The two-episode Watchmen series that was announced yesterday will be a prequel, according to a preview from 1UP. You can choose to play as either Nite Owl or Rorschach, with the other controlled by AI or via split-screen co-op, in the time before masked heroes were outlawed.

The third-person action games take place exclusively at night is set to be M-rated. While they brought on some heavy-hitters for the story -- notably Wolverine creator Len Wein and Watchmen illustrator Dave Gibbons -- we're always hesitant when someone other than the original author tries to expand a story. Still, an M-rated series with visuals reportedly "worthy of being a now-generation game" and Rorschach's infamous makeshift flamethrower? We remain cautiously optimistic. Watchmen episodes will be released around the same time as the film (March 6, 2009).

Buried deep down on a PlayStation Blog post about PixelJunk Eden and the Trophies available in the game, is an odd little paragraph about possible Trophy support for PixelJunk Monsters. Dylan Cuthbert, president of Q-games, developers of PJM and PJE, mentions he's been "inundated" with requests for Trophy support in Monsters. He says the company is looking into it and will badger the game's producer at Sony, Deborah Mars, "to get some dates set."

The information is a bit ambiguous and we're guessing is designed as a tease for an incoming PJM patch. Cuthbert also says the patch will "implement XMB music and a couple of other things." Considering we know PlayStation Blog posts are "checked," information like this doesn't just slip by. Looks like we're going to have to stop playing PJM Encore and wait 'til that Trophy patch gets added, because we're guessing the achievements won't be applied retroactively.

We were just a ... Wii bit shocked when a new Grand Theft Auto was announced for Nintendo DS and not the Big N's wildly popular home console. Still, it's no doubt a coup, but what about a proper Wii installment in the series?

MTV Multiplayer asked Nintendo of America prez Reggie Fils-Amie just that. When prodded on the likelihood that a DS version of GTA might lead to a greater possibility of GTA for Wii, Reggie stated that "GTA on the Wii is all based on what Rockstar and Take-Two want to do," adding, "From our standpoint, if they build a bottoms-up game that takes advantage of what we do well, I'd love to see it on the platform."

We're pretty sure Reggie meant a GTA that's built from the ground up for Wii. Or perhaps he was just getting into the GTA swing of things? If so, naughty Reggie!

We were ready to be disappointed by Ubisoft's new portable Prince of Persia, largely because the protagonist bears a striking resemblance to an Oompa-Loompa. But the charming, colorful animations won us over, as did what appears to be a pretty full utilization of the DS's touch-screen capabilities.

It was then we realized what wasn't included in the trailer: Our almost comically meaty hands. Now we're in doubt that we'll be able to see any of the on-screen action behind our mitts, leaving us just as nervous about the game as when we started. So, we'll rely on your judgment: How's it looking to you?

Watchmen is just full of surprises. We would have never thought anyone could make a competent movie of the epic graphic novel but, if the trailer is any indication, Zack Snyder may be doing just that. We also would have doubted that the book could be made into game form, but it seems Warner Bros. is surprising us once again. The company will release two downloadable episodic games on PC, Xbox Live and PSN, to coincide with the theatrical and DVD releases of the film.

All we know is we can expect Nite Owl and Rorschach in an action title developed by Deadline Games, which is currently crafting Faith and a .45. We actually think making shorter games to hit deadlines is a smart way to break the terrible licensed games cycle. But of course, if they're short and terrible ...

Here, in all its compressed glory, is the first actual screenshot of Sony and Zipper Interactive's 256-player MAG: Massive Action Game. We say "actual" because it was clear to anyone with eyes that Sony had pulled another Killzone 2 with the MAG video debuted during its pre-E3 press conference. In other words, it was all pre-rendered.

MAG senior producer Rade Stojsavljevic posted the shot to the official PlayStation blog, calling it "a sneak peak from one of [Zipper's] internal play sessions." Stojsavljevic also said that the dev has used its experience working in online games with the SOCOM franchise to create an entirely new server architecture for MAG capable of supporting its, well, massive amount of players.

Shown for the first time at E3, Sony and Titan Studios' upcoming PSN title, Fat Princess, grabbed us with its classic Zelda-like presentation, 32-player online, and off-color infusion of blood & guts for such an otherwise cutesy title. We also figured there would more than a few folks none too pleased by its title.

It's not just the title that's angering the folks behind sites Feminist Gamers and Shakesville, female-run gaming blogs who are already voicing their displeasure to Sony. It's also the concept that players must feed the titular princess – who starts out slim – in order to make her fat, and thus harder to capture.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville writes: "Congrats on your awesome new game, Sony. I'm positively thrilled to see such unyielding dedication to creating a new generation of fat-hating, heteronormative assholes," while Feminist Gamer's "Mighty Ponygirl" suggests a simple gameplay switcheroo would solve the problem (and change the title). "Instead of running out into the forest to find cake to fatten up the princess with, why not go out and find gold (which is a lot heavier than cake) to stuff into a treasure chest," she says, adding, "The more gold in the chest, the heavier it would be, and the harder it would be to carry."

Despite the (still limited) fury being directed at Sony, we suspect that there's a fat chance either the title or gameplay will change.

