Presented in glorious alphabetical order, New Media: Retail Roundup is your indispensible checklist of the home console and handheld titles arriving in stores this week. What will you be playing?

MICROSOFT Xbox 360 Nothing

NINTENDO Wii Nothing 3DS Nothing DS Nothing

SONY PS3 Nothing PSP Nothing

VARIOUS PC The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff

New Media: Downloadable Digest is your handy reminder of the new downloadable titles released during the past week.

MICROSOFT XBLA Bastion

NINTENDO WiiWare Nothing eShop 3DS Classics: Xevious DSiWare Nothing

SONY PSN Golden Axe * Limbo Minis Dr. Maybe and the Adventures of Scary Girl * JellyCar 2 * Me Monstar! Hear Me Roar * One Epic Game

VALVE Steam Air Conflicts: Secret Wars * ArmA: Cold War Assault * ArmA X: Anniversary Edition * Lucid * Runespell: Overture * Tobe’s Vertical Adventure * Trapped Dead * War Inc. Battlezone

Recent instalments of New Media: 17.07.11 l 10.07.11 l 03.07.11 l 26.06.11 l 19.06.11

Listerine has nothing on this stuff.

Swords & Soldiers developer Ronimo Games has unveiled its latest project, a frantic online adversarial title known as Awesomenauts. Players will take control of one of several oddball combatants (deranged cowboy, monkey with jetpack, brain floating in tank, etc) and fight for supremacy across a variety of 2D environments.

While Awesomenauts appears at first glance to be a fairly typical action platformer, Ronimo is promoting it as a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena (MOBA) title. The real time strategy subgenre, popularised by Warcraft III mod Defence of the Ancients (DoTA), generally involves a clash between two teams, with each player controlling a single character.

While the majority of games in the subgenre are presently found on PC, Awesomenauts will be coming to XBLA and PSN. Its playful 2D art style and side-on perspective should also prove a talking point in a genre dominated by top-down fantasy epics.

Publisher dtp entertainment, a company with a longstanding aversion to capital letters, is yet to announce a release date.

Welcome to The Black List, your one stop shop for the stories published on the site this week.

MONDAY NEW TRAILER Dark Souls > It’s time to dig those broken controllers out of the cupboard and smack them into working condition, because the release of From Software’s Dark Souls is only around the corner! Well, actually it’s not for a while yet, so that’s a perfect amount of time for you to go out and buy all new controllers. Because if the newly released footage is anything to go by, I think you’re definitely going to need them. READ MORE

TUESDAY JUST ANNOUNCED Hitman: Absolution > Known in recent years for its work on the controversial Kane & Lynch titles, Danish developer IO Interactive is returning to the franchise that put it on the map. Hitman: Absolution will be the fifth game in the third person stealth action series. The very brief announcement video reveals little beyond the fact that Agent 47 hasn’t altered his approach, or his hair style, since last we saw him last. READ MORE

WEDNESDAY JUST ANNOUNCED Soul Calibur V > Notwithstanding the lamentable decline of the arcade scene, there has probably never been a better time to be a fighting game fan. The past year alone has seen the release of new versions of Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Dead Or Alive, BlazBlue and Marvel vs Capcom. We can now add Soul Calibur V to the list, with Namco Bandai revealing that work has commenced on a new edition of its popular weapon based fighter. READ MORE

THURSDAY NEWS NanoBITES 42 > Sony has announced an Australian release date for hotly anticipated super hero sequel inFAMOUS 2. Cole will return to shelves on Wednesday 8 June, with original developer Sucker Punch again at the helm. This is just one of the stories in this week’s edition of nanoBITES, our ongoing feature devoted to small but important news items. READ MORE

FRIDAY REVIEW Garshasp: The Monster Slayer > Dead Mage and co have seen fit to serve up a shameless God of War clone that somehow misses everything that made Sony’s trendsetting epic enjoyable. Bad graphics, awful controls and a shocking amount of bugs are the order of the day, with the only positives being some decent sound and okay level design. The best part of Garshasp: The Monster Slayer is its short length. READ MORE

Recent instalments of The Black List: 14.05.11 l 07.05.11 l 30.04.11 l 23.04.11 l 16.04.11

How to make a half baked video game

Ingredients

1 x PC
1 x copy of God of War
1 x random middle eastern legend

Directions

Take your copy of God of War and be careful to remove any element that may be considered fun. This includes the interesting puzzles, great fighting mechanics, awe inspiring graphics and great story. Now replace Kratos with a random figure from Persian mythology. In this case we are using the legend of Garshasp. The next step is to program the game for the PC, a platform wholly unsuited for this sort of game. To add that extra level of frustration, make sure that playing with a gamepad is almost impossible, thus ensuring the precise analogue control needed for the platforming elements will be unavailable to the player. Bake your final creation for half the time of an enjoyable game and serve on a digital distribution service, hoping that the idea of an ‘Indie God of War’ will earn you a quick buck. Read the rest of this entry »