New information on XCM’s multi console component cable v3

XCMLive has released a new video fo their new multi console component cable as well as a promotional chart regarding the latest build of the versatible cable.

Sony: PS3 is the best choice for small developers, PS3 brand will win globally

Responding to negative comments from the opposing party, Sony\’s Scott Steinberg notes that the PS3 is the best choice for small developers wishing to get their games to an online audience. Steinberg points out that they do not charge for their service thus widening the accessability of the content without people having to \’cut a check\’ all the time. He went on to say that on a global basis, the PS3 brand will emerge as the winner.

Press release confirms Resistance 2 for Fall 2008

Hidden at the bottom of a press release regarding Insomniac Games \’Nocturnal\’ initiative is news that the PS3 exclusive title Resistance 2 is due out in Autumn 2008. The press release states \”Insomniac Games is currently developing Resistance 2, which will release this fall, exclusively for PlayStation 3.\”

Home is the best-looking multiplayer world, won’t appeal to Second Life geeks

The creative director of Sony\’s Home project has said that they have made it the best-looking multiplayer world and the most user-friendly. He said he is aware of the comparisons people make between Second Life and home, but looking at Second Life, he is amazed at how many people go on it. He said the Home virtual world doesn\’t \”have anything in there that\’s appealing to that kind of geeky audience that you might find in Second Life.\”

Lair analog patch coming in Q1?

According to Doug Allen\’s IGN Blog, a Lair patch is coming in Q1 that will add the choice of analog control. He apparently got to grips with it at GDC and the results were amazing.

Rumor: Famitsu shows MGS 4 release date - June/December 6th?

A tidy little rumor is being posted (re-posted at NEOgaf) around the internet that MGS 4 is set for a release on June/December 6th (we\’re not sure exactly of the date formats over there). A picture which is supposedly from Famitsu is the reason for this rumor, although many believe it\’s a fake so let\’s not get too angry just yet!

Patapon BE@RBRICK only available through special promotions

Sony revealed today that the Patapon BE@RBRICK you may have seen will be up for grabs via special promotions only (so ebay inevitably). The Bearbrick page at the Papatapon site currently says \”Check this page for updates and links or look online for contests and promotions.\”

Golden Eye for XBLA screeenshot, can we save it?

Xbox World 360 magazine has confirmed that next week they will be featuring the abandoned port of Rare\’s N64 classic Goldeneye for XBLA. The mag says they will answer the following questions \”How different is it? What improvements have been made? What does it feel like on the 360 pad?\” They will also apparently tell us how we can all make sure this incredible remake does see the light of day.

New FIFA Street 3 video featuring Ronaldinho

EA has just released a new trailer for FIFA Street 3 featuring the one and only Ronaldinho!

Xbox Live reveals it’s community’s pick for best awards

At the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2008 today, Microsoft Corp. celebrated the success of its industry-leading Xbox LIVE Arcade platform with the inaugural Xbox LIVE Arcade Awards. In January, more than 26,000 people voted for their favourite Xbox LIVE Arcade games, and this week Microsoft announced the winners at a private developer reception at GDC.

GTA IV exclusive DLC is like GTA3 Vice City & San Andreas expansions

MS apparently told bloggers over breakfast that exclusive Xbox 360 GTA IV downloadable content will be a lot bigger than people think. They say its a major expansion and that we should think of it like GTA3 Vice City and San Andreas expansions. No price has been discussed yet but its apparently up to Rockstar whether they will charge or not.

2K Sports announces Pontiac Virtual NCAA Final Four tournament

The third annual Pontiac Virtual NCAA Final Four Tournament, presented by 2K Sports, featuring College Hoops 2K8 will begin open registration starting Friday, February 22, 2008. The College Hoops 2K8 online tournament will be available exclusively on Xbox LIVE, as the top four semi-finalists will have the chance of a lifetime to win Final Four tickets and play College Hoops 2K8 in front of a live audience at the 2008 NCAA Men’s Final Four on April 5, 2008 in San Antonio, Texas. The winner of the Pontiac Virtual NCAA Final Four Tournament will drive off the court in a brand new 2009 Pontiac Vibe GT.

Many gamers left disappointed with Ninja Gaiden ‘demo’ which shows others playing

For a while, the Ninja Gaiden II demo has been teased to fans worldwide. The demo has finally hit, but to the dismay of many, the proposed demo is merely a video of someone else playing the demo. So it\’s less of a demo and more of a true teaser trailer!

The Spiderwick Chronicles Review

The Spiderwick Chronicles will not make your inner child throw itself on the ground screaming, or cause your outer adult to turn an even more bitter shade of jade. Indeed, the game manages to relate the movie’s plot effectively, has a brisk pace, and is never particularly odious to play. Then again, it’s rarely outright fun, since most of the game’s elements (collection, fetch quests, easy action, bad platforming) are the kinds of things you would like to escape from, not to.

