On November 26th, deep in the forests (or whatever) of the Netherlands, developer Guerrilla will be partying it up, celebrating the Dutch release of Killzone. We bring this up because all of you are invited to party with the studio. Sort of.

According to a recent official PS blog post, Guerilla will be hosting a “Killzone 2 retro tournament” between November 27th and 30th with only two (DLC) maps in the rotation: Beach Head and Southern Hills. In addition to this, the crew is throwing a Double XP weekend thing between those dates.

If you don’t have the DLC, it’s no big deal; Guerrilla plans to slash the price of two bits of content. As of today, Flash & Thunder should be listed at $2.99 while the Map Pack Bundle is to be $9.99. Neat.

There’s more to this celebration, including some retro commentaries, so do check out the PS blog post for more information if you’re down in Killzone. While you do that, we’ll be practicing for this weekend. Anyone remember how to throw grenades?

I'm always happy when game music gets some US lovin', and today Square Enix is treating with an early release of the remix album Love SQ.

Really slick arrangements of twelve great songs from games like Crono Trigger, Final Fantasy, and Romancing SaGa, and Legend of Mana are on Love SQ. Each song blends old 8-bit chippy sounds with modern day beats and samples, making for an interesting listen. I love De De Mouse's arrangement of "Eternal Wind," and the treatment of "Frog's Theme" is a crowd-pleaser, coming complete with 16-bit croak samples.

If I could ask you to do one thing, I'd ask that you at least download a song to tell Square Enix that we dig these kinds of releases here in the United States.

Love SQ is on iTunes now. $9.90 for the full album. Go!

[via OSV]

As we said about 40 minutes ago, Borderlands DLC “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” is a thing that is happening right now over PSN and Xbox LIVE. I grabbed the content off of Xbox LIVE Marketplace this morning, hoping to put some quality hours into the material before having to hit the grind again. Turns out that I was only able to put about 30-40 minutes before putting down the controller. Bummer.

No matter, though -- I think I got gist of it. The DLC adds a central HUB to the core game, Dr. Ned’s little haunted island of awesome. Upon downloading the DLC, you’ll be told to hit a travel beacon and zip to the content if you so please. It’s that easy to break into, and that easy to leave if you so desire. But you probably won’t want to get out. The epic introduction to the content pulls you in hard.

And speaking of that introduction, there’s a TMT above in the header showing off the first 10 minutes of the DLC. You’ll catch some heavy narrative, some zombie-skull busting, and a brief look at the immediate environment. Its swampy, dark, and infested -- just what we expected the DLC was announced.

So, what do you guys think?

In a weird turn of events, Pandemic Studio's Mercenaries Inc. -- or, as it's now tentatively dubbed, Mercs Inc. -- isn't canceled. In fact, it's still in pre-production. Apparently, all of the Internet buzz surrounding the project was enough for EA to go ahead and announce it fully.

"From the studio at EALA, a core creative team is forging new ground and conceptualizing new ideas for this exciting franchise," says EA senior VP and group general manager Nick Earl.

No other substantial news was given. Even though it's very rough around the edges, the video that circulated recently is indeed early footage. It could be quite some time before we see anything new on Mercs Inc., which is fine by me. Take your time, guys. Please.

Cast away your fears of terrorist attack or natural disaster while immersed in a session of your favorite Xbox 360 game. It's no longer a problem if you live in New York.

New York State is planning on blasting out alerts of natural disasters, terrorist attacks and the like to your Xbox 360 messaging service from the Emergency Management Office. This is like an updated emergency broadcast system. The goal is to reach younger people to spend more time on game systems than they do radio or TV. Good call.

InformationWeek says that the plan is still early, and is only in the testing phase so far.

I'm one of those rare ones that has his messages shut off in Xbox Live. I guess I'm screwed should we be hit by the Big One one day.

Oh, and look at what one douche's reply at IW:

Wonderful. This is just more way for the government to invade our personal lives. I believe that the current warning system is quite adequate. At what cost is this being implemented and how many lives is it expected to save? Isn't there somewhere else that our money might be spent with greater impact?

Not a gamer, obviously.

A lot of people -- including a few Destructoid staff members -- didn’t dig the so-called “weak” conclusion to Borderlands. I can’t agree with the assessment for a few reasons (one being my epic confrontation with you-know-who), but I understand the argument. More insightful than my reactions to the matter, though, are Paul Helquist’s, a senior designer for the game. He told MTV Multiplayer that Gearbox is going to keep the poor reception of the ending in mind going forward, in both downloadable content and full games in the future.

"We went through lots of different iterations on what the ending of the game was,” Helquist said. “We ultimately ended up with what you get to play. We didn't know how people were going to react to it. Obviously the reaction hasn't been as strong as we had hoped.

“That's something we're going to be keeping in mind as we do new things, whether it's download content or other games in the future. We're gonna think more about it and try to get more user feedback before the game comes out so we can ensure that we'll have endings that you guys like in the future."

Later, Helquist said that, at the least, the ending of Borderlands keeps the story open for sequels and content. The recent release of the “Zombie Island of Dr. Ned,” is proof of that. It picks right up where the game trails off. Hell, it even adds zombies to the core game without issue. Weird, right?

LucasArts is looking for some help. Something to do with consoles, they say. One ad mentions that they have "top secret projects in development" and that "experience building and shipping titles on the Xbox360 and PS3" is desired.

Right now they have plenty of want ads for positions at their San Francisco offices, looking for everything from environment artists and level designers to graphics and multiplayer engineers. Gearing up for something, looks like.

