Kane and Lynch 2 Dog Days Bowling For Shanghai Trailer
This trailer shows off the recently announced Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, the sequel that takes player in to the gritty Shanghai underworld.

Kane and Lynch 2 Dog Days Burger Joint Trailer
This trailer shows off what can happen in a buerger joint in the recently announced Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, the sequel that takes player in to the gritty Shanghai underworld.

Once again, it is GameTap Thurdsay and today marks the second to last Grimm chapter to be released for the zany episodic series from American McGee. Also joining the scary fairytale line-up is Eidos’ Kane & Lynch: Dead Men.

• Grimm: The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs: A man must prove himself worthy of marrying the king’s daughter by plucking three golden hairs from the devil’s head and bringing them to the king. While in hell pursuing the thumb-sucking golden haired devil, the young man befriends the devil’s grandmother.

• Kane & Lunch: Dead Men: What do you get when you cross a dangerous schizophrenic, a professional mercenary, and a fortune in gems? When a criminal organization holds Kane’s wife and daughter for ransom, he needs the help of the often-volatile Lynch to make it through the day.

No free games were added to the catalog this week, but like all previous episodes of Grimm, The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs is free to play for the first 24 hours. The full Grimm schedule is listed below and all are $3.99 except where noted:

• July 31: A Boy Learns What Fear Is  (always free to play)
• August 7: Little Red Riding Hood
• August 14: The Fisherman and His Wife
• August 21:Puss In Boots
• August 28: The Girl Without Hands
• September 4:Godfather Death
• September 11: The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs (free to play for the first 24 hours after launch)
• September 18: Beauty and the Beast

As always, for more information on GameTap and their list of over 142 free games, check out the official website.

It’s not as great a deal as some of the previous sales we’ve seen on Steam, but if you’re interested in checking out Kane & Lynch and seeing what was the source of that whole Gerstmanngate thing, Steam’s looking to hook you up. This weekend, the game is on sale from its usual price of $40 down to a meager $20. This was a full-priced retail game released last November, so when you look at it that way, it’s quite a bargain.

Then again, there was a reason the game wasn’t received particularly well.

Back in November, Jonathan reviewed the game, saying, “At PAX this past year, one of my favorite games that I got some hands-on time with was Kane and Lynch: Dead Men. The level I played felt exactly like the street shootout scene in Heat, and that was a very good thing. As I made my getaway from a bank heist, my crew AI reacted just like I wanted them to, the graphics looked pretty sharp, and the whole experience was challenging, but not impossible. Now that the full the game is out, I just want to know one thing: what the hell happened?”

He summed things up by saying, “Overall, Kane and Lynch: Dead Men is your typical third-person shooter, complete with frustrating controls and AI, but with a superb story. The characters themselves are great, and I’m looking forward to seeing the movie already (particularly if Bruce Willis and/or Billy Bob Thornton are involved). It’s just too bad that everything else in the game falters so much. I’d like to see these issues get ironed out in a sequel, but still, this is a disappointing new game from the guys who developed the Hitman series.”

If that hasn’t helped you make up your mind, there’s a demo of the game available on FileFront.

Action heroes never die – they just get old, bald and fat or any combination of the three. When most actors in their fifties and sixties start to take meatier acting roles or give in to the age demographic and play fatherly figures in a family drama or family comedy; some actors who previously wowed us in the past with death-defying leaps from exploding buildings or single-handedly rescuing a group of POWs from a torture camp somewhere in Asia just can’t or won’t give up the ghost.

Despite the run on sentence above, you all know which ones I am talking about. Harrison Ford is just a bit old to be the dashing adventurer all the little girls fell in love with in Star Wars and Indiana Jones. He is no longer the Indy or Han that we knew, and he is most definitely not Jack Ryan any more – I am not suggesting that he do another movie with Anne Heche or one with his lady love Ally McBeal Calista Flockhart- I just think that he should play something more akin to his age group instead of a lothario or an action hero. Same with Sylvester Stallone. Look at the latest “Rambo” flick. Why in the world are these guys trying to bring back a youthful nostalgia to our existence with these characters? That would be like Clint Eastwood doing another Dirty Harry movie -all it does is not only show their age along with ours and do we really want to be reminded daily how old we really are?

Now comes Bruce Willis. Granted, he is not reprising his role as John McClane in another “Die Hard” flick, but he is supposedly on board to play Kane in the movie adaptation of Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. According to Variety, Bruce Willis is negotiating to star in Lionsgate’s transfer of the Eidos game and it is to be directed by Simon Crane (second unit director and stunt coordinator for “Hancock,” “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” “Troy” and “X-Men: The Last Stand”). The movie is expected to start shooting sometime in November and movie honchos are still looking for a actor to play Kane’s other-half Lynch.

Read the full article

The new, free downloadable content for Kane and Lynch is now available on XBL Marketplace.

