Damnation review – Even steampunk can fail
New Activision titles on Steam 25% off
Tiger Woods 10 gets Banff Springs DLC, already on Wii
LEGO Rock Band teaser trailer
Borderlands dated for US and Europe
Batman: Arkham Asylum pre-order bonuses detailed
Killzone 2 Map Pack bundle out today
Spore patch 5 now live, asymmetry available
Tatsunoko vs Capcom Fight Stick coming from Mad Catz
Famicon Controller shaped business card holder
The Sims 3 sells 820,000 US copies in 1 month
Halo Legend anime to debut early 2010
Battlefield 1943 smashes previous records
Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth dated
Band Hero coming to DS, peripherals revealed
Stormrise review — A complicated mess

Damnation, developed by Blue Omega, is a third person shooter set in a alternate 19th century Civil War in the US, where Steampunk robots have been invented and are used in warfare. You play as Hamilton Rourke, who left the army after all his men were killed in a battle. Instead, he turned solo and set after the main antagonist in the game, Prescott, who builds robots to fight for him and uses a serum to inject into soldiers to make them ultra powerful, and in the end, his plan is to take over the world. Why not, if you have an army of robot-men?

You’re not alone in the game, you’re followed by a few companions, like a chick who’s leather top barely covers her breasts, an English professor who’s companion is his own created cyborg daughter, a Native American who can do magic, a Mexican with anger management issues — all these side kicks are so horrible written and created, that it’s almost embarrassing to watch all the cutscenes, especially with voice acting that’s so bad your ears soon start to bleed. Trust me, it’s for your own sake that I stop writing about the side kicks now.

The gameplay is standard 3rd person shooter, if “standard” means total crap. You see, most of the action is just you climbing buildings, leaping of edges, sliding down zip lines etc. It’s like Tomb Raider, only in Damnation, there isn’t much to explore. Instead of simply running, you’re forced to do tedious and boring climbing and jumping, just to do the basics. And when you do meet action, which means gunfights, it’s just terrible. The enemies have no sense besides standing still and occasionally fire at you. In that case, you’ll take cover, squeeze off a few rounds, kill your foes and move on. It’s just hopeless.

As for the technical side of the game, it looks horribly outdated, despite the fact that the game runs on the Unreal Engine 3 — of all the engines out there. Low res textures, which are repeated through each level, making everything looks the same. On top of that, you have the glitches and bugs, which there are aplenty of. The sounds aren’t any better, gun sounds and ammo are almost intolerable to listen to, and the voice acting deservers a nomination for worst voice acting of this decade.

While most of the game doesn’t work, the developers did include multiplayer options; not only is there co-op, but also classic multiplayer modes like king of the kill, death match etc. I wanted to review the multiplayer portion of the game, I though to myself, “It might be a hidden gem to be found online, playing with others”.

So I logged in to play the game online on the Xbox 360 and there’s wasn’t anyone online anywhere. Anywhere! I was the only Damnation player in the world, who happened to be online at that point. This has never happened to me on any other Xbox 360 game. It’s quite an astonishing feat. Let’s see how the guys from Epic Games and Valve pulls something like that off…

How bad is Damnation? Developer Blue Omega has closed down due to the commercial failure of the game. And that’s all you need to know about Damnation, really.

The Good:
Original setting

The Bad:
Horrible gameplay
Bad AI
Dated visuals
Buggy and glitchy
Awful sounds
Even more awful voice acting

Overall score: 1/10

Steam has updated this morning with a couple of titles from Californian developer and publisher Activision. Featured in the update are Space Quest Collection, King’s Quest Collection, Aces of the Galaxy, TimeShift, and 3D Ultra Minigolf Adventures. All of these games will be 25% off until July 30th.

If you haven’t checked out 50% off deal for Paradox Interactive titles, be sure to give that one a look, too.

Read (Steam News)

New downloadable content is available for Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 today, featuring the golf course Banff Springs. If it so happens that you have the Wii version of the game (complete with Motion Plus), you don’t have to worry about buying the DLC since you already have it. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, however, did not include this course on the retail disc.

So, if you really want the golf course, you’ll have to dish out 600 Microsoft Points, or $7.50 on the PlayStation Network. It’s not too bad of a price, considering it’s the same price for every map, but it’s the thought that Wii owners don’t have to waste a dime for extra content because it’s already available to them.

Read (WorthPlaying)

This year’s San Diego Comic-Con has launched, and with it comes loads of trailers. Today we bring you a LEGO Rock Band teaser, complete with ridiculous puns like “Build Your Band”. No gameplay footage was available, so I still won’t be able to know if the frets are going to be LEGO blocks.

