Take for instance Gameloft's Guitar Rock Tour. The GameLoft-developed title leans heavily on the Guitar Hero franchise for its gameplay mechanics and aesthetic, but it manages to do enough different to make it work on the iPhone that I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play.

The game comes with two instruments to choose from and 17 songs, all of which I suspect are covers. To play through a game using the guitar you just tap your way through the notes on the four-fret guitar as they fall toward you down the neck of the virtual instrument. The songs drop sustained notes and lines of notes at you as well as a number of double notes. If you come across a line of notes you can slide your finger across them as they scroll down. Once you build up enough rock power you can activate the familiar power-up by sliding your finger up the gauge to go into a power-up mode that doubles your points.

While some songs can be a tad difficult to follow along on the tiny screen, in general I found it to be quite a bit of fun to play. I wasn’t as taken with the game’s drums.

The game has just two buttons for the drum mode. One on each side of the “musical highway” that drops down your iPhone. For some reason I had a lot more trouble keeping up with the song despite having half as many buttons to push as I did with the guitar.

The drum mode also highlighted an issue both instruments have. The game tends to chug occasionally when you miss your notes. These occasional slowdowns can throw a wrench in your timing as you play through a song, leading to more chugs. Fortunately it didn’t happen so often that it broke the game.

Guitar Rock Tour includes both a tour mode with unlockable achievements and a quickplay mode. What it doesn’t include, at least yet, is any form of multiplay or downloadable content.

While the ten dollar game is certainly limited with its short set list and lack of multiplayer gaming, I still think this is one of my favorite games currently on the iPhone. I just hope that they plan to expand the title with more, free or cheap songs and perhaps another mode.

Jenga Donkey Kong Collector’s Edition is essentially the wood stacking game painted black with a new set of rules. The version comes with a pile of rectangular blocks painted black with red girders painted on two sides of each block. There are also three holes drilled into each rectangle. The game also comes with four plastic Mario pieces, a plastic piece featuring Donkey Kong and Pauline and a little cardboard spinner.

You can play the game with normal Jenga rules, pulling out a piece of wood to replace at the top of the stack until someone knocks it over, or with the new DK rules. The Donkey Kong rules add enough of a twist to the classic game to make it bit more fun and of course, what with the neato pixel graphics, quite a bit more nostalgic.

The new rules have you place a peg-backed Mario piece into a hole of one of the bottom Jenga pieces. Once everyone has placed their Marios you take turns flicking the spinner. The spinner tells you how many girders to move as you make your way up and around the Jenga tower. It also tells you how many girders you have to slide out of the stack and place back on top. Removing and replacing the pieces is just like classic Jenga, except you have to remove and replace the Donkey Kong piece as well, making sure he and Pauline are always at the highest point of the tower. The spinner tells you to move zero to three spaces and to remove zero to three pieces.

To win you have to either move your Mario to the top of the tower, or be the highest Mario on the tower when someone else knocks the tower down. Fairly simple, but quite a bit of fun.

We played the game two or three times last night and really enjoyed it. The only problem we had with the game is that the plastic pieces were a bit wonky. The pegs on the backs of the Mario sometimes didn’t slide into the Jenga holes, which makes the game near impossible to play until you’ve worn the game in. Also the spinner didn’t really spin, but again that got better with use.

I’m a big fan of classic video games and I happen to love Jenga, so this would be a must by for me. With the holidays nearing I’d say it probably should make some wish lists if you’re a fan of either the video or table top game.

“Pole Position: Remix is a fun and intuitive game that anyone can take for a spin,” says Scott Rubin, senior vice president, Namco Networks. “Similar to playing a racing game in an arcade, Pole Position: Remix makes you feel as if you are actually getting behind the wheel and racing on the track, screeching around turns and breaking to avoid a crash.”

In a fit of nostalgia I downloaded the game this morning. It's solid, and the controls are fun, both the tilt steering and the on-screen thumb-controlled steering wheel options. It's just the gameplay really hasn't aged all that well. I need some sort of nostalgia alarm that locks my wallet when the feeling hits. If you just can't resist, PP:Remix is now available at an Apple Apps Store near you.

Namco Shifts Into High Gear With Pole Position: Remix on iPhone and iPod Touch

SAN JOSE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Namco Networks, a leading publisher and developer of mobile games and entertainment for the mass-market casual gamer, today announced the worldwide availability of Pole Position: Remix for play on iPhone and iPod touch devices. The game is available for purchase from Apple’s App Store.

Pole Position: Remix takes full advantage of iPhone and iPod touch’s unique features and offers three intuitive control modes:

Tilt to Steer Mode allows you, via the device’s accelerometer, to steer your car by tilting the device either to the left or to the right, simulating the feel of an actual steering wheel.
Touch Wheel Mode allows players to rotate the on-screen wheel to control their car.
Slider Mode lets players slide their finger across the on-screen slider to steer with a touch of a finger.
Each mode offers realistic control during sharp turns and a touch-to-break option perfect for power slides. Game play can be customized for left handed and right handed users.

“Pole Position: Remix is a fun and intuitive game that anyone can take for a spin,” says Scott Rubin, senior vice president, Namco Networks. “Similar to playing a racing game in an arcade, Pole Position: Remix makes you feel as if you are actually getting behind the wheel and racing on the track, screeching around turns and breaking to avoid a crash.”

Each track in Pole Position: Remix can be played in four racing modes: Practice, Single Race, Grand Prix and Sudden Death. Points are earned for the distance traveled and for passing competing cars. If players race well, players can unlock reversed or mirrored versions of the tracks, race in new cars and experience different themes, including those based on favorite Namco games such as PAC-MAN®, Galaga® and Dig Dug®!

Similar to the iPod version of the game, Pole Position: Remix for iPhone delivers an entertaining quality game experience anywhere, anytime. Visit www.NamcoGames.com/polepositionremix for more information.

Yesterday Insomniac president Ted Price told a gathering of game writers that their upcoming shooter will be the studio's "biggest and best game we've ever made."

And it's not just because the developer feels they hit it out of the ballpark with the game's single-player experience, or that they think their game offers the deepest multiplayer competitive mode around. It's also because the game's cooperative mode, which seems to tap into the dungeon-crawling, monster-bashing roots of massively multiplayer online games.

Topping all of that off, Price said, is an upcoming community portal which will include live game stats and some things other game portal sites haven't done before.

On offering last night was a chance to check out the recently tweaked multiplayer competitive mode, the first two levels of the game's campaign and the monster-spawning 8-person cooperative mode.

I sat down with seven other gamers to play through an entire scenario. In it we were given a rolling set of objectives which had us battling an increasingly overwhelming number of bad guys.

Unlike in the other modes, players start the game by choosing one of three archetypes: medic, special ops or soldier. The soldier is your basic tank with the ability to throw up a shield and chew through enemies with a heavy chaingun. Medics have the ability to shoot a Ghostbusters-esque stream of light that either sucks life away from a bad guy or heals a good one. Special ops come armed with a long-distance weapon and instead of throwing grenades they lob ammo packs.

On first blush the mode looks an awful lot like a World of Warcraft instance, but without the loot. A group of eight huddle around one another, healing, reloading and shooting as they work as a team toward a single objective.

Instead of drawing from the single player campaign, the mode will use a series of separate stories that play out over the course of the map, allowing gamers to go through them in any order without confusing what's happening.

As you play through a map your character can level up, automatically upgrading their armor and weapons up to four times for the map. Price said that as with the single player campaign and competitive mode, any experience you game while playing coop goes to your character's permanent overall Resistance 2 rank.

