It made me laugh when I heard from a follow gamer in work today that Gran Turismo 5‘s release date of March for Japan has been pushed back yet again, this time indefinitely.

While us poor old westerners have never been given a solid idea of when we might see our version of the game, this announcement isn’t especially encouraging for those who are still waiting. Conspiracy theories abound (in several places) on exactly what the “production-related” issues are that Sony say have caused this latest delay – their unwillingness to set a new release date is a bit unnerving given how long the title has already been in development.

Now, I own a PS3, and although I can’t say GT5 was ever a game I was desperate to play on it, it bugs me how Sony have swung another hammer blow to a nail in the PS3′s coffin. How many more times are they going to drop the ball? Is it even a ball any more, or a mangled, deflated mass after being repeatedly dumped into a spiky burning pit of doom? Did they release the PS3 purely as an exercise in finding out the most cackhanded and drawn out way of systematically ruining a gaming platform? Sometimes it certainly seems that way.

Yes, I exaggerate. It probably isn’t that bad, and the pit wasn’t actually very spiky at all. Look on the bright side: at least Final Fantasy XIII appears to be on schedule…

ArenaNet have released another trailer for Guild Wars 2, and this time it shows off a few tasty clips of what seem to be in-game combat. Without too many more words, check it out here!

The more I see of the diminutive Asurans, the more I’m convinced that’ll be the race I’ll start out with. A friend of mine in work considers them to be “vicious, pointy-teeth midgets with a serious attitude problem” – ha, but he’s so wrong! They’re a bit prickly on the outside, I’ll admit that, but if I were the only one able to build dirty great stompy war golems to sort my problems out for me, I’d probably rub that in other people’s faces too. And what’s wrong with a nice toothy smile from time to time?

Anyhow, seriously, it’s a very cool trailer, and Jeremy Soule‘s superb music complements it perfectly. Watch it now! And if you can’t get enough, you might want to read Massively.com’s analysis for some extra commentary.

There aren’t a lot of MMOs that I’m following at the moment (apart from an occasional glance at Aion and feverish anticipation of Guild Wars 2) – but this caught my eye.

It seems that today is the day when the Dominion expansion for EVE is released, laying the groundwork for a most ambitious vision of player-controlled territories that include both the vast reaches of space and the planets that lay within. What I find interesting is how CCP plan to merge their future title Dust 514 – a first-person shooter / MMO hybrid game for consoles – into an existing online universe in such a way that actions taken in either game will affect the shared environment.

While the reality of this grand design is still a long way away, Dominion’s feature list should keep new and old players alike busy – it boasts a complete overhaul of the way players can control and influence star systems, gorgeous procedurally-generated graphics for planet surfaces, further improvement to the New Player Experience (that’s the in-game tutorial to you and me), and epic mission arcs for pirate factions. Should any of this tickle your fancy, check out the expansion’s homepage.

I snatched up Madballs in… Babo: Invasion [link] yesterday in Steam’s holiday sale and had a ton of fun in the multiplayer. I’ve been racking my brains trying to remember exactly which game it reminded me of, then it struck me like a swarm of rockets – the ol’ classic BaboViolent [link], of course! It’d been ages since I played it after someone recommended it to me several years ago. I think I spent about a week in there before I went back to whatever it was I had been getting up to previously, so it didn’t really stick in my mind…

Which, in a round about way, brought me to thinking: “Hey, I wonder how many of today’s Modern Warfare 2 players would know about the real online games of the past decade that sparked everything off?” Probably not a whole lot. So I reckon it’d be nice to go back and cover some of the best oldschool 2D multiplayer games – some that time caught up with, and others that are still going strong.

As a series of posts I won’t say they’ll be done overnight – I want to at least try and be concise with the content for each game, and knowing how lazy / easily distracted / generally slow I am, it could take a while. Still, I’ll try to keep prodding myself in the direction of getting them done.

If you think you have some interesting information, historical or otherwise, about any of these games, I’d love to hear it, so feel free to post a comment here or contact me with your thoughts. Watch this space!

To continue with a similar theme…

Runic Games just announced that their hotly-anticipated action RPG Torchlight [link] will be available on Steam from the first day of release (October 27th). Previously you’d have had to wait an extra month if you wanted to buy the game this way, but there’s no need for that now!

Of course, should you wish to support the Runic team directly you’ll also be able to buy game keys from their website.

Blizzard will will kicking off 2009′s BlizzCon very shortly, and those who have subscribed to the live internet TV stream will see the hot news as it happens – but there are also plenty of other ways to keep up to date with developments! There are plenty of blogs (such as Massively and Joystiq amongst loads of others) and Twitterers working furiously to deliver the gossip as it’s known.

I’m hyped. It’s going to be an interesting couple of days!

Superb news! Possibly the best “ethical” abandonware site that ever was has been put back into action. A group of determined individuals seem to be working their socks off to reincarnate Home of the Underdogs after several years of stagnation! I wish them the best of luck… it’s not the smallest of tasks to attempt.

Take a wander through some of yesteryear’s best games at www.hotud.org. And don’t forget to tell your friends!

E3 has come and gone, and I can’t say there was anything in it that really grabbed me by the throat. Well, apart from perhaps one thing…

First of all, if you didn’t get sucked up in the miniature hype tornado that appeared around Mythos before it sadly disappeared off the face of the internet, let me explain a bit. It was a point-and-click action RPG in the vein of Diablo and Dungeon Siege, and it had a ton of potential. Unfortunately, Flagship Studios – its ill-fated developer – went bust early last summer, taking Mythos with it. But in a twist to the story, it turns out that virtually all of Flagship‘s development team has been signed up into a new software house called Runic Games. What are they working on? Well, it’s this little ol’ thing called Torchlight…

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