With Grand Theft Auto 5 due in just over a month's time, Rockstar chose today to unveil the game's online component, aptly dubbed "GTA Online," in a brand new trailer.

The studio briefly teased an upcoming reveal back in last month's gameplay trailer, but now you can sit back and take in what to expect when you head online with GTA 5, which takes to the streets of PS3 and Xbox 360 on September 17.

The latest NISAmerica newsletter reveals Dragon's Crown is coming to Europe, Australia, and other PAL regions on October 11, and confirms the art book pre-order bonus is available at select retailers. The PS3 and Vita brawler is already out in North America and Japan, getting off to a storming start in the latter after shipping 300,000 copies in its first week.

The game proved sovereign with our Danny, too, notching four and a half stars in his review: "Vanillaware breathes new life into a worthwhile but rarely attempted style of gameplay with Dragon's Crown, a brilliantly executed tribute to arcade gaming's past that offers up an endlessly satisfying loop of questing, looting, and character progression."

Capcom is packaging five PS3 games together in a special collection, and has announced said Capcom Essentials bundle will come to Xbox 360 as well. The bundle includes Resident Evil 6, Super Street Fighter 4, Devil May Cry 4, Dead Rising 2 and Mega Man 10, all for $60.

The Capcom Essentials pack also comes in a branded bag, just in case you run out of room in your fanny pack as you leave the store. Capcom Essentials will launch on October 8, and pre-orders are available now at some retailers.

The Batman: Arkham Origins collector's edition for North America, Australia and New Zealand runs $120 and includes a terrifying, yet oddly alluring, statue of The Joker surrounded by LED-lit TVs. The statue is 9 inches tall, 13 inches wide, 11.5 inches in depth and probably a 7 on a "this will scare young children" scale.

More physical goodies included in the collector's edition are two pieces of evidence from the Gotham crime lab, an 80-page art book, a Batman "wanted" poster, blueprints of the batwing, an Anarky logo stencil, a glow-in-the-dark map of Gotham City, the Wayne family photo and dossiers on all eight assassins out to get Batman, including Black Mask's contract.

Digital items include the First Appearance Batman Skin and the Deathstroke Challenge Pack. North American customers get Necessary Evil, a documentary of DC Comics' most famous villains, and PS3 owners in all regions get the Knightfall pack.

The European collector's edition appeared earlier in August, running £80 and including, overall, less stuff, and certainly a less creepy Joker statue. Examine the North American statue in greater detail here.

Continue Reading

2K Games has issued a features list for NBA 2K14, highlighting improvements over last year's game and some new additions to the series altogether.

After a few years of absence, Crews mode is making its comeback in NBA 2K14 on Xbox 360 and PS3 only. We know what you're thinking: It's not a mode that replaces all your players with Terry Crews, but the 2K series' take on clans, in which players group up and play against rival squads. The mode also lets you incorporate your custom MyPlayer persona.

A selection of 14 European teams will be represented in NBA 2K14 across all platforms, including true names and uniforms, and the game will benefit from daily roster updates to reflect real-world player performance in-game. In addition to that, a whole host of features and balance tweaks are documented in the extensive list past the break.

Continue Reading

Battlefield 4 players will be able to move all of their stats from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, or from Playstation 3 to Playstation 4, in a one-time transfer. The transfer includes all stats, unlocks, awards, assignments, rank and all the premium content and memberships players may have.

This follows the announcement of a similar profile-transfer system for Call of Duty: Ghosts, made during Activision's multiplayer livestream today.

Microsoft's Xbox One will include the Season Pass Guarantee, a program that carries participating Xbox 360 season pass content to the Xbox One, for free, if the player owns both versions of the game. Battlefield 4 and Ghosts will support this program. There's no word if Sony will roll out a similar system for the Playstations 3 and 4.

Call of Duty: Ghosts stats will transfer fluidly across Xbox One and Xbox 360, or PS4 and PS3, Infinity Ward announced during its livestream event today. Individual profiles will transfer from current-gen to next-gen consoles, and vice versa. Ghosts profiles will not be transferrable across console families.

Players will be able to upgrade content from the Ghosts season pass, which runs $50 and includes four DLC packs. Season pass owners will be able to transfer that content from Xbox 360 to Xbox One, or from PS3 to PS4.

Call of Duty: Ghosts will include playable female soldiers in the multiplayer campaign, a video in Activision's multiplayer livestream event revealed. Developer Infinity Ward confirmed the addition with a tweet, "Yep, that was a female soldier #GhostsMP."

