Damn. I am not a game release historian, but I bet there hasn’t been a March full of this many quality games in a long, long time. I’m sure someone will take the time to go back and check every March since the dawn of gaming, but without doing any research I am declaring this the best March in gaming history. Why for, you ask. Check out the games we reviewed below....
Despite potential for a never-ending torrent of downloadable content keeping it alive for years, a sequel to last year’sRock Bandwas invevitable. Harmonix or MTV Games have yet to confirm its existence, but these two scans of the game’s potential cover art do a decent job for them. Obtained byJoystiqfrom a reader who was part of a Listen Research survey, the cover art was presented to participants who were asked to choose which one best fit with the game’s description....
It seemsEurogamerhas heard the same things we’ve been hearing aboutMass Effect 3: it will feature a four-player cooperative mode. The mode is said to be completely separate from the main campaign, and may stick closely to the Horde formula where players kill of waves of increasingly difficult enemies. Eurogamer also adds that there may be “competitive elements,” although it’s unclear how that will work. “We haven’t talked about multiplayer in theMass Effectfranchise, but we’re exploring multiplayer in all of our games and all of our franchises,” BioWare’s Ray Muzyka told Eurogamer last week....
Hip-hop legend RZA is in cahoots with Activision. The Grammy-winning artistrecently tweetedthat he had completed doing motion capture work for the publisher, but provided no details on what game it was for. “Great team of guys who really appreciate hip-hop,” he says of the Activision team, adding, “I’m delighted to see that some people in Corp America who are beneffitin $$ from hip-hop are really fans of our work. Big ups Activision!...
I finally managed to get my hands onSpider-Manat an Activision preview event yesterday here in San Diego, right before Comic-Con officially kicked off. We didn’t have time to fully explore the game, but it was enough time to let us have a look at both the Noir and the newly announced Ultimate universe — two of the four that the game will feature. It was a good idea to have us play through a bit of the Noir world first, as Ultimate is quite different in comparison....
Eight Singapore fans of Japanese gameSlayersenteredinto a suicide pactso that they could become “Slayers” themselves and kill demons in World War III. The “pact” lasted two suicides, before the rest of the kids realized they were being f*cking stupid and backed out of the plan once they saw two friends leap to their deaths from a tall building. The pact was started by a 16-year-old, self-proclaimed Taoist medium called Ku Witaya, who convinced his brother and six other kids to join him in his quest to become a “Slayer....
Rumors of a PlayStation 3 price drop have haunted the Internet since, well, the console was first announced. More recently, little birds have been speaking, tweeting about an October 12 “big bang,” which some have speculated could be a price drop. Well, it continues, as the folks over atEngadgethave received some Best Buy documents that show a listing for a PlayStation 3 with a 40 GB hard drive at $399.99. As an added bonus, it also appears to ship with the filmSpider-Man 3on Blu-ray (which is to be in stores on October 30)....
Game publishers are always looking for new ways to provide that “first free hit” as if they were nerdy drug dealers, and a fresh patent from Sony appears to have stumbled upon an interesting way of doing it. The filing details a “degradable demo” that provides users with a full game, and then slowly strips away features until the player is forced to buy it. The detailed software lets a developer set when the game downgrades....
If you love both the PlayStation brand and ridiculous amounts of overpriced material garbage (no PS3 jokes, please) then youmight be interested to hearthat Sony has got together with Target Entertainment in a bid to produce huge amounts of merchandise for its hardware and first party videogames. “Many of Sony Computer Entertainment’s first party software titles and characters are now recognized by millions of people around the world — from the legendary Ratchet and Clank through to the iconic Sackboy fromLittleBigPlanet,” says licensing and peripherals manager Stephanie Freeman, who somehow thinks Sackboy has achieved iconic status....
Hey guys, let’s talk about theTeam ICO Collectionsome more! Despitelistings that saythe game is definitely coming, and rumors aplenty, Sony has remained coy on the subject, with Sony Worldwide Studios VP Shuhei Yoshida claiming that he “wants” to see an HD Team ICO game, but won’t confirm it’s a real thing. “We want to see them played in HD in a better frame rate as well. That’s something we’re very, very aware of,” he claims....
It wouldn’t surprise Phil Spencer (or Brad Nicholson) if Lionhead Studios integrated Project Natal support into a future iteration of the Fable series. In a recent interview withJoystiq, the Microsoft VP lauded Lionhead Studios for its innovation, in particular with the move to makeFable 2episodic. As a natural piece of Spencer’s thought train, the important-sounding man added that it wouldn’t “surprise” him if Lionhead took that innovation, used Natal, and dropped motion controls into a futureFabletitle....
EA recently slapped down some new screenshots fromSporethat reveal a tiny bit of what users will be doing during the civilization and space phases of the game. Other than looking pretty, I think the civilization screenshots are quite revealing. The apparent depth ofSporecontinually surprises me. If you didn’t know, the game is broken apart by five distinct phases. The screenshots that we have detail the fourth (civilization) and fifth (space) stages of the game....
Okay, I don’t currently play mobile games, but I have to say I would play mobile games if something that wasn’t total crap was actually available to play (or if the majority of US cell phones weren’t totally uncomfortable to play games on.) In Japan however, cell phone users are light years ahead of us, programming their phones to signal their friends when attractive potential males are in their immediate radius, alerting them when its time to cram for tests, and summoning giant robots to do their bidding....
