Instead of simply porting over Unreal Championship 2004 on the PC, Epic Games (you know them from “Gears of War”) decided to take a different approach to the next Xbox iteration of its Xbox FPS fragfest. From Doom’s chainsaw to Halo’s energy sword, melee combat has always been a part of FPS combat. This time however, hand-to-hand combat skills are just as important as your l33t sniper skills. Shooting at your opponent isn’t enough, now you have to learn how to pull off combos, reflect shots, and use special attacks just like in a fighting game. There are several characters to choose from, each with different abilities and techniques. Along with the standard deathmatch, team deathmatch, and capture the flag modes, there is also the new nali slaughter mode, in which you have to kill more Nali creatures than your opponent. Single player modes include tournament ladders for each character, challenge mode, and the story based “Rites of Ascension”, which tells the story of Anubis, one of the game’s characters. Of course, you can also take the game on Xbox Live as well, and you can even grab the free downloadable content (including new characters and arenas) while you’re at it.

Toys based on video games is still a woefully untapped and underserved market. Even massively popular lines like Halo 2 from Joyride don’t make it much further than stores that sell video games (even Toys R Us stocked them near the Xbox games).

Metal Gear Solid 4 may not have a release date, but the 12″ Solid Snake (picutred) will be out in November. He’s pretty detailed, and employs some advanced action figure technology to keep his body in realistic posts, which sounds nice but its really a shady way of saying he’s not getting double jointed limbs. Couldn’t find a price point, and Medicom is a Japanese toy company so be prepared to pay brutal import prices.

NECA has a handful of figures already out based on Eidos properties: Tomb Raider Legend, Hitman, and Legacy of Kain. They also announced at Toy Fair they’ll have some Resident Evil figures out by September, and Castlevania in October. Simon Belmont will be based on the NES box art, but Alucard, Dracula, and Succubus will be styled after Symphony Of The Night.

First 4 Figures has a Metroid license, but seem intent on making statues too expensive to buy on a whim. Zero Suit Samus will retail for $109. An excellent likeness, and sure to be the pride of your basement collection. They’re also stamping out Zelda statues. Why not make me a proper 6″ Varia Suit Samus Aran action figure and some Space Pirates, F4F?

SOTA Toys will have some Darkstalkers to add to their Street Fighter line. Dimitri and Lord Raptor will be out late spring 2007.

Its really frustrating that theres still no line that conforms to a scale and offers more than the most obvious characters as figures. Getting ONLY Snake or ONLY Lara Croft seems odd. Even Mario brought some supporting characters to Happy meals.

The breakout release on the download circuit this week has to go to Playstation Network’s “fl0w”

Fl0w comes from Jenova Chen, the lead behind the highly creative PC game Cloud. It looks like a mash up between Katamari Damacy and Geometry Wars. You control a small organism in a vast expanse of water, and can gobble up those smaller than you, but avoid anything bigger. Naturally, with everything you eat, your microscopic character grows and you’ll be able to take on larger organisms.

Wii Virtual Console gets one of my all time favorites this week with Donkey Kong Country. I mentioned to fellow Powet Army solider Phil Bond that this game is every bit as good as Super Mario World, and I stand by that. Going in for a few levels of Co-op and then beating that giant beaver, all the platforming fun came rushing back. This was truly a special game that resides somewhere between the retro cool of the NES days and the less favorably remembered 32-bit revolution. Back when this came out, the Playstation and Saturn hype machines were getting ready to roar, then Rare and Nintendo dropped a Super NES game that looked better than anything on a CD based system! Sure it wasn’t 3D, but 3D was pretty much a disaster until Mario 64 came along, so this remains one of the great 2D games from the days when 2D was starting to fade.

Xbox Live is taking the shaft 2 weeks in a row now. Wednesday used to be the day to grab new Live Arcade games, but the most notable release to Marketplace recently has been the Borat dashboard theme and picture pack (I’ve taken Azamat as my avatar!). Team 17 hopes to have Worms ready soon, but have been frustrated by Microsoft’s constant delays. THQ announced they’re releasing in a box, much to our surprise. Tetris Evolution better be budget priced, because theres no reason that the world’s most popular puzzle game wouldn’t fit Live Arcade’s standards. An even though I own many other versions of Tetris (in arms reach, I have no less than 5 copies ready to go), I’ll probably buy this Xbox 360 version too.

