Pixie Lott joins the Sims 3 video game EA announce

Electronic Arts announce the collaboration between exciting new pop singer Pixie Lott and the highly anticipated PC game from the EA Play Label, The Sims 3. Activity kicks off with a Simlish recording of Pixie’s debut single, Mama Do available for simultaneous download with the English version of the game plus a music video showing Pixie singing a duet with her Sim character

"The Sims 3 takes the infinitely creative world of Sims to the next level, and once again its music is no exception," said Steve Schnur, Worldwide Executive of Music and Music Marketing at EA. "Pixie Lott now joins artists like Black Eyed Peas, Lily Allen, Robyn and Natasha Bedingfield in bringing her tremendous vocal talents to the Simlish arena. Her amazing talent and love for the game makes Pixie a perfect ambassador for The Sims."

Pixie Lott releases her incredible debut single Mama Do available on the 7th June, through Mercury Records. Pixie’s personality, her rich vocals and her magnetic persona are all over her first single Mama Do, an archetypal teenage tale of sneaking out on mischievous dates under the cover of night and an appetite for adventure, action and the unknown. Pixie learned and recorded this song in the unique language of The Sims, Simlish.

“It was really good fun re-recording Mama Do in Simlish,” Pixie Lott added. “Singing Simlish words to a tune you know really well was a really strange experience and had me in fits of giggles but I got the hang of it and I love the end result. The Sims 3 allows for so many fun adventures, which fits how my world is so I’m happy to be a part of their newest creation!”

Get inspired by the endless creative possibilities and unexpected moments of surprise and mischief in The Sims 3! Customize your Sims’ appearances and choose up to five traits to create individual personalities. From the “romantic” trait or “kleptomaniac” trait to “evil” trait, create millions of unique Sims from the vast amount of personalities. New goal-oriented game play enables you to choose which short or long-term objectives you want your Sims to pursue and even determine your Sims’ destinies in life. Create and edit your own movies by capturing your gameplay moments or select from a library of clips. Then join The Sims 3 online community where you can show off all of your creations, receive additional content, hear the latest news, and more! Download exclusive content and hear the latest news of The Sims 3 at www.TheSims3.com.

Blitzkrieg - Panzerkrieng Burning Horizon 2 video game

Panzerkrieg is the new battle strategy PC title inspired by the cult game Blitzkrieg. Due for release in June 2009 by Ascaron Entertainment, Panzerkrieg is a real time strategy that combines the historical accuracy of World War II with thoroughly engaging, yet easy to master gameplay.

Based on three story-driven single player campaigns, Panzerkrieg provides gamers with over 50 hours of tactical combat and engaging strategy. Players can choose between the Allied, German or Soviet campaigns, reliving key battles from history such as the Battle of the Bulge, Operation Sturgeon Catch and Battle of the Frontiers.

German campaign: Lost Victories
Operation Barbarossa is one of the authentic battles that players can relive in Panzerkrieg. The mission begins with German troops located in the East and West, with the surrounding terrain at the enemy’s advantage. Players must deploy their troops to storm the USSR border where the enemy lie in wait. Just like the real invasion, many of the attacks will be from fighter planes in the sky. However, players can also make use of the souvenir H39 French light tank with lethal flamethrowers, for obliterating infantry and light armoured vehicles at short range.

Soviet campaign: Red Horizon
The Soviet missions begin in Orshca, 1941, when Europe was dominated by the German Reich. Players must eliminate the enemy Flak gun and take control of the Katyusha rocket launcher, a formidable weapon with immense fire power. Commanding as Marshall Voroshilov, this tactical mission provides a small number of units that must be carefully deployed. The sniper unit is particularly powerful, as camouflage mode can be used to scout out the enemy, making covert stealth attacks.

Allied campaign: Blitzkrieg Rolling Thunder
After tackling the German and Soviet campaigns, players can truly test their skills as a great war leader in the challenging Allied missions. These include the retreat to Burma from Singapore in 1941, where players can command as General Patton. Quick and strategic thinking is required, as enemy attacks are constant, rapidly diminishing the number of Allied troops. Using the right units is also important, as correctly positioned Bofors anti aircraft guns and British Cromwell and Churchill tanks will help protect troops from airborne and tank attacks. Players can also deploy snipers or officers to see further afield than other units, gaining important information on enemy positions.

