All I need now is some gold fronts...

As someone with fond memories of gathering 'round the television to watch the Batman cartoon of the 90's, hearing that Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy (the voices of the Joker and Batman from the cartoon respectively) are going to be voicing the same characters they played in the show in the upcoming Arkham Asylum gets me psyched to play the game. The DVD's of the original series are available now, and are worth the purchase if you are at all a fan of the comic book series. The stories portrayed in the show were usually some heavy shit for a 10 or 11 year old to behold. The villains in particular were often far from fantasy, and their stories were often pretty complex (my favorite villain is still Clayface). Knowing that Mark Hamill takes his vocal portrayal of the Joker very seriously spells out that this game is not screwing around. VG247 leaked the news here.

Although it's absent from developer Free Radical's homepage, apparently when the staff showed up this morning, the doors were locked. Does anything suck more than that? Free Radical has developed some great games, like TimeSplitters (which I'll always remember had a cameo in Shaun of the Dead) and Second Sight, which if you like Force Unleashed you would most likely enjoy. It's just a rumor that Free Radical is in this kind of trouble, after all when I used to be a supervisor at a video game retailer I forgot my key once, maybe that's what happened? Check it on Kotaku here.

Oh you PR firms and your marketing genius. I found out today that a bit of news prior to Dead Space's release that I ate up was that the game was being banned in Germany, China, and Japan. It turns out that when GamePolitics called shenanigans on the story that it all came tumbling down. Dead Space is freely available in all of the above countries and that it was never banned in the first place. Reading through the GameInformer interview with Glen Schofield, the producer of the game, you can quickly realize though that some of reasons as to why the game would be banned in Japan are complete bullshit. Check out this quote here:

Schofield: I was very surprised with Japan. In finding out exactly the reasons why, it kind of makes sense. There is a cultural difference dealing with the dead. They just had something that we could not overcome and we didn't want to compromise the game. Hell, [Takashi] Miike is the king of horror over there, and if you watch any of his films they are frickin' insane. So, for us to get banned, I was a bit surprised.

Yeah, exactly, no way. A country that launched the Resident Evil series has a problem with the dead? You've probably never seen Versus either. GamePolitics article is here.