Electronic Arts has announced that two celebrated actors, Rosario Dawson (Sin City, Men in Black II) and Brian Cox (The Bourne Identity) will star in the sci-fi first person shooter, Syndicate. "The stars take on the role of cutthroat executives working for the biggest and most aggressive syndicate, EuroCorp, in a near-future world ruled by three mega-corporations," said EA.

Rosario Dawson will be play Lily Drawl, the rising star of EuroCorp with a shattered and conflicted psyche. "Lily is torn between the demands of her corporate masters and the underground resistance to syndicate rule. She knows that this balancing act can only last for so long before she falls, most likely, to her death," EA said.

• DETAILS: Syndicate Hands-On Impressions: Stealthy Yet Satisfying

“I’m amazed how videogames have become so deep in story, delivering fantastic worlds and memorable characters rivaling big Hollywood films,” said Dawson. “I was excited when EA approached me to play Lily Drawl in Syndicate. She’s an interesting and strong female character. How cool is it to play the mastermind who designed the military chip inside the player’s head!” 

Read More »

Next week on X-Play, the new release season is upon us, and we'll have verdicts on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Twisted Metal, UFC Undisputed 3, The Darkness II, and Amy.

Plus, the PS Vita is almost here, and we'll get one in our hands and deliver our first game reviews for this next generation of portable gaming hardware from Sony.

We'll also get Battlefield 3 pro tips from pro gamer Tsquared, and have our top 7 games for Valentine's Day. All this and so much more when a brand new week of X-Play kicks off this Monday at 6:30PM ET.

Game company Valve has just sent more information about the hacking attacks against its Steam service.

According to Valve's president Gabe Newell: "It is probable that the intruders obtained a copy of a backup file with information about Steam transactions between 2004 and 2008.  This backup file contained user names, email addresses, encrypted billing addresses and encrypted credit card information. It did not include Steam passwords."

Valve says it has no evidence that the information has been "compromised," so, presumably, the encryption is still in place. The company advises Steam users to "watch your credit card activity and statements.  And of course keeping Steam Guard on is a good idea as well."

The full text of Valve's email is under the "Read More" tag.

Read More »

During a quarterly financial call yesterday, Activision dropped some interesting stats on FPS Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. There are more than 40 million monthly active users across all COD releases, and Call of Duty Elite boasts 7 million users with 1.5 million paid annual members. Activision reported that it is working on Call of Duty Elite 2.0, which will add new features and will support the next major series entry, due to launch later this year.

Basically, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a very successful video game. The most successful ever, according to Activision. To make sure we understand the dominance of MW3 over every other video game and other piece of entertainment ever in history, Broadband Choices sent us a huge infographic outlining the ways in which Modern Warfare 3 has trounced all competitors. I've taken some interesting slices of the scroll-like thing and pasted them below the "Read More" tag, but if you want to view the entire thing, click there... it's a huge file, though.

Read More »

Bethesda’s The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim was the big winner at the 15th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards held last night as part of DICE 2012. Skyrim was named Game of the Year, and took home four other awards as well including bestRole-Playing/Massively Multiplayer Online Game of the Year, and Outstanding Achievement in Story, Gameplay Engineering and Game Direction.

Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception received accolades for publisher Sony Computer Entertainment America and developer Naughty Dog, getting awards for Outstanding Achievement in Animation, Art Direction and Visual Engineering.

Read More »

Blizzard is locked in a legal dispute with Valve over the latter's trademark request for the DOTA 2 title. The upcoming game is a spiritual successor to the popular WarCraft III mod, Defense of the Ancients. The lead designer on the project is IceFrog, a modder who worked on keeping the mod going from 2005 onward, until joining Valve's DOTA 2 team sometime before the game was announced in late 2010.

Blizzard hasn't been quiet in expressing its dissatisfaction over a competitor developing what is essentially a standalone sequel to a mod from one of its own games, but we're only now first hearing of an ongoing legal action to block Valve's trademarking of the DOTA name. NeoGAF users discovered (via Kotaku) a November filing with the US Patent and Trademark Office in which Blizzard formally opposes the Valve trademark request.

Read More »

Mass Effect 3! Videos! Information!

That pretty well sums up everything you need to know about this news. The official Mass Effect 3 website is now home to five new gameplay videos, with each one focusing on different aspects of the game. The RPG junkies out there will definitely want to check out the "Custom Arsenal" video. For all its accolades, some felt that Mass Effect 2 was a little too stripped down compared to its predecessor in the realm of customization. ME3 not only has more weapons to find, it also brings back a more involved mechanic for modding those weapons (and armor).

You'll find four more new videos after the jump, offering closer looks at things like online co-op, enemies, storytelling and action. You should also head over to the official website, as each video lives on a page that offers even more details on what you can expect to find when Mass Effect 3 launches for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC platforms on March 6.

