Xbox 360 Features

Licensed games come and go, so most of us don’t bat an eye when titles based on movies and TV shows fall into obscurity. Today, they’re ephemeral by nature, seemingly designed with an expiration date only as far off as the coinciding property’s DVD release date.

Wesley’s days of playing a timid office drone are over. He’s embracing his new role as a gun-slinging assassin in Wanted: Weapons of Fate. The game takes place after the events in the 2008 movie, and apparently, Wesley’s trying to find out what happened to his mother.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Ghostbusters on C64, Aladdin, Goldeneye, Riddick: the list of great movie tie-ins is barely longer than Russell Crowe’s temper. What chances, then, of even seeing a few good ones during 2009? Can the year that sees Barack Obama’s inauguration, a Michael Jackson comeback, and a Star Trek movie that doesn’t suck, prove that anything is possible?

Ghostbusters: The Video

Videogames, like movies and music, live and die by their release dates. A smartly planned launch can make a niche product soar to unpredicted heights or cause a long-respected franchise to slip beneath consumers’ radar.

Now that the veneer of freshness is drying off of our copies of Modern Warfare 2, we can fully devote ourselves to complaining about the lack of dedicated servers, and just how much the maps suck because our piss poor ranking certainly isn’t due to a lack of practice and the statistical disadvantage of playing against millions of people, no! Which got us thinking: What multiplayer maps reign over all others?

Pac-Man and Mario owned the 1980s. Sonic, Lara and Snake took over for the 1990s. Their games are considered classics. Their names are timeless and iconic. Their images are burned into the memory of every gamer, even those who were born after the characters themselves.

Now we have another ten years worth of heroes, villains, sidekicks and love interests to occupy our imagination. Which, however, will remain there?

We just made it through the holiday rush, wallets scraped bare from last year’s heaviest hitters, and there are no fewer than eleven quality games about to rush us. The first quarter (January through March) is usually a time of “catch-up,” where you play all the stuff that keeps piling up on your teetering backlog of games. Not happening this time.

No matter your platform there’s something killer on the way

July is a bit dry in terms of new-stuff quantity, but we’re really looking forward to the majority of its releases. We have a healthy amount of oddball gems, sequels and re-releases to look forward to. It’s as much a month to experiment on weird stuff as it is to catch up on stuff you may have missed a year (or five) ago. What’s particularly exciting is that we’re seeing a solid number of awesome-looking downloadable games. If you’d rather not spend $60 on bananas-bullshit like Catherine (which we’re way into, by the way), put that money toward a few XBLA games instead. You’ve got slimmer pickin’s than usual, but them pickin’s look good...

Normally the words “Warhammer 40K” send my brain into immediate sleep mode, so I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of FAPing along to the Space Marine demo that recently emerged online. I thought it looked a little derivative of Gears of War, but it turns out I had it completely backwards! Clad with their jet packs and “Chainswords,” Captain Titus and his brood are the original Republican Space Rangers, and the game’s a bloody mess of fun to boot...

You might be too old to go trick-or-treating, but that doesn't mean Halloween needs to be abandoned altogether. All across the globe, MMO fans get together to celebrate the ghastly holiday together in their favorite virtual worlds, and developers often greet them with fun, featured content. We've assembled a list of some of the most interesting Halloween-flavored additions to MMOs, giving you an easy way to find out what sort of fun your virtual avatars can get themselves into as Halloween approaches.

We'll continue to keep this updated as more MMOs announce their Halloween plans...