Day number twenty-nine. Month three. Time, unknown.

The writers of this site continue to make me read their work and comment on it weekly… prodding me to make fun of their colleagues for some sick, selfish reason I’m still not privy to. I’m not sure if it is a form of punishment or a sort of training for some greater purpose. I’m sure their motives will become clear in time. I just hope that I make it through these trials.

Footsteps in the hallway. A shadow making its way down the walls. I mustn’t dillydally… the recap must begin.

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What’s Call of Duty?  Only the most popular entertainment property of all time.  A sequel is inevitable.  So are rumors and leaks about it.

Today, we’ve got a name (unconfirmed), some setting details (unconfirmed), and something that’ll make the PC gamers veeeery happy (also unconfirmed, but we’re crossing our fingers for some validation)…

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After 3 years in development, the popular DoTA clone Heroes of Newerth (HoN) is finally entering into open beta.

Sadly, the HoN community is one of the most venomous and anti-noob friendly environments I have ever played in, hence it’ll be interesting to see how the community reacts to a sudden influx of newbies.

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You may have heard about the whole “get rid of the explicit apps in the iTunes Store” debacle a few weeks back.  Shortly after the apps were pulled, it was rumored that they might be coming back after it was revealed that developers had the option of selecting an “explicit” descriptor during the app submission process.  Then, Apple said no, not going to happen.

Now the rumors that Apple is bringing back the iPorn are flaring up again, with some screenshots of iTunes revealing an Explicit Apps section… and one for the iPad as well.

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It’s no secret that Dead Space fans everywhere were groaning when Extraction, a light gun spin-off game, was announced for the Wii. Although it recieved some pretty solid review scores, it practically broke records for how poorly it sold on the console. Strangely enough, when asked about it at their PAX panel, Visceral responded “keep your ears peeled”.

Visceral definitely deserves some more sales for Extraction. So why not just port over a value priced pre-existing game to cash in on the 360/PS3′s upcoming motion debut? Read more… »

Having finally invested in a laptop that has a better graphics card than the Etch-A-Sketch-esque specs of my previous rig, I figured it was time to look into revisiting some PC-specific franchises. So, while the masses lined up to gawk at boobs from the 50′s in Mafia II at the 2K Games area, I instead joined a small group in the back for a guided hands-off demo of the latest iteration of the Sid Meier juggernaut, Civilization 5.

While the Civ franchise has continually refined its gameplay mechanics, many of the staples of combat and exploration have remained static. After seeing the changes to combat, gameworld, and user interface, it looks like the Firaxis team has moved the venerated turn-based strategy game another rung up the tech tree. I came out of the demo excited to be a PC gamer again.

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Last year we had our Ratchet & Clank charity gaming marathon, which almost ended in a crazed James stabbing everyone, fortunately for this event there is a dedicated team of marathon gamers.

ExtraLives are attempting to play through their top 10 N64 games over a 64 hour period, their donation goal is $2,500, and at the time of this post the marathon has been running for 8 hours and has already received 1,203.60 in donations.

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There’s a strange lack of tension in Front Mission 4, considering that the Front Mission storyline is about nations perpetually warring with each other using bipedal tanks called Wanzers, and making battlefields out of inhabited cities. I couldn’t put my finger on what the problem was until I was most of the way through the game.

One time while playing, my girlfriend watched for a few minutes, and I asked her if she felt tense watching a city being made into a war zone. She pointed out that there’s a distinct lack of human element in the game; there’s no people running for their lives, no civilians to protect, not even any repercussions for hitting buildings with missiles on accident. Hell, there’s not even any vehicles on the side of the road!

The epiphany hit me like a ton of bricks. The previous installment – Front Mission 3, of course – for all the bad things I have to say about it, successfully made me feel as if my life was constantly in danger. It also made me feel like, by grace of piloting a Wanzer, I was constantly endangering other people who could care less about the pointless conflicts which spark the fuels of war. Read more… »

We posted recently about the pre-order incentives available for Modnation Racers on the PS3, well, the Playstation blog recently dropped some pictures and they are just so darn adorable how could we not share them with you?

The available packs are for Kratos (of God of War fame), Ratchet & Clank and everyone’s favourite incarnation of Nolan North, Nathan Drake (of Uncharted fame) and after the jump you will be delighted by screens of both Kratos and Ratchet.

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I’ve been following Halfbrick’s progress as a developer for some time, chiefly for the fact that I like to support Brisbane devs. Having been lucky enough to do some focus testing on their upcoming XBLA title, Raskulls, I was keen to see what titles they were able to pump out on the side.

Enter: Rocket Racing for the PlayStation Minis collection. The introduction of these pint-sized productions has been something of a revelation for PS3 and PSP owners, as they are often the perfect games to play on the run.

Rocket Racing seeks to punch players in the face with a fistful of fast-paced racing, while at the same time, appeal to our obvious lust for all things retro. But does it succeed?

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Microsoft announced today that the 360 will soon support the use of USB storage devices, which is great news for those of you (and me) who bought a 360 early on and have subsequently been left juggling saves, demos and videos around your puny hard drive. According to Major Nelson:

“On April 6th, we will be releasing a system update over Xbox LIVE for your Xbox 360 that will allow USB flash drives to be used for storing profiles, game saves, demos and more.”

The update will allow you to connect two devices to your console at once, and you can even select how much of each device you wish to apportion to your 360, leaving the rest to use as you please. However, you will be limited to 16GB per device, giving you a potential total of 32GB of extra space to play with at any one time. They have also enhanced the memory management functions, which will apparently give you better control of what you want to copy or move between your storage drives. Read more… »

You heard about GameCrush.  Pay a girl to play video games with you?  Scandalous… and lucrative, it seems.

Hit the GameCrush site today and see this.  Over 10,000 lonely nerds lookin’ for love in the span of five minutes means that the GC servers bombed, hard.  The solution?  Add more servers!  Players gotta play!

Oh, and that “$6.60 for ten minutes” rate?  Yeah.  That’s for a Flash game, or Checkers.  Halo 3 is going to cost you a little more.  At least there’s a “dirty” section of the site for the truly deviant (that’s you, you know it is!).  Get on the email list to be notified as soon as you can come back for more.

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