Monthly Archives: October 2009

Telltale has released Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space over on Xbox Live.

It will run you 1600 MS Points ($19.99/£13.60/€18.61), and says it’s on available in Japan.

Usually that means everyone else is getting it, but you may wanna check with your region anyway.

Game blurb:

Join the Freelance Police for a second season of adventure, crime fighting, and chaos. Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space is a 5-episode trek from the North Pole to Easter, from outer space to Hell and back. Babies will dance. Mariachis will sing. A giant battle robot will trash the streets. And when their friends are caught in the middle, Sam & Max will risk their very souls to set things right.

Whoo hoo!

Thanks, Major.

Nintendo has sent word that on November 16 black Wii Remotes and Nunchuks will hit retail.

The Remote controller will be packaged with a black Wii MotionPlus for $49.99, while the Nunchuk will be available separately for $19.99.

“The Wii Remote revolutionized not only how people play games, but also who plays them,” said NOA’s Cammie Dunaway.

“The new color lets people customize their setup, and the controllers make great stocking stuffers for players of any age.”

Yes they do, Cammie.

The split-stage Eurogamer Expo’s confirmed a string of top-flight developer sessions, GI reports.

Team 17 be talking Alien Breed in Leeds on October 27-28. Paul Wedgwood will also be doing a Brink presentation at the event.

Introversion’s Mark Morris will demo Darwinia+ in Leeds, as will Stewart Gilray from Just Add Water with the PSN-exclusive Gravity Crash.

London sessions for October 30-31 include Nick Baynes demoing Black Rock racer Split/Second, and Quantic Dream showing off Heavy Rain.

There’s more through there.

Bright Side of News is rumouring that Nintendo is planning on using Nvidia’s Tegra tech to power the next DS – which is apparently due in late 2010.

As Engadget points out, “The primary source on this comes from Bright Side of News (which doesn’t have a big track record to judge by), who claims the debut is planned for late 2010 and conjectures that the device could either use the upcoming 40nm 2nd-gen Tegra tech, or the existing, tried-and-true 65nm chip.”

You be the judge. Hit the links.

Following last night’s awesome comments scramble for free copies of Brutal Legend, SCEE’s very kindly agreed to stump up four promo copies of Uncharted 2 for VG247 readers.

It’s very simple: you win by commenting. We award a copy of the game to the posters of the 500th, 1,000th, 1,500th and 2,000th comments.

To receive your prize, you’ll need to be following both @patlike and @vg247 on Twitter. There’s no real reason for this, other than the fact we want more Twitter followers.

That’s it. We’ll get the games sent over next week. Anyone can enter, no matter what your location. Good luck!

Uncharted 2 ships in the UK on Friday.

Sony Ericsson’s launched the PS3 compatible Aino, as you can see on the EU PS Blog. It’s a phone, in case you didn’t know.

Stuff it lets you do:

• Turn a PS3 on and off
• Browse and control the XMB user interface
• Access the internet and any DRM free media content saved on the hard drive
• Sign in to the PS3 network and message friends
• Shop for items in the PS3 store
• Watch and record live television using PlayTV

Buy three. Hit the link for full details.

China’s banned all foreign investment into its online games industry in an “effort to tighten control over its virtual worlds,” according to Reuters.

According to that piece, “China’s video game industry regulator the General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) and copyright watchdog issued a circular on Saturday prohibiting foreign investment in domestic online gaming operations through joint ventures, wholly owned enterprises and cooperatives.”

Nasty. But maybe not so unsurprising when you consider the market will likely grow between 30-50 percent this year to $3.5-4 billion.

More through the link.

Company of Heroes has been heavily discounted on Steam, as you can see here.

The original game and its two expansions – Opposing Fronts and Men of Valor – now cost £23.49 at 50 percent off.

The promotion’s part of a week of THQ deals on the Valve DD platform.

The Left 4 Dead 2 boycott is officially over. The internet has spoken.

“Effective Wednesday October 21st 2009 at 12:00 PM Eastern Standard Time, this group will be closed,” said revolution architect Walking_Target.

Why?

“People have lost sight of why we’re here. The comments are always full of trolls, people bashing Valve and phishers. What is more, people are unwilling or unable to wait for Valve to follow through in any cohesive way.”

Fellow man of the people Agent of Chaos added:

“We have accomplished everything we can on our manifesto. We’ve been dealing with Valve ever since our group started, then we met them in-person and now we’re at the point of concluding our discussions. Our goal wasn’t to steer people away from L4D2, it was to get Valve’s attention and have them support original L4D. We succeeded and that’s where our mission ends; nothing more or less.”

And that’s the end of that. The game’s out on November 17.

Codemasters is planning on some serious DLC releases for Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising, as confirmed in this Telegraph interview with Sion Lenton, the game’s executive producer.

“We’ve got some very ambitious plans with DLC – our first pack is coming up in a matter of weeks,” said Lenton.

