Eurogamer in blog format - PlayStation 2

War's road to redemption begins.

Croteam's high-def update of the PC blasting classic gets a formal release date.

Rock Band gets light-hearted with the minifigs.

Dotnia experiences an expansion into an entirely new dimension.

Wheee! We're suckers for a bit of dog-fighting, especially with those crazy rear-prop driven Japanese planes.

Sneaky tactics and sharp headshots in the sequel to DICE's jolly battlefield romp.

Blood Bowl gets its first new race in the lithe and dangerous form of the Dark Elves.

As an ancient and powerful Umbra witch, Bayonetta has a few handy tricks up her tight sleeves. Here, learn about her flashy, demon-powered killer moves.

Video on demand streaming is coming to the PS3 very soon, with a massive wedge of entertainment waiting at your digital fingertips.

When you're heading into a life or death battle against uncaring robotic overlords, you want to be wearing the right dress.

Ever wanted a zebra-striped AK-47? Of course you have.

The PSP title slips out, somewhat in the shadow of its big brother.

Meet the two opposing forces of the Avatar world, and choose which one you'll be fighting for.

Series creator Chris Taylor discusses his sequel, and what improvements have been made over the original.

Two short CCTV vignettes with those lovable, psychopathic rogues, Kane and Lynch.

Tecmo KOEI offers a first look at Again, a DS game made by Hotel Dusk developer Cing. Story and contenxt are explained in this clip.

A fantastic job of a sequel, building on strengths and addressing weaknesses - AC II hits the shops this Friday.

The perpetually confined simians return in their first balance board title, jonesing for bananas like the dirty little potassium junkies they are.

With social network integration a hot topic, Sony pumps up its Facebook app.

The hub of all starship activity, the bridge is where the important stuff happens. That and engineering, but engineering is far less glamorous and doesn't have the comfy chairs.

If I ever find myself in charge of naming a fighting game, I probably won't go with "Melty Blood". I'll probably opt for something sensible instead, like "Cul-de-sac Fisticuffs", or "Binge Drinking Brawler". And even if I'm brainstorming during a David Lynch marathon, I probably won't piece together "Hologram Summer Again, Tri Hermes Black Land" as a subtitle. As a fighter which has never seen a Western release, Actress Again's nonsensical full name is an indication of its very hardcore heritage.

The story of Melty Blood begins in 2000, when fledgling developer Type-Moon released its first graphic novel, Tsukihime (Lunar Princess). Although a tad risqué by Western standards, Tsukihime's narrative focused on a secondary school student named Tohno Shiki who, like a 21st century Grim Reaper, gets mixed up with vampires after discovering he has the power to sever lifelines. Then in 2002 Type-Moon teamed up with French-Bread and released Melty Blood for the PC, an experimental 2D fighting game featuring characters from Tsukihime, but without the hentai undertones.

After it proved a hit with fighter fans, Type-Moon followed it up with the arcade release of Act Cadenza in 2005. This drew more broadly from Type-Moon's books and was ported to PlayStation 2 the following year. By this stage the Melty Blood series had established itself as a serious fighter, to the point where Act Cadenza featured for three years straight in Japan's heavily contested Arcadia Cup Tournament. With such prestigious credentials, a second sequel was inevitable and arcade fans were treated to Actress Again in 2008. The version I'm playing is the recent PlayStation 2 port. Read more...

Sony has released a bundle of treats for stat fans to celebrate nine years of PlayStation 2.

Around 140 million people across the globe own a PS2. In the US alone more than 500 million games have been sold and there's a PS2 in one in three homes.

More than 485 developers have produced nearly 10,000 games for the console. SOCOM is one of the most popular franchises, with more than 530 million hours of online play logged - equivalent to 60,000 years. Read more...

Not many people played this one, so here's the cheat sheet. Steambot Chronicles, aka Bumpy Trot, aka That Weird PS2 Mech Game Set In The Twenties Where You Play A Harmonica Or Something, is the story of an amnesiac boy who finds a big robot, but don't hold that against it. By now no-one's more allergic to this particular brand of immorally predictable Japanese storytelling than me. Steambot's different. For starters, your robot is not just used for fighting. It's also lorry, a taxi, a stage, whatever you need. And if I was going to compare Steambot to anything in order to make people sorry they didn't buy this, it'd be Harvest Moon.

