Unfortunately, due to a new business strategy for NIS America, we won’t be seeing the PS3 Ar tonelico until at least 2011. With the game so far off, NIS only had a batch of screenshots and a features list to share with us a their annual preview showcase event.

The most striking update is a planned battle system alteration that shifts the series away from traditional turn-based combat to “something more action-y” within monster encounters. It sounds a little like the free-running, button-mashing combat in the Tales series from Namco Bandai; however Qoga adds a musical twist. During combat, players can unlock combos or bonuses by timing attacks or other button presses to the beat of the music. Pulling this off fills a Song Magic gauge that allows you cast special effect spells like stat buffs.

It wouldn’t be Ar tonelico without a little bit of kink. To that end, there are characters within the game who cast stronger spells by shedding more and more clothing — and certain characters the main character can “interact” with to change their appearance. No, we’re not talking hot coffee stuff, but expect some interesting dialogue options en route to one of several possible game endings.

Ar tonelico Qoga: Knell of Ar Ciel us due out on PS3 around spring next year.

The Sony PS 3 Console, in particular, lets you play amazing and hi-end games. Highly recommended if you are into racing games, the Sony Playstation 3 can remarkably change your digital life. The third system of the Sony Playstation Video Game Console, the Sony Playstation 3 has real time 3D computer graphics, enhanced by the Cell processor.

Games being played on the Sony PS 3 console are available in 20 GB and 60 GB and usually come with multiple flash card readers. These features, and many things besides, make the Sony Playstation Video Game Console and the Sony Playstation Video Game Systems compatible both with high definition televisions and the conventional televisions.

The system also allows you to store your music files, as well as video and image files in the 60GB removable hard disk the Sony Playstation Video Game Console usually comes with. Another great thing about the Sony Playstation Video Console Systems is that you can access online games anywhere and anytime, so long as you have an internet connection.

Aside from that, you can also enjoy other features, such as text and video messaging, multiplayer gaming, voice chatting, internet browsing, downloading, and with the Blue-ray disc player, even enjoy hi-end games and movies.

Indeed, there are many multimedia activities you can do and enjoy with your Sony Playstation Video Game Console. Equipped with outstanding memory capabilities, the Sony Playstation Video Console is undoubtedly the most powerful gaming console in the market today.

The time for a great gaming experience has arrived with the Sony Playstation Video Game Console and the Sony Playstation Video Game Systems.

Released in 2008, Grand Theft Auto 4 is considered one of the top PlayStation 3 games. The game is action packed like its classic precedents in GTA series. However, a superb single-player story mode and online support for up to 16 players make this the best Grand Theft Auto game ever. We’re big fans of better graphics and this game delivers extraordinary details. Plus the install cuts down on loading screens, which gives us more time to ram firetrucks into dirtbikes. Controls are much improved over previous versions. which helps increase the games intensity. GTA4 is undoubtedly a must-have for all PlayStation 3 fans.

What with the best PlayStation 3 games list be like without Metal Gear Solid 4 on the list? This classic video gaming character is brought to life in one of the best PlayStation 3 games to date. It is a mix of powerful storytelling, entertaining gameplay and jaw-dropping graphics. Unlockable rewards, plus lots of cool gadgets and weapons that you can customize to your own style of play. If you’re planning to buy a PlayStation 3, or you already have one, Metal Gear Solid 4 should be at the top of your list.

The newly released Street Fighter IV doesn’t miss a beat as famous world warriors are still capable of super-extraordinary, eye-bedazzling 3D street fighting. Release by Capcom on Feb 17, 2009, Street Fighter IV won’t disappoint loyal street fighting fans after almost 10-years-of waiting. Ryu, Ken, and a host of familiar warriors get back to doing what they do best in Street Fighter IV. Awesome single-player modes, strong online multiplayer, and stunning graphics make up for the lack of tournament mode. It is easy to see why this game is ranked among the best PlayStation 3 games to date.

To learn more about Best PlayStation 3 Games, I recommend you checking out PlayStation for Sale. It is a specialized Sony PlayStation for sale site that lists up to the minute deals on the PlayStation 3, Play Station 2, PSP and most popular PlayStation games and accessories. Be sure to try this website first.

