Their main complaint seems to be that Sony is charging a $150 fee to repair the consoles that were broken by the firmware update. The two are now seeking a class-action lawsuit against Sony.

Back in 2006, an owner sued Microsoft for bricking his console with an update and settled out of court.

Nintendo has actually gone ahead and censored the dialog of Admiral Dane in the new Metroid Prime Trilogy. In the original Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, the Admiral says “Damn!”, while in Trilogy, he says a whole-hearted “No!”.

It’s a very minor change, and I’m not the least bit affected by it, but it’s interesting to see what is censor-worthy in Nintendo of America’s eyes.

via GoNintendo

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday — It seems that a gaming communtity by the name of Ziip got their hands on the domain name modernwarfare4.com and decided to blackmail Infinity Ward for its use.

No, they aren’t asking for a large sum of money but instead a copy of Modern Warfare 4 for each member of their community.

How will Infinity Ward respond to this? Well, they will most likely just use a domain name like codmodernwarfare4.com which will redirect to modernwarfare4.infinityward.com like they did with Modern Warfare 2.

But wait, what happened to Modern Warfare 3?

“Tekken 6 and TapouT fans share a deep-rooted passion for the mixed-martial-arts lifestyle,” said Namco Bandai’s Makoto Iwai “This partnership will bring TapouT’s signature style into the world of Tekken, giving new experiences to video game enthusiasts and MMA fans alike.”

Hopefully these shirts won’t look as awful as Ecko’s Halo shirts. The new clothing line will go on sale this September.

Read (PlayStation Lifestyle)

“I always envisioned Resident Evil as a trilogy of films,” Anderson said. “And we’ve been very lucky where it’s a trilogy where the audience has built and built. I wanted to kick off a brand new trilogy. I’m really excited we’re doing it [in 3-D] and we’re using the same camera system [James] Cameron used for Avatar. There are a lot of exciting things about this one. I don’t regard it as Resident Evil 4, I regard it as a re-tooling and rebirth of the entire franchise.”

Details are still scarce at the moment, but we know that Milla Jovovich will return as Alice. Resident Evil: Afterlife will be hitting cinemas September 17, 2010.

Read (ShockTillYouDrop), via Evil Avatar

If you haven’t checked out 50% off deal for Paradox Interactive titles, be sure to give that one a look, too.

Read (Steam News)

• Don King Boxing
• Mario and Sonic: Olympic Games
• Sonic Unleashed
• MadWorld
• Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party
• Shaun White Snowboarding Road Trip
• Wario Land: Shake It
• Wii Music
• Animal Crossing: City Folk – Game Only
• My Fitness Coach
• Donkey Kong Jungle Beat
• Excitebots: Trick Racing – Game Only

Not exactly your triple-a titles, but hey, it’s a free game. Wario Land: Shake It is a pretty damn fun game, too. Anyways, the offer began today and will last until July 26th.

Read (GameStop)

Blizzard Entertainment and Legendary Pictures will be working together for the film. So, maybe it won’t be so bad if Blizzard has most of the creative control.

“Sam’s passion for ‘Warcraft’ is undeniable and we know that he will create an incredible film worthy of Blizzard’s phenomenal franchise,” said Legendary Pictures CEO Thomas Tull.

“From our first conversation with Sam, we could tell he was the perfect choice,”” added Paul Sams, chief operating officer of Blizzard Entertainment. “Sam knows how to simultaneously satisfy the enthusiasts and the mainstream audience that might be experiencing that content for the first time.”

There’s a lot of Warcraft lore out there, beginning from the debut of the scourge up to the return of the Lich King. And who can forget all of the novels that spawned along the way? Details are scarce right now, as the movie is still in production. Hopefully more information will pop up in this year’s Comic-Con.

