Yesterday was the tenth birthday of the Playstation 2, a very long time in console lifespans. I’m sure all of us have had or played a PS2 in our lives at one point or another and with good reason; It’s one of the best consoles ever released.

Some of the best games I’ve ever played came out on the PS2, including God of War, Disgaea, Final Fantasy X, and Metal Gear Solid 2, which is the reason I bought a PS2 in the first place. Our friends at Kotaku whipped up a very neat time line of the history of the Playstation 2 and I recommend you check it out.

Short Version: MLB 10: The Show is taking its rightful place at the top of the list when it comes to baseball games. If you’re a baseball fan with a PS3, MLB 10: The Show is a must have.

Game Rant reviews MLB 10: The Show

The king is dead, long live the king. Sony’s MLB 10: The Show has done what no other game has been able to do – top EA Sports’ MVP Baseball 2005, at least in my eyes.

When Major League Baseball sold the 3rd party rights to 2K, EA had to discontinue its MVP Baseball series.

Since then, 2K and Sony have been battling it out to become the “King of the Hill” in terms of baseball games. Once EA was out of the race, the remaining competitors were deadlocked in mediocrity.

MLB 2K7 took the lead, but quickly gave it up to MLB 08 the following year. Since then, 2K has been on a downward turn and The Show has been gaining momentum. Both games have still been living in the shadows of MVP Baseball 05.

If you were waiting for the MLB 10: The Show demo before the game’s release date, you’re out of luck. The last two year’s demos for The Show have come out two to three weeks prior to the release date but this year, the demo won’t come out till at least two days after the game hits retail shelves.

“I am not sure what purpose would be served by misleading you. We said there will be a demo….and there will be a demo. The simple fact is….The demo HAS been completed….the demo HAS been submitted for approval and posting. We, as devs of the game, have absolutely ZERO control as to when it gets approved or posted.”

As you may know, the demo for 2K Sports’ MLB 2K10 came out today for XBox 360. After playing a handful of games in the demo, I’ve already drawn some opinions about it. Mainly, 2K Sports is successfully making strides to build back up its baseball series. In my opinion, MLB 2K7 was a very good baseball game, but since then, 2K8 and 2K9 have dropped the ball, no pun intended.

Let’s start with the good. The analog stick pitching mechanic that was introduced in MLB 2K8 has been highly refined. This is by far my favorite part of MLB 2K10. As a pitcher myself, if the pitching mechanic in a game is broken, the game is usually dead on arrival for me. 2K10 has built on the mechanic that was created in 2K8, what in my mind is the best pitching mechanic in a baseball game.

Here is the bad, and hopefully this was just a demo issue. The default camera for batting is pretty impossible to hit with. The camera is setup about where the catcher’s head would be. This is a problem because you get no depth perception, making it extremely hard to determine when to swing. Hopefully, and I assume this is the case, there will be other choices for batting cameras in the full release.

I’m very impressed with what 2K Sports has done with this year’s iteration in their MLB 2K series. I’m actually very excited to get my hands on the release of the game. If you’re on Xbox 360, DS, or Wii, you’ll be very happy with this game. However, if you’re on a Sony platfrom, I still think MLB 10: The Show is the way to go. This year is the first time in a long time that it looks like its a very close race on the PS3. Recently, The Show has been dominating on the system, but this year I don’t think you can really make a bad choice.

Both MLB 2K10 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, DS and PSP) and MLB 10: The Show (PS3, PS2 and PSP) are releasing on March 2nd 2010.

I’m sure this brings much sorrow to the huge number of gamers who thought Final Fantasy VII was the best thing since the Earl of Sandwich invented the sandwich, but personally I didn’t really put the kind of merit as others may have. If you haven’t had the chance to play Final Fantasy VII yet, you better warm of your PSN account, because a remake is not coming any time soon. Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase had this to say in an TechDigest interview:

Sony has recently mentioned some of the new additions to the All-Star Week festivities in MLB 10: The Show. In addition to playing in the All-Star Game (as you could in MLB 09), you can now play the All-Star Futures Game and start swinging in the Home Run Derby.

While playing the franchise mode you’ll also be able to participate as either the US or World teams in the All-Star Futures Game. In addition, you’ll be able to choose which players you want to enter into the Home Run Derby, and have the abilty to fast forward past computer controlled players. Of course, you’ll still be able to play the standard All Star Game.

When you walk into my old bedroom, the first thing you will see is the side of a white dresser with black knobs and a black top. If you walk around to the front, you will quickly notice that the wood on the front is dented in several places and the paint is heavily chipped, revealing the wood underneath. How did this happen? Would it help if I mentioned my television and all my gaming systems that used to sit on top?

