Animal Crossing 'Comparison' clip I wouldn’t blame you for mistaking Animal Crossing: City Folk for Animal Crossing on GameCube and maybe even Wild World on DS. This GameVideos comparison video lets you see the three games in motion and in quick succession. It’s obvious that the GameCube and DS games don’t quite have the crispness that City Folk does but …

Joystiq reported that Bungie engineers have said that installing Halo 3 to the harddrive using the NXE’s new install feature will actually result in less than optimal play. Installing games can result in slightly faster load times most of the time although from the games that I’ve tested – Gears 2, Fable 2 and Fallout 3 the sppeed increase in …

Finally we have an answer about the GTA IV DLC that has been noticeable with it’s absence recently. Rockstar has now announced the first DLC (which is exclusive to the 360) will be made available on the 17th of February and will be entitled The Lost and Damned. If you recall The Lost was the name of the bikers gang and …

Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360 and PC hits shelves this week and looks to pack a ton of multiplayer mayhem. Think Gears of War 2's horde mode, on crack, with zombies and with a different experience every time that you play through a level. There are quite a couple of gameplay videos available now and I can tell you that some of them are showing off exactly how dark and scary some of the locations will actually be. I'm all for zombie bashing though, so I cannot wait to pick up my copy and let rip on the suckers. Honestly, where would the world be if Zombie's weren't invented.

So, the other night we were playing a game of Gears of War 2 and we were all destroying each other on a map called Day One. I have taken quite a liking to the photo mode that came with the game, so after my death, I was having my usual fun taking photo's of the action. On the Day One map there is a small street corner arcade, in which I found something rather interesting. You may remember that the infamous anti-videogame lawyer Jack Thompson always referred to the Grand Theft Auto series of games as a "murder simulator". Now looking at that header image will show you that Epic decided to poke a bit of fun at that whole mess by creating an arcade game by the name of "Murder Simulator" and placing it into the map. I live easter eggs like this and I think it was really cool that Epic took the time to take a quick stab at an industry story that has caused a lot of grief for gamers worldwide. At least Jack is barred for life now, so until another lunatic comes along and tries to pick up where he left off, we can all rest easy knowing that we can play our violent games in ironic peace.

By now you are all very obviously aware that the NXE dashboard update has been released and is impressing a lot of 360 owners the world over. Lazygamer reported earlier today that there are some issues in the form of an error coming up when you try and view certain pages. It also now seems as though that isn't the only problem. Before the release of NXE, Microsoft promised that the old themes from the original dashboard (OXE?) would work seamlessly and also look great, but the truth is that they just don't. Although I found an article about this on OXM's website, it was one of the first things that I realised when I booted up into the new dashboard. Not only are the background images not suited to the new layout that has windows running through the centre of the screen, but the images seem to also be stretched wider and have a definite loss in quality as a result (see header image). Although I don't feel as though it is a major issue, I am not the type of gamer that spends a lot of Microsoft Points on themes and gamer pictures, so I can understand if those who do are not very impressed with the translation over to the NXE. I'm sure that more little issues are going to be popping up here and there, there are rumours flying around that the NXE is causing RROD's, but until we are sure that it is not just one or two random cases, we won't be saying anything about it just yet.

Gears of War 2’s skill-based matchmaking has now become Epic’s top priority as far as fixes to the recently released game goes and they hope to have a solution soon. Hit the jump to see what Senior producer Rod Fergusson had to say on the official forums Gears forums. Last Updated: November 20, 2008

I have to admit that I had really high hopes for Skate It on the Wii. I am a huge fan of EA's Skate. that was released last year for PS3 and Xbox 360 and so I was obviously holding thumbs that the Wii version would give me a good reason to slide out the Wii balance board for the first time in months. I was excited to see that 1UP had posted it's review of the game, so I clicked through to see what they thought. The result was unfortunately not exactly what I was hoping for as they landed up scoring it with a "D" (using the same system that grades were given in school) According to the review, the controls are incredibly poor, often resulting in different tricks being performed even though the reviewer was using the same motion each time with the Wii-mote. The balance board is apparently pretty much useless due to oversensitivity and the game world empty. I was really sad to read through the brief but straightforward review. Maybe if a sequel is produced, the developers will have a better grasp of the hardware and it's abilities. My last hope is that the DS version comes along nicely, if not, I guess I will have to wait for Skate 2's release in the first quarter of next year.