Fast facts:
Publisher: Ascaron Entertainment
Developer: United Publishing
Release date: 12th June 2009
PEGI: 12+
Format: PC
Genre: Battle Strategy
Price: £19.99

Nintendo WiiWare downloads Final fantasy IV, Kubos, Animal Crossing

This week, lots of WiiWare and Nintendo DSiWare games have been added to the mix, with something for everyone.

Continue the story of the role-playing classic in FINAL FANTASY IV: THE AFTER YEARS, exclusively on WiiWare. Coupled with this, several new DSiWare titles are arriving at once: Art Style: KUBOS, Animal Crossing Clock and Animal Crossing Calculator.

WiiWARE - FINAL FANTASY IV: THE AFTER YEARS
(SQUARE ENIX, 800 Wii Points):
FINAL FANTASY IV: THE AFTER YEARS is the sequel to the hit RPG, Final Fantasy IV. The story takes place many years after the original and centres on a young man named Ceodore, the son of the paladin, Cecil, and the white mage, Rosa, who with their loyal and steadfast friends once saved the world from the evil born of the second moon.

Monsters have now begun reappearing in a world that had finally attained peace. The second moon has returned anew. What tidings does this ominous harbinger bring? Familiar faces and new allies join the battle to save the Blue Planet once more from a yet darker threat.

Plus – continue the adventure with additional chapters to download via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection; the first of which, Rydia’s Tale, is available from today for 300 Wii Points.

NINTENDO DSiWARE - ART STYLE: KUBOS
(NINTENDO, 500 DSi Points):
The Art Style series brings you unique, simple-to-play games with striking visuals and immersive sound.

In KUBOS your aim is to climb a tower of cubes which becomes higher as new cubes drop from above. Walk across the cubes to score points, avoiding being crushed by the falling cubes; but keep climbing or you’ll fall when the lower cubes disappear.

In TEN FLOORS mode, try to reach the 10th floor while scoring as many points as possible. In TOWER mode, simply climb as high as you can. Quickly defuse Bomb cubes before they blow a hole in your tower, and remove obstructing cubes with a gentle shove or a huge Cube Blast!

NINTENDO DSiWARE - ANIMAL CROSSING CLOCK
(NINTENDO, 200 DSi Points):
With the Animal Crossing Clock, wherever you go, you’ll always have time! Wake up with your favourite Animal Crossing music, or simply use the Nintendo DSi as a desktop clock complete with authentic Animal Crossing background. You can even compose a Town Tune to play at the top of every hour!

Customise the clock to your liking: choose from analogue or digital displays, 12h or 24h modes, and set up to three separate alarms with different Animal Crossing tunes, or use your own saved sounds from the Nintendo DSi Sound application.

NINTENDO DSiWARE - ANIMAL CROSSING CALCULATOR
(NINTENDO, 200 DSi Points):
Make maths more fun with this Animal Crossing-themed calculator! Simply use the Touch Screen to enter figures and make calculations, and you’ll see and hear your favourite Animal Crossing visuals and sounds

As well as a fully-featured calculator, also included is a Unit Converter for converting to and from a variety of different measurements such as weight, length, speed, temperature and more. You can even convert human years to animal years!

As the Wii Shop Channel is continually updated with exciting and refreshing games, make sure you keep checking the Channel and www.Wii.com for all the latest WiiWare and Virtual Console news and releases. Downloaded games can be saved to Wii’s internal memory or SD card and added to the console’s Wii Menu or SD Card Menu allowing them to be easily accessed at any time.

Gold Giveaway Event for Ultimate Soccer Boss Players

New and existing players will receive gold for their soccer clubs

The Ultimate Soccer Boss team is proud to announce the first gold giveaway event for Ultimate Soccer Boss players. Players will receive 5,000 gold for their soccer clubs and will be awarded only once during the giveaway event. Players can participate by logging in and or signing up for this event at http://www.ultimatesoccerboss.com starting on June 8 and ending on June 22.

