Colin will probably be at his pad because he's frightfully groovy.

This is good news.  Microsoft have finally realised that the d-pad on their 360 controllers is marginally worse than Hitler.  They are working on a new pad that allows you to change the height of the d-pad with a quick twist, making such things as hadukens and whatever possible.

They (some R&D prick) say “The Xbox 360 Wireless Controller with Play & Charge Kit – with Transforming D-pad will be available worldwide beginning early 2011.”

That’s a mouthful.  Not quite as clumsy as the PSP Slim & Lite but still pretty awful.  Still, if it’ll up our scores on Pac-Man: CE then we’re all over this.

Game Room bringing its A-game.

As huge fans of retro, PEOWW was eagerly awaiting the Xbox Live Game Room.  The idea of playing our fave coin-op ROMs over Xbox Live with online challenges, highscore tracking and achievements had us harder than Super Contra.

Unfortunately after their first week of releases (a mix of terrible arcade games, Intellivision filth and pointless fucking Atari 2600 roms) we knew that Game Room was doomed.  The occasional pathologically argumentative retro forum shut-in idiot might have claimed differently, but anyone with any nous knew we weren’t going to be getting anything good on there for a long, long time.  If ever.  Our dreams of challenging other Peowwsters to high score challenges on Bomb Jack were in ashes.

Well, the team that brought us this traversty – Krome Studios – are finding that their careers are also in ashes with the closure of their Adelaide office and several layoffs.  They still had time to give us Atari 2600 versions (read: abortions) of Checkers and Pinball this week though.  So that’s something.

For a hero, you're quite a hypocrite!

Dead Rising was already out by the time PEOWW said its first tentative swear-words but, if we’d been around to review it, it would have gotten a big, fat, sexy 10/10.  It was that good.  That doesn’t mean we’re crazily excited by the sequel though, not after Crackdown 2 anyway.

We did however notice this little box of trinkets.  The Dead Rising 2: High Stakes Edition is only available via pre-ordering at Capcom’s site and features 100 poker chips, two decks of cards, a Fortune City map, a nice black case and the game.  It also gives you a downloadable code for the Pyscho DLC pack – ugh… day one DLC.  Expectation levels dropping.

Also, one lucky buyer will get a life-size zombie statue of Burt the zombie to eBay immediately to some idiot.

Operation: Cheap Plastic Tat

Xbox Live Party Chat is quite the popular thing here at  PEOWW mainly as it stopped us having to play Bomberman: Live online if we fancied a quick natter.

The only problem is that Xbox voice comms are beyond awful with voice packets being dropped constantly and the rest being muffled by the cheap piece of shit they call a headset.

Well, Microsoft are soon going to be updating the service with new codecs and more bandwidth meaning that we can all enjoy being sworn at by twelve-year old Call of Duty cunts in a slightly clearer way.  Bonus!

This was Vegas.

Warner Bros have canned their upcoming sandboxer This Is Vegas after three years, and almost $50m, in development.  With the finished game rumoured to be at least eight months away, Warner Bros decided to pull the plug completely.

The game, originally one of Midway’s projects before they went under and it was picked up by WB who, with Vegas‘s production costs spiralling to at least a quarter of a million dollars per month, have decided that maybe another blaverage GTA clone probably won’t recoup enough of their outlay to bother pursuing it.

Warner Bros haven’t confirmed the story yet.  So if it’s wrong blame whoever it was we stole it from.

No... I will not buy the sequel.

We weren’t too fussed with the original Saw game here at PEOWW but it’s a slow news day and so here’s some info about the sequel nobody wants.

Saw: Flesh and Blood has been lined up for release in October and, according to some bloke at Konami, will  “new traps and puzzles, more visceral combat, and an all-new storyline that takes place between the first and second movies.”

Its release will coincide with the cinema release of Saw 3D, the seventh and final chapter in the series.  We’re not sure which one we’re awaiting less.  Okay, it’s the game frankly.

At least it's not a picture of Shirley Crabtree.

Ken Levine, creator of Bioshock, has been speaking at Gamescom about Bioshock: Infinite, saying that he’s ready to bring the mystery back.  The only mystery about Bioshock was how they managed to make such a dull collection of fetch quests out of such a good setting.  But anyway.

“One of the most important things to us was bringing the mystery back to the franchise,” he said. “When BioShock 1 came out people were like, ‘what? What am I seeing here? What is this?’

Yeah, we here at PEOWW were like ‘argh!  What’s this green case?  Argh!  There’s a shiny disc in it!  Arghhh!  The disc goes in the white thing that says Xbox on it.  WHAT IS IT?  WHAT IN GOD’S NAME IS IT?!  What’s this vibrating, plastic thing in my hands.  Why is the flat, bright thing in this room showing images.  What is a plane?  Argh!  Why can the flat thing talk to me in a bad Irish accent.

Bioshock was as mysterious as Doom 3.  Now shut up and make something as good as System Shock again. 

Lynch.

We don’t think we’ll be reviewing Kane and Lynch 2 here at PEOWW.  There’s a few reasons.

Firstly, as one of our forumers, P Wee, has noted there’s the issue of ‘why the fuck are they persisting with this shit when they should be making a new Hitman.’  We’d go one further and say a new Freedom Fighters but the point stands.

Then there’s the fact that Kane and Lynch wasn’t very good.  Although it had fleeting moments of interest, everything about it was so poorly put together that we’re not even sure why IO are even allowed to make games anymore.

Mostly though, it’s the fact that sources are saying the main campaign lasts FOUR HOURS which presumably means the focus is on playing against bastards online.  Thanks but we’re too lazy to find IO’s press email address and far too clever to buy this fucking lemon.  The demo was pants anyway.