In a morally corrupt Grant City, you will play as vice-cop Jack Slate who, along with his sidekick Shadow, has to fight and expose the underworld gangs, each with their own fighting style, and all looking to destroy him and Grant City.

A teaser trailer announcing the game Magic the Gathering Tactics.

This week’s Zero Punctuation takes on Ghostbusters The Videogame. Yahtzee’s not afraid to take on games and films with a deeply devoted and sometime rabid fan base to task. It’s an ugly brawl and he manages to pull Star Trek and Dr. Who into the fray.

Although I may not always agree with his opinion, I always enjoy it. Yahtzee isn’t afraid to cut anyone down to size including himself.

You can view the Zero punctuation videogame review archives on The Escapist.

One of the driving factors behind my early adoption of the PS3 was the fact that I could play all my PS2 games on it thanks to the Emotion Engine Chip that it had under the hood. In subsequent SKU’s, that hardware was removed, and Sony even said that they were focused on moving forward without it.

Well, that may be changing in the near future. According to Siliconera, Sony has secured a U.S. Patent for the technology that will apparently allow the Cell Processor in the PS3 to emulate the Emotion Engine of the PS2.

Couple this with the rumors of a price cut and the release of the PS3 Slim this fall, and you start to think that Sony may have a fundamental strategy shift under way.

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After last week’s stellar review of inFamous, Zero Punctuation pits Cole McGrath and his thunder god impression against Protoype. The main character Alex Mercer is more of a “you are who you eat,” type of guy.

I thought this comparison piece of InFamous and Prototype was rather inevitable actually. Early on in their development cycles I often became confused over the two games only being able to straighten it out because one main character eats people and the other… doesn’t. What with all the government interference in the natural order of things coming back to bite them in the ass, in Prototype’s case literally, they seem very similar at first glance.

A more detailed Impression of inFamous is available on Gaming Today.

If you haven’t heard yet, Activision CEO Bobby Kotick has threatened, in a roundabout way, to drop his company’s support for PS3 if Sony doesn’t consider a price cut.

According to MCV, Kotick said in an interview,

“I’m getting concerned about Sony – the PS3 is losing a bit of momentum and they don’t make it easy for me to support the platform. It’s expensive to develop for the console, and the Wii and the Xbox are just selling better. Games generate a better return on invested capital on the Xbox than on the PlayStation.

They have to cut the price, because if they don’t, the attach rates are likely to slow. If we are being realistic, we might have to stop supporting Sony. When we look at 2010 and 2011, we might want to consider if we support the console — and the PSP too.”

That’s a big shot fired across Sony’s bow. So, will Sony take him seriously, and how will they respond?

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As if two new Metal Gear titles at E3 weren’t enough, Sony’s now bringing the undisputed champ of the Metal Gear Series to PlayStation Network. Starting today, you can grab the PS1 classic, Metal Gear Solid, for $9.99. You can even get it for your PSP!

As usual, there’s a lot of other stuff in the update. Some of it is interesting, like Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter for the PSP. Some of it is mindless, like Qore (Seriously, does anyone actually watch that?).

You can also choose the demo for EA Sports’ NCAA Football 10, as well as the usual weekly song downloads for Rock Band and Guitar Hero. Rock Band gets Spinal Tap this week, something guaranteed to make people my age smile with nostalgia.

If you want to see a full list of what’s available this week, it’s available after the break.

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InFamous is an action packed trip into a familiar genre with an interesting twist. You start out as Cole McGrath, a poor schmuck who has a mysterious delivery package blow up in his face, leaving him with burgeoning electrical based powers and everyone else in a six block radius with a slight case of death. You emerge from your baptism by fire, crawl out of the blast zone and run for your life guided by your buddy Zeke as the police force hunts you down.

Once you reach the relative safety of your roof top penthouse, the game truly begins throwing you into a grand conspiracy masterminded by a clandestine mystical organization. As you unravel the mystery, you can either fight your reputation as the bringer of the apocalypse or revel in the new coolness that is you and start building your own evil empire.

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So, every week the slavishly obsessive video game public saunter over to the escapist website to line up in morbid fascination ready to hear the idiot savant ramblings of critic and “commentarian” Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw skewer and lambaste the most recent game releases. Big game or little, he usually has something particularly biting to say in his punctuation-less rants and only rarely does that amount to anything but sidways praise for a title. This week it looks like one of those rare occasions when the stars, moons and hormones align to see the personality spout true praise for a title sprinkled with minor niggling and an admission the game is worth playing.

The target of his slight admiration: Sony & Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS. The review itself is worth watching not because I agree with him on almost every point (which I do) but because its a rare event when the Zero Punctuation master has to work to tear a game apart.

In a post on the official US PlayStation Blog, Justin Richmond, one of Uncharted 2’s Multiplayer Designers commented on the great success that the recent beta test of the upcoming games’ multiplayer mode has been. Bundled with retail copies of Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS the competitive online game mode for the previously solo only series has benefited Naughty Dog’s team greatly and the team is preparing to implement some changes to the beta.

The Uncharted 2 Multiplayer Beta is about to enter its second week, and we’re already making some tweaks to improve your experience. We are preparing a patch for release in the next few days. Properly applying this patch requires some careful attention on your end: You must watch the screen closely while booting into the beta. As soon as you see the patch message come up in the XMB overlay, you should hit X to accept as quickly as possible.

Richmond describes the fixes included in the beta patch and goes on to announce the dates for “Play with the Developer” events during the ongoing testing cycles.

The patch  fixes include:

General

• Grenade explosions now apply damage properly

Matchmaking

• Players should no longer get hung up in matchmaking for long periods of time

Bug Fixes

• Ranks should no longer reset randomly
• Quitting the game will no longer reset the PS3
• Player collision – players should no longer get hung up on each other when moving through the environment
• Player will now be killed if stuck in falling animation for too long
• In Plunder mode, treasures will no longer disappear during matches