It was recently announced that the port of Flashback, which originally made its debut on the Amiga platform, has hit the App Store today.

Priced at $4.99 Flashback will feature everything included in the original with the addtion of intuitive touch controls. Yes, this is one of those classic sidescrollers packed with action, adventure, and guns.

Me? I’ll wait until Manomio (the game’s developer) releases a trial version of the game first.

Activision has recently gone ahead and revealed the above turntable controller for DJ Hero via Twitter.

Upon first glance this thing looks pretty lame, but make note that just pressing the 3 buttons isn’t the whole game. What’s hidden on the above render is an effects-dial and crossfader, so expect this game to actually take some skill.

DJ Hero is currently under development by FreeStyleGames and is expected to hit shelves later this year.

Fingers have been pointing towards the release of Guitar Hero: Van Halen since early March and of course, Activision has kept their lips sealed.

Well, the Santa Monica-based developer has finally decided to officially announced Guitar Hero: Van Halen for a second half 2009 release.

That’s all we have to go by as of now but expect to see some Van Halen signature guitars and normal Guitar Hero pricing when this game drops.

Read (ThatVideoGameBlog)

It looks like Microsoft is again looking to expand this time announcing plans to acquire Vancouver, Canada-based game developer BigPark. Apparently, Microsoft has been working with this developer for some time now getting ready to release an Xbox 360 exclusive.

There is no word on how much the deal will go down for or what game Microsoft and BigPark have cookin’ but E3 is right around the corner

For those who weren’t aware, BigPark was started back in 2007 as a collaboration of former EA and Distinctive Software executives.

It was recently made known that Jeff Huber, SVP of Engineering over at Google, has recently taken a seat on EA’s board of directors. Huber’s dayjob includes working behind the scenes at Google working on their various Google Apps, but what could he be doing for EA?

EA CEO John Riccitiello had this to say:

“We’re thrilled to have Jeff on our board,” said John Riccitiello, CEO of Electronic Arts. “His proven track record in technology and engineering will make him a strong addition to the board.”

There’s no telling what Huber’s position will entail of now but as this story unfolds we’ll keep you updated.

Read (BusinessWire)

While EA and THQ are reporting huge losses, worlds largest game publisher, Activision Blizzard, have just reported a massive $981 million in revenue for fiscal 2008, well above analysts expectations, while net profits were at $181 million. The sales were fueled by World of Warcraft, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty franchises. Another interesting bit of information released, was that World of Warcraft was raking in $100 million per month. That’s right, per month.

Possibly to coincide with the animated movie in development, a new Astro Boy game is in development at High Voltage, who are working on the Wii, PS3 and PSP versions, while Art Co Ltd. is working on the DS version. The games are slated for release this October, other than that, not much else is known. Expect more details at E3 in a month.

A SEGA representative confirmed on the official forums of Virtua Tennis 2009 that the game will be delayed till next month, and will be released on June 2. The reason for the delay was to get more time to polish the Wii version of the game — possibly related to more work on the new Wii Motion Plus accessory. The game will be released on the Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Despite the fact that PS3 sales topping Wii sales in Japan might suggest that the system isn’t in demand quite like it once was, Nintendo is still reporting incredible sales figures for the previous fiscal year. Their net sales increased by nine point nine percent to more than 1.83 trillion yen while their operating profits grew to over 555 billion yen, a hefty fourteen percent growth.

Both the Wii and the DS pushed their lifetime sales past landmark numbers, with the Wii selling over 50 million units (26 million from last year) and the DS topping the 100 million mark (31 million last year). Software figures for both were relatively equal, with 204 million and 197 sold for the Wii and DS respectively.

Despite these huge sales they’re being cautious in their predictions for the next fiscal year, anticipating a drop in both sales and profits to 1.8 trillion yen and 490 billion yen. Their figures for this year estimate 26 million Wii units sold along with 220 million games, 30 million DS units sold and 180 million games.

It’s strange, when an old series that you’d thought was long dead suddenly decides to crop up again, from literally out of nowhere.  You’d honestly begun to think that you’d never see it again, and in some cases, you might well have forgotten it ever existed at all.  That was the case with the Alone in the Dark series, and now, it’s the case for a whole new generation of PC games suddenly making their revival into the next-gen console market.  This time, we’ve got none other than Leisure Suit Larry back for more raunchy fun in Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust.

And frankly, I’m having a hard time figuring out just what to say about it.

This time around, you’re playing as Larry Lovage, the young horndog nephew to the great scion of the franchise, Larry Laffer, who has recently made good as a cinema magnate.  You’re hired on for a summer job doing grunt work at uncle Larry’s studio, and in the meantime, you’re also out to expose a mole hired by a rival studio to publicly air all of Laffer and  company’s dirty laundry.  In some cases, quite literally.

If you’re familiar with the movie industry at all, it will not surprise you in the least when I tell you this was written by Allen Covert of Happy Madison Productions, convincing me thoroughly that Adam Sandler is out to destroy humanity.  They’ve brought plenty of second-rate B-list star power along to do voiceover work, including Jay Mohr, who’s reprising his seemingly favorite role as a slimeball theatrical agent, not to mention a host of lesser names like Artie Lange, Dave Atell and Carmen Electra.  There are other names in here who probably shouldn’t have been here in the first place, like Patrick Warburton, Jeffrey Tambor and Shannon Elizabeth, but I guess everybody’s got to have a side project.

The gameplay is the most tedious sort of fetch gameplay—go here, get / do that, come back, repeat until you want to throw things, but considering your character is playing the lowest kind of studio grunt (if his title’s not production assistant I’ll be downright amazed), this actually makes sense.  There is a sense of humor here, but it’ll wind up being entirely too devoted to off-color humor of every stripe to be a whole lot of good.  One particularly funny bit occurs in one of the many loading screens, suggesting that your grandmother would LOVE a copy of this game for her birthday.  My grandmother would shatter the disk into bits and force-feed them to me if I ever actually gave her a copy of this.  I just know better.

You may be interested to note that this is the second recent Larry title (the first being Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude), and also the second created with absolutely no input from original Larry designer Al Lowe.  Maybe this has something to do with why they suck so badly.

But I’ll give it this much, it’s nice to NOT play a first person shooter for once, and in this industry, any game that’s not a first person shooter or a sports game has to get extra credit by virtue of SHEER ORIGINALITY.  Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust might be worth a rental just for a little bit of something completely different and a few laughs, but it’s not going to be something you want to bring home to mother.

Or home to grandma, for that matter, despite what the loading screens suggest.