It’s something more marketing folks should try: there’s a simple, somewhat illicit method of obtaining the Chromehounds demo on your filthy American Xbox 360: just make a new, free, Xbox Live Silver account and fill in “Australia” as your country of origin. Log in to Live with that account and you beat the system that is unfairly denying you a demo of next-gen mech combat.

It’s hacking-lite. It gets you posted on blogs. It’s certainly more fun and more immediate than loving bees.

Aeropause gets the credit for being the place I noticed this trick, which may or may not work. I can’t verify, since I don’t even have an Xbox 360 due to me not being related to an old lady with a limited vocabulary. My new grandpa-in-law plays Civilization III or Diablo II just about every day, but he talks like a human being instead of a sailor, so I doubt anyone would care.

This is not a discussion about whether or not there should be games about prison.

(more…)

Seafaring ghost stories may be as old and as common as The Flying Dutchman, but add a little bit of comic relief and apparently you are stepping on Ron Gilbert’s toes. If peg legs even have feet with toes. They probably do on Monkey Island, which he invented after watching WLVI one of the five thousand afternoons they ran The Flintstones back-to-back with the “Go Away Ghost Ship” episode of Scooby-Doo (pictured).

But you don’t see Hanna or Barbera blogging about that. Probably because one of them is dead and the other one receives a daily comeuppance from the incarnated spirit of Justice in return for pushing Scrappy Doo. But even if they weren’t inanimate or having their liver gnawed out every day only to have it grow back every night, they’d be able to admit that Ron did his own thing, and did it very, very well.

After eight years of consistently producing commercially successful titles for various leading publishers, Edge of Reality has decided the time is right to give life to its own internal vision.

…

In Cipher Complex, a recon satellite is mysteriously blasted from orbit, and when diplomatic requests for information are stonewalled, the US government is forced to call in its last resort – Operative John Cipher. Charged with uncovering the truth by any means necessary, Cipher is going behind enemy lines to extract information the hard way.

Don’t you mean the complex way?

Though the real question is: how much high-tech espionage stuff can you do saddled with an old-timey, hand-cranked nazi-code-breaking machine sort of last name? Especially when your first name is just John. Put it this way: if these guys were making a porn game, the lead’s name would probably be Joseph “Marital” Act.

In fact, unless there’s a swerve in the plot and you get transported back in time to Little House on the Prairie and help Laura pass her frontier arithmetic exam with your super surname powers, I’m going to have to pass on this one from the get-go.

Our latest episode of virulent misinformation has been incubating since Wednesday, but went pneumonic today when Penny Arcade got all hot and bothered about Assassin’s Creed having multiplayer co-operative play. Co-op? Really?

(more…)

Metafuture, in cooperation with the Prey demo, is pleased to present this handy, concise guide to the history and customs of the Native American tribe known as the Cherokee.

(more…)

When you’re dying of tuberculosis at age 39, in your final hours you may have a fever dream. In that dream you may be an anime version of yourself in a world where the terminally ill have magic powers.

Well, it could happen. Turns out Japan would like to say that it happened to Chopin— who did in fact die of tuberculosis at 39, but most likely was dreaming about drowning or being crushed instead— and use that as the premise for an RPG. Since it stars Chopin and a cute, also terminally ill little girl, I’m guessing it will have a little bit of pathos as well as a small portion of piano music.

Personally, I can’t wait, but if it’s not your bag maybe Rockstar will entertain your suggestion of a knockoff based on the syphilitic final ravings of Al Capone.

Read – New Namco RPG For 360 [IGN]

Quite an international effort! AKA Capcom’s other survival horror series, Clock Tower was never quite the big deal here as it was in Japan, where the franchise is a million-seller. There, the twin market crackers— brutal slasher violence and girls in school uniforms— overcome the dense and twisty trial-and-error, multiple-ending gameplay. Here, we care even less than the translators and voice actors that did the localizations.

But maybe that’s being a little harsh. The cutscenes do frequently pull off some good horror. Despite that, a movie isn’t really going to feel a whole lot like playing Clock Tower. It’s supposed to be about you finding hiding places to escape the killers, whose only weakness is thinking that there’s no way you’d be hiding in a closet in the room they just saw you go into. If you can ignore the gameplay contrivance, though, it can pull you in and be suspenseful. The music cues help a lot. Watching a person on a movie screen doing the same thing, however, will just encourage you to point out how dumb it is and the music will come off as hammy.

Regardless of what I think though, good luck to this Jorge Olguin fellow directing the movie, as I’ve never met a Jorge I didn’t like. You’ve got until production begins this fall to find a way to make it work.