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If you played RPGs during the Playstation’s heyday, you likely rememberXenogears, a superlative action RPG from Square. I waited with baited breath forXenosaga, hoping it would compare to that other game’s quality, but it didn’t quite live up to what I hoped for, only enhancing that golden glow aroundXenogearsin my memory. While Sega’s upcoming fantasy RPGWorld Destructionisn’t the newXenogears, it may be as close as fans of the original game will ever get: Writer Masato Kato, character designer Kunihiko Tanaka, and composer Yasunori Mitsuda are all on board, which certainly points in a positive direction....

The once-mythical Skarlet, borne of a glitch and left in limbo for more than a decade, will be a playable character inMortal Kombatwhen she arrives as downloadable content on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade on June 21st. Here’s a trailer featuring her backstory and showing off some of her blood-based attacks. I had a chance to play about with Skarlet a bit at E3. She has great air defense working in her favor and manages to feel different enough from the other ladies....

It’s considered professionally courteous not to slag off a company you used to work for in public. Sledgehammer Games boss Glenn Schofield obviously hasn’t heard of professional courtesy, and he’s got no love for former taskmaster Electronic Arts. “Wow, a year ago today I left EA,” reminisced the developer via Twitter. “What a day that was. They really treated me like shit even after creatingDead Spacefor them.” After the inevitable whirlwind of attention that Tweet got, Schofield had this to say: “Seems my Tweet got some attention....

Sony just announced over at thePlayStation.Blogthat the first of their “premium”LittleBigPlanetSackboys, based on Old Snake (fromMetal Gear Solid 4) and Sephiroth (fromFinal Fantasy VII), will cost a whopping $1.99 each. These are just the first of the “premium” Sackboys to become available, with other designs “from our PlayStation family and even some outside the family” to come. Now it would be one thing if these acks did something that other sacks couldn’t do, like stab, or shoot, or realistically shrivel up in cold water, but instead all they have going for them is their resemblance to other videogame characters....

There’s this showStorage Warson A&E in which buyers visit storage container auctions and then try to flip swag they’ve won. It’s essentially a bllsht version of the far superiorAuction Hunterson Spike, but the comedy gold that I’m about to share totally justifies this show’s existence. In this past week’s episode, one of the buyers, Mark Balelo, got his mitts on a storage unit for $925. While sorting through the junk, he stumbled upon a rather banged-up NES and exclaimed:...

We all knew that the next Eyetoy was on the way and for the first time, Sony has announced and shown the details of their next-gen PlayStation 3 version — which is slated for release this summer. Now this is the kind of innovation we need, right? Here are the features: • A sophisticated microphone with the ability to reduce background noise and focus on spoken word for smoother, more accurate speech recognition• Engineered to perform in low-light conditions• Faster frame rate for improved tracking, responsiveness and smoothness• Two position zoom lens for close-up and full body options• Free EyeCreate(TM) editing software, which allows users to save, edit and add cool visual effects to photos, video and audio clips• EyeCreate also enables user to capture videos and audio clips directly to your PS3’s hard disk drive and access a range of different capturing modes, including slow motion and time-lapse....

I sawSquare Enix Japan’s mystery webpageearlier today and had some ideas. You see, the title of the page is “NEW GAME,” and other than a John F. Kennedy quote and a cool cityscape, not much else is shown or shared. But if you listen instead of look, you can kind of imagine the sounds coming right out of a newFront Mission(Square Enix’s militaristic strategy RPG series) videogame. But that’s all I had, really....

There’s music in my head that I want to make… …It just happens to sound like video games. -Alexander Kiefer / m0demphreak,philosopher-artist Much has been said already about the scene building around Chiptunes, or 8 bit music, as it is also known. A share of the commentary has been outright dismissals of music that, allegedly “tries to sound like video games.” If that was a goal, let alone the ultimate goal of this music movement, it certainly wouldn’t be half as interesting as it actually is....

It’s not Ewoks, but we’ll take it anyway. Recently, BioWare revealed another character class inStar Wars: The Old Republic, the Republic Trooper. These intergalactic shock troopers don’t possess aBounty Hunter’scunning or a Jedi’s grace, but they do have guns. Guns kill things. And just like Ma-Ti, the Trooper class fights with heart. From the new blurb onthe officialSW: TORWeb site: The Troopers’ greatest weapons are their indomitable spirit, their unwavering sense of duty and their undying loyalty to each other and to the ideals that the Republic represents....

In my earlier days I would go nuts, buying multiple games a month. It got to a point where stupid banks were giving me credit cards with crazy high limits, allowing me to charge up new games every week. I knew I hit a low point when I found myself buying a soccer game for the Sega Saturn on launch date. I’m not like that anymore. I hang back, wait for prices to drop, and then jump on it if I still really want it....

Still, it seems that Target is beginning to stock these PlayStation Plus access cards, which are good for one year of elevated PlayStation Network service. AJoystiqreader found the above pictured card at a Target store recently. On it you’ll see that one of the bulletpoints is that you’ll get PlayStation Store discounts. What kind of discounts? What sense does it make to pay for discounts? Beyond that, I’m all for early access, free stuff and exclusive features....

Being a retrocentric turn-based strategy, one would think thatShining Forcewould have already been exploited by Sega for DS appearances a hundred times by now, butShining Force Featheris actually the first time that the series has appeared on the handheld system. It was on show in Sega’s considerably large TGS booth, so I hopped in and checked it out. As you’ll know from my last hands-on, I was mostly just using Sega’s DS booths as an excuse to take a chair, but it rewarded me with some good preview time....

As I’m sure some of you may have noticed from whatlittle footageof the game we’ve been allowed to show,Mega Man Universepays homage to the classic series while providing updated visuals, with a dash ofcustomization. While I’m fine with the updated visuals, I find myself asking why they feel the need to sacrifice quality of game play in favor of said enhancements. Sure, one could argue that the demo we played is a work in progress, or that that finished product may be a bit more refined, but it simply doesn’t seem promising....