The front of that dresser bears the scars of years of video game frustration. It has played host to three systems’ worth of curse words, elevated blood pressure, and the occasional almost-kicking of a small animal. A veteran of aggression, it has witnessed the infuriating A.I. of Tecmo Super Bowl, the laughable difficulty of Battletoads, those stupid floating barrels in Donkey Kong Country, and the immeasurable real-life threat to friendships posed by Goldeneye and NFL Blitz. More controllers have hit the front of that dresser than all of the Wiimotes without wrist straps in the world. And that’s a fact.

If you’re fearing the day that Microsoft pulls the plug on Xbox Live for the Original Xbox, then watch out for EA pulling online play for some of their older titles. On March 16th, a handful of EA titles on various platforms will lose their online functionality. EA has stated that the games being “retired” only make up 0.3% of the online community.

Bungalows. Crime. Hollywood. Corruption. Blondes­. Smog. Death.

This was Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles of the late 1930s and early 1940s, and one Team Bondi might hope to recreate in highly anticpated upcoming title, L.A. Noire. That’s right kids, Noire is no longer in the Duke Nukem Forever territory of vaporware.

It should even be showing up on multiple platforms. Now that the game is official, expect the usual flow of media showing off the game, like this teaser over at the official Rockstar website and these screens featured in the latest issue of Game Informer.

There are still 48 days left until Opening Day of the MLB season, but you only have to wait 14 more to get your hands on MLB 10: The Show.

On Monday, Sony posted a new trailer for their exclusive baseball title. The trailer shows some great highlights from last season interlaced with some beautiful game play footage from the PS3 version of the upcoming title.

Sitting here looking at my shelf, I count no less than 15 games I currently want to play. My collection edges over 100 games, but those 15 I’ve identified as to-play (and, in some cases, to-play-again). This isn’t even counting games coming out in the next couple of weeks. Is there an overabundance of video games? You bet there is.

I can’t count on one hand the games I’ve started but just haven’t had the time to finish; there’s just too many of them. The game industry continues to produce at a breakneck pace, and games are just getting better and better. Recently finishing stellar titles like Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Dragon Age: Origins and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 showed me that.

Let’s look at some of the games I’m having a hard time finding time to play:

NPD just released their monthly North America numbers for January 2010 and there were definitely a few surprises. On the software side, the Nintendo Wii continued its sales supremacy by taking five of the top ten spots. Leading the way was New Super Mario Bros.Wii, which sold over 650,000 copies, despite being released in November 2009. Mass Effect 2 also made an impressive debut by selling 572,100 copies in only six days, and Army of Two: The 40th Day made a better than expected debut, selling 246,500 copies for the Xbox 360. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 continued its strong performance as well on both the Xbox 360 and PS3. Somewhat disappointing, however, was that both MAG and Bayonetta did not rank in the top ten in sales, even though both had received a lot of buzz before their release.

On the hardware side, the Wii and the DS continued their dominance by taking the top two sales spots, selling 465,800 and 422,200 units respectively. The Xbox 360 sold 332,800 units and nudged out a win over the PS3, which sold 276,900 for the month. Overall sales for the month, however, were disappointing. Software sales declined 13% over last year and hardware sales were down 21%. With so many big titles slated for release in 2010, though, the gaming industry’s fortunes may improve as the year progresses.

Gran Turismo.  Remember it?  You’d better.  With Gran Turismo 5 tentatively slated for later this year, Sony would like to take a moment to remind everyone just how massive Gran Turismo is.  What better way to do that than with lifetime sales figures?

And what a figure it is.  From its humble origins on the PSOne in 1997 to its most recent incarnation on the PSP, the series has sold a staggering 55 million units.  Congratulations to all involved.

However, one thing  sticks out when reading the numbers:  the relative softness of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue’s performance.  Granted, Prologue was an over-priced demo released for a system without much of an installed user base.  The fact remains, across all territories, Prologue sold roughly half as well as the last full game in the series, Gran Turismo 4.

Street Fighter: The Movie, Super Mario Brothers: The Movie, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, House Of The Dead, Postal, Resident Evil Apocalypse, Street Fighter Legend Of Chun Li and the list goes on and on. These were all extremely horrible films and, an abomination in the eyes of video gamers and movie goers alike. I have always been very optimistic about that one golden video game adaptation coming along and helping me to forget these blemishes on pop culture but this is fading fast.

I will admit that this summer’s Prince Of Persia is looking quite sweet but it just looks like Pirates of the Caribbean in Prince of Persia clothing and after the steaming pile that was World’s End this does not leave me hopeful. My dream job in the future is that of a screenwriter, so needless to say that when I hear horrible dialogue and truly terrible stories I want to throw up and scream “why!?” at the top of my lungs. So I started to wonder where could a good, if not excellent, video game adaptation could come from and it lead me to one form; the mini series.

