NPD Instant Analysis: Things You Should Note

A fighting game blow-out. An EA surprise. As always, some notable omissions. And an NPD-PD PlayStation bump! For your May NPD gaming sales armchair analysis, consider the following: Killzone Leads Infamous For Biggest 2009 PS3 Original: The PlayStation 3 push for original first-party games gave the world Killzone 2 in February, which managed 323,000 units…

How did you die the last time? Me? I underestimated an Octamammoth with low health.

UFC 2009 Is May’s Undisputed Bestseller

THQ’s mixed martial arts brawler crushed the competition in May, when more than a million copies of UFC 2009 Undisputed were snapped up by gamers looking to snap some joints. The Ultimate Fighting Championship game moved 679,600 copies on the Xbox 360, 334,400 on the PlayStation 3, making it May’s bestselling video game. It beat…

Nintendo Tops U.S. May Hardware Sales Once Again As Sales Drop

The U.S. video game industry took another hit, right in the sensitive hardware region, as May sales show another month-to-month and year-over-year decline. Despite drops, Nintendo remains the hardware champ thanks to continued Nintendo DS and Wii sales. Both the DS and Wii saw sizable hits from the previous month. April was boosted by the…

Nintendo: Wii Vitality Sensor Targets Gaming Hold-Outs

Nintendo’s announcement of the Wii Vitality Sensor was one of the most mystifying product announcements at the show. We asked for more information. Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata unveiled the Wii Vitality Sensor at E3 and has since explained in interviews that the Wii add-on will use light to measure bloodflow and therefore certain bio-rhythms for…

Peggle For The iPhone Goes Cheap

Need a little EXTREME FEVER on the go? The iPhone version of the highly addictive Peggle is just 99 cents today via iTunes. Like other versions of Peggle it packs in awesome gameplay and comes highly recommended. Buy it! [iTunes]

Pac-Man Employed As Indicator Of Our National Debt

Good news for the economy came today when U.S. Senator George V. Voinovich of Ohio used the iconic Pac-Man to illustrate the United States’ nation debt, which currently stands at more than $11.38 trillion. Where’s the good news? It’s not in the ever-increasing “Federal Debt as percentage of GDP” ratio. Because that looks bad. The…

The Best Game Death Innovation At E3?

One of the odder things about video games is all the work that’s put into new ways of killing virtual enemies or having one’s own character meet their doom. Atlus’ Demon’s Souls showed a new twist at E3. I was given a quick demo of the dark upcoming PlayStation 3 third-person action game Demon’s Souls…

Rise Of The S-Word In T-Rated Games

In the first minutes of the T-rated Infamous, players will hear the curse commonly associated with manure and stepping in it. A new report examines how much profanity makes it into T-rated games. A few weeks ago, I e-mailed John Davison, a games journalism friend, who runs the parental-guide video game site WhatTheyPlay.com. I’d been…

Bayonetta’s Scarborough Fair: How High Heels, Herbs Influenced Weapon Design

I really dig PlatinumGames’ Bayonetta, especially after being able to finally go hands-on with the game at E3. I also really appreciate the insight the developer is providing into the game’s design, which today focuses on Bayonetta’s guns, Scarborough Fair. PlatinumGames designer Muneyuki “Johnny” Kotegawa illustrates how the ornately designed guns, which Bayonetta can also…

Persona PSP Packed With Persona Soundtrack

The Atlus Spoils customer appreciation program continues to live up to its name, with the announcement that every launch copy of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona for the PSP comes packed with a two-disc soundtrack. That’s right, two-discs, not just half the soundtrack, like the disc that shipped with Persona 4 for the PlayStation 2. The…

Nintendo’s Reggie Finds Natal ‘Ironic,’ Talks Facebook, Virtual Console

In an interview with Kotaku, the president of Nintendo of America discussed the Wii’s new motion-control competition, and an array of topics that included some E3 rumors that didn’t come true: Wii Netflix and DSi Virtual Console. Reggie Fils-Aime was his usual confident self during Kotaku’s interview with him in a Nintendo meeting room this…

Green Day Officially, Exclusively Comes To Rock Band

Punk rock trio Green Day is bringing its catalog of music to MTV Games and Harmonix’s Rock Band, confirming the news dropped by the band itself earlier this week. While details about just how much of the band’s back catalog are still to be revealed, the partnership will kick off on July 7th with three…

Video Games Live Has Its Own MP3 Player

The Video Games Live concert tour kicks their merchandising up a notch with this new VGL-branded VIVO MP3 player, loaded with unreleased recordings from Kingdom Hearts, Halo, and more. The 2GB MP3 player is now available for sale at the Video Games Live online store, and will also be making appearances at the merchandising tables…

Spore Galactic Adventures Attacks The Mothership

EA only has a week and a half left to convince you that the Spore Galactic Adventures add-on is worth your time and money. Let’s see if this trailer helps! I can’t help but think Ratchet and Clank as I watch this trailer for Mothership Down, one of the Maxis-created adventures included with Spore Galactic…

Kingdom Hearts Still Master Of The Domain In Japan

Japanese gamers liked last week’s sales chart so much, they bought the exact same games, making for an encore sales presentation. Once again, Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days, Gyakuten Kenji and Shin Sangoku Musou 5 Empires win, place, and show. That puts Square Enix’s newest Kingdom Hearts game for the Nintendo DS at over 400,000 copies…

Zenonia Micro-Review: Unexpectedly Epic

Korean developer Gamevil seeks to pack an epic experience into a tiny space with Zenonia, an action roleplaying game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Zenonia follows a young man named Regret as he searches for answers to the mystery surrounding his birth after the sudden death of the man who raised him. Players start…

Natal Launch Will Be As Big As 360’s

On that day in the future when Microsoft launches its E3-darling Project Natal no-touch control system, it will feel like a console launch, a company exec told Kotaku. Forget the launch of previous gaming cameras and mics like the PlayStation Eye or the Xbox Live Vision Camera when you try to imagine the impact Microsoft’s…

PlayStation Home’s Xi Comes To A Close

Sony’s PlayStation Home alternate reality game Xi is coming to a close, and the door to the story’s dramatic conclusion now stands open for all. After a couple of months worth of teases and mini-games, Xi is finally winding down. Now anyone, regardless of how much they’ve participated in the ARG, may enter the final…

Zombie Apocalypse Preview: Top Down Left 4 Dead

Haven’t we had enough of zombie games already? No, and really, I can’t seem a time when we will. Konami’s top-down zombie killer blends undead flesh with Robotron to produce something uniquely fun, but is it too derivative? What Is It? Zombie Apocalypse drops you into a world where infected undead outnumber humans in a…