The first thing you'll notice about "Lips," the Xbox 360's answer to the PlayStation consoles' venerable "SingStar" franchise, is its two wireless, motion-sensitive microphones that flash all sorts of crazy colors while you sing. These things are magnificent, a triumph of industrial design. They're sturdy, eye-catching, highly functional and, most [...]
"Grand Theft Auto IV" (rated M, $40 on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, $50 on PC) has been on the market for nine months now, and Xbox 360 owners will finally get a chance to play the game's first downloadable add-on, a new campaign set in Liberty City called "The Lost [...]
With the shift of my column from the Sunday paper to the Friday paper, I'm going to start writing about new releases a couple of days after they've been released, rather than the Sunday before. I'm also going to rework the idea behind the feature a bit to include games [...]
Every week, McClatchy News Service sends us a list of the top 10 renting and selling games at Blockbuster. I almost never look at these. Well, this week I did, and something jumped out at me right away. The top 10 renting titles, according to Blockbuster, follow. For the sake [...]
With all the recent undead updates, I might soon have to rename this blog "The Occasional Zombie." (And I haven't even gotten around to writing about "Resident Evil 5" yet!) Nonetheless, I couldn't resist the opportunity to comment on a couple of recent downloadable content-related announcements.First, Valve announced recently that [...]
A fuzzy video shot with a handheld camera hinted at it Friday, and Capcom made it official on Monday: "Dead Rising 2" is on the way. There's no release date yet, but the shambling, free-roaming zombie title will trade the first game's shopping mall setting for a Vegas/Reno-like gambling town [...]
Electronic Arts has been doing a lot of shuffling of the deck chairs lately, following a ho-hum 2008. When the company reported its earnings this week, CEO John Riccitello was candid in his admission that EA hasn't done enough to try to capture the hearts, minds and dollars of Wii [...]
While a nation of gamers has surely gotten a ton of mileage out of "Rock Band 2" and "Wii Sports" -- possibly the two greatest party video games ever created, it's time to move on ever so slightly. You might have played either of the "Rock Band" games or rival [...]
For whatever reason, the video game industry loves itself some countdown clocks. Are you a big video game publisher who wants to hype its new first-person shooter, "Sir Shoots-a-Lot" to make a big splash? Set up a countdown clock at "www.heshootsalot.com" and pay some college kid $50 to submit a [...]
Despite last year's rash of bad economic tidings that included waves of foreclosures, soaring unemployment, a huge spike in gas prices and other unpleasant news, the video game industry kept setting sales records, with $21.3 billion in U.S. sales, according to the market research firm NPD Group. Two consecutive years [...]