It’s about damn time that Atari lost that license, but I think that it’ll put Atari one step closer to being bought out by the massive Japanese corporation. Namco/Bandai now has the sole distribution/development rights to both the North American and Japan/Europe markets. They announced shortly after the license was acquired that they have 3 separate Dragon Ball Z games coming out by the end of this year alone.

I don’t know about you guys, but I have a special love for the DBZ series. The games just happen to be a guilty pleasure of mine.

Mimicking Pee Wee Herman’s classic line, Naoya Matsui (head of product planning for Sony) claims that they were planning on having a non-UMD PSP come out BEFORE they even released the first PSP…the only thing holding them back was the lack of a decent digital distribution market.

In an interview with GameBusiness.jp he states:

“We’d planned to release a PSP model without a UMD drive since the very beginning, but if we’d simply released the hardware, there wouldn’t have been much for everyone to enjoy. We wanted to release it when the delivery of digital content was on par with the delivery of physical media. That’s what we’ve been working on these past two years. We’ll be selling the PSP Go alongside the existing PSP models, because it’s a product targeted at those people who are more accustomed to digital content.”

I happen to be a bit more cynical about news like this, I see it as the company trying to save face for yet another failed medium (you kids need to research BetaMax) and as a means of having a convenient excuse as to why the PSP Go won’t have UMD support. They very well could have considered it from the beginning, I just choose to think the former, it’s just more fun to be an ass about things like this.

You get some Brutal Legend. Thanks IGN!

Guys, I love the PS3 as much as the next guy, but after reading an interview over at CVG, I think it’s safe to say that Valve is effectively done working on that platform. Doug Lombardi stated in the interview:

“Until we have the ability to get a PS3 team together, until we find the people who want to come to Valve or who are at Valve who want to work on that, I don’t really see us moving to that platform.”

If you remember, any Valve game that has come out on the PS2 or PS3 was actually done by an outside company and not Valve themselves. For example, The Orange Box was ported to the PlayStation 3 by EA. He continues:

“We’ve kind of learned a lesson in that again, if we were customers of that product on PlayStation, we’d feel like we sort of got the stepchild version of the product while the guys on the PC and the 360 got the sweet version of it.”

Well if you read the other bits in the interview, you’ll learn that he’s talking about the disparity between the scores of The Orange Box on Metacritic. The game received a aggregate score of 96 on both the PC and 360 and only got a 89 on the PS3 port. That’s still a respectable score, but not quite in the same ballpark as the near-perfect versions on the PS3.

Guess you guys hoping for a PS3 port of Left 4 Dead will just have to suck it up and get a PC or 360, sorry!

Yeah, they really haven’t changed that much since the original game, but for some reason whenever I see pictures like this…I feel a bit of sadness for the horribly misguided little sisters. I loved the first Bioshock so much because of moral ambiguity of whether you chose to save or harvest the little girls (I could never harvest them myself). The high point of the first game for me is when you suit up as a big daddy in order to escort around a little sister near the end, it was the typical VIP escort mission, but hey…those kids had tons of personality.

The Polytron Corporation have announced that their soon to be released 2D/3D platformer Fez will be coming to XBLA early 2010.  I’m really excited for Fez and I’m pretty sure anybody who has been following it’s development is pretty excited too. Now it’s been announced for release on XBLA it should reach the wide audience that it deserves.

Paul Anderson made Mortal Kombat, one of the 90s best unintentional comedies. When I say that I mean that it was so bad it was good. Even Resident Evil wasn’t THAT bad, but then Paul Anderson ended up making two sequels, both of which were abominations. Even though Resident Evil: Mad Max Extinction was meant to be the last movie, it was left on a cliffhanger and now Hollywood wants to make me rage yet again by making yet another Resident Evil movie. Yesterday it was just a rumour that Resident Evil 4 was coming out in September 2010 but today when Mila Jokeovich Jovovich was being interviewed, she said that she would be started filming on something at the end of the year. When asked what, she simply said “number 4!” pretty much confirming that filming on Resident Evil 4 starts at the end of the year.

