Alas, here are the winners of our Jericho Halloween contest!  In no particular order they are....

360 WINNERS - JERICHO + SOUNDTRACK

travolta  - He's a bloody Tampax! Yum!
sirjester  - Bruce (groovy)
riomccarthy  - Zombie chick (pictured above)

PC WINNERS - JERICHO for Games for Windows

PraiseChaos  - Bloody face
LostCrichton - Various (you are a silly man and we love you)
GENACON - Various satanic things

PS3 WINNERS - JERICHO while not Folding@Home

BlindsideDork  - Zombie threesome
BS3 Owner - Gasmask, bringer of a billion pumpkins
SPJglitches - Gorillathing

Special thanks to tehArtist for the Destructoid nipples on the flasher pic -- I'm going to send you something random just for that!

Congratulations to our winners and thanks to everyone that participated -- some contest entries and video game pumpkins can be seen in the gallery below. Winners: We'll be in touch by email soon to get your mailing addresses or by all means save us some time and ping us at HR@Destructoid.com with your details.   Thanks for reading Destructoid! You are strange and I like you that way.

So on an unrelated note... does anybody have any epic photos from last night's Halloween parties?  Post them in the comments using bbcode! 

I've been awaiting the chance to play through the final build of Clive Barker's Jericho with some degree of trepidation. You see on a personal level I've had rather a lot invested in the game since its announcement. Ever since my teens, Barker has been probably my favorite artist working in any medium, the level of intelligence, wonder, beauty and brutality he invests into his work striking a special chord with me whether the media be print, film or painting. As a result, his recent impassioned advocacy of gaming and expression of his desire to work heavily within it have excited me to fever pitch with the potential of its future results.

What's worried me though, is the fact that gaming is a medium in which, unlike literature or paint and canvas, Barker can't have total creative and production control over. While I've seen several times this year that Jericho is packed to the gills with his trademark nightmarish viscerality, I haven't been able to shake the nagging consideration that with large parts of development out of its creator's hands, the game could still very well turn out to be Barker in aesthetic alone, with its actual tone and gameplay content subject to the whims and abilities of others. 

Has it been my hopes or my fears that have become crystallized in the final product now that I've been able to play the entirety of the PC version of the game? Well, a bit of both. To find out which side has come out dominant, hit the jump and read the full review. 

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Just a quick reminder -- Jericho hits store shelves today and we've got nine copies of the game on all available consoles as well as the soundtrack to stab community members in the face with -- free!  All you've gotta do is take a photo in costume holding up a sign that says "Citizen of Jericho" or try to win a stand-by spot by posting an insane gamer's pumpkin on the official contest page comments.  The random drawing is just a week away, so get your entry in (or die choking on your blood and vomit)!

In other contest news, don't forget we're also giving away a Hellgate: London lifetime membership and a Nintendo Wii courtesy of Goozex.  Look for these and more updates on our contest page for more information. 

Good luck, worship Satan, and thanks for reading Destructoid! 

 

I'm proud to announce this week's sponsor is the fruit of Codemasters and Clive Barker's labor, the new horror game Jericho arriving next week on the 23rd.  Since Halloween is around the corner, we thought we thought we'd put something in your goodie bag a little early: We're giving away three copies of the game on each platform as well as the soundtrack and other swag to the top three winners -- a total of nine winners! Here's how to steal your free copy:

Contest rules: 

(1) Post a photo of you in your costume holding up a sign that says "Citizen of Jericho" (preferably something scary, but any silly costume is fine).  If you can pull off a Jericho cosplay, your odds of winning obviously go up.  Some screen shots of the various characters are attached in the gallery below. Who needs working eyeballs, anyway? Go all out! 

(2) Please specify your platform of choice and a backup choice (Choose from: PS3, Xbox 360, or Games for Windows) .  The contest ends on October 31, so be sure to post your entry before you go out trick or treating.

Prizes:

My favorite three entries will win a copy of the game and the soundtrack. Six winners will be selected at random.

Other ways to win: 

Not planning on dressing up this year?  You can also participate as a "standby entry" by posting a found photo of a carved video-game related pumpkin.  If we can't contact the winners of the costume contest, one of the pumpkin comments will be selected at random instead.  You can post as many costume entries and pumpkins as you'd like but you can only win once. 

Good luck!

While not as nifty as last week's PlayStation Network Update, this week does have a few goodies in store, including some horror, basketball, and a few upgrades.