Coop can support upwards of 100 enemies in a single frame, so the name of the game is sticking close together and supporting one another.

In my play through of a map we criss-crossed a sizable map, stumbling upon packs of enemies. Some stood near respawn areas, others seemed to be laying in wait. The map's many objectives had us going in and out of buildings as well.

In general, we stuck closely together with the soldiers up front acting as shield-packing tanks while the medics and special ops folks hovered around behind us making sure we were ammoed up and well healed.

While the match I played seemed to rely more on brute force than strategy to succeed, that didn't make beating the lengthy map any less exhilarating. I can't imagine I would find this mode satisfying enough to support the weight of a triple-A title, but as another option, a different way to play, I quite enjoyed it.

Of course this means you can't play through the entire game in cooperative mode, but I'm not sure if that's a bad thing. First it allows the developers to preserve the story and single-player experience, but it also doesn't feel like a cheap add-on of a mode.

Sony PSP 3000 Hands-On [GameSpot]

I spent a bit of the weekend playing around with them and came away fairly impressed, though their are some things that make using them for honest to goodness gameplay a challenge.

The developers of the toys seem to have spent quite a bit of time incorporating a Halo 3 flavor into not just the way the devices look, but how they operate.

Each post has a trigger and a reload button. The guns, according to the instruction manual, can fire off 50 regular shots before having to be reloaded, which produces the reload sound from the game. You can also do super shots by holding in the trigger to overheat the gun. Firing off one of these shots takes up a tenth of your ammo and causes the gun to remain overheated for five seconds, meaning you can't fire for a bit.

The side of the guns have a little red light which blinks when you're out of ammo and the front of the gun glows green when it is powered on. The green light flashes brighter when you fire.

The target is a square cube that you latch to your pants or what have you. The front of the target is a big red circle that flashes red when a hit is scored. Underneath the red circle is a green light bar made up of what appears to be six LEDs. Each time you take a hit one of the LEDs blink out. If you get hit with an overcharged shot you lose half of your LEDs. This shield indicator will actually start to recharge if you're not hit for 20 seconds.

When your shield totally depleted the target says "game over" in the voice from Halo 3 and then five seconds later, it reactivates and says "Slayer". Both add a really neat touch of virtual realism to the game.

While I like the design of the weapons and how accurately the targets both track score and represent death, there are some issues.

First off having a single target makes it hard to play a true game of Halo 3. You can't shoot someone from behind, or the side and it's easy to have the target accidentally or purposefully covered. I know this is more of an issue that laser tag games face, but it would have been nice if the Halo 3 set included two targets, one for the front and one for the back.

Another issue is that the gun isn't in anyway linked to the target, which means you can keep shooting even after you are killed which results in a lot of hard-to-call, down-to-the-line battles.

Finally, I wish they had incorporated vibration in the pistols. It's a minor thing, but an overcharging Covenant pistol isn't an overcharging Covenant pistol unless it's about to shake right out of my hand. The Plasma pistol sold on it's own not only vibrates, it has a vent that pops open after a overcharge shot is fired. It also has an digital display of ammo left.

One thing I suppose people could do is play dual-wielding Halo 3 laser tag and buy one of these two-player packs for each person. That way they'd get two pistols and two targets, one to wear on the front and one to wear on the back. Personally, I think the targets should be worn on some sort of harness or something that allows it to be located at chest and back level, but that's totally doable to.

Final verdict? The guns are a ton of fun to play with, sure the ones sold individually have more bells and whistles, but if you're looking for something fun to play around with in a darkened office or outside at night, these are probably worth the $40. Now if only Jasman sold the target cube's seperately.

Between the LucasArts presentation of the game and my brief hands-on, I walked away feeling confident that this could not only be one of the most exciting Star Wars video games of all time, it could very well provide moments more epic than anything we saw in the three prequel films.

One particular moment had me believing in the Star Wars franchise all over again. The story opens with Vader hunting down a surviving Jedi hiding out on the Wookie homeworld of Kashyyyk. He finds the cowering Jedi, but as he prepares to strike him down his lightsaber flies out of his hand, into the hands of a small child. There is a moment right then...Vader looming over this small boy, defiantly holding a weapon against one of the most powerful beings in the universe...it gave me chills. Nice chills.

From then on the story revolves around this secret apprentice, whose powers can only grow. He walks into a room filled with Rebels and Imperials, and everybody dies. He's a secret, you see? You see him, you've pretty much signed your death warrant. His is, for all intents and purposes, a Force ninja.

Despite the recent spoiler-filled trailer, there will still be plenty of surprises in The Force Unleashed for fans of the Star Wars films, from returning characters from the prequels to all-new characters never seen before in the Star Wars universe. During a brief bit of game involving a fight with a massive rancor a dark-haired male character flashed by the screen, and the gentleman presenting the game quickly blurt out "Who's that!?" before telling us we'd have to play the game to find out. I have my suspicions though.

As for the gameplay itself? While I didn't get to try out the Wii version with it's lightsaber controls, I did spend a bit of time with the Xbox 360 version in which our hero (anti-hero? villain?) wanders into a fight between Rebel and Imperial forces in a Tie Fighter factory, and carnage ensued. Force powers tossed enemies about like rag dolls as they desperately tried to save themselves from my wrath. While I longed for some of the powers I had been shown during the presentation, the potential was certainly there. The only problem I really had was overconfidence - I felt like such a bad ass that I wound up dying horribly. Should probably have channeled all of that confidence into hate or something. Whoops.

The graphics are nice and clean, but of course the physics are the real star here. The Digital Molecular Matter technology really shines in conjunction with NaturalMotion's Euphoria and Havok physics. I notice a few issues, such as trees that seem to break as if they were planks of wood instead of living plants, but for the most part it does the job quite nicely.

While LucasArts' Fracture gives you control over the forces of nature, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed makes *you* the force of nature. It could very well surpass Republic Commando as my favorite Star Wars game of all time, and it's really hard to top Sev and crew.

No. They were very good. After all, at that point they'd been playing the game for three days straight, so I didn't stand much of a chance. Still I took a few swings, only to discover the force isn't quite so strong in this one.

The reps were really keen on showing off the Star Wars characters, so that's what I mainly played. First came Yoda on the Xbox 360, who proved a bit of a nuisance to my opponent's Cervantes, who couldn't seen to land a high attack to save his life. Yes, Yoda effectively cuts the attack arsenal of his enemies by a third, with upper attacks harmlessly passing over his tiny, wispy head. His character model was excellent - in fact the characters have never looked better, but that's the sort of thing you'd expect from a "next gen" game. I was so busy button mashing gawking at Yoda's character model that I was soundly defeated.

Then I tried out Vader's secret apprentice, and proceeded to get pummeled by my opponent's newly useful upper attacks. He did show me some of the special force moves, including a force lightning attack that actually had me win a round before the Namco Bandai rep realized he was better than that and came back strong.

We moved over to the PlayStation 3 then, where another rep had been working on creating a custom character than looked a lot like Jack from the Tekken series. He moved aside to let me try my luck playing as Darth Vader in a match against an AI opponent.

"So who do you want to fight against?"
"Oh, let me fight against Raphael. She's hot."
"Um, Raphael is a guy."
*blank stare* "Riiiight.

Apparently Raphael is a vampire, a fact that I must have completely missed in the last two games? When did this happen?

Confusion aside, I quickly found the one hidden weakness of lightsabers - real swords. If Obi-Wan had just pulled out a scimitar during his final battle aboard the Death Star, the trilogy would have been severely truncated. I decided to forego button mashing and note taking for actually playing the game as it was intended, and Raphael went down like the little bitch he is.

