4 new shots posted.

Here’s a Call of Duty: Black Ops trailer featuring the Berlin Wall, one of five new maps for the First Strike downloadable content.

We traverse back to Three Kingdoms-era China and find a few surprises in the latest of this long-running series.

You may think that after six Dynasty Warriors games, there’s little new to discover in this sprawling hack-and-slash series. Tecmo Koei is hoping to pleasantly surprise cynics with the newest addition–Dynasty Warriors 7–by adding in a considerable amount of new content, particularly in the form of a brand new faction that comes with its own set of new characters and battles.

Dynasty Warriors games have long focused on the three warring clans of Shu, Wu, and Wei, but Dynasty Warriors 7 will for the first time include the Jin clan. For those of you up-to-speed on the original historical Chinese novels the Dynasty Warriors game are based on–Romance of the Three Kingdoms–the Jin was (spoiler alert) actually the clan that ended up ruling China after this tumultuous period.

As such, Dynasty Warriors 7 will include new battles in which to fight in, as well as including several new Jin generals for players to take control of. With dozens of playable generals already available in Wu, Shu, and Wei, there won’t be any shortage of characters to take on the massive hordes of soldiers you’ll be up against in this game.

The story, too, is supposedly taking a more realistic turn. In previous games, any clan was able to “win” power over China, but history clearly shows that there was only one winner amidst many losers. Dynasty Warrior 7′s narrative will now more closely resemble those events.

Game play, too, has been enhanced, both in minor and major ways. The biggest addition is the ability to wield different weapons for each character, as opposed to having one weapon which you can find upgraded versions of as in previous Dynasty Warriors titles.

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We slip and slide all over the place in this eccentric platformer.

The Fancy Pants Adventure is a game about pants. More specifically, fancy pants. Well, at least that’s the goal. You don’t start out the game with fancy pants. In fact, the pants you begin the game with are downright plain. All solid colors and whatnot.

But the more time you spend with this eccentric 2D platformer, the more pants you unlock. We’re talking plaid pants, striped pants…you name it. All the pants you can imagine!

Yes, The Fancy Pants Adventure is an extremely silly game. If you dig below the surface, however, what you’ve got is a fairly straightforward core: It’s a 2D side-scrolling platformer in which you attempt to run and jump in a generally left-to-right direction across a variety of treacherous levels. But layered on top of all of that is a thick smattering of ridiculousness.

Fancy Pants, based on a free Flash game by then-college student Brad Borne, is presented in a hand-drawn stick-figure art style that feels more than a little bit like you’re peering at someone’s notebook doodles. The controls are also quite different from most platformers because building momentum speed plays a huge role in how you move about the levels–you’re basically sliding all over the place as though running on ice.

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GDC 2011: Rockstar San Diego’s Western triumphs at Game Developers Conference’s annual ceremony; Mass Effect 2, Limbo, Minecraft, also honored.

Each year, the Game Developers Conference‘s crowning event is the Game Developers Choice Awards, one of the most prestigious ceremonies in gaming. Hosted once again by the comically gifted head of Double Fine Productions, Tim Schafer, the evening wasted no time in getting started, awarding the Best Audio trophy to Red Dead Redemption.

After making a crack about his onetime legal foe Activision CEO Bobby Kotick, Schafer went on to introduce the Best Debut category, which was won by Independent Games Festival Grand Prize winner Minecraft from Mojang. Interactive Achievement Awards Game of the Year Mass Effect 2 picked up the trophy for Best Writing, often an augury for the GDCA’s Game of the Year.

Moving on to Best Game Design, Red Dead Redemption rode off with the trophy, putting another notch in developer Rockstar San Diego’s belt. Minecraft got another trophy for Best Downloadable Game, as well as the Innovation Award, leaving game co-creator Markus Persson virtually speechless.

Best Visual Arts went to Playdead’s Xbox Live game Limbo, which was also the subject of one of the night’s various skits by nerd-comedy troupe Mega64. Best Handheld Game was won by ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope.

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GDC 2011: Creative director behind EA’s 2010 multiplatform hoops game explains how the team decided what was kept and what was tossed for a new console take on the hit arcade franchise.

Who was there: EA Sports creative director Trey Smith was on hand for a presentation titled “Bringing back the ‘BOOMSHAKALAKA!’”

What they talked about: Smith opened his talk by explaining the origin of the new NBA Jam, which wasn’t an NBA Jam at all. At first, Smith was told to make a Wii basketball game for kids where the only thing players had to worry about was dribbling the ball virtually with the Wii Remote. The game became Bounce, which was an original intellectual property that was essentially inspired by NBA Jam. When they nabbed the NBA Jam license, Smith said the team partied like rock stars that night.

However, they woke up the next day and realized the enormity of the task ahead of them. In 1993, the original NBA Jam brought in billion in arcades, Smith said. That’s more than three times the highest grossing film of the year, Jurassic Park.

To start with, Smith said the team invoked “The Sequel Rule of Thirds.” One-third of the game had to be the same as before, to “take players back to their Happy Place.” The next third of the game had to be improved over the original. Enhance the recipe, but don’t change it so much that the audience doesn’t like the taste anymore. The final third had to be all new, taking the franchise places it had never been before. But above all, Smith emphasized the need to be true to the source material.

As for what to keep the same to appeal to the hardcore fanbase, Smith pointed to the arcade-style features of the original NBA Jam. It had to have over-the-top dunks, Big Head mode, players catching on fire, backboard shattering dunks, and a strong multiplayer component. (He remembered it being a vary rare sight to have just one person at the old four-player Jam arcade cabinets.) Finally, there was the amped-up play-by-play announcer yelling “BOOMSHAKALAKA!”

