SAN FRANCISCO — Final Fantasy XIII began its life as a PlayStation 2 game. Here’s what it looked like.

Speaking at Game Developers Conference on Friday, FFXIII director Motomu Toriyama talked a bit about the development history of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game, showing the early screenshot pictured above. The battle system, Toriyama said, let players attack enemies so they slammed into a wall and collapsed — perhaps the precursor to the finished game’s “Stagger” mechanic.

“The battle system and ..read the full article

The Xbox 360 version of BioShock 2 topped the sales charts in February, moving half a million copies in a month packed with big game releases, the NPD Group said Thursday.

Boosted by BioShock, Dante’s Inferno and continued sales of Modern Warfare 2, the Xbox 360 was the best-selling home game console in the U.S. last month. On the software side, Wii hits New Super Mario Bros. and Just Dance continued to sell boatloads, and Sony’s innovative Heavy Rain had a ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Sony’s motion controller is called PlayStation Move and will be released this fall, the gamemaker said Wednesday. Whether any killer app games will be released with it is still in question.

At a lavish press briefing taking place a few blocks away from the Game Developers Conference, Sony revealed the final name and specifications of Move, which it first showed off at last year’s E3 Expo.The controller itself is almost exactly like the Wii remote, although Sony says ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — Think the music game market is already crowded enough? Here comes a new challenger, a full-band game that will use real electric guitars for controllers.

PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, published by Seven45 Studios, will be demoed on the Game Developers Conference show floor this week. It’s scheduled to be released this fall on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Wired.com got an advance look at the game and the guitar peripheral (above), which looks like a Rock Band ..read the full article

Portal 2 is real, and coming this Christmas, Valve said Friday. And it looks like Mac owners might get to share the love.

The Seattle gamemaker announced that it would release the sequel to Portal, its space-time-bending, hilarious 2007 sleeper hit later this year. If you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up the next issue of Game Informer magazine. And Valve’s not done making waves: A slate of teaser images released this week that the company is ..read the full article

After much deliberation, Microsoft has changed its policy about self-identifying one’s sexual preference, race, religion or nationality via its Xbox Live online service.

In an open letter written Friday, Xbox Live general manager Marc Whitten said that the Xbox Live Terms of Use and Code of Conduct will now allow players to “more freely express their race, nationality, religion and sexual orientation in Gamertags and profiles.”

Specifically, it is now kosher to use the words “lesbian,” “gay,” “bi,” “transgender” and “straight” in ..read the full article

The most important thing to understand about Final Fantasy XIII, the latest in the world’s most popular line of role-playing games, is that it isn’t a role-playing game.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just ask its creators: In a recent interview, the director of this PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game (available March 9) said the changes he made to this installment were so dramatic that it constituted a “new genre” outside the “RPG template.”

Various Final Fantasy ..read the full article

Harmonix launched the Rock Band Network music store on Thursday, featuring over 100 songs created by end users.

Rock Band Network works with the Xbox 360 version of Rock Band 2. From the average user’s perspective, it’s just another source of music; 100 more songs from obscure indie bands as well as acts like Flogging Molly and Steve Vai. But these songs weren’t created in-house; they were put together by independent music-makers using software provided by Harmonix, then peer-reviewed by their ..read the full article

What’s up with Square Enix’s Nier, anyway?

We’re a little over a month away from the release of this Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game, yet we don’t know a whole heck of a lot about it. It’s an action role-playing game developed by the hit-or-miss folks at Cavia (Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, but also Bullet Witch). Square Enix insists it’s heavy on the RPG side of the seesaw: “This is not a God of War clone. This is not an ..read the full article

The venerable heavy metal record label Roadrunner Records has released a five-song EP inspired by the forthcoming videogame God of War III.

God of War: Blood & Metal, featuring songs by Killswitch Engage, Dream Theater, Trivium, Opeth and Taking Dawn, is free to those who purchase the $100 God of War III Ultimate Edition bundle. Otherwise, the EP can be downloaded for just $2 at Shockhound.

Headbanger Ben Apatoff from Metal Injection wasn’t terribly moved by the tracks. Opeth’s “The Throat ..read the full article

Activision Blizzard will release new games in the Call of Duty first-person shooter series in 2010 and 2011, plus a game that takes the series into the action-adventure genre, it said Tuesday.

The details of the blockbuster war-game franchise follow the shocking news that Jason West and Vince Zampella, the top execs at Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 developer Infinity Ward, were ousted from the company. Activision confirmed the pair’s departure today but did not give any further details, although ..read the full article

Sony has acquired Media Molecule, the developer behind innovative game LittleBigPlanet, which allows PlayStation 3 owners to create, share and play their own videogame levels.

The announcement, made in a press release Tuesday, said that Media Molecule would become a part of Sony Computer Entertainment’s global gaming business as part of SCE Worldwide Studios.

Media Molecule was founded by Lionhead Studios alumni in 2006. Their first game was indie hit Rag Doll Kung Fu. In 2007 Media Molecule unveiled LittleBigPlanet at Game ..read the full article

Twenty-four hours after PlayStation 3 owners first reported that their game machines were ceasing to play games or connect to the internet, many consoles are coming back to normal.

PlayStation 3 machines around the world ceased to function properly Sunday, when a bug that had laid dormant in the machine’s internal clock reared its ugly head, throwing the PS3’s date/time function out of whack. This caused gamers to be unable to log in to PlayStation Network, but also stopped them from ..read the full article

Remember all the hysteria about the Y2K Bug? Well, something like that just happened to PlayStation 3.

On Sunday afternoon, around 4 p.m. Pacific time, some PlayStation 3 owners found that they could not log in to Sony’s PlayStation Network. At first, it seemed like the online service was experiencing an outage, but the real problem was much worse: Downloaded games, and even some disc-based games like the recently-released Heavy Rain, refused to load.

Savvy users realized that this meant that ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — High-quality Wii games from third parties may be few and far between, but Guilty Party could buck that trend.

Guilty Party, unveiled Wednesday at a Nintendo media briefing, is best thought of as a more complex version of the murder-mystery board game Clue. It’s the first collaboration between Stubbs the Zombie creator Wideload Games and its new corporate overlords at Disney. From all appearances, it’s a match made in heaven: Wideload’s penchant for comedy and family-friendly party games ..read the full article

Buy Battlefield: Bad Company 2 used and you’ll miss out on some free content, publisher Electronic Arts has said.

EA announced Thursday that it will give two new downloadable levels to players that buy new copies of Battlefield: Bad Company 2. The maps will be available on March 2, the same day that the multiplayer shooter launches on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Like most new games from Electronic Arts, Battlefield comes with a code printed on a card that’s tucked ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — I’m more excited about Super Mario Galaxy 2 than about any other game at Nintendo’s summit. And why shouldn’t I be?

Available in the U.S. this May, Galaxy 2 is the sequel to one of the best games of the past few years. Super Mario Galaxy perfected the 3-D Mario game, with gravity-based gameplay mechanics that spawned tons of unique level designs and surprising styles of play. Galaxy 2 exists because the development team just didn’t stop coming ..read the full article

SAN FRANCISCO — The big star of Nintendo’s press summit is the long-awaited Metroid: Other M.

Nintendo’s science fiction adventure game series is one of the company’s most consistently excellent franchises. Often imitated and never duplicated, it melds fast shooting action with deep exploration that requires you to think and consider your environment.

Metroid: Other M, developed by Ninja Gaiden maker Team Ninja in collaboration with Nintendo, is the next-gen Metroid that everybody figured would happen, before the unexpected debut of the ..read the full article