My final match pitted me as the pointy-breasted, anime-inspired Angol against the game's big boss, bird-armored Algol - no relation. Using a secret combination of "blocking" and "attacking intelligently" the boss soon succumbed to my adorably spiky chest armor and I was triumphant.

Force powers aside, the game plays out much like any other Soul Calibur game does, only prettier. The Soul Calibur series has been uniformly excellent for years, and the fourth installment (technically fifth) looks to be no different. Tons of characters, smooth controls, and what looks like one of the best character creation elements ever included in a fighting game - you were expecting anything less?

I shouldn't have to go on from there, but I will.

LEGO Batman: The Videogame looks like it will be delivering the sort of over-the-top addictive LEGO fun of both the Star Wars and Indiana Jones games, but with even more memorable and equipment-laden playable characters than both games combined.

"Over the decades there have been lots of stories about Batman, this is a distillation," said Traveller's Tale's Jonathan Smith. "It is our original telling of Gotham City in chaos."

While the game will have you playing as a "stern Batman" and "try too hard Boy Wonder", Smith said you will also be able to play as a number of villains including the Joker and the Penguin. The game will include a 15 level campaign divided between the heroes and villains.

The game's central hub will be the the Batcave and yes, Alfred will be an unlockable playable minifig.

Sitting down with the game, I found it fairly easy to drop into. The main difference between LEGO Batman: The Videogame and past LEGO games is the batarang mechanic. To use Batman's nifty weapon you tap the X button and then move a bat symbol around the screen to target things, multiple things if you want. It may sound a bit clunky, but it works really well and the added step of targeting prevents you from overusing the batarang.

I played through quite a hefty chunk of a level with Batman and Robin, battling across some of Gotham's rooftops with the dynamic duo felt very familiar, but in a good way. The batarang was most useful when targeting items or distant foes. Which is probably for the best. The few puzzles I ran into were about as challenging as those found in the Star Wars and Indiie games, so not very.

To get Batman or Robin to change outfits you have to find a suit swapper, something typically that has to be built with loose LEGO pieces. Once you step on it you switch to a predetermined suit. I got a chance to check out a mag suit which allowed Robin to slowly walk his way up metal walls and such. Batman's glide suit was way cooler, letting him float gently across the sky. While I didn't get to test drive them, I'm told that there will be a number of vehicles in the game as well including the Batmobile, Batboat and Batwing.

After playing around with the Batman and Robin level for a bit I jumped into a level that had me playing as The Joker and disturbingly sexy minifig Harley Quinn.

In these levels I had a lot more puzzles to deal with while taking on a seemingly endless stream of Gotham cops. While The Joker can take people down with old school punching, he can also give them a hearty buzzer handshake. Grabbing onto an enemy with The Joker makes the little minifig light up, briefly showing a faded minifig skeleton as the character vibrates until it falls apart. That minifig dismemberment is right up there with Chewbacca's arm-ripping attack.

While I didn't have time to play as the Penguin, I was told his attack involved exploding penguins.

I suspect that LEGO Batman The Videogame is going to resonate with gamers as much as LEGO Star Wars did, both because of the excellent design and the abundance of memorable characters.

Dead Space was one of those titles that sort of snuck up on me, very appropriate for a survival horror game.

Before taking up a controller for any length of time, I was sort of impressed with its look, but I hadn't yet been introduced to some of the game's interesting gameplay designs. Things like strategic dismemberment and the lack of a HUD and the true zero gravity sections of the game. All three combine to make Dead Space both more immersive and otherworldly.

In Dead Space you will play as Issac Clarke, a space engineer responding to a distress call from a "Planet Cracker." In the game's reality, these giant spaceships tear apart dead planets to extract ore. In the case of this particular ship, the planet they were raping wasn't so dead. Soon after boarding the ship, and realizing that most everyone onboard is dead, Clarke is separated from the rest of his team.

From the get go the game nails the look it needs to pull off a space thriller. Things are sterile, dark and otherworldly. Event the design of Clarke's outfit, a blend of deep sea diving suite and steam punk welder's mask, is fantastic. The lack of a HUD helps put you more into the game, making you pay more attention to the little noises and signs of what's going on around you.

The weapons, the weapons are fantastical as the multi-limbed, mutli-headed creatures your face. Dead Space leans heavily on the limited ammo feature found in almost all horror survival games, but than adds a twist. To kill the monstrosities you face you can go ahead and empty a clip into one, and maybe kill it, or you can carefully, and systematically blow off it's head and limbs. You do this by selecting the correct weapon, often one that fires multiple lasers or shots, and lining up the laser sights with the weaving limbs.

My first deep look at the game had me playing through a level of the ship's hydroponics lab. Creatures scuttled and ambled toward me from around corners and out of plants. Some burst from the bellies of dead humans. I lased, shot and burned them all. Other creatures produced toxic gases, slowly killing me until I could find and destroy them. All of the things I took on were wholly unique creations to this game. The creature design, I found, is just amazing.

After making my way through the hydroponics lab, a developer skipped me to a boss battle. In it I had to deal with some patches of zero gravity. My boots, automatically magnetized, allowed me to stick to the floor. To move I would just look at an area that had metal and jump to it, floating crazily to my goal and than latching on.

The boss itself was nested in a giant circular room, its tendrils hidden in ooze. To defeat it I had to run around the walls of the moving room and deal out damage, methodically, taking down the creature one tendril at a time.

I think Dead Space's blend of deep space horror and tactical combat is going to resonate both with hardcore fans of the thriller genre and those more reluctant in the past to dip into it.

I got to wander around the shattered landscape, poking at rubble, shooting at people, and trying on clothes. I got my first hands-on taste of the VaultTech Assisted Targeting system, which allows you to pause the action, choose where your bullets are heading on your target's body, and then plays through in slow motion - and there is nothing sweeter than a slow-motion exploding head. It was all very exciting, but as I took a moment to gaze about the room I realized that the most exciting thing about Fallout 3 is what everyone else was doing.

While we all started at the point in the story where we were exiting the Vault we grew up in for the first time, within 15 minutes each of the groups at the six kiosks they had put up in their booth were in completely different places doing completely different things. Some had made a beeline for a nearby settlement, some had found a ruined school building nearby and were involved in combat with some seedy B&D enthusiasts, while others spent a good 10 minutes trying to see if the ruined playground equipment was working from a physics point of view (it wasn't, and yeah...that was me).

Like Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series - especially Oblivion - Fallout 3 is a game that melds itself to the gameplay style of the player, offering something for people who want to explore, kill, or try on different clothing. By the time my 30 minutes was up I was wearing Mad Max-style bondage armor and a baseball cap, while others didn't even bother going into their inventory at all, the barbarians.

The variety is really something to keep in mind when the game comes out and the reviews start pouring in, as the Fallout 3 the reviewers play could potentially be a totally different game than the one you play. The foundation that Bethesda has laid down for you is excellent, but as with any open-world game the experience is ultimately what you make of it.

Damnation takes place in an alternate early 20th century U.S. where the Civil War has been raging for decades. Now a wealthy industrialist is hatching a plan to wipe out both sides of the conflict, and it's up to your character and his teammates to stop the bastard from recreating the country in his own twisted image.

I actually got to play through a bit of a level of the game with Blue Omega's Jacob Minkoff and Richard Gilbert guiding me through. The level starts with the main character and a couple of AI teammates (one of which can be played by a friend for co-op action) tasked with destroying a far off bridge before the enemy forces can cross, decimating a small, strategically located town. The only problem? The bridge spans the middle of a large chasm, which you just happen to be standing on the side of.