The story is the main exception. It’s well represented in various cutscenes pulled from the film and in the in-game conversations. The Spiderwick Chronicles is the story of a family that, after a bitter divorce, has left dad behind and moved into the estate of a crazy, dead uncle who devoted his life to chronicling magical creatures. One of the kids in the family finds his book, and a magical adventure ensues.

Well, it does in the film, anyhow. In the game, a fetch quest ensues, and then another, and another. You’re constantly running about your house and the forest looking for unexciting items like hose nozzles and vinegar. And everything you eventually are asked to fetch can be inspected the first time you see it. So, if you can look at it now, you’re going to have to get it later, which begs the question, “Why can’t I just grab it now?” The answer, unfortunately, is nowhere to be found.

Sometimes, there’s just no separating the mice from the men.

One of the first things you fetch is a baseball bat, which you use to kill wicked little critters, gangland style. This beating-things-to-death mechanic, while disturbing, is the best one in the game. It requires only one button, but as you knock the teeth out of your victims, you learn new moves. You only need to hit the attack button, and the new powerful moves just sort of happen once you learn them. The best of these is a golf swing. First, your enemy is launched into the air. From there, you can charge up a mighty swing, as time slows and the enemy falls back down into your strike zone. You then release the button to unleash the bat head, slamming your enemy, who rolls like a ground ball while squirting green blood in all directions before expiring in the dirt and spitting out all his teeth, which you then fetch.

But the real gory, Joe Pesci-inspired pleasure (remember the baseball bat scene in Casino?) is short-lived, pardon the pun. As soon as you upgrade to the metal bat, most enemies don’t even live long enough for you to launch them into the air and splatter them into the ground. Even worse, you are soon put in control of a different character, who wields a squirt gun full of vinegar. Even though the concept is just as violent and sadistic (vinegar is like acid to goblins and makes their bodies dissolve while they scream), the reality isn’t as fun or visceral. Another character has a fencing sword, which also lacks the brutal impact of the baseball bat. Still, one cool weapon out of three is a much better batting average than most official movie games can hope for.

Given your characters’ violent tendencies, what do you think you do with the fairies you catch in your fairy net? If your answer involves tearing off their legs and watching them squirm, burning their bodies with a magnifying glass you fetched, or crucifying them on Styrofoam with needles…you are wrong on all three counts. You paint them, and then they grant you a one-time-use ability, like a blast of air or health restoration. While such warm and fuzzy affairs between the boys and their woodland quarry hardly ring true, running about meadows while catching bright happy things in a net is still a treat.

We can’t stop here, this is bat country!

Less entertaining are the portions of the game involving Brownie Thimbletack. The idea of Brownie Thimbletack is very weird and very fun. He’s a tiny, effeminate, drug-addicted bachelor who speaks in rhymes, kills roaches, and lives in a birdhouse. If only the challenges he faced were as colorful. They come in three varieties: jumping, dodging electricity, and, of course, fetching. Jumping doesn’t really count as a challenge, because all jumps are handled automatically. Dodging the rampant and freely arcing electricity that exists in the house’s walls (shouldn’t he notify the family?) only requires a little timing. But the fetch quests are awful and are likely to end your time with the game. You’ll occasionally be asked to find a thing and have no idea where to look. You’ll wander all over, dodging electricity, spearing roaches, and rhyming to no avail. You may not see the end of this tale!

That pretty much sums up The Spiderwick Chronicles from a gameplay perspective, though there are occasional puzzles (if “Place fuse in fuse box” counts as a puzzle) and some really lame boss fights. It’s also worth mentioning that while the major gameplay elements are all pretty stale, the game switches between them constantly, so you’re never stuck doing the same thing for long. You won’t have a blast playing The Spiderwick Chronicles, but you won’t be horribly bored, either. There are also a couple of wimpy multiplayer minigames that unlock as you play through the story, though races to capture the most fairies is likely to entertain only the youngest gamers. In fact, this game isn’t likely to entertain anybody for long, because it’s both short and easy.

No matter your age, you will likely think the house looks good, and it should be clear that some very talented artists spent a lot of time making it so. The rest of the game looks average, from the character animations to the enemies to the forest. The sound design, on the other hand, is shockingly bad. Every time you examine an object, your character says something. So if you examine some baggies, your character says “Baggies.” If you examine them again, you get another “Baggies.” If you do it three times in a row, you get “Baggies, baggies, baggies,” which is just crazy. And later, the audio breaks down for a while and the speech gets all garbled, which is just lazy.

