It was recently announced that Take Two executive Gary Dale has taken the seat as Realtime Worlds new CEO. If you’re not familiar with Realtime Worlds, you may be familiar with its debut title Crackdown; you know, the game that came with a Halo 3 multiplayer beta key? Yeah, that one.

Co-founder and creative director of Realtime Worlds, David Jones, had this to say about Mr. Dale:

“Having worked with Gary earlier in his career at BMG Interactive, I am deeply impressed with his management style and profound understanding of the entertainment business. As RTW transitions from being a traditional developer to an online publisher I could not be happier that Gary will lead us through this exciting phase of our growth.”

The real growth we will see from Realtime Worlds, however, is with their upcoming GTA-esque MMO All Points Bulletin.

Press release after the break. READ ON »

After seemingly forever, Criterion has finally released a solid price point for Burnout Paradise‘s upcoming Cops and Robbers DLC pack – The pack Xbox Live and the Playstation Network this Thursday for 800 Microsoft Points or $9.99, respectively.

Featured in the pack is an all new multiplayer gametype which has two teams fighting to obtain and return a stack of gold to their respective bases, you may remember as the mode we saw Criterion devs playing a few days ago. Also included in Cops and Robbers are 33 different police cars for you to use.

Read (Joystiq)

Playing through Army of Two is an experience that’ll leave you sad, in a way.  You’ll want to enjoy this game–you really will–it’s just that the game won’t actually give you very many good reasons to do so.  And yet, when it actually DOES, you get your sense of hope back, only to have it quashed once again by virtue of having no further reason to enjoy it.

The plot of Army of Two, sadly, won’t be a huge help either in terms of making you love this game.  You follow Army Rangers Tyson Rios and Elliot Salem as they become disenchanted with the army and leave to join a private military contractor outfit called SSC, Security and Strategy Corporation. From there, they’ll be running various missions over the course of fifteen years, and even be indirectly involved with a scheme you may have seen recently in theatres—to privatize the military.  And they’ll even work to bring about the downfall of said scheme, which is kind of weird considering they’re working for a company that would directly benefit from such a scheme.  And, even better, after fifteen years with SSC, they start their own company, Trans World Operations.

Yes, that would be the pun…two guys who make an army of two, who eventually become the army of TWO as an acronym.

This is actually a pretty fair storyline, and will send you all over the world doing a whole bunch of awesome stuff in an effort to keep organizations like yours, and the one you’ll found, strictly on the sidelines.  Of course, the problem with Army of Two is that you’ll have almost nothing to DO with any of this awesome stuff because you’ll be too busy running around and shooting stuff.

Much has been made over the fact that, if you’re playing alone, you get an AI partner.  This definitely qualifies as an interesting development, if it weren’t for the fact that your partner has mental candlepower somewhere in the crustacean range.  Seriously—I was holding a car door to use as a shield for this brain-dead troglodyte in Somalia so that he could get behind me and shoot.  I figured he’d be able to aim easily since I had my car door held in a fashion that suggested that every car in Somalia has somehow been reinforced with some kind of steel plating (seriously, folks, if you’re ever in a gun fight don’t use the car door as cover.  Any round of any serious power will blow right through it.  You’re MUCH better off ducking behind the engine block, because that thing requires a chain hoist to move.  But I digress.).

Wait…where was I?  Oh yeah, moron with the car door.  Anyway, I’m holding this thing, and I discover that my partner is so brain-damagingly stupid that I not only have to hold the cover up but I also have to walk him in FRONT of the enemy I think he should shoot because his skill with a rifle marks him as a CLEAR graduate of the Spooky Mulder School of Firearm Use (motto:  We’ll empty an entire fifteen-round clip into a swamp but we STILL can’t hit an alligator the size of a small car from a range of eight feet.).  And don’t even get me started on what happens if you give your partner a boost up to a ledge or overhang or some such and he gets shot before you can get pulled up to join him.  That’s just annoying.

You’ll also get to dress up in costume, including wearing patently ridiculous skull-shaped face masks (yes, that’s a brilliant move…nothing like going into combat with absolutely ZERO peripheral vision!  Clearly, their time in the Rangers taught them this.) and when you do a whole lot of killing you’ll be allowed to give your colleague a congratulatory fist bump to let him know he done good, because otherwise this knuckledragger would have nary a clue that he was doing something right.

Special side note: Army of Two must have some kind of problem with the military because they make it ABUNDANTLY clear how much more awesome it is to be a private military contractor.

Anyway, if you ever wanted to play a first person shooter from third person perspective and thought it would be awesome if Lenny and George from Of Mice and Men could handle the action, then Army of Two is the game you’ve been spending long nights awake for.  Otherwise, just walk on past and maybe try ANOTHER first person shooter.

