Summer Athletics 2009 for Nintendo Wii introduces the Balance Board Cup

Summer Athletics 2009’s Nintendo Wii version will support Wii Balance Board controls. The game is equipped with a unique Balance Board Cup.

Console athletes will need their stability on the Wii Balance Board to control their character in the contest’s five disciplines. These are high jump, triple jump, hammer throwing, high dive and archery. Players wiggle their hips around to spin the hammer and gather speed. Holding your breath and standing evenly balanced is key to hitting the mark in archery. If you center your weight right in the middle of the Wii Balance Board, you have only to adjust to cross winds to score full points.

Like all contests and challenges in Summer Athletics 2009, the Balance Board cup is available in three difficulty settings. "Easy" is recommended for players who have never played a sports game before, "Average" appeals to more experienced players and "Difficult" requires the skills of advanced players. It is possible to obtain a fourth difficulty setting called "Champion" after unlocking special achievements. “Champion” features the hardest AI competitors that will challenge even gaming veterans.

The battle for Gold Medals and personal bests sparks excitement and healthy competition in Summer Athletics 2009. Athletes from all over the world run, throw, jump and swim for victory. Millimeters and split seconds will decide the winners. When playing with friends and family, a living room becomes a stadium. It’s not only four players competing; in Summer Athletics 2009 they can chase records and beat their best times as a team, to eventually celebrate their big victory together.

The athletes compete in 28 summer time disciplines, including 100 meters sprint, high diving, javelin or the new skeet shooting event. In Berlin World Cup mode, a national team can go for ultimate glory in the World Championships in 15 track and field contests.

With a variety of game modes, format specific controls and up-to-date graphics, Summer Athletics 2009 will be challenging and fun to play at the same time.

Summer Athletics 2009 will be available this summer for Wii, Xbox 360 and PC in multiple territories. In the United States, the game will be published under the name World Championship Athletics by Conspiracy Entertainment.

Youda Sushi Chef time management game from Youdagames Download Free demo link

The successful Dutch casual games developer Youdagames and world’s biggest online games website Miniclip.com, have worked together to produce a beautiful and fun to play time management game: Youda Sushi Chef.

The game will be released on both the portals of Youdagames and Miniclip, tomorrow on the 9th of July. A week later, on July 15th , the game will be available on all other portals worldwide.

Following their highly successful free to play online game, Sushi-Go-Round, Miniclip has licensed the rights to Youdagames to develop the sequel to the game that will play both online and will also have a premium PC version available for download. Founder of Miniclip Robert Small was confident Youdagames would be the right partner to develop this game: “Having worked with Youdagames for over 6 years, we were confident that they could bring our Sushi game sequel to fruition online and on the PC. They have a track record of developing high quality, award winning titles.”

Youda Sushi Chef seems to come up to expectations. The game appears to be a beautifully designed and fun to play restaurant game, which will give the millions of casual gamers worldwide a great new challenge in time management land! The expectations of this game are high with both parties. “The game play is very addictive, so when Miniclip and Youdagames cooperate to distribute the game it will definitely have a huge impact on its success.”, according to Horst Streck, CEO at Youdagames.

Youda Sushi Chef
Youda Sushi Chef is a fun time management game. As in other restaurant games, your main goal is to keep your customers happy and serve them the right dishes in time to reach your daily target. Youda Sushi Chef outshines by beautiful design and a challenging game play. You really have to rely on your memory skills. Extra features like reservations and take away orders coming in constantly keep your adrenaline going.

You start your own sushi restaurant, build your sushi restaurant emporium and finally become the one and only Sushi Chef! Serving your customers all kinds of sushi, your goal is to reach a daily target. Every next level more sushi ingredients will be added and the more complex your sushi making will be. To reach your target in higher levels you can buy upgrades to serve customers faster, make combo’s or serve some take-away meals to earn extra money. To keep your customers happy you can decorate your restaurants, perform great knife tricks or serve some sake while your customers are waiting.

The game consists of six beautifully designed restaurants, a great choice of different sushi recipes, lots of bonuses, combo’s and upgrades.

Download Free demo here...

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for Nintendo DS

Aspyr Media and Big Blue Bubble have partnered to launch Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for Nintendo DS. Based on the legendary book series by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson, Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is a first-person fantasy role-playing game that takes players on an elaborate adventure through the Firetop Mountain Keep, the scene of the first entry in the renowned literary line.

