“The release date and price are not yet decided,” Asada said, but the game will receive an English localization for the XBLA version. In the meantime, if you crave Cave, Deathsmiles is in American stores now, published (and put into a really big box) by Aksys.

[Thanks, dirtybeefz!]

We’re hard-pressed to call a book full of concept art for Alien Breed: Impact created by clearly talented artists “kinda nasty,” but, well, part of it features images of gross bugs and stuff. More to the point: gross alien bug things.

If you’re into this kinda thing, we’ve dropped the whole set of images into the gallery below.

Master Chief…all Victorian like.

Over the course of two months, artist Christophe worked on this steampunk version of the helmet worn by the Halo Spartan. After a series of misses, Christophe was able to use four layers of acrylic paint and PCV pipe to create the effect.

Oh, forgot one last material used — the awesome! I hate when I forget that. Hate it.

Master Chief Goes Victorian with this Halo Steampunk Helmet [Hawty McBloggy]

Let’s not spoil anything. Instead, let’s just say that Square Enix’s CGI work for Deus Ex: Human Revolution is really paying off. You should watch the trailer above right now. And then watch it again.

Now that you’ve done that, we’ve got some actual news: It looks like Deus Ex: Human Revolution has been confirmed for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. The game will be released in 2011, and is now available for pre-order from the usual suspects.

Dream.Build.Play is a competition where semi-pro and indy game developers are asked to create innovative video games for Xbox 360 using XNA Game Studio. This year the four winners got their piece of $75,000 in cash as well as the opportunity for their game to show up on XBLA.

Microsoft says that there were over 350 games submitted from 110 countries for this year’s contest. Only four won:

• Nicolas Daures, France, won $40k for Lumi, a 2D action/puzzler
• Nenin Ananbanchachai, Thailand, won $20k for A.R.E.S, a 2.5D run-and-gunner
• Yoichi Hayashi, Japan, won $10k for Prismatic Solid, a rail shooter
• Norman and Steven Hunt, UK, won $5k for Beat Hazard, a twin-stick shooter

If you take the time to watch the gameplay footage (above and below the jump) from all the winners, I’m sure you’ll be impressed. The first place entrant, Lumi, as seen above, looks great. Killer art and music. I’m more into 3rd place pew-happy Prismatic Solid, though.

As a bonus this year, Old Spice teamed up to offer up a prize called the Old Spice Challenge. The community voted, and the winner is an action-adventure called Newton vs. The Horde. Graham Stewart and his dev team take home $60,000 for the win. To celebrate, they’re giving away copies of the game to the first 8,000 people that visit the Old Spice page on Xbox Live.

Congrats to all the winners. I’m looking forward to playing all of these!

A.R.E.S. by Extend Studio from Nenin Ananbanchachai on Vimeo.

That said, the two-minute-and-thirty second version of the live action Halo: Reach short “Birth of a Spartan” is just … well, it’s too much. For future reference: If by the halfway mark we’re shouting at the screen, “Just hit Powder with the muscle juice already and let’s get to shooting fools!” you know you’ve overdone it.

Note: This footage is best viewed in high definition. Click ‘HD’ to enable it.

Halo fanatics will finally get their hands on Halo: Reach when the multiplayer beta, included with the purchase of Halo 3: ODST, is activated next week. You’ve already read our impressions but now you get to see some of the action, with hours of Halo: Reach Pre-Beta footage carefully trimmed down to the essentials.

By showing the new armor customization options, control changes, comparisons to Halo 3 and Halo 3: ODST and full gameplay matches in high definition, we’re hoping to answer as many of your questions as we can before you get your own quality time with Reach on May 3.

Some lazy security at the Mobile World Congress at Barcelona (due to open later today) has allowed these shots to get out, showing not only Microsoft’s new Windows Mobile 7 operating system, but a big badge showing how deeply Xbox Live will be integrated on its start screen.

You’d expect the cross-over to, at the very least, allow users to access their Xbox Live accounts on the fly, for things like messaging. Best case scenario, with the little “games” tag that’s been used, you’d be looking at mobile-specific games that have full Xbox Live compatability (for things like displaying achievements), much like Games for Windows PC titles do.