At around 4PM PST on Sunday, PlayStation Network users on Twitter began began to report that they were unable to connect to the online gaming service. Hours later, the problem seems to continue, to the point where Sony has begun to acknowledge the issue on its official PlayStation Blog.

According to the blog, the problem seems to only affect pre-Slim PlayStation 3 models, with PlayStation social media manager Jeff Rubenstein claiming they “have narrowed down the issue and have engineers working to restore service.”

Despite the fact that the game doesn’t have any online gameplay, many owners have reported that PSN issues have kept players from enjoying Sony’s most recent release, Heavy Rain. Any PlayStation 3 owners experiencing PSN problems today? Share your horror stories in the comment section below.

The sit-down unit is fitted with a pair of eyeglasses for the player to view the action through, with gun-shaped controllers to aim and attack with. The big monitor and 5.1 surround sound offer up an even more immersive environment, all the more important when you think how busy arcades are. Of course, when we say “arcades,” we mean Japanese arcades, since they don’t really exist in the U.S. any longer, and we won’t likely see this unit come stateside in a non-import capacity any time soon.
The recently-concluded Arcade Operator Union Expo in Japan got an even deeper look into the cabinet for Komani’s approaching Metal Gear Arcade. Announced last June, the gameplay is set off a adapted version of Metal Gear Online, but the fully-loaded arcade unit should offer up a much another experience.

Game design feels like one big round of “follow the leader” sometimes: when a game does something successfully, everyone else tries to put their own spin on it. Grand Theft Auto III had that effect, leading to a bevy of like-minded titles that aped the concepts that made it so great. The God of War franchise has also left its own indelible mark and it’s finally starting to show with titles like Bayonetta and Darksiders following in Kratos’ deity-sized footsteps. Dante’s Inferno is another chip off the old Grecian block but it exists somewhere in the middle of those two aforementioned titles: unlike Bayonetta, which took the formula and gave it a total glam makeover, Dante’s hews closer to the tried and true; yet, unlike Darksiders, which was a little too familiar for its own good, it actively tries to do something different.

Dante’s more or less succeeds on that latter point, at least in terms of the overall game world. The Divine Comedy might seem like an odd choice for source material, given its relatively small mass market appeal — before any of you literature lovers decide to write me angry yet elegantly worded hate mail, I’m only pointing out that it’s not something most gamers will know intimately — but Dante Aligheri’s epic poem gave the developer lots of material to work with and it actually manages to step away from Kratos’ imposing shadow. The nine circles of Hell deserve a lot of the credit for that: they’re impressively constructed and the dev team got a lot of mileage out of the unique setting.

The architecture in the Lust level, for instance, is appropriately composed of phallic structures and pulsating flesh while the Greed level shines with spilled gold, both in coin form and the molten lava in which the avaricious are constantly bathed. Unfortunately, while the environments are well done, the overall atmosphere is incredibly lacking: You are surrounded by woe but it’s all rather vague; you see disembodied souls plastered into the walls and you hear shrieks of agony, but it’s never more than ambient fluff. I expected my experience to be suffused with suffering but it’s almost an afterthought; even without reading the Divine Comedy, I’m sure Aligheri describes the horrors that he witnesses in great detail and the resulting sense of dread and foreboding is curiously absent here. The puzzle design — a definite holdover from God of War, complete with block-moving puzzles and handles you have to rotate — also doesn’t leverage each level’s theme enough; a lot more could have been done with the material but it’s mostly a rehash of the timing- and environmental-based puzzles that you’ve seen before.