Read (Toronto Sun)

As for the plot, you play a random traveler on his way to a certain city that’s populated entirely by cheerful anthropomorphic animals despite the fact that your character is clearly human.  Those of you wondering if your avatar is, in fact, some kind of closet furry join me in wondering the exact same thing.  Your new town is admittedly rather small and quaint, but boasts a clothing shop, a museum, a bus station, and a general store run by everybody’s favorite loan shark / raccoon, Tom Nook.  A word about Tom Nook–he operates the general store Nook’s Cranny (ba DUM bum!) and will give you your first home loan to purchase a place in the small town.  He will then offer you a job in Nook’s Cranny to get you started paying down your debt, but he’ll promptly fire you after one day with a huge amount in mortgage left.  At least I think that’s the currency of choice there; I’m a little spacey on that detail.  Anyway, the good news is that Nook’s Cranny deals in pretty much EVERY ITEM KNOWN TO MAN OR ANTHROPOMORPHIC ANIMAL, and thus, you’ll be able to sell Nook any random piece of garbage you find anywhere to pay down your house debt, despite the fact that he could literally stay within sight of his shop and get the exact same thing himself for free.

Seriously–it’s actually quite possible to pay off a home loan in Animal Crossing City Folk with cherries you find on public trees.  No wonder Tom Nook’s a loan shark–people can pay him off with shiny rocks and sticks they found on the ground and he’s required by some kind of law to take them.  He’s got to charge ridiculous fees just to keep ahead of the deflationary curve!  If I went down to MY bank and asked if they take cherries on a mortgage payment they’d probably have me arrested.  Or shot.  Possibly both!

This game is just the epoch of absurdity.  For instance–after getting fired from Nook’s, I went to the town’s bulletin board on my first day and left a rambling, profanity-laden diatribe about how I wished every resident of the town would die in a series of horrible tragedies just to see what would happen.  Sure enough…they greeted me with cheerful smiles and sunny waves and offers to join them for dinner or bridge or knocking over garbage cans or whatever giant anthropomorphic animals do for fun.  You can’t get a rise out of these people, thus you’re left to play the game as intended.

Which is, sadly, boring.  You go fishing.  You find fossils which you take to the museum where they make appropriate oohing and aahing noises over before putting them on display.  Occasionally you can go into the city (hence the name, City Folk) and see a movie or go shopping.  It’s like life, if your banker were a raccoon that accepted tree bark on a mortgage payment and your neighbor were a five foot tall pig that walked on its hind legs and sent you a vase on your birthday.

And frankly, if I wanted my games to be more like real life, I think I’d just stop, you know, playing games.

Basically, Let’s Tap is a collection of five smaller games all controlled by the same method: setting your Wiimote down on a box, preferably a tissue box or some similar cardboard box and tapping on the box.  Yes, that’s right–in this game, you will almost never touch your Wiimote.  You’ll play games like Tap Runner (where you compete in a four-man foot race by tapping on the box your Wiimote rests upon with various degrees of pressure), Rhythm Tap (where you’ll tap out a series of rhythms in time with on-screen indicators), Silent Blocks (where you’ll remove blocks from a stack in a bid to lower an item stacked on top of them to the ground), Bubble Voyager (where you move a space-suited character through a series of obstacles) and Visualizer (which isn’t so much a game as it is a way to play around with the tapping system to make various special effects).

I’m somewhat at a loss by this game.  There’s no storyline here–it’s almost as if Sega were making a demo reel for some greater application to be announced later. I admit that the concept is unique enough–I definitely don’t remember the last time I played a game that literally required that I never touch my controller–but I’m just slightly dismayed by the results it yielded.  Sure, this game is fun, but not for very long.  There’s just so little TO it that it can’t produce much in the way of a fun factor.  All you do is tap, tap, tap a box over and over and over and over again for little or no clear reason.  And when you smack a box a couple hundred times with your hand or fingers in rapid succession, chances are you’re going to be left with a sore arm and not much else to show for it.

In fact, after playing a round of Let’s Tap, I’m left with a whole lot more questions than answers.  Why did they even bother with this game?  There’s so very little to it that it’s almost not worth playing, except as some kind of precursor, some kind of training implement to a future game.  And it could definitely be interesting–think about a version of Missile Command where you fire missiles by PRESSING A BUTTON corresponding to a tap on a box.  Especially if you were to use the Wiimote simultaneously to aim by turning the Wiimote slightly to the left or right to adjust an aiming reticle before firing.  That’d be awesome.

