Not one to miss the downloadable games party, Gameloft aims to be front-and-center this holiday season on the PSPgo and original PSP. The company has sports covered in the form of Real Soccer 2010 and Let's Golf!, while racing and action-adventure fans are catered to with Asphalt 5 and Hero of Sparta respectively.

Still, the most exciting title would have to be UNO. Sad, I know, but with the addition of online multiplayer, it'll be like having the Xbox Live Arcade version in the palm of your hand. I can think of worse things to have in the palm of your hand.

"For the past 10 years our focus and expertise has been digitally distributed games. From mobile games to iPhone/iPod Touch to next-gen consoles, our success stems from the ability to adapt and evolve on the latest platforms," said Michel Guillemot, president, Gameloft. "The PSP(R)go will contribute to the innovations going on in the gaming space right now and we look forward to being front and center with our games at launch."

Check out the official descriptions of Gameloft's offerings below.

- Real Soccer 2010 - the famous handheld soccer simulation arrives on the PSP(R)go system. Get immersed in the atmosphere of a live match thanks to true to life 3D graphics and animation. Discover a complete range of game modes and easily perform the most amazing soccer moves.

- Hero of Sparta - an epic and colossal adventure with staggering 3D graphics that fully capture the mythological atmosphere. 8 levels to explore and legions of phenomenal creatures to defeat in this odyssey.

- Asphalt 5 - a high velocity driving game with more than 15 million downloads sold. Ride the best cars in the world including Ferrari and Lamborghini in high-speed races through 15 of the hippest locations in the world from Paris to Aspen.

- Let's Golf! - It's time for you to become a big hitter and drive for the green with Let's Golf! Choose to play with 4 cool and customizable characters across 63 holes in 4 distinct locations remodeled in refreshing 3D visuals from Fiji Beach to the English countryside.

- UNO (TM) - play the #1 classic card game with friends and family on your PSP(R)go system. Enjoy traditional UNO(TM) or customize your own game with 9 different rules to play your way. Challenge friends near and far through local and online multiplayer mode.

Back when Magic the Gathering first got big I used to joke about magazines including rare Uno cards as pack-ins. Apparently I was just about 15 years ahead of my time.

Street Fighter Uno....more devious than you can imagine. [Capcom Unity]

Microsoft, via its Gamerscore Blog, also write that "a new Xbox LIVE Arcade title will also launch with fully playable in-game Avatars - the first title to ever launch with this feature on Xbox 360!" How exciting!!

NXE: What You Want to Know - More Avatars [Gamerscore Blog]

One can only assume that this "awareness gap" is due to the large number of dedicated Viva Pinata machines.

Magid: Almost a Third of 360 Owners Don't Know Xbox Live Arcade Exists [GameDaily BIZ]

Aegis Wing, a student project picked up by UNO developer Carbonated, will be available to both Silver and Gold users for no cost. Given that the announcement has been removed, I have to wonder if the promised date of May 16th has been reconsidered.

In early March, a rating for the game Aegis Wing appeared on the ESRB's web site, but details on the game have been scarce since its reveal. You can read more about the title after the jump.

Thanks for the lightning fast cut and paste, Chris. Michael McWhertor

Xbox LIVE Arcade Intern Project Game "Aegis Wing" Launches This Week as Free Gift to Gamers

REDMOND, Wash. — May 14, 2007 — This Wednesday, team up with up to three of your friends and prepare yourselves for intense side-scrolling, sci-fi shooting action in "Aegis Wing." Originally conceived by three Microsoft Corp. interns over the course of a summer, "Aegis Wing" will be available for free to all Xbox LIVE Silver and Gold members in North America for a limited time. "Aegis Wing" will be available for download on Xbox LIVE Arcade for Xbox 360 beginning Wednesday, May 16, at 2 a.m. PDT.

"Aegis Wing" is a 2-D side-scrolling space shooter that combines epic space combat with fantastic visuals, and is set to a rich symphonic soundtrack. It is set in the year 2105, when humanity must flee a dying Earth for the distant world Europa. But this new home is soon threatened by a powerful alien race, the Araxia. With stolen Araxian technology, the Europa fleet develops an experimental star fighter and assigns four ace pilots to test it. The Aegis Wing is born, and it becomes your mission to wield this new technology as humanity's last hope for survival.