Luckily, Damnation's gameplay is all about verticality and finding your own path. Mine involves an elevator that takes us down to some ruins, which we have to cross in order to make it to the bridge. Enemy-filled ruins. Yum. It starts off as a standard shooting affair, firing my pistols at the bad guys and trying to stay under cover, but if you take things a bit differently...

For instance, how many times have you played a shoot where they place an enemy atop a turret or something and you are forced to shoot him from far off? What if you could run to the turret, grab a ledge, flip yourself up and then take his gun to get into some of the sniping fun yourself? Once again, Damnation is about vertical movement. Sure, you can just approach combat as if it were a standard 3rd person shooter, but why limit yourself when you can jump off walls, climb up ledges, and scurry up ladders?

Fighting my way across the ruins, I stopped and took a look behind me, seeing several other paths I could have taken, already planning out my route for my next play through. Blue Omega claims that if you were to explore all the different options you could take to navigate the levels you could squeeze out upwards of three hours gameplay from each one.

I know we've seen games that combine platforming and shooting in the past, but Damnation just feels good. Maybe it's the gritty steampunk setting, or the cool way your character grabs a ledge, kicks off the wall and flips himself up to where he's standing on it. Maybe it's just the feeling I get that instead of just making the title a combination of two gameplay types, Blue Omega is creating a title in which either element could stand on its own but together brings things to a whole new level. Players will be creating their own play style as they progress through the game, which should make for very interesting and unpredictable online multiplayer down the line.

Blue Omega have got the hook in my mouth with Damnation, but can they get me into the boat, skin me alive, fillet me and serve me with white wine at a dinner party? Am I far too tired to be allowed to dabble in analogies right now? Damn straight I am. Just keep an eye on the game, okay?

The demo starts off with my character (Chris) holed up in a shack with Rosario Dawson.

Okay, so she isn't Rosario Dawson, but the South African B.S.A.A. member Sheva Alomar bears a striking resemblance to the Clerks II actress. In fact, throughout the demo I could be overheard mumbling, "out of the way, Rosario" or "I'll save you Dawson!" Perhaps an unintentional likeness, but I'd like to think that if I found myself in the middle of a zombie holocaust Rosie would be nearby, just in case.

Chris and Rosie are holed up in a shack, peering out the window as a big boss baddy has a character executed by a bulky figure with an axe, much like RE4's giant guy with chainsaw. Of course we all know what happens when you peek. The bad guy sees Chris through the dirty window and orders his minions to attack.

You're in a dirty shack in a small African town and you're surrounded by zombies. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO!? You and Rosario Dawson open fire, of course. The controls are very similar to RE4 right now, though of course that's subject to change. Hold down the right trigger to pull your gun, aim with the stick, fire with one button, reload with another. Pull up the menu to switch weapons, left trigger does a melee attack with your knife.

These new zombie-ish enemies begin pouring in, crawling over obstacles, coming through windows, or using the door like polite diseased madmen. Killing them is extremely enjoyable. Shoot them in the head and it could blow off, revealing a strange tentacle creature sprouting out of their necks. The enemies react to where you shoot them, which is even more enjoyable when you switch to the shotgun and start shooting them...well, everywhere.

From time to time you'll be forced to do the old left-stick waggle out of a grapple trick, or you'll get the opportunity to deliver a special attack with a button push in certain situations. Rosie gets into a lot of trouble with the zombies, required you to rush to her aid, brutally brushing off her attackers. She also returns the favor, responding to your calls for help when things look most dire.

Your enemies keep coming in relentless waves, as the whole point of the demo is to survive until your support opens an escape route via missile strike. The game looks slick, though there are a few places where nitpicking can be applied. At one point I took cover against a wall and could see the zombies on the other side clipping through as they lined up to scale the surface and take us out. Other times enemies reacted strangely, such as the executioner from earlier, who would take a swing at me and then just stand there with his back turned until I did damage to him. Of course an E3 demo isn't the full game, and I am sure they'll get that cleaned up in post.

While I am not the biggest fan of the Resident Evil series, I have stuck with the series over the years and am happy with the evolutionary steps the franchise has taken. Resident Evil 4 wowed me when it debuted on the GameCube, with graphics unlike anything we had seen on the system and new gameplay mechanics. Resident Evil 5 isn't as much of a leap. It looks great, but aside from a few mechanics (you crouch to pick up items) it feels the same as the last one. That fact bothered me for a moment, and then I pulled out the shotgun and took out six of the crazy bastards at once. Not too big of a leap, but when your starting point is as excellent as 4 was, anything above that is icing on the cake.

As Iga said, Castlevania Judgment is not your standard 3D fighting game. You move in full 3D, almost as if you were playing in a room in one of the various attempts at bringing the platformer to into the 3D arena. There are objects to smash (and in Dracula's case, possess), power ups to be gained, and spectacular special moves to master, but at its core the gameplay is a very simple, pick-up-and-play affair.

The controls are pretty basic for a Nintendo Wii 3D fighter. The X button blocks and the C button dodges. Wiggle the WiiMote to attack, holding A for certain attacks or B for super attacks. Wiggling the nunchuck has your character dodging in a character-specific fashion. Maria slides out of the way, while Alucard disappears in a puff of mist, reappearing a short distance away.

I took on Konami's Jay Boor, who turned out to be relatively good at navigating Alucard, beating me only twice during the two rounds we played. Fights are smooth, enjoyable, and filled with nifty little moments that will have you recalling Castlevania games past. Maria's spellcasting is especially entertaining, with a wiggle of the Wiimote and a press of the B button bringing down a giant heavy object on top of the unfortunately blocking Alucard's head. The final match ended with me finding the perfect combination of mashed buttons and wiggling, launching Maria into a spectacular fire attack that left Alucard in flames, just in time for the round timer to run out, causing me to lose. Damn round timer.

So far I like what I see. It really isn't just a 3D fighter. It's something else entirely. It felt a bit more like a Dragon Ball Z fighter or a Naruto: Ultimate Ninja series game than it did Tekken or Soul Calibur. The only question I was left with really was, "How many characters are going to be included in the game?"

Stay tuned tomorrow for Konami's press conference for the answer to that question and more!

The full Spore, as we've talked about in detail before, is broken down into five phases which allow you to take a single-cell organism and run it all the way up the evolutionary ladder to a space-exploring civilization.

My concern, after watching the Spore demonstration in Leipzig last year, was that the game wouldn't live up to the spectacular creation tools that are so integral to Spore. I worried that it may be more of a series of toys strung together than a full-blown game.

My time with the game managed to ease some of those concerns.

I decided to start Spore as you should, at the cellular level, controlling an organism floating aimlessly in a sea of life.

This stage of the game, which took me about 20 minutes to play through, felt an awful lot like flow. In it I moved my organism around avoiding larger critters and eating smaller ones. I also tried to find bits of meteorites to gobble up which would give me evolutionary abilities.

After enough attacks or gathering enough bits of rock I earned the DNA I needed to add on new bits to me creature. Initially I gave him a set of pincers for attacking, later I added a bulb that produced poison when he was attacked and extra limbs for faster swimming.

The game, like flow, took place among layers of a 2D environment in an almost through-the-microscope point of view. As I grew I floated up the layers towards the surface of the pool. Eventually, I was able to evolve and make it to land.

This initially cell level, while short, was quite fun to play.