I’ll try to ignore anything about this movie but it still makes me angry that another shit RE movie is going to be made. If you’re going to make more movies, at least go with more Degeneration like movies. I guess that doesn’t print money though.

Source: Shocktillyoudrop

It’s time for our light hearted comedy post of the week and this week it comes from the Big Apple, Although it involves Lime and Pizza. Now I’ve never been a fan of Limewire. Of the few times I’ve tried it out of curiosity, I’ve found it’s nothing but a haven for viruses and trojans so it’s not worth bothering with in my eyes.  As you also know, Limewire is also a haven for piracy, which is why what happened in NYC is so funny.

It all kicks off when some guys from a small music label called Dovecote records are eating pizza at their local bar as they’d been told that there was free pizza at the bar that night. However everything goes to hell when a woman comes over and accuses them of stealing the pizza for her company’s party which is taking place in the bar. Confused, the Dovecote guys try to apologize and even offer to pay for the pizza, but she ignores the offer and tells them they can’t steal things from other people.

Now here’s the great part. One of the Dovecote guys tries to befriend her and asks what company she works for. She says she works for Limewire. Considering she just told them that they can’t steal things, that’s pretty hypocritical. In a rage, one of the Dovecote guys says and I quote “Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)”

Now it could have just ended there and then but then one of them tried to steal a whole Pizza from Limewire, resulting in a Limewire software developer pouring beer all over him. Now we’ve only heard this story from Dovecote’s perspectiveve but it’s still a pretty funny story. Obviously the guy shouldn’t have tried to steal a whole Pizza but just the idea of what happened is amazing. If that’s the worst of what happens, then you can at least say there was one casualty in the labels vs users war, a shirt stinking of beer.

Source: Techcrunch (thanks for Tweeting it Wardrox!)

I don’t blame Microsoft for trying to be edgy to  regain its lost browser share…but whoever decided to greenlight this ad should be fired immediately. Microsoft has since pulled down the ad from their campaign, but in an age where nothing is truly gone from the internet, this ad will live in infamy.

Yup, the big man overseeing Tekken 6 (Katsuhiro Harada) says that you’ll no longer have to beat the game with each character in order to unlock all of the game’s hidden and special characters. All of the game’s 40 characters will be available as soon as you hit the start button.

“That’s kind of outdated now though, especially with online play. If we were to have locked characters it would irritate a lot of people, to be playing against others online and to not have all the characters available. So I think it’s no longer useful.”

Make sure that you offer a little word of thanks to Harada-san when you’re able to play as Mokujin or Kuma right out of the box.

In a Q&A session on the Ubisoft forums, Red Steel 2’s Jason Vandenberghe (Creative Director) answered a pointed question to whether or not the company would look towards a multiplatform release.

Red Steel 2 is Wii exclusive, and Wii MotionPlus exclusive. The core gameplay of intense, 1st-person swordplay simply doesn’t function the way we want it to without the Wii Remote.

I find this highly entertaining that someone would answer bluntly that they would cut themselves out of a potential revenue source by remaining console specific. Especially when my previous post has a Wii developer looking to go multiplatform to increase his brand’s recognition. The game industry is MADDENING!!!

[source]

I’ve never really been into the novelisations of games or films, normally I’d just assume that they had been written by some cheap hack author and then pumped out for as cheap as possible to make as much money as they can for whatever product they are tied too.  Being a massive Resident Evil fan I decided to throw caution to wind and went out a picked up the entire series of novelised versions games written by S. D. Perry and found myself to be pleasantly surprised.  Whilst these books aren’t going to win any major awards, they’re a good fun read and fans of the game will get a kick out of the extended stories.  There are six books in total, one for each game up to RE: Code Veronica and there are also two entirely original novels; Caliban Cove and Underworld both of which have been designed to fit into the overall Resident Evil canon rather than too overwrite it. Caliban Cove takes place between the events of Resident Evils 1 and 2 and focuses on the adventures Rebecca Chambers and the S.T.A.R.S Exeter Branch as they investigate the Umbrella Corporations Caliban Cove laboratory.

If Goichi Suda gets his way, we’re sure it will.