But I’m getting away from the point here–the point being that Let’s Tap, by itself, is really not much of a game.  It may represent a greater game to come, but for right now, Let’s Tap should better be titled Let’s Avoid This Piece of Crap And Get On With Our Lives.

Long, long ago, civilization was infested with these things called “form batons”, mystical objects that contained vast power and ostensibly controlled a race of tiny humanoids if the hieroglyphs are to be believed.  Anyway, one day, Nintendo’s biggest anti-hero and treasure hunter extraordinaire Wario was sitting in his chair at home, sucking down cake and donuts and suchlike when one of those tiny humanoids from the hieroglyphs abducts Wario’s snacks.  Naturally, Wario can’t stand for such nonsense, and thus he chases after the tiny humanoid to recover his snacks.  What he finds instead is one of the legendary form batons.  Thus, Wario will join a whole cast of motley characters, including a dog and cat taxi driving team, two inveterate gamers, a cheerleader, an inventor and a witch with her pet demon familiar in a series of slice of life-style vignettes as they go about their lives.

You, meanwhile, will have to accomplish a series of tasks in rapid succession, accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.  You’ll hold it like a waiter holding a tray, like a remote control, up in front of your nose like an elephant with its trunk, and on top of your head like a mohawk to do any of a number of things, including driving a car, picking up trash with a remote controlled robot, picking your nose, and scrubbing a cow’s ass.  No, seriously.  You’re going to do all that and even less savory tasks.  Frankly, I was amazed enough to find myself working my Wiimote into a position where I could ram a finger up a polygonal nose on a polygonal face, but when I started running a scrub brush over a cow’s rump roast, well, that just did it for me.  I had nothing to say.

The graphics are, of course, last generation weak, but the biggest problem with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is also the biggest joy–the controls.  Several times I found myself about to start a game and I was left totally unaware of what to actually DO.  Oh, sure, I knew how to HOLD the Wiimote–they make that perfectly clear from the second you start a game–but I didn’t always know what to do from there.  Did I swing to the left?  The right?  When do I pick up?  And most unaccountably of all, why won’t the Wiimote acknowledge ANYTHING I do, no matter what direction I move?  This didn’t happen often, but when it did, it really spoiled the game.

I have to admit that I enjoyed this game.  I liked the rapid switching of games, and how at higher speeds it could be tough to keep up.  There was some challenge involved here–it was no walkover.  It took me two, even three times to get through some stages.

All things considered, this is definitely a game to get your hands on and wrap some smooth moves around.

Basically, in Hell’s Kitchen, much like the show you take on the role of an aspiring chef in the none too tender mercies of Gordon Ramsay. You’ll manage a kitchen and a dining room, seating patrons, taking orders, preparing and detailing food to be served.  Actually, you’ll just tell a waiter what to do by pointing and clicking with your Wiimote.   Everything you’ll do, from mixing ingredients to clearing dishes, is done by pointing and clicking the Wiimote.

You may be wondering how such a game could be on the Wii in the first place, let alone merely rated T, because as anyone who’s actually seen the show knows watching it on network TV ends up with it sounding like a Morse code tutorial as designed by someone on a whole lot of meth.  But they actually managed to pull it off by A. continuing the grand tradition of bleeping out any and all of Ramsay’s profane dialogue and B. making the game itself little more than a casual computer game knockoff with licensing bonuses.  Playing Hell’s Kitchen felt like nothing so much as a particularly deep episode of Diner Dash.

