I don’t know about you guys, but ever since the original Halo hit the shelves I’ve been a huge fan so you can see why I’d get excited over the following media.

Bungie has recently released new screenshots taken from it’s forthcoming Mythic Map Pack. 

Halo 3‘s Mythic Map Pack, which includes 3 all new levels, is set to be bundled with Halo Wars with a downloadable version hitting Xbox Live some time after.

Head over to EuroGamer to check out the rest of the screenshots.

Those anticipating the release of Guild Wars 2, are in for some bad news. Apparently, during an investor finance briefing, NCsoft was quoted to have said that Guild Wars 2 won’t be out until 2010-2011. Bummer.

Joystiq notes that although the developer had to cut some staff and won’t be showing up at E3 this year, their game Aion sold remarkably well in Korea which leads us to believe that financial woes did not cause this delay.

Stores in Japan have apparently run completey dry in terms of Street Fighter IV as reported on the Capcom-Unity blog:

There ARE no more copies to sell on the store shelves. I heard from Ono-san himself last night that Capcom has a few boxes left in the basement that they’ll be sending out on Monday, but they were totally overwhelmed by the demand.

So there you have it; If you had any doubts that there was only a small market left for Street Fighter IV, your doubts can now be put to rest. But will it sell as well in the USA as it did in Japan?

I guess we’ll have to wait until the game’s February 17th Xbox 360 and PS3 release date to find out.

If you’re absolutely can’t wait to get your hands on the forthcoming PS3 killer-app Killzone 2, then this is for you.

GameAnyone has recently put up a video walkthrough of the entire game start to finish, end credits and all And when I say the entire game, I really mean the ENTIRE GAME.

So, if you really feel the need to ruin every ounce of suspense, action, and surprise Guerilla Games has in store for you in Killzone 2, head over to the video walkthrough and feast your eyes on it.

Still haven’t bought a Wii? Well, if you head over to Amazon’s listing for the console and scroll down to the ‘Best Value’ option, you’ll notice a pleasent surprise.

Amazon has recently begun offerering the console, along with Nintedo’s Wii Music, for $279.99 which, considering the $249.99 and $49.99 retail values respectively, is a none too bad deal.

Read (Amazon)

I don’t know if it’s going to be Nintendo or the Gottis that land on these guys first, but going out to Armor Games is going to show you a reason that someone is going to be sleeping with the fishes.

It’s called Super Mafia Land, and it’s almost a frame-for-frame knockoff of Super Mario Brothers 2.  Call it an homage if you like, but the key thing is that they took it apart pretty nicely and repackaged it.  Basically, it’s the exact same game, only with different characters.  And not even that many different characters, either—I saw Shyguys and Phantos and Birdos running around shooting eggs at me and stuff.  The gameplay is even identical—where you pull vegetables and such out of the ground and throw them at the various monsters.  The only significant difference is we’re not playing with Toad and Luigi any more.  Now it’s Bruno and Giuseppe.

If you’ve been missing Super Mario Brothers 2, and you don’t want to drag your eight-bit Nintendo out of the basement and hook it back up, then Super Mafia Land is just the game for you.

The casual gaming phenomenon has been running for quite some time now, and it’s always a little bit of a surprise to see it segue into the console market.  What I’m about to say may be a little controversial, but I confess, it’s how I felt:  Facebreaker for the Xbox 360 is a casual console game.

You’re not alone in considering this odd–I certainly did.  Console games, unless they’re specifically marketed as such and generally packaged in collections, should not be so simple to play and so simple in construction that they can be called casual.  But this is the case–you play one of several boxers who’s out to win fame and glory and the right to punch a whole lot of people in the face.  And that’s ALL you do.  You punch. You have your choice of high punch and low punch, you can add dash moves to your punch, and you can even use SPECIAL punches called “Breakers” in conjunction with your regular punches.  But no matter how you slice it, you’re still just swinging a fist.

Some have criticized the game’s broken AI being unnecessarily difficult and thus unplayable.  And after playing a few rounds I can’t help but agree with them.  When the game itself actually TELLS you, even on the easiest settings, that you WILL lose and you WILL lose frequently until you figure out each boxer’s specific weak point, someone may have made a serious mistake designing the AI.  A game should never have to openly declare its own difficulty as though it were a box of cookies announcing its fat content!

This is actually pretty sad—the game itself is a good idea.  It’s clever, it’s funny, some of the boxers have really amazing backstories and are downright entertaining.  For instance, fighting Steve in the arcade pits you against a short fat kid in a ninja suit who’s the trivia king of his fantasy gaming guild.  There’s a Russian boxer by the name of Molotov who fights while wearing a belt of explosives.  There’s a certifiable lunatic, a giant with the mind of a child, a voodoo priest, a Japanese schoolgirl…and a legion of other great choices.  The whole thing is done in a cartoonish style, and the visible facial deformations are a riot to watch.   The character voices are nicely done—watching the audition tapes is a laugh and a half.

There are even celebrity boxers involved or at least scheduled to be; ever watch an episode of “Keeping Up With The Kardashians” and say, wow, I wish I could just slug Kim a few good ones?  With Facebreaker, you actually CAN!  Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag can actually square off via Facebreaker.