Once I made it to land, I was asked to modify my creature with a set of legs. Oblivious to the placement of his mouth, which pointed straight down, and his eyes, which pointed straight out, I accidentally misplaced my unfortunate creature's legs. When he took to land, I saw that his mouth jutted out straight down from his rounded torso. Imagine my surprise when my little mistake attacked his first creature with a series of short, angry squats... That's right, my new lifeform had to teabag people to kill them. Oh the humanity.

After getting over the initial shock of what I had just created, I spent an inordinate amount of time running around teabagging other unsuspecting creatures to death. You'd be surprised just how much time you can burn playing a game that allows you to kill things in that particular manner. I tried my best to get Wright's attention, to show him my creature, but I suspect he wanted nothing to do with it.

In this second phase you spend most of you time hunting for smaller creatures to complete quests of a sort and earn DNA and body parts. Again, fun to play, though a bit short lived.

The next stage, which I didn't test out, is the Tribe stage which has you controlling an entire tribe of your creatures, issuing commands to them and evolving their technology. It's in this stage that you can create some pretty amazing buildings. I saw a collection of them and was blown away with what you can do. For instance, a factory made to look like a turn-of-the-century detective in an alley with trashcans nearby, the building's smoke coming out of the detective's pipe. Or a city building made to look like a young couple sitting on a park bench. It was pretty spectacular stuff.

The game's final phase is space exploration, which I managed to tinker with for a few minutes. Long enough, at least, to see that space ships can also take any form, like a jumping Mario.

My time with the game was painfully shorty, enough to tantalize and perhaps put some fears to rest. Is it worth the price, likely, will it be the next Sims? Too early to tell.

Earlier in the day Wright told us that Spore was a way for him to "convey interesting concepts in fun ways" a game of an entire universe, something that makes a game editor a toy and becomes a "creativity amplifier."

With more than 1 million creatures already created with Spore's Creature Creator, and Wright expecting the number of creatures to exceed the population of Earth by launch time, I think it's fair to say Wright nailed what he was going for.

This band game light is both peripheral and original music free, using only cover bands so the developers would be allowed to tweak the music to better fit the game. Those tweaks include the ability to have the lead singer be either a man or a woman, no matter who originally sang it.

The Disney folks told me that they did a number of focus tests during their development of the game. In them they asked potential gamers which of nine versions of the game they would want to play. The options ranged from a peripheral-heavy version of the game with original music, to the game they ended up producing. All of the tests showed, they told me, that gamers wanted a game that didn't require peripherals.

To play Ultimate Band gamers use the remote and nunchuk to strum, drum and flick their way through songs on a bass or lead guitar or drums.

To play lead guitar a player strums with the remote to the beat, matching the on screen timing, while holding different buttons or no buttons on the nunchuk. Depending on difficulty settings, you can guitar with just rhythm strumming or with as many as four virtual frets. The frets are triggered by holding the C, the Z, the C and the Z buttons or no buttons.

Bass is played by flicking the nunchuk and strumming while drums are played by drumming straight down with both controllers for standard drums, to the side for cymbals and then twirling the controllers in the air to mimic grandstanding.

A fourth option for playing, called frontman, consisted of dancing with the controllers. Because the game is peripheral free there is no way to sing in the game.

It may sound like the recipe for a douche simulator, but I actually found the game quite a bit of fun. The biggest problem I saw was that it was far to easy for even the most novice of Guitar Hero or Rock Band players.

I play guitar on medium usually (yes, I suck) but even on the expert setting in Ultimate Band I was able to score above 80 percent.

Hopefully this is something that can be tweaked, though it may be they'll be satisfied trying to drawn in younger, less dexterous gamers instead.

ULTIMATE BAND FACT SHEET

Publisher: Disney Interactive Studios
Developer: Fall Line Studio
ESRB Rating: E10+ (anticipated)
Audience: Tweens, teens and music fans

Coming Holiday 2008 for Wii™ home video game console

It’s no secret that the music video game genre has exploded in recent years. While the attention of this genre has focused mainly on creating music simulation games for an older demographic, Disney Interactive Studios has been developing a performance-based music video game that will appeal to tweens, teens and families alike. With songs that represent new favorites and old classics, truly interactive venues, and innovative controls using only the Wii Remote™ and Nunchuk™ (no peripherals), Ultimate Band for Wii will round-out any family’s entertainment library: right music, right console, right price.

Why Disney Interactive Studios?
Video games rated E through T represent an $11 billion market and no one knows the audience for those games better than Disney Interactive Studios, especially when it comes to developing third party titles for Nintendo platforms. From January to November 2007, Disney Interactive Studios was the No. 2 publisher of Nintendo DS™ games in North America according to NPD. Also in 2007, the company sold 3.4 million units of Nintendo DS video games in the United States alone (source: NPD Data). Fall Line Studio, which is developing Ultimate Band, is Disney Interactive Studios’ Nintendo-dedicated entity, focusing exclusively on developing games for Wii and Nintendo DS™. Fall Line Studio co-developed last year’s Hannah Montana: Music Jam video game that introduced new music mechanics to Nintendo DS titles through its unique “Creative Play Mode” where players could compose original songs using four different instruments. It also helped solidify Disney Interactive Studios’ position as a leader in creating music video games for tweens and families.
The Gameplay
· In Ultimate Band, there are four band roles that players can take on – drums, lead guitar, bass guitar and a band front man - all with unique motion mechanics using the Wii Remote and Nunchuk.
· Players can either follow a unique narrative story mode or stand up and jam to any songs and venues they’ve already unlocked.
· Ultimate Band offers group and family entertainment through multi-player modes that include head-to-head competition or cooperative play.
The Music
· 30+ songs made famous by artists such as The White Stripes, The Who, The Jonas Brothers, Weezer and more.
· All of the songs are re-mastered so they are performed in the gender of the front man and lyrics are age-appropriate.
The Atmosphere
· Players can customize their bands by creating characters that look just like them, or by selecting from different character genres.
· Imaginative and real-life venues, such as a haunted mansion or a garage, come to life during gameplay and react to how well fans perform.

Leading up to last week's event all of the stuff I saw about the game made me feel like it was another shooter, albeit one set in space, but one that didn't seem to offer anything new or interesting to the formula of scary shooters.

But after spending ten minutes or so watching a demonstration and then a few minutes controlling a hapless space engineer, I've got a taste for the game.

The most defining element of the game, besides its graphically rich environment, is the way in which you have to dispatch enemies. Instead of selecting your favorite weapon and pouring ammo into the limb-sprouting Necromorphs that populate the darkened halls of the abandoned spaceship, you have to be slightly more tactical. Each form of the creature, it seemed has it's own particular weakness and a weapon that best takes advantage of that.

After watching the accompanying writers at the demo get obliterated by a varied selection of limb-waving, ceiling-scrambling aliens, I was handed over the controller to give it a try. The weapon I settled on looked like a cross between some sort of battle rifle and a pitchfork. Blue targeting lasers emitting from the prongs of the device helped me try to line up the weapon's spread with the swaying tentacles of my first opponent. A couple of misses and I settled on the empty-the-clip-into-the-abdomen method, which causes a bit of a mess, but did little more than delay my death by a few more minutes.

Dead Space, which is due out for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, this Halloween, seems to add a level of tactical weapons use that I've rarely seen in a third-person shooter. Graphically, the weapons and their resulting damage is amazing, but whether the tactical shift will be perceived as a welcome change or an annoyance stands to be seen.

While we didn't get a walk through of the game's storyline, we were given a chance to mess around with a chunk of the game.

The DS title shows the action of the game on the bottom, touch screen, while the top screen is taken up by a large colorful map of the section of the world you are currently exploring.

The game has you playing a team of Sonic characters, selected among 11 playable in the game.

