Four new pieces of artwork and five new screenshots can be found on the official Diablo III site.

Bethsoft dropped us a line to point out three new Fallout 3: Operation Anchorage DLC screens.

Gamasutra is reporting that ex-Iron Lore vets (Titan Quest) Arthur Bruno and Eric Campanella have formed Crate Entertainment and bought back Black Legion, a console action/RPG that Iron Lore was trying to shop to various publishers:

Crate purchased the rights to two games that were under development at Iron Lore, including a project titled Black Legion. The title is an action RPG for the Xbox 360, and Crate is currently shopping a demo for it to game publishers.

"One of our real goals is to take the solid game play we established in Titan Quest and repackage it to make it sort of grittier and more appealing to the mainstream audience," says Bruno. "We’re trying to evolve the action to something that will bring the RPG to its next level."

Shacknews has a video diary that takes viewers through the upcoming Fable II DLC titled Knothole Island, which is due for release on January 13th.

While it doesn't tell us anything new about Mass Effect 2, this page promoting a GDC panel on BioWare's iterative design approach to Mass Effect 2 obviously confirms the title.  Head over to The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware's MASS EFFECT 2 for a full description of the upcoming 60 minute lecture.

There's a new S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky patch taking the game to v1.5.08 available from the official download page.  This mostly addresses MP anti-cheat measures.

Akella has released a new video for Cinemax's mythologically themed action rpg, Numen:Contest of Heroes. You can pick up the footage of combat and gameplay at GamersHell and File Front.

Lead Producer of Fallout 3's DLC Jeff Gardiner interviewed at Eurogamer.

Eurogamer: The 800 Microsoft Points price point is often challenged by gamers - look at the Gears 2 Combustible Map Pack, for instance - and you have some experience with pricing issues. How's the reaction been so far? Are you still comfortable with it?

Jeff Gardiner: We're offering several hours of unique gameplay - along with a bevy of armor and weaponry the player can use throughout the entire main game of Fallout 3. Reaction has been very positive.

Eurogamer: With G.E.C.K. (good name, by the way!) now out and about, will PC gamers be able to take advantage of the Op Anchorage and other DLC assets when they come out?

Jeff Gardiner: Yes, you can use content in the DLC to create new plugins and mods, but anyone who wants to use those plugins/mods will have to have bought the DLC and have it installed.

While we get our RPG of the Year awards together, Magerette brings us a review of Katauri's delightful King's Bounty: The Legend.  Here's an excerpt:

The core role-playing elements that stand out in Kings Bounty are threefold; skills, items and quests. Many games including most arpgs have the first two down, but flunk on the third. Not here, where the quest system is alive and well and quirky, with both a perfect willingness to replay the golden Fedex oldies like clearing the cellar of rats (or in this case, a garden of overly-aggressive plant material) or to work in some of it's own twists on the usual, like helping the dwarves improve the quality of their wartime brew, coercing the portrait of the griffin king out of an extortionate artist, bribing your way into prison, or swindling a scamming pirate. NPCs abound, and conversations range from the sublimely nonsensical to the ridiculous, but seldom are they without the opportunity to pursue an avenue to wealth and/or experience and thus feed your need for checking off each NPC’s box in a satisfying and occasionally mind-boggling way.

Head here to read it all!

VideoGamer.com has Sega's upcoming release schedule, which shows Obsidian's Alpha Protocol with a "Q1 2009" release date window.  According to the piece, Sega would not clarify exactly what this represents but they speculate it probably means April - June, as this is the first quarter of the Japanese financial year.

Daniel writes that Swiss site GBase.ch has a German language review of Gothic 3: Forsaken Gods.  According to my Google-fu, rampant bugs, the strange story premise and the combat are all criticised.  Calling it a pre-Alpha hobby mod, the score is 4/10.

Soldak let us know the v1.013 patch for Depths of Peril is now official, adding a bunch of minor tweaks and fixes.

GamePro throws out their Top 10 RPG list for 2008.  The Witcher EE, Mass Effect, Fable II and Fallout 3 get nods amidst JRPGs and MMOs taking the other spots.  The list is ordered based on their review scores with Persona 4 for the PS2 taking top spot.