With a highly optimized 3D engine, dynamic lighting and highly detailed, full-frame animations, Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain fully immerses players in the dank, eerie depths of each dungeon and passage.

“Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain is our most ambitious Nintendo DS project to date,” said Damir Slogar CEO of Big Blue Bubble Inc. “Driven by the vision of bringing next gen console gaming to the handheld platform, as well as our passion for role playing games, we spent the past few years working on a game that will showcase how this FPSRPG on Nintendo DS can and should look.”

Mr. Slogar added, “both Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson shared our vision and helped us recreate the world of Fighting Fantasy. The last step was finding a publisher with the same enthusiasm and Aspyr filled this role perfectly.”

“Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain might be the best looking game that we’ve ever seen on Nintendo DS and the opportunity to work with the likes of Ian Livingstone, Steve Jackson and the talented team at Big Blue Bubble was too good to pass up,” said Ted Staloch, Executive Vice President, Aspyr Media. “The series created by Ian and Steve turned fantasy books into unprecedented interactive experiences. The game that bears the franchise’s name will do the same for RPG gaming on a handheld.”

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain follows a lone adventurer on his travels through the old Dwarven keep within Firetop Mountain. Now the residence of an evil warlock and hordes of foul creatures, the keep is a mysterious and dangerous place from which no one has returned in many years. As players guide the adventurer through the many passageways and dungeons, they develop the character’s abilities and attributes to suit their play style. Enemies will fall before the player’s brute strength with sword and axe, power of the arcane arts, nimble quickness or custom combinations of skills. A wealth of weaponry, armor, potions and enchantments are equipped through an intuitive drag-and-drop inventory system while helpful (or not-so-helpful) NPCs provide guidance, quests, trade goods and skill training.

The Fighting Fantasy book series launched in 1982 with the first title, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Authors Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson created a revolutionary new idea for the fantasy genre: the reader would become the hero of his or her own fantasy adventure in a story that would be part book, part game. After each paragraph a decision must be made: which way to turn, whether to fight or flee, which mysterious character to approach, and what risks to take. Each choice sent the reader to a different page to discover the consequences of their choice, with each read-through ending either in disaster, or with the discovery of the ultimate goal. To date, the series has seen more than 70 titles published and more than 14 million copies sold worldwide.

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain for Nintendo DS will be available this holiday season.

Cate West: The Vanishing Files video game on Nintendo DS and Wii

Daughter of Helen and Jon West, Cate is a budding writer and life-time resident of Arcadia City.
Since her father’s death 17 years ago, Cate has been haunted by dreams of the terrible event. She blames herself for not preventing his death even though there was no way she could have intervened.

Yuki Takeba has been Cate’s best friend with since they roomied at Arcadia college. Cate and Yuki are both fans of Japanese art and cooking, with Cate preferring the shopping for ingredients for Yuki to cook!

Over the years Cate’s intuition has gotten stronger and stronger. She’s not sure if this is related to her father’s death, or what to do with the “Gift”. She prefers not to think about these things, instead focusing on her writing.

Cate is currently preparing for the release of her first novel with her friend and editor Wesley Carr. The novel goes on sale in Europe on the 5th September.

Hobbies:
Writing, going to the Farmer's Market and collecting antique Japanese woodblock prints.

Cate West: The Vanishing Files
Release: 05.09.09
Genre: Seek-and-solve
Formats: Nintendo DS™, and Wii™
Pegi: 7+
Developer: Magellen Interactive/Destineer Games
RRP: Nintendo DS - £24.99, Wii - £24.99

Tales of Monkey Island pirate adventure video game after ten years

Arrrrr! Polish up your swashbuckles and grab your sword, because legendary pirate Guybrush Threepwood sets sail today on the first all-new Monkey Island adventure in over a decade. Telltale's highly anticipated game series, Tales of Monkey Island, begins now at www.telltalegames.com for PC with Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, the first chapter in an epic five-month adventure created by the same team responsible for acclaimed episodic series including Sam & Max, Wallace & Gromit's Grand Adventures and Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. The first Tales of Monkey Island chapter is expected to release for WiiWare in the coming weeks as well.

The saga begins with a heated battle involving the brave but often bumbling Mighty Pirate Guybrush, his beloved wife Elaine, and their nemesis, the demon pirate LeChuck. When the showdown goes up in flames, Guybrush finds himself marooned on a strange island with winds that always blow inward. How will our hero manage to escape this meteorological anomaly? What has become of LeChuck and Elaine? And what's the story with the infectious voodoo pox that's spreading across the Caribbean, causing Guybrush and other pirates to act like unruly hooligans? These are just some of the many questions posed in this first chapter of what will become one of the most rollicking and rip-roaring entertainment experiences of the summer.