[Update: Titan Studios' art director, James Green, emailed in to say: "Does it make it better or worse that the concept artist (who designed the look, characters, everything) is a girl?"]

[Via PS3 Fanboy]

Source - Feminist Gamer
Source - Shakesville

You make your way down the hallway in City 17, and push open the door into the bright sunlight reflected off of concrete. A Combine soldier stands before you, so you life your semiautomatic weapon, and as you pull the trigger and fire, the gun recoils in your hand. Another Combine stands across the viaduct, and when he fires at you, you feel the bullet strike you from the left, so you turn, and feel the gun jump in your hand again as you take him out.

That's the ideal experience with Novint's Falcon controller. The controller itself is about an eight inch orb that sits on your table, with a three-inch sphere sitting on the end of three arms coming off of it -- like a Soviet satellite sticking out of the globe. The idea is that you push the little sphere around to move your cursor, and the three arms provide resistance against whatever you bump up against. We got to use the controller at E3, and the verdict is that while it does provide a nice experience, the costs might be a little overwhelming for most players. More after the jump.

Survival plus horror. It's a pretty self-explanatory genre, albeit one that frequently produces thematically lopsided games that would rather have you yell "Eww!" than "Aiieee!" Running around with 43 different kinds of machine guns, a rocket launcher and an abundance of ammo is tremendous, limb-splattering fun (see: Resident Evil 4), but it's not scary.

When we say Dead Space is scary, don't take it to mean that EA Redwood Shores' ambitious, zero-g frightener shoves a stick in your hand and pushes you out an airlock. On the contrary, you're armed to the teeth and quite capable of defending yourself from everything with teeth thanks to an array of upgradeable weapons, including a shotgun, flamethrower and charge-up-in-the-nick-of-time beam rifle. Shooting isn't the problem -- it's knowing where to shoot. The face is usually a good place to start, though!

Adding to the news from last week that BioShock on PS3 will be getting "exclusive" content, the PlayStation Blog reveals that the game will also receive Trophies. Alyssa Finley, executive producer at 2K Marin, explains how the Trophies are being designed and reveals a few of them in the process.

• Bronze: These trophies will be handed out for exploring the general facets of the game, like "researching, modifying weapons, hacking, and crafting."
• Silver: These trophies will require more thorough exploration of Rapture. The "Historian" Trophy will require finding every audio diary in the game. Finley says the other trophies are going to be kept secret, but we're guessing if you look at the Xbox achievements, the tougher exploration ones should be found here.
• Gold: The Trophy "Brass Balls" can be found here, requiring a player make it through the game on hard with the Vita-Chambers turned off.
• Platinum: ???

BioShock should be available to those who forsake all but the PS3 later this year. We might just have to take a return trip to Rapture for the Trophies alone.

Tilted Mill, following up on its re-release of Children of the Nile, recently announced its new title Hinterland, expected later this summer for PC. The game appears to be a Diablo-esque city-builder set in a fantasy world with the tag line: Loot, Level and Build. The game will have small parties of three or four characters in tactical party-based combat. It appears city town building and combat may be of equal importance in Hinterland. Check out the first couple images of the game in the gallery below.

Chris Beatrice, president of Tilted Mill, which is self-publishing Hinterland, believes that smaller games will allow the company to focus and be more innovative, less afraid of risk and keep quality high. Considering the quality of the company's larger titles like SimCity Societies and Caesar IV, this "back to basics" mentality may be exactly what the studio needs to produce something not forgotten two weeks after release. We're certainly looking forward to seeing what Tilted Mill creates under the financially tighter, yet innovation liberating, constraints of self-publishing.

We aren't ashamed to say that one of the only things that even remotely caught our eye in Atari's booth was What's Cooking? With Jamie Oliver for the DS. The gameplay takes The Naked Chef's recipes and places the player in a more realistic Cooking Mama simulation. Actually, it's everything we ever wanted from Cooking Mama: Going through the process of making recipes on the DS and then actually making the same items in real life. Yes, the recipes in the game translate to the real world.

Atari was completely unprepared for our interest in the game, as we couldn't get specific details on how many recipes are in the title, but we were told that there were over 100. Furthermore, the way Atari presented the game was as if someone had never played Cooking Mama before, which was obviously the case with some worthless Nintendo of Europe execs we scared off, who were too busy appearing posh and asking inane questions. Once they were gone, we got some time to actually test out the game and some of its features.

Okay, so Sony's upcoming PSN release, The Last Guy, isn't anything like what we speculated it might be. In fact, the game is incredibly simple looking, although, through an interesting twist, it has a grandiose scale. The game's creators have used Google Earth satellite imagery to build its stages, turning actual streets into Pac-Man like mazes where players will be chased by some monsters and headed off at intersections by others as they lead survivors to "escape zones."

If Sony's clever, it's built the game to change over time as the real-world cityscape does – but that's just our hopefulness. If not, maybe it's saving that for a sequel prequel called The Next-to-Last Guy. While we dream, The Last Guy will hit the Japanese PlayStation Store on July 31 for 500 Yen (about $4.75). It looks like a totally bonkers romp that'd go over well in the West with some localized city maps.

[Via Siliconera]