Action

The three live action films based on the Resident Evil game franchise have always been very loosely based on the Capcom games but the movies have always made their money back and more thanks to relatively low budgets, solid box office returns and high sales of the DVD and Blu-Ray versions. So it's no shock to hear that a fourth Resident Evil movie might be in the works.

According to Shocktillyoudrop.com a "studio source" at Sony's Screen Gems division has supposedly confirmed that the movie, to be titled Resident Evil: Afterlife, is in the works with Sony wanting to put the movie in theaters by September 17, 2010. There's no word yet if the star of the three previous movies, Milla Jovovich, will return for the fourth filick.

There are only a few games with less of a story than Asteroids. The classic sci-fi shooter from Atari is bascially you shooting stuff that are supposed to be rocks in space with an icon that's supposed to be a laser-armed space ship. Pac-Man has more of a plot. Yet, the Hollywood Reporter states that several studios were actually in a recent bidding war to get the movie rights to the game.

The story repors that Universal "won" the bidding war and that screenwriter Matthew Lopez is handling the "adaptation" (he basically has a clean slate to write whatever he wants, we imagine). Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who also produced the awful Doom movie adaptation, is one of the producers of this flick. We hope Universal will get its money back from this deal.

Activision has released a playable PC demo for Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, the just released game adaption of the third movie in the CGI animated series. Yes you can play with the characters from the movie like Scrat, Sid, Manny and Diego as they discover a lost world of dinosaurs. The demo comes from developer Eurocom.

Download the Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs demo (513 MB) at Big Download

Fallout 3 isn't the only game on sale on Steam this weekend, In fact there's a ton of games that have just been collected into a new game bundle via the download service. 20 titles from 2K Games are now available to purchase as one big game pack for just $59.99. If you bought each game individually it would cost $229.80. Oh, and did we mention that from now until July 7 you can get 10 percent off that already low price, making the bundle $53.99?

Here's the full list of games in the bundle:

Sid Meier's Civilization IV,
Sid Meier's Civilization III Complete
Sid Meier's Pirates!
Shattered Union
Prey
CivCity: Rome
Civilization IV Warlords
Sid Meier's Railroads!
Railroad Tycoon 3
Railroad Tycoon II Platinum
X-COM: Terror From the Deep
X-COM: Apocalypse
BioShock
X-COM: Interceptor
X-COM: UFO Defense
X-COM: Enforcer
Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword
Freedom Force
Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich
Sid Meier's Civilization IV: Colonization.

Sometimes games are actually released earlier than expected. Such is the case for Trine, the long awaited downloadable fantasy themed action-puzzle game from developer Frozenbyte. While the game was supposed to be released tomorrow for the PC, the full version of the game is now available to download via Steam right now.

As we mentioned earlier this week, the Steam version of Trine costs $29.99, which is $10 more than the Playstation 3 downloadable version (that port has yet to be released as of this writing). Of course if you were smart you would have pre-ordered the game via Steam and gotten a $9.99 title from Frozenbyte for free (Shadowgrounds). You can download a free demo right here at Big Download to see if you think Trine might be worth the extra $10.

It's a game that was in danger of being canceled but now a new publisher has flown in (hehe) to save the day. We are talking about Heroes Over Europe, the WWI action-flying game from developer Transmission Games. Today Ubisoft announced that they are the new publisher of the title and plan to release the game sometime in September.

The game's future was in doubt earlier this year when it was revealed that the developer had not received a payment from its co-publisher Red Mile Entertainment and as such pulled out of their agreement with Red Mile. Atari, the other co-publisher, also decided to terminate its agreement at the same time. Ubisoft' s new publishing deal announcement also came with nine new screenshots from the game that we have added to our gallery.

It's a game that we have been waiting for a long time to get our hands on and today Sega took the unusual move of announcing a release date for a game that isn't due out for over three months. The game in question is Alpha Protocol and the Obsidian Entertainment-developed action-RPG is now due out in stores on October 6.

The Unreal Engine 3-powered take on the super-spy genre has also picked up a newly revealed sub-title: The Espionage RPG. Perhaps Sega wasn't too sure that the Alpha Protocol title was good enough to identify the game as part of the spy genre.

The PC game download site Gametap updates their library of titles every Thursday and today is no except. This week they are adding the adventure game Runaway: Dream Of The Turtle for their premimum users. Also, the Rebellion-developed action game Rogue Trooper will be free to play via Gametap for the next week.

However the official GameTap blog is reporting some bad news; they are now removing nearly all of the Myst based games from their library of titles. According to the blog the surprise removal of the games was "due to an external conflict between (developer) Cyan Worlds and (publisher) Ubisoft" The one exception is RealMYST, the fully 3D remake of the original game.