Dave Grossman, Telltale's design director and a designer/writer for the original Monkey Island games says "I was laughing my eyepatch off on a daily basis while we were first cooking up Monkey Island at Skywalker Ranch, but if you'd told me then that it would become a classic, and that twenty years later I'd be working with a killer all-star piratey crew to spin an epic new tale and bring the series to a whole new generation of players, I would have said, well, probably, Look behind you, a three-headed monkey, but then I've always been a bit weird that way."

Tales of Monkey Island will unfold over the next five months, with each episodic chapter raising the stakes on Guybrush's quest to eradicate the insidious Pox of LeChuck, reunite with his wife, and vanquish his rival. Much like the best television and films series, the story becomes deeper and more engrossing with interweaving threads building to twists and surprises in the grand finale this fall.

Customers who order from Telltale's online store during the first week of availability can choose any other Telltale episode of their choice to include free with their purchase. Visit www.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland to get into the adventure now. Additional Tales of Monkey Island details, gameplay trailers, and a playable demo are also available at the site.

Battlefield 1943 video game download available in UK for 1200 MS points

Full Downloadable Game On Sale For Only £9.99 / 1200 MS Points; Trial Version Available for Free.

DICE, an Electronic Arts announce that Battlefield 1943 is now available on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and PlayStation Network. Battlefield 1943 is an all-new download-only multiplayer action game that brings DICE’s first-class WWII action to gamers for just £9.99 or 1200 MS Points. Gamers can get a taste of the epic large-scale battles by downloading the free trial version on Xbox LIVE Marketplace and the PlayStation Network.

Battlefield 1943 is a critically acclaimed First-Person Shooter (FPS) multiplayer game that GamePro magazine describes as “a triple-A title at a quarter of the price” and GameSpot says is “rock-solid value”.



Battlefield 1943 introduces two thrilling new modes where 24 players can compete across four classic WWII Battlefield maps: Wake Island, Guadalcanal, Iwo Jima and Coral Sea. These maps are inspired by the award winning Battlefield 1942™ game, but have been redesigned and reengineered using the DICE Frostbite™ engine allowing players to rain havoc and destruction via land, sea or air. The free trial version will feature Wake Island and give players the freedom to choose from the full arsenal of weapons and vehicles on both sides of the battle, either the US Marines or Imperial Japanese Navy.

The Coral Sea map will be unlocked as part of a worldwide community challenge, where players will work together to reach 43M kills on both Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network. The official countdown begins on July 10, 2009 at 19:43 GMT.

“We are excited to witness the intense battles that are going to take place on these tropical Pacific Theatre maps, ripping them to shreds and leaving nothing but debris behind,” says Gordon Van Dyke, Producer on Battlefield 1943. “Reliving these classic maps with the DICE Frostbite engine’s destruction capabilities and full FPS gameplay ups the ante on what can be done in downloadable games. We’re proud to be able to provide this experience to shooter fans for just £9.99.”

Strategy First and Out Of The Park Baseball 10 invites Baseball Fans and Gamers everywhere to take advantage of this limited time give away.

For the first time ever Strategy First will release a five hour interview featuring Red Sox Hall Of Fame Pitcher Bill ‘The Spaceman’ Lee.

In four separate sit down interviews with Strategy First’s Emanuel Wall and the Red Sox Hall Of Fame pitcher covers the highs and lows of his career and personal life.

The entertaining, and informative interviews cover a wide range of controversial topics and interesting stories as seen through the eyes of Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee.

“Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee is an incredible person and we are thankful to have been able to conduct these interviews. Very few things in this world are free and we want to offer Gamers and Baseball fans alike an opportunity to watch these incredible interviews and no purchase is necessary, feel free to celebrate the all-star game with us.” Says Business Development Manager Emanuel Wall.

Strategy First and Out Of The Park Baseball 10 Bill ‘Spaceman’ Lee interview include same features listed below

- Bud Selig, Pete Rose, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Manny Ramirez

- President Barack Obama, President George.W.Bush, Governor Sara Palin, VP Al Gore

- Personal insight on his experience with the Yankees – Red Sox rivalry

- Who Killed the Montreal Expos

- Insight on writing ‘The Wrong Stuff’, ‘Have Glove Will Travel’, ‘Baseball Eccentrics’

- Barnstorming around the world from big cities, to small towns

- Learn the art and techniques of Pitching and its steady decline

- Being black listed by baseball

- Enemies of the Red Sox Nation

Be sure to watch all 5 hours for free while you still can.

