SAN FRANCISCO — Search behemoth Google buttered up the game development community at the Game Developers Conference Wednesday by handing out free mobile phones. At the tail end of the panel “Bring Your Games to Android” presented by Jack Palevich — the programmer who recently ported Quake to the Android platform — representatives from the company gifted a Motorola Droid to every developer who listened in on Palevich’s... 

SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference. Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that $15/month get you? Access to OnLive’s service, but no games — those will have... 

You might have heard that Square Enix recently shipped a new entry in the all-but-forgotten Lufia series of role-playing games in Japan. Or maybe you didn’t. Called Estpolis: The Land Cursed by the Gods in Japan, the game shipped in late February to little fanfare and meager sales (it didn’t even make the top 10). So it’s definitely…  Read More →

It’s officially official: Valve will bring its Steam online distribution service and titles from its massive library of hit games to the Mac this April, the company confirmed Monday. The successful content-delivery service will bring Valve titles like Left 4 Dead and the upcoming Portal 2 , as well as games from other publishers, to Apple computers for the first time. The move was telegraphed last week in a series of teaser posters that... 

Portal 2 is real, and coming this Christmas, Valve said Friday. And it looks like Mac owners might get to share the love. The Seattle gamemaker announced that it would release the sequel to Portal , its space-time-bending, hilarious 2007 sleeper hit later this year. If you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Game Informer magazine . And Valve’s not done making waves: A slate of teaser images released this... 

After much deliberation, Microsoft has changed its policy about self-identifying one’s sexual preference, race, religion or nationality via its Xbox Live online service. In an open letter written Friday , Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the Xbox Live Terms of Use and Code of Conduct will now allow players to “more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles.”... 

The most important thing to understand about Final Fantasy XIII , the latest in the world’s most popular line of role-playing games, is that it isn’t a role-playing game. You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask its creators: In a recent interview, the director of this PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game (available March 9) said the changes he made to this installment were so dramatic that it constituted a “ new genre... 

The Tester marches on, inexorably, indifferent to our anguish. Eight contestants are left in Sony’s reality dog-and-pony show, in which the hapless participants are made to debase themselves in search of a job. The Tester would be some of the most boring and uneventful 22 minutes in television if it were on television, but instead it is on the PlayStation Network. At the end of this series, one contestant “wins” a position... 

Harmonix launched the Rock Band Network music store on Thursday, featuring over 100 songs created by end users. Rock Band Network works with the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band 2 . From the average user’s perspective, it’s just another source of music; 100 more songs from obscure indie bands as well as acts like Flogging Molly and Steve Vai. But these songs weren’t created in-house; they were put together by independent music-makers... 

What’s up with Square Enix’s Nier , anyway? We’re a little over a month away from the release of this Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game, yet we don’t know a whole heck of a lot about it. It’s an action role-playing game developed by the hit-or-miss folks at Cavia ( Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles , but also …  Read More →

TOKYO — Japanese arcades have long relied on shooting games and music games to draw in customers from the street. I suppose it was inevitable that the two would merge. Alongside the latest Japanese arcade games on display at the AOU Expo on February 20, Taito unveiled a “music shooting” game that the company says is the beginning of a new genre. Like the multitudinous other music games that litter Japanese game centers, Music... 

The venerable heavy metal record label Roadrunner Records has released a five-song EP inspired by the forthcoming videogame God of War III . God of War: Blood & Metal , featuring songs by Killswitch Engage, Dream Theater, Trivium, Opeth and Taking Dawn, is free to those who purchase the $100 God of War III Ultimate Edition bundle. Otherwise, the EP can be downloaded for just $2 at Shockhound . Headbanger Ben Apatoff from Metal Injection... 

First Asteroids . Then Missile Command . Now, Hollywood is making a movie out of Space Invaders . The Los Angeles Times reported Tuesday that Warner Brothers is negotiating with Taito to grab the rights to the classic arcade game. If the deal goes through, Mark Gordon, Jason Blub and Guymon Casady will produce. In 2009, Universal won the rights to produce a movie based on the Atari classic Asteroids . Last month, the Times reported that Atari... 

Activision Blizzard will release new games in the Call of Duty first-person shooter series in 2010 and 2011, plus a game that takes the series into the action-adventure genre, it said Tuesday. The details of the blockbuster war-game franchise follow the shocking news that Jason West and Vince Zampella, the top execs at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward, were ousted from the company . Activision confirmed the pair’s... 

Sony has acquired Media Molecule, the developer behind innovative game LittleBigPlanet , which allows PlayStation 3 owners to create, share and play their own videogame levels. The announcement, made in a press release Tuesday, said that Media Molecule would become a part of Sony Computer Entertainment’s global gaming business as part of SCE Worldwide Studios. Media Molecule was founded by Lionhead Studios alumni in 2006. Their first game...