Each of the four maps features its own scenario: take on the local dope dealers and the Russian mafia at an LA construction site in‘Clean Cut’, clash with the Yakuza in Tokyo in ‘Hooker’s Trail’, raid a drug baron’s mansion in a Venezuelan jungle in ‘Flying High’ and ambush General Fuentes’ military convoy in the streets of Havana to steal the gold hidden in his vehicles in‘Hasta La Vista’.

Fragile Alliance is the multiplayer aspect of Kane&Lynch and is based on greed, betrayal and revenge. Up to eight players team up against police or various enemies in a series of heist scenarios – from here the choice is entirely up to the individual player. The objective is to steal the bounty and make it to a getaway point. The winner is the player who escapes with the most loot.

Eidos has unveiled a new trailer for the upcoming multiplayer map pack for Kane and Lynch: Dead Men for the resolute few of you out there who are still playing the game. The video shows off the new map titled, “Hasta La Vista,” that has you and your crew ambushing a military convoy in Cuba and stealing some hidden gold. As with all the other maps, you’ll have to deal with police trying to stop you, our own teammates possibly betraying you for some extra loot, and a broken cover system. The map pack is expected to be released on April 17th.

Rockstar’s Bully video game has been banned in Brazil as of Friday. Judge Flavio Rabello has ruled that the game can no longer be imported, sold, distributed or promoted on websites and in stores in the country. Retailers now have 30 days to comply with the ban.

“The aggravating factor is that everything in the game takes place inside a school,” Rio Grande do Sul state prosecutor Alcindo Bastos said. “That is not acceptable.” JPF Maggazine is the main distributor for the title in Brazil, but did not comment on the ban or indicate in any way yet whether it wants to appeal or not.

The request for a ban of the game, which lets players act out the life of a 15-year-old student, came from a local youth support center. Take-Two Interactive Software Inc. spokesman Edward Nebb said the decision will “prevent Brazilian consumers from enjoying ‘Bully: Scholarship Edition,’ it will not have a material impact on the sales of this popular title.”

As in the UK ASA banning Kane & Lynch ads; isn’t it a bit late to be banning a title that was released October 2006?

via Afterdawn

Dark Sector
Developer: Digital Extremes
Publisher: D3 Publisher of America
Price: $59.99
Platform: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3
Category: Action
ESRB Rating: M for Mature (Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Intense Violence)
Release Date: March 25, 2008

Dark Sector unfortunately suffers from a gaming ailment that I’ve begun referring to as “Gears of War Syndrome.” You see, Gears of War really nailed the whole “third-person, cover-based shooter” genre over a year ago; so much so that any title with similar gameplay since can be labeled as being “good…but not as good as Gears of War.” Army of Two has this problem, Kane and Lynch has this problem (among many others), and Dark Sector also has this problem. Even while playing the game, I found myself trying to pull off some moves from Gears of War — like blind fire — and was disappointed when I couldn’t. That’s not to say Dark sector is a bad game; it’s just mostly all been done before and better.

Read the full article

In an unbelievable move, the UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned Kane & Lynch ads five months after the game’s lackluster release. The ASA has mandated that there will be no reprinting or rebroadcasting of Kane & Lynch ads.

According to the Guardian, there have been a few complaints, 26 to be precise, that the poster above is “graphic and too shocking to be seen in an untargeted medium“.

The ad was used a double-page spread in Future Publishing’s computer game magazine Edge, while a second version appeared in the magazine Total Film…

Ruling on the Kane & Lynch poster… the ASA said it was “likely to be seen as condoning and glorifying real violence”, and was also irresponsible and “likely to cause serious or widespread offence”.

The Guardian also included a quote from the ASA report:

We noted that the demographic profile of the magazines that carried the ads was predominantly adult males and that only a small number of children were likely to have seen the ads.

We considered, however, that the graphic and shocking image, which would be seen as condoning and glorifying real violence, was likely to cause distress to some readers and was unsuitable for children to see. We therefore concluded that the placement of the ads was irresponsible.

Was the ASA really that slow on the draw, or has it decided to jump on the “Ban” wagon as far as violent games? Had they made this decision in November when Eidos released the game, it wouldn’t seem as unreasonable. Five months down the road and it comes off as ludicrous.

via GamePolitics 

Stephany already reported on how Kane and Lynch is slated to get some new, free multiplayer maps soon, but now we’ve got some screenshots actually showing the new maps off. Most of them look like reworked versions of some of the campaign missions, but with different objectives. The new maps will take you to an LA construction site, the Yakuza-controlled areas of Tokyo, a drug baron’s mansion in Venezuela, and the streets of Cuba. Hmm, these might actually make me start playing the game again. You know, for like a couple hours. And then back onto the dusty shelf it goes.

You can check out the rest of the screenshots here.