Publisher: PSP Is A "Bollocking Useless Waste Of Space" [Sony]

Gavin Cheshire, VP of Codemasters (DiRT, Operation Flashpoint), owns a PlayStation Portable. Which may explain why he’s slagged the handheld off in the latest issue of Edge Magazine. More

Every Epic Space Saga Needs A Prison Planet [Bioware]

It you thought Mos Eisley was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, wait until you get a load of Belsavis, the Republic prison planet that houses some of the most fearsome criminals in the Star Wars: The Old Republic galaxy. More

EA Runs Contest to Dismember Fan Virtually in Dead Space 2

The crazy team over at Electronic Arts and Visceral Games are holding a contest where the grand prize will be virtually dismembered in the upcoming survival horror game Dead Space 2, for the gory details on how to enter follow the link.

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EA Runs Contest to Dismember Fan Virtually in Dead Space 2

Bad Flash Game Combats The Sexual Exploitation Of Children [Good Intentions]

It may be the most hideous Choplifter rip-off ever created, but at least “CyberDodo fights against the sexual exploitation of children” has its heart in the right place. Did you know March 4 is the World Day Against Sexual Exploitation? If you’re anything like me, you had no clue. Then again, if you’re anything like me you would have realized that these world days should really be called world marketing days, as they are merely excuses for companies to line up advertising promotions with important issues. We know sexual exploitation is bad. It’s not like we slowly begin to warm to the idea for 364 days and need reminding. I digress. CyberDodo is family-friendly community platform that is dedicated to defending life, and they do so through cartoons, reports, and flash games, hoping to educate people on topics like world hunger. Now they’ve set their sights on the sexual exploitation of children, with a strong focus on child prostitution. To that effect, they’ve created a game where you pilot a helicopter around, dropping a line to save children being harassed by perverts. I mean, I assume they are perverts. Fat, ugly men with their stomachs hanging out of their shirts seem to fit the bill. As you travel through this seedy virtual underbelly, dropping coconuts on the perverts’ heads and collecting fuel icons to keep you in the air, pressing the space bar lowers a line, lifting the children into the warm womb of your copter, where they are safe from harm. “Thanks,” they say casually, as you fly them away from oppression. “Thanks.” Oh, and be sure you dodge the birds. I think they represent bird…oppression? While CyberDodo’s game is indeed laughable, it at least tries to deliver a message about the sort of topic that mainstream game developers go out of their way to avoid, so kudos to them. I’d still like to see a company with a larger budget try and tackle subjects like this. And not just on the World Day Against Sexual Exploitation. Check out CyberDodo’s game here.

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Bad Flash Game Combats The Sexual Exploitation Of Children [Good Intentions]

Aliens And Predators Invade PlayStation Home [Gallery]

Now here’s a couple of virtual costume items that might be worth dropping a couple of bills on, if only to see an Alien and a Predator doing the running man in the lobbies of PlayStation Home. Sega Europe announces official Aliens Vs. Predator gear, coming tomorrow to the European PlayStation Home Thread Store. Choose from male and female versions of the Alien, Predator, or doomed Space Marine. €2.99 scores you a full costume, while €1.99 gets you pants and a shirt and €0.99 secures you a helmet or mask. As of this writing, the new costumes have only been announced for Europe, so whether or not they come to North America as well is up in the air, though highly likely. Also, these items are only available until March 31st – after that, they’re gone. Gear Up For The Infestation Of Home [Sega Europe]

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Aliens And Predators Invade PlayStation Home [Gallery]

Aliens And Predators Invade PlayStation Home [Gallery]

Now here’s a couple of virtual costume items that might be worth dropping a couple of bills on, if only to see an Alien and a Predator doing the running man in the lobbies of PlayStation Home. Sega Europe announces official Aliens Vs. Predator gear, coming tomorrow to the European PlayStation Home Thread Store. Choose from male and female versions of the Alien, Predator, or doomed Space Marine. €2.99 scores you a full costume, while €1.99 gets you pants and a shirt and €0.99 secures you a helmet or mask. As of this writing, the new costumes have only been announced for Europe, so whether or not they come to North America as well is up in the air, though highly likely. Also, these items are only available until March 31st – after that, they’re gone. Gear Up For The Infestation Of Home [Sega Europe]

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Aliens And Predators Invade PlayStation Home [Gallery]