Typically while playing only one of your team is shown on the screen and controllable, but you can switch between them by tapping on their icons. Each character has different abilities, which can be used by tapping icons that pop up at times while wandering the map.

For instance, only Big the Cat was able to make his way through a dense fog of clouds in portions of the map I was on, while a wing icon showed me that I could use Tails' flying ability.

The fighting segments of the game did a nice job of capturing the essence of typical role-playing and adding enough to make it exciting. While you still select who you are attacking and how you are attacking them in a turn-based setting, once the attacks start some require the gamer to rhythmically tap the screen or drag the stylus in particular places, ala Elite Beat Agents, to succeed.

Fleeing an encounter is also very hands on, as you have to keep an eye on your entire team and tap different members to get them to jump over obstacles as you run from the bad guys in a sort of mini-game.

Despite being on the compact DS, the game seemed to pack most of the features one would expect to find in a role-playing game including lots of wandering, dialog trees, puzzles, leveling up and even an equipable pet of sorts.

Over the years I've found myself losing interest in role-playing games, but this slight blending of genres, a move that gets more involved in the process and makes the title feel slightly more like an action game, has me thinking that this would be a great game to take with me on a trip.

"Yeah, just stay there, because you're not going anywhere and now I'm not fucking going anywhere. Park right there."

He lays on the horn.

A map pops up on the video screen showing our exact location, easy to pinpoint because now we're not moving at all.

Outside the passenger window people walk by, each, seemingly, in their own world. The level of detail is amazing, the buildings, piled almost on top of one another, are all alive with activity. Wind whips down the street tossing scraps of paper in the air, it almost looks like the real thing, like Grand Theft Auto IV.

But it's just Manhattan on a crisp weekday morning, me trapped in a cab, staring at the taxi's video screen built into the seat in front of me, headed to see and play around with Rockstar's latest.

Later, inside Rockstar's nondescript offices, located next to a Best Buy in Greenwich Village, I experience Manhattan again, though now it's called Algonquin.

There's no confusing the two, reality and game. Reality is boring and drab, Algonquin is shot from spectacular cinematic angles. I suspect there's a filter involved, something that gives the world a touch of artistry.

Later, over beers at a nearby pub, Rockstar's Jeronimo Barrera tells me that Rockstar loves its filters. It helps, he says, fool the eye, masks some of the imperfections that games, no matter how next-gen, will always have.

I ask about the game's camera angles, which fascinate me. The game makes extensive use of them—and not just during cut-scenes. They seem to pop up at times during play, making you feel like you're part of a cut-scene of your own creation.

Barrerra says one of their team members has a lot of film experience and brought that to the new game.

It works. Not because it makes the game feel like you're watching a movie, but because it makes the player feel like they're making one. There are times when playing Grand Theft Auto IV that it felt less like a video game and more like an engine for experiences. Like the game was, at times, transcending what I had always thought was important about video games, having fun, and opening my eye to a new way to enjoy gaming, by creating.

It helps that the controls have been, or at least feel like they've been, totally revamped for this latest GTA. To any adept of the franchise the controls will still feel very familiar, but gone is that mushy feeling that made me struggle with previous versions of the game.

Movement is tight, backed up by Rockstar's use of the Euphoria, a game animation engine that anatomically animates character movement by simulating not just the body, but the muscles, bones and, it is said, the central nervous system. The result, the thing that matters to gamers, is a layer of movement minutia that help brings the world to life with moments like accidentally tripping a side kick, or watching someone flail as they plummet from a high rise.

What's important though is that these things don't happen as much by accident or because of bad control mechanics. GTA IV's controls do what the best control designs are meant to do, not get in the way of the experience.

Driving, too, is much improved. The times you are behind the wheel feel almost like you are playing a racer, with tight turns and the ability to really maneuver in a city that's all about making split-second decisions. Designers even added a slow-mo mode which allows you to slow time down as the camera drifts up and away to top down perspective, making it much easier to cut between cars, slip past barricades and perform bootlegger 180s.

I found myself wasting inordinate amounts of time playing keep away from the cops, just because I enjoyed the driving so much.

The biggest change in the game's controls, though, come with shooting. I'm a huge first-person shooter fan and I absolutely hated the shooting controls for previous GTAs. The problem was I always wanted to play what was essentially an action game like a shooter.

The new system allows you to do just that. Aiming has been tightened up and now includes a reticule that shows your targets current health. There's also a two stage lock-on system, allowing you to lock-on to a target, but still aim at particular body parts to perform things like headshots. Instant kill headshots. A cover system lets you pop up and fire or fire blindly at targets.

I played through a few missions during my hands-on, but it was "Harboring A Grudge" that felt most like a classic shooter. In the mission, you make your way to a warehouse rooftop near the dock of Algonquin. Down below is a sea of bad guys talking over the finer points of a prescription drug deal.

I start by sniping a guy, marveling at how much it feels like sniping in some of my favorite shooters. I toss down a few Molotov cocktails, mostly missing because, as with grenades in just about every shooter I play, I throw like a grade schooler.

Deciding to take advantage of my ridiculously robust arsenal, I switch to a rocket launcher and send a couple of rockets toward the bad guys. The first glances off the sheet metal roof in front of me, sending the rocket spiraling out of control. The second skips off a container. Finally I manage to plant one in the cement next to a cluster of bad guys. I'm rewarded with a glorious explosion and a few less enemies.

Moving down the roof, not so gracefully, I scramble to some cover and switch over to an assault rifle. The game plays fast, letting you pop off shots quickly and precisely. I take out a couple of people with the simple lock-on. Emptying bullets into the bad guys until they drop, and then I slow down and take my time with the loose lock-on, shifting my aim to focus on headshots.

Taking out the last few guys, I realize that I've just played through an entire mission of Grand Theft Auto IV as if I was in Call of Duty and it felt nice.

And the game has a lot of nice touches an awful lot of nice touches that really have nothing to do with game play. When you snag a car, sometimes the door is left unlocked and you can just hop in. Other times you have to smash in the window with an elbow.

To shoot while driving you have to smash out your window. Once, while driving around a guy who was smoking pot, I smashed out the window and within seconds billowing clouds of smoke were pouring through the busted glass.

There's almost no HUD—instead your entire communication with the game and its many options is through your cell phone. You use it to get missions, find people, even do things like play (and buy) music or take pictures in game.

One of the more memorable moments for me was almost an accidental aside. Standing near the docks one in-game evening, I noticed little white lights lifting and drifting down. Nice touch, I thought, they've included distant airplanes. As we moved toward the lights, talking about some mission or maybe the mechanics of play, I looked up and saw that those lights were now fully formed airplanes. I could actually make them out in detail.

"Oh wow, those are actually airplanes?" I said, a little surprised.

My demo team seemed just as surprised.

There is an entire airport of them, they tell me, taxiing, landing, taking off. And it's all part of the game.

It's no wonder then that when a team of game guide writers descended on Rockstar to work through Grand Theft Auto IV and write their books, they were surprised at the level of depth they found both in game and story, likening it to a Final Fantasy.

GTA IV, I'm told, is a game measured not in hours of play, but weeks. But its greatest potential, I suspect, won't be found in the traditional measures of game—graphics, sound design, mechanic—but in how these things manage to stay transparent and elusive, allowing the gamer to be the center of an experience they create.

Disclaimer: these impressions are eyes-on only. No one at the GDC EA event from which this write-up stems had the chance to play.

You launch the game through the website. a big button on the front and center of the page. You go through a series of screens to select your character and join a game, and you're in. Why is this moment so exciting? The start of the game is also the end of all advertising. That's right, in Battlefield Heroes, despite EA drawing their profits from advertisements, players will not be subjected to dynamic in-game billboards destroying the mis en scene.

