Kotaku

I had a chance to sit down with Team Ninja's Yosuke Hayashi, producer of Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword, in New York earlier this week, where he had flown to help launch the portable title in the U.S.

Hayashi spent much of the day sitting at a table near the front doors of the Nintendo World Store quietly talking to patiently waiting fans through a translator, posing for pictures and signing autographs.

It was, he said, the first chance he had to talk to the public about the game, a game he feels people were waiting to come out.

"The fact that people lined up at the store today to purchase the game, that feels good," he said.

Hayashi said the project started out not as a way to get Ninja Gaiden onto the DS, but as a way to create an innovative action game for the portable.

Your final official cinematic look at Grand Theft Auto IV has been released, featuring little in the way of chit-chat and tons of gunfire, explosions and peel-outs. There's also a big ass booty. The trailer may be painfully brief, but it's enough to get demand frothing yet again.

Team Ninja's stab at bad-ass ninja action on the Nintendo DS has arrived, with Ryu Hayabusa and the demon ninja hordes he must defeat looking tinier than ever in Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword. The game is almost entirely controlled by simple stylus motions, using techniques that may already be familiar to DS gamers who have played The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass. While the scope may be smaller, the team at Tecmo doesn't appear to have skimped on the production values.

The question is, however, can the white knuckle action of Team Ninja's Ninja Gaiden work on a handheld? We'll tell you what we loved and hated in the review.

Maybe! These were obtained by Dutch site XboxWorld, posted, then summarily pulled. There's some nice-looking (in-game!) singleplayer screens thrown in, but for the most part these are shots showing off the game's multiplayer aspect, complete with helicopter combat, gang shootings and the requisite - I'm assuming - downgraded graphics for increased online performance.
[via GTAIV.net]

Wealthy men walking with sticks. This is what I see every day when driving past the exclusive country club down the street from where I live, and about my only real exposure to the real world of golf. The closest I get to playing golf these days is the Hot Shots Golf series, which features cutesy characters with sticks, sans walking. Now Sony and developer Clap Hanz bring the franchise to the PlayStation 3 with Hot Shots Golf: Out Of Bounds, and I've gone several rounds with the title to see how the series fares on Sony's latest console.

The handicap differential in red and blue, after the jump.

As soon as I received the press release announcing Rock Band Wii's ship date, I emailed back to find out what the deal would be when it comes to downloadable content.

Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions have it and Rock Band gamers have been responsible for more than six million downloads so Nintendo would certainly support it... right? Right? Guys?

Not so much.

The Internet's got Jesse McPherson's back.

On March 12 McPherson returned from SXSW to discover that his home had been broken into and that the burglar had made off with his Xbox 360, an old Powerbook and a television.

Familiar with the competence of the Philadelphia police, McPherson decided to hunt for the items himself and soon found that the burglar had tried to sell his laptop at a local pawn shop, which has images of the guy from their camera. He tries to give the info to police, but never hears back.

Fast forward to Friday when McPherson's workmates present him with a replacement Xbox 360. He goes home, hooks it up and discovers a voice message on his 360 from some guy saying he has his 360 and wants cash to give it back. Better still the idiot uses his current account to leave the message.

McPherson calls police again and is hung up on... so he turns things over to the Internet and business is handled.

I just wanted to see what it was like to kill. It could have been anyone.

It's Easter Sunday, and all over the country children will be set loose in their backyards, hunting for colorful treats hidden away by mischievous and sometimes sadistic adults. I'm speaking, of course, about Easter eggs, and while here at Kotaku tower we prefer to shop for our Easter treats in bulk after the holiday is over and the prices get slashed, we can still share with our fluffy bunny readers some of the best video game Easter eggs we've come across in our travels. To start us off on our egg hunting adventure, we give you - well...

Adventure - Atari 2600
In the beginning...
In the early days of Atari, programmers weren't given credit for the games they designed for fear of other companies trying to steal them away, but Adventure designer Warren Robinett felt that credit was due. He included a hidden object in the game that lead to a secret room that displayed the words, ""Created by Warren Robinett," which was the first known video game Easter egg. Not exactly the most exciting example, but the first deserves credit.

I got a chance to sneak over to Ubisoft's San Francisco office during the Game Developers Conference and sit down with Michael de Plater, creative director Tom Clancy's EndWar, to talk about the upcoming voice-command strategy game. Better still, I also got a chance to actually play it—and what I saw impressed me.

