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A Tale Of Two Japanese Bundles: Resident Evil 5

Mr Toffee — Wednesday, 7th January 2009 @ 02:05:59 PM

Capcom has unleashed their bundle packs of their survival horror opus Resident Evil 5, coming to you on its intended March 5th date. The special packs will be for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The Xbox 360 version will contain, as you can see on the picture, a 60 gig HDD, a 48-hour LIVE Gold trial member card, and the deluxe edition of the game itself (with a tin box and the OST) . The PS3 version comes with an 80GB PS3 containing a neat decal of the TriCell corporation, two DualShock 2 controllers, and the game itself (not deluxe edition).

The big catch is that both these bundles are straight out of Japan, so if you're interested, you might want to start saving up until March and head down to Gamescore or any other local friendly game store that deals with imported goods. Thanks to the region-free-ness of one of the consoles, you don't need me to tell you which of the bundles will see more sales of in Singapore.

White Knight Chronicles Gets Some Sales Loving; Dissidia Follows Suit

Mr Toffee — Wednesday, 7th January 2009 @ 10:50:18 AM

Bow to your king

The perennial PS3 opus of last Christmas, White Knight Chronicles, reigns supreme in good old Nippon as it sold a nice number of 207,000 copies between the date of December 22 to 28 of 2008. In shock and awe the PSP fighting game slash fanservice material Dissidia: Final Fantasy based off the, well, Final Fantasy series, came in second place with an estimate of 176 extra copies on its second week. With any luck, Level 5's epic tale might hopefully get more love in the months that follow. Me? I'm just waiting on an English localization; curse my inability to read advanced Japanese text. Hit the jump for the top ten list.

EGM Closes As Result Of New Ownership Of 1UP Network

Mr Toffee — Wednesday, 7th January 2009 @ 09:42:09 AM

For good times, for bad times...

Remember that alleged rumor of long-lasting gaming magazine EGM going the way of the dodo? Turns out it's coming true. Ziff Davis has officially sold the 1UP network to bigwig Hearst, the owners of UGO.com. This new ownership will cause the shutting-down of EGM. According to Gamasutra, the sale in question includes 1UP.com, Mycheats.com, Gametab.com, and GameVideos.com. The specifics of how much was procured in the deal was not disclosed. The last official issue of EGM will be January 2009.

"We believe this is a smart transaction for Ziff Davis Media that places these market leading assets and teams in a great environment poised for further success," said Ziff Davis Media CEO Jason Young. "The transaction allows us to pay down debt and shift our full focus to our core PCMag Digital Network business. We thank our 1UP team members for their contributions and wish them the best of success into the future."

If this isn't a huge sign of the death knell of videogame magazines as we know it, I don't know what is. Cheers, EGM, your incredible tenure of over two decades will be missed. Hopefully GameAxis Unwired will stay afloat for a short bit after this news sets in to the public.

(Breaking: Ziff Davis Sells 1UP To UGO/Hearst, Closes EGM)

Logitech: Serious About Gaming (And Your $$$)

jimmy wartooth — Wednesday, 7th January 2009 @ 09:26:16 AM

Because you can never have enough black peripherals with blue LEDs on them, Logitech revealed a trio of "I waaaantsss" gaming peripherals at CES the other day.

The keyboard, the G19, costing a healthy USD$200 boasts an impressive 320 x 240 color LCD that displays info from over 60 games (WoW being the only important one, obviously). Not really sure why you would want to look at game info on the tiny screen on your keyboard instead of your gigantoid linked monitors setup (that I'm assuming you have if you can afford a keyboard like this) but hey, maybe if your monitors ever blow up you can use the keyboard's screen to play.

The display can also show computer info which actually would be a lot more useful - and a lot less cool. It also has the standard fare of 12 programmable keys and 2 USB ports.

The mouse, the G9x, priced at $100 gives you on-the-fly adjustable dpi from 200 to 5000, onboard memory, interchangeable grips, custom color LEDs and, zomg a weight-tuning system (which I'm assuming is some kind of illegal street racing modding type deal where you can strip out all the non-essential parts of your mouse for faster circuits of your mouse pad).

