SAN FRANCISCO — Earlier this week, BioWare gave the press a peek at the first hours of Mass Effect 2, the science-fiction role-playing game due out on January 26 for Xbox 360 and PC.
The first moments of the RPG highlight BioWare’s penchant for plot. And it’s evident from the first button press that the developer [...]

Indie game maker Péter Soltész has released the full version of his drunken sumo wrestling sim Sumotori Dreams.
For $4, you can buy the full version of the game, with four wrestlers (two human, two AI) and five more destructible arenas.
The amazing thing about Sumotori is its miniature size: 372K, or less than half a megabyte.
To [...]

A new behind-the-scenes video preview of the Prince of Persia film fleshes out the character of the Prince himself, named “Dastan” (no relation) in the movie.
Actor Jake Gyllenhaal, producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Mike Newell explain that the Prince’s character is — wait for it — a lovable rogue! Always getting into scrapes and barely [...]

A new clip of Tron: Evolution was among the many trailers that debuted at Spike TV’s 2009 Video Game Awards on Saturday. Propaganda, the studio behind the 2008 revival of the Turok franchise, is creating the game to launch during the 2010 holiday season, around the same time the movie Tron: Legacy will hit [...]

Long before Bill and Ted or that space marine from Doom went to Hell, one guy had already taken an excursion to the underworld. He wrote a wicked poem about it.
In Inferno, the first part of The Divine Comedy, 14th-century poet Dante Alighieri toured the devil’s domain, using allegory and cultural references to comment on [...]

Want to conquer those nasty 8-bit shooters of your youth? Take some tips from a classic gaming hero.
On this episode of Game|Life The Video, we are visited by Takahashi-Meijin, aka The Famous Takahashi. He was the hero of a whole generation of Japanese gamer kids in the 1980s, renowned for his ability to strike a [...]

Blizzard released significant patches for World of Warcraft and Diablo II this week.
The 3.3. patch for World of Warcraft, dubbed The Fall of the Lich King (trailer above), is said to be one of the last major content updates for the game before the Cataclysm expansion ships. The list of new features, tweaks and fixes [...]

Kim Swift, level designer and team lead for Portal, has left her gig at Valve to work for Airtight Games — the house currently putting the finishing touches on Dark Void for Capcom.
In a press release Airtight Games president said that snatching Swift was a “a strategic move by Airtight Games into new and broader [...]

Dark Void comes from developer Airtight Games, a team featuring core designers of Xbox cult fave Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge.
It plays like Gears of War meets Rocketeer (yes, there’s flying and shooting) and tells the story a pilot who crashes in the Bermuda triangle and finds himself caught up [...]

MONTREAL — Three years ago this month, Yannis Mallat had what he calls a “defining moment.” Mallat, the CEO of Ubisoft’s flagship game development studio in Montreal, was competing for the right to create a videogame based on James Cameron’s Avatar.
In the first few minutes of his pitch, he startled Cameron and his producer, Jon [...]

Here’s a look at the four-player battle mode in the upcoming Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks for Nintendo DS.
I got to try out this multiplayer mode at Nintendo’s office last week. Here’s how it breaks down: Each player controls a differently-colored Link. You have no special weapons, not even a sword. Your mission is to [...]

On November 24, 2K Games released the first downloadable expansion for the co-operative shooter Borderlands.
The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned provides players with a new, ultra-spooky area to explore, unseen rare weapon drops and, of course, a horde of undead enemies to slaughter.
The download is available for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and costs [...]

The ebb and flow of combat in Battlefield: Bad Company 2, currently in beta test for PlayStation 3, feels immediately familiar.
That’s because Electronic Arts’ DICE studio has been tweaking, polishing and reworking its formula for goal-oriented, first-person combat since 2002. Just this summer, Battlefield 1943 re-familiarized us with this particular brand of brawl, where vehicles, [...]

Adding Twitter and Facebook to game consoles is a good idea, but both Sony and Microsoft are missing the point.
These social networks are tools that can be used for all kinds of things. Their usefulness to gamers doesn’t spawn from the ability to learn in real time that your best friend’s wife is psyched to [...]

Don’t let the name fool you. New Super Mario Bros. Wii is actually a little old. This traditional, 2-D action game brings back everything you loved about classics like 1991’s Super Mario World.
Hey, it’s the totally ’80s, totally radical Koopa Kids! Fire Chomps! And Micro-Goombas!

See also:

Miyamoto: New Mario Tests Your Hard-Core Gaming Chops

The big [...]

You can’t see me. I’m there in the shadows, crouched down on the roof above you, dangling on the ledge below you. Maybe you know I’m nearby. Maybe you’re afraid for your life. You should be. Because by the time you realize where I am, you’ll be dead.
That’s the promise of Assassin’s Creed, a promise [...]

Much of the wailing and gnashing of teeth coming out of last week’s videogame sales reports seems centered around the music game genre and its failure to stay on the charts.
Let’s not confuse the decline of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band brands with the death of music games as a genre, though.
In October 2007, [...]

Here’s what you need to know about Modern Warfare 2: It’s a magnificent multiplayer game.
Yes, the incredibly popular new shooter for the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed) comes bundled with an entertaining and substantial single-player storyline, one that has already stirred up a little controversy.

See also:

Test-Driving Modern Warfare 2’s Night-Vision Goggles

Powerful [...]

The long-delayed Final Fantasy XIII will be released in the U.S. and Europe on March 9, 2010, Square Enix said Friday.
Square Enix also said that the Western releases of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game would feature a new theme song — “My Hands,” by RCA Music Group recording artist Leona Lewis. The Japanese [...]

The folks behind James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game didn’t have to struggle too hard to make their videogame look lifelike. Director Cameron did most of the heavy lifting (and reportedly spent $500 million) when it came to clawing up and out of the uncanny valley.
The new trailer for the Avatar videogame underlines the lengths [...]