Ion Assault video game for Xbox LIVE Arcade

800 Microsoft Points Gets Germany's First Space Combat Title

Black Inc., the core gaming division of RTL Interactive GmbH, today announces the release of Ion Assault, the first Xbox LIVE Arcade title from a German games studio. Developed by German developer Coreplay, Ion Assault offers Xbox 360 gamers a top-level gaming experience that makes full use of the technical possibilities provided by Microsoft's next generation console in order to offer arcade fans an action romp featuring outstanding graphics and gameplay.



In 2183 humanity discovers an energy source that facilitates travel into new regions of space. Gigantic mother ships collect the newly discovered fuel from the distant energy fields and transport it to Earth. When the fleet is destroyed in an alien attack, the player sets out on a perilous journey home in a small harvester. In Ion Assault, instead of conventional weapons, players use the free energy particles that are abundant in space to fend off swarms of aliens. The particles are bundled and the player is able to shoot them at asteroids and enemy ships. The particles are not destroyed in this process, but are redistributed in space, ready to be magnetically attracted again and re-used. Their random distribution makes for dynamic gameplay and calls for a more strategic approach.

"Through the dynamic particle and fluid system the player faces a constant challenge." says Peter Ohlmann, Coreplay Technical Director. "The immense variety of effects, and the scope of the variables, makes Ion Assault a true next-gen game. It would simply not have been technically possible to implement this game concept on older consoles."

Ion Assault offers four scenarios with gorgeous, detailed visuals, each with different types of opponents, bosses and background themes. In the course of the campaign players get to upgrade their spaceships and will, in turn, be able to affect power-ups that enable things such as an increase in ship speed, or an enlarged collected particles radius. Thanks to special power-ups, such as the ability to create temporary black holes, even large numbers of opponents can be dealt with. Players also get to show off their skills in various multi-player modes, and compare their scores to those of the world's best Ion Assault pilots through online high score lists.

Ion Assault will be available for download in the summer of 2009 via Xbox LIVE Arcade, priced at 800 Microsoft Points.

Free download content for Fight Night Round 4 release date

Free New Game Content Coming by Early August; Button Controls Included In Additional Summer Update

Electronic Arts announce its initial Downloadable Content (DLC) plan for Fight Night Round 4. Recently named the Game Critic Awards “Best Sports Game of E3 2009”, Fight Night Round 4 has been winning over reviewers since its release on June 23rd.

The first DLC pack, which will be available for free to both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 users by early August, will include a new training gym, new gameplay sliders, as well as a host of new equipment that can be used for outfitting boxers. Xbox 360 users will also receive an exclusive alternate version of Sugar Ray Leonard in their first DLC pack, courtesy of Pizza Hut.

EA SPORTS will also be releasing a free downloadable game update by early September that will allow gamers to use face buttons on the Xbox 360 and PS3 game controllers to throw punches, hooks, uppercuts and haymakers.

“The depth and variety of new content we have planned this summer is going to make one of the most critically acclaimed games on the market even better,” said senior producer, Dean Richards. “Among the new content in development, our new button control scheme will give fans a choice for how they want to throw punches in the game.

We strongly believe that the refined Total Punch Control is the most intuitive way to throw punches in Fight Night Round 4, but we also want fans of the franchise to have an option.”

Madden NFL team and player ratings season preview

If you’re a Madden NFL fan, the season can’t come too soon. Who will be the powerhouse teams this year? What players have improved? What players have seen better days? See how your favorite team and players will fair – according to the Madden NFL 10 Season Preview.

Each week, we’ll breakdown the overall team rating and each player’s individual ratings, for a specific division – one team per day. In addition to the player ratings, a wealth of team-specific assets will be made available, for both the Xbox 360, PLAYSTATION 3, and Wii versions of Madden NFL 10.

Everything culminates on August 3rd, where Madden NFL 10 will predict the 2008 NFL division winners, season MVP, and more.

This week, we focus on the NFC North. To view the overall team ratings for the Bears, Packers, Lions, and Vikings, as well as download the complete team roster ratings, visit the official Madden NFL 10 website below:

• Madden NFL 10 Season Preview