2 Cents Gaming

There is only one news, today, as far as I’m concerned, and that’s that Beyond Good & Evil, one of the single greatest and most criminally underplayed and underappreciated titles of all time, is getting a sequel. Despite a whole bunch of you out there not, you know, playing it.

The continuation of the adventures of Jade and Pey’J makes me so incredibly happy I may actually break into dance.

But as you don’t get to see me dancing, hit up 1UP and watch the supposedly fully in game introduction trailer.

Empire’s slow news day is something I will gleefully post for everyone to take a gander at - Batman is the latest “face” for the Got Milk? Campaign, in full new suity goodness.

Click the pic for a bigger version, on Empire’s website.

Nice of them to wait a full week after it was confirmed for us in a released EGM story.

According to Eurogamer, the press release states that the game will be enhanced and feature new content. Which might just mean it’ll have the free DLC released towards the end of last year included on the disc.

Still, anyone with a PS3 only, now’s your chance to pick up one of the greatest games ever made.

PALGN has a report up from one of it’s Aussie readers, detailing what censorship occured in the Australian release of Grand Theft Auto IV. According to the article:

According to Mick, when players pick up a prostitute in the Australian version, there is no way to select a ’service’ from the prostitute. The sexual intercourse sex animation has also been completely removed, so players will only see the car bounce from a locked rear-view. In the uncut version, after selecting a service from the prostitute, players can rotate the camera to see the prostitute’s actions.

Also in the Australian version, no blood pools will appear beneath a dead person after shooting or stabbing them to death. There are blood splatters, but no blood pools. In the uncut version, blood will slowly ooze out from under a body, and it is possible to create bloody footprints by walking through the blood, or bloody tyre tracks from driving through it. Finally, when Niko or other NPCs are injured in the uncut version, light blood patches appear on their bodies which basically represent bruises/bullet wounds.

No other changes were made. The hooker thing is just the way things were in prior GTA games, and honestly, the “sex” animations don’t add much to the game anyway, and I don’t believe I ever noticed blood oozing under a body. Then again, never really hung around the bodies much…

News found via Gamepolitics.

MTV Multplayer has a short note up regarding an interview with Alex Navarro, one of the Gamespot reviewers who left in the furor surrounding Gerstmanngate (forgot about that, hadn’t you?) regarding a note that found it’s way into the reviewers hands, regarding the review of a Wii game, most likely prior to sending them a copy of the game for release.

If the review is 9.0 or higher you can post immediately. Lower than 9.0, could you please hold until launch day, November 19th? Thanks

According to the interview, Gamespot really does - or did - have the ethics they were accused of not having in the whole Kane and Lynch debacle, as they instead reviewed the game off of a copy bought from the store.

 Found via Kotaku

Rachel Shukert writes on Salon.com (a site I hesitate to read further on, due to the fact that it may or may not be the online equivalent of one of those magazines you find in the dentists office) about how Rock Band saved her marriage.

Ok, so that may be hyperbole. But she was, until her husband brought home Rock Band, a gaming widow. She’d sit by, and despair, while her husband and his noise cancelling headphones killed whatever the enemy of the day was. Rock Band made it possible for them to have a gaming activity they could enjoy together, and thereby removed the gaming from the widow, and seeing as her husband was still alive, kind of nixed the widow part too.

Of course, there may have been something slightly wrong with the man anyway, as he turned down boobies to play a World War II shooter.

Article found via Eurogamer

Michael Hollick, the voice actor who gave a great performance as Niko Bellic in Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV received $100,000 for his performance, recorded over 15 months. Not bad, you might say.

Then you consider the $600,000,000 that GTA IV made in two weeks, and are slapped around the head with the fact that Michael won’t see any of that. He won’t see any money from the TV ads they showed, or the internet ads - he won’t see any more than that $100,000 for being one of the most famous voices in the world at the moment.

Hollick himself said, in an interview with the New York Times

It’s tough, when you see Grand Theft Auto IV out there as the biggest thing going right now, when they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it.

I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games

The unions, according to the article on Yahoo! Games, have absolutely no provisions for electronic media. What this means, in practice? We’ll probably start seeing less and less of the talent that we’ve started to become used to in our game actors performances, and be back to such memorable lines as “you were almost a Jill Sandwich.” And we all remember with how much passion that was delivered.

Here’s hoping this is something they can sort out soon, as these folks deserve to get paid for part of what they make successful - and let’s hope that it doesn’t result in a strike similar to the writer’s strike of last year.

Thanks to Shan, again, who found this article before I even had a look.

Cool School : Where Peace Rules was released as a response to the Columbine massacre of 1999. Not to bash violent games, but, as a video game itself, to teach children that non-violent conflict resolution is a viable means to an end.

Currently, trials have been undertaken in Illinios schools, where it’s been found to be very effective, as well as, strangely for an educational game, reported as being fun from the 5 to 7 year olds it was aimed at. 