The most notable is probably Clive Barker's Jericho. A click and 821mb later, and you'll have access to the nightmarish FPS demo we've been waiting for.  

2K Sports' NBA 2K8 demo is also available for download today, letting ballers get a feel for the court before next week's release. 

Sony has also added a couple of add-ons in this update, including a new vehicle, the “Castro Capitano,” for Motorstorm, priced at only $.99. Ninja Gaiden Sigma owners can download a new Speed Master add-on ($2.99), which adds five new survival modes for those who thought they were Ninja Gaiden badasses. 

As always, Sony has some video trailers to pull down:

• NBA 08 Upside Progression System tutorial
• Eye of Judgement Overview
• Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock trailer
• Iron Man trailer
• We Own the Night trailer (ugh)

Good morning, and happy Thursday! Demos for 2K Sports' NHL 2K8 and Codemasters' Clive Barker's Jericho have hit Xbox Live this morning, and are ready to be downloaded as I write this.

After a 1 GB NHL 2K8 download, gamers can check out the game critics are calling "exciting and fun," a "great distraction," and "skating on thin ice." The 885.17 MB Jericho demo will hopefully scare the crap out of you, and if Destructoid's own David Haughton is to be believed, has "potential."

Personally, I'd be more interested in playing a game that combined the best of both of these titles. Demonic hordes on ice? Mutant League anyone? But don't buy into my negativity -- check out the demos, and let us know what ou think.

Hot off the presses, and by that I mean the Something Awful forums, is the news that the Jericho demo is a day early on Filefront and Gamespot. Jericho appealed to me because of its demonic time-traveling squad mechanic, although the trailers have made it look a bit silly in an eye-rolling, takes-itself-too-seriously way. Despite Dtoid's earlier good impressions following a preview, reports in this thread are less than enthusiastic:

Well I guess I'll say that I thought the demo was pretty damn terrible.

It feels like I'm looking at the world through a camera with a half-jar of vaseline on the end (including the jar itself), the character movement feels very sluggish and the DDR sequence is really awful both in pacing and style. I don't mind console-centric controls in my games, but this one just seems to be a half-assed "map some shit randomly to the keyboard" instead of any sort of thought being put into it.

I really hope this is the wrong version of the demo since it's out a day early.

I am personally unable to verify suck or not suck, as it were, since I am currently without a monitor.  Here's where you come in: I want you to cram every cubic inch of that comments box with your own very personal impressions of this demo, starting NOW. 

In a move which has stunned the entire population of those who have actually been living under a rock for the last ten years, - incidentally a proud people who are sick to death of being reduced to a semi-humorous cliche in the eyes of the rest of the world - Germany's notoriously draconian media classification board has refused Clive Barker's Jericho a rating.

This is one of those stories that could have been pre-emptively written months ago, given that the game is one long orgy of S&M-tinged demonic FPS slaughter, and as the bloody cherry on top of the intestine cake features the country's favourite-ever subject matter, allusions to Naziism. So expected was this turn of events in fact, that at my initial preview of the game some months ago, a conversation I had with some of the Codemasters guys began with them laughingly predicting it.

The ruling by the USK states means that the the game can't be sold to minors, sold online, advertised, or displayed in stores. Add to that the fact that neither Sony nor Microsoft will back a game in the country without a USK rating, and it means that to all intents and purposes the console versions of the game have been banned, with only the PC edition available, if indeed it can be found. Just as well that Germany's right in the middle of a whole array of mainland European countries with more measured ratings systems and good transport and postal services really, isn't it?

In the meantime, you can find out exactly why Germany has such a problem with Jericho through the demo which is released this week. The PC version is available from Wednesday, with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions due the day after. The EU PS3 demo is however, delayed until October the 4th. German sabotage is so far unproven. 

Regular readers will by now be well aware of my excitement over Codemasters' upcoming collaboration with author, film maker, artist, and all-round creative legend Clive Barker. I've been a huge fan of Barker's work since my teens, and the prospect of the creator of Pinhead and Daniel Robetaille taking creative control of an ultra-violent, nightmarish FPS has had me spun into a feverish, gore-hound tizzy ever since it was announced.

I've already had a short hands-on earlier this year, and took away with me some very promising early impressions. On Friday though, I journeyed over to Codies' studios for a full afternoon of demonic splatter with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions of the game, and was able to get a much more concrete feel for it. So how was it? Was my early enthusiasm well-founded, or is Jericho another sad case of big-name talent being wasted on an unworthy product? As ever, the answers are after the jump.

