Black Friday is just a few days away, and for many shoppers in the United States it’s even an more exciting day than Thanksgiving. This year features no shortage of deals on videogames and videogame systems; the struggling economy has resulted in retailers going all-out to get people into their stores (or onto their websites), as evidenced by a number of stores opening on Thursday as opposed to waiting for midnight or early Friday morning.

Below you’ll find the highlights of this year’s videogame sales from many of the nation’s top outlets like Best Buy, GameStop, and Walmart — even the Xbox Live Marketplace is having a big sale. Amazon is currently in the middle of a Black Friday week special, but its deals set to launch on Friday are currently unknown. Steam, meanwhile, currently has an autumn sale going on.

Peyton Hillis was a surprise choice for the cover of Madden NFL 12, yet that’s who the fans voted for over the likes of Aaron Rodgers, the controversial Michael Vick, Chris Johnson, and Seattle’s 12th man. Each year it seems like the so-called Madden Curse negatively affects that year’s cover star time and again in a variety of ways. Peyton Hillis appears to be no exception.

Hillis, who is a running back for the Cleveland Browns, has missed the team’s past two games and had not practiced since last week. During practice today, he reportedly re-injured his hamstring, prompting him to slam both the ball and his helmet to the ground.

Welcome to 1UP Presents #3 — it’s behind schedule, the last issue, and the most expensive. Restrain yourselves. But it’s actually kind of awesome.

A couple months ago, 1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish and I decided that we’d close out our print magazine experiment with the third issue. He started it as a pet project about six months ago, and it never really made much money or practical sense, but it was a fun thing to do on the side, so Jeremy spent many off-work hours organizing the first two issues, and handed me the third.

PlayStation Vita may not have gone digital-only — it’s not the right time, Sony says — but that won’t help should you want to play your PlayStation Portable’s UMD games on the system. With no UMD slot, those games might as well be Coleco cartridges.

Sony does see a business opportunity here and, as previously reported, will allow UMD game owners to purchase a digital version on Vita. Sony has now offered details on this functionality along with prices for how much those in Japan will be paying to do so.

It may not have been able to top Call of Duty: Black Ops when it comes to being the most popular game played on Xbox Live, but Battlefield 3 was — at least for a month — able to take the top spot on the NPD sales charts for October.

Battlefield 3 came in at “just under” 2 million units across all platforms in the United States. That’s not a terrible figure for a game released at a time where it had only five days to track in the month, but compared with today’s news of rival Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 selling 6.5 million units in the U.S. and U.K. in a day, it doesn’t sound quite so good. (Here’s a preview of next month’s NPDs: Call of Duty is number one.) It’s important to note the numbers for Battlefield (or any other game) don’t account for digital sales, of which there were likely many thanks to online-only deals and the perks being offered through Origin.

Not even a week after the official Steam forums were taken offline following their defacement, Sony has been forced to do the same with the official website and forums for the Resistance franchise.

MyResistance.net and the accompanying free-to-play Global Resistance game are currently inaccessible. According to Kotaku, Sony took them offline following reports of the site distributing malware, presumably at the behest of hackers.

This week’s episode of The Simpsons (the series’ 492nd overall) featured an obvious take on the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known to most as E3. Following up on previous Surprise Dad Days like Cemetery Paintball and Go-Karts on Real Roads, Homer Simpson decided to take his kids to E4: the Expensive Electronic Entertainment Expo.

There were references all over the place, starting out with statues of the Master Chief, a Big Daddy, and a football (and chicken leg)-wielding John Madden. From there we get to see Furious Fliers, a version of Angry Birds that goes horribly wrong when an angry bird is sent into an under-construction children’s hospital (complete with direct-from-Angry-Birds sound effects).

A quick look at the highlights among the games coming out in Japan this coming week, courtesy the review pages of Famitsu magazine:

- The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (10/10/10/10, 40 points): The 16th game in Famitsu’s 25-year-long history to get a perfect score is also the third Zelda game (after Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker) to manage the feat, also a record. The praise flowed out in the text as well. “The game world, offering a variety of tricks and content without being too large, is enough to make you lose your sense of time,” one editor said. “The battles, featuring enemies that require you to think of a different approach for each one, are also fun. From the puzzles to the fighting, you can feel your knowledge expanding as you go through the adventure, and you can use it in innovative ways whenever you approach something new, which feels fantastic.”

If your plans for Thursday include being online on the PlayStation Network, you may want to start coming up with a backup plan now. Sony will be taking the service down for roughly 14 hours tomorrow.

Sony says this is merely for routine maintenance, though if that were the case, it’d be nice if it were scheduled to take place at night — PSN will be offline from 8am until 10pm Pacific (11am to 1am Eastern) on November 17.

Final Fantasy VII is one of the most oft-requested remakes whether you’re talking about Final Fantasy or games in general, but be careful what you wish for: should it ever happen, the game may not end up being just like fans remember it.

Square Enix’s Yoshinori Kitase, who is currently serving as a producer on the upcoming Final Fantasy XIII-2 and was the director of Final Fantasy VII, recently spoke about how he would personally like to approach a remake of VII, should it ever happen. He’s not keen on leaving things just as they are, a stance that could upset diehard fans.

A quick look at the highlights among the games coming out in Japan this coming week, courtesy the review pages of Famitsu magazine:

- Final Fantasy Type-0 (10/9/10/10, 39 points): A bit of a surprise here, as the PSP FFXIII spinoff (one that hasn’t gotten a ton of hype overseas) just misses out on a perfect score. “The very serious story, which tries to get you crying right from the start, vividly portrays the fact that this is a deep, intense FF experience, something beyond just a side story,” one editor said. “The follow camera works great and the game’s overall a stressless experience. Co-op is novel and very useful, and it’s addictive in how accessible it is.”

