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 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle As they’re legally required to do, Capcom have revealed their financial results for the quarter ended September 30, 2008. And, despite fears over the effects the global financial crisis would have, everything appears to be OK. Net sales were up 0.4% over the same time last year, to ￥31.26 billion ($455 million), while net income was up 16.8% to ￥1.8 billion ($26 million). The company has Monster Hunter Freedom 2G’s 2.5 million sales (and rebounding arcade sales in this post-SFIV world) to thank for all that.
That’s THE iDOLM@STER. It’s a simulation game where players manage a group of young, Japanese pop singers. Originally an arcade game, the Xbox 360 and PSP versions have been big hits with Akihabara otaku. There are even concerts where the game’s music is performed by the voice cast— those tickets fetch high prices.
You may not care much for the DSi, seeing as most of you already have a DS that works and plays DS games. But Japan? Japan don’t care if they’ve already got one DS in the house, or two DS, or even three, that hasn’t stopped them snapping up nearly the entire first shipment of Nintendo’s latest handheld in just over two days. Enterbrain have announced that, in the two days since the DSi went on sale on November 1, 170,779 of them have been sold. That’s out of a total shipment of 200,000. Since the numbers only counted the first two days on sale, by the time you’re reading this, that final 29,221 will surely be gone as well.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, America has picked itself a new president. Here’s a LittleBigPlanet level created by game site Aeropause that commemorates the event, complete with exploding John McCain.
Barack Obama elected President of LittleBigPlanet [Aeropause]
What seems like every week or so, I get emails from readers asking where they should go in Akihabara. While I don’t mind answering emails, here’s a book I can point them to: The Best Shops of Akihabara. It’s forty pages of an English-language manga-style guidebook. As a nice bonus, the book even points out which retailers are capable of helping customers in English — a major plus for non-Japanese speaking tourists. It goes for $14 and is in PDF format. So yeah.
Akiba Guide [Official Site via alafista]
More retail hostage-taking! Normally the reserve of smaller publishers and/or Capcom, this time it’s Sega, with Thunderforce VI director Tez Okana telling Edge:
Sure, the Quantum of Solace movie is getting a mixed buzz, but that hasn’t dampened our interest in the QoS game. The Activision title runs on a modded Call of Duty 4 engine, which just sounds great. We can already hear the Bond theme in our head. We always here it, you know — especially when we walk around our local shopping mall in sunglasses.
A couple weeks ago, fanboy dorks exposed their stupidity to the wider community by hijacking the user reviews of two games on review aggregate site MetaCritic. The games in question were LittleBigPlanet and Gears of War 2, the people in question, morons. And while the whole mess was a little overplayed by some – who cares about user reviews on a website built solely to aggregate the reviews of critics? – MetaCritic were sufficiently moved by the episode to do something about it.
While buying the DSi over the weekend, I was struck how pretty much all stores were running a very strict one-per-person policy. Yet, it should come as no surprised sellers hogging the DSi are popping up on Yahoo! Auctions.
Let’s. Find. Out. As part of a survey commissioned by IGN – dubbed “Are You Game?” – market research firm Ipsos MediaCT asked a whole bunch of American gamers where they shop when looking for games. The answers, while not shocking, are still interesting (the percentages flying waaay over 100% because, obviously, most people buy games from more than one store). Wal-Mart comes out on top, while Best Buy and GameStop/EB come in tied for second place. As for Blockbuster, well…thanks for trying.
Wal-Mart Top Retailer for U.S. Gamers [PC World, via Go Nintendo]
