Wii Gaming News

Forza 3 has officially launched in North America, and just as in 2007, the Internet has exploded with custom paint jobs. There’s livery for every taste, from sports to anime to, of course, gaming, and many of Forza 2’s most popular community artists have returned for the sequel.

New for Forza 3 is the storefront feature, which allows artists to sell their designs for in-game credits. Some designs may go for free, others may go for 10,000 credits, but it’s an interesting way for community artists to get even more recognition than before.

To give you an idea of what’s out there, we rounded up some of the best designs from around the Internet, with themes ranging from Zone of the Enders to Transformers. Check them out below, and if you like them, it’s not hard to download them. Before you know, you too will be driving a stylish Okami-mobile.

Just as promised, LocoRoco Midnight Carnival is releasing today exclusively on the PlayStation Network for $15. It comes complete with the addition of multiplayer play (locally, over ad-hoc) and the ability to race others around the world by way of global leaderboards. Replays of the top five players on any given leaderboard can be downloaded so that you can hopefully pick up some tips and improve your LocoRoco’ing technique.

If you’re not convinced you want to shell out $15 for the latest iteration of the game (or eat up 190MB on your memory stick or PSP Go), a demo will be released today alongside the full version of the game. No word on what’s contained within the demo, but hopefully it’s got a large enough chunk that gamers will be able to make an informed decision about whether or not Midnight Carnival is worth it.

Look for both the demo and full version of the game on the PlayStation Store later today.

Since they’re launch at the beginning of the month, we haven’t seen much in the way of new PSP Minis titles. That changes today, two days before Halloween, with the release of the very timely Zombie Tycoon from Frima Studio. Rather than eliminate zombies, as seemingly every other zombie-infested game allows you to, you’ll instead take control of the undead and attack cows, people dressed like giant hot dogs, and anything else that dares to be alive.

As with all PSP Minis to date, it looks again like the price might be a sticking point. At $7.99, Zombie Tycoon costs more than half what LocoRoco Midnight Carnival costs, which also releases today. If Sony is hoping for Minis to compete with games on the iPhone App Store, they’ll need to help third parties to take a look at the not-quite-impulse-buy pricing scheme that’s currently in place.

True to its trademark humor, Valve has whipped up a little extra treat for Team Fortress 2 players this Halloween weekend. The “Haunted Hallowe’en Special” starts today and lasts through Monday, November 2. They’re rolling out a new King-of-the-Hill map called Harvest, with a few spooky gameplay tweaks. The map is haunted by the “restless spirit of Zepheniah Mann,” which apparently freezes players with fear if they happen to come across it. Harvest is littered with exploding pumpkin hazards. The update is also said to make “the mangled corpses of the recently deceased” plague the living with candy, though it’s anyone’s guess exactly what that means.

Finally, five new achievements will roll out for the weekend, and getting them will result in five new Mildly Disturbing Halloween Hats. The achievements are called Candy Coroner, Scared Stiff, Ghastly Gibus Grab, Costume Contest, and Attack o’ Lantern. No descriptions are listed quite yet, so feel free to take guesses at what those might entail.

Videogames seem to make pretty regular appearances on South Park, and last night’s episode offered another gem. This time, the gang were playing a fair rendition of Lady GaGa’s “Poker Face” in a Rock Band-style game — until Cartman started improvising lyrics to mock Stan’s concern about Japan’s whaling practices. “I don’t give a crap about whales so go and hug a tree,” he sang. You can see the clip below:

To see the full episode, along with an entire “Poker Face” montage, check the official South Park Studios site.

Even though Epic Mickey is about a year away, Warren Spector already jokes about what will be in Epic Mickey 2. So during a follow-up interview, I asked Spector the simple, and obvious, question, “is Epic Mickey a stand-alone adventure, or will it be a franchise?”

He bluntly replied, “I don’t do anything that isn’t extensible. And I will certainly feel like that I have not done my job if we can’t make other games in this world with these characters. In my head, I’ve got two more planned. In the business world of reality, those games have not approved, and who knows if we’ll ever see them. I had three games planned for Deus Ex, and you see where that got me.”

Remember when some crazy looking concept art for Epic Mickey leaked? The kind of art that showed off tanks modeled after the Seven Dwarves in Snow White or a giant whale with Spaceship Earth on its back? Some of you might feel a bit disappointed that the official screenshots released to date don’t quite reflect on that crazy steampunk aesthetic, and during an interview, I asked Warren Spector to discuss the disparity between the leaked art and the official art today.

He answers, “There are a couple aspects to that. I think I’ve mentioned before, that I’m a big believer in finding out where the line is by pushing past it. There are lines that are on every project; every project exists in a creative box. For most of my games, I create that box and the team has to sort of work within it. In this case, there’s a creative box that I create, and there’s the creative box that Disney overlays on that. I know where my lines are, but I don’t know where Disney’s are. I had a lot of stuff generated that was very specifically designed to be provocative and to cross that line. I know it’s too far — or is it? You tell me. So it forces a confrontation or a decision. Some of what you saw was beyond the line, and so I learned something from it. Some of it was early design ideas that are no longer relevant. Some of it is stuff that’s still in the game, and I’m not saying what.”

During a brief gameplay presentation, Warren Spector noted that there will be no Wii MotionPlus support for Epic Mickey — he even joked that MotionPlus would be something in “game 2.”

In a follow-up interview, I asked him to talk a bit more about the Wii MotionPlus, and he stated, “Our goal for this game is to make sure it doesn’t break if you have one [meaning Wii MotionPlus] installed. I am intrigued by it, and if we get to do more games that use this basic mechanic, I’d like to play around with it. I have some ideas about it, but not for this game.”

The 20 year old Madden series is known for its realistic simulation style NFL football, TV broadcast presentation, and the musings from now-retired ‘tough actin’ Tinactin pitchman John Madden’s about things like “the team with the most points usually wins the game.” EA Tiburon has decided to forgo those staples in favor of an arcadey pick-up-and-play approach with this upcoming downloadable release, aptly titled Madden NFL Arcade. While not the first foray into the arcade football space for Tiburon (they’ve got NFL Street and NFL Tour under their belts), it is the first to use the mighty Madden name.

Madden NFL Arcade has you playing with five of the ‘best’ players from each of the 32 teams in the league in matches that are intended to take no more than 10 minutes; clocks have been thrown out entirely, as the game embraces a backyard ‘first one to score X number of points wins’ pace. Also, shortening the field to 60 yards, completely eliminating first downs to make way for 4-plays-to-score possessions, turning field goals into free points, and doing away with penalties and injuries round out the major changes to the pigskin action here. This is a Madden game, though, so some elements of pro football are still present — though these are mostly cosmetic.