Major Nelson has recently announced on his blog that SUMO Digital’s OutRun Online Arcade will be hitting the Xbox Live Arcade service this week, Wednesday to be exact.

If you don’t know what OutRun Online Arcade is, read the following excerpt from Xbox.com to familiarize yourself with the game:

Experience the mayhem and action of OutRun Online Arcade as you test your time, speed, and handling ability, bringing your next-gen skills online with this coin-op classic.

Feel the kick as you put your foot to the floor in one of 10 high-performance Ferraris racing your way across the U.S. with an open top and a girl by your side. Winding roads, beautiful beaches and big city lights—it’s mile after mile of unrelenting acceleration through 15 action-packed courses, all visually enhanced in stunning high definition. Jump behind the wheel for the ultimate arcade racing experience and push yourself on the road as you race up to six others with online multiplayer. OutRun Online Arcade … it’s a beautiful journey!

OutRun Online Arcade will be available this Wednesday on the Xbox Live Arcade for 800 Microsoft Points.

If you’re looking to snag a few games but dont’ want to pay retail price, head over to Amazon’s Gold Box as they have apparently devoted an entire day of deals to just games.

So far Warriors Orochi 2, Rock Band 2, Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and Buzz! Master Quiz have been thrown in the Gold Box and quickly snatched up. However, there are still 3 more time slots that Amazon has left to reveal with just clues to what they might be:

Any idea what they might be? If you just can’t stand the suspense, Shaun White’s Snowboarding for the Wii is up as the Deal of the Day with a discounted price of $29.98.

Atlus has recdently announced that they will be bringing their water-collecting puzzler entitled Droplitz to the Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, PC, and iPhone sometime in late spring. If you don’t know what Droplitz is there is a trailer included above to give you a brief overview. However, if you’re too lazy to watch the trailer, read on.

Droplitz is a game in which you turn dials to connect various pipe looking things in an effort to collect droplets of liquid in the collection bins at the bottom of the screen. Four game modes will be included when the game is released: Classic, Zendurance, Power Up and Infection.

There isn’t much more information in terms of release dates or pricing for Droplitz but we’ll keep you posted.

Read (Destructoid)

We learned back in February that PSP title, Patapon 2, would be making it’s North American debut sometime this year which was later honed down to May 5th.

However, if rumors are to be believed, Patapon 2 won’t ever be making it’s physical debut. Instead, speculation suggests that the game will intead be a digital title only with vouchers being sold at retailers instead of the actual game.

Even stranger is the fact that Patapon 2, when downloaded from PSN with no voucher, will cost just $15.99 but the actual voucher will cost $19.99. 

Again, this is just a rumor so we’ll have to wait and see how this unfolds.

Read (Destructoid)

It looks like we’ll have to change the name from Weekly Wii Update to Weekly Nintendo Update as Nintendo has recently announced they will being updating the DSiWare service along with the WiiWare and Virtual Console services.

Retro gamers will be happy to hear that Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, which originally made its debut on the Sega Genesis, was added to the Virtual Console this week for 800 Wii Points. Other than that, we have puzzle and party games added for both the Wii and DSi which you can read about below:

Nintendo DSiWare™

Mixed Messages (Activision, 2-21 players, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Nintendo DSi Points): Mixed Messages is the hilarious party game of mixed-up miscommunication. Sketch a picture to capture your friends’ sentence, or try to figure out what in the world they’ve drawn. You might start with, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” and end up with “A crazy surfer outruns flying sticks of dynamite while his fans cheer!” Two to 21 players take turns writing sentences and drawing pictures to pass along a message. This isn’t a game about winning and losing – it’s all about the funny miscommunications that happen along the way. You’ll laugh when you see just how wacky things can get. Get together with your friends and mix it up.

Master of Illusion™ Express: Shuffle Games (Nintendo, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 200 Nintendo DSi Points): Master of Illusion Express titles are mind-boggling magic tricks pulled from the popular Nintendo DS™ game. Learn the illusions, practice up and amaze your friends. Master of Illusion Express: Shuffle Games will boggle your audience members’ minds as they try to figure out how you know exactly what they’re thinking. Also included is the bonus Vanishing Card trick, which the Nintendo DSi system performs for your enjoyment.

WiiWare

Party Fun Pirate™ (TOMY Corporation, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone – Comic Mischief, 500 Wii Points): Based on the popular Pop-Up Pirate toy, players take turns thrusting swords into a barrel that holds your captain captive, trying to see who can insert the most swords into the barrel. Thrust a sword into the wrong hole and you’ll send your captain flying, which means it’s game over for you! Unique Wii features add to the excitement, making for a fun-filled party game. Try swapping out the captain and putting your custom Mii character in the barrel for some real laughs!

Get ready to electrocute some bad guys (or good guys, depending on your taste) as Sony has bumped up the release of inFamous from a vague June timeframe to a shockingly concrete date of May 26.

Developed by Sucker Punch, the free-roaming action game grants players electricity powers to take on various villains and save the city/world/whatever.