Those of you who did play Steambot might call bulls*** on that one. Some of you might even have opened a comment box and are typing a rude word into it right now. Take a breath! Eat a biscuit.

Harvest Moon is a series that's about sinking yourself into a nice world as you would a warm bath, and building something. It's about making friends and petty grudges and taking part in events and strolling through towns. It's about finding a girl and making her fall in love with you through rude mechanics and routines. And that's Steambot Chronicles! The only difference is you're not building up a farm, you're building up a robot, and instead of watering crop after crop as assorted unpleasant thoughts and worries about your real life creep into your head, you're taking part in awesome fights. Read more...

It makes sense to start a retrospective of God Hand with the E3 trailer, since that was half the fun.

In the summer of 2006, when this trailer was released, it effortlessly raised eyebrows across the entire games press. We had no idea what to make of it, except that we probably should be making something from it because it was from Clover, developers of Viewtiful Joe and Okami. Both the dance in the trailer and the phrase, "It's a ball-bustingly hard game / But a fair game" became memes among my friends straight away, and I kept thinking back to that bit where the protagonist kicks a guy into the sun.

Then God Hand surprised everyone by actually coming out. More eyebrows were raised first by reviewers, then gamers. Then IGN gave the game 3.0 out of 10, causing even more eyebrows to pop up across the industry like stray dirt blown upwards by a landmine. Even now eyebrows bounce when anyone who played God Hand remembers the thing. Read more...

Konami has confirmed to Eurogamer that it is reissuing old PS2 games to shops, as a keen-eyed EG reader suspected.

"They are proper reissues," a spokesperson told us. "Konami has put them out at budget price because of demand. They are re-manufactured. They are ours."

Those PS2 games are Suikoden Tactics, Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner, Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance and Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. And they will soon be joined by Silent Hill 2, 3 and 4. Read more...

A PSP instalment in the Saints Row series is due to arrive in March next year.

That's according to Swedish rockers Opeth. A post on their website, as spotted by VG247, reads: "We may not like playing videogames all that much but we do like it when our music is featured on them!

"Makes us a bit proud even when it's a game as big as Saints Row for the PSP... So if you love playing videogames: the game is expected to hit the streets around March 2010." Read more...

Capcom may be teasing the imminent revelation of a brand new Onimusha game.

A teaser website presents three dates - 1560, 1573 and 1582 - before crossing them out and stamping 1600 in big, bold type on top.

It just so happens that those three dates correlate with the first three Onimusha instalments on PlayStation 2, in sequential order. And the presentation even matches the series', 1UP points out. Read more...

US publisher Atlus had its website hacked last week, and the naughty "third-party entity" responsible may have used it to launch malicious software onto visitors' PCs.

"A third-party entity embedded malicious code into the script, and regretfully, for a period of a few hours (from roughly 9:00am PST until 2:30pm PST), this malicious software (which we believe we have identified as a Trojan) may have made its way onto your systems," a newsletter to fans explained (thanks Joystiq).

"The faith and trust of our fans is of the utmost importance to us, a responsibility we don't take lightly. As such, we are deeply troubled by this development, and we are now working to repair and restore the website." Read more...

The president of the Universal Society of Hinduism has called on Sony to withdraw PS2 title Hanuman: Boy Warrior from sale.

The game, which is the first to be developed wholly by an Indian studio, launched in India last month. It sees players taking on the role of Hindu deity Lord Hanuman.

According to a statement issued by the USOH, president Rajan Zed believes allowing players to control Hanuman with an input device amounts to "denigration". Hanuman "was not meant to be reduced to just a 'character' in a videogame to solidify company / products base in the growing economy of India", argues the statement. Read more...

The man whose job it is to turn Shadow of the Colossus into a movie script has spoken about his love of the "emotional and experiential" core of the game and denied he's going to put a foxy sidekick in it or anything like that.

"This is a game that catches you unaware - it catches you on an emotional and experiential level, not just for the puzzles you solve," Justin Marks told the Hollywood Reporter's blog last week (sorry we're so tardy).

"With a lot of games you're caught trying to please the fans and the mainstream audience," he said. "What's so nice about this game is that it's all seen through such an adult lens, so that what pleases the fans also pleases a wider audience." Read more...