The characters in The Spiderwick Chronicles do their best with their wicked bats, fairy nets, mouse-man friends, and cool-looking house, but they’re no match for the entropic forces of fetch quests, bad platforming, and uninspired action. Though the heroes of the movie eventually save their own day from the forces of boredom, they probably won’t be able to save yours.

GDC ‘08: Puzzle Quest: Galactrix First Look

Galaxy Quest

Puzzle Quest creator Steve Fawkner dishes on his latest, Galactrix.
Watch | Download

If you’re one of the many people who was delightfully surprised last year by Infinite Interactive’s excellent Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, you’ll be equally delighted to know the company is working on a new hybrid puzzle/role-playing game in the same vein called Galactrix, which is slated for release later this year. Publisher D3 has rather shamelessly slapped the Puzzle Quest moniker on the front of the title, understandably to garner brand recognition among fans of last year’s medieval mash-up. While Galactrix was already in development at the time of Puzzle Quest’s release, it does share most of the latter game’s mechanical trappings, wrapped up in a new sci-fi milieu that looks like it will provide the impetus for a quest much wider in scope.

The story (if you really need one) is set in the far-distant future, after mankind has colonized the stars. Four gigantic megacorporations are now running the galactic show, and one of them has gotten a little too big for its collective britches by conducting some unknown experiments that will potentially have dire consequences for mankind. If all this sounds a little vague, it’s because D3 reps wouldn’t go into specifics on the storyline (or most aspects of Galactrix, actually). We do know you’ll play as a novice pilot who will become more skilled and powerful as you get closer to discovering, as well as vanquishing, the secret of the nefarious experiments.

A ship-building system will let you customize your fleet to take on different battle conditions.

What we can tell you is that Galactrix’s core puzzle-based gameplay will be eminently familiar to anyone who played even a few minutes of Puzzle Quest because the Bejeweled-style match-three gameplay of that game is fully in evidence here. But there are a few differences. First, the tiles are now hexagonally shaped and arranged in a corresponding hexagonal grid, which gives you more than four sides surrounding the board. That might not seem like a big deal until you figure that gravity itself can play a part in the way the pieces fall. If you’re fighting a match in orbit around a planet, the planet’s gravitational pull will cause the pieces to always fall downward. But if you’ve engaged your enemy in open space, where there’s no gravity, new pieces will slide in from whatever direction you made your move (due to momentum, natch).

The basic contents of a puzzle board in Galactrix are quite similar to those in Puzzle Quest. You’re matching three of a kind of various tiles colored red, yellow, green, blue, purple, and silver. Red, yellow, and green correspond to your weapons, engines, and ship computer. Mechanically, they act like the mana you used in Puzzle Quest because they’ll power the various weapons and abilities of your ships in battle. The only special ability we got D3 to talk about was disruptor, which will prevent your opponent’s shields from recharging for a few turns.

Blue tokens will recharge your own shields when you match them. Purple ones represent “psi power,” which sounds a bit like the experience tokens in Puzzle Quest. However, your psi rating will also directly affect subsequent minigames and non-player character interactions outside of battles. Silver tiles are for intel; the more of these you match, the more scuttlebutt and information you’ll be able to collect as you travel from one star system to the next. Lastly, the attack tiles (represented by skulls in Puzzle Quest) have evolved here. They’re now numbered, and the base damage you do by matching them will be a sum of the numbering on all the attack tiles you’ve matched.

What mysteries await our intrepid hero at the far ends of the galaxy?

D3 was only focusing on the core puzzle gameplay in Galactrix during our demo, so that’s all we got to see firsthand. But in talking with company reps, we discovered there will be more going on between battles here than there was in Puzzle Quest. That game took place only on a single world map, but in Galactrix, your quest will span planets, star systems–and perhaps even the entire galaxy. A number of other gameplay systems will underpin your mission. There’s a diplomacy system that will track your standing with various factions throughout your interstellar travels, governing the interactions you’re able to have with them. A commodity system will tally your income and dictate what resources you’re able to amass to assist your offensive effort. And, there will be ship building, allowing you to collect blueprints you can use to construct new and varied ships for your fleet then customize their weaponry for different kinds of enemy encounters.

We got to see Galactrix on the PC, where it’s looking sharp in high resolution. Versions are also confirmed for later this year on the Nintendo DS and Xbox Live Arcade. Disturbingly, D3 wouldn’t confirm a PSP edition of the game. That was disappointing to us because we preferred the PSP version of Puzzle Quest for its mix of portability, as well as superior graphics and music over the DS game. However, Infinite’s official Galactrix page still lists a PSP version in development (as well as a possible OSX port), so we’ll cross our fingers. At any rate, Galactrix looks and sounds like an intriguing follow-up to Puzzle Quest, so we’re excited to get our hands on it for ourselves–whatever platform we end up playing it on.

-If Its Games