Since its announcement last June, gamers have been awaiting the arrival of the latest Alien franchise title. With the lackluster response from the most recent Aliens vs. Predator title, it looks like it is up to Aleins: Colonial Marines to pick up the pieces of the franchise and put them back in the right places.

SEGA makes an odd choice of making this trailer fully cinematic while the previous one released featured in game footage. The reason behind that is the game has a look and feel that we have experienced many times before with FPS Marines versus Aliens gameplay. If they focus too much on this in the trailer instead of building on the possible story points like the chaotic nature of a full battalion of marines taking on an infestation, the game could potentially just feel like one of those “been there, played that” scenarios.

In terms of scale, Aliens: Colonial Marines may be the largest single player battle gamers have had the opportunity to encounter. Expect lots of grizzly cut scenes with dozens of different marines acting as cannon fodder to the xenomorph menace.

For now, check out the trailer after the jump. Stick to the Flickcast for more on Aliens: Colonial Marines coming to the PC, PlayStation 3 and XBox 360 scheduled for Fall of 2012.

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Take square blocks and build whatever you can imagine, limited only by your own creativity. It’s a description that could fit perfectly with one classic toy franchise as well as one of the most groundbreaking PC games of 2011. For decades, children have put together the little pegged blocks in billions of combinations building castles, cities, vehicles and creatures in ways the creators never could have expected.

For the past year, gamers have dug squares out of a virtual landscape and created everything from replicas of famous landmarks to Godzilla-sized Pokemon recreations. And now, the two franchises which look to be a perfect fit for each other, LEGO and Minecraft, are coming together.

As reported on LEGO’s CUUSOO blog, the Minecraft project has been approved to move on to the product development stages:

Since the Minecraft™ project reached 10,000 supporters on LEGO® CUUSOO, many of you have been eagerly awaiting our update. Until now, the project has been in the LEGO Review—a stage before product development begins where a LEGO Jury evaluates the idea’s feasibility as a product and makes a decision.

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After the critical and commercial success of Resident Evil 5, it is no surprise that a sixth proper Resident Evil title is coming out. Selling over 5 million copies and garnering a Metacritic score in the mid 80s, it is only common sense that Capcom would continue the story of their top tier franchise. After several viral teasers, no pun intended, on NoHopeLeft.com, Capcom finally revealed to the world Resident Evil 6.

This Resident Evil will feature series headliners Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield along a new unknown male character, this one who seemingly has an unknown immunity to the T-virus. This new character appears as a mercenary for hire and is seen in the trailer below constantly being given injections, whether these are used to revive him or help him fight a T-virus infection are still unknown. This new character also has a female sidekick much like Sheva from Resident Evil 5.

Take a peek below at the new trailer and the first image reveal for the game. Stick to The Flickcast for more on Resident Evil 6 coming out for the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC on November 20th, 2012.

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A billion dollars in sales in just 16 days. An unprecedented release both for the video game and entertainment industry. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a juggernaut. It only seems fitting that along with the Call of Duty Elite mobile app going live this week, that the DLC announcements would start rolling out as well. Starting January 24th for premium Call of Duty Elite members on XBox Live (and later dates for other platforms) until September, there will be at least twenty content drops for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 including “brand new multiplayer maps, Special Ops Missions, new game modes and more.”

“The mammoth launch of Modern Warfare 3 and the breakout success of Call of Duty Elite were just the beginning. Call of Duty Elite provides an “always-on” connection to our fanbase, and the MW3 Content Season is the ultimate way to demonstrate our ongoing commitment to the Call of Duty community and provide tremendous value to Call of Duty Elite premium members,” said Eric Hirshberg, CEO of Activision Publishing. “With the Call of Duty®: MW3 Content Season for Call of Duty Elite we are delivering on our promise of more new content, more often, and with more variety than ever. With three studios collaborating on the first season, the breadth and depth of material on tap is truly extraordinary. It’s rare you can successfully execute both quantity and quality, but thanks to the expertise of our developers, the reach of Call of Duty Elite and the passion of our fans, we intend to deliver.”

Content drops will occur once a month for the nine month duration of the DLC season with the first three months from January to March promising five different content drops.

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This is it. It’s the big one! Right before the New Year, we posted our awards for the best of gaming in 2011. But there was one all important award that we needed some extra time to deliberate on… The Game of the Year.

In this episode, JC and WallE forgo the usual format of the Bitcast and engage in a conversation where they, along with some input from Flickcasters Matt Raub and Cortney Zamm, decide on what game earns the coveted title of Game of the Year.

And The Nominees Are:

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Just passing its fifteenth anniversary, the Diablo series has become known as the quintessential loot grabbing dungeon crawling RPG on the PC. With only two formal releases, the third installment of Diablo is set to come out this year from Blizzard. While fans of the series have clamored for more, they also know that Blizzard is not a company to rush a game if it isn’t ready and have earned a reputation for quality because of this. As a result, Diablo III may be the most anticipated game of 2012.

Returning from Diablo II will be the Barbarian, the game’s standard melee class but with a reworked skillset. Also in the melee vein will be the new Monk class. The Wizard will debut similar to the sorcerer from Diablo and sorceress from Diablo II.

New to the series will be the Witch Doctor, similar in playstyle to the Necromancer from Diablo II and a new rogue-like character known as the Demon Hunter possessing ranged abilities, traps and evasion tactics.