“We are happy to award players extra gold to help them enhance and improvement their clubs in matches,” said Nicole Chen Marketing Manager of Ultimate Soccer Boss.”

About Ultimate Soccer Boss
Launched on April 2009, Ultimate Soccer Boss is an MMO Sports Manager Game powered by Digenetics, Inc. Ultimate Soccer Boss (USB) is the first ever free-to-play soccer manager browser game powered by Digenetics' patented adaptive evolutionary learning technology which enables players' traits to evolve. Unlike other sports manager games, Ultimate Soccer Boss feature players that actually evolve their skills over time based on variables such as numbers of plays, training matches, and overall management of the club, thus resulting in a truly unique game play.

Batman Arkham Asylum - Gliding Into E3 screenshot trailer

Featuring the world-renowned characters of DC Comics, Batman: Arkham Asylum, developed by Rocksteady Studios, will be playable on The PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system, offering show visitors a journey into the depths of Gotham City's psychiatric asylum for the criminally insane as Batman faces his greatest challenge yet. Visitors will have the chance to experience a selection of the game's extensive FreeFlow Combat and Invisible Predator Challenge Maps.



Also playable for the first time will be one of the eight maps that will allow fans to play as The Joker, a character that is playable exclusively in the PLAYSTATION 3 Challenge Maps that will be made available as a free download for owners of the game through PlayStation Network. Rated “T” for Teen, Batman: Arkham Asylum will be co-published in North America by Eidos, Inc. and Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment for the Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, Games for Windows, and PLAYSTATION 3 computer entertainment system. The game will be available in North America August 25th and throughout Europe August 28th.

Interactive 3D TV take gaming to new level with Project Natal-style body control of games

A revolutionary interactive 3DTV system is being created by De Montfort University Leicester (DMU) researchers.

The €4.2 million (roughly £3.7 million) project aims to develop a television that can recognise where somebody is sitting in a room and what they wish to view and interact with on their television.



Researchers believe it is a step towards truly interactive 3D video games where gamers use their bodies to control the action without the need for a controller.

The project, called HELIUM3D (high efficiency, laser-based, multi-user, multi-modal 3D display) is also exploring ways of allowing viewers who are watching the same television to each view a different channel at the same time and could even let them choose different viewing positions within the image.

For example, groups of people watching a football match in the same room could each pick the part of the stadium from which they would like to experience the action.

The 3D effect will be seen without special glasses and will use head-tracking technology developed during previous 3DTV research projects led by DMU to deliver the perfect image to every viewer.

The system will not only display standard 3DTV, it will also allow viewers to experience an effect known as motion parallax or the ‘look-around effect’. This is where the image has a ‘holographic’ quality, giving it a greater sense of depth and movement than standard 3D.

Researchers at DMU’s Imaging and Displays Research Group (IDRG) are leading the work, with partners from: Fraunhofer Heinrich-Hertz-Institut; Philips Consumer Lifestyle; Eindhoven University of Technology; Nanjing University in China; Barco, a display hardware manufacturer in Belgium; University College London; and Koç University in Turkey.

The project is supported by £2.8 million funding from the European Commission’s Framework 7 programme.

Researchers working on HELIUM3D will also be exploring the display’s potential in professional applications, including medical imaging, video conferencing, engineering design and oil and gas exploration.

DMU’s Dr Ian Sexton, Head of the Imaging and Displays Research Group, said: “The inherent flexibility of the HELIUM display takes it beyond mere 3D and will open up a whole new world of exciting interactive possibilities.

“The display will give gamers a new freedom to enjoy interactive 3D television and games – for example viewers or gamers will be able to see 3D on the HELIUM TV and also interact with the game through the viewer sensing built into the system wherever they are in the room and without 3D glasses. This will make 3D games more natural, exciting and ‘real’.”