Infinity Ward's Mark Rubin mentioned the inclusion later on in the event: "And as you saw in the trailer, you can also play as a female soldier."

This is the first time female soldiers are a playable option in multiplayer Call of Duty history.

Activision is pulling back the curtain on multiplayer in Call of Duty: Ghosts today. The event is streaming live through Twitch starting at 10:30am PT/1:30pm ET/6:30pm UK time, and you can follow it right here.

Joystiq will be in attendance at the Los Angeles venue, so keep an eye out for our impressions later.

Infinity Ward is leading development on all platforms for Call of Duty: Ghosts, save for the Wii U, which is being handled by Black Ops 2 developer Treyarch. Ghosts launches on November 5 for Xbox 360, PS3, PC and Wii U. Xbox One and PS4 launch dates have not been specified yet.

Our review deemed Volition's return to Steelport a "non-stop cavalcade of self-aware meta-humor and surprising, bombastic gameplay decisions from stem to stern," but there are other crews in town. Here's a meta-sampling of the net's judgments on Saints Row 4.

• The Escapist (100/100): "A fantastic game, keeping up the series' tradition of giving players a wide open world and the tools to go absolutely bonkers within it. It's hilarious, it's action-packed, and most of all, it's fun to play."
• Destructoid (95/100): "What I love most about 4 is how it puts the player first -- absolutely every new feature and ability gifted to the player seems designed purely to make the game more convenient to enjoy, and more fun to play."
• Giant Bomb (80/100): "The game is packed with some great moments that subvert the open-world crime genre even further than SR3 did, it's funny, and its references aren't just lazily tossed off, they're earned. You'll feel like you've played some of this before, but if you're at all interested in Saints Row's brand of weird, it's absolutely vital."
• Eurogamer (80/100): "Saints Row 4 may lack refinement - nothing thwarts a superhero quite so frequently as an overhanging roof or your homies standing in a doorway - but it compensates with sheer exuberance. It's a heartfelt love letter to the superhero genre and to a medium that makes such madness possible."
• OPM (60/100): "Occasionally excellent, often mired in mediocrity, Saints Row 4 is inferior to Red Dead Redemption and even five-year-old GTA 4 in almost every way. And while you're always likely to miss when comin' at the kings, Volition's effort still falls short of the more cohesive Sleeping Dogs, the expansive frolicking on Just Cause 2's Panau and the polished pantomime of Infamous 2."

It was while stuck behind enemy lines, carefully studying the movements of armored guards that I realized just how deeply I'd fallen for Splinter Cell Blacklist. Completing most of the game as an unseen and non-lethal ghost, I left the franchise's protagonist motionless for minutes as I examined the patterns of three aggressive adversaries. This is the Splinter Cell of days past, a game with as much focus thrown at patient stealth progression as at Hollywood bombast.

Back from the cold, Splinter Cell hero and seemingly ageless covert agent Sam Fisher returns to help thwart American enemies. For Sam's latest jaunt through coordinated terror strikes, Ubisoft Toronto recalls the stealth gameplay that made the series famous, while offering more action-focused players tools to survive an onslaught. Whether it's a player's desire to pass through each sequence completely unseen or leave nary a pulse beating in their wake, Splinter Cell Blacklist allows them to craft their perfect gameplay style.

Continue Reading

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) announced it will no longer license its trademarks for EA's future college football games. Teams from the SEC won the last seven straight BCS National Championship games in college football, so EA's next college football game will be without the branding of the sport's most successful conference.

"Each school makes its own individual decision regarding whether or not to license their trademarks for use in the EA Sports game(s)," the SEC said in a statement to ESPN. "The Southeastern Conference has chosen not to do so moving forward. Neither the SEC, its member universities, nor the NCAA have ever licensed the right to use the name or likeness of any student to EA Sports."

The news comes nearly a month after NCAA opted to not renew its partnership with EA, pulling all NCAA marks from future games from the publisher. EA will continue to make college football games without the NCAA through the use of a non-exclusive three-year deal with the Collegiate Licensing Company. At the end of July, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied an appeal by EA in its ongoing student athlete likeness lawsuit.

We've contacted both EA and the CLC for comment, and will update as we learn more.

Update: A CLC representative tells Joystiq that "150 collegiate institutions, including SEC schools, have approved renewal of the EA college football license, to begin with the 2015 edition. As with any licensed product, individual schools continue to make their own decisions."

