Mighty Ape are having a large sale on over 300 games. List of games can be found here. Loki for $19.99 is an absolute bargain. The New Zealand $ is worth roughly half that of the €, so you’ll get some good bargains there.

Mighty Ape Australia are also having a large sale on over 400 games. List can be found here.

CD WOW currently have a sale of up to 85% off select titles. List can be found here. They also have games for sale on clearance, list can be found here.

GAME.co.uk’s weekly sale can be found here. Some excellent deals to be found on all platforms.

Smyths.ie are having a weekly sale. Sale can be found here. A Nintendo DS Lite + Nintendogs for €99.99.

Argos.ie are having a clearance sale on some games and older models of current gen consoles. List available here.

Xtravision are offering a free copy of Scarface on dvd and the Vegas DLC when you purchase Mafia II (PS3 & 360 only). Also if you preorder Halo: Reach, you get 800 MS Points, downloadable Spartan Recon Helment, Variant and UA Multi-Threat Mjolnir Mark VI Armour. Deals only available instores and not online.

GamersGate are having a sale of up to 75% off of 22 select titles. List of games available can be found here.

Impulse are having a 50% off sale on select titles. List of available games can be found here.

Go-Go Gourmet is currently 50% off at Boonty.

Steams mid-week sale can be found here.

Preorder RUSE at Direct2Drive US Store and you get 2 free Challenge Maps and 10% off your next Ubisoft purchase (at D2D).

Preorder Civilization V at Direct2Drive UK Store and you get the 1st DLC for free and a free copy of Civilization III.

Preorder Red Faction Armageddon to get a free glow in the dark Red Faction Armageddon t-shirt. Preorder WWE Smackdown vs Raw 2011 to get a free Smackdown vs RAW t-shirt. Applies only to the Xbox 360 versions of the game. Available through THQ’s online store. (North America only I believe)

Game.ie are offering free one month dvd rental with any purchase.

Play.com are offering up to 15% off of all preorders. Up to 50% off their Hot Picks of the week. List can be found here.

Napoleon Total War is currently 20% off at gamesload.ie.

DVD.co.uk are offering select titles on all platforms for 2 for £25 and 2 for £30. They are also offering  up to 70% off select titles on all platforms.

PS3 2 for £25 list can be found here. PS3 2 for £30 can be found here. PS3 deals can befound here.

XBox 2 for £25 can be found here. XBox 2 for £30 can be found here. XBox  deals can be found here.

Wii 2 for £25 can be found here. Wii 2 for £30 can be found here. Wii deals can be found here.

DS 2 for £18 can be found here. DS 2 for £30 can be found here. DS deals can be found here.

PSP 2 for £18 can be found here. PSP deals can be found here.

PC deals can be found here.

HMV are having a sale on over 200 games. List can be found here.

Gamesnash.ie are currently having a sale on select titles. List can be found here.

On September 17, the device wil launch for €59.99 of your eurobucks, assuming you don’t have the Playstation Eye. If you do, the Move controller will cost €39.00, which is actually a rather reasonable price of entry. Is it worth it, though?

The games we’ve seen from Sony before were on show here. Primarily, the focus was on party games. Eyepet was there, with a new way to interact with your furry virtual friend – which feels a little pointless given the whole point of Eyepet was that you can use your hands to interact. Any fans of the game will enjoy the extra mini-games, but it’s all still a bit “tech demo” esque.

Sports Champions is a direct rip off of Nintendo’s Wii Sports. There’s no point in beating around the bush, it’s the same idea but with far superior graphics and utilising the Move a little better. Archery, Frisbee, Sword Fighting, Table Tenis and the like are all available here. While fun, they’re nothing you can’t find on the Wii, albeit in HD. Other games on show included the arcade shooter that reminded me of Time Crisis, “The Shoot” and “The Fight”, which is basically just Wii Boxing but more akin to that awful “Fight Club” game that came out a few years ago.

At E3 Sony announced some major titles to Move, which makes it a more tangable product then Microsoft’s Kinect, or even the Wii, when it comes to addressing hardcore gaming fans with regard to these new input methods. SOCOM, Killzone 3, Motorstorm and more were all announced, but not on show for us. What was on show was the interactive movie style game, Heavy Rain. It plays as well as you imagine, but if you’ve already played the game you’re probably not going to benefit from Move as it merely does the same thing as the DualShock3, but with more flailing.

