If you loved playing poker with your Facebook account, Zynga just made the whole thing better especially if you have an iPhone. Zynga (www.zynga.com), one of the largest social gaming companies, announced today the availability of “Live Poker” with support for Facebook Connect on Apple’s App Store. “Live Poker” features Facebook Connect for iPhone which allows players to bring the social gaming experience available on Zynga’s top Facebook game Texas Hold’Em Poker with them on their iPhone or iPod touch.

With “Live Poker” and Facebook Connect, users can login with their Facebook account through a user-friendly interface designed specifically for the revolutionary iPhone and iPod touch. Users can play poker against their real Facebook friends when those friends are playing “Live Poker” on an iPhone, iPod touch or Texas Hold’Em Poker on Facebook. With the integration of Facebook Connect, users can also see how they rank among their Facebook friends who play “Live Poker” or Texas Hold’Em Poker on Facebook.

“Live Poker” is now available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore. Additional “Live Poker” versions are available from $0.99 to $59.99.

(Source) Press

Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. The Rock, who starred in 2005′s “Doom” movie, and adaptation of the game of the same name, has come out and said that they failed when making the movie, adding:

“Now, there’s been great video game that have been made into movies. Our goal with Doom was not only to appeal to its audience, but maybe break out into the sci-fi or thriller genres. That just didn’t happen for us. It always just comes down to writing and material.”

As they say in Hollywood, when things go wrong you can always blame the writer. Doom was released in 2005 and received mostly negative reviews and raked in some $30 million at the box office.

News comes from PocketGamer that Ubisoft’s sneaky Assassin’s Creed is coming to the iPhone in the near future. There are little to no details about the game, but we can expect some sort of open-world gameplay that made the original Assassin’s Creed so special.

Assassin’s Creed was originally released on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in 2007, and will now find its way to Apple’s iPhone (and iPod touch) as well. Mobile game maker Gameloft is said to be developing the game, in addition to creating the upcoming Terminator Salvation for the iPhone as well.

For the many fans who are crazy about this 3D soccer game, Power Soccer, the stakes just got better with this expansion announced by top Spanish-language sports brand, Fox Sports en Espanol. Fox Sports en Espanol, is expanding the way fans interact with their favorite soccer teams by adding Power Soccer(R), a web-based, console- quality, multi-player soccer game developed by Power Challenge to its online, broadcast and advertising offerings.

Power Soccer(R) was integrated into the Fox Sports en Espanol’s website, foxsportsla.msn.com; the co-branded site can be found at foxsportsla.msn.com/virtual.

Power Soccer(R) users build, personalize and play their own soccer teams in live head-to-head matches with other players around the globe. Users can join their favorite national and Premier League teams in the Power Soccer(R) Fan Zone, then play Championship Cups against other fans to earn trophies for their favorite teams.

With 240 million page views to date, the new online asset, Power Soccer(R), is expected to drive online usage significantly.

(Source) Press

Valve has released yet another update of Team Fortress 2. In addition to fixing a number of bugs, it deals with balance issues regarding the new Scout update.

The new update increases the minimum distance in order to stun someone with the Sandman, and the damage Scouts do to stunned enemies has been reduced by 50%.

Valve has also recently announced their plans to introduce “server scoring” by punishing servers that are inaccurate, thereby making it easier for players to find better servers.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope Review–Oddly, I’m Not Disappointed
Gen Review–Fun With Spheres
Wallace and Grommit coming to PC March 24th
DICE details new BF2 map
Burnout Paradise hits Steam
F.E.A.R 2 Toy Soldiers map pack free of charge
SF4 DLC has Chun-Li showing more skin
New Call of Duty: World at War “Verrückt” trailer
First Fight Night Round 4 gameplay footage
Japanese schools incorporate Nintendo DS into cirriculum
Japanese SF4 commercial shows real life Sakura
Capcom justifies charging for Resident Evil 5 multiplayer
New York won’t tax downloadable content
Ghostbusters theme song on Rock Band?
Bandai adds Noby Noby Boy offline multiplayer, Mars
Xbox Live discounts Fable, more
CoD: World at War demo hits Xbox Live
Resident Evil 5 to get multplayer via DLC
BioShock 2 Details Leaked
Gears of War 2 Map Pack, Patch Incoming
LEGO Harry Potter and Indiana Jones Sequel Confirmed
The Beatles Game to Feature Never-before Released Material
Rock Band Gets the Funk Out
Wheelman Goes Gold
Top Ten Reasons Why The Wii is Winning
Korean player getting $500k to play WarCraft 3
Nvidia reconsidering GTS 240 re-naming

