardware,” he said.

“It’s not that we don’t like other hardware and that we don’t want to do it. It’s just it was original made for handhelds, it was made to be played on the go, and also the interface we created the game, especially for Ace Attorney Investigations, uses the touch screen and we want people to interact with that. You can’t replicate that on Xbox Live. For us, the DS seems like the most natural fit,” he explained.

Being the savvy lawyer that he is, Phoenix tried to take advantage of a loophole in the form of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. It didn’t work.

More through the link.

Instead of playing, creating, and sharing, you watched and waited. And now, your patience has been rewarded. LittleBigPlanet’s getting a game of the year edition with so many bonuses that you’ll wonder how the vanilla edition of LBP ever managed to win game of the year in the first place. The only downside? It’ll run you $60.

Fortunately, it packs plenty of bang for your buck. For your money, you’ll nab:

* 18 new levels made by players just like you
* 7 different content packs
* Exclusive access to the upcoming ModNation Online beta

The new levels also include interviews with each creator.

For all the nitty-gritty details, check out the PlayStation Blog.

Aspyr Media and Mindware Studios just sent over a trailer of their latest effort, a creepy, chaotic shooter called Dreamkiller. As expected, the trailer primarily focuses on dreams and killing — with an almost 50/50 slice between the two, in fact!

Main character Alice Drake, a psychologist who enters patients disturbed minds and proceeds to fill them with hot lead, narrates the whole thing.

Looks like the gothic-tinged baby of Psychonauts and Painkiller, if you ask us.

Catch the trailer after the break.

More »

Gameloft and Interplay are in cahoots to put Earthworm Jim back on the map, it would seem. The two companies have partnered to develop and publish a new title in the series that will eventually grace the likes of PSN and WiiWare.

First, though, Jim’s making a month-long pit stop on Xbox Live Arcade, as a timed exclusive. The early bird gets the Earthworm Jim? Something like that, we guess.

The game’s out sometime during the last quarter of 2009. Pertinent press is after the break.

More »

But which one? Speaking with VideoGamer, design director George Andreas stopped short of blurting any details, but he gushed in just about every other sense of the word.

“Natal as well gives us an opportunity to maybe at some point in the future investigate some of those older IPs. I won’t name names,” he said.

“One in particular actually I think we can do an absolutely phenomenal, absolutely phenomenal version on with Natal. The interface, the way you interact with it – I think it would be an absolutely world-beating product. But we need to explore a little bit more in that direction.”

Battletoads? Killer Instinct? R.C. Pro Am? What could it be? We hunger for knowledge, Rare, and you’ve only served up an appetizer.

What? An unsubstantiated headline isn’t good enough for you? Gosh, people these days. Well then, Evidence A: the Guild Wars 2 Twitter feed has come online, albeit in the form of a small trickle of info. Evidence B: the Guild Wars 2 website‘s sporting a fashionable new splash page in anticipation of something. And finally, Evidence C: ArenaNet boss Mike O’Brien is teasing as though his life depended on it.

“Last week I promised you’d get your first glimpse of Guild Wars 2 ‘very soon now.’ That day is almost here,” he said.

“Guild Wars 2 is going to be a huge leap beyond the original. We have the best team in the industry executing at the top of their game, and I’m very proud of what our team has accomplished so far. As I said last week, I’m confident that when you get your first look at what we’ve been working on, you’re going to love what you see. Stay tuned for an exciting week ahead.”

No need to look towards the horizon, folks. Guild Wars 2 is right in front of you.

Thanks, Kotaku.

According to a reader survey by Game Informer (via The Consumerist), 54.2 percent of Xbox 360s have crashed and burned, meaning that — conversely — 45.8 percent have yet to see the red, glowing face of untimely death.

PS3 and Wii, meanwhile, cause far fewer headaches, sporting failure rates of 10.6 percent and 6.8 percent, respectively.

Nearly 5,000 readers were surveyed, though the sample’s rife with inconsistencies (Xbox 360 is apparently used more than other consoles, etc). Still though, it’s an interesting look at console usage among core gamers.

Click through the link for more flame war-fueling stats.

Bethesda seems to think last weekend’s Elder Scrolls V comments were blown out of proportion, so the master of massively single player RPGs decided to clarify things a bit.

“At his QuakeCon talk he was asked when TESV is coming out and Todd replied, ‘Don’t look for a new Elder Scrolls game in the near future.’ He also went on to say how much the franchise means to us and that it definitely will continue. He just wasn’t going to provide any timeframe on ‘when,’ wrote Pete Hines on the Bethesda Blog.

“Todd and Bethesda Game Studios are hard at work on their next big game, and we’re not ready to discuss it. As always, we prefer to have something amazing to show when we talk about it. We aren’t going to confirm or deny or comment on speculation, nor are we going to give hints about anything. If you know us by now, you know we don’t really do that.”

