A fan of the 2001 GameCube game Wave Race: Blue Storm found a long-buried Easter egg in the racing game this week. The code, posted to the NeoGAF message board by user “Raoul Duke,” unlocks a sardonic commentary track that insults the player at every move. “You don’t have an inferiority complex,” the announcer quips. “You’re just inferior.” The code seems “pretty elaborate,” says Chris... 

Final Fantasy XIV . Image courtesy Square Enix Square Enix will commence open beta testing of Final Fantasy XIV at 7 p.m. Pacific time Wednesday. The beta test of the new MMO was meant to begin on Tuesday, but was postponed when the Japanese gamemaker discovered “critical” bugs in the code. Final Fantasy XIV , due out September 30 on PC and in March 2011 for PlayStation 3, is the company’s first foray into the MMO space since... 

Christopher Lloyd will reprise his role as Dr. Emmet Lathrop “Doc” Brown in the Back to the Future videogame, publisher Telltale Games said Wednesday. This will be the first time the actor has portrayed the harried inventor of time travel since Universal Studios launched Back to the Future: The Ride in 1991. Telltale announced its intention to revive the classic 80’s films as a videogame series earlier this year. Through a... 

Case Zero , a downloadable game for Xbox 360, gives players a few hours’ worth of the zombie beatdowns that the full Dead Rising 2 game will feature in September. Image courtesy Capcom Let’s not mince words. Dead Rising 2: Case Zero is a demo that costs five bucks. It’s still worth it. The idea of paying real money for a hands-on preview of a game might be a bitter pill for frugal gamers. But Case Zero , an exclusive prequel... 

Fantasy University , a new Facebook game, uses parodic characters with classic role-playing game mechanics to draw in gamers that want more complexity than FarmVille . Image courtesy Simutronics Though Facebook games have a reputation for being addictive, they’re also seen as far too simple to satisfy the serious gamer. David Whatley, president and CEO of Simutronics, hopes that his company’s new game will live up to the rigorous... 

Hudson will donate 10 cents for every Facebook user that clicks the “Like” button on its forthcoming game Lost In Shadow . Child’s Play is a pet charity of the videogame set. The organization, founded by Penny Arcade cartoonists Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik, raises cash for children’s hospitals, providing toys, games, books and movies to sick kids. It’s not uncommon for game companies to tie Child’s Play... 

Disney Interactive Studios unveiled the collector’s edition of Tron: Evolution on Monday. The high-end package, slated to come out on December 7 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, will include an exclusive Tron light cycle model crafted by Sideshow Collectibles. The special edition retails for $130 and comes with a plastic display case for the light cycle, which has a drawer underneath for storing your game. Tron: Evolution bridges the... 

Microsoft will increase the price of a subscription to its Xbox Live online gaming service later this year, it said Monday. Via the Major Nelson blog, the Xbox 360 maker announced that a one-year Xbox Live account will now cost $60 instead of $50 effective November 1. The prices of one- and six-month subscriptions will also increase, as will certain subscription plans in Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom. The fee increase comes as “no... 

Nintendo will lower the prices of its DSi line of portable game hardware next month, it said Monday. The company’s Nintendo DSi will be lowered from $170 to $150 and the DSi XL will go from $190 to $170 starting on September 12, the launch day of Professor Layton and the Unwound Future . The low-end DS Lite hardware will remain at $130, the price point at which it was launched in June 2006. In July, Nintendo said it lost $289 million in... 

> > View all Metroid: Other M is the exact kind of game Nintendo said it wasn’t making anymore. Sometime during the last generation of game consoles, everybody decided that action games had to be big cinematic to-dos stuffed with lengthy movie sequences, Hollywood actors and epic storylines. Everybody except Nintendo, that is, who said “No thanks, we’ll just make Wii Sports forever” and then made sure that its flagship... 

Used games stacked deep at an Xtra-Vision store in Ireland. Photo: Cian Ginty/Flickr Debates over used games aren’t entirely about used games, just an uncertain industry looking for an easy villain. The old back-and-forth over used game sales got kicked off again this week thanks to these comments from THQ creative director Cory Ledesma, per the company’s introduction of a one-time use code for online gameplay in its World Wrestling... 

Chiptune artist Moldilox released a pair of songs last month for a videogame that never existed. The two tunes , composed with the program MilkyTracker, are meant to be lost songs from the soundtrack to a NES game called Fourteen — a cart based on a bizarre manga of the same name by Kazuo Umezu . The manga does indeed exist. Sadly, we are not fortunate enough to live in a universe where there was an 8-bit videogame that told the story... 

Wheatley guides the player through GLaDOS’s murderous assembly line. Valve released new footage from Portal 2 yesterday. The clip (embedded below) features the debut of actor Stephen Merchant as Wheatley — a quirky A.I. that aids the player in their return to the Aperture Science complex. Wheatley was unveiled at E3 this June and was temporarily voiced by Valve animator Richard Lord . If the video is any…  Read More →

“My goal is that people who work here love it here and talk about it,” says Klei Entertainment’s Jamie Cheng. Photo courtesy Jamie Cheng To the outside world, Jamie Cheng appeared to be working his dream job. It was 2005, and Cheng was an AI programmer at Relic, a game design studio based in Vancouver, British Columbia, that had just been acquired by superpublisher THQ. Cheng had designed the artificial intelligence for strategy... 

The videogame Portal is required reading for some Wabash College freshmen this year. Michael Abbott, a teacher at the liberal arts college in Indiana, explained Friday how Valve’s first-person puzzler wound up on a reading list alongside work by Aristotle and Shakespeare. Earlier in the year, Abbott found himself on a committee to create the curriculum for a mandatory freshman seminar called “Enduring Questions” –a class...