De Plater said that part of the impetus for the game was the fact that, as real-time strategies have evolved, the genre has left a lot of people behind. People like my dad, even people, in some cases, like me. People, basically, who aren't interested in dealing with a Zerg rush five minutes into the game and instead want to play something a bit closer to, say, a detailed and realistic game of chess.

"One of the things we hear a lot of us is 'I used to love real time strategies, but it's gotten too complex'," he said. "So we decided to make a tactical game, slow the pace down. We call this game strategy at the speed of thought."

Bandai Namco's Duel Love takes players into the underbelly of prep school fighting. That doesn't mean the game is only about fighting. At its core, Duel Love is a Japanese "renai game" ("romantic game") where the goal is to get the game's exceedingly male metrosexuals to fall head over heels in love with you. This is standard dating sim stuff, but Bandai Namco tries to spruce up the formula with touch pen touching.

Duel Love, like most renai games, is more reading and less playing. (Thus, that doesn't exactly make it import-friendly!) Onward the "Loved" and the "Hated"!

One more round today in the continuing downward spiral of controversial Miami attorney Jack Thompson. Today the Florida Supreme Court sanctioned Mr. Thompson after he failed to prove that they shouldn't through his recent "show cause" order. So what does all this law jargon mean exactly? Well the long and short of it is that Thompson will no longer be able to file cases directly to the courts but instead will have to hire another lawyer to do so on his behalf. While this move won't completely muzzle the outspoken Thompson, it will certainly make it difficult for him to bring more of his frivolous lawsuits to the court's attention. Bear in mind that this is a separate issue from his disbarment trial which is currently in the works.

If you are a fan of reading long legal documents, Game Politics has the full court order available for your perusal on their website.

BREAKING - Florida Supreme Court Sanctions Jack Thompson {GamePolitics]

Never let anyone tell you that San Francisco isn't the heart of the gaming world. Where else would you find a church using Mii to promote an upcoming Easter service. Mission Bay Community Church in San Fran sent this clever picture out to parishioners earlier this week. So great.

Mission Bay Community Church

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas 2 brings gamers back to Sin City to rescue it from the clutches of another group of terrorist who've decided to start blowing stuff up. This time around, the game spends more time developing the characters and gives players a chance to shoot through the campaign with a friend in co-op mode. Ubisoft Montreal doesn't try to tinker with the formula, instead looking to add to what was an already popular title.

Vegas 2 can, at times, dip into the monotonous and the AI is spotty, but overall the game delivers a fun experience.

Yesterday's leak of Prey 2 info was confirmed today by the Radar Group, a company dedicated to developing video games "specifically for cross-media leveraging in the video game market and other ancillary media markets, such as film, TV, music and other emerging online markets." In other words, it sounds like Radar Group aims to put out games destined for the film treatment and vice-versa.

The company today confirmed that they are working with Human Heads Studio on Prey 2. They also announced that Recoil Games is working on a shooter called Earth No More and third title being worked on by a yet-to-be-announced studio.

Hit the jump for the description of all three and some more art.

Instead of doing extra posts on Kotaku about important things, Mike McWhertor has been squandering his valuable time creating his own company, Meat Bun. Combining his love of t-shirts and video games, Mike foolishly went into business with friend and Pikachu belly enthusiast Scott Spatola, creating a line of game-themed tees. He's been wearing them at events and TV appearances all year, cruelly teasing that they'd be coming any day now.

Any day now... any day now. But finally, they're here. Go check out the Meat Bun store and give him some money so he forgets about that nasty "raise" business.

Meat Bun

Sega and Monolith bring first-person serial killer hunting fun back to consoles in Condemned 2: Bloodshot. Anti-hero cop Ethan Thomas is back on the streets—literally, he's pretty much a homeless drunk—and ready to punch out droves of insane bums, vagrants and derelicts. The star of Condemned: Criminal Origins returns filthier and boozier than before, this time as an overly grizzled ex-member of the Special Crimes Unit. He's on the hunt for another killer, one who has ties to his previous prey. Monolith looks to have paid close attention to the criticisms heaped upon the first Condemned, tightening up level design, adding online multiplayer and addressing the original's monotonous combat.

How successful were they? Very. Here's what we loved and hated.