Claptrap’s Robots Rise in New Borderlands DLC

Borderlands players will face an army of robots in an upcoming downloadable expansion, the fourth for one of last year’s dark-horse videogame hits.

Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, priced at $10, will be available for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this September, 2K Games and Gearbox Software said Wednesday. The expansion will pit players against mysterious bot Ninja Assassin and his Claptrap robot followers, which are bent on overthrowing the Hyperion Corporation’s military forces.

Robot Revolution players will get 20 new missions, new enemies to ventilate, 10 new skill points to tweak their wastelander and three more backpack slots for all the loot they’ll be scrounging.

Borderlands is a Diablo-esque, post-apocalyptic shooter that came out last October. When I reviewed the game last year, I praised it for melding a slew of familiar videogame tropes into something new and, ultimately, comforting.

Image courtesy 2K Games

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Next Up for Double Fine: Halloween RPG Costume Quest

Tim Schafer and his team at Double Fine will follow last year’s heavy metal epic Brütal Legend with a modest downloadable game. Costume Quest, a quirky, Halloween-themed role-playing game coming this fall for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, will be the company’s next release, Double Fine said Tuesday.

The game, spearheaded by Double Fine animator and cartoonist Tasha Harris, follows the adventures of a gang of trick-or-treaters who use the powers of their costumes to battle monsters that threaten to ruin Halloween.

Check out Tasha’s Game, a rainbow-filled Flash platformer, and Tasha’s Comic, an ongoing three-panel strip about cats, unicorns and everyday life, to see the kind of work Harris is capable of.

Costume Quest is the first of several Double Fine games slated to be published by THQ.

Image courtesy Double Fine

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Video: Battlestar Composer Kicks Up SOCOM 4 With Taiko, Gamelan

The soundtrack to Sony’s war-zone action game SOCOM 4 will sound a little familiar to anyone who’s seen Battlestar Galactica. Composer Bear McCreary, who wrote the epic music for the rebooted sci-fi TV show, will bring his signature blend of rock and ethnic instruments to the PlayStation 3 game, which Sony will launch in 2011.

Wired.com visited Skywalker Sound earlier this summer, where McCreary was recording the game’s soundtrack. While we were interloping on George Lucas’ ranch, we produced two videos that examine different aspects of the SOCOM 4 music. This first installment is about the specific instruments McCreary chose, such as taiko drums and a gamelan ensemble.

Last year, McCreary stepped into videogame soundtracks with Capcom’s sci-fi action title Dark Void. His work was generally recognized as a highlight of the game.

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Felicia Day, Wayne Newton, Ron Perlman Star in Fallout: New Vegas

Bethesda revealed the star-studded voice cast of Fallout: New Vegas on Tuesday.

Hellboy’s Ron Perlman, Friends star Matthew Perry, legendary Las Vegas crooner Wayne Newton, Shawshank Redemption actor William Sadler, Zach Levi of TV’s Chuck, Felicia Day of the web show The Guild, Star Trek vet Michael Dorn, country singer Kris Kristofferson, Machete’s Danny Trejo, John Doman of The Wire and Deep Space 9’s René Auberjonois will all provide voices for the post-apocalyptic role-playing game, which is due out October 19 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Of these actors, you’ll probably spend the most time listening to Trejo, Levi and Day. The trio have been cast as “companions” — characters who tag along and help the player in firefights.

Felicia Day will play the role of Veronica, a smart-mouthed scribe from the Brotherhood of Steel. Danny Trejo stars as “Raul the Ghoul,” — a mechanic and gunfighter who has been deformed by exposure to radiation. Zach Levi’s character “Arcade” is a member of the cult group The Followers of the Apocalypse — a faction familiar to players of the original 1997 PC game.

Bethesda promises that it will reveal more celebrity cameos in Fallout: New Vegas soon.

Image courtesy Bethesda

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Wii Sells 30M in U.S., Nintendo Reveals Best-Selling Games

The Wii console has now sold over 30 million units in the U.S. alone since its launch in November 2006, Nintendo said on Tuesday.

Besides pointing out this milestone, Nintendo released lists of the best-selling U.S. Wii games produced by Nintendo and other software makers, which are listed below. Besides Wii Sports, which was and continues to be packed in with the console, the biggest-selling game is Wii Play (pictured above).

On the third-party side, Guitar Hero III is still the best-selling game, but recent titles like Lego Star Wars and Just Dance have made significant progress up the ladder.

As of March 31, 2010, Nintendo said it had sold nearly 71 million Wii consoles worldwide, making it the best-selling home videogame machine that the company has ever produced.

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Video: 8-Bit Styled Scott Pilgrim Game Launches Today

Can the growing nerd passion for all things Scott Pilgrim conquer simmering geek antipathy for Ubisoft and their DRM? Time to find out.

