For those of you that played and completed Ratchet and Clank: Quest for Booty, you probably remember the sly message after the credits, saying “The Quest Continues Fall 2009.” Insomniac Games made good on their promise, announcing Ratchet and Clank: A Crack In Time, the last of the PS3 trilogy, at GDC this past week. At the time, all we received was a short description, a title, and a logo. As of now, we haven’t even seen any gameplay for it- but we do have this brand new teaser trailer, courtesy of GameTrailers.

The trailer, as you see above, has a mysterious voiceover explaining the concept of time, and the people that seek to control it, one of them probably being Dr. Nefarious from Quest for Booty. As you near the end of the monologue, a Lombax is revealed as the mysterious voice, which probably hints to their possibly pivotal part of A Crack in Time. This trailer also gives an official time frame for the game, so you can look forward to it hitting the Playstation Network in fall of this year.

Tonight was the Spike TV VGAs, and though the show pretty much tanked as usual, I have to say that some of the footage shown during the show piqued my interest a lot.

If you didn’t see the trailers that were shown during the VGAs, you can catch every one of them after the jump, and you can even see the opening skit from the VGAs, of Jack Black having sex with various consoles above. Disturbing.
Trailer for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Trailer for God of War III:

Trailer for Watchmen: The End Is Nigh

Trailer for Mafia II:

Trailer for Brütal Legend:

Trailer for Terminator: Salvation:

GameInformer has finally confirmed the long-awaited sequel to Naughty Dog’s debut PlayStation 3 game, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. As you might be able to tell, the new game, entitled Uncharted 2:Among Thieves, will feature a radically different setting- snow. This time, Drake is chasing the treasure of 13th century explorer Marco Polo, and the game will feature a “free-climbing” mechanic and a stealth system. Hit the jump for the first trailer.

The full trailer will run at the Spike TV video awards on Sunday December 14. Can’t wait- this is sure to be a fantastic game, bearing Naughty Dog’s histroy of great games in mind.

Via Shacknews.

Announced at Nintendo’s lackluster E3 conference and remembered as that game that was somehow related to the internet’s most famous soccer mom breaking her wrist, Shaun White Snowboarding is a snowboarding game sponsored by pro boarder Shaun White. It utilizes the Wii Fit’s gyration/motion-sensing technology to make you feel like you’re actually jumping up and down on a $90 box thing jumping off of the Alps on a snowboard. Well, in the Wii version, that is.

Not being one to show the least visually-appealing version, today Ubisoft released the first trailer and screenshots for the Playstation 3/Xbox 360 versions of the game, which you can see in the gallery after the jump.

Since I haven’t yet been convinced to pluck down 90 bucks for Wii Fit, I’m glad that they’ve gone multiplatform with the game. I just hope that they don’t try to force a gyration/motion sensing peripheral on all the console owners that are interested in the game. It looks beautiful to say the least, and the inclusion of online snowboarding with friends is tempting. Chances are we’ll be seeing more of the game before it hits retail in Q4 of 2008.

In an interview with Rockstar, the German website Cynamite.de revealed that we should expect a fourth trailer for the highly anticipated game. It would be naive to think that if they weren’t working on trailers the game would come sooner, but I’d like to say – stop working on trailers and get on with the game.

This story has now been removed from the website, which could be suggest that this news was untrue, or that Rockstar didn’t want the news to get out. In my eyes all publicity is good publicity, so take that Rockstar, here’s the rumour for all to see.

Via Neogaf

As we previously reported, Xbox Live has not been having a good time, what with all the disconnects and general wonkiness. All this was meant to be fixed by the end of the weekend.

Well, the weekend is officially over and the service is officially “getting better” – so says Major Nelson.

Given that my beloved Live is now working again, I “jumped in” to reminisce about all of the things that made me enjoy Xbox Live in the first place.

So, without further ado, I present to you the Top 5 Reasons to Love Xbox Live!

5. Universal Gamertag – No matter what game I play, my Gamertag is the same. People that meet me on Call of Duty 4 can see my tag again later in any other game, and they know I’m the same guy.

The last people you played with show up in a “players list”, which if I look at now… wait… oh, I guess I haven’t played with anybody, EVER, because my players list is empty. Weird…

4. Friends List – Unlike other services, which I refuse to mention, my friends list is tied to my Gamertag, so I can always see what my friends are doing – watching a movie, playing any game, etc.

For example, right now all of my friends are… uh… I guess they are all offline. Either that, or I’m not really online. Hmmm…..

No you won’t Robbie, nobody will be

3. Marketplace - The Marketplace is awesome, offering movies, television shows, original Xbox games, Live Arcade games, demos and trailers for upcoming 360 games.

They just released a demo for Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom that I really want to check out, but I’m unable to retrieve content from the Marketplace.

2. Media Center – If you have a Media Center PC, you can easily stream movies, pictures, and music from your computer to your TV through your 360. Even non-Media Center PCs can do most of this without any problems.