Spiderweb are looking for testers for their latest Geneforge 5.

What we need testers for:

Right now we need Windows Testers for Geneforge 5. You will need to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and get it back to us fairly quickly (Faxing it is a very good idea). People who don't get the NDA in promptly won't be able to test.

Important note:

We get lots of tester applications. Lots and lots of them. Sorting through the flood takes a lot of time. Due to the large number of applications we will receive, we will not respond to every application. Please do not E-mail us asking if you were accepted. We will only E-mail those who have been accepted. Many apologies, and good luck!

In some broader industry news, IGN is reporting that long-standing gaming site 1Up has been sold, and magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly may shut down. This follows after the owner of these and other game-related sites, Ziff Davis Media, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy last March.

Here's the whole article with assorted links for those interested:

January 6, 2009 - The end of an era might be dawning for a stalwart of the videogame industry -- Electronic Gaming Monthly might be closing for good.

Today, paidContent.org, website devoted to the business of digital content, ran a story titled "Ziff Davis sells 1UP digital network to Hearst, shutters EGM." In the article, which has since been removed, paidContent states that publisher Ziff Davis Media is closing EGM with this month's issue being the 20-year-old publication's last and selling the 1UP Digital Network to the Hearst Corporation. Under Hearst, 1UP would fall under the UGO Entertainment umbrella. Ziff Davis Media filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2008.

A spokesperson at 1UP refused to comment this afternoon and directed questions to Jason Young, Ziff Davis CEO. A message left for Young, an e-mail to paidContent Managing Editor Ernie Sanders, and a message for paidContent Publisher and Editor Rafat Ali were not immediately returned this afternoon. Meanwhile, a UGO spokesperson did not return a phone call.

Today, former 1UP Editorial Director and EGM Editor-in-Chief John Davison wrote an article about the paidContent brouhaha on What They Play, a gaming site he co-founded. Davidson also couldn't get a straight answer as to what is going on in EGM/1UP land, but in an update he stated "Sources have indicated that details will be forthcoming as to the validity of the story by tomorrow morning."

UPDATE: 1UP has posted a story confirming the site's sale -- along with GameVideos.com, MyCheats.com, and GameTab.com -- to UGO, but it doesn't mention anything about EGM.

UPDATE No. 2: Gamasutra has posted what it claims is a leaked e-mail to Ziff Davis employees from CEO Jason Young confirming the EGM closure. "With this transaction happening, we have also made the decision to discontinue publication of EGM. The January 2009 issue will be the final issue of the publication. With demand for print continuing to decline amongst both advertisers and readers and the content being produced by 1UP no longer available for use in the publication, it simply did not make sense for us to move forward with this business any longer."

Gamebanshee has collected a trio of reviews for Soldak Entertainment's casual dungeon crawler, Kivi's Underworld, all of them positive.

GameCyte gives the game a 3/5 score and a very detailed analysis:

Now, if you’re a fan of hack and slashers, chances are your favorite aspect is exploring the maps. Each of Kivi’s stages is laid out like a maze, with traps, multiple locked doors to open, secret rooms to discover, and many keys and triggers to find. Objects are also destructible, containing gems and coins which will increase your score (the higher your end score, the higher your attribute point reward). You’ll also find plenty of power-ups during your travels, and these range from simple healing spells and area of effect ice blasts to the spell brute strength, which causes your character to double in size and gain tremendous physical power. You can carry up to three power-ups at any given time, which isn’t very much when they drop so often. Unfortunately, being able to hold only three will drastically reduce your tactical options as you’re going to want to hold on to health and mana replenishing power-ups when you find them, and will end up having to ignore many of the other ones.

Third Party Ninjas, scoreless, also like the game:

...This is a different experience, and it’s really refreshing. Instead of controlling a single character that you spend hours tweaking and equipping, Kivi’s is built around unlocking lots of unique characters that each play differently. Switching to a new character can completely change the way you play a level, and you’ll need to play each level again to fully experience everything.

