Reggie Fils-Aime (aka the Regginator) has just announced that the eagerly anticipated successor to the Nintendo DS will be released in all territories by the end of the financial year.

The so-called ‘prototype’ model received an overwhelmingly positive response at E3 last week, with critics lauding its technical prowess and convincing 3D effects. However, many gamers demanded to know to real reason as to why Nintendo refused to confirm an official release date at the conference.

Read more… »

Yes, yes, we all know that the US gang had fun at E3, but while they were relaxing at their lazy convention, we gamers were putting in the hard yards playing videogames.

So what exactly have you been playing this past week? If you managed to hit up E3, be sure to come in and boast about all the awesome games we plebs will have to wait several months to get our hands on.

Read more… »

If I could sum up Crackdown with one phrase, it would be “KILL THESE GUYS, THEN SOME OTHER GUYS TEN MORE TIMES, AGENT!”  Sadly, while it was a cool looking game, the mission structure was pretty repetitive, and simply required you to raid crime boss base after base, killing similar looking models for about ten hours on end. But while repetition was the name of the game, there was some solace to be found: the ability to essentially jump forty feet in the air, and climb giant skyscrapers in ways never before possible in any sandbox game on the market.

Is Crackdown 2 the same old jump-fest? Take a journey with us as we examine the new Xbox Live thirty-minute “do whatever you want” Crackdown 2 demo. Read more… »

The most influential band in the history of popular music was always going to be a tough act to follow. Conceived as a carefully crafted tribute to the band, The Beatles: Rock Band was crowned as one of the most refreshingly diligent music games to date, but despite it being universally praised, it was not as commercially successful as the developers had hoped. So who would you presume was going to be the next iconic group to be given the coveted band game treatment? The Rolling Stones? Queen? Iron Maiden? Nope you’re wrong, because it is in fact a band who named their most successful album after a juvenile term for fecal matter.

Many have been openly cynical about Harmonix’s decision to grant Green Day a game of their own. Afterall, going from the Fab Four to three middle-aged degenerates who once sung about profound topics such as masturbation and who still think they’re 18 by wearing copious amounts of eyeliner was bound to scorn some. And yet it actually makes sense.

Love them or hate them, there’s no denying that Green Day has a massive following of troubled teenagers and youthful adults alike, and are most notable for their sizeable influence during the punk rock phase of the 1990s. From a commercial standpoint, Green Day is far more relevant to current consumers in today’s music scene, so there is a higher potential for game sales. But does this latest Rock Band incarnation give you the Time of your Life or does it trail into a putrid pile of Dookie?

Read more… »

As a die-hard Philly fan, it pains me to see a Chicago Blackhawk grace the cover of the NHL game in back-to-back years – an EA Sport’s first. However, the Blackhawks had a phenomenal year and my Flyers put up a fight. But I am still bitter!

Patrick Kane, NHL 10‘s cover athlete, is followed by his teammate, Jonathan Toew as this year’s cover athlete for NHL 11 – a game that left me speechless at E3. This is surely a proud moment for Toew as making the cover of the 20th anniversary title for a franchise that has won 22 Sports Game of the Year awards over the past three years is no joke. Be sure to hit the jump to see what Jonathan had to say on the honor. Also, be sure to read the E3 hands-on preview of NHL 11 as the video above shows off a lot of what left me speechless. Read more… »

How does one improve the best sports franchise in the last three years? No, don’t say it. Don’t argue with me here. NHL is, without doubt, the best EA Sports franchise there is – the 22 Sports Game of the Year awards the franchise has received over the past three years speaks for itself after all. Sure I am a huge Madden fan, but the realism, the polish, and the amount of content in NHL 08, NHL 09, and NHL 10 have been a few of the reasons why it has been so successful.

After last year’s title, it was hard for me to fathom exactly how it could be improved – hence the previous question. Well, that question was answered for me by getting my grubby hands on it behind closed doors at E3. However, before my mind could process the changes and improvements that have been made in NHL 11, I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. Read more… »

It is often preached that one of the great pros to the App Store is the little games that would otherwise go unnoticed or would quickly die under the blizzard of AAA mainstream mega-games. Enter, Chase the Dot: an incredibly simplistic and fun title developed by art studio Universal Everything who specialize in handheld media.

If you haven’t heard by now, then let me catch you up to speed on the gameplay: there is a dot that appears, disappears, and reappears in several spots on the screen, and you get points by tapping it before it’s gone. In Double mode there are two dots which disappear and reappear simultaneously, and therefore must be tapped simultaneously. Read more… »

Right after the new Xbox 360 Slim came out, we let you know that the red ring of death was officially no more - but we didn’t quite know why.

Thanks to a new Xbox user on NeoGAF who purposely overheated his Slim, we now know that the system shuts itself off before it can overheat, and brick your console. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about this – I mean, Microsoft never really *fixed* the problem, they just skirted it. Additionally, your game (which may be unsaved for hours on end) will promptly end immediately without prior warning.

I think a better system would be to warn you way before it happens, or just put an internal fan/heat monitor on the Guide screen. We’ll see if this only kicks in every so often, but as it stands, it might get pretty annoying! Read more… »

While the Sony PSP has had its ups and its downs, most people can agree that one the few shining examples of great game design on the system is God of War: Chains of Olympus.  Not only has it been heralded as one of the best PSP games released, it’s also considered by many to be one of the best God of War games to date.

It should come as no shock then that Ready at Dawn Studios is back to bring Kratos to the small screen one more time in God of War: Ghost of Sparta.  Being a huge God of War fan myself, I knew I had to get my hands on the game at E3 to see if this was really an adventure worth embarking on.  Now that I’ve washed the blood off my hands after the long 15 minute demo, I’m ready to tell you all about it. Read more… »

There’s a simple recipe that has been handed down for generations to add some spice to a racing game: when all else fails, take an assortment of outlandish cars, place them in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world, and equip them with mounted machine guns. In some cases, this resulted in a dish of exquisite car combat, with early examples of Twisted Metal, Interstate 76, and Vigilante 8 leading the genre. Times have changed however, and the ingredients have since become rather stale to the point where you might as well be eating rust – you only need to sample the gristly Full Auto series to realise this.

Unbeknown to most racing fans, the original Deathtrack was an obscure vehicular combat game originally released for the PC in 1989, which later spawned a remake entitled Death Track: Resurrection last year, also for the PC. For whatever reason, Gaijin Entertainment, the people responsible for IL2: Birds of Prey and the recently released Anarchy: Rush Hour, felt that the time was right to port Death Track: Resurrection over to the PS3 in the form of a budget PSN download, in the hope that it will attract a whole new audience. Quite frankly, they needn’t have bothered.

Read more… »

Bethesda showcased four different titles, and of the four, Fallout: New Vegas was the most well known.  Ironically, Rage, Brink, and Hunted were the lesser known, but because of their solid display, they quickly became the focal point of discussion whenever Bethesda was brought up.

Simply put, New Vegas was a disappointment for me, and because Vegas was once a place I called “home,” it was the title I was looking forward to most.  While it may sound contradictory, or even slightly biased, my impressions of the demonstration are completely separate from how I feel the overall game will be upon release and with good reason too. Read more… »

One of the benefits of being a music game nerd is that you never have to wait for anything to be announced. Everything will be leaked. Musicians who can’t shut up, licensing that goes public, or demos gone wrong.

For Rock Band one big source of leaks are the commercials. In this case the Miley Cyrus Pack commercial leaked 3 new Ministry songs. Two of them being Jesus Built My Hotrod and Stigmata.

Read more… »