But I still enjoyed my time with Dante’s because the combat is expertly handled. The cross, which acts as your projectile weapon, is especially satisfying and after fully upgrading it, it became my default weapon; the scythe is a decent implement but shooting out waves of holy death was far more enjoyable. The minor enemies, while uniformly dull, are also serviceable and the bosses are varied and interesting. The deep skill tree, the collectible relics which buff your abilities, and the overall pacing of the game — it constantly has you moving forward and you never stay in one circle long enough to get tired of it — also conspired to make me enjoy myself and I, for the most part, gave into that temptation. But there were a handful of moments so maddeningly frustrating that I felt as though I was suffering through a divine punishment of my own; poor cameras and ill-placed lakes of lava resulted in many cheap deaths, and you can’t skip cinematics so prepare to rewatch the same clips multiple times. The final boss fight is also ridiculously hard, enough so that I gave up and bumped the difficulty down to the easiest mode just so I could see the ending for purposes of review; when I did that, I literally beat the boss in literally two minutes.

I also found that I was never really awed by the game’s narrative. Rampaging through a realm of eternal suffering should have left a deep impression but it didn’t, mostly because the storytelling is weak; because I’m not familiar with the Divine Comedy, I had to accept the built-in narrative on face value, and it falls flat thanks to some incongruous holes. For instance, while the main character Dante looks memorable — the Holy Crusader motif is surprisingly effective, from the metal crown-of-thorns to the cloth cross he stitches into his chest — he’s basically an empty shell in terms of his personality. For a man who confronts the demons of his own past, Dante demonstrates no real sense of moral complexity or inner torment; he screams with emotional agony a lot but I never really felt the weight of his plight. Also lacking are the encounters with the many lost souls you can either punish or absolve; while the choice itself is meaningful — relegate them to suffering or offer them salvation — the end result is anything but. These encounters exist solely to open up the skill tree, and it felt like yet another wasted opportunity to leverage the rich setting of the game.

Because most gamers aren’t familiar with the Divine Comedy, the devs were free to safely take creative liberties but that doesn’t absolve them of the burden of crafting a coherent narrative where your actions actually matter.Dante’s doesn’t do that particularly well and while the combat and level architecture are interesting enough that I stuck with it to the end, I was never fully invested in the story nor did I ever come to truly care about Dante’s quest. Add in the fact that the plot twist revolves around an age-old cliche and you’re left with something that has the scope of an epic tale but carries the emotional weight of an action movie. That I enjoyed it as much as I did says a lot about the high level of expertise expended on the game’s action and set design but the lackluster story means it isn’t nearly as timeless as the poem it was based on.

PROS: Worthwhile combat sequences and excellent level design are the highlights in this devilish tale.
CONS: It doesn’t carry the emotional or moral weight that it should; for a game set in Hell, it’s surprisingly bland.

In 2008, Square-Enix was creating Final Fantasy games. In 2009, they released Final Fantasy games. In 2010, they’ll release more Final Fantasy games. Those three facts are the main reasons Square-Enix reported a 50-percent increase in revenue for the last nine months of 2009 over 2008, and why the company forecasts a successful first quarter for this year.

Due in large part to the release of Final Fantasy XIII in Japan, Square-Enix reported a 48% increase in income from March to December of 2009 when compared to the same period in 2008. Eidos published Batman: Arkham Asylum during that same timeframe, which probably helped things a bit, as did the worldwide release of Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. With Final Fantasy XIII and Just Cause II coming out in the US next month, the predictions for the final quarter of this fiscal year (which ends in March) are upbeat, predicting a 58% increase in revenue for the fiscal year overall over the previous one that ended last March.

A comment from the financial report pointed out Square-Enix’s methods of success. “We are pleased with the success of our Final Fantasy XIII launch in Japan” said Yoichi Wada, the President and Representative Director of Square Enix, who continued “Further, our integration activities since the acquisition of Eidos in April are progressing rapidly and allowing us to strengthen our global business framework.”

What should be interesting is seeing how the next fiscal year shapes up for Square-Enix, as the company has many relatively unestablished IPs like Nier and Supreme Commander in the works for major consoles, as well as iPhone versions of the first two Final Fantasy games.

1UP has come across a report from the US Department of Defense-owned news source Stars and Stripes stating that the US Air Force has commissioned a supercomputer comprised of 2,000 PlayStation 3s. The $2 million project will also utilize an “off-the-shelf” graphics processor to create a supercomputer “nearly 100,000 times faster than high-end computer processors sold today,” according to Stars and Stripes.