Up to four players can play together either locally or over Xbox LIVE to defeat waves of nefarious Araxian ships and bosses, and can even combine spacecraft in two-, three- or four-ship formations to access powerful Super Weapons.

"Aegis Wing" was originally conceived by three students - Scott Brodie, Danny Dyer and Matt Monson -during a summer internship at Xbox LIVE Arcade. The students worked in tandem with Carbonated Games - the creators of fan-favorite, UNO - to bring the game to the Xbox LIVE Arcade community. The full version of "Aegis Wing" is being released on Xbox LIVE Arcade free of charge and will be available for a limited time.

Game Features

Game features include the following:

Amazing environmental art
Full symphonic soundtrack
Up to four-player simultaneous cooperative multiplayer gameplay, either locally on the same Xbox 360 console or over Xbox LIVE*
Ability to attach your ship to your wingmen's spacecraft to gain the "turret" ability and increase the firepower of the Super Weapons
Four Super Weapons: the Hades Beam (wreaks total destruction), the Gorgon Burst (wipes out incoming fire and disables enemy spacecraft with an electromagnetic pulse), the Arcus Missile (a heat-seeking missile) and the Lambda Shield (deflects incoming fire back at enemies)
Six epic missions and several memorable boss encounters to fight through

Where Can I Get It?

You can download "Aegis Wing" beginning Wednesday, May 16, at 2 a.m. PDT on Xbox LIVE Arcade. "Aegis Wing" will be available for download in North America only. "Aegis Wing" is rated E for Everyone, with Mild Fantasy Violence. More information is available at http://www.xbox.com/games/livearcade.

I can't think of a single cartoon that I would care to play video games with, but I can think of a single cartoon force that would be loads of fun.

The voices from Aqua Teen Hunger Force's Master Shake, Meatwad, Err, Carl and Ignignokt will be mixing things up in Uno on Xbox Live on April 24. WTF? What happened to Frylock. What a tool, leaving to him to not show up.

The toons will be playing some Uno from 7 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Eastern time next week. Send a friend request to ATHFGWF for a chance to pwn them. If you make the list take notes and let us know how they did. Brian Crecente

Aquateen

Cross your fingers for cross-platform Uno goodness in your future! Michael McWhertor

Games for Windows - Live beta announcement and invitation!

The dirty details, including video are linked below. Michael McWhertor

Playing Xbox Live over Google WiFi While Driving [via Major Nelson]
Xbox Live Goes Mobile As We Play Rainbow 6 on Google Wifi [XHYD.tv]

Halo 2 may not be playable between the Xbox 360 and Vista, despite what a Microsoft press release lead us all to believe, but at least PC gamers will be getting some hot Uno PC versus 360 action on.

It looks like they also might be bringing Geometry Wars to Vista. About 45 minutes in to Microsoft's CES keynote the game pops up in the Vista gaming montage. This shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft recently shot down the Geometry Wars clone for the PC, GridWars, and it's a pretty easy port.

[Thanks for the tip Brian]

Today Xbox 360 Uno gets a Kameo flavored deck of cards.

The deck, which sells for 100 Microsoft points, comes with a slew of themed pictures for the card and one special swap power-up card. By playing this card you get to swap hands with another player. The best part is that only one of the players needs to have the Kameo deck for everyone to play. Brian Crecente

To block incoming video hope into Uno's Help & Options screen, then go to Camera Settings and press the Y button to disable your camera. Voila, no more free streaming porn.

You can also change your settings to only allow friends to communicate with you and finally, you can file a complaint against people who flash their frank and two beans at your right after you win a hand of Uno. Brian Crecente

Three Ways to Protect Yourself [Gamerscore Blog]

But things like the Oblivion horse armor highlight how easy it is to abuse this system. The most recent example? How about a new pack of Uno cards? Seriously, why are they charging for a pack of Uno cards that have pictures of cars from Project Gotham Racing 3 on them? Granted, it's only 100 points, but it should be free, or at least part of a set of packs.