Aria is one of those great Xbox Live community games that isn’t great because of what it does, but rather what it is.

Yes, when you start playing Aria, you’ll notice that it plays a lot like other games like Powerup Forever, Geometry Wars, and a host of others.  But this one is different–see, what it’ll do is take your music library, assuming you have one, and send out its steadily growing flood of enemies in time with the music, while playing it.  This is actually a really exciting feature, if not necessarily a real game-changer.

If just listening to music has grown tiresome, then you’ll probably get a kick out of playing your playlist.  As in  playing AGAINST your playlist. The thought of my music turning on me is actually a cheerful one, and makes a nifty game.  Sure, the gameplay’s a little on the soft side, and frankly, they definitely could’ve done a lot more with it but they’ve broken some interesting ground and hopefully paved the way for refinement.

And at the low price of four hundred Microsoft points, well, it’s worth the cost.

It might not be the first game ever to utilize slow-motion mode, but Max Payne was one of the first to use it in such a way that got it copied ever after. In truth it was the only real hook of the game; the storyline was just your standard renegade cop revenge story. The real joy of it came in going into slow-motion “Bullet Time” dives and blasting away at hordes of thugs before they can barely react.

Both Max Payne and Max Payne 2 have been brought to the Xbox Live Originals page. Each game is available for 1200 Microsoft points, or fifteen dollars. Unfortunately for Microsoft both of these games are on the backwards compatibility list and could probably be purchased for less than $15 for the both of them used.

Targeting mothers this time, Nintendo today unveiled the newest DS Lite color – a zesty lime green model that is being bundled with a carrying case and Personal Trainer: Cooking. While the color may look disgusting to us (and most probably to our mothers as well), it will most probably sell out to people who have no taste at all.

The bundle will be available starting May 3. While Nintendo did not specify a price, Amazon lists it for $150.

So, bust out your wallet and show your mother that you care in the form of a disgustingly green DS Lite that she will most probably forget after fiddling with it for an hour or so.

Continuing their weekly tradition of adding new games, Nintendo today updated their online DSi and Wii shops with four new titles.

DSi gamers can look forward to Clubhouse Games Express: Card Classics ($15) and Paper Airplane Chase ($2). The former, as the title suggests, is a collection of five card games while the latter lets your glide your virtual paper plane through increasingly tricky slalom courses.

Wii gamers can look forward to Cocoto Platform Jumper ($7) and Nobunaga’s Ambition ($8) – the latter is a SNES game. Both are action games and let players take control of their character and destroy their enemies, though the latter lets players decide between economic sanctions or unleashing ninja assassins. Sounds like fun times!

Starting the week with such craziness wasn’t exactly on my mind, and hey I’m not making this up: ZootFly has announced a game based on the Mr. T graphic novel series for a series of games based upon the famous A-Team character.

I shit you not: the first game will see Mr. T take on Nazis and their machines in various locations, including South American rain forests, ancient cities, industrial complexes and more. He is aided by none other than Sims creator Will Wright, who is an American geneticist in the game. They will join forces to “annihilate the Nazis and their hardware.”

The studio promises “over-the-top adrenaline-pumping action of Mr. T” coupled with platforming, brawling and puzzle-solving. It is unclear what Wright’s involvement in the game is. He recently left EA for Big Stupid Fun.

Mr. T vs The Nazis is in development for PC, PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. No release date was given for this bundle of awesomeness.

Xbox 360 gamers are going to go through a lot of payne, as the original Xbox versions of Max Payne and Max Payne 2 are now available through Xbox Live Marketplace as downloads, as reported earlier.

The games cost 1200 Microsoft points ($15) each and offer slow-mo shooting action featuring a police officer who has a constantly constipated face.

Originally developed by Remedy Entertainment, the third entry in the series will be released this year; it is being developed for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 by Rockstar Vancouver.

The video games industry is used to criticism and controversy, yet no title in history has come under fire as heavily and as quickly as Six Days In Fallujah. Within mere days of its announcement soldiers, veterans and family members were protesting the game, calling it tasteless in its planned depiction of the invasion of Fallujah a mere five years ago.

There were some soldiers who when asked said they had no problem with a historically accurate and realistic game; many even included that there are possible benefits to the game including greater understanding of the stresses of war and training new recruits in the rules of engagement. Unfortunately however these soldiers aren’t out stumping for the game, so the publicity circling is still vastly negative.

Faced with endless complaints, petitions and accusations of poor taste Konami has decided to save face and pull out of the project. Despite the fact that developer Atomic Games collaborated with soldiers via diaries and satellite images to get the game as close to the actual events of the battle as possible none of its detractors seemed to think there could be any validity to the game.