1up seems to have locked up all the Soul Calibur news. see also these images and The 1UP Show Soul Calibur IV Special, a 16 minute look at the game.

Yes, Trailerz.

First up, a live action promo shot by Neil Blomkamp and WETA, the team that would’ve been making the Halo movie by now had Fox not dropped out. Orbital Drop Shock Troopers suit up, and the factories ramp up production on war hardware.

Now the gameplay trailer. The Covenant have invaded Earth, Chief and The Arbiter must work together to stop them and save Cortana from the Flood.

[Read the rest of this entry…]

Event just started with a performance from Corpreal, the band of high school students who played the Halo theme to some success on youtube in the past year. They played in Peter Moore, who spoke briefly about the change of venue and then announced that every game they’d show in the conference tonight will be released this year.

Then Moore introduced some of the Harmonix crew to play Rock Band. After some stumbles and Peter’s off key adlib vocals while playing guitar, they wheeled out the evenings next big gun… Viva Pinata Party Animals.

Viva Pinata Party Animals will be a party game not unlike Mario Party with… Viva Pintata characters. Yeah, I’ll leave this one to aDam.

The Mass Effect trailer. [Read the rest of this entry…]

Two guitars, a drummer, and a singer… we were kinda wondering how this would all work on one screen, and now we have a video of some of the Harmonix crew getting into Guns N Roses first hit. Rock Band will have its own guitars, but this video confirms that your 360 X-plorer will still work.

Earlier this week, Ubisoft dropped some new maps on to Xbox Live community for Rainbox Six: Vegas in the form of the Player’s Pack: Black Edition , costing 800 points, not unlike the Red Edition they released back in April. Only one problem: This was supposed to be free.

Rainbow Six Vegas just came out on PS3 with all of the Red & Black content included, so fans obviously cried foul, and rightly so. Ubisoft pulled the download shortly after went up and apologized for the mistake. Its now available for all Xbox Live users completely for free, and the Red Pack will be converted to a free download on July 6. Those who made the ten dollar plunge into Black Edition will be refunded their points… in 8-10 weeks. Oh well, I guess it can’t all be perfect.

I personally just picked up this game a few weeks ago, and if you’re itching for more Gears Of War, R6V is a worthy successor. Intense difficulty, great use of cover for fire fights, and enough sneaky stuff to have fun with, but not so much as to ruin the experience for a run & gun player like myself. I guess I’ll have a lot to dig into with the game this week when I go online.

This weekend was supposed to mark the release of the Dead or Alive movie after a year of set backs but that did not happen as a result of last week’s disastrous limited release. Why is anyone surprised that it didn’t make the top 10? It was a limited release. I certainly never had the oppurtunity to go see this movie, as much as I’ve been intending to for quite a while.

Since it’s original international release in September 2006 this movie has been jerked around so much with plans for a straight to video release on and off and and eventual frequently delayed theatrical release. I’m not sure how much interest we’re expecting to have in a movie with so little studio support. Why didn’t we get this thing a year ago? The video release in Europe was months ago and people have been able to get this movie in some form for half a year.

Did anyone see so much as a commercial for this movie? I certainly didn’t. Hell I didn’t even know it had been released in Europe until after it was out on DVD. How lame. A movie’s initial weekend numbers are not based on it’s quality but rather on what advertising and hype are generated for the movie. It was treated like an independant movie and got those kind of numbers.

Oh well now we can finally get a DVD release of the movie like we should have gotten last year if the studio didn’t F this movie in the A.

Thanks for nothing Weinstein Company.

Now check out my Dead or Alive movie review from way back in March.

My review of the new Xbox Live Arcade sequel to Pac-Man

Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal dropped a bomb this week, that the next gen sequel to Katamari Damacy would be exclusive to Xbox 360. Gamespot ups the ante a bit more, announcing that it will hit Xbox Live Arcade. Namco announced nothing.

One look at the above video, and a download title makes sense. Katamari was never a graphically intensive game, since so much stuff had to be on screen at once, detail remainded low. A Xbox 360, PS3, or even Wii release would be more detailed. The first footage clearly looks no better than the PS2 is capable of, meaning the game is likely limited by size for a download. There will be 4 Player online multiplayer and new levels, which all anyone wanted anyway.

And to think only 6 short months ago, Xbox Live’s Ross Erickson called the rumor of Katamari on XBLA “total crap“