Negotiations Underway to Inflict Space Invaders Movie on Us All [Cinema]

Did you ever play Space Invaders and, while you were dodging and firing and shooting, make up a story about who was in the tank and wish you could someday see them in a movie? Yeah, I didn’t either. Apparently someone at Warner Bros. has. The Los Angeles Times reports that the studio is negotiating with Taito for the feature film rights to the franchise. The Times says that, if a deal is reached, Mark Gordon, Jason Blum and Guymon Casady would produce the film. Gordon’s credits include “Saving Private Ryan” and “The Day After Tomorrow.” Blum produced “Paranormal Activity.” Casady is a Hollywood fixture with plenty of A-list clients. I don’t know how this movie ends, but I’m willing to bet in a key scene the tank blasts through a shield and fires in between two full columns of invaders to bullseye the flying saucer. You may recall that Asteroids will also become a feature film , with Universal having won the rights last summer to produce that. I’m not sure which game’s premise has less of a story, but the upside is, there’s very little canon for any schlocky adaptation to be unfaithful to. Space Invaders also is a year older than Asteroids , so I foresee this arms race ending only one way: “Pong: The Official Movie of the Game.” Video Game Incursion Into Hollywood Could Continue with Space Invaders [Los Angeles Times]

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Negotiations Underway to Inflict Space Invaders Movie on Us All [Cinema]

Kotaku Originals: The $43,100 Question [Original]

Last night a hunk of plastic no one ever played set a sale price record for rare video games. In 1987 it retailed for $30. And people complain about $60 price points and used sales today. The week in Kotaku’s original reporting: Kotaku Talk Radio Top Stories Collector’s Item Obliterates Record for Rare Game Sale The Stalling Of An Anti-Bush Video Game Nintendo Summit News Round-Up Super Mario Galaxy 2 Hits North America May 23 DSi XL Hits North America Next Month For $190 F***ing Weird Killer Whale’s Violent Past Includes Deadly Attack on Ultima-Obsessed Drifter News Tokyo Game Show Dated, Should Be Moved Itagaki And Tecmo Settle Legal Brouhaha Nintendo Summit News Round-Up To-Do In Boston: Kotaku’s Very Own PAX East Panel Unreal Modders Win Awards, Don’t All Clone Gears of War Heavy Rain Explores Player Depression With Freezes And Glitches SNK Announces The King of Fighters XIII Plants Vs. Zombies Attack Your Desk, Phone Sega Gives The Wii One Last Shot Of The Old Ultra-Violence Take Two Interactive Opens Japanese Office Sony Computer Entertainment To Become SNEP (Temporarily) Sega, You Are Once Again Making A Giant Mistake Take A Tour Of The New, Improved Steam Mark Beaumont, Capcom COO, Dies Suddenly Unreal Engine 4 “Still A Long Ways Off” iPhone Chart Toppers: Surprise, Surprise, Guess What’s Number 1? Inside Grasshopper with Silent Hill and Doshin the Giant Developers Box Art Has To Cover All The Bases How Australia’s Proposed Internet Censorship Will (And Won’t) Affect Video Games Should Japanese Arcades Worry About 3D Goggle Bacteria? GameStop’s Current Trade-In Promotion Is Insane Video Games in Space Nixed Over Fears of Space Station Hacking Features Where Have All The Zombies Gone? Why We Play Games, And Why We Grumble About Them Star Trek MMO Log: The Final Frontier The Search For The Video Game Auteurs Are You Playing A Video Game Before You Are Playing It? The Toys That Amazed Me Columns Stick Jockey: Imaginary Triumphs: Sports As A Role-Playing Game Something Negative: In Defense of – and a Salute to – The Pro Speak-Up On Kotaku: Game Mash-Ups, T-Shirts, Singalongs, And Viewtiful Woes This Week In Comics Reviews, Previews, Hands-on and Impressions Star Trek Online Review: A Piece Of The Action FlingSmash: It’s All In the Elbow Disney’s Guilty Party: Family-Friendly and Fun…Really. Transformers: War For Cybertron DS Preview: Grimlock Goes Portable [UPDATE] Super Mario Galaxy 2: Yoshi’s Back…and He Brought a Drill! Metroid: Other M: A Change of Perspective The Difference Between A Pinata Kill And A Hang Kill The Wii’s Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands Is Not a Ported Prince Kaleidoscope Micro-Review: What a Colorful World Call of Duty: World At War: Zombies Verrückt Micro-Review: Solo Fun The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom Micro-review: Snack Of The Clones Nintendo DSi XL Review: Super Size Me Assassin’s Creed II: Bonfire Of The Vanities Micro-Review: Once More, With Fleeing Resident Evil 5: Lost In Nightmares Micro-Review: Less Fighting, More Frightening Plants Vs. Zombies iPhone Micro-Review: Touch The Dead Endless Ocean: Blue World Review: The Wii Game You’re Wrong About Hands-On, Sword Out With Red Steel 2 Link ‘N Launch Micro-Review: How About ‘Pikmin Rockets’ Or ‘Better Than Bioshock Hacking’? Across Age Micro-Review: Slam Evil Sports What’s On Deck For MLB 10 The Show The Road to the IGF Mile Marker 13: Miegakure Mile Marker 14: Shank Mile Marker 15: Cogs Mile Marker 16: Vessel Mile Marker 17: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity DICE 2010 Braced For The Skeptics, Richard Garriott Challenges Gamers And Teases What’s Next How To Do A Red Carpet Right: Add Video Games Apparel Kotaku-Tan, The T-Shirt For The Kotaku Fan Clips Red Steel 2 Has Live Action, But Not How You’d Think Kotaku ‘Shop Contest Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Worst Sonic & Sega Cameos Edition Kotaku ‘Shop Contest: Conversation Hearts Edition Winners Screengrab Don’t Worry, DSi XL Fits In My Rear Left Pocket The Party Is Complete Twitterati Playboy’s Jo Garcia Wasn’t Expecting “That” In Heavy Rain (What’s “That”?)