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As we have talked out with our other recent Coming in 2012 articles, there are some big games coming out throughout the year. For the most part, these games look to be pretty spread out throughout the year… except for the collection of games announced for March 6th. Six, yes you read that right, SIX blockbuster titles will be releasing on March 6th, 2012 representing four different genres in the gaming industry.

First, fighting fans will finally get their hands on the much heralded and anticipated Street Fighter X Tekken. Back at NYCC, I had the opportunity to get hands on with the game and from what time I got with it, it has the potential to live up to the hype. It’s incredible to think about the dream matchups coming to Street Fighter X Tekken such as the wrestling heavyweight brawl expected to take place between Zangief and King or the martial artistry shown by both Ryu and Kazuya.

The Mass Effect trilogy comes to an epic conclusion with the release of Mass Effect 3. Shepard and his crew come back to earth with this action RPG along with the inclusion of a new multiplayer mode on top of the game’s signature dialogue tree and morality based decision making. Expect this game to consume the lives of those gamers who are finally just finishing their 250 romps from Skyrim.

Another game that will be getting a 3 after it is the Max Payne series. After a long hiatus, Max Payne 3 will be hitting store shelves. Years, both in game time and real life, have passed since the last time we saw Max in bullet time with his Noir dialogue and comic style storytelling.

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Much as 2011 was a year of sequels, some of the most anticipated games of 2012 look to be continuations on existing franchises. One of these titles came from one of the sleeper hits of 2009 called Borderlands, from Gearbox.

In Borderlands, players got the choice between one of four classes of characters and could play through the world by themselves or with up to three friends cooperatively online in an apocalyptic world with a cell shaded comic book art style. The game came from out of no where and would spawn its own community and garnered loads of DLC as well.

Coming in 2012, Borderlands 2 features new classes including the already famous gunzerker, new locations and new challenges. The four original characters from Borderlands are said to be returning nonplayable characters and favorites like Clap Trap will make appearances as well. This time, a man by the name of Handsome Jack claims responsibility for the deeds of the vault hunters from the first game and has used it to gain control of the Hyperion Corporation and has taken a strong hold on the world of Pandora and now is trying to expand his power.

The game will continue Borderlands’ FPS RPG style featuring quest lines, leveling up and loot drops all using the modified Unreal Engine 3 to power it. Take a peek below at the teaser trailer from the team at Gearbox for Borderlands 2, coming to the XBox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in July 2012.

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One thing we’ve learned is there are too many games and too little time to play them all. This also means there isn’t even enough time to give all of them awards, but we try our best. Today we take a look at both the most time consuming efforts of the past year as well as give some awards for games that deserve some notable mentions as well.

Game Most Likely to Consume Your Life: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

Two Hundred and Fifty Hours. By most estimates, this is how long it’ll take an average player to explore MOST of the content of Skyrim. To give some perspective, if the average person works a 40 hour a week job, Skyrim would take six and a quarter full work weeks to complete. Now, we realize that most gamers work jobs outside of the gaming industry and cannot devote a full forty hours a week to a single game.

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Yesterday we took a look at Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Capcom, Dark Souls and Portal 2. Today, we have a whole second set of awards to be given out for the best (and worst) of 2011.

Game That Shouldn’t Have Taken Nearly As Long to Come Out: Duke Nukem Forever

What happened in the time span since Duke Nukem Forever began development?

The entire Presidential run of George W. Bush.

This writer’s entire high school and college career.

Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and The Clone Wars were all released in theaters.

The XBox was released and ended its lifecycle.

Activision released 7 proper Call of Duty titles.

Lost.

A child born when development started would have grown to be a teenager.

The list goes on and on…

And the worst part is, after all that wait… Duke Nukem Forever wasn’t very good when it did finally come out. What was considered controversial when the game began production is pretty tame by comparison to what people are enjoying in gaming now and the humor comes off as sophomoric instead of clever.

While we can understand the desire to release a passion project to finally let it see the light of day, sometimes it is better to let it enjoy a quiet death with some dignity instead of coming out guns blazing as a failure.

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2011 was one heck of a year for gaming. Once again, the Call of Duty franchise set records for the largest entertainment launch in history. A game that was only in Beta was able to sell millions of copies and spawn an ungodly large community to the point they had a convention before the game was officially released. There were tons of critical darlings encouraging developers to rethink how they create games.
Take a look this week at the awards The Flickcast (along with The Bitcast team) are proud to present for gaming in 2011

Think Outside the Box Game: Portal 2

While many may argue that Minecraft may be the most deserving of this award, they need to remember one thing. In Minecraft, there are no rules. The expanses of the box are too extreme to find the outer boundaries of. Within Portal 2, players are asked to explore new viewpoints of physics, matter and… well, portals. The puzzles in Portal 2 completely overtake the complexity and creativity of the original, which in itself was groundbreaking. With additional toys at their disposal and the introduction of a cooperative mode, the team at Valve came up with a game that redefined both the puzzle solving and FPS genres all at once.

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Saturday night, Spike TV held its annual Video Game Awards show which, as promised, gave the first looks at some huge trailers for 2012′s gaming landscape.

Naughty Dog gets to step away from their blockbuster Uncharted series to work on a new IP titled The Last of Us. This new title takes a different approach from the recent string of zombie / infected scenarios where it looks like it can be a game of stealth and horror mixed together. It isn’t a world like Dead Rising or Left 4 Dead where the creatures flood the street and makes the possibility of combining the stealth and horror genres pretty intriguing.

This has the possibility of becoming a fantastic PlayStation exclusive franchise. The trailer for The Last of Us is definitely one of the great surprises from the VGAs this year.

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