After watching sales of XBLA games soar whenever they had their “Summer of Arcade” event, Microsoft has since made “Game Feast” in the fall, and now “House Party” starting on February 16th, including five games.
The first game released will be Hard Corps Uprising, a 2D shooter in the Contra tradition. The other four games are Bejeweled Blitz, Full House Poker (also with a Win7 version), the console port of Torchlight, and the HD version of Beyond Good & Evil.
If the guys from Penny Arcade aren’t awesome enough already, their charity – Child’s Play – definitely pushes them over into that category.
$2,294,317.53 was raised during 2010 for children’s hospitals across the country (and a few offshore from America,) through auctions, donations, and toys bought for hospitals off their Amazon wishlists. Which, according to Tycho (Jerry Holkins, for those politically correct people) is almost over nine million overall that the charity has collected over the years.
For that much money to go to such a good cause throughout the year, I think all involved in this wonderful charity deserve a word of thanks for all their effort for those sick kids. It just goes to show how big gamers’ hearts happen to be despite being seen in such a negative light at times. You guys are certainly awesome and here’s hoping there’s another good year for this charity!
Microsoft has confirmed that Kinect for Xbox 360 has sold 8 million Units worldwide in the 60 days immediately following its November launch at their CES 2011 Press Conference. Steve Ballmer made the announcement on stage after revealing Avatar Kinect, a Playstation Home-like service that allows gamers to chat using their Avatars and Kinect.
Microsoft had previously said they were aiming to sell 5 million Kinect units between launch and the end of 2010 as a target; this was upped from a previous, lower target. They smashed that to pieces, as well. Needless to say, that’s impressive.
Steve Ballmer told the crowd at the CES press conference and the thousands watching online that 2010 was an “exciting” year for Microsoft thanks to the launch of products like Kinect. Kinect was also described as part of a Microsoft strategy of taking “big bets” on new technology. He went on to recount the history of Xbox and said that it was now “front and centre” of the social revolution.
Opening CES, Microsoft were quick to laud the successes of Kinect on stage. Kinect launched on November 4th in North America, November 10th in Europe and November 20th in Japan.
Staff Edit: Edited this for Clarity; sold in 60 days not ‘just’ in 2010 – these sales figures could potentially include the first five days of January 2011 – that’s unclear. – Ed.
PS3 players of Mass Effect 2 can get the Terminus Armor and the Blackstorm Gun for free via the PSN store until February 23rd.
Even if you don’t plan on buying the game, it’s still a free download, so…why not?
The Terminus Armor and Blackstorm Gun were originally a pre-order bonus from GameStop, but now new players on the PS3 can partake free of charge.
SEGA’s mascot Sonic the Hedgehog will be celebrating his 20th anniversary on June 23, 2011.
The blue blur was first introduced on the SEGA Mega Drive console in 1991 to give the teenagers a hipper, more “down with da kidz”-style mascot to counter Nintendo’s Mario.
According to Rock Band Aide, who fished out a post on the Rock Band Forums by Rock Band Network author Ron over at Alt-Strum Productions, alternative rockers Alien Ant Farm will have their first major label album, ANThology, released progressively via the Network.
Previously, I had read a post on Rock Band Aide about some inexplicably discounted DLC in the Rock Band Store.
RockBand.com announced today that it’s a legitimate sale to toast in the New Year with some rockin’ discounts!
We’ve recently ended a decade in which it’s been absolutely fantastic being a gamer. Not only was video games brought into the mainstream, mostly thanks to the Nintendo Wii and iPhone, and some truly fantastic games have come out during the past 10 years. But the days of looking back are in our Game of the Year article. This particular piece is about looking forward.
So far 2011 is looking to be yet another great year in gaming and seeing as lists are all the rage on the internet; here are my 11 most anticipated games of 2011. Why 11? There simply were too many games I wanted to include in a simple list of 10.
Make note of the fact that this is my personalised list, not indicative of the thoughts and feelings of the rest of TGV’s staff. Feel free to have a problem with it and bash me for not including the sequel to one of your favourite games.
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin!
When Civilization V was announced, many were surprised to find out that the lead designer was a young lad of 25 named Jon Shafer. Like Soren Johnson before him, he got hand-picked out of the Firaxis team to act as lead designer, while Sid Meier was more of an overseer.
Now Shafer has been hired by Stardock, the developer and publisher behind Demigod and the new Elemental: War of Magic. Shafer will first help fix Elemental, which got a pretty horrible reception when it launched. Stardock has also earlier hired Derek Paxton, developer of the Civ IV Fall from Heaven mod for the same purpose. Shafter will then oversee his own mystery project.
Game Informer has released it’s predictions for 2011 of what it feels might be around the bend for us gamers. However, some are just a bit more absurd than others.
Genre: Open-World Action Adventure | Developer: Ubisoft | Publisher: Ubisoft Platform: Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/Wii U/PC | Players: 1 Local/8 Online Rating: ESRB: M (Mature) / [...]
