The first trailer for Call of Duty: World at War has been released. It shows some of the new features of the game such as flamethrowers, and some hand to hand combat. The game will center around the Pacific theater of World War II. Also new is a 4 player co-op (both split-screen and online).

Call of Duty: World at War will be released before the end of Activision’s 2009 fiscal year.

KLind

While not the first of it’s kind, three friends have embarked on a journey through the Mushroom Kingdom this weekend. The goal is to complete 7 Mario games (Super Mario Bros, Super Mario Bros 2, Super Mario Bros 3, Super Mario World, Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine, and Super Mario Galaxy), within 3 days. It started up on Friday June 27th at 3PM. You can check their progress here

The main goal is to raise money for Child’s Play, a charity that provides games for children’s hospitals.

Will they succeed? Will they fail? Pull up a Toadstool, and watch!

UPDATE: They finished all 7 games on time, and raised a total of around 10,000 dollars for Child’s Play. Great job guys!

KLind

Meet Uncle Sofa:

Uncle Sofa knows how to get the party going. He was created using the Spore Creature Creator.

The Spore Creature Creator is but a crumb of crust from the pie that is Spore. The name is pretty literal as all you do in it is create creatures. But unlike a normal character creator, this one will hold your attention for quite a while. In most games I tend to select the most normal looking character, or the polar opposite; the entire process taking around a minute. I’ve been playing around with the Spore Creature Creator for the past seven hours without getting bored.

What sets this apart from most character creation software is the feeling that you’re actually creating something unique compared to choosing Face 5, Body 4, and Haircut 9. The feeling of working with the tool is most comparable to playing with modeling clay. You sculpt out the body and begin adding features to it. There’s no correct answer as to where any of the items are supposed to go. Do you want your creature to have it’s face on it’s back? Go for it. Want every surface of it to be covered in Mouth’s? Do it. Want an upside down head? I sure did! So I did it:

(Funtime Lenny)

One of the coolest parts of the program is the many ways available to share your creatures with your friends. In the “Test Drive” where you make your creation walk around, dance, emote, you can click a button on the UI to take a picture.

(Max from Sam and Max)

If your friends aren’t impressed by things that don’t move, you can click another button to create an animated gif of your creature doing wacky things.

Finally, the feature that impressed me most was the ability to record videos of my creature (in this case Uncle Sofa) doing things, and automatically being able to upload them to Youtube all in game.

After creating a creature you can name it, give a brief description, and upload it to the Sporepedia where anyone can download your creature. You download a PNG image of the creature you want and when that’s put into the game, it’s recognized and automatically loads as a 3D creature for you to tweak and modify.

More than anything the Creature Creator makes me extremely excited for the full release of Spore. Thinking of the possibilities of evolution and cross-breeding with my pre-existing character palate makes me grin ear to ear.

A colony of Uncle Sofa exploring the cosmo’s in search of a more habitable environment for it to colonize… I can’t wait!

The Spore Creature Creator will be released on June 17th, with a free trial coming at the same time. Spore fully releases on September 7th.

Take us home Uncle Sofa:

KLind

If you aren’t already aware there’s a ton of content over at ResidentEvil.com including both trailers, screenshots, wallpapers, and other information. We’ve already posted some scans and such which can be found here. Any new content we find will be added to this post, with newer stuff being added at the top and older stuff just works its way down. We might be doing this with some other major titles so make sure to check back frequently.

Here’s the new Trailer:

And here are some fairly recent screenshots.

More screens after the break.

(more…)

This time in a foreign language! Note the flamethrower and riot shield looking thing.

TGFJF! (Thank God for Jeux France)

Just a reminder that a new and extremely awesome Dragonball Z game is coming out in just a couple of weeks. Burst Limit does three things right so far and I haven’t even touched the game yet. First, it gets rid of the crazy long subtitles like Budokai, Tenkaichi, etc. Second, the graphics are the closest to watching an actual anime I have ever seen. Third, this:

There are some cool pre-order deals going down as well. I think I might go pre-order the PS3 version for the Blu-ray movie (DBZ in 1080p should rock my face off). Here are the details:

According to the new Game Informer article, the successor of Guitar Hero 3 will include:

- Create a song. Although these exclude vocals due to storage and possible copyright issues.
- You’ll be able to name your song as well as create album art. After you’ve done all that you can upload it to GH Tunes where anyone can download it.
- You’ll be limited to 5 songs at first. But depending on the ratings you get you’ll possibly be able to upload 10 or more.
- The song sharing mode will be in the Wii and PS2 versions also, but GI says it’s unlikely that it’ll be as robust as the PS3 and 360 versions.
- Drums, bass, vocals guitar
- Create a rocker
- Create a guitar and drums
- All songs will be master tracks
- They don’t want to discuss specifics on track listing out of fear of being scooped by the competition. However they confirmed 4 bands: Van Halen, The Eagles, Linkin Park and Sublime.
- A new guitar designed by Red Octane that includes a new input mechanic that’ll “impact the way you play GH in the future”.
- GI saw see through notes while playing that Neversoft said was the new input mechanic and that they were trying to patent.