The device itself feels good and solid in your hands. The more rounded design makes it more comfortable then the Wiimote, and unlike the original non-Motion+ Wii controller, the Move comes with more sensitivity then a stock Wii does. This is apparent in games like Archery or Table Tenis.

The Archery game worked by using your right hand to pull arrows out of a bag behind your back, and the left hand was used to hold the bow. Pull back your right hand and aim with the left. This often bugged out and we ended up pointing at the ground, or desperately trying to get our extended arms to aim upwards as the targets appeared.

Less buggy an experience was the Table Tenis game which I would have bought on its own because it was so fun. It reminded me of the many hours I dumped into Rockstar Table Tenis a few years ago on the 360. So much fun, for such a simple concept. Playing as a rather attractive girl gave my ego a boost, too. I’m still not sure why, though…

The controller works with the Playstation Eye, which detects the ball on the end of the Move. The ball changes colours depending on the usage. If you’re using two, they can be different colours so the PS3 can see them. It’ll also change colours automatically based on your clothing to ensure it never gets lost in the haze of badly lit bedrooms. Furthermore, there’s a Nunchuck Navigation Controller, which was not in use here, but will make more sense with Killzone or SOCOM.

Is this worth investing in? Sure. If you have the extra cash dive into some party games, but what’s more interesting is the long term prospect for Move. Right now it is a bit gimmicky, but with Sony putting a lot of time into developers’ working with Move we’ll be seeing this device in use with Killzone, SOCOM, LittleBigPlanet and other big, AAA titles. This is a huge boost for the device as the software is what’s stopping the Wii becoming a hardcore device, or Natal looking like it has no third party support in its future. In summation, it looks good, but the future looks better. Which is a rarity in a device which is so clearly getting all its ideas from elsewhere.

While you chat, here’s the video live:
Watch live video from Bwana on Justin.tv

So good news that they are now tackling the tennis genre, it won’t be your Virtua Tennis kinda game but should be a whole heap of fun, with character customisation and multi-player to boot.

[PS EU Blog]

“It’s clear that Apple is taking share from Sony’s PlayStation Portable, and to a smaller level, the Nintendo DS,” says Flurry Analytics’ report. Sony’s market share fell from 20% in 2008 to 11% in 2009, and Nintendo fell from 75% in 2008 to 70% in 2009.

“It’s getting to the point where Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft need to be looking seriously at the iPhone and iPod Touch; Apple’s devices single-handedly gobbled up 5% of all video game revenue in 2009. That’s up from just 1% in 2008.” The report went on to say “Apple has already established broad third-party game publisher support. With the iPad featuring a larger screen and more processing power, games on the tablet take a step closer to PC and console gaming. Unless the other major video game platform providers (ie, Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft) respond accordingly, Apple could continue to roll up video game market share. With these figures, our main finding is that iPhone (and iPod touch) is a gaming platform to be reckoned with,” Farago wrote. “Controlling 5% t revenue of a $10 billion industry in just a year and a half is significant.”

It’s hardly a shock to anyone that the 79c pricetag on small, puzzle type games are popular on a platform that’s in the hands of nearly every single student and yuppie the world over. What’s more interesting is the fact that Apple are sitting up and paying attention to gaming for the first time in their illustrious career making hardware and software. OS X will be the next battleground in an attempt to take market share from Windows by bringing Valve’s acclaimed Steam platform to OS X, also bringing Source-engine based games with it. Those with licenses for games on Windows can re-download their titles in Steam for Mac entirely free, too.

A small plugin with oddly goes into the headphone socket will allow you to patch certain games to use the motion control.

Did Sony miss the boat here? Should the PSP Go have had motion sensors built in? Perhaps the PSP2 will have that and touch screen, we might find out at E3.

In the meantime if your interested checkout www.tiltfx.com, price set at £14.99, not too bad.

Its a relatively hilarious(and out of character) bit of marketing from Sony. Apparently the future is bright for the ‘Move’ in November 2010 and according to Kevin and the handful of millions of gamers who play shooters –  anything that doesn’t use buttons sucks big red ball.

Watch the spot below.

So, when faced with the prospect of churning 60 laborious hours into White Knight Chronicles came about I did what any man who runs a game site would do – try to give it to someone else. Alas, no one could take. Nor did they want to. Perhaps because they played Level 5′s previous titles, namely Professor Layton; a cool looking game, but ultimately not my kind of thing.

