Back in 2010, six French students won the GDC Student Showcase award for the liquid physics puzzle game Puddle.  Konami later picked up the title, and after development by Neko Entertainment, Puddle was released on both the Xbox Live Arcade and PSN a couple of weeks back.
The premise of the game is straight forward.  The player guides liquids through hazardous environments, while trying not to lose so much volume that you have to start over.  In the early levels, this means navigating water through pipes filled with fire and heated surfaces …

The always wonderful to read “Art of the Title”, which focuses on the craft of creating effective title sequences, generally using film and TV, has posted its first game sequence, with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. Included is an extensive interview with both Paul Furminger from Goldtooth Creative (director of the sequence) and Jean-François Dugas from Eidos-Montreal (Game Director).

While Konami has yet to peg down a definite North American release date for Metal Gear Solid HD Collection, there’s news floating around (via Joystiq) that it will land in Japan on November 23th. This suggests that international dates can’t be far behind.

Ubisoft had quite a bit going on at Fan Expo in Toronto this year.  One of the upcoming titles that caught our eye was Rocksmith, which puts a new spin on the rhythm guitar game.  It’s specfically designed to work with any electric guitar, which plugs into your Xbox 360, PS3 or PC via a USB adapter, and uses the chords you strum to keep track.
In the video above, you can catch Ryan’s talk with Adam from Ubisoft, who also demos the game using an Epiphone Les Paul plugged in via …

Before we get into the meat of this game, I’d like to start with the lesson I most sincerely hope every other studio takes away from Deus Ex: Human Revolution. How to handle morality systems. Straight, DX:HR has the best morality system ever implemented in a game. It handles player choices in a way that is meaningful, powerful, and allows you to genuinely effect the way the game plays out. How does it do that?

Spoiler warning: Everything about L.A. Noire. EVERYTHING. Also a significant spoiler for Heavy Rain, though ultimately incidental to the main story.

E3 Is probably the biggest video game exposition, and this year it takes place June 7th to 9th in Los Angeles. That doesn’t mean you have to miss out, as Konami is hosting a series of pre-shows live across 5 different cities, including Toronto. The venue for Toronto couldn’t be more apt, as the Real Sports Bar & Grill is adorned in a slew of HDTVs, inlcuding a display over the bar itself that stands about 15 feet high, and I’m not talking about a bunch of smaller panels with seams.

Last Wednesday Sony took both the Playstation Network and Qriocity offline after an external intrusion, taking them a couple of day sto communicate this with the public. It’s now the following Tuesday, bringing the outage to day six, with little official word until now. In an update to the Playstation Blog, Sony has confirmed that there has been a “compromise of personal information”.

I don’t have much to say about Portal 2 for two reasons. First, posting spoilers for the game just feels like a bad idea. Letting you in on some of the gags or the overall trajectory of the plot would be criminal, so much so that even the requisite spoiler warning doesn’t feel like enough protection.

Spoiler warning: Plot spoilers for Homefront. All four hours of it.
Though I would love to expect a higher level of emotional engagement with my video games, when it comes to military-style first-person shooters, I don’t ask for much—probably because they almost always fail to deliver. You run through a bunch of corridors, shoot a bunch of dudes, pick up some new guns with one of seventeen different scopes, hit a slow-motion sequence, feel like a bad-ass. I’ve just distilled the essence of every modern Call of Duty game into one …

I’ve poured almost thirty hours into Dragon Age 2 since its release less than a week ago, and in that time I’ve been slowly getting a handle on what exactly I like and don’t like about the game. Narrative concerns I will probably leave for another day, but there were a few things I noticed:

The instant I triggered Killzone 3’s ending cinematic I literally said “Thank ****ing GAWD” out loud. Killzone 3 is like an abusive loved one with deep-seeded issues. There are those moments where you’re having fun with them, moments where you feel sorry for them, and then moments where they make you so angry that you just want to hit them over the head with a baseball bat.