Lastly, we have the G35 7.1 surround sound headset, yours for only USD$130 which, as well as your usual headphone stuff, comes with an awesome voice morphing option allowing you to scare the sh*t out of your guild mates on vent by recreating a dead-on Chuck Norris informing them of their impending ass kicking.

Radiant Silvergun on Xbox Live Arcade?

Mr Toffee — Tuesday, 6th January 2009 @ 02:16:17 PM

Do want

It's nice to want things, as a recent interview with Treasure CEO Masato Megawa on Gamasutra said that Microsoft has asked the company to remake Radiant Silvergun, the perennial shooter on the Sega Saturn that led to the awesomeness that is Ikaruga (not that Radiant Silvergun is any less awesome). The CEO stated that they're thinking about its release since the game "(has) certainly aged in assorted ways." If retro dreams do come true, it definitely beats shelling out a kidney or two just to get a copy of the game.

(Games The Way They Want: Catching Up With Treasure)

The Top 20 Xbox Live Games Played

Mr Toffee — Tuesday, 6th January 2009 @ 08:40:23 AM

Because we love statistics and "top so-and-so" lists, the original Xbox Xpert, Major Nelson (a.k.a Larry Hryb), has compiled a list of the top games being played on Live. We start off with the full-price games, and try not to act too shocked at who's number one. A pittance that our perennial fighting game in the office, SoulCalibur IV, didn't make the cut. More after the jump.

1. Halo 3
2 .Call of Duty 4
3 .GTA IV
4 .Gears of War 2
5 .Gears of War
6 .Call of Duty: World at War
7 .Guitar Hero III
8 .Battlefield: Bad Company - Demo
9 .Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Demo (given the hype, I'm surprised this wasn't in the top five)
10. Rock Band
11. Fable II
12 .Mirror's Edge - Demo
13 .Madden NFL 09
14 .BF: Bad Company
15 .Rainbow Six Vegas 2
16 .UNO
17 .Castle Crashers
18 .COD: World at War Multiplayer Beta
19 .Forza Motorsport 2
20 .Too Human - Demo

The News So Far...5th January '09

Mr Toffee — Monday, 5th January 2009 @ 11:16:29 AM

This just in: AsiaSoft cracking down on actual pirates of MapleStory server

....because we were too busy churning out articles for the magazine and moving stuff to the new office. The website is clearly missing some official news posts as of late, so let's sum it all up, bullet point style.

- An 11-year old kid who loves Sonic & Sega (good for him) gets a law preventing people from keeping hedgehogs abolished.

- Someone had time to mod the D-Pad of the Xbox 360 controller. Jimmy Wartooth would love that.

- Yoshiki Okamoto, formerly of Capcom claims that Dimps president Takashi Nishiyama (Dimps being the people behind Street Fighter IV) is bisexual. It really is a slow news day.

- What happens when Take-Two rebuffs a #25.75 offer from EA? They end up 2nd on the worst media deals of '08 created by investors at UBS.

- White Knight Chronicles sold quite decently for an original I.P. 203,000 copies in seven days, to be exact.

- Some kid in Singapore is running a pirate Maple Story server in his bedroom and getting flak for it from AsiaSoft. And rightfully so.

- A mother physically slots in three credit cards into her brand new Nintendo Wii. Guess Japan forgot to put that bit of oddity in their safety manual.

This Week In Releases/ Titles: Hitting The Streets On The PC

Mr Toffee — Monday, 5th January 2009 @ 08:46:52 AM

And we start off the new year with a bang of, well, jack all. Surely you jest, you might address moi. Take a look for yourself, I wish I were jesting.

Saints Row 2 (PC)

Sal loved it, Jimmy Wartooth loved it, Yahtzee loved it, the majority of the gaming media feel that it comes in second to GTA IV. Then again, most people love a game more for its chopped-up-but-tried-its-best narrative than its gameplay. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.

As for me, I'm on the love train for this. It's not everyday that you can create a Cockney-speaking fat guy wearing a suit and a bowler hat and make him run rampant across town. And who knows, maybe this version will actually run bug-free on its first day (ba-dum-bish).

