Gearbox: The Wii U Will Get The Best-Looking Version Of Aliens: Colonial Marines 
Microsoft Responds To Reports Of Xbox Live Account 'Jacking' 
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 The latest issue of Nintendo Power reveals, via cover story, that Sonic the Hedgehog is back! After a painfully long absence, the “Blue Blur” is returning to the Wii with Sonic & The Black Knight which the mag pitches as a “big new Wii-exclusive adventure” in which Sonic “swings cool steel”. Yep, the Sonic drought is over.
We have little info beyond the cover details for Sonic’s third Wii outing, but can imagine a Sonic themed adventure with the compelling gameplay of Red Steel or Dragon Quest Swords will fit the series like a glove. Hey, we’ll take it (begrudgingly) over gunplay any day.
To sum up… :\
Sonic and the Black Knight (Wii) revealed in new Nintendo Power [NeoGAF - thanks, Carlos!]
OK, and after this, I promise no more bashing on Nintendo’s press conference. But I used to work in internal PR for a very large software company (that may or may not have produced products that rhyme with Shmorton Shminternet Shmecurity) and we’d go to RSA, host our own user conference, all that stuff. What I mean to say is that I’ve seen some eye-rolling moments in keynotes, when top executives try to get hip. But I’ve never seen anything close to this.
The -Minus World sums it all up with the five most embarrassing moments. Yes, No. 1 is DJ Ravi flailing away like a toddler batting at a mobile. But the other four are alternately hilarious/pathetic too, and I think any one of them, by themselves, would have made it a trainwreck.
Anyway, enjoy. See you back here tomorrow.
The 5 Most Embarrassing Moments of Nintendo’s E3 Conference [The -Minus World, and pic]
Message boards and forums are livid at EA and NCAA Football 09, whose problems apparently go well beyond EA Locker corrupting the roster files. AOL Fanhouse went through the boards and made a full accounting, and it’s grim.
• Sliders are borked. The CPU sliders do nothing. Human sliders affect both CPU and human. Level playing field! • Online dynasty mode is borked. It sometimes simulates games that have been played by humans. • Super-sim is borked: Using it to fast-forward through a blowout can add many more plays than would actually happen in the football game, and produce extremely lopsided final scores. • Kick returns are borked. • The new player speed model is causing huge problems with pursuit angles by CPU-controlled players.
Damn, does this count as simulating a “war economy” too? Gamepolitics picked up an item out of Tacoma, Wash. that a former technical advisor on the original Metal Gear Solid faces a federal charge of attempted parts smuggling. The parts in question are “sophisticated holographic night vision gunsights”, bound for Japan.
Capt. Tomoaki Iishiba, a Japanese national who joined the U.S. Military in 1993, faces one count. He basically acquired the sights and then mailed them to others without an export licence. The sights cost more than $US 600 each.
He’s scheduled to enter a guilty plea at the end of the month.
Metal Gear Solid Tech Advisor Busted By Feds for Shipping Weapons Parts [GamePolitics]
Penny Arcade nails it in three panels. Then F@NBOY$ goes and re-nails it in seven. Well, they re-nail Nintendo’s cringe-inducing presser, anyway.
Both full size strips are on the jump. Sorry to do that, but at front-page width you can’t make out the words.
I’ve read a number of thought-provoking pieces over at Only a Game, and this week Chris Bateman has a meditation up on Nintendo, the ‘mass market,’ moving away from games, and what this could spell for the industry at large. Is it really all it’s cracked up to be? Unlike most of my favourite essays from Bateman, this one is pretty short and digestible — he points out that aggressively pursuing the ‘mass market’ (casual market) is working out splendidly for Nintendo, but he wonders if aggressively targeting that market inherently means moving away from games. And what about the industry at large? Well, that’s not so clear:
Wasn’t there to see it, don’t know, as this is the E3 Gameplay Trailer for Lego Batman, but it has no sound. Not sure if that’s a bug or intentional. But it begins with Lego Riddler sitting on a toilet, and if I see that I have an ethical obligation to report it to you mature people. (Snicker). Then Riddler and Mister Freeze go out, drive a cop car into a lot of smashable minikits, and Freeze goes apeshit with the gun, freezing Riddler in the process.
This video is 15 minutes long. I’m pissed there’s no sound, because I love the Lego speak in the cutscenes, and God only knows what they’re “saying” in that opening. It looks like a delightful game, with tons of LOL potential.
LEGO Batman: The Videogame E3 2008 Gameplay Trailer (HD) [GamersHell]
Ever wanted to decimate the world’s population or see if you could develop a super-bug that would leave the globe in utter pandemonium? If the answer is yes, browser-based Pandemic 2 is your game; even if the answer is ‘uh, no,’ it’s an interesting way to while away some time. Watch as your customised disease of choice is let loose on the world, then use your ‘evolution points’ to mutate the perfect delivery method for a global pandemic — the goal is to have a trail of devastation (and bodies) left in your wake. There are two different modes, ‘realistic’ and ‘relaxed,’ so if you’re not sure you’re ready for a realistic onslaught, you can try your hand with the easier mode.
Pandemic 2 [CrazyMonkeyGames via IndieGames]
This is absolutely parody. It could be unintentional self-parody. Or it could be someone masquerading as a PS3 fanboy to parody that particular constituency. But it’s parody. A guy who gives the announcement of Final Fantasy XIII for the 360 equal weight to Asperger’s is, shall we say, having a disproportionate reaction. (Full text on the jump). Still, we had a video earlier of an angry, ticked off PS3 fanboy who claimed to know Japanese culture about as well as Marcus Brody could [teeth clenched]blend in [/teeth clenched]in the Middle East of the late 1930s. That guy turned out to be a Something Awful goon.
The fact the text is available only as a screen capture (full version after the jump) leads me to be skeptical someone actually feels this way. But, if you’re a Microsoft partisan and want to gloat, here you go. And if you are four-square for Sony and want to rage, here is a comrade-in-arms. And if you invest your emotions and identity in pro bono advocacy for multinational corporations with billions in market capitalisation and brigades of PR professionals, you need some perspective. Like this guy.