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It's no secret that I'm rather excited about Clive Barker's Jericho. For a start, it's taking heavy creative input from one of my favorite writers and artists of all time (If you haven't read Sacrament, Imagica or any of the Books Of Blood, then do it immediately after reading this post), and having had a preview of an early build, I can tell you that it's shaping up to be one of the most atmospheric and brutal games I've played in a very long time. 

To whet your appetite for the delicious filth Jericho is looking to bring this fall, we've got the new gameplay trailer and a smattering of stills showing off the game's environments for you today.  Click, enjoy, and await my fuller reports when I get another go with it at the Leipzig Games Convention next week.

Games like Clive Barker's Jericho really frustrate me. While I'm a highly enthusiastic gamer, and like to look for potential positives in a new title until I'm given reason to think otherwise, when writing about an unreleased game I have to hold back and maintain a degree of journalistic scepticism until the final product is in my hands. Some games hold so much pre-release potential though, that they blow my reservations clean out of the water and play havok with my sense of reservation. Jericho is one of those games. 

Hit the jump for my impressions after playing the 360 and PS3 versions, and find out why you really need to be paying attention to this one. 

 

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We here at Destructoid are all a little crazy, what with the bestiality and all. So, it comes as no surprise that a merry band of fetishists like us have been watching Clive Barker's Jericho the way The Gimp watches Marcellus in the back of that dusty pawnshop. We've been furiously touching ourselves accordingly.

This latest batch of Jericho screens has only served to ramp our collective excitement to rabid, frothy, foaming-at-the-mouth levels. The game looks gorgeous and disturbingly sado-maso at the same time. The (relatively uninspired) stone-hewn environments look as good as their demented inhabitants, and I'm particuarly impressed by the light in the stained-glass window in this scene. (Note to self: make a shield out of the corpses of your enemies -- it looks cool.)

Unfortunately, I don't have any new info on this supernatrual, squad-based FPS; however, your friendly, neighborhood Britcepticons will have a vertiable plethora of demonic chicancery and diabolical tomfoolery for us soon, after they go play the damned thing Friday. So, horror fiends, how jealous are you?

[Via VideogamerX, thanks Kayka!]

Clive Barker is sort of a love him or hate him type of guy. For instance, I love his books, hate his movies. And by "his" movies, I of course mean the Hollywood bastardization of his works. But listening to this man speak was interesting, highly entertaining, and surprisingly empowering as a gamer. It was a truly amazing privlege to  have him spill his thoughts on the industry and the future potential of gaming.

Hit the jump for the complete Clive Barker interview from the Hollywood and Games Summit and some details on his upcoming next-gen project, Jericho. Honestly, if you listen to nothing else from the entire event, listen to this.

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IGN has a bloody splattering of new images from Jericho, horror maestro Clive Barker's latest dabbling in the gooey entrails of gaming. It's all looking rather foul at the moment, and as a gore-hound Barker fan, I do of course mean rather great. The shots depict some exceedingly grimy and claustrophobic looking environments, populated with the kind of gleefully dismembered, S and M-loving denizens we've come to expect from Pinhead's dad. It all bodes well for some particularly dark and dirty horror FPS action when the game appears in September. Check out the gallery for the pics.

The site has also had a run-through of selected parts of the game, revealing some new details on the gameplay mechanics. The game is a squad-based FPS, with the player leading a supernaturally powered team against the obligatory millenia-old demonic threat. Each member of the seven-strong squad has their own unique skills, ranging from the traditional snipers and heavy weapons experts through to exorcists, telekinetics, and the very Barkerian-sounding blood mage, who slices herself open to make use of her own haemoglobin in magic attacks.

While allies can be tactically placed nearer to or further from the carnage depending on their abilities, and given simple, Freedom Fighters-style orders, there's also the option of jumping into any of their gore-soaked shoes at will in order to control them manually. Your teammates will of course make use of their talents independently when the need arises, but it's always good to be able to take over should the AI start leading a character down the path of natural selection. 

Also featuring multiple eras to be traversed through an interesting sounding time travel element, and the promise of some multi-disciplinary combined attacks, the game seems to be shaping up to be a promising little trek through hell. Hopefully it will live up to the precedent set by Barker's previous videogame input when it comes out for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 in the fall.