From MSNBC.com’s Casual Game of The Year award to the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences Overall Game of the Year award, Peggle had made quite a name for itself.

Well, it looks like Peggle is looking to make an even bigger name for itself as it was recently announced that it is finally coming to the Xbox Live Arcade.

The game will be available in 2 forms, both digital and physical. The digital version of the game will cost 800 Microsoft Points. The physical version, on the other hand, will ship in a bundle called PopCap Arcade Volume 2 which also includes Feeding Frenzy 2 and Heavy Weapon.

Watch out for Peggle on Xbox towards the end of this month.

Read (Kotaku)

Publisher Ignition Entertainment sent out word that the hand-drawn SNK fighter King of Fighters XII will hit PS3 and Xbox 360 this July.

"While other fighting games have abandoned the time-consuming process of creating beautiful 2D art, KOFXII fully embraces the refined aesthetic beauty that only human hands can produce," said Ignition business development director Shane Bettenhausen. He seems to be taking a stab at Street Fighter IV, which was recently released to much fanfare.

More information and media on the game is expected closer to release.

Following word that Japan is getting another Wii controller – “classic controller PRO” – Nintendo today announced that they currently have no plans to bring it to North America or Europe. No reason was given.

Due out in Japan this summer, the new controller adds lengthened handles and two more shoulder buttons. It also revises the wire placement of the original classic controller. Despite all this, it will still need to be plugged into a Wii Remote for use.

Unlike Harmonix, Activision releases a monthly schedule for Guitar Hero: World Tour DLC, and this month is no different.

This month sees the introduction of three different packs, with music from Jimi Hendrix and Queen. European bands make up the other two packs, with music from The Rasmus, Within Temptation and Die Toten Hosen. Finally, a James Bond-themed single will be released.

As usual, each pack will sell for 440 Microsoft points ($5.50) and individual songs for 160 Microsoft points ($2).

European Track Pack Vol. 3 – March 5

• The Ramsus – "In the Shadows"
• Vanilla Sky – "Break It Out"
• Les Rita Mitsouko – "C’est Comme Ca"

European Track Pack Vol. 4 – March 19

• Within Temptation – "What Have You Done"
• Die Toten Hosen – "Hier Kommt Alex"
• M-Clan – "Carolina"

Jimi Hendrix Track Pack Vol. 2 – March 19

• Jimi Hendrix – "Freedom"
• Jimi Hendrix – "Angel"
• Jimi Hendrix – "Foxey Lady (Live, Woodstock 1969)"

Queen Track Pack – March 26

• Queen – "We Are The Champions"
• Queen – "Fat Bottomed Girls"
• Queen – "C-lebrity"

James Bond Theme Song – March 26

• "A new recording of the classic James Bond theme song."

In an unprecedented move, GSC Game World has released an early build of STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl – which was released back in 2007 – for free, offering fans a peek at cut levels and unfinished features.

The build – dated October 18, 2004 – is called the “xrCore build 1935″ and can be downloaded from this GSC forum thread. As expected, this build is full of bugs but offers a look at the game midway through its development. It offers several unused levels from the final game, including Dead City, Swamp and Generators.

STALKER was first announced in 2001 and was expected out in 2003, but got delayed over the years until its final release in 2007.

Warner Bros. today announced Watchmen: Justice is Coming, an upcoming MMO for the iPhone.

Taking advantage of new “cloudMMO” technology, the game will allow players to create their own masked avatars in the ’70s era of Watchmen. Players will be able to chat with others and participate in street battles.

While no exact gameplay details were given, WB notes that gmaers will be able to complete challenges, explore the universe and fight others. It is set for release later this month.

Gamestop has been making a killing for years with their used games market. They buy your games for a relatively low price, then turning around to re-sell them at a much higher price. It often seems a rather unfair system, because eventually some older games are worth barely more than pennies for resale while other titles like Gears of War that they have dozens of are still being sold for a large proportion of the original price tag.

If you’ve got old games lying around that you’re bored to death of and you can’t get more than a few quarters of trade-in value for you can now do something good with them. A charity is starting that aims to help some of the unfortunate individuals of the world. Donate Games will accept used games and re-sell them, with the proceeds going to help ‘orphan diseases’. There are a whole lot of diseases out there, but many only affect a small portion of the population and are of less concern for the population at large. The charity is founded by Jim Carol and his wife Cynthia. Mr. Carol worked in the IT industry and his son was diagnosed with Philadelphia Chromosome. Although his son is now in remission, the couple saw many people suffering from equally rare diseases that aren’t getting enough funding for proper treatment research.

