Video Games

Star Wars Kinect Coming Holiday 2011

One of the biggest titles revealed with Kinect at E3 this last year was Lucasart’s Kinect Star Wars game. The demo showed a Jedi Knight blasting through waves of Stormtroopers while using the Kinect peripheral to control saber strikes and force powers. Fanboy dreams suddenly soared, I mean who didn’t want to be Luke Skywalker or Darth Vader as a kid?

Recently at the official Kinect launch for the UK, resident Xbox sunglasses aficionado Kudo Tsunoda let slip that Star Wars Kinect is currently set for a Holiday 2011 release. While this may not be as soon as some fans were hoping, Kudo affirms that from what he has seen of the game— It’s worth it.

Indie Games Holiday Uprising Announced

Indie games have had a rough go on Xbox Live. While there are tons of great independent games on the marketplace, sifting through the garbage to find the gems can be a bit of a chore. To get the jump on the holiday spirit, it was announced that indie games would be getting some love as part of a new promotion called “Indie Games Holiday Uprising”

Similar to Summer of Arcade and Game Feast for XBLA, Indie Games Holiday Uprising will showcase some of the best new titles to grace the independent scene. Expect games from known studios like Ska Studios and Radiangames as well as some new kids on the block.

Sly 4 Reveal in The Sly Collection

Hidden in the recently released Sly Collection is a teaser video for the new Sly 4.

There had been some rumors that a new current generation Sly Cooper game may have been in the works, but this reveal seems to confirm its existence for the first time.

Direct2Drive Begins Rockstar Week

Amazon got us off to a very early start on the relentless pre-Christmas sales frenzy with their “Prelude To Black Friday Deals”, now Direct 2 Drive has joined in with a week of sales on games by Rockstar Games which will run from now through Friday, with one game on sale each day.  Today (Monday) it is Manhunt 2, which has been marked down by 75% to $4.99.  The Manhunt series never quite got the critical success of Rockstar’s other franchises, and deservedly so, due to Manhunt’s gratuitous gore and mediocre gameplay.  The second game in the series is a bit better than the first, but the increase in quality was drastically overshadowed at launch by the hysterical controversy about the Wii version’s use of motion-sensing controls.  

Baldur’s Gate II Now At Gog.com

Good Od Games has been slowly adding a series of classic RPGs from the late 90’s and early 2000’s to their stable over the last couple of months.  Now they’ve completed the set by releasing Baldur’s Gate II: Complete.  This comes after GoG.com released the original Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Icewind Dale II,  Neverwinter Nights and Planescape: Torment, which were all huge commercial hits, in addition to being some of the top rated PC RPG’s of all time.  They’re all based on the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop top games, and fans of modern RPG’s by Bioware will see early versions of Bioware’s distinctive playstyle present in these older games.

Marvel Pinball Coming to PSN

Zen Studios, the creators of Pinball FX 2 on the Xbox360 will release Marvel Comics inspired pinball games as DLC on Xbox360 and as a stand-alone game on PSN. Initially, the new content will include four machines–Iron Man, Spiderman, Blade and Wolverine. Since Zen Studios has complete access to the Marvel Universe, you can expect a sinister amount of new tables for “2011 and beyond.”

Amazon Holding Lightning Deal on Civ 5

As part of their “Prelude To Black Friday” hysteria, Amazon is holding a series of Lightning Deals on video games for the next week and a half.  They’re distributing it between the various platforms, so the deal won’t alway be something of interest to us PC Gamers, but today they actually do have something relevant to us; Civilization 5 marked down to $34.99   Because this is a “Lightning Deal” it’s only available until 5:00 pm EST today (Monday).