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American McGee’s Grimm Out On GameTap

American McGee's Grimm

After years of hiding away in Shanghai and delivering beyond-terrible gaming with Bad Day L.A., the veteran behind Doom, Quake and Alice – American McGee – has emerged back into the land of the living with his uniquely twisted take on the already-twisted Grimm Brothers’ Tales. The first of 24 tales in the series, A Boy Learns What Fear Is, is out today on GameTap, with the others set to release consecutively with each passing week.

All the games will be free to play for the first 24 hours, after which players will be required to fork out $3.99 per episode. A Boy Learns What Fear Is, like all the other tales that are set to follow, should offer around an hour’s worth of play and is loosely based around a cruel, sadistic and blood-chilling version of Katamari Damacy’s gameplay style – according to the official website, a boy who wants to learn the true meaning of fear goes around “hanging gallows, a haunted house and even a wedding, but doesn’t truly encounter fear until Grimm decides to enter the story.” After all the terrifying nursery rhymes and the sheer violence and terror of having gone through the original stories once, I am most definitely staying away from these games. But then again, it’s not like I really have a choice – GameTap still refuses to serve gamers outside the United States. Thanks a lot, guys.


Telltale Unveils New Wallace & Gromit Game

“Porridge today, Gromit!” Or rather, an omelette, we guess – one flying out of Wallace’s cranky contraption in all the wrong ways. After their great success with the truly episodic (and 100% brilliant) Sam & Max Seasons 01 and 02, the cartoon-3D geniuses at Telltale Games have announced that they are indeed hard at work on Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventure. Unveiling the game with a whole bunch of screenshots and a teaser video at Comic-Con 2008, Telltale has said that that while they are looking at multiple platforms for launching the game, the game is confirmed only for the PC, leaving Wii and Mac fans hoping for nirvana yet again.

According to the official press release, gamers will be able to play as both Wallace and Gromit, presumably alternating between the two at various stages of the game, as they get themselves in various predicaments and come up with outlandish contraptions to escape trouble. Although we’re not exactly sure if Peter Sallis will be returning to voice Wallace, we’re more than happy to see the naked dog as we wait for the dog-in-a-blue-suit to return to his possessed Desoto and his zany adventures early next year.

And if all that wasn’t enough for the fans, Wallace & Gromit will even be returning to television with an all-new short called “A Matter of Loaf and Death”, along with DVD compilations of the uniquely British duo’s shorts. Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures is expected to be out sometime later this year on PC via the Telltale Store and presumably, Steam.


First Look: Tomb Raider: Underworld

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For a series that was left practically dead after the horrifying Angel of Darkness, Tomb Raider has been revived so well by Crystal Dynamics that it’s now got people who’ve never played the games hopelessly falling in love with it. Having first taken the spunky, extremely well-endowed Lara out for a spin in 1997, and having gone back to where it all began with Anniversary, this deranged, maniacal, slack-jawed Tomb Raider nutcase has seen it all. Having made Legend and Anniversary the best damned games in the series, Crystal Dynamics looks set to pull out all the stops in the upcoming Tomb Raider: Underworld, which already has a quite a bit of fans going “Drake who?”

We sat and dug through the first preview on the PLAY magazine, and we’ve got all the dirt on Lara’s latest adventure. Directly continuing from her adventures in Legend, Tomb Raider: Underworld (as the name suggests) will see Lara explore vast labyrinthian areas around the world, in addition to doing all the monkey stuff that she does in one of the largest, lush areas seen this side of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. While it is not entirely sure how the story will tie in to Legend’s and all that is hinted at in Anniversary, fans might want to look closer into Lord Richard Croft’s words in Anniversary, and at the deeper connections between Jacqueline Natla and Amanda Evert (as in why do they look so much like each other and why Amanda’s operation in Bolivia has crates with Natla Technologies logos on them) to figure out where the story is heading in Underworld.

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Assassin’s Creed: Ubisoft’s Golden Leap of Faith

Assassin's Creed Rakes in the Moolah

Yves Guillemot and Jade Raymond couldn’t be happier. Why wouldn’t they be, considering a certain robed and hooded Santa, complete with a spring-loaded dagger for his ring finger has been stuffing Ubisoft socks with millions of dollars over the last three weeks? The first part in a trilogy involving all sorts of medieval (and futuristic) hijinks, Assassin’s Creed has crossed the 2.5 mn. units sold milestone – recording worldwide sales of 1.51 mn. units for the Xbox 360 and 0.95 mn. units for the PlayStation 3 – making Ubi so damn happy that they have revised their initial financial forecasts and sent them packing straight into orbit.

Announcing that Assassin’s Creed had earned the distinction of becoming the fastest selling new videogame IP in the US ever, Ubisoft now claims that it will sell a minimum of 5 mn. units of the game in 2007-08 instead of the previously estimated $3 mn., with sales targets being raised to €840 mn., an increase of €15 mn. from their previous target. So much for all those “crystal ball gazers” who jumped the gun and screamed from the rooftops about what a phenomenal failure the game was. Hope you got enough quarters for the suicide booth, fellas!