The details for the game are quite odd, giving players the ability to “destroy giant robots with killer riffs”. If you’re looking for a true Rock Band title, this probably won’t be your cup of tea; most of the tracks are geared for a younger audience.

LEGO Rock Band is scheduled for a November 30th release for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Nintendo DS.

Back in June, we learned that Gearbox Software will be expecting an October ship date for their sci-fi action RPG Borderlands. Today, we learn from the game’s publisher, 2K Games, that the game will indeed be seeing an October release; slated for the 20th in North America and the 23rd in PAL regions.

In response to questions on how the game will fair against blockbuster titles like Uncharted 2, 2K Games president Christoph Hartmann doesn’t “think we have to be afraid of competition or shy of what’s out there, I think this holiday season is a little bit lighter in triple-A games than last year. It’s actually a good holiday to put something out. … There’s always risk and opportunity. The risk is you have a hard time standing out against established IP. The opportunity is you have a lot of traffic here and it can be a much bigger product at retail than it would be otherwise.”

Borderlands will be released for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Word around town is that it will be the first title in its franchise, so expect a sequel in the future.

Read (GameSpot)

North American game retailer GameStop has released information regarding the pre-order bonuses for Warner Bros.’s upcoming Batman: Arkham Asylum. Players who reserve the game through GameStop will receive an exclusive “in-game Villain Challenge Map”. No other details were mentioned about the map.

Arkham Asylum will be out in stores August 25th for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC.

via EvilAvatar

Not long ago, we reported that the new Killzone 2 DLC would be hitting the PlayStation Network today. The DLC, titled Napalm & Cordite, includes Suljeva Cliffside and Arctown Landing multiplayer maps.

It also turns out that a new Map Pack will also be seeing release today, featuring six multiplayer maps from every DLC released so far; Steel & Titanium, Flash & Thunder and Napalm & Cordite. As for true Killzone fans who already have the DLC, the map pack doesn’t have anything you already don’t have.

The Map Pack Bundle retails for $11.99 in the States and £9.99 for Europe.

Read (GamerZines)

The new Spore patch is now live, and comes with a number of changes, including asymmetry being implemented into the game. If you already have Spore, you just need to launch the game and the software should patch.

Don’t forget that you need the EA Download Manager to make the patch possible, though. Here’s the full changelog:

Spore Improvements:

• Asymmetry is now available for creatures! Details on new Asymmetry features for Creatures and Vehicles can be found here.
• This patch fixes several crashes in Space Game.
• Many tuning improvements to Space Game, including reduced disaster rates at all levels of difficulty, adjustments to Hard Mode, increased limits on concurrent trade routes, as well as changes to tool unlocks for the Knights.
• Creator Lineage appears correctly for all creation types shared after this patch is installed.
• Cheat is included that permits Creators to export creatures in Collada format for use in Maya. Creators must acknowledge and accept a Tools EULA to perform this operation. An additional cheat has been provided to enable highest quality textures to appear on vehicles, where it is supported by user hardware.
• Fixed a problem where creations would go missing if a user quits the game in any way while downloads are in progress.
• Fixed a bug where achievements were disappearing.
• Fixed a bug where some Sporepedia cards had corrupted backgrounds.
• Fixed a problem in Space where some Grox planets were unreachable.
• YouTube movies now publish as public

Galatic Adventure Improvements:

• This patch must be installed again after installing Galactic Adventures, even if you have installed this patch previously.
• You can now place the avatar, NPCs, and handheld objects on top of air, land, and sea vehicles in the Adventure Creator. Get more info here.
• Improvements are made to the Adventure Creator, including right-click camera behavior, and User Interface enhancements.
• In EP1 open gates were not working correctly when they were disguised
• Some customer-reported crashes in Galactic Adventures have been fixed.

Read (Spore)

After the success of MadCatz‘ Street Figher IV Fight Stick they have been hard at work producing just about every kind of arcade stick you could shake a stick at (ha..ha).

Anyways, today at Comic-Con they had the above controller on display, a Tatsunoko vs Capcom themed Fight Stick. Sure, it may have the same hardware as the Street Fighter IV Fight Stick (you know, the one that was notorious for breaking) with some Tatsunoko vs Capcom artwork slapped on top. But it’s the novelty that counts, right?

No word on pricing or availability but considering Tatsunoko vs Capcom: Ultimate All Stars is expected to drop for the Wii towards the end of this year, you can probably expect it then.

via Destructoid