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As revealed during this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, tormented writer Alan Wake will continue his dimly lit journey in the form of post-launch downloadable episodes. After the internally episodic thriller hits shelves on May 18, Remedy Entertainment will extend it with at least two episodes in 2010. The scope of subsequent episodes and the duration of DLC support will hinge on the audience, of course, but Remedy managing director Matias Myllyrinne envisions a substantial engagement.

“I think it’ll depend a lot on the audience, but certainly we want to — if we’re successful — we want to do a large “Season 2,” if you will, at some point,” he said in an interview with Joystiq. “Right now, I’m not allowed to say what we’re doing exactly this year. But we’re going to have more than one episode come out this year.”

Once the full game is complete and the team has a chance to gauge acceptance and feedback, Remedy Entertainment will shed some more light on its plans. We’ll share ours with you right now: Expect to see the full Matias Myllyrinne interview on Joystiq later this week.

Alan Wake: several DLC episodes this year, second ’season’ dependent on audience originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Yesterday, Ubisoft claimed that its controversial (and f*cking retarded) DRM servers were down due to what it called “exceptional demand.” Not only was that comment insulting to anybody with a brain, it’s also been revealed as a bare-faced lie. Ubisoft has since commented that the DRM servers were attacked.

“Apologies to anyone who couldn’t play ACII or SH5 yesterday,” explains the publisher’s Twitter, clearly having not yet received the PR memo. ”Servers were attacked which limited service from 2:30pm to 9pm Paris time.”

It would appear that naughty Internet thugs, possibly disgruntled PC gamers who were protesting against Ubi’s shady DRM, initiated a DOS attack on the servers. Ubisoft claims that only 5% of players were affected, although I am now struggling to believe a word the publisher says. 

This definitely won’t be the last PR blunder we see as Ubisoft continues to polish the biggest turd in the PC market right now. 

Ubisoft confirms server attack [Videogamer]

[Update: This story has been updated to include a comment from Sony about the problem, as well as gamers' reactions.]

Nearly 24 hours after a leap-year bug hit PlayStation 3 videogame systems, gamers around the world still can’t play games on their crippled consoles. In fact, Sony recommends they don’t even try.

“If you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data,” said Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold in a statement e-mailed to media and posted on the company’s blog.

“We have not found a solution just yet,” Seybold told Wired.com by phone Monday afternoon. “A lot of engineers are working on the problem,” but Sony does not know when the glitch will be fixed, or if it will fix itself at 4 p.m. PST Monday, when the consoles’ internal clocks advance to the first day of March in Greenwich Mean Time.

The problem appeared at approximately 4 p.m. PST Sunday, when some PlayStation 3 owners found that they could not log in to Sony’s PlayStation Network. Gamers received messages with the cryptic error code “8001050F” (pictured in the screenshot above). The Twitterverse quickly dubbed the problem “ApocalyPS3,” and gamers wailed about crippled consoles and lost data.

“I got hit with the #ApocalyPS3,” tweeted James Scharmack on Monday. “Lost my Heavy Rain trophies. Went to do the sync last night & got an error. Reset & saw it was 1999.”

It’s a cautionary tale of the modern age, in which a tiny little bug in one component of a complex machine can bring the entire operation to a crashing halt. Similar bugs hit Microsoft’s Zune player in 2008 and caused hysteria in 1999 as companies scrambled to deal with the Y2K bug.

Image: N30RYU/NeoGAF

At first, the PS3 problem seemed like a simple failure of Sony’s online PlayStation Network, but the real problem was much worse: Downloaded games, and even some disc-based games like the recently released Heavy Rain, refused to load.

Savvy users realized this meant the issue went beyond mere network problems, since the games should have played with the PS3 in offline mode. By Sunday night, PS3 owners were theorizing that the consoles’ internal clocks were glitching out, mistakenly thinking that 2010 was a leap year and that the date was Feb. 29, not March 1.

Sony confirmed this to be the case. “We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system,” said Sony spokesman Patrick Seybold in a statement e-mailed to media and posted on the company’s blog.

All PlayStation 3 consoles retain limited functionality — games that don’t ping the clock on startup will work. Sony said Monday that it hopes to fix the issue “within 24 hours.”

Since the ApocalyPS3 bug only affects early PlayStation 3 models, the people hit hardest by the glitch are early PS3 adopters — Sony’s most loyal customers.

In the meantime, gamers are taking pot shots at Sony over the embarrassing glitch.