As for the combat, it's sort of like Battlefield Light. Players choose between 3 classes (soldier, heavier gunman and spy) and let it rip from there. The third-person gameplay is a cross between capture the flag and team deathmatch. Each team races for 50 kills, but capturing a flag gives the successful team a score modifier that will affect the fragcount (meaning a 2x modifier will give your team two kills for the price of one).

The level we saw tested featured both tanks and planes. The tank was designed to be easy to drive, with each mortar round exploding light a classic Adam West punch. The plane looked just as easy to operate, with the fun option of dive bombing a teammate to give them a seat on your wing. (Note: the pilot can also leave his seat to sit on the opposite wing, in which case the plane will land softly on the pillow-like ground). Yeah, this ain't realism.

Then there's the power-up system. On top of your base skill set, you'll occasionally have access to more powerful techniques. Do things like see through walls or replenish health. It's a balancing system for casual players, and it's one part of the game that actually reminds us more of Shadowrun (R.I.P) than Team Fortress 2.

So are we pumped? Not really. Don't get us wrong, for a free web game Heroes looks great. But for those used to online multiplayer fragfests, Heroes' simple (read: rudimentary) mechanics will grow dull quickly. It's hard to see in the promo clip above, but there's something about the physics and general interface that just feels a generation younger than the current consoles...let alone PCs.

But honestly, we're not so sure that Battlefield Heroes is intended for anyone reading this article anyway. We're betting it's EA's gateway drug for casual gamers to try out shooters. And with that hat on, the game could be quite successful.

Here's a run down of his posts which include impressions, images and such:
Super Smash Bros. Brawl Line Madness
Super Smash Bros. Brawl in the House
Here's The Super Smash Bros. Brawl Online Menu
What's Super Smash Bros. Brawl Online Like? Eh...
Does Super Smash Bros. Brawl Actually Deliver?

Today's Playstation Portable firmware update came with a little touch of Skype (except if you live in China, go figure). Once patched, the Skype option shows up under Network. I was able to pretty quickly register for a new account using the PSP and get it working in less then five minutes.

It's a pretty cool build of the software and while I'm not sure how often I'd use it around the house, I definitely plan on bringing it with me when I travel for some free calls. Also plan on abusing the hell out of it to harass Ash since it only cost me $10 to buy seven hours worth of worldwide Skype to phone service. (Skype to Skype is free) That's right seven hours of me rambling to Ash... can't wait!

First off, the continues have gone from endless to a mere three, which completely changes up the difficulty factor of the game. Amateur shooter fans will have to go through the first three stages multiple times before making it completely through with enough lives to even consider going on to the remaining five. You'll have to learn enemy patterns, figure out which of the game's five special weapons best fit the situation, and basically learn the level like the back of your hand. Frustrating at times, sure, but if this sort of thing gets you riled then maybe you should go back to your happy, colorful platforming genre where it's safe.

You can play through Adventure mode to unlock levels for play in Arcade mode, where you get the standard allotment of lives with no continues, with the goal to get the highest score. In Nanostray the first you then would get a code you could upload to the online leaderboards via the internets, but now you simply connect via Nintendo Wi-Fi and slap that baby up there for the world to see. The feature was already running in the preview and worked without a hitch. Granted my score sucked compared to the ones already posted, but such is life.

Challenge mode helps a great deal. In Nanostray 2, the challenges are like little shmup nuggets that test your skills in various aspects of the genre. They've created completely new sequences for the challenges, rather than rehash established levels, and they focus on completing quick tasks, like scoring 30,000 points in 45 seconds, or surviving for a certain period of time. Some are even exercises in tactical thinking, as you are put in a situation such as a ship rising to completely fill the area you are in, killing you unless you find a way to open up an area to hide. There are four sets of eight challenges, and every time you complete one you get a little better at the main game. Very nicely done.

The developers took complaints about the control scheme to heart, changing the weapon-switching over to the shoulder buttons so once you are in the game you don't need to touch the screen at all, unless you opt to control your ship with it. Choosing touch-screen control schemes moves the action from the upper to the lower screen, with the control pad handling your primary weapon and the shoulder working the special weapon. Controlling the ship with your stylus adds a degree of control and speed you don't get with the standard setup, though of course you're going to have a portion of your screen obscured by the stylus itself and your giant, snausage fingers - where applicable.

All in all, this is one amazing shoot-em up for the Nintendo DS, better than its predecessor in virtually every way. Unless they do something horribly wrong between now and the January release date, expect Nanostray 2 to be the shmup to beat on the DS.

Ultimately the key for me here lies in the animation. I've played too many wrestling games were highly detailed portrayals of the sport's superstars promise amazing action only to discover that they ultimately move as they are marionettes controlled by an arthritic puppeteer, jerking from one motion to the next. It's like typing in a cursive font...everything looks pretty but nothing really connects. Midway has taken there impressive animation tools from titles like NBA Ballers and Blitz and applied it to the wrestling genre with pretty sweet results.

As far as control goes, the game is easy enough to pick up and play that I looked like an old hand at it by the time I played my third bout. Unfortunately my opponent looked like an even older hand, but I'll chalk that down to the fact that he'd been drinking and I had not. Drinker's luck is real I tell you. Characters were quick to respond to button presses...another pet peeve of mine from previous games taken care of.

The graphics, despite being not quite in a finished state, were quite impressive indeed. Along with the highly detailed players themselves, almost everything was rendered. Crowds, the ropes themselves, shadows...all dynamic. When a wrestler is launched out of the ring the lights playing over the crowd play themselves over the character's skin as well, and as he climbs back in the ropes realistically part and spring back into place as he passes.

A few of the more acrobatic moves brought a little bit of slowdown, but the game is still being tweaked and for the most part runs at a lovely 60FPS throughout.

All in the only real problem the game faces is consumer familiarity, but with former WCW star Sting becoming TNA's World Heavyweight Champion at yesterday's Bound for Glory event (at nearly 50 years old no less!), buzz can only grow for the relatively young wrestling organization.

I feel really good about TNA: Impact!. Once all the moves are finished and the stadiums are complete, it truly has a chance at being one of the best wrestling video games of all time. However, winning critics over is one thing. Winning over fans is something else entirely.

I just came back from playing around with the new rumblerific DualShock 3 controller.

It's funny how you don't realize how much you miss a thing sometimes until it returns. I knew that shooters on the PS3 sometimes felt a little off, but I typically adjusted pretty quickly and it didn't bother me.

But playing through a new level of Uncharted: Drake's Fortune (pure awesomeness) with vibration on, I realized just how much I missed the vibration of a machine gun or occasional kick of a handgun. The vibration is nothing special, nothing that you haven't always had in the Xbox 360 controller, but it sure is nice that Sony has finally gotten with the times.

As you can tell from my pics, one crisp, one not so much, the only external difference is the appearance of the words "DualShock 3" on the front edge of the controller.

I also noticed that the controller now has a much more solid feel. Before the PS3 controller felt hollow, almost toy-like, now it has the heft of the Xbox 360 controller but in a seemingly slightly smaller, more compact package.

I haven't had a chance to really playtest it yet, but the new Chatpad for the Xbox 360 feels like it won't really get in the way while you're gaming. And texting with the thing will be a breeze for anyone who is used to thumbtyping. I'm a big fan of this device so far, I'll let you know how I feel after a few hours of intense gaming.

I'm still tinkering around with the settings and such on the PSP Slim that just arrived at the house, but I wanted to get a quick post up about some of the differences I've noticed in the settings and such.