Nickel and dime, nickel and dime. Brian Crecente

Microsoft was kind enough to send me an Xbox 360 Vision Camera on Friday. It's a cute little thing that plugs into the USB port of your Xbox 360. I had a chance to mess around with it over the weekend, though I'm still waiting for Totemball to come out so I can really put this thing through the wringer.

The camera's design matches the sleek vanilla look of the console and even has a green ring of light to show when it's transmitting a signal over the Intertube.

I still haven't figured out where to put the camera in my entertainment center, but fortunately it has a fairly long cable, so I should be able to put it just about anywhere in my set-up.

After plugging the camera into the console I hopped over to the setting's blade where I was able to adjust for the type of room and the lighting. After you set up the camera, you can manually fine tune the focus by twisting a ring around the camera lens.

Next, I hopped over to my Gamertag settings where I was able to take a picture to use as my personal Gamer photo. Again, the process was fairly straightforward. The camera supports two levels of zoom, though by the second one the image is pretty grainy. Instead of just zooming automatically, the software lets you drag a box around the screen to highlight what you want to zoom in on.

After taking the picture, you can add effects to the image. The end result was a fairly grainy image of me. Even after I tried walking up to the camera and taking the picture without the zoom, I found it to be a bit on the grainy side.

I didn't get a chance to video chat with anybody, but I did play a few games of Uno with the camera on. What this did was replace my normal gamertag picture with a live video stream. While this did make the image a bit bigger, it was still way too small to really see any sort of emotions or such. I mention this because there's no way you could use the camera as a way of judging if someone is bluffing in Uno. I hope when it's introduced for poker they manage to clean up the stream and make the image much larger.

The people I was playing with in Uno did say that the video seemed relatively lagless, which was nice, but I'm still unclear why you'd want to have video streaming in a game of Uno.

While I think it will be neat to check out some of the games that Microsoft is going to be releasing specifically for the camera, I sorta had my fill of those with the Playstation 2. What I'm really excited about is the in-game face technology. I didn't really mess around with that much on the few games that did that with the Eye Toy and I'm assuming the technology has improved a bit since then.

I'm not sure if I would rush out a buy this camera when it hits on Sept. 19 (Oct. 6 in Europe). I think I'd likely wait until a good shooter came along that supported it and perhaps a few of my friends or family got the camera.

The camera is going to come in two flavors: For $40 you get the camera, one-month of Live Gold, a 360 headset and Uno and TotemBall. For $80 you get the same thing plus q year of Gold membership, a copy of Robotron and 200 Microsoft points.

What do you think, are you planning on buying the camera when it hits? I'll slap up a short video a bit later today showing me annoying people by inability to video myself and play Uno at the same time. Brian Crecente

So while the maps were background downloading, I decided to hop onto Uno and check out the multiplayer. I was surprised at how fun the game is. Playing the game by myself was OK, but when I got into matches with three others it was a blast. The best part was that people were talking smack. That's right Uno smack talk. And besides the first guy who shouted me down for not reading his mind and changing the play cards to yellow, most of it was pretty funny.

I'm starting to think that it's Live that makes people talk smack and not the games on it. Brian Crecente

In addition to the E3 Live calendar we posted above, the May issue of Power Up Magazine has a list of the upcoming games that will be downloadable through Live Arcade over the coming months.

In addition to who-cares Uno, blah Texas Hold 'Em Poker game and that's-more-like-it Capcom fighter Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, you can expect the sequel to the excellent Mutant Storm — Mutant Storm Empire — and Cloning Clyde to come to Live Arcade in the Summer of 2006.

You'll need to either already have an XBox.com account or sign-up for one through a Hotmail address to access the magazine. As if you didn't have enough virtual repositories for the unsolicited come ons of Russian child brides.

May Issue Of Power Up Magazine [XBox.com]

UNO Will Support Xbox 360 Camera [Playfeed]

The game is due for download sometime this spring.

Uno on Xbox Live Arcade [Xboxyde]