As we’ve previously reported, it’s believed that this Xbox Live integration will only be available on Windows-branded phones.

learnbemobile.com’s Photos [Facebook, via Gizmodo]

For very many years Electronic Arts were the biggest game publisher on earth. They have an income of billions every year and they employ thousands of people all around the globe. EA are very important indeed for the video games industry. But they are no longer undisputed number one. The marriage of Vivendi and Activision, fed by the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, with mega hits like Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero and very ably led by Bob Kotick are now probably established at the top of the heap, especially when it comes to profit. (Amazingly they were bankrupt in the early ’90s.)

So again, very unsurprisingly, Electronic Arts have issued more bad financial results. They lost $82 million in the quarter ended 31 December (the best time of year for video games!). Their stock price took another hit. They can’t blame the industry, big global publishers like the aforementioned Activision, and also Ubisoft have done very well indeed. Even Sega have managed to get themselves back into profit. I have written about EA’s problems on here before. Repeatedly.

So what is going wrong?:

• The market for all entertainment IP (including films, television and books) is polarising into blockbusters and niche. Everything else is a potential loss maker. The most successful publishers are those who have geared themselves to the new reality.
• This generation of HD home consoles have awful business models to develop for. Basically making a came costs far, far too much. Several times the cost of games for the previous generation. The root of this is that HD games need a massive amount of content which is still largely hand crafted. The next generation of platforms will have enough power to run lots and lots of middleware so development costs should drop back to sensible levels. In the meantime we are stuck with the PS3 and 360 and they are causing a lot of problems.
• The Wii has been a black hole for many third party publishers. Their fault. They mostly haven’t made the games that Wii owners want to buy. Just look at the Metacritic for Wii to see this. Electronic Arts on the Wii published NCAA Football 09 All-Play (Metacritic 49), Celebrity Sports Showdown (Metacritic 50), NBA Live 09 All-Play (Metacritic 51), G I Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Metacritic 51) and many other such gems that should never have seen the light of day.
• There is a trend on the more casual platforms for developers to self publish. This removes discipline from the market, especially on price. The job of a publisher is to provide editorial control, finance and marketing. Self publishers tend to use the price mechanism as their main marketing tool. Done competitively this rapidly collapses the viability of a platform. Electronic Arts have not taken the grip that they should have, thus allowing upstarts like PopCap to gain traction. Also they were late on the scene for emerging platforms, such as Facebook.
• Electronic Arts’ marketing still seems to be largely based on that of the 1960s detergent companies with expensive broadcast advertising. Their customers’ lifestyle habits have moved on and EA seemingly haven’t moved with them. Marketing now is far more about one on one, two way communication.
• Electronic Arts is very corporate. This is expensive and not necessarily the best way to run a large organisation, no matter how good the man at the top is. Far better to take a lesson from Alfred Sloan and break it up into semi autonomous profit centres with individual bosses who live and die by the sword and who are far more receptive to their customers.

It is not all doom and gloom. The losses are less than they were. The management are cutting out the non block buster games. EA moved away from licensed products so have built up the beginning of a portfolio of good IP that they actually own. There are huge economic advantages of scale in publishing, which positions EA very nicely indeed. The world’s consumers will spend more on games in the future than they are now. The next generation of home consoles will reward those with enough clout to invest heavily in middleware.  And EA do have some excellent employees.

So where does the future lie? I still think that EA are a prime M&A target. They would make a perfect acquisition for Microsoft to give them ammunition in their console wars against Sony and Nintendo. And they would also be a perfect fit for Apple, if and when Apple launch their own home gaming console. To both of these companies EA would be far more valuable than it is for its current stockholders. And both of them have the cash sitting in the bank to buy EA with ease.

Microsoft’s experiment in casual game creation, Kodu, is now available in preview form online. PC gamers can download the “Technical Preview” version of the game right here, which features a revamped UI sporting mouse and keyboard controls. Microsoft also added other tweaks, enhancing the “move” verb (allowing for scripted camera movements), “streamlined terrain editing tools” and characters that can respond to mouse and keyboard events.

If you’re a PC gamer wondering what all of the fuss is about, we suggest you check out our video walkthrough. Oh, and do let us know if you come up with any Joystiq-inspired games!

[Via Big Download]