Gadgets and Video Games

Justice takes center stage in the latest, and perhaps last trailer for Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening (which is due out this week). Justice is actually a “person,” and not the principle — a ghost trapped in a human body by a sorceress. Uh-huh, it’s up to you to help him escape this mortal dilemma. To make things worse, Justice’s “new” body is basically Christian Bale’s body (and not the Batman one). In other words, he’s a skeleton tightly wrapped in skin.

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New Dragon Age Awakening character needs to go eat a sandwich or something

Click to descend into the Lair of Screenshots If you and your friends are eager to dive into a monster-filled dungeon — and who isn’t — then Bethesda has a thrilling announcement for you: The publisher is handling a new co-op fantasy action game, Hunted: The Demon’s Forge , developed by Interplay founder Brian Fargo’s InXile Entertainment. Fargo describes Hunted as an “upcoming release that takes us back to our roots,” and the screenshots (in our gallery below) paint a pretty clear picture of what that could mean: warriors and archers putting holes in orc-looking things with sharp objects and magic .

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Bethesda & InXile announce ‘Hunted: The Demon’s Forge,’ a co-op ‘roots’ game

Last week, Realtime Worlds MMO APB featured prominently during an in-booth press conference held at GDC. The game was playable (though, sadly, not by me), and the audience was treated to a live demo lead by the developer’s founder, ex-DMA and Grand Theft Auto co-creator, David Jones. Using two separate PCs hooked up to their own projection setups, Jones and another Realtime Worlds staffer hopped onto one of the game’s servers and began by giving a tour of one of three main areas, the Social District. As its name implies, this area — which reminded me more than a little of PlayStation Home — is where players can meet up, trade or sell their items, build custom music in the game’s built-in sequencer and buy a new set of wheels (or upgrade their current rides). When talking about the latter, Jones showed the vehicle customization tool, which featured not only cosmetic mods (custom designs can be sold to other players) but performance and aerodynamic tinkering, as well

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GDC Impressions: APB

In its first week at retail, Final Fantasy XIII charged up the UK sales charts like a Lightning bolt, becoming the “fastest selling” game of the year — a record set by Bad Company 2 just last week . According to Chart-Track , the console sales split for the latest edition in Square Enix’s flagship series was fairly even, with a 54 to 46 percent split on PS3 and Xbox 360, respectively.

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Final Fantasy XIII tops UK sales chart, Just Dance shows stamina

Microsoft has announced the date for your return trip to Pacific City … when you’ll tear it to shreds in the name of justice! Crackdown 2 will launch in North America on July 6, with Asia, Australia and New Zealand releases following on July 8, and Europe’s on July 9 — narrowly missing the ” first half of 2010 ” release estimate. Producer James Cope previously said that a demo will be forthcoming before the release of the game, so we’ll be playing some small portion of Crackdown 2 sooner than July 6. We’re going to start playing even sooner than that, actually — our dreams are littered with orbs. [Update: New multiplayer ViDoc embedded above.] Gallery: Crackdown 2 Crackdown 2 touches down July 6 originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:57:00 EST

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Crackdown 2 touches down July 6

Today’s Wii downloadable releases look like they’ll work nicely together. When Medusa heads have murdered you enough times in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood , you can switch over to Rage of the Gladiator and smash them in first person! Gallery: Rage of the Gladiator (Nintendo Media Summit 2010) Continue reading NintendoWare Weekly: Rage of the Gladiator, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood NintendoWare Weekly: Rage of the Gladiator, Castlevania: Rondo of Blood originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds . Read

As part of the GamesBeat “fireside chat” series during GDC 2010 , Bungie’s Joseph Staten and BioWare’s Ray Muzyka discussed some of the challenges with maintaining big, huge franchises with Spike TV’s Geoff Keighley . Staten noted that Bungie originally “had absolutely no 10 year plan” for the Halo franchise. Now, for Bungie’s next project — the one that isn’t part of the Halo franchise — Staten said that “the responsible thing to do” is to “create something with legs,” adding that it’s easier to secure funding with a project that has long term potential for investors. Muzyka added that it’s important to create a product that keeps players emotionally engaged, so that they anticipate the next installment. When asked about how much consumer feedback, affects the development of a franchise, Muzyka pointed to the many changes that BioWare made to the various systems of Mass Effect when creating Mass Effect 2

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Bungie & BioWare discuss franchise maintenance at GDC

We’ve read all the available info about the new Modern Warfare 2 map collection ” Stimulus Package ,” but we still didn’t have an answer to the big question on everyone’s mind: “Is that the game with a bunch of guys or the one with the beards ?” That, we still don’t know. However, we’ve gotten an answer to the second biggest question from Xbox Live’s Major Nelson : The five maps (three new, two remakes) will run you 1200 MS points or $15. As a basis for comparison, the “Variety” map pack for Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ran 800 points ($10) for four new maps

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Modern Warfare 2 ‘Stimulus Package’ costs $15

Filed under: Mac , PC , Meta (about Joystiq) GDC 2010 is history and, as predicted, there was quite a bit of news from the world’s largest annual gathering of game creators. Let’s review the past week and see what we can find: Exclusive features Supreme Commander 2 review : We give our final verdict to Gas Powered Games’ sci-fi RTS sequel. Boot Disk : Our retro games feature checks out the original version of Serious Sam: The First Encounter . Command and Conquer Canon Retrospective : Ahead of this coming week’s release of C&C4 , we look back at the fictional history of the RTS game series. All You Need To Know : This week, our 411 column gives you the info on R.U.S.E

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The Best of Big Download: March 8-14

[Flickr user Kossy@FINEDAYS ] If you guys like mathematical equations — and, since you’re a regular reader of the Japanese hardware sales feature, we’re guessing you are — then you’re going to love this little ditty we whipped up earlier today: “A blogger flies west across three time zones at 450mph for five hours. Upon his arrival, he covers a week-long gaming convention .

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Japanese hardware sales, March 1 – March 7: Jetlagged edition