Uh, oh: the second Usenet story of the day, this time from Newsdemon. Someone check to see if the planets are still in their orbits, or whether or not that second sun has popped up yet. They’re running a contest over there that I thought I’d point out for a minute. The prize? A couple of free games up for grabs. Nothing wrong with that. → Read More
Direct2Drive, the digital download service for PC games, has started a rental service. It’s $5 for five hours of gameplay, which, doing some maths, works out to $1 per hour. There’s a small catch: only three games are available to rent right now: Grid, Divinity 2, and Silent Hill: Homecoming. The future, Conan? → Read More
Quickly now: Duke Nukem Forever will be released on May 3 of this year for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC. 2K, the game’s publisher, says that “May 3, 2011 marks Duke’s return as he unleashes his brash and brutally honest wit on the world. His return is going to be epic and one that will make video gaming history!” Indeed. Update: Reveal trailer after the jump! → Read More
Video game piracy cost some £1.45 billion ($2.31 billion) in lost sales last year, as well as around 1,000 lost jobs. So says the Association of UK Interactive Entertainment (UKIE), which cautioned that even those impressive numbers are on the conservative side. That’s console piracy, mind you, which yet again throws a wrench in publishers’ arguments that piracy is only a problem on the PC, so draconian DRM regimes are a necessary evil. And you wonder why Sony has freaked out over the PS3 Jailbreak. → Read More
The one disappointing thing about the Nintendo event from this morning: we still don’t have the exact list of launch titles, with Nintendo instead opting to draw attention to the system’s “launch window,” the several week period between its March 27 launch and E3. What are you gonna do? Me, I played a couple of these “launch window” games right after the press conference. Here’s a quick breakdown of what I saw, and played. → Read More
Nicholas here, live from Nintendo’s big press conference in New York. The star of the show will be the 3DS, and Nintendo is expected to announce launch details: exact release date, price, games, etc. The stuff you’ve been waiting for. Like with the IBM Jeopardy challenge last week, feel free to refresh this post every minute or so; I still don’t know how to use fancy live-blogging services. → Read More
It’s probably fair to say that LittleBigPlanet came out of nowhere to become the early face of the PS3. You’ll recall that the system didn’t have the smoothest of launches, completely overshadowed by the Wii back in 2006, but then this odd little platformer and its troupe of sackboys appeared. What, a PS3-exclusive game worth playing?! Has the world gone mad? (No.) → Read More
Nice, it looks like the PS3 version of Portal 2 won’t stink on ice—something that can’t be said about the Xbox 360 version of Team Fortress 2. (Though that’s hardly Valve’s fault, having to play by Microsoft’s silly Xbox Live rules.) PS3 owners can look forward to cross-platform (PC/Mac vs. PS3) gameplay in multi-player mode, Steam Cloud-based storage of saved games (eh…), and cross-platform chat. → Read More
Sony’s trying its hardest to erase the PS3 Jailbreak hack from the Internet, but we all know that’s folly. Two seconds on YouTube turns up not only links to all the necessary files, but detailed, how-to videos describing how to hack the system. The scary thing for Sony is that we’re long past the point where hacking a video game console requires soldering knowledge and a hard-to-find modchip. Today all you need is a small USB flash drive and the ability to follow along with a low-res instructional video, and even our most attention deficit disordered youth can pull that trick off. → Read More
We talk about Steam seemingly every 18 seconds here, so it’s only fair that we pay attention to some of the other digital download services that are out there. Direct2Drive, the IGN-owned download service, has added The Sims to its existing catalog of “more than” 2,500 games. That means one thing for y’all: there’s a big sale! → Read More
Ha! Well that didn’t take long. Sony has now officially sued the folks behind the PS3 hack, Geohot and fail0verflow. This is good news for Sony’s lawyers, and bad news for pretty much everyone else, particularly those of you who still believe the quaint notion of hardware ownership or anything like that. Foolish! → Read More
Well, well, well. THQ, the famous video game publisher that’s brought us all those UFC and WWE games, not to mention the criminally underrated (particularly if you have a beefy computer) Metro 2033, now has a new logo. Surprisingly, the logo doesn’t once mention the publisher’s distaste for the used games market, nor are the letters D-L-C anywhere to be found. → Read More
You forget about some of the fun stuff you’ve seen after having spent an entire week fighting crowds in Las Vegas while sick and tired. And I do mean sick and tired: I was sick flying into Las Vegas (you know the sharp, stabbing pain you get in your ears when your airplane descends from the heavens while sick? Yeah, I had that, and it wasn’t fun), and all that running around, lugging cameras and other equipment all over the place had me exhausted by the end of the first day. But I persevere to bring you our impressions of the Nintendo 3DS. Yes, in one of the fancy hotels away from the din of the show floor Nintendo met with John and I for a while to give us some one-on-one time with the system. Needless to say we both walked away thinking, “Yeah, that’s a decent little machine right there.” But how decent? Hmm. → Read More
Whatever happened to the idea of “you bought it, you can do whatever you want with it”? You buy a car and want to add all sorts of silly aftermarket modifications like it’s 2004 and Pimp My Ride is still relevant? Feel free! But no, you buy a video game console, explore its inner workings, maybe discover and exploit or security vulnerability and The Man wants you silenced. In this case, The Man is Sony, and they are none too pleased that evildoer hackers released details of PS3 security flaws, flaws that could lead to sinister developments. I guess. → Read More
Don’t be like John and stop playing Fallout: New Vegas because “you have no idea where to go.” It’s really not that hard: you help out that first small town (Goodsprings), then you walk down the road to adventure. Oh, and this is a DIY helmet. It’s quite nice. → Read More
If you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Golly gee, I sure would like to know what the insides of the 3DS look like,” then today is your lucky day. The CirclePad, like you’ve never seen it before~! → Read More
And here’s another non-iPhone story to sorta cleanse the pallet. (We recognize that not everybody necessarily goes nuts over the iPhone, but today is just one of those days.) Recognize this Jeep? You will if you’ve played Call of Duty: Black Ops, the Big Mac of the gaming world. → Read More
It would appear that Nintendo has region-locked the 3DS. That’s lame, yes, but outside of importing the rare game here or there—perhaps you want the latest Pokemon without having to wait several months for the localized version—it’s probably not a huge deal for the majority of Nintendo fans. An email sent from Nintendo of Japan to a perspective 3DS buyer says that both the system and its games are region-locked. Meaning, you can’t buy a Japanese 3DS and play your American games on it, or vice-versa. → Read More
And now for some World of Warcraft news. Blizzard says that they’ve sold some 4.7 million copies of Cataclysm since its release one month ago. Most of the sales came on the very first day of release, with 3.3 million copies moving on day one. Mighty impressive. → Read More
Nintendo has released the full list of 3DS launch titles—for Japan, that is. (Nintendo hosts a press conference next week in New York that, one would guess, will cover the North American 3DS launch details. We’ll be there, knock on wood.) Ten games will be available at launch on February 26: Konami’s Winning Eleven Soccer (known as Pro Evolution Soccer outside Japan); Namco Bandai’s Ridge Racer 3D; Capcom’s Super Street Fighter IV; Tecmo Koei’s Samurai Warriors: Chronicle; Square Enix’s Tobidasu! Puzzle Bobble; Ubisoft’s Combat of Giants; a new version of Professor Leyton from Level-5; and three versions of Nintendo’s various Nintendogs/Nintencats games. So is that a “strong” lineup or a merely an “okay” lineup? → Read More