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Kotaku Originals: The $43,100 Question [Original]

Where Have All The Zombies Gone? [The Crazies]

The Infected. Los Ganados. Majini. Parasite hosts. Some of the biggest “zombie” games in recent years don’t feature the undead. Why can’t we call a spade a spade, burying it in the neck of a good old-fashioned undead zombie? This is a conversation we’ve been having fairly often lately at Kotaku Tower, mainly due to the release of the film The Crazies, which we’ll be reviewing here next week. The Crazies (seen above) features a small town plagued by a mysterious toxin, which turns humans into violent maniacs before eventually killing them. While the Crazies aren’t technically zombies, they do share traits similar to other zombie-alikes found in recent games. What’s interesting here is that the 2010 film The Crazies is a remake of 1973’s The Crazies, written and directed by one George Romero, five years after the release of Night of the Living Dead. So if Romero, the king of zombie horror himself, strayed from the zombie formula so soon after Night of the Living Dead, perhaps it’s no wonder that our video game maker’s opt for other explanations for why people are shambling about eating each other. Take for instance: Resident Evil Didn’t Resident Evil originally have zombies in it? Sure, they were really just humans infected with various viruses, but I’m pretty sure they were still called zombies, up to a certain point. In Resident Evil 4 the zombies were no more, replaced with Los Ganados, Spanish for The Cattle. These non-zombies (nombies?) were faster and more intelligent than those in previous games in the series. In Resident Evil 5 they became the Majini, which is Swahili for not-zombies, or more accurately, evil spirit. They were smarter, faster, and still not zombies. Boo. Dead Rising Frank West has covered wars, you know, and he’s also covered hordes of non-zombies invading a mall in a small town. While the shambling hordes in Dead Rising were indeed dead, they weren’t really undead, their bodies controlled by a parasitic insect nesting in their brains, taking control after killing the hosts. Left 4 Dead Despite looking the part, the creatures in Valve’s Left 4 Dead series are victims of a rabies-like virus that causes psychosis. Perhaps they are more like the people in The Crazies than any other video game zombie-alikes. Dead Space No, not space zombies, as amazingly cool as that would be. Just Necromorphs, which sounds to me like the worst Power Ranger spinoff ever. So what qualifies as traditional zombies? In our eyes, there are two main types. Voodoo zombies, which have been seen in games like Akuji the Heartless and Shadow Man, and the mysterious, unexplained zombies. The latter are the sort of zombies you’d see in a George Romero film, the product of some mysterious plague that brings corpses back to life, or perhaps hell overflowing. The key is that we either don’t know why the zombies are back, or they are the product of voodoo. They also have to actually be the dead, brought back to life. None of this rabies, virus, iPhone app made them crazy nonsense. There are a few games that have done it right lately. For example: Call of Duty: World at War While it’s hardly a zombie video game, the zombies in Call of Duty: World at War’s zombie maps are never really explained. The dead have risen, you have to kill them, end of story. Considering it takes place in the middle of World War II, I’m going to assume hell is overflowing. War does that. Plants Vs. Zombies Indie developers don’t seem all that hesitant to throw about the word ‘zombies’ whenever possible. Perhaps they feel they are below the radar from the imaginary zombie police, or maybe you don’t really need to know where the undead in Plants Vs. Zombies come from in order to have a good time with it. With those criteria in mind, what are your favorite zombie video games, and do they actually contain zombies? Be wary! Even the most convincing shambling, brain-munching creature might simply be a guy with a really, really bad cold.