This isn’t the first time that a Sony video game console has been linked to a military power. About ten years ago, Sony’s PlayStation 2 was rumored to have been purchased en masse by the Iraq in order to build a supercomputer for military purposes. And you wonder why we couldn’t find “weapons of mass destruction” over there…

Siliconera reports today that a Tales of Vesperia anime movie called The First Strike is being bundled with downloadable content in Blu-Ray, DVD, and UMD form for a May 28 release. We asked Namco Bandai about a possible US release and were told that currently the company has no plans to bring the PlayStation 3 port stateside.

“As for First Strike, it is possible that an anime publisher in the US may pick up the license as there have been Tales anime releases in the US,” a Namco Bandai America publicist told GamePro, “but NBGA have no details regarding this issue at the moment.”

Namco Bandai previously released a PS3 port of the 2007 JRPG Eternal Sonata in the US which included new story content and playable characters. Similarly, the PS3 Tales of Vesperia features new content and a new character named Patty Fleur.

The First Strike anime serves as a prequel of the game’s story, covering the years main character Yuri Lowell spent as a knight. Siliconera warns hardcore fans who want to import the anime that “PSP/PS3 games are region free, but not Blu-ray discs or UMD movies. You’ll need a Japanese PS3 or PSP to play these.”

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that it felt like Resident Evil’s “pure horror” roots were ripped out of Resident Evil 5. To be fair, the game was a lot of fun and the series’ dramatic transformation into a more Gears of War-style cooperative action shooter worked for the most part. But as a fan of horror movies and Resident Evil’s survival-horror origins, I felt oddly betrayed by the game’s emphasis on explosions over suspense. When I sat down to play the first of the two new episodes coming soon for Resident Evil 5, titled Lost in Nightmares, Capcom explained that the return to horror in the episode is a direct response to fans’ reactions to RE5’s departure from the genre.

“A lot of fans thought Resident Evil 5 was too much action and not enough survival horror,” admits Capcom’s product marketing manager Matt Dahlgren. “And Lost in Nightmares (the first new episode available) is our response to that. After the original game shipped, we took a lot of fan feedback into account before creating the new episodes. There are two main ways people play Resident Evil: there’s the slow and suspenseful way, which is the more traditional Resident Evil experience, and there’s the more action-packed experience, which was featured in Resident Evil 5.”

My time with Lost in Nightmares kicked off in the middle of the episode, where Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield stormed the sinister-looking mansion of Umbrella CEO Ozwell E. Spencer, a decrepit, but evil old man in a wheelchair. You may remember Spencer and his creepy mansion from Resident Evil 5 where they were shown briefly in a cutscene. It’s here that Jill and Chris have a particularly memorable encounter with Resident Evil antagonist Albert Wesker. Lost in Nightmares will allow you to play that previously non-playable scenario and everything leading up to the fight with Wesker.

Playing as Chris with Jill by my side, we worked our way up the mansion, starting with the cellar, which turned out to be infested with rats, rotting corpses and hunchbacked killers wielding massive anchors. The hunchbacks, the main villains in this scene, proved to be lumbering but extremely powerful enemies that were harder to slay than the chainsaw wielding freaks from Resident Evil 5. The first time he leapt out of the cellar’s shadows, he instantly killed me and my partner with a single devastating blow.

Something that I noticed right away while playing Resident Evil 5: Lost in Nightmares was the overwhelming sense of claustrophobia I got due to the narrow, dimly lit hallways of the mansion’s basement. The cramped nature of the cellar combined with the scarcity of ammunition available convinced me that this episode is definitely more “horror” than RE5 — I genuinely felt like I was running through a haunted house from a cheesy, old horror film. And that’s a good thing. I only got to play ten minutes of Lost in Nightmares, but the full episode will take you about two hours to complete.

Lost in Nightmares will be available for download on February 17, 2010 on Xbox 360 and February 18, 2010 on PS3. Costume packs will also be available at that time, and if you can wait a bit longer you can get Lost in Nightmares plus the second new episode, Desperate Escape, on March 9, 2010 when they’ll be packaged together with the full game for retail in the Resident Evil 5: Gold Edition.