Monthly Archives: September 2009

Wii is getting a price cut to $200 on Friday. In case you’re still unconvinced this is happening, take a look at the Best Buy email Engadget published last night.

It’s going to be announced on Friday. OK?

Thanks, Peter.

THQ’s shares rose 13 percent yesterday on rumour that a “major media company” is preparing a bid for the publisher.

MKM Partners analyst Eric Handler started the chatter, according to this Forbes report.

However, Handler said he does not see a sale as likely in the near term.

“[The] company still has a very high percentage of licensed titles and is just beginning to rebuild its wholly owned IP portfolio,’ he said in an email.

Hit the link for more.

Nelson just confirmed that Xbox 360′s firmware will be upgraded today in preparation for the inclusion of Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm functionality.

“Sometime over the next few hours when you sign in to Xbox LIVE you’ll receive a prompt to accept this mandatory update,” said the exec.

“If you are signed into LIVE already, you may be signed out and asked to accept the update and you’ll be back online in a few moments.”

No features are included in the update. Thanks, TheDutchSlayer.

Update: There are reports of not being able to connect to Live after updating. Super Nelson’s fixing that shit, yo. Thanks evilashchris, Blerk.

Update 2: Sorted.

SCEE launched German and Italian versions of the official PS Blog – read all about it here.

“Pretty much everything that we post on the English Blog that is relevant to a European audience will be localised and available in your language on the new Italian and German Blogs,” said SCEE portal manager Emmanuel Orssaud.

“On the top of this content, you will find all the news and events happening around you in your country.”

More languages are to follow, obviously.

The first Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 reviews have gone live, and it’s all panning out pretty much as expected.

Here’s the lot. The game’s out on October 2.

• VG – 9/10
• GameZone – 9/10
• PSM3 – 8.7/10
• SpazioGames – 8.5/10
• IGN – 8.4/10
• G4 – 4/5

Dell’s leaked Alienware’s amazing TGS announcement – it’s a really fast, really heavy, really expensive computer. We called it.

It’s an upgraded M15x, this time, according to Engadget, including “a Core i7 processor, 15.6-inch 1920×1080 LED backlit display, a full 8GB of 1333MHz DDR3 memory, options for a traditional hard disk or SSD drive of unspecified capacity, a 2 megapixel webcam, Blu-ray disc option, Firewire, 3x USB, 1x eSATA, ExpressCard and 8-in-1 card reader slots, an optional 9-cell 86Wh battery, and DisplayPort and VGA outputs among other notables.”

Go nuts. No date.

Joystiq liveblogged the EA TGS press conference this morning, bringing some tit-shots from Dante’s Inferno’s Lust level, some new detail on Bad Company 2 and the Valve stuff we covered this morning.

You’ll also find demos there on Army of Two: The 40th Day, Need for Speed: Nitro and more.

TGS, eh?

Update – Kotaku did it as well.

IGN’s reporting that the PC version is Borderlands is moving back from its original release date of October 20 in North America to October 26.

The PC game’s international version has moved to October 30.

The North American PS3 and 360 versions will be unaffected, and the international console versions will still ship on October 23.

2K’s putting the small delay down to “optimization”.

Valve’s announced that Left 4 Dead add-on Crash Course will be available on September 29 for both PC and 360.

The content’s a new Campaign bridging the gap between the end of No Mercy and the beginning of Death Toll in the original game.

It’s free for PC. Not so much for 360. Full PR after the break.

More »

EA put out four new shots of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 as part of its pre-E3 press conference. See them on IGN.

Snow and guns are clearly this winter’s order. It’s out on March 5 next year.

The Australian 360 Elite has been dropped AU$100 in price to AU$449 (£266), IGN reports.

The Arcade remains at an RRP of AU$299 (£160), while the Pro is on sale at AU$399 (£213) while supplies last.

A Kotaku Australia report appears to indicate that EB Australia won’t be stocking PSP go when it launches next week.

There’s no mention of the handheld on the store’s site, and shop staff apparently said, ““EB aren’t stocking it,” when asked whether or not the machine will be available through the retailer.

EBA’s head office is refusing to comment on the matter.

“As with any new product, there will be continued discussions with retail partners to continue to expand reach over time in line with growth of the entire PSP platform,” said SCE Australia.

Full thing through the link.