The developer went on:

“Our team are already prototyping all sorts of stuff to be released as DLC and we’re really excited about it. It’s a really different type of market now; I remember five or six years ago, you’d get a game, finish it, put it back on the shelf and that was it. But now it’s almost as though the game’s release is just the beginning, really.

“Ours is a game that lends itself very well to expansion – there will be weapons packs, map packs – all sorts of things we can do to get our product out there.”

Another reason to go and buy it, then.

Dreamcast launched in Europe ten years ago today. The fated Sega machine released over here on October 14, 1999.

We don’t need to tell you what happened. It’s enough to remember the European machine had a blue swirl over the American console’s orange. It’s enough to remember the first time you saw Soul Calibur running. It’s enough to remember how quickly the VMU ran out of battery power.

There’s loads more on Wikipedia.

Namco just formally stuck a 2010 release date on the PAL version of Splatterhouse, as you can see after the break.

The reboot’s had a rocky ride during its development, with the project being ripped away from initial studio BottleRocket and taken in-house.

There’s more detail below. It’s for PS3 and 360.

More »

Valve boss Gabe Newell’s stuck his leg in the sand over his team’s place in the gaming community, saying it’s fully involved.

“We recognize that we really are part of this community,” he said, speaking in Australia after a Valve fan raised the cash to ship him out there.

“We talk about it a lot, that we’re not up here and the community’s down here, and the games snowflake in. We really are part of it.”

Newell expanded on the whole Australia incident, which came about after Gabe jokingly said he’s travel Down Under if an L4D Campaign-maker stumped up for his air fare.

“It was pretty clear that this was one of those things that the community fell in love with the idea,” he added.

“They wanted us to come down here and meet with Joe and give him feedback. And in our experience, it’s been very bad idea when we get such a clear signal from PC gaming community, if we ignore it.”

Watch the full interview after the break. Thanks, Kotaku.

More »

Dawn of War II’s getting a new play mode in The Last Stand today – watch a video on how it works here.

Basically, you’ve got a marine team in an arena and you have to survive against increasingly tough waves of baddies. It’s got leaderboards, “arcade” style play, and so on.

Patch notes here.

Former Microsoft Aces Studio employees have formed Washington-based Cascade Game Foundry, another sim studio “poised to create a portfolio of innovative and engaging products which will appeal to both aficionados and people new to the genre.”

There’s a press release here.

“The beauty of starting a new studio is that we get to reconsider all our preconceived notions,” said creative director Rick Selby.

“Our previous efforts focused on building traditional simulation titles. However, now we get to redefine what a simulation game can be. As a designer, that is incredibly liberating.”

Aces was responsible for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator franchise. The studio was axed in cuts early this year.

Thanks, Edge.

Yesterday, God of War: Chains of Olympus developer Ready at Dawn announced that it was moving full steam ahead with a new console-focused game engine. What about the Wii – which got along with RAD’s old engine quite swimmingly – though? Is it getting left in the dust? RAD president Didier Malenfant gave his best answer to that question, speaking with Joystiq:

“We plan on our newly announced platform (sic) to support all console systems,” he said.

However, he stopped just short of confirming Wii support – noting, however, that “we will have more engine news soon.”

So then, as you were.

You could be playing Gran Turismo 5 right now. But you aren’t, because the man behind the wheel, Kazunori Yamauchi, is a total perfectionist.

“The scale of this title is just dizzying, so daily progress is slow, but it’s still going forward at a steady clip,” he told Famitsu (as translated by 1UP). “All the basic stuff is complete, but we’re trying to give everything that little bit extra at present.”

“We could release it any time we want, really, but I want to have that classic GT-style ‘did we really have to go this far?’ feel going. I want to go way beyond gamer expectations.”

Oh yeah? Well, we’re gamers, and we’re expecting the game to be released today. “Way beyond our expectations”? Sounds like you’re going to need a time machine. Gran Turismo 6. DeLorean. Confirmed.

The first six pages of issue one of Dark Horse’s Mass Effect: Redemption comic have been posted over on Comic Book Resources.

Co-written by John Jackson Miller and BioWare’s Mac Walters, Redemption tells the tale of the events leading up to Mass Effect 2 which opens with Commander Shepard having mysteriously gone missing and left to fight for survival.

Also slated for release in January, is IDW Publishing’s monthly Dragon Age: Origins comic, which is being written by Orson Scott Card.

More through the links.

There’s a new video out for Blur, and it’s after the break, courtesy of BigDownload.

It shows the different powerups you can use to outmaneuver your opponents.

Also, it gives you a look at the four-player split screen multiplayer.

Game’s out in 2010.

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A patch has been released for GRID updating the game to version 1.3.

Included in it are the usual bug fixes one can expect with a patch along with some game enhancements.

Full notes are below the break, courtesy of BigDownload, which also has the file available for download.

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