DC and Marvel scrimped on the news today (what, tired of talking World War Hulk, Amazons Attack, and World War III already?), but some interesting news did surface about IDW’s Scarface prequel, Gene Simmons diving into the comic scene, and some great Heroes DVD (and HD-DVD) news. Read on!
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I missed it yesterday, but Wizard World LA is featuring an exclusive two-pack of Minimates – Spider-Man and black-suited Spider-Man, as seen in a little movie called Spider-Man 3. The unique thing about this toy exclusive is that it’s also available for sale online, for the exact same price as that it’s selling for at the convention: a mere $7. You can buy them here, at the Diamond Select Toys site. Well, you can preorder them, at least. Estimated availability date is on March 26th.

Note: Despite the similarities in gameplay (the charging attacks and command ring menu system among others), this game is not in any way related to Square’s Seiken Densetsu series (speaking of which, I featured the third game on last week’s column), nor is it meant to be any kind of sequel or spin-off to Secret of Mana. However, those who played the game will discover that there are plenty of differences which will make this game stand out on it’s on, even if it isn’t mentioned in the same breath as Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana.
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The Legacy of Kain series was one of last generation’s most prolific franchises. Ever since Blood Omen on the original Playstation, gamers everywhere enjoyed the exploits of Kain, the nobleman who was unjustly killed and turned into a vampire. Being able to kill enemies by drinking blood and using an array of evil powers provided a refreshing change of pace from usual action games of it’s time. However, each succeeding entry in the series, from Blood Omen 2 to the Soul Reaver games, would have a few little things holding it back from being on the level of Castlevania and Mega Man in terms of gaming franchises. 2003s Defiance went a long way to addressing these problems.
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Yes, I realize we JUST had two separate conventions. Clearly, this is nowhere near enough of them. Clearly.

Continue on to read about Avengers Classic, Booster Gold & Infinity, Inc., and 9 new Marvel busts from Bowen Designs. All that, and the rest of the Day 1 roundup after the jump
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Xbox Live Arcade is on a roll. This week was TMNT. Last week was Worms. Before that we had Alien Hominid. What release could possibly trump 3 of the best games to hit the service so far?

Oh yeah. Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night. This classic from the 32bit era allows you to literally go medieval as you smash through giant bosses and explore the finer pits and dungeons of Romania.

Unlike your standard NES Castlevania where you took the role of one of the Belmont clan and brandished a whip, Symphony of the Night lets you use knives and stabbing weapons from the hand of Dracula’s own son, Alucard (which just happens to be “Dracula” spelled backwards!).

This is the biggest Live Arcade release yet, coming in at a whopping 96 MB, so make sure you’ve got your hard drive ready, this ain’t fitting on your 64MB memory card. All that space is of course taken up by the lovely English voice acting (“Die monster! You don’t belong in this world!”)

GameScore Blog Press Release

In the realm of webcomics there is no bigger name than Penny Arcade. So when they announced they were making a game, we cheered at seeing our favorite game critics become game characters… and then of course, feared that the game would be the type they’d normally criticize.

From this short preview, theres very little actual gameplay, but it looks promising. It appears to take place outside of the normal “Tycho & Gabe” world in one of their stranger made up worlds. Oh and theres the Fruit Fucker.

Something that is for sure is the game is being simultaneously released to Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. So anyone who can read the Penny Arcade comic can play the game! It’ll be episodic, but hopefully not episodic like S.I.N., which was cancelled after one installment or Half Life, which has its second release now over a year late.

Get all 59 seconds of the preview in quicktime, wmv. or HD. Oh and of course, if you didn’t know already you can read Penny Arcade the comic strip 3 times a week here.

Accoring to an article in the New York Post sales for Blu-Ray to date this year are better than HD DVD sales. More specifically we can see that “The Departed” which was available in both formats sold 3 times as many copies on Blu-Ray as on HD DVD. To show this you can see that as of today The Departed on Blu-ray has an amazon ranking of 84 while The Departed on HD DVD has a ranking of 446. Not that either of these is very impressive considering the DVD has a sales ranking of 7.

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