Without a doubt, we associate Acclaim with some of the worst games ever made. However, they’ve also had the longest run with the WWF licence. Up until the late 90s though, wrestling titles were only limited to a niche audience. All that changed with WWF Warzone. This title laid the foundation for wrestling games today as we know them. It included solid presentation, color commentary, and the one thing that’s pretty much a requirement in today’s wrestling games: create-a-wrestler. With this feature, it was possible to put yourself in the game, bring in a wrestler that was left out the cast, or even recreate a character from another wrestling organization. However, there were two major issues players had with the game, namely the small and out-of-date roster and lack of match types.  In an attempt to address these issues, (and perhaps spurred on by THQ’s WCW/NWO Revenge released later that year) Acclaim went back to work on WWF Attitude, which stands as one of the finest early wrestling games made at the time.
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In late 2002, EA announced a 3-way partnership with developer Aki and hip hop label Def Jam.  The unlikely union resulted in 2003’s Def Jam Vendetta, a mix of wrestling and hip hop.  Although people were skeptical about the game at first, it became an instant hit when it was released.  However, a few things held it back from true greatness, mainly the lack of a create-a-character feature (something common place in most wrestling games) and the lack of play modes.  Enter Def Jam: FFNY which would rectify both of these situations.

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You knew it was coming. Two new characters, Leo and Zafina are unveiled.

Namco proudly displayed the game for the first time at Japan’s AOU 2007 coin-op exhibition. Tekken Official has been updated with several screen shots and a short trailer.

Tekken 6 will undoubtedly land on the PS3 sometime after its arcade run, but with Virtua Fighter 5 jumping ship to Xbox 360, is is possible Namco will finally go multiplatform?

This enterprising youtuber pretty much sums up whats most fun about Crackdown. The sandbox genre needed some new blood, and the next gen horsepower combined with your abilities to lift and detonate anything in the gameworld are just what the doctor ordered.

You start out in a boring room, where you can grab one of four vehicles provided by your supercop garage. After a senselessly long drive in a tunnel, you land on a street corner in the middle of a firefight between gang members and police. I took this first oppurtunity to kill everything that moved, and it was much more satisfying than in GTA because the aiming system actually kinda works. It’s not great, but I’ll get back to that. Getting back in my car, I drove up the road and find that pretty much everywhere I go there’s gangs, so there’s lots of enemies to kill. I wasted no time finding alternate ways of dealing with this problem by running gangs over, tossing random items at them, using explosives. The visuals are much better than screen shots and even videos give them credit for. It’s a very vibrant world and the hint of cartoonyness keeps me from getting too serious and screwing around. I’m sure theres a target I had to kill here, but I spent all my time driving around, trying to scale buildings, and using whatever I had laying around to maul criminals and civilians.

I was never a fan of GTA. I didn’t think it played well, didn’t think it looked good, and the sandbox options were pretty much limited to driving and murder. Crackdown offers exploration and explosives, which are much more my bag.

The demo is currently on Xbox Live Marketplace, and according to Major Nelson, its already more popular than most full Xbox 360 games.

In the early days of the PS1, the Twisted Metal series was to players what Halo pretty much is to Xbox players these days. It was an intense and bizzare car combat game that was filled with bizzare characters with equally bizzare vehicles blowing each other up with bizzare weapons. The first two editions were developed by developer Singletrac. The second game in the series, World Tour, was at the time considered by most to be the best in the series. However, the games took a dip in sales with Twisted Metal 3,when most of the developers had left after a contractual dispute with Sony and joined with GT Interactive. Sony’s in-house development team 989 studios handled the production, rewriting the code for the artificial intellegence and driving physics. These changes attracted new players while turning off longtime fans of the series. Twisted Metal 4 had corrected many of the faults from 3 and had even added a 4-player mode, but by then players had already moved on. Sony wanted to revive it’s flagship vehicular car-combat series for the Playstation 2. Enter Twisted Metal Black.

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