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Japan Takes A Week Off From Buying Game Hardware

The nation of Japan started 2009 off rather slowly in hardware sales terms. Buying slowed to a crawl overseas, as they tend to do, at the turn of a new year. Looking at the drop-off, you’d think it’s rather grim, but that’s the New Year’s holiday hangover in action. No new video game releases means…

PlayStation Store Update: Ultimate Magic Plus

Last week’s PlayStation Store update for North America was a bummer. Not so this week, as gobs of things to buy and download and play freshen up the PlayStation 3. On the gaming side, there’s GTI Club+, Magic Ball and Ultimate Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts for the PSP. There’s even a Skate 2 demo if you…

What Was 2008’s Best Selling Game In The U.S.?

To be honest, we’re still not sure. The NPD Group released data for the “Top Selling Games Annual 2008” with Wii Play coming in at number one, boasting 5.28 million copies sold. Wii Play‘s sales for the year beat out Grand Theft Auto IV with a combined total of 5.18 million copies sold on the…

Study: Gamers Aren’t Fat, Illiterate Manchildren

A new study suggests that gamers are older, more active and more often female than previous industry figures have suggested. The Adult Videogame Market in the US: Tapping Into the New Diversity of Video-Game Players is a pricey consumer analysis put together by Packaged Facts. I don’t have three grand to drop on buying the…

December’s Biggest Game In The U.S. Is… Wii Play

Call of Duty: World at War couldn’t win the battle against the Wii in December, selling 150,000 units shy of Wii Play‘s staggering 1.46 million copies. Yes, that’s a lot of Wii Remotes. The mini-game compilation and NPD top ten mainstay fought off the Xbox 360 version of the latest Call of Duty handily. Factoring…

More Memory, More Memory, More Memory

To: Ash From: Crecente Re: Being An Only Child… I just installed some more memory in the computer, bumping it up to the motherboard max of 4GB. Firefox was sucking up so much memory I couldn’t take it anymore. Man, Firefox really does suck when it comes to memory leaks. Have you had any issues…

Nintendo Breaks More Sales Records, Sells Over 5 Million Consoles In December

The holidays were very merry for Nintendo which sold 3.04 million Nintendo DS handhelds during the month of December, ending 2008 with the best-selling console in the United States, blowing far past the console competition. Nintendo hardware secured the top spot last month — as it had done every month in 2008 — thanks to…

Guitar Hero: Metallica Dated For North America

Metallica’s own Guitar Hero game will be riding the lightning on its way to retail shelves on March 29 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, according to the band’s official site. The second-class consoles, Wii and PlayStation 2, will get their own versions of Guitar Hero: Metallica, but not until Spring, which translates to…

Nintendo Isn’t Just About Old People Bowling, There’s Boxing Too!

We’ve all had it up to our eyeballs with the mainstream press rolling out scenes of octogenarians Wii Bowling every time they want to talk about the successes of the Wii. Apparently so have they. So the press has moved on to Wii Boxing. Blanche Betten, a 76-year-old retired restaurant owner, hammered Bob Warner, 85,…

More EA Cuts Go Live Today

As the year progresses so do Electronic Arts’ planned and massive cuts. Today we hear that Mariam Sughayer, senior manager of corporate communications for Electronic Arts, and the person often quoted in official responses to rumors about cuts was herself laid-off today. Her position eliminated. Sughayer, who did an admirable job of getting official responses…

Legends of Norrath Expands Again, Continues Passing Out Boosters

Sony Online Entertainment’s online collectible card game Legends of Norrath expands again next month, following the story of the Ethernauts with the sixth expansion set, Against the Void. Yes, Legends of Norrath is an online collectible card game with a story, Against the Void is the second chapter in a three-part epic involving the Ethernauts,…

Official Street Fighter IV Training Manual Packed with Cammy Junk, Seth Moves

I just got a work-derailing, pants-tightening package in the mail today from Capcom. Inside were two Training Manuals for their upcoming fighter and copies of the game for the PS3 and Xbox 360 debugs. The glossy 39-page training manual is an ode to everything Street Fighter IV. Inside you get backstory on both the tournament…

DICE Rolls Out Speakers: Riccitiello, Takeuchi Will Say Awesome Things

This year’s DICE Summit is bringing in the video gaming industry’s big guns. Who will be talking about the business of Designing, Innovating, Communicating and Entertaining? EA’s John Riccitiello for one, with an encore performance. Riccitiello will join Resident Evil 5 director Jun Takeuchi, Chris Cao, creative director of Sony Online Entertainment Austin, and Fallout…

Garriott Will Get Back To Gaming One Day

Sure his head is up in the clouds at the moment, but Ultima creator Richard Garriott hasn’t forgotten where he’s from. In an interview with GameDaily, Garriott discusses an eventual return to gaming. GameDaily writer and occasional Kotaku contributer N. Evan Van Zelfden (possible robot) got a chance to speak with Garriott about his future…

Miyamoto, Spore Win Jim Henson Awards

Video gaming makes up half of the list of this year’s Jim Henson Honors, with Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto and PC game Spore both landing awards. Established in 2005, the awards program acknowledges organizations, individuals or products that reflect the core values and philosophy of the legendary Jim Henson and the company he founded. Criteria used…

Molyneux Deems LittleBigPlanet “Most Important Creative Innovation” Of ’08

Lionhead Studios main man, Peter Molyneux, has gushed once again about Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet. He’s nominated the PlayStation 3 game as “the most important creative innovation of the last twelve months.” (We agree.) Sir Molyneux has lauded the creative platformer before, telling the BBC the game was a product of “superb artistry and a fantastic…

January Lips DLC Finds That Lovin’ Feelin’

With nine new songs from the likes of Fallout Boy, The Pussycat Dolls, and The Righteous Brothers due out in January, the Lips song catalog should exceed 70 songs by month’s end. Nine new songs are headed to Lips this month, beginning on January 16th when we’ll finally be able to recreate the bar scene…

Leaked Battlefront 3 Vid Reveals Surprising Plot Twist?

Looking through that beautiful footage of Star Wars Battlefront III again and again and again this morning, I couldn’t help but notice something: It sounds like a Sith, perhaps even a hoodless Palpatine, is telling “Kenobi” to “stick to the plan” about four minutes and 55 seconds into the video. The actual quote is “Stick…

Dissidia, Monster Hunter Top Japan’s No-Release Week

With virtually nothing hitting Japanese retail shelves this past week, 2008’s biggest releases got another chance to shine, sales-wise. That keeps Square-Enix’s Dissidia: Final Fantasy at the number one spot for one more week. Somewhat surprisingly, Capcom’s mega-hit Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G rockets up to the second place spot. That’s the budget version, the…

The Godfather II Teaches Us About Extortion

Not to be outdone by that other free-roaming mobster game, EA has released a new video for February’s Godfather II, which discusses the ins and outs of extortion. Extortion is the act of unlawfully taking money from someone using coercion – threatening psychical violence, destroying property, or setting pets on fire are a few of…