In more good news, if you were worrying about sprunging the house for enough money to buy Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Brothers in Arms 3: Hell’s Highway and Far Cry 2, don’t worry, you won’t have to. The bad news is, the games have now been delayed to the 2008-09 fiscal year, which means you can probably expect to see them sometime around next Christmas, if you’re lucky. We know we’re not, considering we’re still got our keisters parked waiting for Altair to show up around here.


Sam & Max: Santa Claus Is Gunning You Down!

Sam & Max: Ice Station Santa

Oh boy, Christmas sure came early this year. And what better way to celebrate the holiday cheer than by having our favorite canine and lagomorph duo deliver their unique brand of esoteric “justice” to dear ol’ Saint Nick? With Ice Station Zebra, I mean.. Ice Station Santa starting off the second season of the Sam & Max episodic adventures, the homicidal, psychopathic “freelance police” set out to stop Santa Claus, who seems to have become a flesh-and-blood version of the evil Robot Santa from Futurama, sending giant battle robots after our heroes and taking a tommy gun to everything in sight.

But obviously, things aren’t always what they seem and Dog Face and Hyperkinetic Rabbity Thing set out on yet another crazy adventure, filled with frenzied gameplay, hilarious gags and characters straight out of a psych ward.

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Indie For The Win – Azangara

Azangara is a pretty neat arcade adventure game. You play the role of a sombrero wearing hombre, on the run to gather hidden treasure from castles in the long lost land of Azangara. The dark castles are littered with an assortment of monsters, puzzles and traps that make your life harder. Find keys to doors or force them open with crowbars to reach an exit while collecting as much as booty as you can on the way. The whole point of the game is to explore enough of the castle to gather all of the collectibles to get a high score.

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Stepping Into The Dark Void

With Capcom dropping the goods on Dark Void, their upcoming sci-fi action adventure game, at the latest Gamer’s Day event, the first trailer for the game has silently made its way through to GT some time back. All set to make its appearance on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 sometime next year, this God of War-meets-Lost Planet-meets-Battlestar Galactica game promises a good round of third person shooting, GTA-esque hijacking and flying gyroscopic flying contraptions and jetpacking across treacherous floating platforms in space. Hmmm… I’m sold, I suppose.


Indie For The Win – Snowy The Bear’s Adventures

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A bit about the developer, before we start

Aliasworlds Entertainment was founded in 2001 by a group of independent developers: programmers, artists and designers. We formed the company to produce FUN, high-quality games. So, Gold Sprinter is our first creation made following this credo. We hope you’ll like it. We work hard to make games that you will enjoy.

Developer : Aliasworlds
Publisher: Alawar Games

Snowy The Bear’s Adventures was the first in line of a franchise of games from developer Aliasworlds.. The game puts you in the shoes, or rather feet of a happy and cheerful polar bear who throws snowballs and fights off monsters and has a ball doing so…

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Anniversary Retails October 23rd for Xbox 360

Tomb Raider Anniversary

So it didn’t answer any of the questions that Legend threw up, but Tomb Raider: Anniversary was a shining beacon as far as the franchise was concerned, thanks in full to Crystal Dynamics’ brilliant efforts. With PC, PS2 and PSP owners getting their action a long time back, Eidos had announced that the game would be made available to Xbox 360 owners as DLC on Marketplace sometime near the end of the year.

As of yesterday, though, all that has changed. People who were hoping for a retail release, like yours truly, will be happy to know that Eidos will release the retail version of Ms. Croft’s adventures on the Xbox 360 come October 23rd in the US, followed by a European release three days later. A DLC pack, split into two pieces, the first of which will contain the first two major areas and Croft Manor, will be released over Xbox LIVE in November and will require a retail copy of Tomb Raider: Legend to run.

That’s right, one more game that threatens to make me go flat B-R-O-K, broke, in the next three months. (sigh) Check, please!


10 Years of Hootie McBoob!

The Boob is back! And it’s younger, firmer and more supple than before. Now, now, before you start complaining to the women in our lives about our debauchery, we mean Lara Croft, swear! After delivering a power-packed punch to adventure gaming and rescuing the almost-dead Tomb Raider franchise from the gutter with Legend, Crystal Dynamics has finally put a date on when we can expect to play with lil’ Lara again.

Continuing from Legend’s cliffhanger ending, the Anniversary Edition retells the story of the first Tomb Raider, except that this time, the story is more deeply involved with the plot that was unveiled in Legend. Seeking to understand her future and her father’s legacy, Lara heads back to the past to search for answers to questions that Legend raised. As we’ve already been told, the game will feature a revamped Legend engine and will not be set exactly the way the original was, even though most enemies and puzzles will find their place in the remake.

The much younger Lara, minus her friendly companions and her trusty maghook, will make her way through Incan ruins and the sunken Atlantis, battling humans, wolves, bats, bears and even velociraptors and a T-Rex to get to the bottom of this mystery. Anniversary is exclusive to the PC, the PS2 and the PSP, (WHY! I just got an Xbox 360!) with the PC and the PlayStation 2 versions enjoying a June 5 release date, even as the PSP version gets pushed back yet again. We just hope Anniversary does a much better job with the Tomb Raider puzzle elements as well as enjoying a decent run on the PSP, which is something Legend screwed up on big time! We will have an extended preview of the game as well as our experiences on using the camera to look down her blouse soon enough. Hit the preview image on top to get a bigger picture of the luscious Karima Adebibe…



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