He added: “The system will also be used for more serious uses such as medical imaging; doctors and surgeons will be able to intuitively ‘fly’ through a 3D scan of a person to make a diagnosis or to prepare for an operation, making a 3D display that will be useful to a wide audience.”

Previous 3D systems have used flat panel displays in their design but HELIUM3D will use a new type of front screen.

The Gabor superlens screen used by DMU researchers replaces the usual LCD screen found on commercial television sets and is much more efficient than other technologies.

This will allow brighter whites and darker blacks, meaning the resulting image will be much more vivid than in previous 3D projects due to the use of a novel red, green and blue laser illumination source.

The HELIUM3D funding from the European Commission is the latest in a string of projects which the IDRG has worked on over the past seven years, worth nearly £14 million in total.

HELIUM3D runs until 2010 and researchers hope the system will lead to commercial production of interactive 3DTV sets within the next decade.

Germany to ban violent video games

Violent video games look set to be banned throughout Germany. Ministers of the country's 16 states, Deutscher Bundesrat, has just agreed to ban the so-called 'killer games'. Now all that's needed to ban such games is a regulation drafted and ratified in parliament.

Such a law would not only ban the sale of violent games in Germany, but also their creation. Crysis developer CryTek has already promised to move production out of Germany if the law becomes reality.

Germany's current moral panic of videogames stems from an incident in March where a mentally ill teenager shot 16 people in Winnenden.

It is claimed that German ministers have today agreed to ban the production and distribution of all violent video games, with the law only having to go through parliament in the next few weeks.

Ministers of all sixteen German federal states came together for a conference in Bremerhaven where it was agreed to forbid the production and distribution of all video games “where the main part is to realistically play the killing of people or other cruel or unhuman acts of violence against humans or manlike characters.”

The country has been hard on video games in the past with bans on Manhunt & DeadRising taking place, but an outright ban on every potentially violent game would result in a huge loss for the video games industry in one of its most successful European countries. The law would result in no Call of Duty, no World of Warcraft, no BioShock, no Uncharted, and no Grand Theft Auto. Any development firm based in Germany would have to outsource future project developments on a violent game since it would now be banned to even create any such content in that country!

Ministers are hoping the for the law to come into effect before the German federal elections this September, The minister of the interior of Lower Saxony commented:

“Violent games lower the inhibition level for real violence and spree killers always played such games before they did the crime.”

However for violent games and the developments of such games to become illegal, the law must be passed through parliament in which an outcome will be decided within a couple of weeks.

Source: Various websites...

Japanese Software Group Bans Rape Games After Protest

A Japanese game makers association banned its members from making and selling games that contain rape scenes following an international protest by a human rights group that raised the attention of the U.K. parliament.

Move to ban post on gamezplay.org

The Ethics Organization of Computer Software, comprising 233 companies, banned games containing rape scenes and other images of sexual violence at a meeting in Tokyo, the association said in a statement late yesterday. Nearly 90 percent of Japan’s adult-game makers belong to the group.

The availability of rape games in Japan gained international attention in recent months when London-based women’s rights group Equality Now began a campaign against a game called Rapelay, where players act as assailants attacking and raping females including 12 year-old schoolgirls.

Equality Now called on Japan’s Ministry of Justice and other departments to ban games that “normalize and promote sexual violence against women and girls,” the group said in a statement. It asked supporters to write to the government to take action.

Rapelay, published by Yokohama-based Illusion Software, was available for sale on Amazon Japan K.K. before being removed from its Web Site, Equality Now said in the statement.

Amazon Japan spokeswoman Misao Konishi declined to comment. An Illusion spokesman, who gave his name only as Nakaoka, declined to comment when contacted by telephone yesterday. The company has removed Rapelay from its Web Site.

Source: Bloomberg

Ys Online: The Call of Solum - 2nd Closed Beta launch

* More than 50.000 keys will be distributed
* A completely new anti-bot system: The Bomb
* Follow us at Twitter

Over 10.000 keys were gone as soon as the second phase of the Ys Online beta test started. Facing such a demand, Key To Play will release a new batch of 50.000 keys to help as many players as possible to have an early access to one is to become one of the most anticipated MMOs.