Ubisoft launched Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game as a download for the PlayStation 3 Tuesday. Xbox 360 owners will have to wait until August 25 to grab the $10 game. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game is a retro-styled brawler based on the universe of Scott Pilgrim — a six-volume comic book series by Toronto cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley that follows the travails of a videogame-obsessed, twenty-something slacker who must fight all the jerks that his new girlfriend once dated.

The comic caught on with nerds of all stripes thanks to its numerous, exactingly accurate allusions to classic videogames. The inevitable videogame version features retro pixel art by Paul Robertson and a soundtrack by chiptune rockers Anamanaguchi.

Check out the trailer below.

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Review: Roomy Scout Backpack Is Traveling Geek’s Best Friend

Inside the Scout Backpack, pockets and other storage options make organizing your gear easy.

The Scout Backpack is mandatory gear for the geek on the go.

Created by Astro Gaming, purveyor of high-end gaming headphones, the Scout Backpack is designed with the gamer in mind. From the outside, the bag appears modest. But inside, it is lined with a buttery fabric that softly cradles all your gear.

This weekend, I loaded up the Scout for a brief trip. First, I slid my gaming laptop, a Dell XPS M1330, into the pack’s main compartment. A large sleeve accommodates such outsize gear, with room left over in the compartment to store all six volumes of Scott Pilgrim. I could easily have shoved my laptop’s power brick in, but since I didn’t plan on firing up my PC in the airport, I crammed it into my carry-on.

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Final Fantasy Versus XIII Update: Really, Don’t Hold Your Breath

Time again for another gentle reminder from Final Fantasy Versus XIII producer Tetsuya Nomura that if you were looking forward to playing his game you should probably just relax, take a deep breath, go do something else, maybe get married and pop out a couple of kids, try to just forget about it and you can probably play it after you send them off to their first day of preschool.

“Versus has had many difficulties, and past method of production have been completely inapplicable, but these are the difficulties of birth, so we are working hard,” Nomura said on the Twitter feed for upcoming Square Enix game The 3rd Birthday, as translated by Andriasang. “We have a lot to announce, but because we’re going in order, I can’t say too much yet.”

That “order,” Andriasang points out, is the order in which games are released. In short, several other as-yet-unknown games will be announced, hyped up and released before Versus. Square Enix is currently holding voice casting auditions (!) for Versus and its fellow piece of vaporwarey goodness Final Fantasy Agito XIII, both of which were announced over four years ago at E3 2006.

Considering that The 3rd Birthday — a followup to Square Enix’s late-nineties RPG Parasite Eve without the horror license — has its own Twitter feed and all, it’s safe to say we’ll be playing that in short order. As for anything else on the team’s release slate, well, you might have to pry it away from your hypothetical children.

Image: Square Enix

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Golden Nugget Gambles on Facebook

If you thought your addiction to FrontierVille was a problem, just wait until you get hooked by the lure of a jackpot.

Golden Nugget Vegas Casino is playable now on Facebook, although the game’s publisher will officially launch it on Tuesday. This new distraction was created by Last Legion Games, the folks behind Watchmen: Justice is Coming, and is the first social game branded to a real-world Las Vegas gambling house.

Seth Gerson, CEO of Last Legion’s parent company AltEgo, said in an email to Wired.com that addiction is part of a winning social game strategy — and that he frequently finds himself sucked into Facebook games.

“I constantly tell my wife that I am just doing research,” Gerson admits. “But when you get past level five or six, you’re clearly crossing the line.”

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Story-Driven, One-Player ‘Minerva’s Den’ Concludes BioShock 2 DLC

The final piece of downloadable content for BioShock 2 will be a single-player, story-driven experience called “Minerva’s Den,” publisher 2K Games said last week.

In the level, players will take the part of a new playable character and explore a new district of Rapture, the decrepit underwater dystopia that served as the setting for the two BioShock games. The voice in your ear will be Dr. Brigid Tenenbaum, creator of the creepy Little Sisters, and she’ll be helping you take down another one of those evil dictators who tend to grab hold of sections of the sprawling seastead.

Minerva’s Den will be released later this fall. From the press release:

Prepare to explore Rapture Central Computing, a never-before-seen district of the undersea city, and uncover the dark secrets hidden in its founder’s past. Wield new high-tech weaponry and a devastating new Plasmid to best the towering threats in Minerva’s Den: more dangerous Splicers that command the power of the elements, upgraded Security Bots that throw rockets and lightning bolts, and even a never-before-seen type of Big Daddy.

Hey, it’s a piece of DLC that I actually care about. I don’t know what it is that you guys get out of BioShock, but all the multiplayer and the extra Plasmids and all that sort of DLC barely even make me raise an eyebrow. But more story? A new level with a new main character and a self-contained story arc? Now that sounds like the sort of fun that I look to BioShock to deliver.

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