Few games appeal to adults and kids, but The Legend of Spyro: Dawn of the Dragon could please both audiences. The younger group gets its beloved purple dragon and familiar platforming. The older crowd will like the depth in gameplay; among other changes, Spyro can now fly at any time.

After recently seeing a demo of the game, I was most impressed by its style and art; adults will find a lot of nuance here, too. Spyro mixes a lot of brightness and darkness in its style, reminding me of Fantasia or other old-guard Disney animations. Grasses leaned back as the wind raked over them, in a saccharine outdoor scene. But in another moment, sharp, muted stones matched the danger from an attacking monster.

via joystiq.com

Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World isn’t a sequel. It’s not a side-story like Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology, either. But what it really is, that’s hard to say, because there wasn’t much to see at last night’s Bandai Namco press event. We weren’t given a hands-on opportunity with Dawn of the New World - but we did get to see the new monster-catching gameplay feature and we've got some juicy details. We also found out that the control scheme is for the Wii Remote only and we can expect to see the Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World around September 2008.

The demo build was an early Japanese preview, lacking the obvious polish of a finished product - but the town, dungeon and world map we were shown definitely look like the Symphonia settings of old and the dungeon could be straight out of Tales of the Abyss. The party set-up and combat systems were also comfortingly familiar from both the Abyss and Symphonia - but we were sad to see that the world map is a straight forward click-here-go-here affair instead of a explorable field of adventure.

via gamesradar.com

In Obscure: The Aftermath, young college students take on demonic monsters while their friends and fraternity fellows get ripped into bloody shreds. Most reasonable people would react with shock or fear, yet this horror adventure game's characters are more interested in clinging to outdated stereotypes. Corey Wilde, for example, isn't concerned about the giant ogres bursting with bulbous tumors that have infiltrated Fallcreek University. Rather, his beloved car's been totaled, and someone must pay. And so it goes with Corey and his chums, who approach the campus's mutant infestation with the same degree of intensity that they would a study session.

via gamespot.com

Telltale finally confirmed to GameSpot that Sam & Max's first season is coming to the Wii this fall. Rumors of Sam & Max bringing their freelance form of policing to the Wii began in early 2007 and became pseudo-confirmed this January in a German press release. The game will be a port of the Sam & Max: Season One PC compilation.

Sam & Max for Wii will be published in the US by Dreamcatcher and The Adventure Company. In Europe, JoWood will handle publishing duties of the game, which will have French and German voice acting, with Italian and Spanish subtitles added. No word yet on price for the title, but if it does end up being budget priced (PC was $30), we're very curious to see if this excellent adventure game finds an audience on the Wii.

via joystiq.com

Empire Interactive, a leading publisher of interactive entertainment software, today announced that development for Myst is complete. Just in time for summer vacation, Myst allows players to take their eerie adventures on the road, in the sky, to the beach or wherever their travels may lead. The game takes full advantage of the DS' touch-screen technology, seamlessly incorporating new tools for a greater challenge.

Developed by Hoplite Research, LLC, Myst packs in every bit of the original game's engaging and mysterious adventuring goodness - more than 40 hours of gameplay - and adds to it. The experience has been enhanced and recreated for Nintendo DS, including an all-new interface, a new set of mini-tools, re-mastered soundtrack and video, and the Rime Age, a new world not included in the original Myst.

via ds.ign.com

You are Jason Bourne. Sneaking your way through the American embassy in Zurich. Racing through a subway tunnel in search of a madman. Taking down scores of enemies in the cargo hold of an airplane. Screeching tires around the streets of Paris while being chased down by the police. In Sierra and High Moon Studios' upcoming action game Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Conspiracy, you are a 30 million dollar weapon, and the developers are doing their best to remind you of that fact at every moment. We had a chance to check out a demo of the game here in Miami on the same night that Bourne Conspiracy soundtrack contributor and DJ extraordinaire Paul Oakenfold performed selections from the Bourne Conspiracy soundtrack.

The demo shown off here in Miami included a level set in the American embassy in Zurich; a level set 18 months before the events in the first film, with Bourne as a CIA assassin hunting down a criminal; and a brief car chase set in Paris. The demo gave us a pretty strong idea of how the gameplay will work in the full game, especially with regard to the hand-to-hand combat.

via gamespot.com

GTAGaming posted several images of a map for Grand Theft Auto IV's streets and subway system. As for the authenticity of the Liberty City map, well ... that's a whole other issue. The six images are of varying clarity and one image even shows the PS3 controls for the game.

A few things caused red flags for us with the images, like one image showing Liberty City "neighbourhoods" -- with a "u." Although this map could be for an international version of the game, it still seems odd that a map depicting an alternate version of New York City would spell neighborhood in an un-American fashion. Another issue is some awkwardly constructed sentences in the region details (like the first sentence in the Alderney description). We're sure people may find other things to make their spidey sense tingle, but check it out and make your own conclusions about authenticity.

via joystiq.com

We've been anxious to get our hands on LucasArts and Traveller's Tales' latest tag-team effort, Lego Indiana Jones, since the game was first announced last year. The publisher-and-developer pairing has yielded some Voltron-like results with the Lego Star Wars titles, so we've been understandably curious to see what happens when you mix Legos and Indiana Jones. A recent trip to LucasArts' offices finally let us try out a work-in-progress version of the Xbox 360 game which, while a little rough around the edges, is on its way to matching the appeal of the Lego Star Wars titles.

via gamespot.com

Proving that old sprites never die (they just go 3D), upstart publisher Aksys has confirmed that it will release Arc System Works' "tactical action game" Guilty Gear 2: Overture in North America this fall for the Xbox 360. The game, which takes characters from the Guilty Gear 2D fighting game series and injects them into a kind of bizarre amalgamation of 3D action and strategy, cannot help but remind us of last year's Soul Calibur Legends...and we're less than enthused to put ourselves through that experience again without some measure of alcohol.

