BlackSite: Area 51 is a direct sequel of the PSOne's Area 51 released about a decade ago. Both are developed by Midway Austin and published by Midway Games. As the case was with its predecessor, BlackSite: Area 51 is a first-person shooter situated in the mysterious Area 51 facility operated by the American government. It's a sci-fi ride with strong storytelling, frenetic action, and not too shabby graphics, too.

Plating as special forces operative Aeran Pierce, BlackSite: Area 51 pits you against an entire alien horde crawling all over the place. Your task is to investigate what's going on and at the same time find a new home for your bullets in the chest cavities of the enemies. It's not an easy task, but someone has to do it.

These screens show some very nice images of the game's visuals. As you can see, effort has been put into generating them just for you. With the crowded FPS market populated by powerhouses, one has to wonder how this video game will stack up come November 5 when it launches. A demo of the Xbox 360 version has been available via Xbox Live since May of 2007, and demos for the Sony PlayStation 3 and PC are said to be underway. Let's hope this one gives us a bang when it hits.

  
 

Buy: [Blacksite: Area 51 (PC)]

Buy: [Blacksite: Area 51 (PS3)]

Buy: [Blacksite: Area 51 (Xbox 360)]

Masaya Matsuura, creator of the PaRappa the Rapper series of video games, was one of the keynote speakers at the recently-concluded GO3 conference in Australia. During his speech, his message was rather simple and direct: the gaming industry should come up with less violent titles and produce games that are more accessible to non-traditional players instead.

PaRappa the Rapper was first released on PlayStation 1 (PSOne) back in 1996 by video game development studio NanaOn-Sha. It is a rhythm-based title and was probably the inspiration behind today's hit Guitar Hero and upcoming game Rock Band (for the Xbox 360 and PS3). However, despite the success of Parappa Matsuura still has some concerns about this genre, especially for his homeland of Japan, since according to him,

It's very difficult to make brand-new systems for music-based games that involve more than just pressing buttons according to rhythm. Of course, we've tried several already, but unfortunately some of them are not successful. Another reason, everyone is buying flat displays. Flat displays have a delay, but sound doesn't delay.

The creator then commented that one solution for this is to come up with various alternatives to audio. However, he also cautioned that the musical game industry collaboration will not be initiated by the artists as most of them are highly conservative and want to do things by themselves, therefore developers may have to take the initiative.

Lastly, Masaya Matsuura couldn't help but applaud Nintendo for its stance during this cycle of the console war. He implied that the industry will not grow if focus will be given on traditional players as they are already a "captured audience." He explained,

Making good games that everybody can play is a very high priority for the game industry, because if we make games like X-rated videos, the industry won't grow. Nintendo is very smart to appeal to a much wider group of people because it is what's required now.

Could we blame skeptics from saying that "console RTS" won't work? Real-time strategy (RTS) and its close cousin, real-time tactics (RTT), have always been the domain of the personal computer, with its mouse and keyboard. The traditional console controller is ill-suited for the rigors of battle strategy. And with some disappointing attempts to port PC RTS titles to consoles - including the early Command & Conquer titles to PSOne and StarCraft on the N64 - somehow the cry went up from both sides of the gaming world: stick to the status quo.

This is where Electronic Arts, stubborn EA, comes in. Criticized as they are for a number of gaffes in the past year (alone), we'd always held that sometimes, even they can get some things right, or at least good enough. Backing EALA's bold attempts to put RTS into console gaming (starting with The Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-Earth II) might be one of them. And now a bolt from the blue dev, Tiki Games, plans to craft a real-time strategy title for, among others, the handheld PSP.

A crazy effort - ludicrous, even? Or is it finally time some boundaries are breached, some lines blurred? Is the core idea of real-time strategy breaking free (because there's not a star in heaven that they can't reach)? Short of beating the 360 Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars out of EALA right now for a review, we try instead to deconstruct the idea behind strategy games, and see where they fit in the matrix of the gaming console.

Short version of the verdict: it can, and it will - if you're willing to be as wily as Sun Tzu on a coffee high, that is.

Sun Tzu says: Hence it is only the enlightened ruler and the wise general who will use the highest intelligence of the army for purposes of spying and thereby they achieve great results. Intelligence analysis of strategy gaming on consoles after the jump, Commander.

Upon seeing this mod, the first thing that came to mind was what this was all for. And then a few seconds later, we realized just how hardcore this mini Commodore 64 actually is. So without further ado, we introduce the Picodore 64, a mod made by Jason Winters. And yes, just in case you were wondering, it's a fully-functioning Commodore 64 with a matching mini-Atari joystick. Now, how cool is that, having the grand daddy of home video games (not to mention PCs) in your hands?

As for more details on this modified little cutie from 1982, its creator tells all:

I had an old PSOne LCD screen lying around and I thought I'd make a C64 laptop. Actually, it's more like a C64 PDA! It measures 6.5 x 6 x 1.5 inches (15.5 x 16.5 x 4 cm) when closed. It can run from an AC wall adapter or 6 NiMH AA batteries. The keyboard is hacked from a portable folding keyboard for a Jornada PDA which outputs RS-232. I'm using a PIC 16F88 to decode the signals and re-encode them to PS/2 ... There is an internal amplified speaker as well as connections for audio and video output on the back. There's a serial connection for a disk drive and an SD card slot in the side for a 1541-III but I haven't been able to get that to work yet. I also have a connection for a userport/joystick. The joystick in the picture is a hacked Atari keychain joystick.

Again. Hardcore, baby.

PC gaming reached its peak back in 1999 following the release of Half-Life. The game actually sold around 2.5 million copies, boosting the overall sales of PC games at US$ 1.9 billion just for the American market alone. Unfortunately for the business, everything followed a downhill trend after that. Last year, records show that revenues connected to PC gaming barely broke the one billion mark.

Now, the big question is why. Is it a case of the PC being overshadowed by consoles? Admittedly, even we here at QJ just opened a PC blog as opposed to the long running sections for PSP, Xbox 360, PS3 and even the new Wii. So what really happened? Amusingly, it can be traced back to the day Microsoft challenged the gaming world with its Xbox.

Before you get jumpy, we very well know that there are other factors as well such as piracy. To be quite precise, it could even be PC Gaming's worst enemy given the fact that protection for PC games are much easier to bypass as compared to any console. Next is the rise of handhelds DS and PSP. Of course, it is reckless to combine sales of all console platforms then compare it with PC gaming sales. But the point is, there has been a most noticeable decline.

Going back now to Microsoft, the corporation needless to say, takes care of both the Xbox consoles and operating system Windows. Over the last few years, Microsoft has been focusing on console-related services with nothing new for gaming on the Windows platform. Of course there is Vista, but aren't young people more interested with its connectivity with the X360 over its own merits?

Also, there is no denying that console games are more versatile, most especially now with the industry triumvirate (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo) all out for backwards compatibility. Gamers can still play their age-old titles with the new consoles without any complication. Plug and play, or so they say. On the other hand, PC games need installations, setting configurations, patches and the long list of to-do-first goes on.

And so in the end, the song "Video Killed the Radio Star" comes to mind:

Rewritten by machine and new technology,

and now I understand the problems you can see (Oh, oh!)

Consoles killed the PC Game star.

Actually, we don't think it would come to that. While we're seeing it now in a rather low point of its career, PC gaming will bounce back. It will evolve, metamorphose and become attractive and lucrative once more. Linux when it entered the scene, shook Windows to its very foundation. Hmm, now Linux Games definitely sounds good...