Whip out your bear-blasters, as EA LA’s stand-alone PC expansion for Command & Conquer Red Alert 3 is set for release sometime later today.

Priced at $19.95 and dubbed Uprising, the expansion contains four new mini-campaigns, one of which can be called a dungeon-crawler that explores the origins of psychic Japanese schoolgirl Yuriko Omega.

The expansion also features a new Commander’s Challenge mode with 50 new scenarios and live-action cutscenes featuring the charisma of nature boy Ric Flair and Gemma Atkinson, among others.

Steam has become the de facto standard in digital distribution, with Valve and major publishers now supporting it. However, there are quite a few competitors out there right now, and Stardock is one of them with their Impulse service. Company CEO Brad Wardell recently took exception to a Edge editorial proclaiming the “Age of Steam,” writing a defense of competition in the digital distribution market.

Wardell argues that it is too early to name a clear winner: “I must confess that I am surprised to see Edge, or anyone else for that matter, imply that Steam’s early lead in digital distribution translates to permanent dominance.”

He added that Valve’s customers can partly be attributed to “shrewd business practices” such as acquiring Counter-Strike and its user base. Furthermore, he notes the use of Steamworks, which he points would have alarmed gamers if it were employed by EA, Microsoft or even Google.

"Steam does a lot of things right," admitted Wardell. "But there’s certainly room for improvement which viable competition encourages. After all, MySpace once looked unbeatable in the social networking world but such premature assumptions look quaint in ‘the age of Facebook’."

There’s no one else in the world capable of milking the Guitar Hero franchise more than Activision – EA doesn’t even stand a chance! Bearing that in mind, Activision has filed a trademark for Sing Hero, hinting that they are preparing a dedicated karaoke game.

Guitar Hero: World Tour, the latest in the franchise, added drums and mic to its list of plastic equipments. However, Activision has promised a “major re-stage” of the franchise, with “all new differentiated Guitar Hero products,” which most probably has resulted in Sing Hero.

There’s currently three Guitar Hero games due out this year: Metallica, Greatest Hits and On Tour: Modern Hits.

Developer Cryptic Studios has confirmed that Champions Online, its upcoming super-powered MMO, will be released on PC before the promised PS3 and Xbox 360 versions hit.

"All I know is it’s coming out first on the PC," design director and Flagship Studios veteran Bill Roper told Eurogamer. "We really, really want to bring it out on console, the consoles are just hungry and perfect for an MMO, and we’ve done a lot of work to ensure that there’s nothing to prevent us from doing that…It’s an area beyond my control."

Champions Online was once scheduled for release this June, but has been pushed back to a vague spring timeframe. While the game has only been confirmed for PC and Xbox 360, publisher Atari lists it as coming to “consoles”, hence the PS3 speculation.

As expected, EA today officially announced Army of Two: The 40th Day, the sequel to the cooperative action game featuring the high-fiving team of Salem and Rios.

The sequel sees the couple find themselves in Shanghai, China – not on a honeymoon, mind you – which has been completely ruined. As they make their way through the city, they begin to uncover the secret of the 40th Day.

EA promises that the sequel will offer more co-op moves, resulting in a more “organic and immersive” experience. It is being developed by EA Montreal for release this winter on PS3, PSP and Xbox 360.

Yesterday scans hit the internet with scans from Famitsu revealing the newest Resident Evil title for the Wii. Capcom has wasted no time in releasing more information, most of which confirms what we already surmised from the screenshots. Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles is indeed a sequel to Umbrella Chronicles, though the reason for the title change is that the Umbrella Corporation is no longer the enemy.

It is set during the events of Resident Evil 2, with Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield braving the hordes of T-virus infectees on September 29th, 1998. The overall format of the gameplay will be the same, with players blasting away at zombies and other creatures in an on-rails arcade shooter format. Capcom promises a heightened sense of realism this time around though with better camera angles, sharpened visual effects and the ability to see your partner in front of you on screen (for single player mode only).

Complaints about the difficulty of the original have been addressed as the main focus of Capcom is replayability, so while less experienced gamers can play the game without frustration, the more experienced can still get a true challenge. Darkside Chronicles will have more of a horror bent than Umbrella Chronicles and will have scenarios from other games than RE2, but Capcom isn’t revealing any of those quite yet. The game is currently about 35% complete and no release date is set.