Update #2: The Pac-12 and Big Ten conferences are reportedly joining the SEC, and will no longer license their brands to EA. "The Pac-12 Conference has decided not to renew its current licensing agreement with EA Sports that allows the use of Conference trademarks," Pac-12 spokesman Erik Hardenbergh told CBS Sports. "Our member institutions continue to make decisions on their trademarks on a school-by-school basis."

The NFL's regular season is just around the corner, but those hoping to fire up their PlayStation 3 consoles to stream games through DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket app will need to find a new method. Sony recently confirmed to IGN that the service will not be available on PS3 this year.

The reason for the switch remains unclear, though Microsoft announced a partnership with the NFL during its Xbox One reveal event in May that has yet to be clarified. The partnership involves live broadcasts of NFL games through Xbox One. Additionally, those that pre-order the special edition of Madden NFL 25 through Amazon this year receive a free year of NFL Sunday Ticket's PC and mobile service.

PS3 owners won't be totally in the dark, however, as the console received a new Live Events Viewer app this week. The app offers both free and pay-per-view streaming options for sporting events and other live entertainment events like concerts, starting with WWE's SummerSlam this Sunday. Live Events Viewer is free to download from the PlayStation Store.

Update: DirecTV has confirmed with Joystiq that NFL Sunday Ticket will not be available on PS3, nor will it be available this year on Xbox 360 or Xbox One.

Update #2: DirecTV has also confirmed that NFL Sunday Ticket will not be available through the PS4.

When The Guided Fate Paradox comes to North America on November 5, the world as we know it will surely end unless we can get hold of the Doctor! Or... perhaps the Nippon Ichi PS3 RPG is one of those not-so-universe-ending paradoxes we've heard so much about.

Sci-fi tomfoolery is apt for The Guided Fate Paradox, a roguelike RPG with Disgaea-like elements, starring a high-schooler who wins godly powers in a mall lottery, and of course must use those powers to travel between worlds and shape the future - does sound a bit like Doctor Who, really.

The game's release date comes courtesy of NISAmerica's site, where pre-orders for its limited edition are now available. The $75 set includes the game, 2-disc soundtrack, hardback art book, print by artist Noizi Ito, and 8 postcard-like character cards.

Being properly, legitimately astonished by Saints Row 4 is an unavoidable eventuality inherent to the experience, but there's something to be said for going in completely blind, as I did. If at all possible, I highly recommend it – Volition's latest is a non-stop cavalcade of self-aware meta-humor and surprising, bombastic gameplay decisions from stem to stern, and to enter the experience with even the slightest knowledge of what's coming would be doing yourself a major disservice.

If you absolutely must be convinced, however, allow me to elaborate on exactly why Saints Row 4 is a modern classic befitting the insane legacy of the 3rd Street Saints.

Continue Reading

A new teaser page on the official Diablo 3 site looks to point towards an expansion called 'Reaper of Souls.' The page shows an image of a looming, shadowy entrance, along with a quote from the Book of Tyrael, which reads "Death, at last, shall spread its wings over all." The page itself is titled Reaper of Souls, and text at the bottom of it indicates Blizzard trademarked that term, something TMView confirms happened just yesterday. Also, the image has the filename "d3x_teaser_en_us.jpg," the 'x' there suggestive on its own.

We know a Diablo 3 expansion has been planned for some time, but this teaser page adds to suspicions that more info will be forthcoming soon, most likely at Gamescom later this month. In a recent earnings call, Blizzard President Michael Morhaime said the company would share "Diablo-related news" at the event, while invites for its press conference there teased a "special announcement." Blizzard also trademarked 'The Dark Below' recently; that now seems likelier to be related to World of Warcraft or something else entirely.

It's worth noting the teaser page quotes Tyrael's companion book for the game, which is due to be released on October 1 and promises "never-before-known secrets" about the Diablo universe. The teaser also comes just ahead of the action-RPG's arrival on PS3 and Xbox 360, set for September 3, while the PS4 receives the game sometime next year.

Today's PSN update stocks the store with Overkill's heist-em-up, Payday 2, and WayForward's Ducktales Remastered, a remake of the classic NES platformer. Pre-orders are also now open for Diablo 3, FIFA 14, Lost Planet 3 and Final Fantasy XIV.

PlayStation Plus subscribers can snag their free copy of Runner 2 today and grab its Good Friends DLC at a slight discount. Meanwhile, the PS Vita gets Fruit Ninja, Open Me!, A-Men and Breakquest: Extra Evolution.

The full list of this week's content is available on the PlayStation Blog.