I'll be your Huckleberry.

In a move that’ll please bounty hunters and outlaws alike, Rockstar have issued an ultimatum to  the cheating scum who are ruining Red Dead: Redemption online.  The cheats have been using hacked weapons and abilities to lord it over good honest folks but now they now have until the 24th of this month to repent for their sins and delete their cheaty save games and log back in to the game.  Failure to do so will lead to a revolver’s worth of ban-bullets at motherfucking high noon for the pesky varmints who refuse to comply. 

Well done, Rockstar.  It’s good to see a dev team taking this kind of thing seriously.  Hopefully EA will learn from your good work in time for FIFA 2011.

Seabass, earlier.

Anyone still remember when the Pro Evo series was good?  It was a while ago now but we here at PEOWW used to love it.  A lot.  Then it  got all rubbishy leaving a Fat Fwank sized opportunity for EA which they took with both hands.

Anyway, Konami have moved the date forward for PES: Whatever. It will now launch just a week after FIFA 2011.  Konami have, rather bullishly, attributed this move the fact that PES is apparently going to be good this year, thanks to the annually-repeated Seabass dogshit of “smarter AI” and “revamped passing” and whatever else, although we’ll be amazed if our first play doesn’t involve us battering the opposing keeper before losing 1-0 thanks to a badly spilled save and a cheeky tap-in [1].

Basically we don’t care but equally we’re getting very bored of EA’s efforts now as well so hopefully Konami can get the series back on track , if only to spark EA out of their current sequence of minimalist yearly (more if you include their national tournament games) updates.

[1] Otherwise known as Seabass’s Law.

Fact x Importance.

Purveyors of filthy propaganda, Fox News, are super pissed at EA thanks to Medal of Honor‘s multiplayer mode which will literally let you be the Taliban.  The mode, which does sound a tad sketch to be honest, has you shooting US troops which is absolutely not on.  They are still fine with you killing the Chinese and, you know, Mexicans though.

Their extended report feature dragged in the families of dead troops.  Including the mother of one who said “Right now, we’re going into a really, really, bad time in Afghanistan. We’ve just come off of the worst month of casualties in the whole war. This game is going to be released in October, so families that are burying their children are going to be seeing this… It’s disrespectful.”

EA have yet to say if the mode will involve any shooting or if it’s just a tedious ten-year campaign of putting bombs down and running away.  Either way we’re not arsed.  Medal of Honor is going to be completely overshadowed by Tom Clancy’s next Mexican Ninja sim anyway, and Fox have probably just increased pre-orders of MoH by 3000%.

The bad news is I don't give a fuck.

In a fate that mirrors that of the Diff’rent Strokes cast, it seems that everyone who had any part in the cult classic sandboxer Crackdown is now cursed.  The much-loved game was developed by Realtime Worlds who then split.  Part of the team formed Ruffian Games who were responsible for the incredibly blaverage Crackdown 2.

The rest of Realtime Worlds went on to finish APB, a hideously blaverage cops and robbers MMO title that spent over five years in development.  Bad reviews and little interest from PC gamers has meant that Realtime Worlds are paying the price with several redundancies announced last week and the studio dropping into administration this week.

A skeleton staff of fifty will continue to maintain APB but the future is looking bleak for the Scottish development team.

Tony Hawk about to do something "gnarly."

So when did you fall out of love with the Tony Hawk games?  For PEOWW the malaise started with the good-but-tiresome THPS4, but it wasn’t until the fratboy Bam Margera love-in of Tony Hawk: Underground that we began to actively despise the series.

We quite liked the back-to-basics approach of American Wasteland though but were beaten into submission by the joylessly tough Project 8.  As for Proving Grounds and Ride well no, neither did we.  After SKATE, the Tony Hawk games are an annoying irrelevance at best.

Well just like Gazza, it refuses to die and Tony Hawk: Shred is next up.  In a move that rips off their own excellent American Sk8land on the DS, the new game will be cell-shaded and aimed straight at da kidz.  On the plus side that might mean that they’ll tone down ‘sick’ mode as that’s been unbelievably harsh recently.  Expect the plot to involve raising cash by generating “sick footie” or some nonsense. 

Tony Hawk: Shred is expected to land Q4, 2010.

A-number 1.

If there’s one thing that PEOWW is bored of, it’s the Duke Nukem Forever saga.  The first game was great at the time – the XBLA version revealed some high-strength rose-tint on our spectacles though – and yeah, maybe in 1999 we might have given a fuck about the proposed sequel.

After a decade’s worth of vapourware nonsense, 3D Realms mercifully shuffled off of this mortal coil.  Probably due to them taking ten years to make a fucking FPS.

Anyway, Gearbox (the team behind the relentless raping of Borderlands) have apparently taken on the project.  Details are sketchy right now but expect DNF to hit the shelves some time around April 20IDONTGIVEAFUCKANYMORE.