Texture warp heaven

Now I must jump into this game, a game with possibly the worst timing of any release of its kind ever. Not only does it arrive just after Final Fantasy hits shelves, it also must compete with God of War III in the near future. So, I played this so you don’t have to.

So your introduction to this title couldn’t be worse. Amidst a flurry of people bemoaning the game it intro’s with a dreaded installation screen. And once you play the title you question why. The graphics are sub-par. A title with a huge world like this can be forgiven for shoddy graphics, but how does it manage to be beaten by something like Oblivion? If you leave the game sitting there for a moment a rather homosexual intro sequence will begin. It’s as if it was catered for Japanese e-paedophiles rather then a Western audience. They didn’t even try to make this look cool.

Once you create your awfully similar-to-everyone-else character (mine was a young blonde boy with a womans voice called Raiden… but then thought that was cliche so called him Helghasm instead). Then the game begins in Balandor with Disney style font, music and world. And this is where things take a turn for the worse… kind of. The dialog, acting and graphics are awful. This is game development from 1993 dumped into a blu-ray disk and installed on my hard drive. For no reason.

Having said that, I did begin to get twangs of joy. Thinking of this of an RPG to challenge Final Fantasy is absurd. It can’t. Production values aside, FF is a huge series with huge budgets and an actually entertaining story. This? No way. Instead this is a Disney tale, and play it like you’re 12. The awful dialog is forgiving then. And you’ll enter a realm more akin to childrens’ “save the princess” stories rather then the usual RPG fare. It’s not as gritty as Oblivion, or as interesting as Final Fantasy, but it is still doable.

Let's get this party STARTED!

While the story is fairly basic (it literally is Mario-style saving the princess stuff), it does throw in a bit of fore-shadowing and intrigue to bring about plot twists later on. No, it’s not enthralling. No, it’s not Metal Gear Solid, but it will hold your attention. Even if it doesn’t, the awful lip syncing provides a fun game in itself: “Create your own dialog based on their lips!”. Add alcohol and you’re onto a winner.

The story follows a young boy named Link Leonard who is a zero-come-hero who saves, you guessed it, the princess. Or at least tries. He’s the main protagonist because he manages to control a mystical weapon called the “White Knight” (get it?).

Fighting is a bit awful, really. Even as someone who doesn’t enjoy these games I can see the combat system is tediously slow and awkward. It is an open-ended world where you encounter enemies at random (MMO style). It would benefit with a keyboard & mouse, as your combos and moves are placed at the bottom of the screen to scroll through and select. Not exactly a warm welcome to FPS fans.

Chronicling the White Knight, one swoosh at a time

The games world is split into zones which act as your different levels. The first being the immediate town you live in to explore, and then it spreads out into the open world. All of it set up much like an MMO, with people chatting and dialog set aside for you to join in, too. Nothing as complex as Fallout 3 or Oblivion… but it still harks back to MMO’s.

Overall this is a game that takes itself very seriously, or at least wants to. Rather, the developers should have focused a bit more on the fact that they had a nice Disney-esque story on their hands with some interesting plot points and a boy-becomes-hero adventure. Instead, slapping a knight on the cover and releasing at the same time as Final Fantasy seals the unfortunate fate for this title. Oh, I also mentioned a 60 hour game time at the start. Yeah, turns out that was rubbish too. I always thought RPG’s were long. This isn’t anywhere near that long. There are extra quests to go online via the GeoNet, but it’s still not a sprawling title.

RPG fans will probably still enjoy this. This won’t win over any new RPG fans, though. It also won’t win over people who are stuck into Final Fantasy at the minute. It’s marketed at the wrong audience, at the wrong time sadly. It’s not a good game. Nor is it a bit game. The best I can say is that it’s pretty inoffensive. Worth a shot if you think you’d like it. Otherwise, Final Fantasy will do a better job of keeping you happy.

Friday folks, it just can not come fast enough.

What ever you think of SE’s you gots to love that chest case.

My advice? Stay away from all this stuff, one review I watched this morning shows an event that out scales anything iv seen in a game before and I’m disappointed I didn’t get to see it first hand.

Its great to see Sony finally shelling out AAA titles that leave the competition in the dust, although Mass Effect 2 is still the best console exclusive I’v played this year so far. That could all change come March 16th.