He stated recently on EDGE that No More Heroes will need to quit being a Wii exclusive if the series ever stands at becoming a franchise.

Uh oh, you mean Microsoft CAN be sued successfully? Well at least that’s what Peter Hochstein and Jeffrey Tenenbaum are hoping. You see, when the two men dreamed up an idea for communicating to each other while playing the same game in different locations back in 1991, they quickly filed a patent for the idea. Three years later, they received their patent.

Flash forward a decade to the beginnings of the ‘next-gen’ gaming experience (that we’re currently enjoying), turns out that neither Microsoft nor Sony paid the two men for the the rights to their genius.

What to do when corporations won’t pay out for your ideas?!? You get on the phone with your lawyer and you sue! It’s the American way. Sony, hoping to avoid a long and drawn out court battle against the two settled out of court this April, which leaves MS as the sole defendant listed.

If it’s bad enough to spook Sony into paying up, then I think Microsoft might end up paying through the nose when all’s said and done.

[source]

If you’ve been living in doubt, we’ve gottan more evidence of the lack of imagination going on from the powers-that-be over at Nintendo. Shigeru Miyamoto has commented about the next version of The Legend of Zelda that will be coming out on the Wii (announced at E3 2009) in the latest issue of Nintendo Power:

“I don’t think it’s going to be that radically different,”

I know that it’s not exactly news, but its just more ammo for the Nintendo fanboys to make excuses for…and more for me to laugh at how much they’ve strayed as a company.

Whoops, it turns out that the new ban has nothing to do with gold farming at all, but effectively bans ‘internet’ money to pay for real life tangible goods. This will most likely include paypal money as well but was mainly incorporated to get rid of the sneaky way people were gambling by using online currencies. Oh well, WoW players, you can still get your bargain priced gold straight from Chinese sweatshops.

If one of the industry’s most prolific DJs can’t seem to figure out how to play this game…what hope do the rest of us have?

If you haven’t heard of Nightwish, you need to get our from under the oppressive, crappy radio of the US of A and listen to some European bands. They know how to make metal. Nightwish is power/symphonic/gothic metal band from Finland with one of the best female singers I have ever heard, Tarja Turunen….at least they used to. The video above was the last concert Tarja sang with the band. Check out their earlier albums like Angels Fall First, Wishmaster, and Oceanborn to really get a feel for how they used to sound; the new singer just sounds like my mom and really, anyone can sound like my mom.



Their edition of Phantom of the Opera is one that I think just sounds amazing. They deny being a goth band and while I don’t truly consider them full-on gothic metal, they have some themes that are. Anyways enjoy.

I thought it had been proven more than once that all of Nintendo’s brain and fitness games don’t actually make you smarter or help you lose weight. But of course, we Brits are morons so we’ll be more than happy when Nintendo and Channel Five (a channel that should be obliterated of the face of the Earth) announce that they will be hosting talent shows to find Britain’s “biggest” brain. Whether that means ego or ability has yet to be confirmed.

Nintendo and Five will be travelling all over Britain’s major cities (apparently Liverpool, Newcastle or Leeds aren’t major cities) to find Britain’s “biggest” brains. How will they do that? With Nintendo games of course! No, not the Nintendo games that you can enjoy but Brain Training, Big Brain Academy and Wii Fit amongst other games. Wait…Wii Fit? How does that involve brains? If high school stereotypes have taught us anything, it’s that jocks or fit people never have any brains.

This sounds to be like a horrible combination of Nintendo’s ability to convince idiots that their shit actually benefits you and the already horrible X Factor and/or any other idiot talent show. At least not many people will watch it, I hope. (I’ll be wrong about this probably) After all, it is on channel Five.

Source: VG247

If it doesn’t bleed, can you kill it?

Remember all those times when you cut your hand while cutting an apple and you didn’t bleed? Or that time you nicked yourself while shaving and nothing happened? Yeah, me neither. But apparently in bizzaro world, where Team Ninja has their offices, these are daily occurences. I say all this because it seems their latest offering, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, the PlayStation 3 version of Ninja Gaiden 2, will feature much less blood than it’s Xbox 360 counterpart. When asked about the bloodloss by Games Radar (via Destructoid), Sigma 2’s director, Yosuke Hayashi, said “Each game has its own concept and with Ninja Gaiden 2, the focus was on extreme violence. But with Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, we really questioned whether violence is a necessity for a game, so we decided to move away from that trend. So the violence ‘approach’ is not the way we approached the development of Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2.”