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition isn’t a hard game to like.  Chances are you’ve played games just like this one already, and you’ve had fun.  With that in mind, it’s definitely a tall order not to enjoy this one.

The storyline is interesting enough–basically, due to a series of disasters back on Earth that the game never strictly defines, humanity, as led by the Neo-Venus Construction group, has left Earth to colonize an outer planet.  They’ve settled on E.D.N. III (pronounced, not surprisingly, Eden), a frozen mudball of a planet that seems to be at least usable.  It doesn’t take long for human construction to annoy the planet’s previously undiscovered indigenous life, the Akrid, which are basically enormous insects.  Humanity, of course, doesn’t much relish the thought of taking on gigantic bugs until they discover that these massive insects produce and store within their bodies a kind of energy source that enables them to exist in the planet E.D.N. III’s harsh conditions.  They call it thermal energy, or T-ENG, and it’s an extremely potent energy source.  Taking the T-ENG, the humans use it in the development of Vital Suits, giant walking battlemechs that mount sufficiently heavy weapons to turn back even the Akrid.

You, meanwhile, step in as Wayne Holden, an amnesiac who remembers how to pilot one of these Vital Suits, and holder of a mysterious device called a Harmonizer that allows Wayne to directly metabolize T-ENG.  And over the course of the game, you’ll fight the Neo-Venus Construction group in an attempt to free E.D.N III from both them and the Akrid.

Like I said, it’s the kind of game you’ve played plenty of times before.  Take the earlier console title Earth Defense Force 2017–if you put that on a snowy planet and replaced all the vehicles with mechs, then improved the graphics and added on a better story, you’d have Lost Planet: Extreme Condition.  Oh, don’t get me wrong—it’s fun enough to play.  I love games where you can just run around and blast stuff on a fairly linear path with lots of different weapons.  And indeed, you get PLENTY of weapons.  You get the standard machine gun, a shotgun, a rocket launcher, hand grenades, and that’s just for starters before you even get to the first mech.  You’ll get to swing around with a grappling hook cannon and you’ll even get the opportunity to detach mech weapons and carry them around with you like normal guns.  It’s downright exciting to carry a gatling gun around with you and blast everything in sight while you walk around, but it does come at the cost of severely slowing your character down.
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You’ve got to hand it to the retro gaming concept–while over at Newgrounds, I dug up this clever little tribute / marketing ploy for the recently released Watchmen.  It’s called Watchmen: Minutemen Arcade.

The really interesting part about this title is that you play it like an actual video game in a diner, released by Veidt Industries.  The game itself is basically a Final Fight-style sidescrolling fighter, where you get to play as either the original Nite Owl or the original Silk Spectre.  You roam the streets of New York pounding a whole bunch of similarly-dressed thugs and eventually working your way up to a none too difficult fight with Moloch himself.

As a game, it’s not much.  But as a concept, it’s kind of nifty.  It’s the kind of thing that could be fairly easily included as a DVD-ROM option, or maybe even as a straight DVD option.  Considering you only have maybe seven buttons to work–punch, kick, jump and move in four directions–a DVD remote could probably handle it.  Anyway, give it a try–the price is right, and it’s a sufficiently nifty concept to entertain for at least a few minutes.

Since Unreal Tournament 3 was freely playable to everyone last weekend, the play time online increased a massive 2000%. Valve announced that the free weekend spiked the amount of purchases of the game as well, so it’s no surprise that another free weekend of UT3 is coming. The game will be freely played on March 13-15. The title has now a new promotional price as well: only $11.99, which will run until March 22. Thereafter it’s the usual $19.99.

Unreal Tournament 3 has been highly anticipated, but has greatly disappointed in sales compared to previous UT titles. The new price offerings and free play is sure to increase the sales of an otherwise great multiplayer shooter.

The vast majority of Xbox 360 owners have at one point or another have to deal being without their Xbox 360, most likely because it was in for repairs.

A Yale student, Jesse Maiman, lost his Xbox 360 for good at the airport. He then filed a lawsuit against US Airways, seeking his loss and damages covered by $1 million. A new Xbox 360 on the other hand, retails for $399. Maiman claims the console had a “specialized” hard drive, most likely meaning that the content on the drive (e.g. save games) were of great value — something any gamer could understand. But $1 million?