Walmart, Best Buy Close Down Trade-In Kiosks

E-Play, the company providing kiosks for used game trade-in pilot programs has suspended operations, ending Best Buy and Walmart’s short-lived experiment in the used games business. Industry Gamers, which first reported E-Play’s closure, quoted an analyst describing the business generated by the machines as “underwhelming.” They will be deactivated and cleared out of stores over…

Dragon Age Action Figures Will Probably Look Like This

If you want Dragon Age: Origins action figures, DC Comics’ collectibles division has you covered. DC Unlimited will give gamers a quadruple dose of plastic, fully poseable playthings based on BioWare’s role-playing game later this year. Recently announced but heretofore lacking in photographic evidence, the four Dragon Age figures are due to ship on September…

The Simpsons Lampoon Nintendo Straightly With The Funtendo Zii

Last night’s episode of Fox’s long-running The Simpsons parodied, I guess, the Nintendo Wii with the introduction of the Funtendo Zii. The Simpsons’ take on Nintendo’s motion controlled hit was far more straightforward than it was skewering. See, the episode “Million Dollar Maybe” pretty much presented the Wii as-is, offering animated versions of the Wii,…

Life Imitates Art, And Vice Versa, For Monday Night Combat

Aung Zaw Oo – better known as the parkour-lovin’ game animator AZO – shows how he incorporates moves he does in real life into the animations of the upcoming class-based shooter Monday Night Combat by Uber Entertainment. The good stuff begins about the 0:56 mark – especially the move where the sniper tees up his…

Trekkie

To: Ash From: Crecente Happy Star Trek week. I don’t know if you saw but we kicked off a little theme week in light of the launch of Star Trek Online. I dint think we had the same Star Trek influenced childhood, but did you watch the original show at all? I have some Beta…

Final Fantasy XIII Xbox 360 Ships On Three Discs, Says GameFly

Square Enix, to the best of our knowledge, has not officially nailed down the amount of disc-swapping Xbox 360 owners will need to do to enjoy Final Fantasy XIII on Microsoft’s console. But retailer GameFly may know. The online rental service notes in its product description of the Xbox 360 version of FF XIII that…

Madden 11 Cover To Be Put Up To A Vote

Doritos and the Super Bowl. Chances are you’ll be picking up a bag of the former before watching the latter this weekend. On the back of said bag is a promotion inviting you to vote on the game’s cover athlete this year. In a statement, EA Sports only confirmed that it had partnered with Doritos…

Perhaps We’re Sending The Wrong Message

An ad for Auto Show 2010 at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. “Drive it like you stole it” is the slogan of the show, as well as the show’s marketing department. Thanks Kyle!

The Zone Sega Looks Like A Wii, Plays Like A Genesis

Sega has given its licensing blessing to the makers of the Wii doppelganger Zone 40, resulting in the Zone Sega, a cheap, wireless gaming alternative that plays 20 of your favorite Sega Genesis games… and so much more! Unfortunately, that so much more appears to be built-in dreck like Fight & Lose, Bomber and Darts,…

The Lich King Would Like A Word With You

I wasn’t sure how I felt about a rap song about World of Warcraft‘s Lich King at first. Then he beat the crap out of Edward Cullen, and I decided I could live with it. Convoke has released a music video for “Get Lich or Die Tryin,” a song that celebrates the cooler side of…

Building The Perfect Star Trek Frankengame

Has the perfect Star Trek video game been created? Perhaps not, but by taking key elements from the Star Trek games we’ve played over the past three decades, I believe we can come up with the perfect Star Trek Frankengame. Over the years, many Star Trek video game titles have come close to perfection in…

“New” Duke Nukem Forever Footage Opens Old Wounds

More remains from the exploded corpse of Duke Nukem Forever have been found, uploaded to YouTube and paired with unusually inappropriate music, giving followers of the Duke Nukem soap opera another chance to grieve the loss of 3D Realms’ game. The apparently leaked footage is dark, blurry, occasionally covered in on-screen blood and might be…

Capcom’s Dark Void, Resident Evil Expectations, Plus A Probable Typo

Here are screengrabs from a Capcom’s earnings report, in beautiful black-and-white chart form. A report of sales since April 1, 2009, which may have helped the company make a profit: A list of hoped-for sales: And, in a list of upcoming titles, a probably typo I’ve e-mailed Capcom about. Note there was no listing for…

On The iPhone, GT May Not Stand For Gran Turismo

The trick with checking out a new iPhone game from Gameloft, the makers of many hits on the platform, is to look for a clue of resemblance to some other game you’ve heard of. Cars? “GT Racing”? A ha! Later this week or early next, Gameloft will release GT Racing: Motor Academy on the iPhone…

Chime Rings In Release, ‘Splosion Man Goes Cheap On XBLA This Week

This week’s Xbox Live Arcade release is Chime, the Zoë Mode developed musical puzzle game that may evoke thoughts of Lumines with its quad-building mechanic, quad-clearing timeline and choice soundtrack selections. The XBLA game features tunes from the likes of Moby, Orbital, Philip Glass and more, giving your Xbox 360 a bit more music cred.…

Try A Little Miles Edgeworth On For Size

Capcom takes advantage of the Nintendo DS’s download capability today, putting up a demo for Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth two weeks ahead of the game’s release date. Sometimes I forget that I can download things to my regular old DS. Hell, sometimes I forget I can do it with my DSi, and I write…

Romance With Disabled Girls: How (And Maybe Why) An Unusual Video Game Came To Be

About three years ago, one of the most notorious online message board communities decided to create an unusual video game. It would be a Japanese-style erotic dating simulator starring girls with disabilities, a topic not unfamiliar to the 4chan group. The genesis of Katawa Shoujo, an erotic visual novel set on a private campus for…

Aliens Vs. Predator’s Horde Mode

Check out this trailer for Aliens Vs. Predator’s Survivor Mode, in which up to four players co-operatively take on the Alien hordes. I suppose it’s time to set aside the comparisons to Gears of War 2 and simply accept Horde Mode as a standard game type in online multiplayer shooters. It’s just the natural progression…

The Last Guardian Screen Shots

Raven (and I) Need You!

Tomorrow I’m writing up my review of Playstation 3’s MAG. But today, today I need to earn my command stripes and spend an inordinate amount of time playing the game. Unlike our typical reviews, games with heavy multiplayer aspects, like massively multiplayer online titles and online-only games, get a bit of a different approach. We…