Eidos's recent WWII action-strategy game Battlestations Pacific was released last May and later this month folks who picked up the title will be able to download two new content update for the game. One of these updates is called the Mustang Pack which will add six new units to the game including the P-51 Mustang plane, the US Navy's Alaska Class cruiser and the Japanese Super Yamato Class, a bigger version of the legendary Yamato battleship that in real life was never made.

The second content update is the Carrier Battles Map Pack which adds four new maps to the game that can be played on all five of Battlestations Pacific's multiplayer modes. The map pack even includes a level set in Aleutian Islands near Alaska. PC owners can download the Mustang Pack sometime today for 160 Microsoft points on Games For Windows Live. The Carrier Battles Map Pack will be released on July 23 for 800 Microsoft points.

Electronic Arts has released a launch trailer for their game adaptation of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The game, based on the upcoming sixth movie in the fantasy film series (itself based on the novel by J.K. Rowling) is shipping to stores this week. You can also download a playable demo of the game right here at Big Download.

Download the Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince Launch Trailer (135 MB) at Big Download
Check out all of Big Download's Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince files

Yet another game developer seems to have suffered an early death following the release of their main project. This time Shacknews is reporting the Maryland-based Blue Omega Entertainment may have closed up shop. The team was responsible for the recent third person action game Damnation, which was released in late May by publisher Codemasters to universally poor reviews. One of Blue Omega's now former programmers, Geoff Rowland, revealed the shut down a few days ago on his Twitter account.

Shacknews has also gotten court documents that show that Damnation (which began its life as a Unreal Tournament 2004 total conversion mod) had a troubled development history. The documents show that Blue Omega hired two other development teams to do contract work on the game but had issues with both of them and at one point Codemasters tried to remove Blue Omega from the game entirely.

The Underside, Arthur "Podunkian" Lee's magnum opus, has finally released... its second demo. While The Underside has long been in development, the amount of polish and care going into the game is obvious even in the first demo. Now, to tease us some more, Arthur Lee has released the second teaser to his game, vastly expanding upon the previous area players could explore.

Those familiar with games such as Iji or Cave Story will be instantly at home in The Underside. You jump around, move between screens, and attack enemies through an exploratory, semi-non-linear adventure. While the first demo had maybe 5-10 minutes of gameplay, the second has drastically increased the amount, with the new elements seen in the gameplay trailer from last August all present. You can download the second demo from Arthur Lee's official website. You can find new levels as well as give developer feedback on the official forums.

[Via IndieGames]

The summer game-pop culture convention season is in full swing in the US and it will end on Labor Day weekend with Penny Arcade Expo 2009. Today the organizers of the largest video-PC game convention in the US announced that legendary game creator Ron Gilbert will be making the keynote speech at PAX 2009 in Seattle, Washington.

Gilbert is best known as the main designer behind the classic LucasArts adventure games Maniac Mansion and the first two Monkey Island games (the latter of which is being revived). Currently he is a design director at Hothead Games (the same folks who created the first two episodes in the Penny Arcade Adventures downloadable titles) where he is working on the long-in-developnment game Deathspank. PAX 2009 will be held Sept 4-6.

Canadian-based game publisher Meridian4 has had a long relationship with Valve's Steam download service. This week Steam celebrates Meridian4's fifth anniversary with a special week-long sale. In short all of the games from the publisher have had their prices cut to 50 percent their normal value.

That means huge savings for titles like the two Shadowgrounds sci-fi shooters from Frozenbyte, the two Pacific Storm WWII action titles from Buka and the sci-fi first person shooter Alpha Prime from Black Element Software. You can also get all 13 games in the Meridian4 Complete Pack for just $24.99 via Steam. The sale ends on July 6.

We've seen this before with downloadable games that get released on multiple platforms and it's apparently happening again with the upcoming action-puzzle game Trine. The title from developer Frozenbyte is currently available for pre-order for $29.99 via Steam but according to Shacknews the game will sell for just $20 when it's released for the Playstation 3's downloadable game service.

To be fair, the Steam pre-order does include a free download of Frozenbyte's first title Shadowgrounds (a $9.99 value) but apparently the PC version of Trine is being sold in Europe and in other digital download outlets for $40 with no such free game offered. One of the game's developers made a post on the Frozenbyte web site defending the PC price, stating, " . . . we are very confident that we can deliver a full retail experience with Trine (hence PC version is sold in retail also for approx 35 to 40 eur/usd!)". Trine is expected to be released via download for the PC sometime in July with a retail version from Southpeak Games coming later that same month. In the meantime you can check out a demo of the game at Big Download.