Megaton News

EA had their Summer Showcase event today, and those of you with hopes of new game footage or new game announcements will be disappointed, and after today you should just be happy that EA hasn’t announced that they’re leaving the games industry all together yet.

They started off with the EA Sports stuff though not the games they said were their best EA sports games leaving SSX on the shelf while they promoted NCAA Football and some Hockey thing, they then moved on to a Sims expansion pack for a previous Sims expansion pack.

Transitioning to digital downloads EA talked up Origin’s special friends list crossover so ipad gamers, and Battlefield 3 gamers can get together like they’ve been dying to for years, then it was time for Facebook gaming, showing R.I.S.K. Factions, followed by cross-platform play for Scrabble on Android, iPad, iPhone, and Facebook.

They began to go into what looked to be a real game finally with Burnout Crash, but then declared it a Kinect game.

Funcom came out to give a little attention to The Secret World, giving us a teaser trailer, hopefully this MMO won’t be another in the trash heap considering all the development time that could have been being spent on a new Longest Journey game.

Some rep for Bioware came out to push the expansion pack for Dargon Age II which looked notably worse than Dragon Age Origins in both graphics, and of course gameplay.

They closed out the show by showing nothing of Battlefield 3, but promised a great party was waiting for the press in the room.

BioWare released this E3 preview trailer for The Old Republic, shows off a little bit of everything, even the vehicles, and some cute little space battles. SWTOR looks OK I suppose, but it doesn’t look much better than Star Wars Galaxies, which was novel fun at the time, but not worth any real investment, and this looks to be more of the same, just another DC Universe Online.

EA put out a new video from their upcoming SSX reboot, and while it still seems to be missing a lot of charm, and proper level design, at least some of the mechanics on display seem to be working right here, though this new terrain reshaping gimmick they have, hopefully on in Trick It mode, seems to be a significant misstep. It certainly looks cool, and technologically impressive, but in the flow of gameplay it seems to be the equivalent of poor load streaming.

Hopefully they’ll continue to show more of the game throughout E3, perhaps a map with some actual designed elements, rather than big open nothingness with the same jump littered all over the place.

Another trailer out of Geoff Keighly’s vanity project #46, it’s of course a teaser that conveys absolutely nothing about the game, so if you have any hope left for this being a true successor to SSX Tricky, or SSX 3 enjoy that feeling now, cause those hope should soon be dashed with a proper reveal at E3.

Grasshopper put out this Halloween video for Shadows Of The Damned today. Not much more to see since the Tokyo Game Show reveal.

It seems Bioware isn’t changing strategies when it comes to advertising Dragon Age games. Present a God of War style we’re so hardcore attitude, and then cover it in blood. Dissappointing that they continue to treat the most traditional franchise they have, and the fans of classic western style RPG’s with so little respect.

EA finally released some media for the Alice sequel Alice: Madeness Returns. It looks like the real deal, the same atmosphere and style with a modern graphical upgrade. The teaser trailer is short, but shows us that they won’t be holding back on the weird for the sake of grabbing the mainstream audience, This is a true sequel to a flawed classic of PC gaming.

EA today announced their latest Maxis game Darkspore. Not a very creative name for a Spore spinoff, though I suppose it’s better than Spore: Dark.

Darkspore will be a Diablo style game with the twist on the formula being that you upgrade using parts created with an updated version of the Spore creature creator.

Darkspore is planned for an early 2011 release for the PC.

Surprising absolutely nobody, it appears the formerly Wii exclusive arcade basketball title NBA Jam will be making it’s way to the HD platforms 360 & Playstation 3. Discovered, as these things often are, via a ratings board the German USK has rated NBA Jam for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 release. It’s not known at this time whether or not this will be a disc release or a downloadable title, though it would seem somewhat insane to undercut full price disc release sales on one platform by releasing the same game as a lower price download on two other platforms.

Electronic Arts publishers of major video game franchises such as Madden NFL 10, and Mirror’s Edge, have revealed new downloadable content for their free to play online murder simulator Battlefield Heroes, that will allow you to kill Michael Jackson like characters.

Originally they were going to charge for these Michael Jackson costumes, but due to a misinterpretation of customer outrage they have decided to simply promote the game by giving them away for free.