With Ys Online, Key To Play is going further in our fight against the bots with THE BOMB. The bomb is an item that any player can get for 1 copper in game; once the player witness abnormal behavior in game he throws the bomb and the target has to type a captcha in order to check human presence behind the keyboard.

Key To Play is also launching the official Ys Online Europe Twitter page at http://twitter.com/ys_online. The followers will have not only the opportunity to get their hands on exclusives goodies and prices but also to follow real time information regarding the game evolution.

Ys - Call Of Solum

Call of Solum is an MMORPG based on the famous Ys series, created for the Japanese company Falcom. Since its first title for 8 bits, already turned into a classic, several manga series, OAVs and even novels have been stemmed. This time, Falcom and CJ Internet are joining to present Ys - Call of Solum, the new title of the series turned into an online videogame that follows the anime style, so characteristic in the entire saga.

Ys - Call of Solum arrives in Europe thanks to of Key To Play.
With Man of Wings’ ascent to the sky, chaos reigned in the continent of Eresia. The central region known as Europe was divided into two enemy realms: Romun, dominating the centre and south of the region and Etruria, in the north.
After one hundred years of constant battles all over the continent, several kingdoms fell, one after the other, against the fearful monsters emerging from the chaos. This way, 12 soldiers of different races, Eresians, Kimoans and Afrocans, joined Grey the hero, to defeat the monsters and establish a new empire under the name of Romun all over the continent.

Key To Play

Key To Play is a new online videogame portal of different genres, created in 2008 with the aim of bringing great international titles to the European market. With several offices in Europe and Asia, Key To Play is offering offers online players a large network of support and development possibilities. All this with one goal: to be able to give the best quality and playability.

Currently, the titles are launched in 4 languages simultaneously, English, French, German and Spanish, to offer more convenience to the players.

Key To Play has committed, up to now, to two titles, Priston Tale 2: The Second Enigma and Ys Online - Call of Solum.

The Path - Prologue Free Demo download PC & Mac of indie horror game (with video)

Less than three months after its initial release, Tale of Tales are adding a new chapter to their introverted psychological horror trip.

"The Path - Prologue" is a standalone application that is free to download for everyone. As such, it functions as a trial version of the game, even though it contains content that is not part of the full release.

"The Path - Prologue" is available as a free download for Mac or PC




The Path is a short horror game inspired by Little Red Ridinghood. You play six sisters, the Red Girls, who are sent to their grandmother's house, one by one, with the explicit command to stay on the path. But not all young women can resist the seductive allure of the dark forest along the way. In the new chapter, entitled "The Path - Prologue", you take control of the mysterious character of the Girl in White, who roams the forest and can assist the Red Girls in their explorations.

"People who have already finished The Path will recognize some aspects of the Prologue," admit designers Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. "It is similar to a certain part of the game. But not the same. A prologue should show what happened before the events in the story. But in this case, it may seem like it's showing things that happened after. A mystery that will make more sense after playing the full game.

We didn't want to simply give away part of the game as a trial. We wanted to add something to the story instead. And give everybody something new to play with, including those who have already played the full game. But it does function as a free demo for the game: it gives users a taste of the atmosphere and a means to check if their computer can run our technology."

Since its release on 18 March, The Path was met with an impressive amount of high praise. And also an, albeit smaller, amount of passionate rejection. Some claim that the indie title is pretentious mumbo-jumbo and others see it as a veritable mile stone in the evolution of the medium. This controversy pleases the designers tremendously. They'd be worried if suddenly everyone would like their work. Tale of Tales explores the artistic potential of games technology. Sometimes this requires leaving behind all known territory and confronting the audience with the unusual, the unsettling, the sublime.

The Path was created by Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn with the help of Jarboe and Kris Force (music), Laura Raines Smith (character animations), Hans Zantman (technical art) and Marian Bantjes (logo and calligraphy). Production of The Path was supported by Creative Capital, the Flemish Authorities, Flanders Audiovisual Fund, Design Flanders, CultuurInvest and Villanella.