Cards like these won't work anymore.

In what's most likely an effort to help combat piracy, Microsoft is potentially hurting thousands of legitimate customers by disabling unauthorized third party memory cards and storage on the Xbox 360 following the upcoming dashboard update.

Xbox Live's Major Nelson warns that users better "back up profiles and saves" stored on these devices to "authorized" memory devices, because once the update hits it'll wipe your content.

Read More...

Let's face it, it's been a long time since we've known there wouldn't be campaign co-op in Modern Warfare 2.  We got a short quote about how it didn't fit into the single player campaign, and that was that.  We argued, and kicked dirt at the umpire, but really it didn't solve anything.  But now we get a little more detail behind the decision from Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling.

Read More...

Anyone who pays any attention to video game releases knows about exclusive pre-order deals for in-game content. Until a year ago, that content was a statue, a figure, a hat, or something we'd consider "swag" in the gaming world. That all changed when retailers and publishers started releasing codes for in-game content. It started off as a gold-colored Lancer for Gears of War 2, or a Warthog with flames on the sides for Halo Wars. While these were merely collectibles that changed in-game aesthetics, it has recently evolved to game-altering exclusives. I'm talking about exclusive characters or gameplay modes that could potentially change the experience of the game itself.

In one of the most brutal and honest interviews I've seen in a long time, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell lays out the state of PC gaming on the table.  You can tell the man has a chip on his shoulder, and he's not afraid to tell the world about digital distribution, Microsoft's shortcomings, and the fact that company's flat out lie about their sales.

With digital distribution becoming more popular, it seems that most have been clamoring that "retail is dead" - but that's simply not the case.  There's a reason we haven't seen numbers from Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse and other digital platforms - they simply aren't as impressive.

Read More...

If you read our impressions of the Uncharted 2 beta a few weeks back, and were a bit jealous to get your hands on the Gold Rush co-op mode, I have good news.  Today is the day that everyone else, those that didn't preorder from Gamestop, gets to have access to the same demo.  

The demo goes live at 2PM EDT and contains two co-op modes and a handful of versus modes across four maps.  The full game is set to release on October 13th exclusively on the PlayStation 3.

Read More...

Majesty 2 released on Friday, September 18th, a game I've been ridiculously excited about. It's as much a re-imagining of Majesty as it is a sequel, as it's been so long since the original came out.

If you never played Majesty, it's an odd combination of SimCity + World of Warcraft + The Sims. Weird, yeah. But it was fun and it worked. You basically built the buildings of your empire, had a simple tech tree and recruited heroes. You had no direct control over heroes. Each class had a unique AI and would pursue its own goals. But, you could encourage heroes to do what you wanted by placing reward flags around the map with money attached to them. Later in a game, you could directly influence the world through a variety of spells to aid your heroes (healing, buff and attack spells).

Read More...

It's quite surprising sometime the politics that go on behind the scenes of game development.  For a hobby that brings so much joy to people, you'd think things could go smoothly on the back end.  That's not always the case.  When Crackdown 2 was announced, and announced in development by upstart Ruffian Studios, well you can imagine Realtime Worlds wasn't happy.  

Read More...

The fate of the four player co-op game, Aliens: Colonial Marines, hinges on the success of another game that just so happens to have a co-op mode; Aliens versus Predator.  So while the Gearbox developed Colonial Marines, a title with a promised four player cooperative campaign was announced first, it's the latter game with the add-on survival mode that will decide when, and possibly if, Colonial Marines ships.

Read More...

It's a case of timing is everything.  If only the Left 4 Dead DLC was announced and released before E3 this year, the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement wouldn't have been met with such resistance, at least, that's what Valve thinks.

"I think in this case we just didn't message correctly, we didn't make it clear that Left 4 Dead was still going to be updated. We just didn't think to mention it, we were focusing on other stuff."

Read More...

If there's one thing that can be said about Halo 3's online mode is that it's full of...uh, an unsophisticated style of behavior.  This won't be a problem for Halo 3: ODST's co-op modes, including Firefight, because unless you are friends with some dimwits - you won't be using matchmaking to fill a co-op game.

Curtis Creamer, one of the game's producers, had this to say as to why:

“That was basically one of the limitations we had, that we couldn’t just add matchmaking for Firefight because it was based upon the cooperative Campaign gameplay.

“It would’ve been a massive technical rewrite of code, and we didn’t think it would have been the right thing to invest in anyway because it’s meant to be a cooperative experience you have with friends.”

Read More...