…What? Team Ninja does know what game they are working on right? Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2. A game about a ninja killing other ninjas. Killing involves violence, so in this instance, yes, violence is a necessity for a game. I honestly believe that quote has to be a misunderstanding or something. Is the game going to be Ryu having pillow fights with all those guys who want to murder him? Next thing you know, some porn director is going to try to make a porno with no tits. It’s a slippery slope, folks.

Welcome, faithful readers, to another edition of It Came from Obscurity, a regular feature where I take the metaphysical chainsaw to the swarms of mainstream movies to rescue the hidden gems left behind.  This week, I bring you the greatest movie about a band I have ever seen.  Better than This is Spinal Tap. Better than Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Yes, even better than Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny. I bring you Wild Zero, featuring Japanese punk band Guitar Wolf.

Have you ever wished that your career could be playing games professionally?  Well now thanks to this Craiglist advertisement that dream could become a reality, well only if your a Starcraft player.  For $25 an hour you could be learning:

• Micro management (unit management)
• Macro management (unit production and economy)
• Map specific strategies
• Basic and Advanced strategies and build orders for all three races.
• In-game bugs to be used to your advantage such as unit stack, stop lurkers, etc.
• Counter strategies and perfect attack timings.
• Learn Korean lingo, like “chobo” “gosu” “ww” etc
• Basic Korean to communicate with Koreans on battle.net
• Unit details, their size and their pros/cons against other units

There’s also the chance of fortune and fame in Korea, and who wouldn’t want to be famous in Korea?  I’m surprised I haven’t heard of my of these so called professional gamers hiring themselves to improve train the masses, maybe now that one person has started offering their services the others will begin to follow.

As Coonskin said a little while back, this shit is just getting ridiculous. Capcom, you don’t really need to tease us with what games are coming out because you have about 4-5 cash cows that you can always run to when you need a quick cash injection, so I’m not surprised in the slightest that the 1560, 1573, and 1582 flashing on the screen only to ends with 1600 is related to an Onimusha game.

I can only wonder who will be the next company to release yet another unimaginative and boring countdown/cryptic teaser site…wait, maybe Sega will tease yet ANOTHER Sonic The Hedgehog game with a blurry number kind of thing.

Enough already game companies! This means you!

This week, the boys here at MWN discuss the problems we see with having all sorts of advertisements on Xbox Live and on the Xbox 360 dashboard. This all comes your way thanks to our greedy corporate overlords at Microsoft. Hit the link to jump in on the discussion already in progress.

Just kidding, there’s no openings in the Justice League for an overweight guy. But if you want to lose that beer gut, VPT Technologies wants to help. VPT are the guys that made Wii Fit and Let’s Yoga, and it seems the killing they made with Wii Fit just isn’t enough. According to Siliconera, the developer has recently trademarked Fitness Hero and Workout Hero, which I assume is in preparation to branch out from the Wii to the other consoles. I think it’s a little superfluous to trademark both titles, but they’re likely just trying to stifle competition.

Now as an aside, can I just say that the amount of games with “Hero” in their names is getting goddamn ridiculous? Unless you have superpowers, serve in the military, or are a policeman or firefighter, you are not a hero. Guitar Hero got a free pass because at least guitarists pull tons of pussy night after night, and that is near hero-like. But then we got DJ Hero (a cool occupation, but nowhere near being a hero) and Band Hero, which doesn’t even fucking make sense. A band is almost always at least two people, and “Hero” is a singular noun. You can’t put those two words together! And now we finally have Fitness & Workout Hero, which is tricking overweight people into thinking that they are beautiful and unique snowflakes just for losing a couple of pounds. Don’t get me wrong, weight loss is no easy task, and is a very noble goal, but thousands of people do it every day, and they’re not getting the key to the city.