A demo of Harmonix's Dance Central 3 is available now for demonstrative busting of one's moves on the Xbox Marketplace. The sampler includes Jennifer Lopez's "On the Floor," Maroon 5's ubiquitous "Moves Like Jagger" and Nicki Minaj's "Starships!" – the latter to get you higher than a mutha...

The demo also includes Party Time, activated with a a high five, which allows players with a partner, among other things, to make their own moves. Bring The Charleston back, you can do it!

Art Academy: Lessons for Everyone! and Crosswords Plus both launch today on 3DS. You can get both in stores, but Nintendo has sweetened the deal significantly for eShop purchases, offering a free version of Donkey Kong that you can't get anywhere else.

If you buy either game from the eShop and register it on Club Nintendo, you'll get a free download of Donkey Kong: Original Edition, a special version of the NES Donkey Kong that has been edited to add the "cement factory" level. It's previously been released only with a special Wii bundle in Europe and with Japanese New Super Mario Bros. 2 purchases.

Neither of those games seem like particularly natural lead-ins for Donkey Kong, but at the very least, the offer will sway some people who planned to buy one of those games anyway, and will now choose to do so digitally.

Continue Reading

It's no longer clear what makes Resident Evil tick, so Capcom is dissecting it. Resident Evil 6 is a steel tray of plump, disconnected organs, each representing a crucial element of the monstrous franchise. There's educational worth in this exercise, but the gross sight of it in progress can be hard to stomach.

The three primary campaigns in Resident Evil 6 are the excised parts, and only by sampling them all will you begin to see the full picture. Stoic series stalwart Leon S. Kennedy (the "S" stands for "Salon," by the way) leads with Helena Harper, who clues him in on a new contagion giving rise to the dead worldwide. The two really are the worst match if you're looking for rapid plot development – she's basically a viral marketer, and he's bizarrely skeptical for a guy who is statistically likely to be in the room whenever someone sprouts tentacles and extra teeth.

Continue Reading

'Abe's Oddysee HD' is now Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee - New 'n' Tasty, and it has a new and tasty release window of Q4 2013. Last month, Just Add Water asked fans to come up with a new name for the 2.5D remake, and this weekend the British studio revealed the winning title in a Eurogamer Expo talk. New 'n' Tasty is landing on Xbox Live Marketplace and PlayStation Network (for PS3 and Vita) late next year, and on PC later on.

Just Add Water revealed that the 2009 re-releases of Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exodus sold 750,000 units across PC, PS3, and Vita downloads. By those figures, the updated version of the 1997 classic may be a popular item on XBLA and PSN menus in a year's time.

Continue Reading

Leading into a holiday season against an increasingly successful 3DS and even a new iPhone, Sony still isn't considering cutting the price of the PS Vita. PlayStation UK managing director Fergal Gara told Eurogamer that while Sony is considering a price cut, it won't happen until next year at the earliest.

"We always aim to establish price cuts," he said. "So the question is not so much if, but when." Rather than drop the price, Sony is opting for bundles in the UK, "for example wi-fi Vita plus LittleBigPlanet at the £200 price point. There's the wi-fi product again plus FIFA 13 plus Uncharted Golden Abyss plus LittleBigPlanet at not much above the £200 price point."

Timing on an official price cut, and not just an effective one that throws more things into the box, is "still under discussion," Gara said. According to statements made by Worldwide Studios head Shuhei Yoshida at Gamescom, Sony is working on reducing the cost to produce the Vita, and will only drop the price once that is achieved.

Nexon shelled out ¥36.5 billion to buy gloops, a company that develops games for DeNA's Mobage network. That figure converts to an absolutely whopping $468 million. Nexon didn't stump up that much yen because they're seeking fun, but because gloops is one of the most successful makers of Japanese social games. Those games include Shibuya Quest, MLB Battle Game, and Odin Battle, and the company boasts over 10 million active players across its collection. Legend Cards has over 1.5 million players in Japan alone, while Magigate had 100,000 people playing it within just seven hours of its release.

Either way, Nexon apparently has money to burn. The South Korean company, known for free-to-play MMOs like MapleStory, last year set its initial public offering on the stock market at $1.2 billion.

Minecraft is over the 4 million mark for Xbox Live Arcade sales. 4J Studios revealed the figure on Twitter, showing the game that smashed XBLA records is still shifting like crazy. 5 million before 2013 looks well within reach (you heard it here first*).

Meanwhile, Mojang today announced that the PC version is now available in physical stores via prepaid cards. The cards cost the same $26.95 amount at which Minecraft is priced online, and can be found at Best Buy, Target, and Walmart stores nationwide.

*you probably didn't

FIFA 13 debuted in the UK last week and the footie franchise dismissed last year's record-setting premiere. According to Chart-Track, FIFA 13 outsold the previous year's installment in units and revenue by 27 and 31 percent, respectively. The game represented 80 percent of all entertainment software sales on the British isles.

Last week saw the biggest sales week in the UK of the year so far, with a 196 percent increase of unit sales in the market and 282 percent in overall revenue.

FIFA 13 wasn't the only major player to come on the field last week, World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria got its kung-fu panda on in fourth. Although that may seem like a lowish debut for what's still one of the biggest MMOs in the world, it should be noted that the game was available digitally and therefore wouldn't be tracked.

Finally, on the hardware front, the PS3 'Super Slim' 500 GB sent PS3 sales up 138 percent, with the console representing 37 percent of PS3 sales. Storm on past the break for the UK top ten.