The final review at Jay is Games is mostly positive as well:

If you're a hardcore RPG fan, the gameplay and unusual mechanic of Kivi's Underworld might turn you off, or seem repetitive after awhile. On the other hand, it might be just the thing you've been looking for, considering all the isometric action-RPGs (yes yes, "Diablo clones," I know, ::sigh::) that you've probably tried out over the years. The developers at Soldak Entertainment really have a knack for putting a unique and enjoyable spin on the tried-and-true formula.

Hooked Gamers takes a look at a preview build of 1C-Ino-co's stand alone sequel to their turn-based fantasy strategy game Fantasy Wars, Eleven Legacy, and posts some positive comments:

Combat is simple, but hardly straightforward. The maps are richly detailed and contain hills, plains, forests, swamps, rivers, settlements and fortifications. Each of these terrain types has an effect on both the attack and defensive capabilities of units. So far, it still sounds straightforward, but the skills and perks that you award to your units add a bit of variety to the mix. One perk could add a +2 defensive bonus on hilly terrain while another gives you a defensive bonus within urban areas...

Occasionally the game takes a sidestep from playing as the elves, allowing you to play with a different race. During these missions, you see the storyline from a different perspective, giving you a broader view that would not be possible without it. While Elven Legacy is a tough game to begin with playing as the elves, these sidestep missions are perhaps the toughest of all due to unfamiliarity with the skills and characteristics of the units. They do offer a welcome change of scenery however.

Conclusion:

I have had tremendous fun playing Elven Legacy and that was even despite the fact that all the voice work was still in Russian in the preview build. The story twists and turns numerous times and sometimes has you wonder if you are playing the good guys, or the bad guys. An oft-heard complaint about Fantasy Wars was that it was too old-school but to me that is one of its strengths. Elven Legacy continues in the same vein and I for one am delighted that it is.

GameDaily's Big Download posts a polite and bland scoreless review of Codemaster's action title Rise of the Argonauts:

While Rise of the Argonauts is far from being a bad game, it's not a great game either. The combat is too simple and the story isn't strong or deep enough to keep players fully engaged. Bosses generally come off being annoying at first, but turn out to be easy once their pattern is figured out. Even the final boss confrontation is a generally short-lived one. At the end of it all, we were left feeling indifferent toward the whole adventure. It's a decent way to pass the time, but we wouldn't have regretted walking away from the game at any point.

Indie site GameTunnel has announced the winner for the RPG genre in their annual awards.  The unusual side-scrolling Spirit Engine 2 picked up the top accolade, with Mount & Blade, Avernum 5, Savage 2 and Kivi's Underworld rounding out the top 5.

Rampant Coyote Jay Barnson muses on exploring other dimensions beyond geography, to make the content creation easier.  This is a key point for indies but perhaps it could also allow development time to focus on other interesting aspects:

One of the things that makes RPGs so friggin' difficult to make for indies is the sheer quantity of content required for the traditional exploration-based gameplay that is one of the hallmarks (but, I note, not necessarily a requirement) of computer role-playing games. Indies have a constrained budget, almost by definition - and all that content can be really, really expensive to create.

Besides using higher-level building blocks to create content, another approach I've been fascinated by is to separate "exploration" from geography. Television shows re-use the same sets over and over again. It's usually when they decide to take a road trip to some exotic location that they jump the shark. While television shows aren't exactly a key example of "exploration," they do explore ideas, characters, and issues. While the locations change, the context changes each time. The bridge of the Enterprise may usually be the same (except when it's half-destroyed), but the people, time, and situations change. And those are things that could be equally fun to explore in an RPG.

Diabloiii.net has posted a full-length shot of concept art for the female witchdoctor character, as well as the news that the February 2009 issue of PC Gamer has Blizzard's still-in-development game as the subject of it's cover story:

The February issue of PCGamer is sporting a Blizzard special front cover with “Diablo III Leads Top Games of 2009” as the headline.

We have already talked a bit about Diablo 3 being released this year and I think most of us are of the opinion that the game will not see the light of day in 2009, regardless of what the mags say. According to site visitor Booner, there is no new info in the mag but it does have an interview with Rob Pardo who talks about all Blizzard games.