And, rather than release it across the country at elementary schools, Congress decides to cut funding to the game, leaving it with no way to currently be distributed, in what can only be described as a bloody huge screwup.

Thanks to Shan for sharing the article she found on Yahoo! Games with me, and thanks to Yahoo! Games for not only bringing that particular issue to light, but pointing out that the government has no problem continuing to fund Americas Army - where you don’t even have the choice of non-violence.

And remember - the next time your state representative goes off on video games, remind them that the government had to chance to show they weren’t gigantic hypocrites and blew it, big time.

IGN has confirmation that Street Fighter IV is coming out on three platforms when it’s released later this year - Xbox 360, PS3, and, somewhat surprising-but-not, PC. And, well, that’s pretty much that. No new character reveals, no new moves, no new movies, just confirmation of something we all pretty much knew.

I know one person around here who’s looking forward to this, or, at least, the thighs of one of the characters.

1UP has a list of what might, soon, be titles removed from the the Xbox Live Arcade Service. Apparently, there are three criteria:

• Available more than 6 months
• Average Metacritic Score of less than 65
• Demo-to-Full conversion of leess than 6%.

With only two of those available to the public, MyGen put together the list, which found it’s way around the web. List will be after the jump, but before then - using Metacritic as a measuring tool for business practices is not the smartest move Microsoft could have made. They already admit that they give more “weight” to popular sites, rather than the same weight to every reviewer, and Metacritics own conversion scale (say, for converting a “star” rating or a “letter” rating to numbers) is severly broken. Perhaps another standard might be used.

Read on for the list of possible - completely unofficial - deletion candidates.

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Penny Arcades first gaming effort, the first episode of an RPG series, shattered the previous 3 days sales record on Xbox Live, garnering $300,000. It’s not surprising, considering the game will run you $20, a little pricey, but still worth it to my mind. It was actually one of the more challenging RPGs I’ve played in some time.

VG Chartz has all the charty goodness and breakdowns galore, the sorts of things I don’t do here because… well… I have an irrational fear of charts.

News found via Kotaku.

Or, at least, kind of.

Empire has the news that the comic within the comic, the story of the Tales of the Black Freighter, will be getting a fully animated DVD release just after the movie, in order to whet our appetites.

However, Tales of the Black Freighter really doesn’t have much to do with the full story of Watchmen, being more of an aside - an extra little alternative the creators threw in as a creative little side story, concerning the fact that in a world with real super heroes, comics like Superman didn’t gain much popularity, with instead comics about Pirates being the big thing.

This is just all slightly odd. My feeling is that they knew they couldn’t dedicate as much time to the side story - which is as well written and crafted as the main story, only shorter - so decided to give the fans a taste of it via the DVD release.

Watch for both the animated feature and Watchmen to hit next May.

(And to whet your appetite til then, hit up Ain’t it Cool News for a shot of the Minutemen - the heroes who started it all in the Watchmen universe)

(And for heavens sake go pick up the book if you haven’t read it!)

Hit the jump for todays 15 Minutes of Game, 2 Cents Gamings daily podcast.

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The guild “SK Gaming” has managed to beat what one imagines would be a really big boss in World of Warcraft on Saturday. In lore, this means that the game is, for the moment, “over,” with all of the major threats to Azeroth being defeated. The Burning Legions king has been felled, and there was much rejoicing.

In gaming terms it means… not much, other than the fact that obviously Europe is so much better at this sort of thing, so, yay.

Eurogamer has the full story, along with the list of loot and classes used. In case you Americans want to plan your own raids.

Canadians are, of course, exempt from all scorn featured in this article. All scorn should be offset by the fact that I almost called the world WoW is set in Norrath.

Gamingbits has the (possibly) revealed pricing plan of the newly named Guitar Hero World Tour, a game which has as much to do with Guitars as it does Microphones and Drums. They found that Gamestop ws advertising the future pricing of the game, with the “Band Kit,” as $189.99 for all releases but the PS2, which would get the low low price of $179.99.

$20 more than Rock Band, for what amounts to the same game. Oh no, wait, it is slightly different, with additional plastic being saved with only 3 toms, and used again on 2 decdicated cymbals.

Which looks nice and all but… the game is still called Guitar Hero. Will it mostly focus on the Guitarist of the group, with the Drummer and the singer relegated to background roles, or will it indeed go all the way, and completely make things balanced, as Rock Band has done.

One thing they are doing right, according to the Gamestop listing, is to sell a whole bunch of different options at the start, rather than doing special edition only for a few months.

Gaming Bits has these listed as:

• Guitar Hero World Tour - Guitar Kit: $99.99 (PS3, PS2, Wii, Xbox 360)
• Guitar Hero World Tour Game: $59.99 (PS3, Xbox 360)
• Guitar Hero World Tour Game: $49.99 (PS2, Wii)

So… no love for drummers or singers confirmed, then.

Found via Kotaku.