White Knight Chronicles (PS3)

It's a single-player JRPG and MMO experience all in one! If you haven't bought it yet, what the hell? Unless you don't read kanji in your sleep, that is.

And that's it. Unless you're into M&Ms Adventure, Bigfoot, or any other shovelware junk, this week is all dead. Dead, I tells ya. So what have you been playing? Me; I got on the Fallout 3 train and loving it so far.

Dawn Of War II: Nids Do It From Behind...And Under...And Sometimes Above

jimmy wartooth — Saturday, 3rd January 2009 @ 03:18:42 PM

We're going to need a bigger gun

Hope you all had a good new year's. With 2009 underway you're all probably falling into one of two camps: Waiting for Street Fighter IV to come out on consoles or waiting for Dawn of War II to come out. And, although I'm looking forward to a new game starring more of Chun Li's epic thighs, I'm actually quite a bit more excited about Dawn of War II, for the sole reason that they're including Tyranids this time around.

One of my big beefs with the original Dawn of War was that Space Marines were way too OP. It was all good for single player, but when multiplayer becomes Space Marine Vs Space Marine over and over and over, something's wrong (although this is often the case with the tabletop game too, so I'm not sure how much you can blame on Relic).

The Orks, Elder and Chaos just weren't cool enough to play and, on top of that, they kind of sucked too. Fortunately, Relic is fixing that problem in DOW2 by introducing the one race from 40k that might be even cooler than the marines. After all, they were the inspiration for the Zerg (everyone loves the Zerg!) and they already have their own kickass movie too! (Starship Troopers, obviously)

Lead designer Jonny Ebbert described the Tyranids at GC last year: "The Tyranids, with their hive mind and swarm tactics, are all about overwhelming the player in melee combat. We actually took a lot of cues from Jurassic Park in modeling Tyranid behavior -- there's something about the way the raptors jumped out, or how they would stay just out of reach and shadow people throughout that movie, that really influences how we make the Tyranids move."

O rly? Psychic Space Alien Dinosaurs...

That was last year though. Now that the beta is underway and with lots of multiplayer footage of the game out there, we know a lot more about the Tyranids.

Auld Lang Syne: The Year In Comments

Mr Toffee — Friday, 2nd January 2009 @ 10:44:46 PM

I can see this happening to us as soon as this post is up

I would like to thank the many readers, both friendly and belligerent, in taking their time to add in their own two cents. We really appreciate the feedback and voices you give us for our articles; both logical and controversial. Having said that, I feel that we should look back to our favorite comments we've come across throughout the splendorous year of 2008. We have our own way of deciding which ones would be put up in this segment: they range from how colorful it is, how non-contextual it is, and how much unintentional humor can be garnered from people who love nothing more than to flame and hate on us for no apparent reason. In no particular order, I give you the comments that stuck to our minds on the year 2008. Do you smell comedy roasting? Because I sure do!

Keep in mind that this is all for the sake of humor and not to be taken seriously; we kid because we love. Of course, if you feel offended that we're pointing our fingers at your face and laughing at your attempts in sounding smart on the 'net, well, perhaps you should have thought things through before you started typing on the keyboard, eh? Think of this as an extreme case in studying the human psyche. Oh, and to break the monotony of heavy text, I'll add in some pictures of cats who speak l33t.

MajulahSingapura: WTF knn chao angmoh get lost la... ni nao hia!! Dis ish an SG site k!

MobileX (FrackMe): Your list is pathetically american. Did you rip it off some site? Ron jeremy? Rickroll? Chuck norris? Americana popular-cultural icons maybe but nearly irrelevant here.

Found On: GAX Top Ten Thursday: Weapons We Want To See

Thoughts: What a better way to start than to pick someone who probably thought mixing up Chinese slangs and misspelled English would sound cool. Well, it doesn't. Second place should go to MobileX who thinks American popular culture doesn't reach far in SEA. This is coming from the same person who added a slang from an American TV Show. Perhaps you've heard of the American popular culture word known as "irony"?

More idiocy and genius statements after the jump.