Cliffy B made some comments at the Gears of War movie panel at Comic-Con that might interest you. The man has put it in no uncertain terms that “I know people have ideas where they want to see some wrestler, some huge buff guy” we agree. But he added also instead of a wrestler “The thing we care most about is charisma, someone you’d want to watch for two hours.”

From our side we would love to see The Rock in the Gears movie. He could make anything work and thinking wrestlers don’t have charisma is a deadly idea, after all they all have work persona’s to work with and The Rock is a genuine action hero. As a fan of the Doom movie (yes, it’s true) I thought The Rock was the best thing in it and im a fan of almost all his movies. Steve Austin though I don’t think would fit.

If Cliffy is looking for plain actors to play the heroes in Gears who would you want? If it has to be a non-wrestler why not Thomas Jane or John Travolta?

We have had a huge response to our old is GTA the end of PC gaming article and new things have come up. In the newest event the ESRB listed on their ratings website that Grand Theft Auto IV would be receiving an M for Mature rating on the Windows PC in addition to the 360 and PS3 versions already in existence. Having the ESRB leak that a game is to come out on PC is not a surprise at all with several titles over the years all being leaked/announced via ESRB.

Rockstar haven’t issued a denial at time of press although normally they share the same default setting in terms of statements as Microsoft with a “no comment” being the standard even if the rumours are true. If GTA4 does come out on the PC it won’t be unexpected but it would be welcome just as long as a supercomputer is not required to run it at a good enough graphical setting to make things interesting.

Screenshot source: Game-on-Game

Cryptic Studios, the developer behind the Champions Online MMORPG has had a countdown timer on their website’s main page for several months now. On Monday the countdown expires and we get to see what they plan to announce.

There is one theory widely thought to be the truth around the net. Back in January, Perpetual Entertainment announced it was no longer developing Star Trek Online. Then their was talk about how all assets for the game they had worked on bar code had been transferred to a San Francisco development studio. Since that time nothing has been known about Star Trek Online other than this.

What did come around several months ago was the Cryptic Studios timer with it’s space background. Since they would need time to develop something to show it makes sense that Cryptic would work towards a grand announcement and in just a few days time we will finally get some answers. Given the less than great graphics and gameplay shown by Stargate Worlds recently perhaps Star Trek Online could be the last hope for serious TV sci-fi fans.

There was one element that was seen as a terrible idea when Perpetual was in charge for Trek and that was how larger starships would be static hubs online. We can only hope this has been removed and players can run free across the galaxy with whole starships filled with players.

Wallace & Gromit, two of my most favourite animated characters, will be converted into video game form by Telltale Games, the guys behind the great Sam & Max line of episodic adventure games. The series will be titled “Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures” which sounds like a pretty decent, yet generic title.

The game will work along the lines of Sam & Max, but knowing Wallace & Gromit, it should be an easy adaptation. It will also most likely involve a lot of building and zany contraptions. We still have no clear details on this game, but I’d expect it to be an adventure game. I mean seriously, you thought it would be a first person shooter?

Telltale will be really working on this one to give it the clay look. Hell, I didn’t think the screenshot you see above was CG! It’d be really nice to interact with Wallace & Gromit in their native medium! Interestingly, while the claymation in Wallace & Gromit is pretty simple, Telltale is still working hard on it:

“Clay presents a challenge if you really get into the detail of it. For example, adding fingerprints in a medium where there aren’t any is one of the discussions of how far we should go with the game’s detail.”

No idea on the whens and whats of this game, but a good guess would be that the game wouldn’t come around anywhere this year.

Movie video game tie-ins aren’t news, but what Warner Bros. is trying to go with them is. Warner has announced that they will be experimenting with downloadable tie-in games for Watchmen and two are already in the works!

The first will be around the release of the movie (i.e. March 2009), while the second will arrive shortly after the DVD release. What’s more, if these two games end up successful, Warner will go ahead with further episodes.

Seeing the sorry fate of movie-based video games was probably what spurred Warner into action. The downloadable format means that the game will be shorter and more appealing to the fans. According to Warner, this model will end up better at pleasing fans and critics, which is definitely going to be a tough task.

Interestingly, the source article at Variety also says that if the series ends up successfull, there might even be future pics tie-ins with the games. We’re not sure if a downloadable series can get that successful, so we’re just gonna go with a “Yeah, right” for now.

Right now we know that the first game will be released for the PC, Xbox 360 and PS3. It will be developed by Danish developer Deadline Games. I checked out their Wikipedia entry and I don’t see any titles ringing any bells. The game will feature Rorshach and Nite Owl battling crime.

This would mean that the game is something of a prequel to Watchmen, where a close friendship between Rorshach and Nite Owl as crimefighting buddies is hinted at. Would be great to see this in the form of a video game, but again, we’re totally not sure if this is gonna work.

It’s nice to see that the major PC developers are taking some steps to actually evolve the PC Gaming scene rather than bitch about piracy and low sales. While Valve has announced their revolutionary Steam Cloud and experimented with episodic gaming, id will be doing some experiments of their own.

At last year’s QuakeCon, id announced Quake Zero: a concept wherein they will take their excellent Quake III: Arena, make it ad-supported and completely free, and then make it browser-based. And you thought the only thing you can play on your Firefox was that silly Flash game.

Quake Zero has become Quake Live and gone into Beta testing, but we haven’t had much headway other than that. Sure, it may not sound as exciting as id’s other projects, Rage and Doom 4, but it is still an interesting idea that could encourage dozens more.

The promise of free gameplay means that pretty much anyone can play, and without piracy, too, so the developers won’t be affected. And since it’s browser-based, it brings relief to our lazy asses that would rather mull over whatever’s on Firefox rather than start the game. Hmm, or maybe it’s just me.

Regardless, if id ends up successful, we could see a completely new form of gaming, with MMORPGs diving for it (and hopefully ending those monthly subscription fees). Imagine if you will, competition and tournament games like Quake Live: racing games, sport games, it’ll be phenomenal!

I’d like to see Epic do something similar with their Unreal Tournament series. Epic and id have been fierce rivals since Quake III and Unreal Tournament came out almost simultaneously. But their paths somewhat diverged. With Epic’s Unreal Tournament III ending up bombing at the charts, they have no option but to blame piracy for a game that didn’t have much in it anyways. Will Epic (or some other developer) try a competitor to Quake Live?

QuakeCon 2008 starts at the end of this month and there’s still a good week to go before it, but let’s just expect something to happen then. You can also ogle over the recently released trailer that shows some footage, especially the community and score charts on the big website. Also notice the billboards splashed over the maps.

No idea on when Quake Live will be coming out, but we’d expect early next year at the latest, and a month after QuakeCon at the earliest!

Packshots are a funny thing. Most of the time what we have is a quick bit of photoshopping that could have been done by a 5 year old using MS Paint. That is if a 5 year old can use MS Paint, we are still awaiting confirmation at time of publication.

Back to the topic, Left 4 Dead is Valve’s new baby with a huge amount of gamers all wanting to play a survival zombie horror title with a difference, online co-op is the name of the game. Today we had through the packshot for the November release title and instead of getting the cheap packshots we would normally expect we got through something awesome. That can be found above.

To those who go into a store and look at the cover to pick the title it should be an instant winner. To gamers in the know it should be an even more obvious choice. There is only one thing that could be improved upon that would remind us of the old Nintendo star of quality valued in the 90’s. That would be to change the title to have Valve written all over the top of the packaging in really big letters rather than at the bottom since all real gamers know what to expect when they play a Valve title.

We await Left 4 Dead and look forward to it’s release in November.