GTA: Chinatwon Wars shows lots of promise – it’s got the top-down gameplay that fans of the “classic” Grand Theft Auto games know and love, with a bit of drug dealing and a huge-ass play area thrown in for good measure. Now, thanks to this trailer, we can get a little glimpse of that gameplay in motion, as well as finding out a little about the game’s story.

Looking good!

Click to embiggen. No, I didn’t make this. Randomly found on Digg.

The Playstation Network has topped the 20 million subscriber mark, Sony has revealed in a press release today. That’s 3 million more than Microsoft’s competing Xbox Live service (I’m guessing that’s the number of gold “paid-for” subscribers), and has been achieved since the service launched a little over 2 years ago.

To put that figure in perspecitve, Sony have sold 21.3 million PS3s and 50 million PSPs, according to the most recent figures available. It’s surprising that the subscriber figues aren’t a little higher, considering that the service is free and all, but I guess not everyone has braodband yet – and accessing this kind of thing over dialup is a big no-no.

From the press release:

PlayStation Store offers more than 14,500 diverse digital content, ranging from exclusive on-line games, downloadable version of UMD™ titles, game demos and items, and titles from “Game Archive,” through which legendary and popular titles from the original PlayStation are made playable on PS3 and PSP, to more than 5,900 movies and TV episodes that are available through Video Delivery Service that started in the United States in July 2008. To date, more than 380 million pieces of content have been downloaded, with total sales exceeding 180 million US dollars.

They also announced that Home, their free Second Life-ish wandery-aroundy thingy, now has 4 million subscribers.

Well the clues have been around for a while, with Metallica confirming that there would be at least one other playable character after Lemmy was announced and King Diamond himself saying there would be a special treat for Merciful Fate fans in Guitar Hero: Metallica, and now the release of the PS3’s trophy list for the game confirms that King Diamond WILL be included as a playable character.

So, if rocking out looking like a reject from Kiss is up your alley, then grab a copy of Guitar Hero: Metallica when it comes out on March 29th stateside or May 5th in Europe.

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The Pac-Man Dossier by Jamey Pittman is perhaps the most detailed, in-depth guide to one of the world’s most popular arcade games (that’d be Pac-Man, if you hadn’t guessed). It’s certainly the best retro game guide I’ve ever read (although I don’t generally spend my time reading about old arcade games), and is a fascinating journey through every aspect of the game – from the story of its creation, to strategies on the different ghosts’ movements, to hidden easter eggs. It even reveals the mysteries of the unbeatable “corrupted” level 256.

The guide is bang up-to-date, and the effort this guy has gone to to uncover every little fact and figure about the game is astonishing. A must read for retro game fans!

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What would you do if you were the winning bidder on 3 million brand new Atari 2600, 7800, and Jaguar games? Keep them for posterity? Play all of them? Stick them all in a huge-ass cave and slowly sell them all off?

Well, that’s what O’Shea Limited decided to do when they managed to get their hands on Atari’s entire inventory back in 1990. GameSetWatch currently have an interview up with the company’s president, Bill Houlehan, who made the canny investment all those years ago and stored the games in the only space he had available – a limestone cave in Missouri!

So far the company have managed to sell over 2 million of the games – they’re as new, sealed in boxes, and sell for a flat rate of $5 a piece. Apparently the best-selling titles are Pole Position, Ms. Pac Man, Dig Dug, Battlezone, Galaxian, and Hat Trick.

Setting up my very own Ataricave has now officially been added to my list of “things to do if I ever get fabulously rich” – I’ll be like Batman, only a million times more awesome!

The first of 3 ‘deleted scenes’ for Twisted Pixel’s excellent XBLA title ‘The Maw‘ has been released today for the princely sum of 100.  The new level, entitled ‘Brute Force’, is longer than any of the levels included in the game when it was released and slots into the story between the Bulb Valley and Chaindown levels.  Using the powers of Beetull and Gastro, Frank & Maw will have to try and fight their way past the bounty hunters fiercest warriors, the Brutes, on their quest to get back home.

Weighing in at a tiny 604kb, the download has sparked some debate on the net as to whether this is just a download key to unlock content that was included in the original release, so I contacted Twisted Pixel’s CEO Micheal Wilford to get the official word on the situation.  He gave me this response:-

“I can assure you that the DLC pack is not just an unlock key.  Our engine is set up in such a way that we only need a few simple text files in order to add new behavior and gameplay mechanics.  Since the new level re-uses music, sounds, terrain textures, objects, visual fx and more from the main game, the bulk of that 604k is the textures and animations for the new Brute Soldier character.  But as we’ve said in the past, Granny 3D does an amazing job of compressing that type of data.  Our entire game normally would have required more than 2 GB but with Granny we got it to fit under 150 MB easily.  So considering the technology we’re using, 604k is actually quite a bit of data for one level that re-uses a lot of the main game’s assets.”

So there you go doubters, Twisted Pixel are not just trying to fleece you for something you already bought, but instead have the most insane compression system known to man, all hail Granny3D!

See more screenshots of the new level after the break.

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You may have heard of the chewbacca defense, famously used by OJ Simpson’s lawyer Johnnie Cochran in an episode of South Park. It’s probably the best legal defense in the world (except maybe the Shaggy Defense), but Pirate Bay owner Carl Ludstrom’s lawyer just had to try and go one better anyway, busting out a legal gem today in the ongoing Pirate Bay vs. The World trial.

Ladies and gentlemen of this supposed jury, may I present the King Kong defense:

“EU directive 2000/31/EG says that he who provides an information service is not responsible for the information that is being transferred. In order to be responsible, the service provider must initiate the transfer. But the admins of The Pirate Bay don’t initiate transfers. It’s the users that do and they are physically identifiable people. They call themselves names like King Kong,” Samuelsson told the court.

“According to legal procedure, the accusations must be against an individual and there must be a close tie between the perpetrators of a crime and those who are assisting. This tie has not been shown. The prosecutor must show that Carl Lundström personally has interacted with the user King Kong, who may very well be found in the jungles of Cambodia,” the lawyer added.

If chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit – this simply does not make sense!

The words ‘Sonic the Hedgehog’ bring back fond memories of unwrapping my Megadrive when I was a young lad, probably the greatest Christmas present I’ve ever had, and shoving in the game it came packaged with.

A few moments later and, after the sound of “SEEEEEEEGAAAAAAA”, the Sonic theme tune kicked in and I even remember the little blue guy winking at me, what a guy!

Now, as a grown man, you’d think that I’d have put that type of childish excitement behind me, but this trailer just smashed that crazy notion to pieces.

Sonic running around and smashing things.

A cool looking fire cat.

A dragon – which, by the way, looks a lot like a dragon from Phantasy Star and that makes it even better.

Looks good to me!!

The only thing which could make this better is if the Black Knight, at some point in the game, screams “I’ll bite your legs off!”

A few weeks back when one of Rob Zombie’s solo efforts was released as DLC for Rock Band I commented that they really should get some White Zombie in there, as it’s all a million times better than his solo work.  Well, it seems that Harmonix has delivered on my prayers, as this week we will get 2 tracks from White Zombie and a track from Norwegian punk maniacs, Turbonegro.  The 2 White Zombie tracks are ‘More Human than Human’ from their Astro-creep 2000 album and ‘Black Sunshine’ which most people will remember from the god awful cover that was included in Guitar Hero 3, with Turbonegro contributing the anthemic ‘Wasted Again’ from the album Party Animals.

This weeks offerings will only be available as individual tracks at the regular cost of 160/$1.99 each and will be released on Tuesday on Xbox 360 and Thursday on PS3.

Full tracklisting with video links after the break.

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