Xbox 360

Play As Catwoman Now

Are you excited about Catwoman being playable in Batman: Arkham City?  What if I told you that you won’t have to wait until the Fall to play as Catwoman?  It’s true!  She’s already a playable character in several, mostly terrible games.  The feline fatale has a rocky history as a playable character, so before we all go into heat over Batman: Arkham City, let’s take a look at the Princess of Plunder’s cat-a-clysmic history in gaming.

Remember a few years ago when Ed Brubaker re-vamped the monthly Catwoman comic book into a film noir-inspired setting where Selina teamed up with hard-boiled detective Slam Bradley?  Yeah, that was cool.  You know what wasn’t cool?  Pretty much every other attempt to give Catwoman a solo series.  The worst of them all was the embarrassingly long-lived series from the 90’s. That book hired, then fired a different writer every year.  With the exception of Devin Grayson’s turn at the helm, almost every issue was garbage that sold only because of the sexy cover art.

Batman: Arkham Asylum Retro Review

Pre-2009, if you mentioned the words “Batman” and “video game” in the same sentence, chances were good that the recipient of the conversation would cringe. Video games just weren’t kind to the poor Caped Crusader, as most of his games were at best mediocre, never taking advantage of the terrific franchise.

Why Mass Effect 3 Doesn’t Need Multiplayer

It’s official that Mass Effect 3 will have a four-player cooperative multiplayer mode called “Galaxy At War”.  Details aren’t in yet, but many gamers are quite excited by the prospect of fighting the Reavers alongside other players, or engaging in the as-yet-unconfirmed possibility of head-to-head combat against their friends.  While this is enticing, it’s probably not the best use of Bioware’s resources, and even if the developer had as much time and money as they like, Mass Effect 3 still doesn’t actually need multiplayer.

Electronic Arts describes the multiplayer mode as putting “Players in the role of a team of elite Special Forces soldiers”. This sounds like shorthand for “A team of Generic Space Commandos”.  They’ll inevitably be described as“Highly-trained, Heavily-armed”, and poorly-written.

Microsoft Studios Acquires Twisted Pixel

Game developers Twisted
Pixel, the team behind the acclaimed ‘Splosion Man on Xbox Live Arcade
and The
Gunstringer on Kinect for Xbox 360 have been acquired by Microsoft
Studios, a move that will allow them to ‘incubate new game and entertainment
experiences’ under the Microsoft umbrella.

Batman: Arkham City- Nightwing DLC Bundle Announced

It’s only 9 days until the release of Batman:
Arkham City, the sequel to the record-breaking Arkham Asylum which
gathered a host of accolades as the highest-scoring superhero game ever
created, and to whet our appetites even further, the publishers of the game
have announced some DLC for the title already.

Former Celtic Great Bill Russell Suing EA Sports and NCAA

Bill Russell, the former Boston Celtic and owner of 11(!) championship rings, is the latest athlete to sue the NCAA and EA Sports for using his likeness in a sports game without compensation.  Russell’s likeness was used in NCAA Basketball ’09, as his University of California at San Francisco college team was part of the game’s Tournament of Legends mode.

Why RAGE Doesn’t Have Deathmatch

Gamers across the globe have always looked to id Software since the days of Wolfenstein and Doom as the pioneers of the deathmatch.  With virtually every shooter released since those glory days in the early 1990’s having some sort of “kill everyone you see” multiplayer mode, it came as quite a surprise that id’s newest release, RAGE, was lacking the staple of first-person shooters.  In an interview with Kotaku, id’s Tim Willits sheds some light on the decision.