The game ships with firmware 3.60 preloaded on the system. There are a lot of menu differences but I found two in the system menu.

UMD Cache: If you set it on you can reduce the frequency at which the system reads from the UMD.
USB Charge: Allows you to charge using USB instead of a A/C.

The system now also has a new menu in Settings that gives you options for when you connect your PSP to your television to either play games or watch a movie.

Connected Display settings
Switch Video Output: You can use this to display video on the television or you can hold in the display button.
TV Type: 16:9 or 4:3
Component /D-Terminal Cable: Lets you select either progressive or interlace output.
Screensaver: Lets you set the timeout for a screensaver from none to 15 minutes.

I still have to play test the thing, check out the video output and compare the screens. More to come.

The FedEx guy just dropped a white box on my doorstep, inside? A new Playstation Portable, the one that is 33 percent lighter, 19 percent slimmer and uses beefed up system memory to decrease load times. The new PSP comes in silver white and black, the loaner I received was silver and good lord it's light. It actually feels, without the battery in it, almost like one of those empty cases used at furniture stores to make an entertainment center look more enticing... if furniture stores had some need of portable gaming systems.

I'll be posting up some more details, impressions and side-by-sides in a bit, but I wanted to get up these pics pronto so you could luxuriate in the unboxing and see how it compares to the old PSP, the DS Lite and the DS.

Mercenaries 2 is an open world game that's not just about blowing up the bad guys, but leveling every building in their entire country—where they may or may not be hiding.

As you run around the open world with, say, a rocket launcher, you become a one man wrecking crew, dropping buildings not with massive explosions, but what resembles a perfectly executed controlled demolition. The buildings fall evenly, like a tiered cake, floor by floor into a pile of dust.

Plant a few charges of C4 around a block, and you can simultaneously level entire streets of the game. It may get old, but not during the 20 minutes I spent with the demo.

Hopping into a helicopter proved to be a more difficult task. Stiff controls or a bad but intentional gameplay mechanic made it tough to float over more mountainous areas of the map. Plus, the birds eye view also showed a huge draw distance problem that is probably only because we were playing an early version of the game.

Overall, the graphics aren't the dazzling spectacle we've come to expect with the current generation, but those looking to blow up a world without scrutiny may find solace in the warm embrace of Mercenaries 2.

McWhertor had a little hands-on time with the Princess in Mario & Sonic At The Olympic Games...she's a fast girl, if you know what I mean.

See, I have this theory. It's not really a theory, really, and it's not my original idea. But every year we see people excited about some new FPS. We hear its features—the way it's doing things differently. And we're generally sold (anyone remember the Prey media blitz?)

As Crecente wrote in his earlier feature, Haze is all about the asymmetric gameplay. One side is the Mantel, super juiced soldiers who have an incredible amount of battlefield awareness and general killing skill. The rebels, on the other hand, are more about versatility and adaptability than brute force.

At all times as a rebel, it's your job to figure out how to use Mantel's precious nectar against them, be it by:

1. Shooting the drug administration canister on their backs to make the soldiers overdose and go berserk.
2. Killing the soldiers and taking their drug packs, quickly modifying the technology into a grenade to make the soldiers overdose and go berserk.
3. Stabbing soldiers with a haze-covered knife to make the soldiers overdose and go berserk.

You being to wonder why the rebels can only induce control the flow of drugs one way, despite using just about every weapon at their disposal. Why isn't drug withdrawal an issue in multiplayer? Why can't the rebels grab a haze pack before killing a Mantel soldier, rendering his opposition's aim shaky, strength lower and susceptibility to damage higher?

Maybe a Mantel soldier, finding his stash pickpocketed, could have a set time to find a spare haze pack before they found themselves temporarily incapacitated, you know, for a helpless living corpse humping. Because that's what we mean by evolving the FPS genre.

I think Haze is, unfortunately, that sort of one-trick pony FPS that fails to explore its Big New Idea to a level that makes it rise from the pack. But then again, as our own Michael McWhertor was quick to point out:

"It's better than a no-trick pony."

By: Brian Crecente

Rob Yescombe is worried. Not that Haze won't be critically received, but that the innovative shooter might be overlooked in the pre-holiday glut that threatens to deliver half a hundred must-have titles in three months.

The challenge Haze faces right now is one purely of Yescombe's doing: Everyone is focusing on the game's fascinating story, penned by Yescombe, which seems to turn an eye on both the nature of gaming and the nature of modern warfare. But in all of the talk about the deeper meaning of Haze's plot, gamers seem to be losing sight of the fact that that's not the only thing that makes this particular shooter different.

"The fun aspects of the gameplay kinda of got buried under the fun aspects of the story," he told me. "Most games tend to pin their chances on one thing. But we have many more things. And it can be too much to consume."

There is, for instance, the story, the fact that the game will support four-player co-op and the game's use of the drug Nectar. But what Yescombe and project lead Derek Littlewood want to focus on for now is how the team has created both in single and multiplayer modes a very asymmetric experience.

"Having an actual, functional asymmetrical gameplay system, that's pretty fucking exciting," Yescombe said.

The game is divided into two types of play. When you start the game you are a Mantel soldier, which means you have elite training, the best weapons and a limitless supply of Nectar. While the drug does filter everything you see, it also provides you with some pretty significant gameplay advantages.

When you juice up on the drug, administered through a pack built into the back of your armor, you're given four very specific boosts abilities.

Nectar Perception: All of the rebels in the vicinity are highlighted in a strong orange glow.
Nectar Foresight: A sort of six sense that causes a ripple effect around grenades that have been thrown near you. It also warns you of pending melee attacks.
Nectar Focus: This sniping aid allows you to focus in on a target and, after a second, draw you automatically into a headshot.
Melee Blast: A very powerful melee attack.
Power-up: In general you can take and deal out more damage and you move and turn faster.

"If you use Nectar you are in your most effective fighting state," said. Littlewood. "You are the most powerful fighter you can be."

To make full use of these abilities you need to keep your Nectar levels at about 90 percent and every time you shoot someone you get a small Nectar boost. But with this power comes a major draw-back, too much Nectar and you go into overdose. So the trick to playing Mantel is to find that perfect balance.

"When you overdose, everyone around you starts to look the same," Littlewood said. "Your ability to not shoot is reduced. Your auto aim snaps to players."

What this means in game, especially in multiplayer games, is that literally everyone looks like a rebel when you OD and your controls will try to auto aim to anyone near your reticle. If you do end up aiming directly at someone your gun will start to fire automatically.

"You suddenly finding yourself working to not aim at people," he said.

People in a Nectar Haze also will sometimes automatically pull a grenade and start to cook it, letting the pin drop out but not throwing it. Eventually it blows up in your hand, taking you and anyone near you out.

The developers said they are playing around with the idea of adding a mini-game that would allow you to toss the grenade away if you succeed. They also are playing around with the idea of letting your teammates melee you into dropping the grenade.

While Rebels don't have the training,weapons or Nectar, they still have plenty of unique abilities.

Weapons Steal: You can melee and swipe away a Mantel players gun and then use it on them.
Play Dead: When you down to about 25 percent health you can push a button to drop to the ground and play dead. Because of the Nectar you will literally disappear from the view of all Mantel soldiers. A mini-game allows you to pop back up and dish out some damage. Succeed and you hop to your feet, fail and you stand slowly.
Scavenge: This ability allows you to convert the ammo of any dropped weapon you find to work with the weapon you are currently holding.
Nectar Grenade: You can pry loose the Nectar pack from a