He also noted that ZeniMax Online Studios — not Bethesda — is hard at work on an MMO, though when the big game will be ready for its big day is anyone’s guess.

So, that’s it for today’s Bethesda news. If you’d like to know anything else about the company, just leave a misinterpreted, hyperbole-packed message at the sound of the beep.

Modern Warfare 2′s adding a new weapon to its arsenal of modern media blitz tactics, Infinity Ward announced today. Joining games like Dante’s Inferno and Star Wars: The Old Republic, Modern Warfare 2′s getting its own comic book miniseries, starring a ghastly ghoul named Ghost.

Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling gave MTV Multiplayer a brief description of the series.

“The ‘Modern Warfare 2: GHOST’ comic is a 6-part series delving into the, more legend than history, backstory of Ghost. The series takes place before his inclusion in Taskforce 141 and as such before the events of Modern Warfare 2; focusing more on the origins of his character, the mask, and his ‘Ghost’ moniker,” he said.

Wildstorm, a branch of DC Comics, is set to publish the bullet-riddled rag.

We can’t wait to crawl under our covers and read it with our official Modern Warfare 2 night vision goggles. Being the biggest geek in history has never been so manly.

Microsoft’s confirmed that it’s to release Lips: Number One Hits in the UK for October 23rd.

Included in the sequel to the 360 karaoke game from last year is Avatar integration for the game. You can unlock rewards in the game for your Avatar to parade with somewhat.

Tracklist includes Lady GaGa, Rhianna and Marvin Gaye, plus more.

Thanks, Eurogamer.

According to an NGamer article (via GoNintendo), Phoenix Wright was originally slated to apply his brand of word-fu to the fisticuffs of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. However, the iron-willed lawyer didn’t make the cut. Why not? Ryota Niitsuma, producer on Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, explained.

“Because Phoenix Wright only has one move, ‘Objection,’ we struggled. We designed a move for him: when he says objection, the actual writing attacks the opponent,” he said.

“However, ‘objection’ in Japanese is ‘igiari’ – it’s four characters, whereas ‘objection’ becomes ten. When we localize, the balance of the game gets destroyed because the move becomes bigger. There’d be no way of avoiding it! We had to remove [Phoenix] for these reasons. In the future, it is one of our aims to get him in.”

So now you know.

In case you failed to notice, Shadow Complex is your Arcade game for this week.

It’s going for 1200 MS points from Wednesday. Several sites went live with their review today including Eurogamer, IGN, Kotaku and more.

Go catch the launch trailer over at Gamersyde.

Spore Hero, a new Nintendo Wii and DS action-adventure spin-off of Will Wright’s evolution-themed magnum opus, is on track to reach the retail phase this October, EA announced today.

Both versions of the game will be arriving on October 6 in North America, and October 9 everywhere else.

Sure, the lack of geetar, drums, and rock is a bit disheartening, but pitting adorable creatures against each other in pursuit of evolutionarily gained powers has never looked so fun. Or maybe it has. Hmm.

Thanks, Shacknews.

Capcom’s released 34 brand new screens of Monster Hunter 3: catch them over at Eurogamer Portugal.

The game’s on show in Cologne this week. It’s the first time the localised version of the game will be there.

It’s out in 2010 for the West, exclusively to the Wii.

SCEA’s confirmed that Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune and SOCOM: US Navy Seals Confrontation has been added to the PS3′s Greatest Hits collection in the US.

They’re both on sale for $29.99. Uncharted has been in the European Platinum collection for a good year or so now, you should go pick it up for about £15.

From the US PS Blog.

PlayStation LifeStyle‘s gotten its hands on some very juicy — sumptuous, even — gossip, in the form of an alleged Sony GamesCom document. This telling piece of intel reveals, among other things, a new PS3 SKU, which is apparently set to be announced during Sony’s GameCom presser.

Click through the link to see the full document for yourself. Honestly, though, the info looks a bit dodgy to us, so we’re taking this one with a grain of salt. Plus, it’s a document. We could whip up a document right now that says Sony’s announcing the PS4 tomorrow, with a new Ridge Racer and an even more historically accurate Genji game set on the moon.

We’ve asked Sony for comment, so hopefully we’ll hear back on this soon.

According to Console Monster, Play.com and ShopTo are listing a Game of the Year version of Fable II, which features past DLC like Knothole Island and See the Future.

Check out the listings from Play.com and ShopTo listings here and here respectively.

Is this Lionhead’s big announcement for Cologne? Of course not, you’d be silly to think so, although we wouldn’t rule it out for an appearance during the MS conference on Wednesday morning.

We’re gonna check in with MS to see if there is any weight on it.

Update: Play.com listing added. Thanks, Roybott.