Whoa, I didn’t expect a create-a-song option. The instruments were expected but all master tracks? That’s impressive.

Source

It’s a friday night, and you’re really bored of the games you have. You get in the car and drive over to Blockbuster, only to find that all of the games you would be interested in getting have all been rented out.

Well Blockbuster aims to change that with their new gaming initiative. The games section at Blockbusters across America is being expanded, with new options for getting your games. Not only will the stores be stocked with the latest game releases to rent, but the store will begin selling these games new as well. In addition to Wii, PS3, and Xbox 360 games, Blockbuster will soon be adding Nintendo DS to the list of games you’ll be able to take out. As if that wasn’t convenient enough, you’ll be able to purchase consoles too. The store will have a special Playstation 3 bundle which will include:A 40 GB Sony PS3

• A PS3 Media Remote
• HDMI cables
• Spiderman 3 on Blu-Ray
• Transformers Game
• A 12 Week PS3/Blu-Ray rental card (one week free rental a week for 12 weeks)

Ubisoft Montreal has announced plans for a follow up on the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy, with a promise of a ‘new breed of gameplay’. If you recall the great Ubisoft leak of 2006 included art for a new Prince of Persia game. It had a unique look to it, which this announcement describes as a ‘brand-new illustrative art style’.

The game features a corrupted world that the prince will need to heal. It seems that the prince in this version isn’t the same prince from the Sands of Time trilogy. The story is less focused on reality, but more magical fantasy. When you “heal” parts of the world, the transformation occurs in real time (sky returns to normal color, plants regrow, etc.).

Some notable differences between this and the Sands of Time Trilogy, is the lack of time control. This was a big feature for the last games, and it will be interesting to see it go. The environments won’t be as linear, but instead more open organic, ala Zelda. It’s not as open world as Assassins Creed, but the paths will offer multiple options. As seen in leaked concept art, the prince has a Glove which allows him to slide along walls. He can use it for combat situations too. Ubisoft seems to be taking a different approach to combat as well. Instead of a room full of enemies to hack and slash to pieces, there will be fewer enemies and they will be more powerful leading to more interesting battles.

Ubisoft release a video on their site of one of their artists doing an exclusive illustration of the Prince. It can be viewed Here.

I’m interested in the new art style, and really can’t wait to go hands on with the new Prince of Persia this holiday season.

KLind

I’m usually not a fan of Xbox’s arcade game selection, and why waste precious Microsoft points on games when I can use them to buy more rock band songs? Ikaruga is the exception. It’s your everyday classic vertical shooter em’ up, with a big twist. Your ship can switch between two modes of “polarity” with inverting effects. Light polarity absorbs light based attacks and deals critical damage to dark enemies. Switching to dark polarity absorbs dark based attacks and deals critical damage to light enemies. The whole game is based around this concept of polarity.

This game is very simple, consisting of 3 buttons: fire, change polarity, and release a charged attack from absorbed attacks. While holding down fire and swerving around to avoid enemy fire seems simple enough, there’s another puzzle like twist to it. You can put together chains of 3 to gain a bonus to score. And with the the light and dark enemies scrambled together, this can quite the challenge to put together a respectable chain.

Ikaruga is insanely difficult no matter what difficulty you pick. The screen is littered with black and white dots, and you’re immune to half of them. Boss fights are over the top and very punishing if you making one wrong move, so fast reflexes are a must here. Two player co-op makes Ikaruga a little less daunting to attempt, but still challenging regardless.

There seems to be some lag issues in Ikaruga, but nothing game breaking. On certain occasions, like the explosion of a boss, the frame rate slows down to a crawl. It might be intentional, but it did stand out. And playing two player co-op over Xbox live often presents a delay in control, for example it may take a half a second for your ship to move left when you press left on the joystick. When this issue occurs depends on who you are playing with. However, there is no delay when playing a local or a system link match. What I also dislike is the fact you must play for extended periods of time to gain more continues. For every hour you invest into Ikaruga you gain another continue to use for a another attempt to run though the game.

Overall Ikaruga is a must have for fans of the shoot ‘em up genre. I recommend trying the trial version first for everyone else before considering purchasing. For me this was definitely worth 800 Microsoft points.

Rizer1