GAME Australia Lays Off 281 Employees, Closes 60 Stores 
How Diablo III's Always-On Internet Requirement Makes It A Better Game GAME: No Buyers Yet, Crisis To Drag On For Another Month 
Have Your Say On Video Game Pricing 
35,000 Telstra Passwords Reset After Games Services Hacked 
Dragon's Dogma: The Kotaku Review Before you get excited at the feature-list, know this thing costs FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS. Got it? Let’s continue. This is the Game Haven PC3. You can buy it from Skymall. And it would be just about the best thing in the world for emulator fans if you could buy it with normal-human money. At it’s heart, it’s a PC running Windows XP. On its face? Two arcade stick layouts. A third, four-directional-only stick. Pinball flippers. Tilt buttons. And a trackball. The thing’s got AV outputs out the wahzoo, supports a regular old keyboard and mouse and looks like it’s built out of battleship steel. In other words, it could play almost anything. Only downside? Yeah. FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS. Official Game Haven PC3 [Skymall, thanks HBunny!]
Some people like retro games. Others like retro games sealed. That way, and only that way, can one guarantee that it doesn’t have cooties. And no cooties means higher retro game prices! Game site Insert Credit points to English/German forum Sealed Game Heaven, which exactly that: A sealed game heaven. The site is for people who collect unopened games and is packed with useful info like different kinds of seals PlayStation games use. Fascinating stuff — even if you prefer actually playing games over looking at packaging. Sealed Game Heaven [Official Site via Insert Credit]
id’s Rage is FPS-meets-racing-meets-vechicular-combat-meets-lotsa-sand. So many ideas rolled into one. Sure, id probably had no shortage of FPS ideas — the developer all but invented the FPS. But where did it get those other ideas? From other games! id’s Todd Hollenshead explains: For other areas, MotorStorm was an influence, and I was a big PGR3 fan, and of course we have some other guys who are racing game fans. But the driving side of it isn’t intended to be a racing simulation like PGR3 or Gran Turismo. It is intended to have the feel and response that you would expect, and one of the things we had to prove to ourselves internally is that we had the capability to drive around in vehicles and have that be a significant aspect of the game and fun.
There’s more! id’s Tim Willits adds:
The announcement of Starcraft 2 got one monkey off Blizzard’s back. The other three (Diablo 3, Warcraft 4 and, for me, Lost Vikings 3D), they’re working on, one at a time. First up is another Warcraft RTS, which Blizzard’s Rob Pardo says is definitely “on the table”. The way that we develop things, each time a development team becomes available, because they’re done with creating the games that they’ve been doing, they have a lot of say over what their next game is. So what it would take is for one of our teams to decide that they want to make Warcraft RTS and of course, there’ll be some talk about doing that and I’m sure after StarCraft 2 ships, it will be one the ideas on the table for that team to do, but that’s pretty far off in the future and it would really be determined by a combination of the dev team and the company leadership.
This “Warcraft” name, it’s pretty big these days. Think an RTS might be a no-brainer move for them, since you could release a Warcraft Activity Centre on the V.Smile and it’d still shift 20 million units. Blizzard’s Pardo Hints at Warcraft RTS; Not Interested in Consoles [GameDaily]
n-tv have gotten hold of some (rounded for your pleasure) GRP hardware sales figures for the German market. On offer, both total lifetime sales for the three current-gen consoles, as well as monthly numbers since May. Which are the Germans hottest for? I’l give you a hint, make it easy for you. It’s not the 360. Not the PS3, either.
Alone in the Dark, BloodRayne and House of the Dead. Director Uwe Boll has made movie adaptations to varying degrees of bad and really bad. (Though, he newest movie Postal is apparently somewhat good!) So what games would Boll really like to direct? He says about his dream projects: METAL GEAR SOLID, I loved HITMAN …but now they made the movie without me. I loved THE SUFFERING.
Too bad Kojima Productions wants nothing to do with you, Uwe! And The Suffering? I’m sure your viewers know about that. Boll Interview [Aeropause]
Real or fake? A sample of Halo 3 manual images has surfaced. The manual doesn’t the Covenant’s Needler as a weapon that can also be wielded by Master Chief. Odd, because it’s been dual-wieldable since the last Halo. Stuff like that and the fact only a sample of pages are floating about makes me think these are scans from an early proof copy or totally and utterly bogus. We’ll find out when the game’s released this September. Hey, that’s soon!
Halo 3 Instruction Manual? [FileFront via POWET.TV, Thanks Marcus!]
360 achievements are nice, sometimes, but they’re not really my cup of tea. Little too competitive for my liking. I would also have thought they were a little too competitive for Nintendo’s liking, but on that, I’m so wrong. Looks like MP3 will feature some kind of achievement system, where pulling off certain feats/tasks sees you awarded coloured tokens. Some of these tokens are for you (i.e. you use them to unlock hidden/extra stuff), but some are for you to send to friends (so they can unlock stuff).
It’s certainly different. And officially unconfirmed (this info all comes from a GameFAQs poster who apparently played the game at his local GameStop). But you can definitely see a blue token being awarded in this trailer (7:59), and the whole notion of a caring, sharing system of achievements instead of one centred around pissing contests is certainly more Nintendo’s style.
Interesting Metroid Prime 3 Feature [Go Nintendo]
The exciting and inevitable conclusion to the my-Xbox-360-starting-freezing post! On Saturday night, after playing the BioShock demo to death, I decided to fire up some Gears of War. I played for ten minutes and then it moved on from this world, leaving Red Rings of Death as a memento. To recap: I got the “checkerboard effect,” and the next time I switched on a disc-based game, the box konked out. So Xbox Live Arcade games and free demos could be the answer to Microsoft’s hardware woes! Or something.
7pm EDT. Monday night (if that’s your neck of the woods; the rest of you go sort out your own time zone conversion like I had to). That’s when PC users can get in on the sweet, sweet BioShock demo action those 360 owners have been licking off their fingers this past week. FilePlanet users, you should already be “pre-downloading” it, everyone else, hold tight. Big question is, will you be playing the same demo? NO! OK, mainly yes, but we’ve been told one of the plasmids is in a different spot. Here’s hoping this relocation doesn’t completely RUIN the experience.