Right now a friend of mine “found” I Am Legend on his PC, so we’re going to watch it on his big-screen. What? You must sign in to view this content? I thought I was signed in? And why would I need to sign in to look at crap on my PC, er, his PC anyways? Well, never mind. I guess we’ll actually go pay for it and watch it in the theater like suckers.

1. You’re Always Connected – From the moment I turn my 360 on, my Gamertag auto-signs me in, and I am connected to everything – Marketplace, Friends, my PC. I can launch a game and immediately get into multiplayer, or I can join a friend’s game in progress.

This is something I would love to do right now, but whenever I attempt to do so my dashboard screams obscenities at me (not that I could see or connect to any of my friends anyways). This is the best feature Xbox Live offers, and it’s the one thing that gets people to pay to upgrade to a Gold membership. So that begs the question: What exactly am I paying Microsoft for again?

So as you can see, there is plenty to love about Xbox Live. I wish I could love those things right now, but I can’t.

For me, Xbox Live is the worst it’s ever been, so I’m not quite sure what language Major Nelson was speaking when he said the service is “getting better”.

Major Nelson and his bottle of lies

Hopefully Microsoft realizes that they need to apologize to all the Live subscribers if they wish to keep us as just that – paying subscribers. And by apologize, I mean I want some free shit… or some cake.

Odd, and entirely true; Square Enix put a trailer for the new installment of their much-loved series online – and then tried to prevent fans from getting to it.

It seems you’re only worthy enough to see the video if you are both a registered SE member and have a serial number from the Star Ocean 1 remake on PSP– which was only released today, in Japan. Plus, there’s no scheduled European or North American release date.

All that effort, just for a trailer? If there’s method to this madness, then we don’t see it. Good thing some bright spark went and youtube’d it. There’s nothing on show in terms of plot or game mechanics, but it’s gorgeous enough to set your tongues wagging at any rate.

Whoever said Squenix was a cocktease when it comes to trailers?

It’s been roughly a year-and-a-half since Final Fantasy XIII’s original announcement and the developers still have very little to show for it. Though the initial footage of protagonist Lightning is still quite impressive, the average gamer’s only been treated to what amounts to remixed teasers since, and the press hasn’t gotten it much better. We plebeians had to settle for artists reproductions and second-hand reports of what transpired behind closed doors at both E3 and the Tokyo Game Show.

Is this fair? In purely technical terms, sure. Square-Enix can show whatever they want, whenever they want, to whoever they want. But this kind of behavior doesn’t instill much confidence in their products, hurting not only the game’s image in terms of potential consumers and Final Fantasy fans all over the globe, but also Sony’s bottom line. FFXIII/Versus have always been a feather in the PS3’s cap, with many claiming they won’t even consider purchasing the console until the games actually hit. Take a step back into history and you’ll notice that Playstation sales didn’t really start to pick up until Final Fantasy VII was released. This could be a major breadwinner for Sony (and Square-Enix), but with each delay and each trailer being shown behind closed doors, that potential slips more and more.

Is it a signal of troubled development? Most likely. It’s always tough getting a new development platform off the ground and, no doubt, the White Engine has posed some nasty problems. We also know what might happen when footage is shown of a game in an unplayable state. Often acceptable by press standards, unleashing video of unpolished gameplay on the public could be disastrous. Just look at what happened to Silicon Knights and their unfortunate showing of Too Human just a couple E3s ago. Denis Dyack become persona non grata at forums all over the internet.

While that’s a legitimate fear, the frustration seems to come more from the idea that Square-Enix should have something to show at this point. There seemed to be no major problems with the trailer at TGS, which showcased more of Versus’ concept, as well as several new characters. Then again, even that wasn’t playable. Could we honestly be in for another FFXII? And that was one game. Imagine three (all part of Fabula Nova Crystallis), each with its own troubled development cycle. Is this what happens when a next-gen game gets way too ambitious for its own good?

For now, all we can do is sit on our hands and wait and consume whatever scraps actually get thrown our way. The recently-announced Kingdom Hearts games are also being shown in the closed theatre, but I think we can all give those a little more leeway. Just about everything else is the standard fare.

Here’s the full listing of what Square-Enix has to offer at Jump Festa ‘08:

• Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker (Playable)
• Dragon Quest IV (???)
• Final Fantasy IV (Playable)
• Chocobo’s Mysterious Dungeon (Video)
• Dissidia: Final Fantasy (Video)
• Kingdom Hearts: 358/2 Days (Video – New)
• Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep (Video – New)
• Kingdom Hearts: Coded (Video – New)
• Fabula Nova Crystallis [FFXIII/Versus/Agito] (Video – New)
• Final Fantasy VII AC: Complete (Video – New)
• Star Ocean: First Departure (Video)
• Front Mission 2009: Border of Madness (Video)

As many of the trailers are listed as being new, we might just get something out of this yet.