The game is the latest attempt at reinventing the storied franchise, following 2004's Guilty Gear Isuka, which upped the ante by allowing up to 4 players slug it out in a chaotic battle royal. Overture instead turns its attention to the series' complicated, often convoluted post-apocalyptic storyline, with spiky-headed Sol Badguy and his rectangular sword leading the charge in large scale battles while "balancing resources and deploying troops." Frankly trying to wrap our heads around how this will all work has given us a headache, so we're just going to file this one away in our 'might be interesting' basket and go have a lie-down.

via joystiq.com

According to the television show Lost, in 2004, Oceanic Airlines flight 815 crashed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Whether you think the survivors are stranded on an island or bottled up in a different location, Ubisoft has added one more survivor to the mix in its latest adventure game. Lost: Via Domus tells a good story, but it's far too short to justify the game's price of admission.

In Lost: Via Domus, you take control of an amnesiac photojournalist who was also aboard the fateful transpacific flight. During the game you must slowly regain your identity through completing quests, talking with the other survivors, and correctly identifying clues during flashbacks. Early on you find out you had a camera on the plane with you. Evidently one of your photographs made another survivor mad enough to want to destroy the photograph and kill you. The events in the story unfold in a great parallel to the TV series. Most of the game's storyline occurs during the first two seasons of the show, but characters appearing in season three of the show are also included in encounters and exposition. The core characters are all there: Jack, Locke, Kate, Sawyer, Charlie, Claire, Sun, Jin, Hurley, and Sayid. Tom, Ben, and Juliet--of the Others--appear as well to ensure that the hostile, we-were-here-before-you storyline is kept alive and well.

via gamespot.com

In light of its innovative paint-brush gameplay mechanic, many considered Capcom and now-defunct Clover Studios' Okami to be a far better fit for Nintendo's Wii than the PlayStation 2 it appeared on in 2006. Luckily, despite the game's original development house being dispersed shortly after Okami's release, Capcom signed on Daxter developer Ready at Dawn to pick up the title for a Wii port.

In laying out its release lineup for the first half of the year in mid January, Nintendo gave the game's fervent following happy tidings, marking Okami for release on March 25. However, that reveal now appears to have been premature, as Capcom has today confirmed to GameSpot that Okami's prowl has been postponed three weeks to April 15.

via gamespot.com

We hear all sorts of goodness when these big gaming convention, such as the 2008 Game Developers Conference rolls into a town somewhere in the world. These conferences spark the imagination of everyone, both young and old, as they get to see video goodness of many a new game that will come out sometime in the next year. One of these games? Well, that would be the Penny Arcade’s first adventure game entitled Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness , which is being developed by some lovely Canadians over at Hothead Games.

Not only do we get to check out some screenshots, which you can find over on this post at Kotaku, but we also get to hear of a release date for the awesomeness which is live action Penny Arcade goodness. And that just happens to be sometime this summer.

via theadventuress.com

Microsoft promised that we'd have access to special GDC media from the comforts of our own home thanks to the wondrous service that is the Xbox Live Marketplace. And so far, they've done a pretty fine job releasing trailers, free gamer pictures and videos. But never in our wildest dreams did we expect a Ninja Gaiden II demo, which is exactly what is headed down the GDC XBLM pipeline.

According to a GDC content banner that appears on the XBLM, it makes mention that a downloadable Ninja Gaiden II demo will be "Coming Soon". The item is not clickable just yet, so no demo goodness for us, but we have a feeling that Thursday will bring bloody ninja fun for fanboys across the globe.

via xbox360fanboy.com

Today I want to show you one of the fan crafts that are being made by other WoW fans. While I love to craft this is something that I doubt I'll ever be able to create. Saturn over on the Craftster forums made this Night Elf lady on her mount. Made entirely of sculpy (craft clay) this lovely Night Elf seems to have gotten herself the Swift Zulian Tiger from Zul'Gurub since this tiger is a little more orange than the typical Frostsabers the Night Elves get.

I think she must be pretty uber leet too because she is hardly wearing anything and from what I have gathered the armor gets less and less....there as the game goes on. She must be a hunter too because it looks like a high end mail set to me. This just goes to show you just how creative you WoWers can get.

via wowinsider.com

Even though Phantasy Star II is totally old, and thus seemingly fair game for spoilers, be warned that this VC Advantage is entirely concerned with the major spoiler of Phantasy Star II. If you don't want the story to be ruined, don't read this. If you're all about gameplay only, or if this is the second time through for you, then come on in!

The spoiler in question: Nei dies. Rolf's faithful companion from the beginning of the game, the lovable, innocent, purple-haired artificial life form Nei, gets killed by her "big sister," a prototype of herself known as Neifirst. This isn't like the normal deaths that will happen all the damn time in Phantasy Star II (seriously, all the time. The game is brutal. You'll die. Luckily the Clone Lab music is really nice.) This isn't a gameplay death. It's a narrative death, an Aeris death, and there's no coming back from it. Except there is, kind of!

via nintendowiifanboy.com