News

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode 2 launches for XBLA on Wednesday May 15 for 1200MSP. The conclusion to Episode 1 looks to be pretty intense with a lot of high …
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Joy Ride Turbo will release on May 23 for 800 MSP, according to Major Nelson. Developed by Vancouver-based Big Park Studios, the kart racer is a follow-up to …
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Now that the Arcade Next promotion is over, and Minecraft and Trials Evolution are breaking records all over the place, Microsoft seem to celebrating with a huge sale. If …
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This week’s Deal of the Week comes with a Kinect flavour. From 15-May to 21-May, you can chop, dance, balance or strike a pose till your hearts content with …
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It’s official: those psychotic bats and jokers are clinically insane. Gotham City Impostors will soon be receiving a new map based in Arkham Asylum, free of charge. The new map brings …
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When the Xbox 360 launched in November of 2005, the console wars were largely viewed as a two-horse race. Nintendo’s Wii was an afterthought in the minds of most industry analysts and executives — a belief that would be proven correct in terms of relevance among the traditional gamer audience, but so very wrong on the sales front, as it marched on to over 95 million units sold worldwide as of March. Rather, both popular and informed opinion said the battle would be fought between Sony and Microsoft.

Sony had spent the past 10 years decimating Nintendo and Sega’s positions as dominant forces in the industry by appealing to an older consumer and making the PlayStation 2 the best-selling home console of all time with more than 150 million consoles sold as of the end of last year. After having replaced the name “Nintendo” with “PlayStation” as a synonym for video games, the Tokyo, Japan-based electronics empire was feeling as invincible as Superman. With Nintendo having done its damnedest to torpedo its relationships with third-party developers and the software behemoth in Washington looking like the proverbial babe in the woods when it came the console biz, Sony could see no kryptonite in sight. Of course, few outsiders did either at the time.

Had it not allowed the pride that success brought to convince it that sinking so much of its PS and PS2 profits into the foolhardy enterprise of out-muscling the Xbox 360 with the PlayStation 3, however, it might have foreseen that it was on a path to learn the same hard and humbling lesson it had itself taught Nintendo. Instead, it produced an expensively priced machine that arrived a year late to the party and quickly built a reputation, fair or not, of being notoriously difficult to develop for. Geekwire reports that when he spoke to the Northwest Entrepreneur Network last week, Robbie Bach, former president of Microsoft’s Entertainment & Devices Division, highlighted how Sony’s miscalculations and mismanaged generational shift opened the door for the 360 to become the hugely profitable success that it is today.

“When you’re doing a startup, you need friends. It’s just the way life works,” Bach said. “It turned out we were able to convince retailers and publishers like Activision, Electronic Arts and others, that it was a good thing for Microsoft to be successful, because if we were not successful, the only game in town was Sony. Being dependent on somebody else was bad for them, and so they supported us disproportionately to what they should have, mathematically.”

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More people watch Web video via their Xbox 360s than on any other non-PC device, according to newly released data from online video ad company Freewheel. According to the …
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Trials Evolution, RedLynx‘s wonderfully infuriating sequel, broke records a few weeks ago. After a day, Mojang‘s build-em-up Minecraft looked set to beat that record. Microsoft has now confirmed Minecraft Xbox 360 Edition has eclipsed previous XBLA …
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After a showing at PAX East, we knew the release of Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown was on the horizon of summer. Now we have a confirmed release date …
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Hungarian based production company NeocoreGames, famed for tactical RPG King Arthur, have announced that they are currently developing a new action RPG for PC and XBLA, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing. The game, which is said to be loosely based on Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula, will follow the son of the famed hunter, known in-game as Van Helsing, to the dismal land of Borgovia where former supernatural foes have enlisted his help to defeat a new scourge terrorizing the ravaged Eastern European city. Viktor Juhász, lead writer at NeocoreGames said of the project:

“Being located in Eastern Europe and having experience developing RPGs, Van Helsing is a natural fit for us; it’s a project where we can demonstrate our expertise in both domains and create something novel that RPG fans can appreciate”

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is slated for a late Q4 2012 release and we’ve got some concept art for you to enjoy after the jump.

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