GamersHell adds nine screens to their gallery for IC-Ino-co's standalone sequel to Fantasy Wars, Elven Legacy. You can view them here.

Worthplaying has kicked up some hopefully new screens from Akella's Disciples III.

This is stretching our mandate a long way but Russian games have some profile in this genre and King's Bounty gets a brief mention or two.  Gaming in the Russian Cosmos Part 1 is an updated piece at Rock, Paper, Shotgun (the original version goes all the way back to May 2008) with Jim Rossignol relating his experiences from a trip to the KRI gaming event.  On the effect of logistics in Russia:

Just 142 million people have 17 million square kilometres to live in. (Compare that to 60 million of us in the UK sharing just 245,000 square kilometres). It’s an eight-day train journey from Moscow to Vladivostok, where the the King’s Bounty team reside. They couldn’t make it to KRI for that very reason. What’s more it’s a place where publishers need to battle with the problems of distribution and rampant retail piracy. We might get upset about torrent sites and online theft, but up until a few years ago most games sold in Russia were pirate copies sold as packaged products on the street. The cost of broadband meant, for the larger part, it was cheaper to buy pirate product from a vendor. The problem was so bad that pirate companies were reportedly approaching publishers to offer to distribute their games. This has been quite fiercely stamped out by the Russian authorities.

Fragland has posted a positive review for Lionhead Studios' so far XBox-only title, Fable II, giving it a score of 92/100:

The world is ready for your rule, and it is a beautiful, interesting world. The setting looks fantastic, both on technical and artistic level, and you really feel like being in a fairy tale in which your play the main part. This feeling is among other things reinforced by the original and enchanting (or when needed frightening soundtrack and the excellent voice acting that finally is not limited to some grumbling Americans or Japanese teenage girls reaching puberty. The many quests also help to bring the world to life and are one by one original, partly original, or at least provided with funny, surprising characters with their own background or story. No simple back and forth quests here, because in return for less quantity, quality is given. The only negative point that we could think of, is that the main story perhaps could have been somewhat more epic, but in the end that is hair splitting.

Conclusion:

Fable 2 has become a wonderful, exciting fairy tale, one in which the promises of freedom of choice, real role-playing and an exciting world have finally been fulfilled. Regrettably, some technical shortcomings like the many loading times, the sometimes inadequate interface and the not always well devised fighting system make the whole a bit less pleasant. However, at no time those negative points will be able to stop you from fully enjoying this warm, pleasant game in which you can let yourself go and in which you can enjoy the humour, the fantasy, the surprising end and the many unforgettable moments.

Thomas Riegsecker from Basilisk let us know he has posted an updated feature list for Eschalon: Book II as a sort of interim development update.  The list of improvements is quite long, so here's just the gameplay section:

GAME PLAY
* 7 new spells; several existing spells have been altered/upgraded.
* Gender Selection (play as a male or female character).
* Selectable attack mode alters damage and accuracy based on character ability and enemy stats.
* Parry mode for defensive posturing when needed.
* New skill: Repair. Used in fixing worn equipment for better performance or increased value before selling.
* New skill: Foraging. Used to increase your chance of finding food and alchemy components during your travels.
* Significant skill rebalancing for more unified progression.
* Weapons and armor now deteriorate realistically with use (optional). Increasing your weapon and armor skills slows deterioration rate, and the Repair Skill can be used to fix damaged equipment.
* Food and Water now a factor in survival. Long treks into deep dungeons will require planning and preparation. (Optional)
* Powder kegs can now be picked up and dropped in new locations which makes for strategic game play options.
* Game world objects more dynamic: explosions and fire can affect objects; more objects are usable.
* Rebuilt the luminosity function to remove exploits. This corrects the "Torch exploit" as well as balancing "Hide in Shadow" better.
* New difficulty modes and tracked statistics add to replay value.
* New item generation function for thousands of unique weapon and armor variations.
* Difficulty settings for easier or more challenging gameplay.