On the one hand, a casual game like Diner Dash is pretty well suited to the Wii’s admittedly inferior graphics capabiliities and control scheme that focuses on the point and click.  Adding on a license like Hell’s Kitchen actually boosts the credibility of things a bit, and gives it a connection to something people are already familiar with.  There’s also a really interesting strategy element here that bears mentioning–dishes are all made differently, and you may have three or four dishes to process per table.  Thus, you’ll have to figure out which ingredients you need, and in which order you need them.  You may need, for example, two eggs, three fruits and two grains.  If you’re smart you’ll already have one of each pre-made before you even start.  But then you’ll have to start preparing ingredients on the fly, seeing which dishes will take longest to prepare and taking advantage of the time lag to prepare the other ingredients.  Plus you’ll have to do the whole thing on the fly under a time limit.

See what I mean?  Despite the fact that this game is fairly simple there’s a lot of different permutations involved here, and getting your head around all of them can be downright difficult.  That dichotomy is actually kind of weird, and adds to the fun factor.  This game shouldn’t be this complex.  Or this entertaining.  And yet, it is.  There’s an odd sort of compulsion to this game that makes you long to jam your success in Ramsay’s smirking little maw and make it all the way to master chef.

And you’ll get the chance to do exactly that here. Even better, you’ll get actual recipes that you can try if you’re desperate to make an incredibly complex dish (seriously, there’s a recipe for a salad that requires BLANCHING vegetables.  I took one look at it and said, no, I think I’ll just cut some lettuce.).  But the key thing is, Hell’s Kitchen is a hell of a game.

In The Munchables, you’re part of a race of fuzzy little critters that inhabits the planet Star Ving, in which said critters do nothing but eat on a series of peaceful islands interconnected by rainbows.  You may wonder how critters that do nothing but eat can actually survive in their ecosystem–that’s thanks to the Legendary Orbs, gigantic stone structures that vaguely resemble…pudding?  I think that’s pudding.  But I’m terrified that it might be something much, much more disgusting.  Anyway, the Legendary Orbs generate a nonstop supply of food for the critters on the islands, and all is high-calorie heaven until a race of aliens shows up and steals the Legendary Orbs so that they too can become superpowerful monstrousities. All would be lost until one of the critters notices that, hey…these aliens, these “space pirates” as they’re called…look an awful lot like food.  And so, in what may be the single lowest point in interstellar diplomacy since Douglas Adams’ microscopic space fleet was inadvertently swallowed by a small dog, the Star Vingians proceed to eat their invaders.

And that is where you come in.  You’ll steer one of two Star Vingians around, eating anything that even vaguely looks edible and occasionally jumping.  If you find a food monster that is bigger than your mouth (you can tell by noting the “level” of both your character and the character you’re about to chow down on) you’ll have to attack it first to break it into smallish, bite-sized pieces.  Attacking boss characters is slightly more complex than this, however, and requires attacking weak points that will be clearly labelled for you.

As you grow in level, you’ll also PHYSICALLY grow–picture Katamari Damacy in which you don’t push the Katamari, but rather, you ARE the Katamari.  The control scheme is very simple, requiring the nunchuk to move your character around and a couple buttons on the Wiimote to perform the rest of your functions.  It’s also a fairly fun title.  Chowing down on the various enemies and swelling in size is an admittedly visceral thrill, but sometimes, the fun gets a little…strange.  See, at the end of every round, all that food you’ve eaten has to go somewhere…and where it goes…well, this is actually really creepy.  Your character will execute a one hundred eighty degree turn, visibly strain, and…spew a pile of sparkly multicolored orbs from its lower rear quadrant DIRECTLY onto an elderly onion.  Who will in turn seem very happy about this development, and assign you a letter grade based on how deep a pile of sparkly orbs you’ve landed him in.

I thought it was some kind of weird caffeine hallucination the first time I saw it, but then sure enough, the next round I’m burying an elderly onion in a pile of spherical dookie all over again.  And he’s happy about it.

This aside, The Munchables is a surprisingly fun title with some decent humor, graphics and gameplay.  it may not be a great long-term value but in the short term it almost certainly won’t disappoint.  A terrific rental, and possibly even a good buy, The Munchables is plenty tasty.