“I’m loving the whole PS3 error thing!” tweeted Irish gamer Dara Coleman. “Haha that’s what those fanboys get for dissing the 360!”

See Also:

• 10 Things to Do While Your PlayStation 3 Is Broken
• PlayStation Network Problems Cause PS3 Meltdown

Two words, folks: Flame pants. Nothing says “iron fist” quite like Jin Kazama’s classy couture, and these latest shots from the upcoming Tekken film deliver in spades. Be assured, this ain’t no fan-made hullabaloo — we can clearly see someone spent at least a couple hundred bucks making this thing. The film hits Japanese viewers on March 20 and presumably arrives on US shores in the not too distant future. But for now, why not get started on piecing together your Eddy cosplay? How could you resist those sweet contrasting colors!

[Via TwitchFilm]

Marvel at the Tekken movie’s amazing outfits originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thank the Enkindlers! Encompassing an entire galaxy’s worth of alien beings, uncharted worlds and tattooed psychopaths, Mass Effect’s bible doesn’t exactly make for light reading. “We probably spent 6-12 months with a team of designers, artists and so on doing concepting, world building, design and character iteration, timelines, and the history of the universe,” BioWare CEO Ray Muzyka recently told IGN. The “IP bible” is consulted for all Mass Effect games, he explained, comparing it to an “iceberg that’s down there, giving it weight and gravity, credibility and depth.”

Echoing earlier statements made by BioWare co-founder Greg Zeschuk, Muzyka pointed to the franchise’s considerable backstory as a viable source for “future extensions, ancillary products, things like that.” Things like that may include spin-offs like Mass Effect: Galaxy for iPhone, novels, further expansions to Mass Effect 2, and, obviously, Mass Effect 3.

Sadly, if there’s one thing the Mass Effect bible can’t teach us, it’s the virtue of patience. Who wouldn’t kill for the next part of the trilogy right now?

The Mass Effect bible is ‘quite large,’ BioWare’s Muzyka assures originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to announced that we have a VSWID exclusive this week. Not only does this episode have a special guest narrator, but it also will unveil, for the first time, a brand new character for Sonic the Hedgehog 4. Yes, that’s right, we’ve got the first ever showing of Sonic’s latest furry friend. How awesome is that!?

This week’s episode is not only themed around Sonic 4, but also acts as a comprehensive retrospective of the blue hedgehog’s career. Since Sega’s latest franchise reboot is all about the nostalgia, it’s only fitting that we look back at Sonic’s greatest hits. I think you’ll find plenty to appeal to your rose-tinted view of the world in this new show. 

Sit back and enjoy. 

XSEED Games has announced that KORG DS-10 Plus is golden, baby! The game will be out for the Nintendo DS and DSi on Feburary 16 for $29.99. $30 is nothing for everything that Korg DS-10 Plus offers.

The music synthesizer lets anyone make music and you’ll get more bang for your buck if you use KORG DS-10 Plus on a DSi rather than a DS. Playing the game on the DSi will get you 12-voice polyphony, four tracks for the analog synthesizer simulator, two drum machine and more. Additionally, up to eight units can be linked together to play music or exchange songs with on either the DS or DSi.

Check out the above video to get an idea on just what can be done with the music synthesizer.

Folks who couldn’t bring themselves to buy Uncharted 2 until they played the demo, well, now’s their chance. This week’s PSN update adds a single-player demo for Joystiq’s Game of the Year for 2009. For those who already have Nathan Drake’s latest adventure, the update also includes the $5 “PlayStation Heroes” pack, which allows you to reskin the Uncharted 2 crew with Resistance, inFamous and Killzone bodies. Check out the full PSN update after the break, along with the PSP comics update.

Continue reading PSN Thursday: Were you waiting for the Uncharted 2 demo?

PSN Thursday: Were you waiting for the Uncharted 2 demo? originally appeared on Joystiq on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 18:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Sims 3 wasn’t just the biggest-selling game at US retail stores for 2009. It was also, according to publisher Electronic Arts, the biggest-selling PC game in the world.

Gathering data from North America and Europe, along with “internal EA estimates”, the publisher says this is the sixth time in ten years a Sims title has been the world’s top-selling PC game.

While in the absence of a full chart or a disclosure of sales figures there’s reason to doubt EA’s claims, it must also be remembered that publishers have access to fairly accurate global sales figures (which we don’t, as that kind of data costs a ton), for both their own games and those of their competitors.

EA: The Sims 3 Top-Selling PC Game Worldwide In 2009 [Gamasutra]