But all of these wonders together can’t quite exempt Facebreaker from its biggest problem—an AI so damaged that it’s virtually impossible to play in single player mode.  I can’t say how the multiplayer would work out—I generally work alone.  But the key point remains: playing Facebreaker is like trying to drive a Ferrari with a busted axle.  It looks great, it sounds great, it’s a beautiful system, but man…it’s not going anywhere any time soon.  And trying to go anywhere with it will only do more damage and leave you seriously frustrated.

One of the great things about writing game reviews is the opportunity to find those little known items that you can play for free. One such item comes by way of Newgrounds, and it’s called Shopping Cart Hero.

Now, you may think that nothing could quite top the sheer weirdness quotient given to us by “You Have to Defecate Upon King Bhumibol”, and you’d be right.  But how about a game that lets you jump a shopping cart?  With rocket boosters on the side?  And full of girls?

Before you start thinking that this is the kind of thing Johnny Knoxville sees if he drops acid (though you’d probably be right), that’s the point of the game.  Customize your cart with a selection of upgradeable parts, buy new tricks, and jump your cart to long distance, maximum height and maximum style.

It’s nothing fancy–all the characters are stick figures, and you can forget about anything resembling a story.  What it is, however, is a fun little time waster that you can play quickly if you have a couple minutes to spare between websites or YouTube videos or what have you.  At the end of the day, it’s a fun game, and that goes a long way.

It seems like it wasn’t so long ago that I was bemoaning the constant flood of first person shooters coming out for the newest generation of consoles.  Seemed like four out of every five games was yet another in a long series of games featuring you camped behind a gun barrel, blasting the holy bejeezus out of anything that happened to wander in front of you.

Occasionally, some of them were really good.  Stuff like BioShock, which featured a fairly deep story and some great atmosphere alongside its blasting.  And my perennial favorites, Morrowind, Oblivion and Fallout 3 were all first-person shooters.

And then there were games like Jericho and Doom 3–sludgy, cramped shooters that put me in a little box with lots of turns and never bothered to let me out.  Games like those to this very day give me the worst motion sickness.

One such game that left me wanting to give back my lunch is today’s review–F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.

Picking up just before the previous F.E.A.R installment left off, you play as part of a Delta Force squad dispatched to recover Armacham’s president Genevieve Aristide.  As the game progresses, you discover numerous secrets about yourself, your relationship to Alma (whom you’ll remember from the last game) who apparently wants to absorb you, your entire team, and your role in something called Project Harbinger.  Also in something called Project Paragon.

At this point you’ll probably be wondering why they called it Project Origin since there isn’t actually a Project Origin mentioned in this story, at least nowhere I could notice.  There’s Project Harbinger and Project Paragon and the downloadable content might as well include Project Everything But The Kitchen Sink, but Project Origin appears to be very much MIA.  Well, the likely reason for this is that the game’s name is actually the result of a contest held by Monolith Productions to name the game.  The three finalists were Dead Echo, Project Origin, and Dark Signal. Project Origin might’ve made a good subtitle for the LAST game, but why it went on to THIS game, well, that’s the responsibility of the fans and developers that made it a “strong favorite”.

Nonsensical names aside, you’ll find this F.E.A.R installment a lot like the LAST one, in which you run around vaguely industrial buildings with lots of corners shooting and getting shot at using an array of vaguely advanced weapons (and a couple outright advanced) while occasionally you hallucinate monsters.  Sometimes these hallucinations kill people.  You’ll also get to use the surprisingly fun but still downright overused Bullet Time, this time called “SlowMo”.  So if you weren’t terribly fond of the first one you’re not likely to enjoy this one terribly much either.

Perhaps the worst part about this game was that I could really only play for about fifteen minutes at a stretch before a wave of nausea seized me in its foul clutches and refused to let go.  And it was kind of a shame that this massive speed bump set itself in my way, because the story was fairly awesome.  Getting Alma back in the game to wreak her special brand of bloodsoaked psychokinetic insanity (is it me or does this chick just really get off on turning men inside out?) is just as creepy now as it was in the last installment, and the addition of character nightmares and twisted monstrousities that burst out of morgue slabs is the kind of thing you WISH you saw in more horror flicks.

It’s hard to say exactly how I feel about F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin–I love the story, but man, I can’t stand the gameplay.  I hate games that require you to keep a bucket handy, and not because you’re watching some twisted horror rip someone’s throat out.  If this had been a movie series I’d probably be all over it.

In summary, the rewards are great in this one (a killer story and some very fun weapons), but the road getting there (the nausea-inducing gameplay) just wasn’t worth it.

Coming to you from the depths of the XGen Studios vault is a casual browser game that burned through a LOT more time than I care to admit.  It’s called Motherload, and it is indeed a motherload of fun gaming.

In Motherload, you play a miner on the surface of Mars, but you won’t be on the surface very long as you drive your mining buggy down into the Martian soil in search of vast mineral wealth.  You can upgrade your buggy with better hull plating, faster drills, better engines, and a panoply of additional devices including reserve fuel tanks, teleportation systems, and explosives.

Playing Motherload is a lot like playing that old game Dig Dug, only without the enemies and with lots and lots of greed.  Completionists will find this game like crack as they tunnel through the soil and snatch up every last crumb of rock from beneath the planet’s surface.  The graphics are, of course, only inches from 16-bit fugly, but the gameplay is both fluid and compelling, giving you that just-one-more-level feeling until you finally reach the surprise at the end.  And it will be quite the surprise.

Motherload is a fantastic little time-waster that’ll keep you occupied for hours until you finally reach the end, and when you do, you’ll likely leave satisfied, the best measure of a casual game.