Armada Online brings an indie tear to my eye. A sci-fi themed MMORPG with some of the sickliest-sweet art direction I’ve ever seen, Armada takes the hyper real art style of Eve Online and gives it a coating of playfulness. Don’t be mistaken though, Armada is already a surprisingly solid game, featuring quite an in-depth items, weapons and stats system for the RPG nerds deep down inside all of us and a rapidly growing and enthusiastic community. Currently the world features 1 PvP and 1 PvE instance, though I expect this to grow as more players discover the joy of massive PvP space battles. Hopefully a Mac client is forthcoming, since this would be a nice addition to the paltry options available to us Mac users (who like to keep their PCs permanently shutdown).

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..and by announce I mean they released another in a long line of poorly written and absolutely unexciting press releases. Moving on. LifeSigns: Hospital Affairs is a Japanese drama-soap game for the Nintendo DS, which JoWooD has chosen to be their debut title for the Nintendo DS, bringing Austrian-backed games to yet another console! LifeSigns will be released first quarter 2007 for the Nintendo DS console.

From JoWooD’s ‘Marketing Manager’:

Lifesigns for Nintedo DS takes part of all Nintendo DS features and we are really proud to publish such an innovative game concept on the successful Nintendo DS. This is for JoWooD the perfect possibility to have a good start on the DS console

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Blizzard has added a feature to their website allowing users to view up to date statistics on some of the many data points contained within the massively massive multiplayer world. The WoW stats allow you to see the most auctioned items (Runecloth), most dangerous NPCs (Drek’Thar), most looted items (Linen Cloth), most created items (Soul Shard), most complete quests (A Threat Within) and the most gathered items (Chopper Ore). Whew. So go forth statistics nerds and bury yourself in gobs and gobs of data related to the game everyone loves to hate.

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An amusing story by way of N’Gai at Newsweek, where he’s reminiscing on an amusing bet between him, several other members of the press and Microsoft’s Chief XNA Architect, J Allard, in 2004 regarding Sony’s soon to be announced PSP hand held console. The wager was over J’s belief that the PSP would be a resounding failure, stating in pure Allard fashion, “You can sell 500,000 units of anything!”. Always up for a bit of fun, the gaming press made J a wager, if the PSP reached 10 million units shipped worldwide within 12 months (same as the PS2) Allard would have to wear a dreadlocks wig for the entire month of May, including the week of E3 2006. If the PSP fizzled and failed, the journalists (some of whom sport quite a nice set of natural dreads) would shave their heads, on stage, during the Xbox E3 press conference, in front of 1500 attendees. Ever the gamer, J took the bet, only, didn’t seem to follow through. E3 came and went, J looked as snazzy as ever, but, there was no sign of J sporting those dreads. For shame J, for shame!

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Total Annihilation was a great game for the hardcore RTS fan, a label I sometimes stamp on myself. Well, thanks to the Supreme Commander himself, Chris Taylor, we’re getting ready for the next-generation RTS title, Supreme Commander (see what I did there?). Supporting dual monitors (yay!), extremely nice graphics and AI, and sporting an art direction that looks like Terminator meets Battlestar Galactica, Supreme Commander is looking hot and I can’t wait to have this rolling on dual 20.1″ tft! Supreme Commander is currently in open beta and will be released early 2007.

Watch the trailer after the jump..

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No I haven’t gotten my frickin’ Wii yet. Argh! But oh well, I’m already having fun reading all the reports of overzealous Wii-heads who are going about tearing their homes apart thanks to slippery hands, flimsy safety cords and way too much adrenaline pumping through those Wii-hands. Never one to turn down taking advantage of a new market-opportunity, enterprising bloggers and self-confessed Wii fanboys, have created Wiihaveaproblem.com, a community blog focusing only on the newest trend in video gaming violence. Flying Wiimotes.

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Whosa whatsa!? It was recently revealed that Killzone PS3′s production is aiming to be the most expensive in Dutch history, topping the 16 million EUR ($21 million USD) mark of the Dutch WWII movie Black Book. A large part of the costs are attributed to localizing the game into 20 different languages. Yes, 20 different languages. As the bubble continues to inflate, fanboys around the world quiver in anticipation.

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23 year old games design (or games art, it’s a bit unclear) student Bob Averrill surely doesn’t believe in organized religion, even going so far as to write a blog named Portland Athiest to let people know about his beliefs, or lack thereof. So it goes without saying that a discussion of religion taking place at his school (The Art Institute of Portland) would interest Averrill. That it did. During a classroom discussion between other students, Averrill joined in, mainly with another student about her particular religious beliefs in energy layers and astral beings, where it was also discovered she believes in leprechauns (this *is* Portland, Oregon we’re talking about here). Averrill attempted to convince her to stop stating that her beliefs were in fact scientifically proven (it appears she believed leprechauns were floating astral beings on various energy levels). Needless to say, the discussion became a bit more heated and Averrill found himself called before the dean, where he was informed that religious discussions weren’t allowed, before promptly finding himself suspended after a judicial hearing due to violation of the student conduct policy.

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CVG has an extremely thorough preview of Remedy’s upcoming action/adventure thriller, Alan Wake, including a few new screen shots showing off the visual candy Remedy is pushing into the title with the help of Intel, Nvidia and Microsoft. The much anticipated follow-up to the Max Payne series, Alan Wake actually feels as if it IS the follow up to Max Payne, with Remedy’s signature art and atmosphere style shining through every screen shot we’ve seen. Now where’s that follow up to Max Payne we heard about a year or so ago? Hmmmmmmmmmm, I wonder…

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Whoa ho ho. How can this be an EA title? Granted, this is a Japanese game (for now!!), but wow, EA is looking primed to actually have someone in the Japanese market show some interest in their games. By taking on the visual style of an Animal Crossing or Harvest Moon, EA is bringing the right amount of sickly sweet character-driven fun to a stale property that just might work in their favor. Wow, the Wii is going to be huge folks. You didn’t hear it here first.

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