That's a trailer for Army of Two. Lots of shit exploding and flying around, lots of men running, shooting, etc, but the standout for me isn't the game (especially since there's no "game" in that footage). It's the music! That's Mastodon in the background, warbling out the most metal cover of Three Dog Night's "One" you've ever heard.
[via The PRP]

Ah, Samorost. So beautiful! So woefully underappreciated by the gaming public at large. Maybe machinarium, the Samorost team's latest outing, will fare better. It's a "full-scale" adventure game for the PC, and should be out later this year. More info is coming "sooner or later", so for now, pass the day away gazing at these gorgeous screenshots.

Developer Cave has churned out some amazing shmups. Amazingly hard and amazingly great. Have a gander at MUSHIHIME SAMA FUTARI and DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou. Truly stuff for the utterly devoted. People who are so into Cave shmups that they'd pay ¥44,500 ($US 430) for a cardboard box! This isn't just any old cardboard box, but a Cave cardboard box which has Cave's Muromachi era shooter Guwange written on the outside. It also has DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou handwritten on it as well. Meaning? This cardboard box was used to send out a Guwange arcade board in 1999 and then presumably a DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou one in 2002. It's not just cardboard! It's Cave cardboard, dammit! Not sure I'd pay four large for it, but I do understand. When I met Cave's resident genius Tsuneki Ikeda, I asked for his autograph, and I never do that.

Last month, in the wake of EA's analyst presentation, we threw up a little graph they'd used to highlight their market position in terms of average review scores. It was nice, but it was also brief. Some publishers were missing, and it was only for 2007. Their curiosity well and truly piqued, Next-Gen have dug through the same data, expanded it to include all publishers who released ten or more game sin the US during a calendar year, then went back to 2006 and 2005 and got data for them, too. All terribly exhaustive, and all terribly exciting. 2007's data is above, hit the link below for the rest.
THE RATINGS RANKINGS [Next-Gen]

Britons being paid in Microsoft points for pre-ordering Lost Odyssey, that was understandable: while it's a good game, it's hardly a sequel to a AAA franchise, licensed property or sports game, so retailers had a job on their hands trying to sell the thing. But offering 500 MS points to people pre-ordering GTA IV? It's like money for nothing. Yes, I know it's only GAME/GameStation stores offering the deal, and yes, I know they'll say it's to encourage people to order the game from their stores, but where else were you going to pre-order it from? Tescos?
Grand Theft Auto IV [GAME]

A two-month delay later, and Japan is finally getting its PSP Skype connected. Europe and the US have been chattering away on PSP Skype since January, while Japanese gamers waited. The reason? The Skype mic Sony Computer Entertainment Japan had slated for release didn't meet Skype specs. Two new mics will go on sale in Japan on March 19th, one for ¥2,500 ($US 24) and ¥4,000 ($US 39). A software update will hit the day before.
PSP for Skype for Japan [Mainichi]

You've either played Space Hulk (the "accessible" board game) or Space Hulk (the old PC/Amiga/3D0 game) by now. I'm just going to assume that. This, then, is truly a pleasant surprise: A group of guys going by the name Teardown have, with the blessing of both EA and the Games Workshop, released a free-to-play update of the old classic. It lacks the first-person mode of the old computerised version, but anyone aching for another go-round of the board game will find this does the job quite nicely.
Space Hulk [Teardown]

Remember Duel Love? That female-geared DS game that has players whip the sweat off fetching young males. It's a Japanese dating game that centres around a school's secret fight club. Players "help" the fighters by wiping off sweat, treating injuries or giving "massages". The game's out this month, and that's the game's producer decked out in Duel Love gear. Here's what she says about her boy sweat scrubbing game:

Spring's in bloom! The season of love has arrived. Now, people want to fall in love, some people are tired of love, other want to forget it. Wouldn't you like to start fresh with Duel Love's Passion Mode? If lovey-dovey couples can play together, it'll be no accident that they get aroused!

