Playable Press

It's looking like February will be an uncharacteristically high-profile month next year: Joining Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time in 2013's second month will be Konami and Platinum Games' controversial sequel/spinoff Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. The devs' choice to return the reins of the story to series red-headed stepchild Raiden continues to baffle us, but even considering the major shift in tone from previous entries the promise of more over-the-top Platinum goodness has us hopeful.

Good news on the Sly Cooper front yesterday in Sony's Cross Buy announcement only naturally means that there's going to be something negative to even it out. Sony confirmed at Gamescom today that the upcoming PS3/Vita Cross Play title Thieves in Time will now be delayed until February:

It's no secret that we've been concerned about the life expectancy of the Playstation Vita for a while now; With the lack of strong original titles in favor of portable collections of last-gen console ports cutting heavily into its sales, many have already written off Sony's struggling handheld as dead. Even the announcement of the Cross Play initiative at their E3 show wasn't enough to drum up interest, leaving audiences wondering whether this meant they were now being asked to buy the same game twice in order to take advantage of it.

Those chomping at the bit to  will have to wait just a little bit longer. Earlier today, SuperBot Entertainment president Park Chan announced on the official Playstation Blog that the Western release of Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale will be delayed just shy of a month to November 20.

Remember when we told you about the Neo Geo handheld back in March? Well, to be honest, we kind of forgot about it. With everything that's gone on since then the original Q2 release date just passed by without us really noticing. The good news is that the newly-branded Neo Geo X Gold has escaped from the clutches of vaporware with today's announcement from SNK Playmore setting the system up for a worldwide launch December 6.

Despite Konami's efforts to deliver a comprehensively satisfactory collection of the early titles in their marquee survival-horror series - Silent Hill - recent reports of frame rate issues, audio synchronization problems, and various bugs in Silent Hill HD Collection indicate that it still has room for improvement. The good news is that Konami has announced a patch to see to these issues that should be available soon; The bad news is that this patch will only be available for the Playstation 3 version.

Virtual reality has long been the fantasy of many a gamer, and while one notable misstep in bringing the experience home in 1995 had many consumers seeing red (Eh?) the field has been anything but closed to companies trying to do it better. VR-style head-mounted television displays do exist today, but the issues of size and price tend to keep them out of the hands of all but those with the most discretionary income.

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THQ has been tightening its belt to ensure that its recent first quarterly profit in years won't be a fluke: Projects like Warhammer 40K: Dark Millennium Online have been repurposed into safer genres, while some others like Devil's Third have been scrapped entirely and returned to their owners. As of yesterday, the Insane trilogy - originally slated for release sometime in 2014 and headed by prominent filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro - has joined the latter in cancellation.

Considered the standard in MMORPGs since its release and explosive success in 2004, Blizzard Entertainment's World of Warcraft has successfully weathered close to a decade's worth of potential usurpers (oftentimes billing themselves as WOW-killers) and remained at the top of the heap by an incredibly healthy margin. However, there's one opponent that it seems even the high fantasy juggernaut is vulnerable to: time.