As Game Rant reported back in November, Datel is in the process of suing Microsoft. The suit came after Microsoft launched its fall update, which disables the use of any third-party memory storage: so essentially, Microsoft forced users to buy their own brand of overpriced memory cards and hard drives. For gamers who had been using third party devices, the update nullified all of their saves, downloads and data – a collective cry of agony and lost gamerpoints screeched through the galaxy.

Now it seems Microsoft has filed a motion to dismiss Datel’s lawsuit, and they’re actually siting long-time rivals Apple for their own defense. Last year, Apple fought off an unofficial vendor by stating Apple’s users had agreed to the terms that by using its product, any aftermarket products would be from the original vendor (Apple). So essentially, Microsoft is stating that you can’t run OS X on any non-Apple computer, so therefore it’s okay that users can’t use any non-Microsoft memory cards for their Xbox 360.

Last year, both Wal-Mart and Best Buy decided to jump into the glamorous world of used games to try and take a piece of the market share. Said market is mostly dominated by places like GameStop, which generates almost half of its profits from the exchange and sale of used games.

The E-Play manufactured used-game kiosks at both Wal-Mart and Best Buy failed to make a significant impact – or any impact at all, really – and tanked completely. Analysts had predicted placing such a type of kiosk would have little to no impact on the market, and it seems they were accurate: Today, E-Play suspended its operations and neither Wal-Mart nor Best Buy have indicated a desire to continue exploring the market.

George Hotz, aka Geohot, known for creating jailbreaking/unlocking tools for the iPhone and iPod touch, claims to have hacked the Playstation 3.

The Playstation 3 has been relatively safe and secure for the past 3 years but over the last 5 weeks Geohot has opened up the beast, learned its inner workings and now claims to have full read/write ability to the entire system memory.

“I have read/write access to the entire system memory, and HV level access to the processor. In other words, I have hacked the PS3. The rest is just software. And reversing. I have a lot of reversing ahead of me, as I now have dumps of LV0 and LV1. I’ve also dumped the NAND without removing it or a modchip.”

In a recent interview, Sony rep John Hight discussed the future of the God of War franchise, stating that the series will not be ending with the release of God of War III.

Although Sony’s current focus is the upcoming release of the long awaited return of Kratos, Hight points out that the game engine is constantly evolving. He continues to note that “we’re going to be really careful about what we do next”.

The second game was a nice evolution from the first graphically, and players can expect more advancement from the upcoming God of War III. Hight points out that the newest entry will employ dynamic environments where “Kratos can now navigate, battle on, engage other creatures on, find treasures, you name it.” This is being done through what Hight states is “soft body collision” – a process two years in the making.

Researchers can predict your performance on a video game simply by measuring the volume of specific structures in your brain, a multi-institutional team reports this week.

The new study conducted at the University of Illinois has found that nearly a quarter of the success rate seen among men and women playing a new video game could be predicted by measuring the volume of three structures in their brains.

Participants were then trained on one of two versions of Space Fortress, a video game developed at the University of Illinois that requires players to try to destroy a fortress without losing their own ship to one of several potential hazards.

Activision CEO Bobby Kotick in an interview with Game Informer stated that the Spider-Man games coming out of the studio weren’t exactly the best titles they could have released. In fact, he’s rather blatant about it.

“Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years…They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games.”

I love when stories like this hit the internet. According to a poll by an online UK discount site MyVoucherCodes (now that’s credibility if I’ve ever seen it), one in five women have kicked their partner to the curb for an overindulgence in gaming or surfing the web. The “research” goes further by stating 80% of women believe their significant other spends too much time gaming and 70% cited it as a cause for arguments. On the other side, 72% of men felt their better halves were on the internet too much, but only 6% thought it was grounds for walking out the door. And what game was blamed for the most conflicts? You guessed it: Call of Duty.

The folks over at Official Nintendo Magazine have a new trailer up for Konami’s Wii/PS2/PSP  title Silent Hill: Shattered Memories.

Shattered Memories is a re-imagining of the original game in the Silent Hill franchise.  Players re-assume the role of Harry Mason as he searches for his missing daughter Cheryl in the pant-wettingly creepy town of Silent Hill.

Steve at Collider interviewed Mike De Luca last week and in their hour-long conversation they touched on the subject of the Metal Gear Solid movie. With the film industry making a push into video game adaptations and it possibly becoming the next comic book movie genre, it seems like a no brainer that the hot property is ripe for a film adaptation.

According to De Luca however, things are seemingly on hold for the time being as not everyone’s fully on board, mainly the video game companies. In this case, the developer is Konami and it looks like they maybe fearful of letting a Hollywood studio adapt their prized property considering the history of quality in video game movies.