Sony, the publisher, in a rather stupid move announced that only those who pre-order the game will be given access to the playable demo on May 7. Peasant folk will have to wait till May 21.

id Software has, through the years, been a premier PC development house, producing great technology mostly exclusive to PC. However, the company seems to have been affected by changing times, as they recently went wholly multiplatform with Rage, their upcoming shooter, ditching PC-exclusivity for console release.

Gamespot talks with company CEO Todd Hollenshead about the shift. And here’s what he had to say:

Well, actually it’s been a fundamental, sort of philosophical shift at the company, is that we really have transitioned from, first and foremost, a PC developer to a multiplatform developer. And so when John [Carmack] developed id Tech 5 (see below), it really was targeted from the initiation as a multiplatform technology solution.

Now, there’s no question that our roots are in PC gaming. And when I play a first-person shooter, keyboard and mouse is the configuration that I want to play on. I’m devoting my gaming time right now on the PC to Quake Live. I like a little Rock Band on the console, to be honest about it. But we feel like, in terms of your triple-A, big-budget, big-market title, that you really have to be cross-platform to be successful, unless you’re a first party.

So as an independent developer, we feel like we have to be on all the relevant platforms. So we don’t really view ourselves as PC first. I think I would say that John says that probably the primary development platform for Rage is actually the 360.

So, there you have it: Rage is primarily being developed for Xbox 360. Let the online game boards flame up.

So if you’ve seen the movie Wanted recently, or read the comic book, you’ve probably already figured out that it was really only a matter of time until it was going to be converted into a game, dubbed Wanted: Weapons of Fate.  And like most movie to game translations, this one will also be a lackluster cash grab designed for the sole purpose of separating you from your cash.  Let’s take a good look at why.

Basically, the plot of Wanted: Weapons of Fate puts things at about five hours after Wesley killed his own father with quite possibly the longest range rifle I’ve ever SEEN.  After whacking his own father, Wesley drifts off to sleep the sleep of the parricide and has a dream about his pregnant mother, who also gets shot, not surprisingly by assassins from the Fraternity.  Turns out Wesley’s got a LOT to do with the Fraternity before he was even born.  Anyway, from there, Wesley’s out to try and identify the guy who shot his mom in his dreams, and on the way there, he’s going to travel the world, shoot at and get shot at by tons of different people and a few downright personalities, and discover the truth about his family’s connections to the Fraternity.

All of this, of course, SOUNDS awesome.  The problem is that this is merely the story surrounding the overall gameplay, which is where the problem is.  Those experienced with the movies and the comics will know that, somehow, Wesley has all these nigh-magical powers to control the flight of bullets.  Wanted: Weapons of Fate will let you USE those powers, but only a little at a time.  You have to “build up” your adrenaline via a whole lot of killing.  You’ll get more adrenaline for using a knife rather than a gun, and when you gain adrenaline, you gain the ability to bend the bullets you fire in flight, kinda like in the movie.  I find that a cheat, in all honesty—in the movie, he was doing this sort of thing every couple of minutes.  In the game, I have to practically exterminate entire area codes before I get to try it.  I don’t know if this was some kind of attempt to introduce challenge or what, but it really just hampered the experience more than anything.

In fact, with all the running and jumping and finding cover and, yes, roadie-running, it reminds me of nothing so much as Gears of War with a whole new paint job.  I don’t know how many times I’ve played Gears of War with different settings and different characters since it came out and frankly, it only gets worse with each passing time.

I understand that it’s an action game, and a game about assassins, and frankly, expecting a movie to game conversion to pack anything more than action is probably a stupid idea.  But surely we could do something a little more original than yet another Gears of War knockoff with the Wanted license.  Or maybe we really couldn’t…and that’s the most depressing thing about the whole mess.

Never before has a publisher criticized its own game this much: EA has released a new trailer for Fight Night Round 4, hyping it by punching Round 3 right in the face.

"[In Fight Night Round 3], you often found that the gameplay degraded into two guys standing in front of each other and trading blows," says producer Brian Hayes. "You saw a very scripted, very repetitive experience where people stood in front of each other."

"What we’re really trying to deliver is the most realistic simulation of the sport of boxing ever in a video game….Fight Night Round 4, you see a much more fluid, natural game."

The trailer reveals a release date of June 30. It will be released on PS3 and Xbox 360.

Maybe one of the best values on Xbox Live Arcade today is a little title called R-Type Dimensions. Going for 1200 Microsoft points, it’s actually TWO games in one, offering up both R-Type and R-Type II in the same package.  The plot of each is shockingly similar, with the evil Bydo Empire out to destroy everything in sight and you playing as the lone warrior sent to stop them.

Fourteen stages of Bydo-blasting fury are all yours right here. Chances are you’ve played R-Type before in one form or another, and even if you haven’t, chances are you’ve played something similar. It’s not very often any more you find side-scroller action games, so it’s fun to take this quick trip backwards in time to take on a blast from the past.

Fly forward and blast enemies until there are no enemies left to blast–that’s the name of this game. Sure, not exactly a deep experience, but for a fast and casual game, you could definitely do a lot worse. Especially when you consider you won’t be paying even twenty bucks for two games in one.