If Haze didn't float your boat, and it didn't float many, Free Radical's right back atcha with TimeSplitters 4. Of course the game has been officially officially known for some time, but FR put up three concept art scans on the official website earlier this week. The chainsaw nun above is one. You can also get a look at some blinged out four-wheel cat ("Cat Racing: Underground") and a dismembered Monkey/Frank n' Furter transvestite robot on a torture rack. If those descriptions don't send you over, I mean, what will. Check also the homage trailer to LucasArts/Revenge of the Sith with Vader's role reprised by, what else, a monkey.

Free Radical Design - TimeSplitters 4 [via and thanks to Popzara for noticing the new content.]

Midway has unvieled the official box art for their upcoming crossover fighter Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe, and while previews of the game and footage I've seen seem to indicate it will be a solid fighter, I still can't help but laugh when I see Scorpion facing off against Batman holding a kunai. Along with the box art comes a few new screenshots that aren't nearly as laughable, giving us a look at Baraka, Raiden, and Captain Marvel himself, SHAZAM! *gets hit by lightning bolt, dies*

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe Gallery

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Capcom has pictures of an Bionic Commandoprototype figure. Imagine that! Must say that the updated character design has grown on me, dreads and all. And this fig looks rather nice. While the Capcom blog did have pictures, it didn't have any release or pricing info. Bummer.

Click through to the gallery below.

Bionic Commando Prototype Gallery

Bionic Commando Prototype Figure [Capcom]

'Matthew Wasteland' of Magical Wasteland has a thought provoking essay up over at GameSetWatch on how we think of games as art — and why it may not work, or what our current limitations are. His opinion is the more we think about this stuff, the more we can work on overcoming current problems — certainly not an unreasonable point of view. My favourite section was on the problem of 'systems as art' (his example is a little gem called The Marriage, which is lacking in context to say the least) — a pretty nice critique of some of the intentionally 'artistic' games that seek to 'rise above' the entertaining masses:

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The Cutter IT Journal is offering their latest issue — on the subject of the challenges of virtual worlds — for free (registration required); the issue includes articles on 'real world' applications of virtual worlds and the pitfalls and promises of such a presence. I've only had time to read the introduction and breeze quickly through the rest of the issue, but if you're interested in the rise (?) of virtual worlds, it looks to have some interesting fodder:

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Check Out master Chief's Wang - Shouldn't laugh, but really, there's a poignancy to it. It's an old store display from a record store near my house. Done by a local artist who, it turns out, is quite handy with a brush. Sadly, his website doesn't feature the aforementioned wang. It does have another very nice digital painting of the chief, however.

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Call me a misty-eyed nostalgic, but for me, the "golden age" of video games is not 2008. Wasn't 2007, wasn't 2004, wasn't 1978. It was the 1990's. Where, as a predominantly PC gamer, I was treated to not only some of the greatest games of all time from companies like Lucasarts, Origin and Bullfrog, but some of the most entertaining attempts at story-telling and world-building as well.

Forget Half Life 2's train ride. Forget Halo 3's bombastic aspirations. I'm talking about the cinematic introduction sequence, and its little brother, the cinematic cutscene.

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Oh, come on Capcom - you can do better than this, surely?

This dodgy diptych of box art features a slightly too muscular Chun Li (c'mon she may be a strong lass, but as drawn here she could throw shot at the Moscow Olympics) a Ryu who looks like he is trying to do long division in his head and typography that looks like the artist was doodling band logos during double geography.

If you look closely, you will see that Ken is striking exactly the same pose (even down to the spray of mud at his heels) when fighting both Chun Li and Ryu at the bottom of their boxes.

Ryu, incidentally, is demonstrating an ancient fighting technique, known in the East as Goatse Hadouken.

[Thanks to MarkMan for the tip]

Now that the cat's out of the bag on Ensemble Studios' canceled Halo MMO — codenamed "Orion" (or "Titan") apparently — we expect the tiny leaks of background information on the project to grow into a flood.

Thanks to one of our snoopiest readers Jeff, we have an in-depth look at dozens of pieces of concept art from "Orion", much of which provides fascinating insight into how the game was originally intended to look, from its many character types to creatures to vehicles to cleavage-exposing Spartan armor.

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Persona 4 for the PS2 is still an agonizingly long 2+ months away, and the folks at Atlus have decided to make the wait just a little bit tougher by releasing character profiles for the main protagonists in the game. Chie, Yosuke, and Yukiko join the protagonist on the trail of a serial murderer who strikes in their small town of Inaba. Of course it wouldn't be a Persona game without something bizarre thrown into the mix, and that's where Teddie here comes in. It's apparently a mysterious creature that the group meets inside the TV. What exactly that means is up to us to discover, or our Japanese-fluent friends to completely spoil for us.

Persona 4 Gallery

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