Nintendo released their latest Wii channel today: the TV Friend Channel. What is it? A TV Guide. With benefits. Yes, on the surface, it's just a TV guide with the ability to highlight shows you'd like to watch. BORING. Some of the things Nintendo have added to spice things up a little, however, aren't quite boring. For one, while the Channel's running, it'll let you use your Wii Remote as a TV Remote. Pointless, yes, but interesting nonetheless. The Channel will also have limited community features: you'll be able to see what shows your friends have highlighted, and Nintendo will centrally track these records (as well as star-ratings for each program). Still pointless, but a little more interesting. Finally, it'll also let you register your mobile number and e-mail address: mark a show on the guide that you wanna see, and 30 minutes before it starts you'll get a text message and/or an email about it. That's not pointless. It's downright useful!
TV No Tomo [Nintendo]

Since going on sale last fall, Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles has shipped over a million copies. That's worldwide. The rail shooter was developed by Bullet Witch developer Cavia and, well, Capcom. Folks sure love those Wii RE games, don't they?
Biohazard UC Shipped Numbers [Famitsu]

As it stands, watching movies or shows on your TV with your PSP is...well, it's not elegant. You hook the cables in, you press play, and...what the hell do you do with your PSP? Hold it? Sit it on the coffee table? It's messy. Enter Sony, with the just-announced PSP Cradle, which will not only power your handheld while it's outputting video, but also comes bundled with a remote control, meaning those days of you having to get up to press play are well and truly over. The cradle - due for release in Japan on April 24 - will come bundled with AV cables for ¥6500 ($US 62), while the cradle alone will cost ¥4800 ($US 46). No Western dates or prices, obviously, so don't bother asking. Further pics and press release dutifully follows.

New PSP color incoming! "Matte Bronze." Going on sale April 24th, the ¥23,800 ($US 230) Value Pack features a pouch, strap, cloth, memory stick (32MB) and a cable you can plug into televisions. But "Matte Bronze"? That's like third place, but not as glossy.
New Color [Famitsu]

Last October, THQ decided to block Oz and NZ users from purchasing it games via Valve's Steam. Although the publisher was unwilling to provide a reason for the block, the working theory was that local users could purchase the company's games via the service for significantly less than their price at brick and mortar stores, thanks to the weak US dollar.

Rather than increase the price and face our collective wrath, THQ decided to remove its catalogue instead. But like I said, it's just a theory.

It looks like the recently released Frontlines: Fuel of War slipped through the block - at least for a while. It was briefly available for $US 50 on Steam for Australian and New Zealand users, but it looks like it's been taken down as of today. THQ's local presence couldn't really comment as this sort of thing is out of its hands.

If I had to guess, I'd say that Frontlines was never meant to be available to us from Steam. THQ/Valve has just corrected the error... much to our chagrin. Good news is that if you did purchase it while it was up, it's still playable.

Uhh..I live in Australia, where did Frontlines go? [Steam Powered forums, thanks Lev Arris]

Numbers fans ahoy! The latest issue of Famitsu contains a neat, handy chart, listing the top ten publishers in Japan for 2007 by sales. These only include Japanese publishers, and doesn't include games sold outside of Japan, so don't go crying me a river over Koei's high placement or the absence of, oh, I don't know, Bungie or 2K Boston.

1. Nintendo: 23,520,000
2. Square Enix: 7,580,000
3. Bandai Namco: 7,500,000
4. Capcom: 5,560,000
5. Konami: 4,910,000
6. Sega: 2,930,000
7. Pokemon: 2,870,000
8. Sony: 2,230,000
9. Koei: 1,940,000
10. Banpresto: 1,790,000

Lucky I didn't put a tenner down on Marvellous making the list, otherwise I'd be down $US 10.

Die Top 10 Publisher in Japan 2007 [Famitsu, via Gamefront.de]

The Wonder Festival is long over, but our memories of it live on. In the gallery below, there are upcoming retail garage kits of Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Zero, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter Online, Melty Blood, Guilty Gear, Persona 3, Quiz Magic Academy, Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, Trigger Heart Exelica and more. Take a look! They're neato.