Read More »

UPDATED 3:45 PM -- Well, it's official. Thanks to the donations of 25,995 individuals, Double Fine's Kickstarter campaign has now surpassed the $1 million mark. The total currently sits at $1,001,988.

Original story follows:

Wow, gamers of the world! You can all give yourselves a hearty pat on the back this morning. Yesterday, Double Fine boss Tim Schafer launched a Kickstarter page seeking to raise $400,000 in crowd-sourced donations to fund a new adventure game, called Double Fine Adventure. Just over eight hours later, that goal was reached and surpassed. 

There are 33 days left for more money to be raised, but with 11,735 backers and a total of $512,855 pledged at the time of this writing, it's safe to say now that Double Fine Adventure is officially a go. And it's all because fine gamers like you, the people reading this news, saw this awesome thing and opened your wallets en masse. You should be proud. Seriously.

Read More »

The release of Diablo 3 is getting closer and closer, people. During a financial conference call held moments ago, Activision Blizzard displayed a slide indicating that the company is aiming for a Diablo 3 release in Quarter 2 2012. What that means in gamer speak is that Diablo 3 is intended to be released by June 30, 2012.

The real release date, however, is still "when it's ready," of course. As soon as we know anything more about the release date of Diablo 3, we promise to tell you.

Yesterday, we brought you a compendium of some of the coolest Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim mods out there, including useful inventory management tools, map tools and more. But those nearly-essential tweaks to Skyrim don't tell the whole modding story. The other side of the coin are the mods listed below. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy The Top Ten Weirdest  Skyrim Mods In Existence!

10) Lydia Dialogue Removal

Remember the first companion you get, loyal Lydia? Remember how when you ask her to carry your stuff she's all, "I'm sworn to carry your burden," in a really sarcastic way? Well some modder out there was appparently so offended at Lydia's insolence that he took that line of dialogue out of the game. All this mod does is make Lydia more subservient.

Read More »

Happy Thursday, everyone! If you're not too busy donating to a particular Video Game Kickstarter campaign, why not take a moment to watch The MMO Report? This week's episode covers THQ's financial troubles regarding the future of Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium Online, TERA's Collectors Editions, and reads your e-mails in Uncle Casey's Mail Bag. Now get to enjoying your weekend a little early and press play.

The MMO Report: Thursday, February 9th »

Subscribe to G4's WEB SHOWS Video Podcast:

For our latest hands-on look at BioWare’s upcoming Mass Effect 3, we team up with Commander Shepard and company as they are sent to investigate a Cerberus-infested research facility on Mars. Our own Adam Rosenberg suited up for the preview session, and came away especially impressed with the work BioWare has done to make the combat more fluid and responsive than any of the previous installments:

"The controls feel silky smooth, a definite improvement over what's come before. Shepard can dive-roll in any direction with the press of a button, and the response time from button-press to on-screen action is immediate. The last two games always felt a little chunky to me on the control side, and there was no sense of that during my ME3 play time."

Adam also encountered a rather compelling spoiler towards the end of his playthrough, but you’ll have to check out his full Mass Effect 3 hands-on preview to find out more.

Update: The YouTube video we originally posted was pulled. Above, you'll find the entire speech from DICE last night. The Skyrim mod bit comes in at about 21:25.

This is really neat, but let's make the context clear first. The video above doesn't actually show off upcoming Skyrim DLC. Rather, it's a compilation of what are essentially Skyrim mods from the game's developers. After Skyrim was released last year, the team was given one week to put whatever they wanted to into the game. 

Howard says pretty much the same thing before playing the sizzle reel for the gathered DICE crowd (via Joystiq). There's some really cool stuff to be seen in there, and it's something that every Skyrim fan should take a look at.

My favorite part though? How this official Bethesda-produced video uses music that riffs on the game's utterly ridiculous "arrow in the knee" line, which became such a popular meme last year. Always welcome to see a dev acknowledging things like that with good humor.

Source: YouTube

This fall, Sega will finally unleash Gearbox Software's Aliens: Colonial Marines. Gearbox first revealed that it was working on an Aliens game a month after the PlayStation 3 was released in 2006. Colonial Marines was then officially confirmed as a thing a couple years later, in 2008. We all got our first look at the game last summer and now it really is almost here, relatively speaking.

Sega is celebrating that fact today with the reveal of the game's official box art for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC platforms, as you can see above. Hit the jump for a much more up close look of the PS3 box art.

Read More »

Want to see every single kind of kill and/or execution from The Darkness 2? Of course you do, so we made an awesome compilation of all of them and set them to some equally awesome swing music!

I know what you're thinking. "Bloody dismemberment and swinging tunes vaguely resembling Frank Sinatra? It's my lucky day!" You're damn right it is. Enjoy!