Because seven just wasn’t enough. Hot on the heels of the announcement that Europe would be seeing a range of new Xbox 360 bundles – three of which we already knew about – comes new that there’ll be an eighth hardware bundle for the Holiday season. This one includes a 60GB Pro, a single controller and a copy of Pro Evo 2009, which you’ll get for £190/€270. The bundle will be available in Austria, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, and the UK, and will go on sale on October 24.
The royal we have a bit of vomit phobia. The last time I threw up was college (go figure), but the time before that was grade school: Fruit roll-ups everywhere. Upcoming shooter Left 4 Dead from developer brings out the puke for the Versus mode hi-jinx. Valve’s Doug Lombardi explains:
Yeah, there’s this slapstick quality to the game that really comes to life on Versus mode. When you’re playing as a Boomer, your best shot is to vomit on somebody and maybe see the horde come in before you get taken out. You’re not going to be around too long.
It’s funny how something that simple and insane-sounding is fun and so satisfying. It’s really something different than you’ve done in a game before, and I think that’s part of the charm of it. It’s like, “Wow, I vomited on all these people and I get to watch all these zombies and rip them to shreds.” You know, there’s this sense of a little bit of the accomplishment thing, but then there’s also this slapstick moment where it’s like, “I vomited on him.”
Valve, breaking new ground in in-game upchucking.
Left 4 Dead Interview: Versus Mode, Demo Details, and the Joy of Vomit [Shacknews]
Half-Life 2′s “episodic” expansions are hardly what you’d call episodic in the gaming sense of the word. Other series can knock out two, sometimes even three full games in the time it takes Valve to cobble together a single 4-6 hour mission pack. Of course, the wait’s always worth it, since nobody does it quite like Valve does it, but still. Long waits hurt. And when something hurts, we like to blame somebody. So who can we blame for the agonising wait between Episode 2 and Episode 3? Blame Left 4 Dead. And blame Team Fortress 2.
Valve’s Doug Lombardi:
So I mean, we’re taking more time because it’s a more ambitious project. We also sort of had Left 4 Dead become this big thing in the middle of it that we wanted to spend more time on, and you’ve just got a lot of stuff that we spent this year doing with Team Fortress 2 updates and what have you. So there’s just a lot going on, and then an ambitious project on top of it caused the schedule to move out a little bit from the delta of the last three releases in the franchise.
Goddamnit Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead, how dare you…ah, who are we kidding. We can’t get mad at you guys.
Valve on Episode Three: ‘A More Ambitious Project’ [Shacknews]
We’ve counted the votes up — your votes — and have picked winners for our PAX Penny Contest. The first place winner will get tons of t-shirts (including pretty sweet Fruit Fucker and The Maw shirts) , a Fallout 3 survival guide, a World of Warcraft pet card from this year’s WWI in Paris (the Blizzard guys were kind enough to hand one over to us), a ping-pong gun, a Champions Online backpack and plenty of other little do-dads. And yes, we’re giving away Crecente’s one and only Vault Boy puppet. The second and third place winners will get other stuff. And who doesn’t love other stuff?
First Place Second Place Third Place
If you are responsible for either of these, shoot us an email at kotakucontestATgmailDOTcom with the subject line “I Won You Bastards”.
Seems the Ts & Cs for Playstation Network have been updated recently to include reference to User Generated Content, no doubt just in time for the launch of LittleBigPlanet. According to Dean over at I Have The Princess, there is a clause that claims Sony and affiliated companies may license, sell, “or otherwise exploit” your user material with no payment to you.
They clearly needed to give themselves some leeway to redistribute content created by users, and for most players the prestige of a highly rated LBP creation will be enough. But what about if that made it onto an expansion disc at retail with no kickback for the creator?
Clearly many will be annoyed that there isn’t much to suggest they are recognising user copyright at this stage. As news spreads I’m sure a clarification will have to come from up on high, as previous suggestions have pointed to LBP players being able to set prices for their creations. Nice pick up by Dean at IHTP.
LittleBigRipoff? Sony can sell your user content [I Have The Princess]
Despite World of Warcraft continuing to conjure millions out of thin air, Blizzard are already hard at work on their next MMO. The burning question being: what is it? Is it World of Starcraft? World of Diablo? World of Lost Vikings? No idea. We know what it’s not, though: it’s not a World of Warcraft sequel. Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime:
So let’s just say it’s going to be different and it’s not going to be a sequel to World of Warcraft. It will be different.
We’re not trying to replace World of Warcraft with this new MMO. We’re trying to create a different massively multiplayer experience, and hopefully World of Warcraft will still be going strong when that one is released.
So…they’ll still be making millions off WoW, then making more millions off a new experience that catches everyone who doesn’t play WoW? That’s one hell of a sound business plan.
Q&A: Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime on DRM, WoW and the Next MMO [Wired]
Series creator Infinity Ward dragged the Call of Duty series out of the Second World War and into the present day with Call of Duty 4, and promptly engineered one of the greatest games of all time. So will series co-developers Treyarch – currently putting the finishing touches on Call of Duty 5 – be following suit? In an interview with CVG, Treyarch’s Noah Heller fails to rule that out, saying “I can’t say that there won’t ever be a WWII Call of Duty game again”.
He continues: If we had time we might have shown the end of the war from many different country’s perspectives, and maybe that’s a story still untold.
But in the meantime people definitely haven’t seen the final charge of the Red Army, people haven’t seen what the fighting was like in Okinawa and I think it’s definitely important to show those stories from a polished perspective rather than show some of the mopping up elsewhere in the world.
Hmm. See, we’ve already seen the final charge of the Red Army. That’s how Call of Duty 1 ended. You want our totally unsolicited advice? Ditch WW2. It’s been run dry. Now WW1, with Belgium 1914, Russia 1914, Palestine 1917…that’s some fertile ground for a shooter.
Ecogamer has passed on word of a big 50% off selected games sale at Dick Smith for “10 days only”. Ecogamer has compiled a list of titles on offer to save you a lot of legwork. Plus they have the cunning suggestion that we should all help each other out by doing some price matching at nearby stores so that more gamers get to share the bargains while stocks last.
Here’s a few highlights they’ve shared. Lots more listed at Ecogamer: Crysis PC – $27.50 No More Heroes Wii – $34.88 Burnout Paradise PS3 – $32.38 Viva Pinata Party Animals X360 – $15 Phoenix Wright DS – $7.50 Wipeout Pure – $7.50
50% Off Selected Games [Ecogamer]
Back in August, comparison pics emerged showing that the new PSP 3000 appears brighter than the previous model. And now that the PSP 3000 has gone on sale, more comparison pics have emerged again showing that, you guessed it, the new PSP 3000 appears brighter than the previous model. There’s a gallery below. But be warned, the PSP 3000 is so bright you might wanna wear shades.
新型PSP（PSP-3000）、拾い物比較画像集 [my game news flash]
Nintendo, the house of smiles, innovates once again. This time, it puts a unique and charming spin on responding to NPD sales data, in which it crushed the competition on the hardware side and showed spectacularly on the software side.
