While we've seen EA's upcoming Simpsons game quite a bit recently, the game continues to pleasantly surprise us. The tongue in cheek adventure finds the animated family braving the perilous world of videogames in a platformer starring the whole clan. We had the chance to check out some new levels in the Xbox 360 and PS3 game at EA's press event today that showed off the game's smart wit and fun gameplay.
The version of the game on display at the event featured a broad sampling of levels that included many we've seen before and two new levels. The first new level, The Land of Chocolate, serves as the game's tutorial and, for those unfamiliar with the classic fantasy sequence, is set in a candy fueled dream had by Homer. The level opens with a cinematic that's right out of the cartoon and then segues to gameplay. Your goal in the level is to follow a white chocolate rabbit through a chocolate village and to the top of a cake. Along the way you're filled in on the basics of ... More »
Earlier this week, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominated Insomniac's widely admired lombax and robot duo in two categories for their PlayStation 3 debut, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Though the winners will be announced on October 23, the heat-packing duo, should they win, won't be on hand to accept the award as originally anticipated. Posting to Sony's PlayStation Blog, line producer Greg Phillips has revealed that, yes, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction has shipped to manufacturers, but it won't arrive on retail shelves until October 30.
Slightly offsetting the bitter side of today's news, Phillips offered an extra helping of sweet with word that a Ratchet and Clank demo should arrive on the PlayStation Network on October 11. An optimized version of the demo shown at this year's E3 Media & Business Summit, the free trial lets players tool around in the futuristic city of Metro... More »
We already posted the EUR PSN update info, and now here are the US details from their official blog:
Hey, everyone. It’s time again for the PLAYSTATION Store weekly update.
Demos:
TimeShift Demo (free)
Master Time to become the Ultimate Weapon in this single player demo from forthcoming FPS TimeShift™
File size: 479 MB
ESRB Rated M
Need for Speed ProStreet Demo (free)
Compete at the highest level of street racing. Experience the intense rivalry of Grip Racing and prove yourself in the all-new Speed Challenge - the ultimate test of speed and control.
File size: 906 MB
ESRB Rated E 10+
PSOne Classics for PS3 / PSP:
Twisted Metal 2 ($5.99)
It’s a whole new world to blow away with new cars, new battlegrounds, and new killer combat!
File size: 322 MB
ESRB Rat... More »
When one thinks of the leaders in computer animation, a few familiar film studios come to mind, namely DreamWorks and Pixar.
Traditional movie companies like Fox and Warner Bros. have also made successful forays into animated fare.
Video games, however, have rarely been known for the artistry of their animation, for two reasons.
First, while they almost inevitably fall short, most video games of any genre try to look realistic — realistic cars, realistic football players, even plausibly “realistic” dragons and aliens.
But what defines great animated characters like Mickey Mouse and Shrek is not any notion of realism, but rather an exaggerated yet unthreatening expressiveness. That is one reason so few of the classic animated characters are human: anthropomorphized animals give the artist much more creative leeway.
Just as important, in those cases when designers have gone for an animated look, technology has simply ... More »
This modern masterpiece shakes the FPS genre to the very core.. Warning: The text you are about to read contains heady intellectual discourse and is not recommended for anyone made queasy by the discussion of feminist film theory or psychoanalytical signifiers.
Since its release two months ago, Portal has met with overwhelming popular and critical success thanks to its quirky physics and dystopian humor. Yet beneath the mainstream success lies the most subversive first-person shooter (FPS) ever created. Portal is essentially a feminist critique of the FPS genre, flawlessly executed from within the margins it assails. Gender politics just got a whole lot more fun.
Deconstructing the term "first-person shooter" reveals two fundamental concepts of the game mechanic. "First-person" is a personal pronoun that provides linguistic context, or origo, to enable discourse. It is a perspective. "Shooter" describes the discourse that is to occur, specifically the shooting... More »
2007 was a rough year for the PS3. It was slow getting out the gate and a lot of awesome titles were pushed back to late 07 and 08. Even after being hammered by the competition in the beginning of the year, the black box just refused to stay down and ended up finishing 2007 a lot stronger than most of us anticipated.
If you’re a PS3 owner, here’s the Must Have games of the year. (No, Lair isn’t on the list. Neither is Kane and Lynch since Eidos doesn’t want to pony up the money.)
Motorstorm
For the first 6 months of the PS3's life we experienced a dearth of quality titles as the system was plagued with terrible ports and with more movie based games than any carbon life form should have to endure. There were only games worth owning was Resistance and Motorstorm. Motorstorm was the first racing game, outside of Mario Kart, that I actually purchased at full price and, at the time, it was somewhat expensive for what you got. You could count t... More »
This video is not related to anything the PS3 Devs are doing here, but until their next news update (hopefully tonight!) those interested can check out this video mailed to us from Erik.
Although it looks like some super-cool PS3 Loader in the video, it's likely just an edited save file only which is why we uploaded it under the 'entertainment' YouTube category. :D
Enjoy guys, at least there is some humor between the more serious Dev reports eh?
The Greatest Generation looks forward to its golden years.
Postpone the decorative-coffin-pillow shopping and drop out of your creative-epitaph writing classes; the old PS2 ain't dead. Despite the prognoses of many well-meaning analysts, the little console that helped you ring in the new millennium seven years ago may just make it through 2008. The sharp increase in both gas prices and the speed at which our female pop superstars age may tell us that we're living in a far different world than the year 2000, but one fact remains: Like all good things worth bingeing on, the PS2 is cheap and plentiful.
While the PS2 does lack the "oomph" of the new generation of consoles, when looking at the system's future release list, there's something to be said about the active life of seniors. The groundbreaking, blockbuster games of tomorrow, with their accompanying Internet arguments already going strong, obviously won't grace the meager PS2. However, the past few months... More »
If there's a reason to be afraid of clowns, then Sweet Tooth is it. A murdering psychopath with a flaming head, his character is almost as iconic as the series he originates from. And now Sweet Tooth (and several other recognizable characters) can once again grace your television with Twisted Metal: Head-on: Extra Twisted Edition, an impressively robust port of Head-on for the PSP.
If you're a fan of the series and have been hoping to get more chaotic, car-combat action, you'll be quite pleased with Extra Twisted -- especially if you were fond of the original PSP title. Extra Twisted is a perfect example of an impressive port and the slew of special features included on the disc make this a very appetizing deal.
Let's begin by breaking down Extra Twisted if you're not familiar with its components. As we've just explained, the bulk of the game is a port of Head-on, which runs quite well on the PS2. The biggest additions outside of the main game are the Lost Le... More »
Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can't put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play.
"These gender differences may help explain why males are more attracted to, and more likely to become 'hooked' on video games than females," the researchers wrote in their paper, which was recently published online in the Journal of Psychiatric Research.
More than 230 million video and computer games were sold in 2005, and polls show that 40 percent of Americans play games on a computer or a console. According to a 2007 Harris Interactive survey, young males are two to three times more likely than females to feel addicted to video games, such as the Halo series so popular in recent years.
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