It seems that a large group of people have become financially unstable to the point where they have had to sacrifice their beloved game consoles.

No they didn’t take them out back and smashed them, they pawned them at their local pawn shop:

“We’re seeing a lot of expensive video game systems, PlayStation 3s and X-Box and others, and a lot of LCDs (flat-screen televisions),” Ace Pawn Shop manager Chris Banul told the Associated Press.

Kotaku reports that the pawnshop empire Cash America has acquired over $1 billion in profits last year for the first time since the companies creation, 25 years ago.

All I know is my Wii would definitly go before my 360.

If you were one of the few who was a fan of Sony’s Go! Messenger service for the PSP, today is a sad day.

Sony has recently announced that they are pulling the plug on the service, giving the following statement on the situation:

“Although Go!Messenger brought innovative communications features to the PSP community, the service has not developed the base of users that we were hoping for.”

If you’re like the rest of us and not too familiar with Go! Messenger, it was a VoIP service that provided PSP users with the ability to make video, and voice, calls utilizing the Go! camera and was developed by BT.

This may not be the end as Sony has given word there is a possibility of more Go! software in the future.

Read (mocoNews)

If you are among the Final Fantasy fans in the gaming industry, watch out for the official launch of The Last Remnant for PC that is set to be available this March 24, 2009.

THE LAST REMNANT is a completely original adventure title, benefiting from the finest creative talent to build a lush, real-time fantasy world. The game’s battle system has been carefully crafted to deliver a brand-new experience for gamers, as they control forces in massive cinematic battles.

The Games for Windows version boasts a host of new features, these include; giving the player the choice to select Japanese or English voice- overs, improved character animations, the ability to allow multiple leader units to form unions and faster gameplay during battles.

Features

New features not included in the original Xbox 360(R) release version include:

(Source) Press

Microsoft has remained mum on the number of paid subscribers it has on Xbox Live, refusing to offer any form of numbers, but that silence has been broken by Seattle PI who reports that over half of the Xbox Live accounts worldwide were Gold-level accounts as of February 2008.

At this time last year, 56% of the worldwide subscriptions were Gold, which is 4% lesser than that of February 2007’s. North America has the highest number of gold users – 60% – a number that is said to have “remained relatively flat” over the previous year.

These figures come from an internal Microsoft spreadsheet viewed by Seattle PI. Microsoft has since then released the New Xbox Experience, a completely overhauled user interface for the console, which has surely lured in new users.

Detailed in Valve’s latest teaser page, this week’s Team Fortress 2 update will add a new weapon to the Scout class – the “Force-A-Nature”.

A double-barrel, two-shot shotgun, the weapon is characterized by its unique knockback effect and slow reload time. Keeping in line with the Scout class, if used in mid-air, the weapon will propel the player further upwards.

Valve has also opened a new user poll, allowing fans to vote for the order in which the new items are unlocked. They are also selling a new Force-A-Nature themed t-shirt in their web store.

About time PSP got some love: Sony has announced that Rock Band, Assassin’s Creed, LittleBigPlanet and MotorStorm are coming to the handheld platform.

Not much is known about any of the titles at the moment since they are yet to be officially announced. However, Joystiq reports that Rock Band Unplugged will feature an in-game music store through the system’s wireless capabilities and that its gameplay will be similar to Frequency and Amplitude, Harmonix’s past rhythm game efforts.

Assassin’s Creed will be an “exclusive installment” which hopefully translates to a completely new story or an expanded one and not another port. LittleBigPlanet is being made in conjunction with creator Media Molecule and will pack new levels and areas specifically created for the PSP.

Meanwhile, MotorStorm Arctic Edge is being developed by Pursuit Force makers Bigbig and will be released on PS2 and PSP. As the name implies, it will be set in Alaska.

All games are due out later this year.

To celebrate the release of Resident Evil 5 next month, Microsoft today announced a new red flavor of Xbox 360 that will accompany the game in a limited edition bundle.

Set for release on March 13, the bundle will include a red-colored Xbox 360 Elite console with a 120GB hard drive, a copy of Resident Evil 5 and a couple of extras for $399 – the same price as the regular Elite model.

The bundle will come with Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix, an exclusive Resident Evil premium theme, HD AV, HDMI and Ethernet cables and more.

The economic crisis has hit Funcom hard, as the Age of Conan developer today announced a fourth quarter loss of $23 million, with an overall 2008 net loss of $33.8 million.

In even more bad news for the company, Olav Sandnes, its chief financial officer, has resigned.

The worst news is yet to come: Age of Conan boasted 700,000 subscribers following its May 2008 release, but Norwegian financial group DnB NOR Markets now estimates that subscriptions to the game have fallen below 100,000. This is in line with previous word that Funcom had shut down 63% of the MMO’s servers in January, reducing the game’s worlds from 49 to 18.

These days there’s reviews on anything; cars, restaurants, films and of course video games. Newspapers, websites and magazines all have people whose duties are to evaluate the experience of something. In many cases it’s relatively straightforward, mostly with technology: effectiveness of features versus cost, ease of installation/use etc etc. With things like food, films and video games it’s far more difficult to write reviews that’ll keep everyone happy. Ask any group of people their thoughts about a film and you might get as many opinions as there are people present.

Video games are just as dividing. Halo 3 got a review score of 94 on Metacritic but many gamers would rate it far lower. Some of the more addictive games I’ve played received relatively low review scores in comparison to games that didn’t hold my attention for long. The question with reviews is always this: are reviewers writing for anyone but other reviewers?

When asked at DICE Summit 2009 a panel of game developers said that they generally don’t consider the thoughts or opinions of reviewers when creating games. Some point out that the true hallmark of a successful game is its sales, others mentioning the fact that especially for casual games a review is useless, since it likely won’t be read by the person who buys the game. Others point out that reviewers are easily swayed by effective marketing (literally how sumptuous the spread and bar were at an event) and that they’re generally concerned about different things than consumers, reviewers giving more weight to story, voice acting and music. Overall they all stated that for one reason or another the Metacritic scores don’t mean all that much to them.

Japan has given the world many wonderful things; all sorts of scientific and technological advances, entire movements of art and film, pretty much the whole world of video gaming itself and best of all, sushi. Japanese culture has always been more accepting of nudity and sexual content than our own society, which despite how many years have passed still has a heavy puritanical basis.

If you’re familiar at all with anime you’ve probably heard of some of the more sexually explicit things involving school girls and tentacles. That’s just the tip of the iceberg however as a PC game has recently caused a big ruckus stateside. It’s called RapeLay and you can figure out pretty much everything you need to know from the title. It’s recently been pulled from Amazon and eBay, but anti violence activists are still up in arms about it.

Illusion, the software company that released the game in 2006 has stated on their website that the game is only available in Japan, but the activists are still concerned that games like this won’t do anything but harm. The jury is still out on whether or not the media affects people’s actions, but if there’s even the slightest chance that it’s as the alarmists say, the thought of a game like this being out there is incredibly perilous.