Valve said at a pre-TGS EA press conference in Japan today that Left 4 Dead 2′s demo will release on October 27.

No specific platforms were named. The full game releases November 17.

If you were worried about Nathan Drake’s continued gainful employment as Sony’s go-to tomb raider, fear not; according to Naughty Dog’s Amy Hennig, Drake still has plenty of adventures left in him, and none of them end in Naughty Dog’s garbage bin.

“[Uncharted 2] doesn’t conclude the story at all,” she said. “The expectation with Uncharted 2 is that it can be an ongoing franchise as long as people want more of it. All these stories are self-contained. You don’t have to play the last one to play this one. Obviously, you’re going to get a little bit more out of it if you have. But [Nathan Drake]‘s going to have a lot of adventures, thank god.”

The full video is after the break, courtesy of the PlayStation Blog.

Thanks, Joystiq.

More »

No one – short of Sony, Sega, and maybe God – knows whether or not that leaked SCEA-Sega doc is real or not, but that hasn’t stopped Alpha Protocol developer Obsidian from treating it as such. (Granted, Obsidian is working on a game about spies. Maybe it knows something we don’t. Hmmm.)

Responding to a Sony tester’s allegations that his company’s suave, stealthy RPG is “barely RPG” and “too challenging,” Obsidian marketing manager Matthew Rorie said:

“We’re not really sure how much this gentleman played of Alpha Protocol, or what his ideas of an RPG are. Suffice to say, the game is 100% an RPG; we don’t really make any other kind of game. You earn XP, you get levels, you choose your skill progression, you modify your weapons, you interact with NPCs (or kill/sleep with them), the world reacts to the choices you make in pretty dramatic ways, etc.”

“As for what he said, obviously we enjoy any feedback that we can get, but without knowing how much of the game he played (and I seriously doubt that someone as busy as a product evaluator for Sony is going to be playing through an entire game if it’s as long as Alpha Protocol), it’s hard to judge what he meant by those comments. Suffice to say that Alpha Protocol is going to tickle your RPG tastebuds when it’s released,” Rorie added on Alpha Protocol’s official forums.

There’s tons more over at Shacknews.

After being wooed by Microsoft early in the game, it appears that Netflix now wants to spread the love. Speaking with Reuters, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings outlined his plan to boldly stream movies where no other service has streamed before.

“Eventually we want to be on all the game consoles, all the Blu-ray players, all the Internet TVs. So we are working in parallel with all of those efforts. Currently our Xbox deal is exclusive and we haven’t characterized it more than that,” he said.

Expect to see Netflix on everything short of the Game Boy Color the second that exclusivity deal runs out.

More through the link.

The first video for Empire: Total War expansion Warpath is up on Shack.

It’s full of things no longer present in the American West, as well as a couple of stereotypical Native American accents, but there ya go.

At least this way you can get revenge on the settler’s for all the havoc they caused.

Go get ‘em Tonto.

Thanks to the SCEA document leak regarding all things SEGA, it appears the two and a half years in the making Thor superhero game is progressing.

So much so that Sony has requested to see the current code from SEGA.

The game will be based on the Thor film and last we heard, the game was set to be released alongside the film in 2011.

Good to know.

Via MTV.

Rebellion’s Tim Jones has told D’Toid that he thinks it’s terrific that more Alien games are in the works, even if it’s not being made by the firm, apparently.

“As a life-long Aliens fan, I think it’s terrific that Sega is publishing more than one Aliens game in the near future,” he told the site. “I’m naturally very excited to see what the talented guys at Gearbox deliver.”

“We’ve been such obsessive fans of the franchises for so long that we seem to have a natural instinct for what we can add to the universe, while remaining faithful to, and consistent with, what has gone before. Naturally, when we create new concepts, we throw around all sorts of crazy ideas before settling on what seems right but Fox and Sega have been very supportive of all the ideas we’ve proposed. No doubt there’ll be one or two things that will provoke ‘healthy debate’ among the fans when they experience them.”

More through the link.

Ubisoft has announced The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom for spring 2010.

Currently in development at Blue Byte, Settlers 7 features three paths to triumph–military, science and trade with a new victory points system, a new graphics engine, improved AI, “more than a dozen AI profiles, each with unique behaviors,” and multiplayer modes with leaderboards, and support for “user-generated and downloadable content.”

Shack has the announcement trailer posted should you care to have a look.