There’s one thing you can say about Microsoft without fear of dispute: they throw a good nerd party.
The “X” series of events are an annual, vaguely Canadian-specific Xbox 360 showcase in Toronto, and this year’s fete was housed at This Is London. While TIL is a club I would not be caught dead in under [...]

Rob Fahey over at GamesIndustry.biz has an insightful op-ed about the burgeoning practice of baking ads right into your game console’s operating system.
I’ve always been very dubious of this practice. It seems crass, particularly for paying Xbox Live gold members. And now Sony has followed suit, placing ads in the latest firmware (the What’s New [...]

Microsoft’s Xbox underlings have been scurrying around the internet lately, drumming up support for the forthcoming Dashboard overhaul and the new low price point for the Arcade unit. It’s all a part of their huge fall push. They’ve also now launched a massive ad campaign; MS is going to spend more money over the next [...]

Sweet but very short. Maybe the shortest demo since Heavenly Sword. You get literally half a level, 2 challenge stages (which I haven’t tried yet), and a tutorial. It’s just an appetizer, at best. Capcom could have given us a little more to fiddle with, without screwing with their sales figures, I reckon.
I guess it [...]

Echochrome is cool.
English demo is out now.
Brain explodes, leaks out.
Call of Duty 4.
Map packs way late on Triple.
Not much more to say.
Ok, Army of Two.
Slam a Dew and run foot-race.
Montréal made this?
Burnout Paradise.
Massive fucking patch kills bugs.
Next up, bikes at night.
Iron Man is shit.
The movie looks sort of neat.
But the game is shit.
Sigh. Lost Odyssey.
Make [...]

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while now. There’s a strange bumper crop of RTS games on the 360 this year, but this one stood out for it’s unique setup and radically asymmetrical balancing. Also, Petroglyph did those Empire at War Star Wars RTS games, which I understood to be not-sucky.
I heartily [...]

When I heard that Treasure’s famously rare, punishingly difficult shmup Ikaruga was dropping on Live, of course I had to try it out. The original cabinet is a “tallscreen” aspect ratio, not exactly appropriate for modern televisions. The normal mode of the game is to just pillarbox it graphically, so there is just background texture [...]

OH HAI, I am everything Nerfgun despises in alien design.
Almost as bad as this guy.
By the way your Mass Effect DLC is available on Live.

GDC is in full swing now, with Microsoft having given their keynote presentation yesterday afternoon. There’s some interesting stuff in there, although nothing too earth-shattering, and a few notable omissions were apparent as well. Here’s the Cliff Notes version:
After going over the general positive spin on Live and announcing that gamers had amassed 1 billion [...]

By way of Kotaku we find that the industrious gnomes at ScoreHero have delved deep, too deeply into the guts of a DLC pack and unearthed what appears to be The Master List of Songs. Some of these are already out there, but the rest are placeholder slots for DLC that is yet-to-come. That’s right, [...]