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Where Have All The Zombies Gone? [The Crazies]

Where Have All The Zombies Gone? [The Crazies]

The Infected. Los Ganados. Majini. Parasite hosts. Some of the biggest “zombie” games in recent years don’t feature the undead. Why can’t we call a spade a spade, burying it in the neck of a good old-fashioned undead zombie? This is a conversation we’ve been having fairly often lately at Kotaku Tower, mainly due to the release of the film The Crazies, which we’ll be reviewing here next week. The Crazies (seen above) features a small town plagued by a mysterious toxin, which turns humans into violent maniacs before eventually killing them. While the Crazies aren’t technically zombies, they do share traits similar to other zombie-alikes found in recent games. What’s interesting here is that the 2010 film The Crazies is a remake of 1973’s The Crazies, written and directed by one George Romero, five years after the release of Night of the Living Dead. So if Romero, the king of zombie horror himself, strayed from the zombie formula so soon after Night of the Living Dead, perhaps it’s no wonder that our video game maker’s opt for other explanations for why people are shambling about eating each other. Take for instance: Resident Evil Didn’t Resident Evil originally have zombies in it? Sure, they were really just humans infected with various viruses, but I’m pretty sure they were still called zombies, up to a certain point. In Resident Evil 4 the zombies were no more, replaced with Los Ganados, Spanish for The Cattle. These non-zombies (nombies?) were faster and more intelligent than those in previous games in the series. In Resident Evil 5 they became the Majini, which is Swahili for not-zombies, or more accurately, evil spirit. They were smarter, faster, and still not zombies. Boo. Dead Rising Frank West has covered wars, you know, and he’s also covered hordes of non-zombies invading a mall in a small town. While the shambling hordes in Dead Rising were indeed dead, they weren’t really undead, their bodies controlled by a parasitic insect nesting in their brains, taking control after killing the hosts. Left 4 Dead Despite looking the part, the creatures in Valve’s Left 4 Dead series are victims of a rabies-like virus that causes psychosis. Perhaps they are more like the people in The Crazies than any other video game zombie-alikes. Dead Space No, not space zombies, as amazingly cool as that would be. Just Necromorphs, which sounds to me like the worst Power Ranger spinoff ever. So what qualifies as traditional zombies? In our eyes, there are two main types. Voodoo zombies, which have been seen in games like Akuji the Heartless and Shadow Man, and the mysterious, unexplained zombies. The latter are the sort of zombies you’d see in a George Romero film, the product of some mysterious plague that brings corpses back to life, or perhaps hell overflowing. The key is that we either don’t know why the zombies are back, or they are the product of voodoo. They also have to actually be the dead, brought back to life. None of this rabies, virus, iPhone app made them crazy nonsense. There are a few games that have done it right lately. For example: Call of Duty: World at War While it’s hardly a zombie video game, the zombies in Call of Duty: World at War’s zombie maps are never really explained. The dead have risen, you have to kill them, end of story. Considering it takes place in the middle of World War II, I’m going to assume hell is overflowing. War does that. Plants Vs. Zombies Indie developers don’t seem all that hesitant to throw about the word ‘zombies’ whenever possible. Perhaps they feel they are below the radar from the imaginary zombie police, or maybe you don’t really need to know where the undead in Plants Vs. Zombies come from in order to have a good time with it. With those criteria in mind, what are your favorite zombie video games, and do they actually contain zombies? Be wary! Even the most convincing shambling, brain-munching creature might simply be a guy with a really, really bad cold.

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Where Have All The Zombies Gone? [The Crazies]

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