It is no secret that Ubisoft wants to expand a number of its franchises into the world of movies and TV shows. On the heels of an announcement that the Raving Rabbids franchise will be turned into a television show by Nickelodeon, Sony Pictures is apparently close to a deal that would allow it to create not just a film, but a film franchise based on Assassin’s Creed.

This is according to Variety, which reports that negotiations are in the final stages following a bidding war in recent months. Universal Studios was among the other companies interested in the movie.

Feature

Lara Croft and the Reinvention of Game Heroes

How Tomb Raider changed games, and why its leading lady still matters 15 years later.

By: Jeremy Parish
October 22, 2011

A woman sits on a boxy sofa in a hotel. It’s meant to be a classy Calcutta hotel from colonial days, but the decor is very Silicon Valley circa the mid-’90s: Simple polygonal shapes make up the columns and furniture, and harsh lighting breaks the room into clearly demarcated spaces of shadow and light. The camera rotates around the the center of the room as it zooms in and descends, bringing the checkered floor — the hallmark cliché of early 3D modeling — into clearer view.

A robotic man glides toward the divan and its occupant as the point of view comes around. He lobs something onto the coffee table before her: A magazine, which glides to its resting point with no sense of inertia. On the cover is a photo of the woman to whom the magazine has been presented, captured in the act of riddling a massive yeti with bullets.

If going up to a Japanese game shop and asking for “If I Were Locked in a Room With a Girl, I Might Wind Up Doing…” wasn’t embarrassing enough for you, Spike has just the thing — a new PSP RPG whose name translates to “Please Give Birth to My Child!”

Conception: Ore no Kodomo o Unde kure!, announced this week in the pages of Famitsu magazine, is an anime-styled fantasy RPG with the sort of plot that only anime fans might truly appreciate. It starts Itsuki Yuge, a shiftless, unmotivated high-school kid who, with his pregnant cousin Mahiru, is thrown into the world of Granvania and charged with saving this realm from a mysterious spreading miasma. Only the offspring between the chosen one (i.e. Itsuki) and one of the divine maidens of the zodiac can fend off this menace, and so Itsuki has to…well, you know.

This year we won’t be getting any new Rock Band or Guitar Hero games for the first time since 2004. Guitar Hero was officially put on the back burner earlier this year. Rock Band isn’t necessarily dead, even if we aren’t getting a new game this year. The year (or perhaps more) off isn’t just time being used to think of the next instrument to introduce — future iterations of the series may end up being much different.

Sales of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band have declined in recent years. Many point to Activision flooding the market with Guitar Hero releases (each having a version packaged with a plastic guitar) as the cause of that. Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos told Giant Bomb that he thinks “there is probably some truth to that,” but it’s more complicated than a simple explanation like that suggests.

Time: Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. PDT
Location: Check out our live blog above.

Level-5 typically has a big presence at the Tokyo Game Show. That wasn’t the case this year; the prolific Japanese developer and publisher instead opted to host its own two-day event, Level-5 World, this weekend in Tokyo. Boss Akihiro Hino has stated there will be in the neighborhood of ten unreleased games on display and several new game announcements.

Level-5 held its annual Vision press conference in Tokyo last night (Saturday morning in Japan) for nearly two hours. It covered a great variety of games, among them the absolutely gorgeous Ni No Kuni, which was confirmed again to be headed to North America and Europe in 2012, now with Namco Bandai attached as publisher. We learned that Professor Layton has a son who will be starring in Layton Brothers Mystery Room, a reworked version of DS title Mystery Room that is now coming to iOS. The Gundam Age game made an appearance and we heard about how the aim is to make something for a younger audience fans in order to create a new generation of Gundam fans.

In addition to the conference, also taking place this weekend is Level-5 World, a two-day event being held for the first time ever. You can check out our liveblog for a recap of the conference and flip through our gallery to get a look at pictures and video from the ensuing event. Click on any of the photos for a larger view.

This week’s issue of Famitsu magazine brought the first word on Shining Blade, latest in the long-running Shining series of sometimes-strategy, sometimes-action RPGs and the second one to find release on the PSP. The new game will look and sound familiar to fans, chiefly because series standbys Tony Taka (character design) and Yuki Kikuda (music) are contributing to the project.

The story concerns Rage, a young man who bears a mystical “Soul Blade,” and Altina, a princess with the power to conjure up spirits through singing. They’re journeying in hopes of restoring the earth’s magical spirits, though exactly how they’re doing this isn’t revealed yet — Famitsu’s preview mostly consisted of background renders and character art. What is known, however, is that the fighting system will borrow a page or two from BLiTZ, the pseudo-realtime strategy system used in Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles games. Hopefully this will provide a shot of novelty to a series which could probably use it.

Three Square Enix RPGs have been given firm (re-)release dates on the PlayStation Network. While none of them come as a surprise thanks to ESRB leaks from earlier in the year, fans should be excited about the chance to play this selection of classic titles on PS3, PSN, and (starting next year) Vita.

Square Enix is labeling these three releases as the Winter of RPGs campaign. Despite what the name would suggest, you won’t have to wait for winter to officially begin to start playing any of them — in fact, all three will be out weeks before winter even begins.

Starting later this month, you’ll have to stop sharing content with others and/or become more selective about which PlayStation 3 or PlayStation Portable systems have access to your downloadable game content.

In an announcement on the PlayStation Blog today, Sony announced plans to make game content accessible on only two activated PS3 or PSP systems at any one time. Should you download the game on two systems and want to bring it to a third, you’ll have to deactivate one of the first two before doing so.