Fans of soccer, soccer video games, and FIFA especially should be excited for FIFA Street. Excited not just for the game, but for the page turned by its parent franchise—the caricatural style of past iterations has been put on the shelf in favor of sober depiction, though that isn't where the game pans out as a great sports experience.

During Spring Training, San Francisco Giants shortstop Buster Posey took a break with pitcher Ryan Vogelsong to support the ESRB and videogame ratings. The duo traveled to an Arizona Gamestop to film a PSA video aimed at parents. The spot, which will play in AT&T Park and locally in the Bay Area, instructs parents about gaming ratings. 2010 World Series Champion Posey talks about the ESRB and videogames from the set of the commercial in the exclusive video below.

Sega and The Creative Assembly offer Total War: Shogun 2 fans the first expansion to the hit real-time strategy (RTS) sequel. The Fall of the Samurai offers a number of the modern weapons available on land and at sea. The expansion also introduces a new third-person mode, which offers direct fire-control over Gatling guns, cannon, and naval weaponry, and explores some of the new multiplayer options 

One of the features that Sony is vehemently trying to take advantage of with the PlayStation Vita is its augmented reality.  This is where you can take a real location and implement some sort of gaming into it, and while others may not get why you’re so excited, the experience in itself is an interesting one.  Sony’s already offering a number of free games that take advantage of this feature, as well as offering the full retail release of Reality Fighters, a brawling game where you can not only take locations and have a fight anywhere, but also create your own.  It’s a great idea, though one that’s sorely lacking in execution.

Why am I not a bigger fan of role-playing games?  Because outside of team aspects or any given new features, they mostly play the same.  Cast an attack, prepare for a counter-attack, use a special attack to finish the battle, repeat.  Yeah, there’s story too, but it seems built more for folks that are fans rather than the ones that aren’t.  That said, there are exceptions to the rule, and I’m happy to report that Namco’s Tales of the Abyss remains a good one.

The Game Audio Network Guild (G.A.N.G.), the non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and recognition of game audio, held its 10th Annual G.A.N.G. Awards during the Game Developers Conference (GDC 2012) in San Francisco. Gamers can watch the entire awards show on TwitchTV starting March 18th.

One of the big games of 2012 hits PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 this summer. Rockstar Studios in Vancouver has been revitalizing the Max Payne franchise with this latest sequel. Taking a Hollywood approach with the new game, the game maker has released a new video that focuses on the visual effects and cinematics of Max Payne 3. The video highlights the real time motion-comic panel generator that updates the graphic novel style cutscenes made famous by the original games,  as well as a series of innovations that move the game seamlessly from cutscene to gunplay and from one chapter to the next, putting greater emphasis on the moment-to-moment shooting action, and keeping the player locked into Max’s dark and troubled narrative.