Champions Online is aiming for a 2009 launch and developer Cryptic Studios is slowing releasing more info and, more importantly for us, new screenshots showing off what their next super hero MMO looks like. Recently a batch of new shots from the game were posted up on the game's official web site.
It was revealed in the latest GameTrailers.TV episode but today Disney Interactive officially announced their plans for Split/Second (that's how they are handling the title) the new arcade racing game from developer Black Rock Studio. The game will be released for the PC and other platforms in early 2010.
Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has spoken out on their Impulse game download service and competing with Valve's Steam before but in a new editorial on the Edge Online site Wardell goes even further, saying that Steam's lead in this kind of service may be fleeting. Wardell feels that while Steam has 20 million accounts only 1.5 million actually log on each day. As he states, "When one of these services has 20 million active users per day, then I think we can say that they have reached a critical threshold. Right now, however, by Valve's own statistics, about half of Steam users use it for just Counterstrike -- not including all of Valve's other games." Wardell feels Valve will find itself fighting off competition with services like his own Impulse for a piece of the downloadable gaming pie.
Tilted Mill's first downloadable original game, Hinterland, was released back in the summer of 2008. Now it appears that Tilted Mill is bringing the game to retail stores via publisher Got Game Entertainment. The company announced this week that Hinterland: Orc Lords will ship to stores and also released via download on March 25.
F.E.A.R. 2 didn't get as good of a critical reception as the original but the horror FPS sequel from Monolith seems to be doing decently on the sales front on the PC side, showing up in the top 10 best selling PC game in its first two weeks of release. Now the game's publisher Warner Bros. Interactive has revealed plans for a new multiplayer map pack for the game with a unique twist
Street Fighter IV Producer Yoshinori Ono has teased the inclusion of Dee Jay and T. Hawk in the fighter to Famitsu, reports IGN. Ono apparently stated that incomplete 3D models were created of the characters, and the staff even planned out T. Hawk's combat, but no explanation was given for why the pair didn't make the four-quel. The characters are the only two fighters from Super Street Fighter II Turbo missing in SF IV.
Harrah's Casinos is inviting gamers to visit its gambling hotspots and spend all their cash on slots show off their Rock Band skills during the free, MTV Games-sponsored Total Rock, Total Rewards Rock Band Competition. The seafood buffet, however, will cost extra. The musical event kicks off in March at 17 Harrah's casinos in the US and Canada, with weekly Rock Band competitions offering up various prizes. Come April, four regional contests will take place, with the most talented group receiving $10,000 and the opportunity to open for The B-52s in Atlantic City. Registration details and a list of participating casinos can be viewed here.
D3Publisher is working on a retro-style side-scrolling XBLA and PSN action game intended to fill in the backstory of Matt Hazard, the lead character of Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard. It's planned for release sometime this summer. (Eat Lead launches against Halo Wars on March 3.) If you're not hip to Eat Lead's "hook," it's supposed to be the latest game in a long-running series, and Matt Hazard is supposed to be a "video game icon." Only it isn't and he's not. The downloadable game is ostensibly one of his past titles being made available for the first time in years. Only it's not. Get it?
Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King. With two matches under our belts already this season, it's time to lay out the season's preliminary lineup of bosses from Wrath of the Lich King's five-man instances. Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves is our series of fantasy death matches between the game's infamous PvE villains.
3D seems to be making a reemergence lately -- there was a 3D commercial on the Super Bowl last week, I'm going to see Coraline in 3D this weekend (Neil Gaiman and stop motion for the win), and Nvidia's 3D Vision cards have recently been integrated with World of Warcraft. But not so fast there: apparently while the system does make WoW stereoscopic (sends a different picture to each eye), and while it does work for some media (apparently watching 3D HD content with the system "feels like your monitor is a window"), analyst Rob Enderle over at TG Daily says WoW in 3D isn't all that amazing. Let's not forget, of course, that this is a game going on four years old, and while it has a terrific art style, and has recieved multiple graphic updates since then, we're still dealing with old technology in terms of a graphic engine. So Enderle says that the 3D really makes you realize that there are no real physics in the game -- "the objects," he says, "look like flat cutouts fanned out in a 3D field." The physical limitations are there, too -- you need a special monitor, apparently, and it's only 22" big, which might seem fine for most, but anyone who works all day on a computer (like yours truly), is used to a little bigger screen.