The Hollywood Reporter and Variety report that a film of Team ICO's 2005 game Shadow of the Colossus is in development at Sony Pictures.

Producer Kevin Misher is setting it up. The script is to be written by Justin Marks, who wrote the recent and widely panned Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake that's in development at Disney. The Hollywood Reporter describes him as a "go-to young scribe".

Shadow of the Colossus is a beautiful, minimalist boss-rush adventure in which a young man and his sturdy horse must vanquish a series of giant stone colossi by clambering all over them and solving puzzles. It's "not an obvious candidate for a film", said Variety's Ben Fritz, inarguably. Read more...

Sony has told Eurogamer there will be no reduction in the UK price of PS2 - despite the fact it's being slashed in the rest of Europe and the US.

As reported on the PlayStation blog, the US price of PS2 will be 99.99 from tomorrow. That's equivalent to GBP 70 / EUR 75.

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has also released a statement saying the Euro price of PS2 is being reduced to EUR 99 (GBP 93). Read more...

If you're familiar with Persona, all you need to know about the latest instalment is a brief checklist of changes and improvements: direct control over team-mates in battle, a range of themed dungeons replacing Tartarus, Persona 3's single tower, and a welcome shift in setting from the city to the countryside.

If you don't know Persona, things are a little more complex: this is Harvest Moon through a glass darkly, or Animal Crossing with sex crimes - a foppish blend of dungeon-crawling RPG and convoluted social sim, dressed up in David Bowie's mid-seventies wardrobe and set to the tune of some radiantly bizarre pop-jazz hybrids. If that sounds a little too much to take in, don't panic: despite the daunting concept, now is just about the perfect time to hop on this particular school bus, as Persona 4 is stylish, clever, and surprisingly approachable.

Newcomers will find plenty of wilful surprises, not least the game's opening two hours, which give you little to do but plod through reams of text as the story shuttles you from one cut-scene to another, occasionally flinging in thirty seconds of anime, while painstakingly piecing together a large cast and simple mystery one atom at a time. Your only duties during this period, besides pressing the circle button to inch events forward by a single sentence, lie with occasionally trying out an attack move, or, when directly questioned, selecting one of three interchangeable platitudes as a response, most of which have no effect on how things unfold. Read more...

A report on the Hockey Downloads forum has indicated that NHL 10 will never make it to PS2 or PC, saying that economic pressures are behind the decision.

Veteran user 'Drezz', who has apparently been in touch with Ryan Nicholas at EA, writes in his post that: "I regret to inform all of you that I was notified on Monday that NHL10 will NOT be produced for the PC/PS2.

"As of now, the division in charge of putting out hockey games for those platforms have been reassigned to work on the console versions (Xbox 360 and PS3). Due to economic concerns, the separate PC version wasn't worth putting manpower into - I don't blame them, since the revenue from PC sales wasn't high enough to create a significant profit for the company." Read more...

Suave automoton and Lombax companion Clank is seeing new horizons as Secret Agent Clank is ported onto the PS2 by Sanzaru Games.

Speaking on the PlayStation Blog, Sanzara president Glen Egan says that the port will be ready for buyers on 26th May.

There's been an obvious visual update, to take advantage of the extra grunt that the PS2 offers, as well as a switch back to the traditional lock-strafe camera mode seen in previous Ratchet and Clank titles on console. Read more...

Namco Bandai plans to release a brand new Naruto PS2 game here in May.

Ultimate Ninja 4 will be the first instalment based on the Naruto Shippuden anime. It is set two-and-a-half years after the ninja left his friends to pursue his craft.

That's exciting for fans of the series, because all sorts will have changed for his return, which soon sees him uncovering a threat from a mysterious organisation called Akatsuki. Dun dun dun. Read more...

Square Enix plans to release PS2 role-playing game Persona 4 here on 13th March. And the PAL box will include a special soundtrack CD with 24 songs on.

Persona 4 has a brand new plot for the supernatural detectives to get to the bottom of, plus lots more dungeons to delve into and bosses to batter. Square Enix reckons the whole thing will take around 60 hours to finish.

The stylised art influenced by manga and Japanese pop culture returns, blending to create a world refreshingly devoid of orcs and goblins and robes and wizard hats. Read more...