The Star Ocean system has a long and somewhat checkered history, offering up a long progression of good and bad games going as far back as the original Playstation and beyond.  Thus, when I heard there was to be a new installment of the Star Ocean series, Star Ocean: The Last Hope, I found it all rather ironic.  I’d been burned on Star Ocean titles before.  Frankly, so had other people. The boys out at Penny Arcade, in their grand inimitable style, once described a Star Ocean title, specifically, Star Ocean: Till the End of Time as “being a lot like high school”, in that, no matter what you do, whoever you’re not “currently controlling gets gangbanged by reptiles”.  This basically means that, unless you’re constantly near them or in charge of them, your AI characters will do absolutely idiotic things and your AI controlled enemies will gang up on them and proceed to beat them into a pulp.

So I had my concerns about Star Ocean: The Last Hope, mostly because it was MY last hope that the series could actually generate anything but a gigantic pile of suck.

And surprisingly enough, I wasn’t terribly disappointed.  This time, I got to play as part of an interstellar space force–yes, kind of like Starfleet–that represented a post-Apocalyptic earth.  This may be one of the very few times I’ve seen utopia grow from dystopia, and frankly, I can’t name any others off the top of my head.  Anyway, this interstellar space force launches a small fleet of five ships out to planet Aeos, where hopefully, sufficiently Earth-like conditions will be found so humanity can pack up, leave their shattered Earth behind, and possibly come back to rebuild except from a planet we didn’t just catastrophically screw up.  Of course, not all goes according to plan and four out of the five ships crashland on Aeos, with the fifth being, at the beginning of the game, “lost”.  From this rather shaky start, you’ll have to roam the galaxy, discover corruption at the core of the space force, and do a spectacular amount of other assorted stuff on a game that covers THREE DVDs.
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So I went back to Kongregate to see if there was anything interesting to play, and indeed, under the hot new games section was Gen, a twisted little puzzle game that put a little extra punch in my day.

Basically, you control a sphere with the power to attract other, smaller spheres, and you’ve got to guide these spheres to the safety of the main sphere.  I’m not sure why the spheres are gone, or why touching spheres to things around you kills them, but the key thing is, this is a diabolical little puzzler that’ll test your every brain cell.  Seriously, if you want a way to perk up your brain in the morning, bust out one of these puzzlers and try to guide some spheres.  You’ll find yourself in a much better mood, between the relaxing music and the mindbending puzzles.  You even manage to feel a genuine sense of accomplishment after carrying through a level, and it’s not every game that can do that.

If you like a good puzzle with some calming music that’s fast in, fast out, then Gen is the game for you.

If you are a fan of the popular claymation series, Wallace and Grommit, you will be happy to hear that Telltale Games has recently announced that the duo will be making a March 24th PC debut.

A demo for the series Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures will also be available prior to the release date, on March 16th.

Also, as an added bonus, Telltale has said that those who pre-order the game will receieve full episodes for both Sam & Max and Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People.

Read (Joystiq)

Battlefield 2 is still one of the most popular multiplayer shooters out there, but despite that, updates of the game are quite sparse. The new 1.5 update has been delayed several times, with little to no information from developer DICE.

Now however, they have detailed the new map which will be included in 1.5, called “Operation Blue Pearl”. In particular, DICE writes about the technical limitations of making a BF2 map;

When we make maps here at DICE we are constantly using programs that check draw-calls on our maps so that, wherever you position yourself on the map, the draw-calls never exceed the maximum limit. (A draw-call is when the game engine must call a texture image into the graphic card’s memory for it to be rendered on screen. The more draw-calls the game must make, the more it impacts computer performance so limiting these is one of the cornerstones of game production.)

The new update is expected to be released in the upcoming months.