Yes, it’s true–the game that amounts to little more than a board game wherein mini-games are played to decide who wins and who loses has reached its eighth iteration with this one.  And, plotwise, that’s really all you do.  You’ll play, generally in a four player environment with computer players to make up the slack as needed when humans aren’t on hand (if it’s just you, you’ll play against a trio of computer players), a series of board games.  You’ll punch a dice cube above your head when it’s your turn, then you’ll proceed the correct number of spaces along the board, at which point you’ll receive rewards or punishments based on the rules and then proceed onto the next mini-game, and you’ll repeat for a certain number of turns.

Yes, it’s a little bit monotonous. No one ever said this sucker was going to be the kind of thing you’d ever mistake for high art.  Or low art.  Or any other kind of art, come to think of it.  There’s nothing really resembling a storyline here–in fact, the only thing that keeps Mario Party 8 from being nothing more than a second-rate collection of mini-games is that it’s actually a FIRST-rate collection of mini-games.  I admit that, when I played this, I had more than my share of fun, for about the first half-hour or so.  After that first half-hour, however, that’s when the boredom settled in.  It only started grating, though, and every time a new mini-game came up, the boredom lessened significantly.

Now, there’s a lot of appeal in a game like this.  Indeed, with three or more friends around this sucker’s probably incredible fun.  Even with one extra buddy in tow, Mario Party 8 could easily be a great time.  But if you’re playing this one by yourself, the limits of the fun are sorely strained.  In fact, the appeal in playing this one in single player mode is fairly well limited to the number of new mini-game experiences you can have.  Once you’ve played through all the different games, and all the different boards, and won all the various prizes you’re able to win, you might as well just unplug your Wiimote and take that sucker back to the store, because you’ve just done everything you could ever possibly do with this game.

Mario Party 8 isn’t the kind of game you can give a simple yea-or-nay review to.  It has a series of very specific applications that, if your intended use doesn’t fit them, will limit your enjoyment of this game by limiting its usefulness.  If you need a game to play with friends or as a short-term rental, then yes, absolutely, Mario Party 8 will do the job nicely.  The game is called Mario Party for a reason–take the hint.

If you thought you were a fan of the Gundam series, check this out — It was recently made known that a life-sized replica of an RX78 Gundam was rececently constructed and is nearing completion.

The statue came to existence to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Gundam franchise. The mammoth stands 59-feet tall and was constructed from a steel frame covered with fiberglass-reinforced plastic.

Unfortunately, the display will only stand for about 2-months in Obaiba’s Shiokaze Park however the statue’s 50-points of illumination along with 14-points of mist emission along with a moveable head will make for a great spectacle.

Read (DannyChoo)

In Help Wanted, you play a young man, or a young lady, whichever, who has a serious problem.  Their grandfather has discovered that an enormous meteor is heading straight for Earth and will destroy all life as we know it unless it can, somehow, be stopped.  But rather than call the police or the government or something, the old codger instead looks to his grandkids to—get this—take a series of odd jobs so that they can save enough money to buy various things from a series of home shopping networks that they can use to attack the meteor.

No, seriously.

That’s the entire plot of Help Wanted—the world can only be saved by cheap child labor.  Not that these kids’ labor is exactly cheap; many of the jobs you take on can net you as much as a hundred bucks a day or more.  And while you’re earning that money, you can spend it with a series of home shopping channels for new uniforms (allowing you to unlock new jobs), trophies of your previous jobs (which increase the amount of “shopping points” you get), support items (which make your jobs easier) and stuff to affect the meteor, either delaying its arrival or causing damage to it which will eventually make it break up and no longer pose a threat to Earth.

You’ll rapidly find, as you play Help Wanted, that there are some jobs you enjoy more than others, and some jobs you’re better at than others, and some jobs you just plain old can’t stand, just like in real life.  I, for example, found I was a positively crackerjack fisherman and action hero.  You may well discover a gift for babysitting and teaching, two things that some say aren’t that far removed.  But the key thing here is, there’s a lot to do and a lot of different THINGS to do.  Nothing really has a chance to get old or stale because you can switch to something completely different almost at will.