So what is it they're working on? No ideas, I'm afraid. Let's hope it's not Fracture 2.

[via CVG]

Industry Gamers recently caught up with Epic's Cliff Bleszinski and asked him the dreaded question -- what are your favorite games of all time? Cliff picked ten, later lamenting on Twitter that he wished it had been 20.

Here are his choices in what appears to be no particular order:

• GoldenEye/Halo
• Contra
• Grand Theft Auto III
• Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle League
• Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past
• Super Metroid
• BioShock
• Super Bomberman
• Doom
• Half-Life 2

As a gamer (and someone who writes about games full time), I get this question all of the time, and I hate it. "What's your favorite game?" It's a tough one, because it's hard to narrow down what games had the most impact on me, both at the time and even 15 or 20 years later.

But I'll give it a shot in the comments, and it would be great if you could do the same. I asked some of the Dtoid staff to pitch in to get it started; now let us know what you feel are your ten favorite games of all time. (Hint: There are no right or wrong answers.)

As Nakky promised over on the official Super Street Fighter IV dev blog last week, the new issue of Famitsu carries within it some hot new character reveals for SSFIV. Officially joining the roster this Spring will be Adon, Cody and Guy from the Street Fighter Alpha series.

Looks like Adon's foot was probably the source of Chun-Li's pain in that Focus Attack screenshot we saw last week, and the new stage was Cody's. This being a leaked scan spotted over at Shoryuken, Capcom still has yet to release any official information on these characters. But a look at the scans gives us a taste of what kind of action they'll be bringing back to the game. 

Perhaps when they get to talking, they can tell us why Cody is still wearing his prison clothes and shackles after all this time.

And if our SFIII fans out there are feeling let down, don't. Take a look at the gallery below and you'll see that the cropped shot of Guy's punch is blocking a kunai. Furthermore, the text above that image in the magazine pulls the Chun-Li teaser stunt from last week and asks whose it might be. 

Hmm, kunai ... I don't want to speculate, but I'm going to guess her name definitely rhymes with Ibuki.

Maybe it's that there's a large number of Japanese with bad eyesight. That's all I can figure. With the tens of thousands of DS and DSi that sell every week there, you'd think that the whole country has two by now. Well, now going on three.

A whopping 103,524 DSi LL, the new big-screened monster portables, sold in just two days, says Enterbrain data. That's almost as fast as the DSi Regular, and way faster than the PSPgo.

Is it all old people buying the LL? Probably. Here's why I say that: Bigger screens, big ol' fat stylus, muted "adult" colors, and packed-in brain-type and practical applications. It's like the big type books of videogames. And if this is the case, then Nintendo is really making new customers.

Oh, Nintendo. You guys with your money printing.

[via Kotaku]

I'm not sure how to tell you this, but instead of finishing and releasing the Splatterhouse remake, Namco Bandai has first teamed up with GLOBE International Limited to produce a shoe. 

The Splatterhouse Co-op limited series shoe is based off of Globe's "Superfly" model, and features red skulls, splattered blood, and the Splatterhouse logo. The kicks are available at select online retailers, but I'm not telling you where you can get them... because I'm buying them for myself. (Namco Bandai, feel free to send me a pair for our first "shoe review" -- I wear a size 11. Thanks!)

Along with this special announcement, Namco Bandai also sent along some screenshots of the actual game. Which is the important thing, right? Splatterhouse is apparently still scheduled for a Q3 2010 release for both PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Planning my outfit now...

If there is one thing that people can't seem to agree on in the world of MMOs, it's how games that are designed to be played forever should fund themselves.

There are plenty of models out there, like subscriptions, micro-transactions, advertisements, but all of them seem to have their different issues. When we spoke to Jeff Strain about his new MMO company, Undead Labs, and his upcoming zombie MMO, we brought this up.

He had some interesting things to say about why paying a monthly or annual subscription fee is the best way to go.

Sony Online Entertainment has revealed that Nightwing will appear in the upcoming PlayStation 3 and PC MMO DC Universe Online.

Of course, this is no surprise. It's the "universe," guys. That's like, everything. The list of DC characters that will appear in the game is staggering, everyone from Superman to Batzarro, Congo Bill to Two-Face. So Nightwing should be no exception, what with his little pieces of black hair hanging down in front of his face. His father, General Zod, should be proud. [As pointed out to me by grebweb, the Nightwing pictured here is the original, Dick Grayson. Comic geeks, forgive me, for I have sinned.]

While MMOs on consoles haven't quite lived up to PC expectations, what I've seen of DCUO looks solid and well-adapted to the PS3. And if it's going to be awhile before I have to fight off the massively online zombie hordes, then DC super heroes will do. 

DC Universe Online is tentatively schedule to ship sometime next year.

A modern-day fighting game without DLC is like a Thanksgiving without indigestion. You just don't see that anymore.

Tekken 6 had DLC...kind of. Cardboard Tube Samurai was cool, but not really what most would expect to see as Tekken DLC. There could be more coming. When asked about the possibility of some hot new DLC, Katsuhiro Harada, Producer, told PlayStation Europe, “There is a strong possibility we will. However, even if we were to do so, it would be free to the end user.”

I like "strong possibility" a lot, and I love "free." Gimme some crazy sh*t, Namco Bandai. Throw in the Prince from Katamari Damacy. I'd love him and KOS-MOS to fight.

Damn, someone needs to let me make a fighting game.

[via Siliconera]