That announcer, Chicago actor Tim Kitzrow, wound up being part of the one-third of the game Smith said was kept the same. Mark Turmell was another returning face from the original NBA Jam development team. Turmell, who Smith described as “the godfather of arcade sports,” was enlisted to work on the NBA Jam revamp a few months after development began.

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Tecmo Koei teases reveal of blood-spattered sequel at upcoming convention; game to ship sometime in 2012; first trailer inside.

Last year at the Tokyo Game Show, Tecmo Koei unveiled Ninja Gaiden III, the upcoming installment in the ultraviolent–and ultradifficult–action series. Little was revealed about the game, other than it would once again feature protagonist Ryu Hayabusa engaged in the bloody combat the franchise is known for.

Today, Tecmo Koei released the first teaser trailer for the game, which also teased the title’s brutal nature. Running around 37 seconds, the clip shows Ryu Hayabusa repeatedly slashing and stabbing someone–from the victim’s point of view. The clip then shows the titular ninja, covered in blood, leaning back to take off his famed mask–and then cuts to the Japanese character for the number three. The words “unmask” and “E3 2011″ then appear before the trailer ends.

The accompanying press release–which never mentions Ninja Gaiden III by name–promises that the “new title” will see release sometime in 2012. Development is underway at Team Ninja under the leadership of the studio’s leader, Yosuke Hayashi. Hayashi took over the shop after former head Tomonobu Itagaki left the company following Ninja Gaiden II’s release in 2008.

“The game is set to introduce this franchise to a broader audience while at the same time retaining the legendary challenge that has drawn hardcore gamers to the series for years,” Tecmo Koei said in a statement. The company promised that a playable demo of the game would be on hand for the press at E3.

We make our way through a slimier version of Aperture Science in a two-hour hands-on demo of Portal 2′s single-player campaign.

“Say apple,” Wheatley commands, surveying you with his twitchy blue eye. You go to speak, but end up jumping on the spot instead. “I don’t want to alarm you,” he starts, trying to keep his voice steady, “but you probably have brain damage. Not to worry, though. We’ll probably be okay. I mean, you know, as long as nothing else goes wrong.”

Plenty of things went wrong during our two-hour hands-on demo of Portal 2′s single-player campaign at Valve’s headquarters near Seattle. We made our way through the opening chapters of the game, before skipping ahead to a new section in the latter-part of the campaign.

Portal 2′s beginning is familiar enough: Chell, alone in a room. It’s not the cold, sterile environment we’ve seen before; this new room is a vast improvement–carpeted floors, a wardrobe, a desk, potted plants, and even art. But something just doesn’t feel right.

The new AI caretaker is male, for one. His baritone voice breaks out over the loudspeakers, instructing you to move around and get used to your surroundings. If you’re feeling up to it, he chirps, you can do some basic mental stimulation exercises by staring intently at the framed painting that hangs above your bed.

Or, if that doesn’t do it for you, he can always provide some classical music. You’re just beginning to think about requesting Bach’s Organ Concerto in G when you lose consciousness; you come to in the same room, although you barely recognize it now: vines creep along the walls, the carpet is a mushy brown color, and the desk and wardrobe have fallen into disuse and decay.

And suddenly, there’s Wheatley (brilliantly voiced by Stephen Merchant)–the neurotic caretaker of Aperture’s 10,000 test subjects–telling you that the whole place is collapsing and you have to escape, now.

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Activision’s music games getting new content thanks to “continued support” from fans despite publisher’s decision to disband business.

Two weeks ago Activision disbanded its Guitar Hero business and said it would cease to release new songs for both DJ Hero and Guitar Hero after February. Now, the publisher has pulled a 180, saying both games will score additional downloadable content.

According to the official Twitter feeds of Guitar Hero and
DJ Hero, both games will enjoy at least one more track pack thanks to fans’ “continued support” for both brands. The Twitter streams did not state which songs will be available in the upcoming packs or affix a release date to them.

For more on the franchises in question, check out GameSpot’s reviews of DJ Hero 2 and Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock.

We take a first look at Platinum Games’ chaotic multiplayer brawler.

As the Anarchy Reigns demonstration wraps up, producer Atsushi Inaba addresses the problem of assimilating what we’ve just seen: “There was so much going on and there’s no way we can explain every single thing that happened here.” He’s not wrong. Our first look at the game, variously described as an online action combat game and a third-person multiplayer brawler, was a violent whirlwind of leggy cyborgs, berserker mutants, tsunamis, black holes, and carpet bombing in the ruins of a postapocalyptic city.

And though we say “post”-apocalyptic, it’s not clear if the city was ruined before or while the game’s freak-show cast set about each other with chainsaw arms and spiked maces, dodging smartbombs and collapsing bridges and giant saw blades as they went. The presentation is light on the game’s fiction. What little is said about the game’s single-player story mode amounts to: “It has one.” The focus is unambiguously on online multiplayer action.

That online multiplayer action has groups of players clobbering each other across large stages while natural and unnatural disasters wreak havoc around them. It’s “basically a fighting game,” says Inaba-san, “but with not only a couple of characters fighting each other.” The roster of fighters revealed so far is a motley cyborg crew, each more or less human according to how much nanotech-enabled body modification they have undergone: cybernetic bovine Bull, ninja-like Zero, MadWorld’s Jack Cayman, and frosty femme Sasha, with two more MadWorld cameos (pimp caricature The Black Baron and Mathilda of the nipple spikes) unveiled for this demonstration.

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