Sure, the graphics are a little low-end, as is the standard with the Wii, where its games are ported to the Playstation TWO rather than the three.  Sure, the characters couldn’t be much more chibi and cutesy.  But there’s a lot of humor here, and some of the cut scenes are a riot.  Consider the dog that runs away because he’s tired of playing the villain in the younger siblings’ games.  Upon his return, he’s given a special treat—a makeover and upgrade to hero.  This is not where the strangeness ends, but rather, is merely the beginning.

There’s a lot to like about this game—its constant variety and a soupcon of comedy besides—but I’ll caution you that it really is just another collection of mini games.  But this seems to be working out fairly well for the Wii.  And you should be fairly entertained by the whole thing too.

The plot is about what you’d expect for a game like this, where those brain-damage cases with bunny ears and horrible dental work, the Rabbids, are once again pursuing Rayman for reasons that probably only make sense to them, if they make sense to anyone at all.  From what I can tell, Rabbids were a race of extremely trusting idiots, kind and gentle, but wholly idiotic.  This left them the butt of numerous jokes, and, unable to take the abuse any longer, the Rabbids snapped, resulting in the lunatic wackjobs who beat anything and everything that comes nearby, including each other.  Anyway, due to a freak lightning strike, the Rabbids end up transported to an alternate dimension located inside a television.  Now the Rabbids have seized control of the programming and are recasting it in their own image, forcing you to play along.  The sheer parody value alone is worth the price of admission, as they’ve skewered most every TV show imaginable and several movies to bring you this game.

As is generally the case with games like this, you get a whole slew of things to do—the Rabbids have seized the entirety of cable, apparently—and you’ll get to choose the programming for the Rabbids’ new network by selecting one of several minigame choices for that day.  You might be playing music by shaking your Wiimote, or dancing (or doing aerobics) by holding it in a certain position.  You’ll shoot plungers at targets, you’ll drive a lawn mower, you’ll kill weeds, you’ll decimate towns with radioactive fire.  You’ll do literally hundreds of different things in the course of this game, and that’s what I love about it.

There is an INCREDIBLE variety here.  It is a time sink the likes of which I haven’t played since my last round of Fallout.  Seriously—I started this one last night and figured I’d play a bit this morning just to get reacquainted before I wrote it up.  I wanted a half hour…but by the time I noticed the clock again forty-five minutes had passed.

I didn’t even notice.  I lost almost an hour and I didn’t notice.

To me, that’s the surest sign of a game’s success—when I no longer care about time.  When I’m having so much fun playing a game that the clock no longer has any bearing, that’s a good game.  And that means this is a good game.  Sure, it’s simplistic. There’s no great and epic storyline here.  There’s decent sound and good graphics (for the Wii, anyway, which is always something of a laggard in graphics), and most importantly, a whole lot of fun.

Granted, if you don’t like simple games, and you crave a good story, Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party isn’t going to be the game for you.  You can look at the front of the box and tell it’s not going to be the game for you.  But if you want something fast and simple that’ll eat up a whole lot more time than you’ll ever see coming, then this is the game right here.

If you haven’t already had the chance to try this one, go.  Go and grab it.  This thing is downright amazing and I relish every moment.  Chances are, you will too.

If soda drinking isn’t your cup of tea, you can always enter the video contest and make your own Rock Band music video for a chance at an MTV Video Music Award Moonman. More details about the sweepstakes can be found on the official website.

via GameSpot

This story probably isn’t for those who strongly dislike any time of creepy crawler but anyways — A user by the name of VictoriousOne recently posted about a PS2 slim he purchased off Craiglist on the GameTrailers forums.

To make a long story short, his fat PS2 stopped behaving so he bought a $30 PS2 slim off Craigslist. After about 2 months of use it too stopped behaving so he decided to crack it open only to find dead cockroaches, cockroach eggs, and cockroach feces splattered all over the console’s innards.

Yeah, it’s disgusting, head over to the forums for more pictures like the one above and think twice before you buy something off Craigslist.