And here you all were thinking you'd be getting the Wii version of Okami on March 25. You're not. The game's been delayed a smidge, and instead of being ready in march now has an American release date of April 15. No reason was given for the delay, so feel free to come up with your own hair-brained plots involving aspect ratios and brushwork calibration below.
Wii Okami bumped to April 15 [GameSpot]

Ah, yes. Punch Out! When I played it, the game was Mike Tyson's Punch Out! — which was later changed to simply Punch Out! when Tyson's contract was up and when he got into legal trouble. Video Game Comedy site The -Minus World has a look at the game's stereotypes, tongue planted firmly in cheek:

Hey, have you ever had one of those friends that says something really racist against black people but stupidly tries to placate everyone by assuring, "Dude it's ok...I have friends who are black." ....or maybe you have a friend that hits woman but eases your fears because you know his mom is a woman so it's all good? Well along those same lines, Nintendo throws in Piston Honda as a red herring to allay any suspicions that Punch Out is racist. I recommend that you intentionally go two rounds with Piston just so you can read him nonsensically utter "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi." Yeah. Japan basically kicks itself in the nuts here.

Poor Nathaniel, who had his artwork-adorned 360 scrubbed clean by over-zealous Xbox repair staff, is to be compensated for his loss. By Bungie. Because the kid was such a Halo nut, the series creators will be trying to make up for his loss with something of their own doing:

Our team and the community as a whole is rallying to help fix this unfortunate situation. It's been awesome to see such an outpouring of sympathy and support from our community. We can't replace the exact item that was lost but, but we should come very close.

It's not so tough being a PS3 owner waiting for ports of PC and/or 360 games. Sure, you've gotta wait, but when a game does make the jump, it normally brings with it some free extras. Like Oblivion did. And now Crysis, if the latest issue of PSW is to be believed:

...it won't be a straight conversion of the PC game. We understand PS3 Crysis will be an almost 50% new game, with many of the original games staff taken off PC Crysis months before release to begin to work on Crysis 2 and a port to PS3 that will include aspects of the sequel - but a new structure, environments, weapons and enemies will feature on PS3.

Core and Arcade Xbox 360s are missing something super important: a HDD. That means developers must make sure their games can work without a HDD so a segment of users aren't totally screwed. Rory McGuire, lead designer on PS3 title Bourne Conspiracy, says:

In retrospect I wish Microsoft had made the choice to have [mandatory] hard drives like Sony did with the PS3... They did it with the original Xbox. I'm not sure why they decided to not require a hard drive on the 360. From what I understand they don't move many [Core/Arcade] units... Developers certainly benefit [from a hard drive]", he went on to explain, adding: "if you have a hard drive, the whole game loads faster. Obviously you'll be facing a short install time, but the developer benefits from it and you definitely benefit from it as a player... So I think that was one of the mistakes that Microsoft made with the 360.

Okay. It's not that sexy.

True, I sometimes force my voice to drop a few octaves for the ladies, but I usually end up coughing in their faces or spilling my apple martini on their shirts. Which is definitely not sexy.

But we won't be talking about any of that. The main topic of conversation will be the review of an R18+ rating for video games and its opposers - though I'm sure we'll cover other bits and pieces.

If you'd like to hear the irresistible timbre of vocals, tune in to 774 ABC Melbourne around 3:30PM AEDT. For those unable to pick up the station on their electronic frequency catcher, you can stream it from the ABC Radio Melbourne website.

To: Ashcraft
From: McWhertor
Re: Does Anyone Besides Mark Wilson Know Mark Wilson's Middle Name?

Apologies. I know I have a bad habit of teasing things in the Day Note. Readers hate it, but I love it! The only down side to being mysterious is when things don't come to fruition and you can't admit to what you were talking about. But I suppose that's better than announcing something super cool and then having it turn to dust. When you get into the regular habit of signing NDAs, it makes keeping a secret much, much easier.

Today was spent working on something pretty cool for Kotaku, a regular feature that we hope to implement soon and something that we've been slighted for in the past, despite those slams being based in ignorance. Exciting? Oh totally, but also a bit daunting when I'm the one proposing the new standard for it. People will either love it or hate it, but I'm formatting this new feature on how I'd want them to read.

What you missed today
Atari says the future is online
Meet Atari's future man, Phil Harrison
Canadians enjoy Super Smash Bros. Brawl in parkas
Ray Maguire opens mouth, PlayStation news falls out
Games are raping our women (or something)!
Tron to destroy MCP, Saark again
PlayStation Video Store shown to publishers and retailers

Ah, SOCOM. On the PS3. Forgot all about it. I'm probably not the only one, which explains Sony's recent marketing push for the game, with a big feature due in next month's EGM and a couple of screens posted up on the PlayStation Blog. The EGM feature, it's not here yet, but the screens, they are. One's above, the other after the jump (click on either to embiggen them). Oh, and if you're wondering about the new camera angle, developers SealTeam-6 would like you all to know that the game will ship with an option to revert to the "classic" SOCOM camera view.