Linear gameplay. Sometimes it can mean an excruciatingly simple and trudging story that you can do little to make fun. Other times, it can be one of the most thrilling experiences you can have playing any video game at all. In recent times, some of the best games to be released were largely linear experiences. I speak of course of titles such as Modern Warfare 2 and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, games that were not focused on giving you a whole-wide world to trudge through and wreak havoc upon, but rather very engaging set pieces with simple goals. I, for one, enjoyed the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 immensely. If I described it to someone, I would call it “the best summer blockbuster you’ll never see in a theater,” and I think that held true for one reason: Linear gameplay.

Linear gameplay, that is to say, gameplay that nudges you along in the right direction with no allowance of real exploration, can be a real benefit for game developers because they can concentrate on immersing the player in the story they crafted. One of my favorite parts in the MW2 campaign was the first portion of the mission in Brazil where you had to find the right-hand man of a target you were after, from that opening where you were sitting in the car, to pursuing the contact, and then to shooting him in the leg. Not a complicated gameplay segment at all, but very engaging and definitely thrilling. Why? Because YOU were there and YOU had to shoot that guy in the leg.

Nielsen Games – Gameplay Metrics, the subdivision of Nielsen Media Research, has released it annual media fact sheet regarding video game usage. According to Nielsen’s polling, the Xbox 360 was the most used game console in the United States in 2009. The consoles were ranked in terms of minutes used:

1. Xbox 360 – 23.1%
2. PS2 – 20.4%
3. Wii – 19.0%

If these results are accepted at face value, Microsoft has to be pleased that it is leading its home market in popularity, since the overseas market (excluding the United Kingdom) has been much more challenging. Despite this, Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer did announce yesterday at CES that the Xbox 360 has now shipped more than 39 million units worldwide.

EA seems to be dropping something else besides employees, now confirming that they will be shutting down servers on quite a few older titles in their library. So, if you own Facebreaker, Fight Night Round 3 (PS2), Fantasy Football ‘09, Madden ‘09 (Wii/PSP), or NHL ‘07 then you better blow some dust off those titles because the online in these games are going to start getting the axe early this February.

You can check out the list of games – courtesy of MCV – right after the jump.

Sony had a choke hold on the video game market during the last generation of console gaming. It is therefore strange that a company that had a installation base of almost 40 million people, could struggle in the next generation only a few years later. More surprising is the fact that from a technical stand-point, the PS3 has the most powerful features and the least amount of required hardware peripherals (unlike its Microsoft counterpart.) So, why is the PS3 not dominating the market? I believe that it can be boiled down to several instances of executives making promises and comments that eventually came back to bite them.

It all started at E3 in 2005 when Sony announced the PS3 at a very boring press conference that focused mostly on numbers and specs. The key points were the announcement of  a spring 2006 release, gameplay graphics that are better than what we have seen in high-end CG cutscenes and the reveal of the new controller. As we all know, the PS3 did not release that Spring and came just in time for the holiday season of 2006 alongside the release of Nintendo’s Wii. As for the graphics and controller, take a look at these two before and after images, they speak for themselves.

LEGO bricks are seemingly becoming more well-known as LEGO digital bricks nowadays with the brand’s jump into the video game industry a few years back. We’ve already seen LEGO Star Wars, LEGO Batman, LEGO Indiana Jones and there’s even a LEGO Rock Band – not even based on a movie but on another game as simply a LEGO-styled skin.

As we know, Ubisoft makes the Prince of Persia video games and Disney’s film adaptation of The Sands of Time is coming out in summer, 2011 and that of course means, LEGO toys will accompany it. But does it mean we can expect a LEGO Prince of Persia game too?

With the 2009 coming to its end, I’ve been incredibly impressed with how the games released this year presented cinematic experiences that feel so organic, and it only looks like it’s going to get better. Major blockbuster hits such as Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and Assassin’s Creed 2 (Guess things get better the second time around, huh?) definitely drive this point home and in a very big way. From the literal birth of an assassin in Assassin’s Creed 2 to a harrowing snowmobile chase after destroying a Russian military base in Modern Warfare 2, games are becoming more immersive and hugely cinematic in how they deliver their stories. Where the gamer is able to actually be in an interactive movie where you get to do all the cool things you’ve watched all before.

Fansite Battlefront3.net is reporting that the third title in the great Star Wars Battlefront series is still in development.  Correspondence from LucasArts voice actor Chris Marazzo indicates that what was to originally be Battlefront 3 actually evolved into the Star Wars Empire At War expansion pack, Forces of Corruption.  The message from the actor went on to confirm that Star Wars Battlefront 3 has been cast and is indeed in development.