The site is up and accepting donations, but right now you can’t buy any of your games yet.

Many of us can remember our first cellphones; not quite the gigantic monstrosities that are parodied in anything related to the early 90s but still sizeable pieces of technology with monochrome screens and large pixels. My first cellphone had an Othello game that I played many times, but since that time they’ve come a long ways. With more and more complex phones like the iPhone some are expecting the mobile phone gaming market to blow up, and others are expecting it’ll drive existing handhelds out of demand.

Most of the people making these predictions though either have a vested interest in saying so (like working for Apple) or aren’t involved in the industry (business analysts). Nintendo has insisted that they’re not concerned about the mobile gaming industry, saying that they in no way designed the DSi as a competitor for the iPhone or other cellphone gaming devices.

David Yarnton, general manager of Nintendo UK said that in designing the system the company left out many features they could have included, planning on keeping with their approach of letting the software sell systems. “We could have added lots of things, but then you become a jack of all trades, and a master of none. One of the things we are really honest about is that we stay faithful to our roots, of being a games company. The most important criterion is to make sure that what we’re offering can do the best games.”

He’s also warning people already that systems will be in short supply come this holiday season.

After several years of happy partnership with Activision to make the Guitar Hero games someone at Gibson decided that the oodles of money they were probably getting from licensing fees and royalties weren’t enough. The guitar maker sued Activision claiming that the game series infringed on a patent they held for “simulating a musical performance” which was filed in 1999. As you might imagine Activision filed a counter-suit claiming that their product doesn’t infringe upon Gibson’s patent (for a technology that they never actually made I might add).

A US District Court judge ruled yesterday in favor of Activision, claiming that Gibson’s patent only applies to devices that output an analog audio signal and not MIDI signals or any kind of control signals. After all, the guitar controller doesn’t produce any sort of music in and of itself as a real guitar does. Gibson also had a lawsuit out against Rock Band for a similar patent infringement but with this ruling it’s very likely to be dismissed as well.

A lot of people had fun with Assassin’s Creed on the Xbox 360. I am not one of them.

In a mindbender of a plotline, you play as the distant descendant of a legendary assassin, Altair.  You’re stuck in the middle of a lab in 2012, having memories extracted from you on the genetic level about all the stuff your legendary assassin great-great-great-many times over grandfather did.  Your character will be remembering these events, but you’ll be the one playing them.

Altair did a whole lot of damage to the so-called Assassin’s Guild, breaking all three of its cardinal rules on one mission, and thus getting demoted all the way down to novice.  This means, sadly, that all the sweet things you can do in the first level will be off limits to you until you can re-learn them.  I can’t even express how ludicrous this is–demotion equalling loss of ability is too preposterous to even try and refute.

So you’ll be going about your business, trying to regain your former status (and ability, somehow) by carrying out a series of missions related to finding something that will end a war permanently.  Worse yet, further complications will come around by introducing the now-popular Mayan end of the world date of December 21, 2012.

On a visual level, Assassin’s Creed is patently top-notch.  And all the bells and whistles are present with great sound and level design and the like.  Indeed, whoever compared Assassin’s Creed to a giant parkour run wasn’t just whistling in the dark.  And the plot is massive, if confusing in more than a few points.

But the biggest problem in this game is its lack of substance.  The missions are mostly information gathering runs, without a whole lot of fighting or action.  This makes sense on some level–it’s not Warrior’s Creed or Soldier’s Creed, it’s ASSASSIN’S Creed.  If you get in a big rolling fight then you’ve probably done your job wrong from the word go.  This makes the problem a structural one—if you don’t want to play the stealthy assassin, then you don’t want to play Assassin’s Creed.

Specialization, folks, is for INSECTS.  Robert Heinlein said it first and best.  The best games may well require you to be the most versatile.  Look at some of the greats—where you have to gather information, act on that information, and see it through to the end.  You’ll have to plan your approaches, fight your way through a legion of foes and solve some puzzles to get where you’re going.  You get to play on every conceivable level at once—strategic, tactical, and operational.  Games where you do the same thing, over and over, seldom offer as much fun as those games that offer variety, no matter how pretty they look.

So if you love the parts of the various games out there where you have to sneak around, then you’ll no doubt love Assassin’s Creed.  It’s a beautiful game with a storyline so dense that light cannot escape from its surface.  But if you want something fast-paced with a more comprehensible storyline, you’ll likely turn this one down.