Continue Reading

---

A majority of gamers are familiar with Donkey Kong, one of Nintendo's core video game characters. The words Donkey Kong Country will likely remind players of their time with the classic SNES game. Unless they live in France, in which case it could also bring back memories of a 1996 French television show that featured CG-animated characters from the games interacting with real-life actors.

This clip from the show demonstrates just how well apes can sing, dance and generally rock. The show was originally called "La planète Donkey Kong" (translated as "The Planet of Donkey Kong"), and was televised in a variety of regions, including the US. Still, it didn't quite reach the level of popularity that it received in France, its country of origin.

Continue Reading

The Left 4 Dead series has sold more than 12 million copies, Valve writer Chet Faliszek noted in an interview with VG24/7. Faliszek talked about the company's approach to promoting its games, saying Valve doesn't rely much on marketing because "when a game does really well at pre-release, they're going to know that you're not just talking a bunch of PR crap."

"We just let the game speak for itself because the internet has made this thing where you can't pull the wool over people's eyes any more. They're going to know you're hyping," he said. Either the zombie apocalypse creates some high-quality wool, or Left 4 Dead must be a pretty great series.

---

What's your game called and what's it about?

The game is called Anna and is a point-and-click graphic adventure about a "sort of haunted" sawmill.

What inspired you to make Anna?

The main inspiration came from a real-life old sawmill in Valle D'Aosta, an all-mountain region in Italy (to be very precise, in Val D'Ayas). It is an ancient and beautiful place, with some legends about ghosts and hauting around it. We mixed all this with a set of local legends and personal stuff. This game is actually a true homage to Val D'Ayas and its heritage.

Continue Reading

Stiq Flicks – from film and video game industry freelance writer Kevin Kelly – examines video games and attempts to pair them with matching films. It's like wine and cheese, but with more aliens.

Continue Reading

Resident Evil 6 is available in Australia for Xbox 360 and PS3, and has been since Thursday, Game Informer AU reports. The game technically has a release date of Tuesday, October 2, but hey, that's more of a guideline anyway.

Back in August, copies of Resident Evil 6 were let loose in Poland, though those turned out to be stolen. The Australian sales appear to be legit (or so EB Games makes it seem), so if you're in the area call up your local retailer and see if you can get lucky.

[Thanks, Blaise!]

Peter Molyneux is narrowing the answer to the question posed by 22 Cans' first experimental game, Curiostiy: What's Inside the Cube? It's not a huge pile of money, a dead cat, a sports car or Half-Life 3, Molyneux says. However, whatever's inside there will "change your life forever."

Maybe Molyneux is toying with us. Maybe the cube is harboring two huge piles of dead sports cars and a copy of Black Mesa Source. The answer was right in front of us the entire time, and the knowledge of purposeful human deception will change anyone's life, at least for a little bit.

Curiosity is undergoing Apple certification now.

The Mass Effect Trilogy includes all three games in the Mass Effect franchise, launching for Xbox 360 and PC on November 6 and at a later date for PS3, and it'll look something like that photo up there. The Trilogy will come with DLC as well, BioWare clarifies:

The PC version will get Bring Down the Sky and Pinnacle Station for the first Mass Effect; Mass Effect 2 comes with the Cerberus Network, which includes Zaeed – The Price of Revenge, The Firewalker Pack, Cerberus Assault Gear, Arc Projector heavy weapon, and Normandy Crash site mission. Mass Effect 3 includes the Online Pass with access to multiplayer.

Xbox 360 won't get Bring Down the Sky or Pinnacle Station on-disc, but both will be available as standalone DLC via Xbox Live. Mass Effect 2 gets the Cerberus Network and Mass Effect 3 the Online Pass.

Information about PS3 DLC is coming "soon." The original Mass Effect will launch as a digital standalone on PSN on the same day the Trilogy launches for PS3, for $15.

The Trilogy is compatible with other versions of the Mass Effect games, meaning players can transfer saves from previous games to the Trilogy games, and Mass Effect 3 multiplayer is playable between versions. Considering the Trilogy is Mass Effect repackaged for the holiday rush, it'd be more surprising if the games were truly a separate beast and weren't compatible with previous releases.

There's still no sign of the Trilogy coming to Wii U, which gets Mass Effect 3 on launch day, November 18 in the US. The Wii U version includes the Extended Cut ending and the From Ashes DLC.

Indie Royale is back with a new Steam and Desura six-game bundle. The Oktoberfest bundle features Zoe Mode's Chime and all three episodes of Hector: Badge of Carnage by Telltale Games.

Smudged Cat Games' The Adventures of Shuggy also makes an appearance in the bundle along with Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble and "story-driven interactive drama" The Witch's Yarn by Mousechief. The Network by AquaFox rounds out the bundle.

Those that spend more than $8 on the bundle will also receive two chiptune albums by Savestates, "Calm Your Nerves" and "Chip unDeath." The Oktoberfest bundle is on sale now until Friday, October 5 for its usual "pay the minimum" price, which is currently $5.21.

Ouya CEO Julie Uhrman announced Roy Bahat as chairman of the board Friday. Bahat served as president of IGN Entertainment for five years before joining Ouya.

Uhrman also revealed that Steve Chamberlin will lead Ouya's engineering division while Raffi Bagdasarian is in charge of the software side of operations, including services for developers and user experience. Chamberlin previously was Senior Development Director for Trion Worlds, developers of Rift. Bagdasarian spent over five years working with Sony on its Crackle streaming service.

Uhrman added that "over a thousand" game developers have been in contact with Ouya since its Kickstarter campaign ended in August, and that more than 50 distributors have applied to carry the system when it launches.