For gamers who slap down a fiver to reserve their copy of Double Fine's Brütal Legend comes a new in-game guitar, or axe as goes the parlance. Aside from the unique look, voice work has been provided (for a guitar?) by Tenacious D's Kyle Gass and Jack Black.

In an announcement sure to please just about anybody, Bioware announced that the PC version of the upcoming Dragon Age won’t be using SecuROM for its copy protection scheme. Chris Priestly, Bioware’s community coordinator on their official forums posted that “the retail PC version of the game won’t require you to go online to authenticate the [...]

Announced at Game Developers’ Conference this past week, Entertainment Consumers Association Hal Halpin announced that membership in the organization now gets you 10% off of games at Amazon.com. The $20 membership fee helps to fund the ECA’s advocacy issues, as they work to improve such things as DRM and basically act as a gamers’ lobby. Looking into [...]

Gametap will be removing 97 games from it's free library on Thursday, making them available only to their subscribing members. As the current free library contains about 145 free games, this comes to a 67% reduction in size. Several of the notable titles in Gametap's lineup are included in this cut, including Tomb Raider Legend, Psychonauts and Deus Ex.

According to an email sent out by Square-Enix, the release date for Star Ocean: The Last Hope has been moved up from March 3rd to February 27th. The Japanese and European releases are remaining the same at February 19 and April 24, respectively.

It's been uncovered that Nintendo has patented a new gameplay methodology designed to squarely target non-gamers and bring them into the fold that 'hardcore' players have enjoyed for years. Made public today, the patent describes the new gameplay style as having a built-in hint system, enabling players to move past sections of a game that formerly proved difficult for them.

There is always an incredible amount of quality in the Independent Games Festival, and this year is no exception. Here are the indie games vying for the top prize this year:

Riding high on the success of their recent Street Fighter Tribute book, Udon Entertainment is teaming up with Capcom once again to do a new art book. Celebrating its 15th anniversary this year, Udon and Capcom have decided to release a Darkstalkers Tribute in honor of this significant milestone. No further information is available at this time, the full announcement should come Thursday or Friday.

I promise that this picture is totally relevant to the story. Meanwhile, check out the happenings after the jump.

I'd love to be witty about this, but I hate frickin' Prinnys so here is a bunch of pictures of a guy in a Prinny suit at a bar.