Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better 
Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review 
Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending What’s that you say? Renowned comics (and arcade book foreword) writer Warren Ellis worked on Dead Space? Wow, that’s great! Oh…what’s that you say? He worked on it over two years ago and now there’s barely anything, if at all, of what he did left? Wow, that…sucks. Dead Space executive producer Glen Schofield:
Those figures of your “favourite” Guitar Hero “characters”? They’re just the start of Activision and McFarlane’s push to sell you more mostly-immobile hunks of Guitar Hero-related plastic. Due for release in January 2009 will be a line of customisable guitars that let you swap out the heads, necks and bodies (no word on size or price), while later in the year, there’ll be more versions of the guitars, as well as 10″ versions of the already-seen characters, eight more of the 6″ characters (including Clive Winston and Eddie Knox) and a few lines of 2″ character figures. If you’re torn between just which Johnny Napalm 10″ figure you’ll want – the “British Flag” variant or the “Skeleton” variant – the full release (sadly, lacking any pictures) follows.
Sure, we’ve seen plenty of pics of the PS3′s bluetooth headset before, but they were lacking context! Scale! The thing could be as big as your finger, or it could be as big as your leg. Lucky we’ve got this trailer (and it’s wonderfully cheesy corporate-metal soundtrack) to set us straight!
The latest issue of Shonen Jump shows Final Fantasy IV hero Cecil Harvey in its latest update on PSP title DissidieFinal Fantasy. He’s standing across from FFIV bad guy Golbez. The game launches this December with three more characters to still yet be revealed. Ah yes, drip-fed PR.
Dark Knight Cecil Confirmed For Dissidia [PSP Hyper]
Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal is at the GameStop Expo in Vegas. And he’s seeing stuff. Stuff that, we’re guessing, only GameStop managers are supposed to be seeing. Not saying he snuck in, just, you know. Saying. Case in point: there are some games being unveiled behind closed doors. One of them is Fight Night 4, by EA. Details so far are sketchy, as it looks like N’Gai is posting via his phone in the dark under his shirt, but he says that while the visuals aren’t much of an upgrade over Fight Night 3′s, EA are talking up big improvements in the game’s physics and AI. And…that’s it. Expect more of an announcement when EA get around to actually making a proper announcement.
Any Fight Night fans in the house? [Newsweek]
Set your watches. Starting today, Xbox Japan has another go at that cruel mistress collectively known as the people of Japan. The Xbox 360 is marked down to ¥39,800 (US$US 371) from the original ¥47,800 ($US 445). The Xbox 360 Arcade version is now priced at ¥19,800 ($US 184) compared to its original ¥27,800 ($US 259) price-tag, making it cheaper than the Nintendo Wii.
What’s more, Xbox 360 with a 60GB HDD will also go on sale for ¥29,800 ($US 277). The Xbox 360 120GB hard disk has been reduced in price to ¥15,750 ($US 147) from ¥18,900 ($US 176). The measliest price reduction? The Xbox 360 512MB memory unit is now ¥5,250 ($US 49) from the original ¥5,775 ($US 54).
Will these price cuts cause widespread panic across Japan? Doubt it. But the Japanese hardware sales numbers should be interesting. They always are, you know. Well, not always, but still.
本日よりXbox 360の本体モデル改定！ [Dengeki]
Seems Pete Hines is quite talkative now! First the news that the Aussie-edited version of Fallout 3 is the only version, and now the one (yes, single) change made to the game to conform with classification guidelines. First, some background from Pete:
The chems in the original Fallout used fictional names…Buffout, Jet, Rad-X, etc. Those all appear in Fallout 3 in exactly the same way as before. We had added a new chem to Fallout 3 and had given it a real-world name, Morphine. Questions were raised about the use of that real-world drug, not only in Australia, but other territories as well.
Even though Australia’s a good example of classification gone wrong, I understand it’s not the only country with issues. So, what concession was made to appease aging conservatives the world over?
Activision released Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, didn’t go down too well. Well, not as well as they’d have hoped. The Metallica version should do much better. But what about Harmonix? Think they’re gonna take all this artist-specific stuff lying down? Like hell they are. We’ve today heard that the developers are at work on Rock Band: AC/DC. And not just at work on the game, but a massive marketing exercise to go along with it, featuring t-shirts, branded guitar controllers and even branded pickguards (ie faceplates). It’s unclear whether this will be a standalone disc product or a massive DLC pack, but hey, at least it explains what ex-AC/DC drummer Chris Slade was doing at Harmonix’s E3 gig a few months back.
Back on Monday, Square Enix announced its big Tokyo Game Show plans. The company hadn’t then decided in what form The Last Remnant and Star Ocean 4 would take at the show — whether they’d just be new trailers or actually playable. Well, Square Enix has made of its mind and yes, both games will be playable on the TGS show floor. Not only that, there will be trailers, too. So when you’re not playing, you can be watching. And when you’re not doing that, you can be doing other things.
Bloody MadWorld isn’t your typical Wii game by any stretch. It’s got mini-games, but violent ones. Wii Sports, this ain’t. But for Platinum Games, the developers of MadWorld, the fit makes perfect sense. Says the game’s producer Atsushi Inaba:
We’re really interested in the Wii platform so we wanted to create a really cool and stylish game for that… As you can see [from our Leipzig presentation]it’s really easy to pick up and play so when we came up with the concept of Mad World the Wii felt like a good console for that. It feels like a game that is at home on Wii.
Stuff like this is good for the Wii as a platform, you know. It really is. The machine is starting to get pigeonholed.