The minimalist stylings of Echochrome are certainly welcome, but seeing the game play in a photorealistic environment with a man in an all-white suit and stunning afro makes me wonder what might have been...

Say, this is only a fortnight away! I might have to import.

Video game baseball fans will be belting out "What the hell is this crap?" to the tunes of 2K Sports' Major League Baseball 2K8, as the publisher has announced an agreement with Pitchfork Media to select half of the game's soundtrack. Indie rock fans and wannabe indie rock fans will delight at some of Pitchfork's choices, which include chart-bottomers like Blitzen Trapper, The Cool Kids, Battles and Jay Reatard, alongside more mainstream stuff like The Strokes and The Flaming Lips.

To everyone involved, we say kudos. While they may have looked to Sub Pop in the past for left-field style musical picks, we're just pleased as punch that they haven't regressed to throwing in John Fogerty's "Centerfield" or Dire Straits' "Walk of Life".

Full tracklisting and annual odd pairing after this.

The current PlayStation Store is a bit of a clunker. It's functionally sound, but a bit rough around the edges from a usability standpoint. Compared to the rest of the PlayStation 3's visual design, it's certainly lacking—but that's reportedly going to change come Springtime, as the Store is said to get a new coat of paint. One aspect of the Store that's been hinted about by reliable publications, like the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, is Sony's download service, one that president Howard Stringer may be talking about when he refers to the "expansion" of the PlayStation Network.

It may be Sony's best bet in fending off Apple's iTunes for movie and television distribution. And it may be closer than we thought.

A recap of February's Oz gaming news? Why certainly!

Last month 2K Games and EA frustrated us to no end, with the former hiking up the price of Civilization IV on Steam (informally know as "chucking an Activision") and the latter deciding that Australia didn't deserve multiplayer support for the Wii's Medal of Honor: Heroes 2 (informally known as "stupid"). This wouldn't have been so bad had EA not waited until the game was well and truly on retail shelves before saying something. That, and only providing a statement and refund offer after players - rightly - kicked up a stink.

Lost: The Video Game turned out to be lacking, which came as no surprise to most, and the GameTraders in Perth supplied our Western brothers and sisters with plenty of games way before their official street dates.

Oh, and it turns out Kevin Rudd's son Marcus plays World of Warcraft, though we're still waiting on confirmation.

Lost: The Video Game Xbox 360 Impressions

Does PM Kevin Rudd's Son Play World of Warcraft?

Co-op Zombie & Survival Horror Mods You Have To Play (Or Watch Out For)

Make Your Own Guitar Hero Songs With Aussie-Made Editor

A Look At Ubisoft's Oz Release Schedule

Xbox Originals: Ninja Gaiden Black Definitely Not Coming To Australia

2K Games Steam Titles To Return To Oz Shortly

EA Will Amend MoH: Heroes 2 Manual, No Plans To Stop It Happening Again

2K Games & Steam: Civ IV Twice As Expensive, Bioshock Dumped

GAME Thinks Wrath of The Lich King, StarCraft 2, Out By November

Church and Black Are Lesbians?

DMC 4, Burnout Paradise Oz Street Dates Broken

AFK Cafe Leaves Keyboard Forever

Perth GameTraders Is a Game Goldmine

Why Wait? Grab Devil May Cry 4 Now

Sega Superstars Tennis gives us the most conflicted early feelings of any game we know of in development. On the one hand, it's Sega. On the other, Sumo Digital is actually doing the work. On the original hand, it's going to prominently feature Sonic the Hedgehog and Shadow the Hedgehog. On that other hand again, it has Ulala and Gum and Beat. But back on the negative hand, this is certainly not how we expected to hear from Space Channel 5 and Jet Set Radio's main players. Returning to the positive hand, we are pleasantly surprised to see how well Chu Chu Rocket mini-gameplay seems to be integrated.

My brain is about to be ripped in half as I struggle to come to terms with Sega's answer to Mario Tennis. Do we hate it to death or smother it into oblivion? Someone! Do the thinking for us!