Splosion Man is Twisted Pixel’s follow up to their much acclaimed platformer The Maw. And as good as that game was, Splosion Man outshines it on every level. Microsoft featured the title in this year’s Summer of Arcade on Xbox Live and it’s easy to see why.

The concept of the game is simple, you are a science experiment gone wrong. You are now made up of a molten fiery substance and have the ability to explode. Hence the title Splosion Man.

After becoming a freak of nature your life is centered around two goals:

1. Escape from the laboratory.

2. Kill every scientist in your path (revenge is a bitch).

That’s it. There’s your plot. Simple but extremely addicting.

Read the rest of the review after the break…

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In this week’s Featured Artistic Creations I’m going medieval on your asses. Not in a historically accurate kind or way, but in a fantastic dragons and lion knights kind of way. Follow me on a fantastically geeky adventure!

No seriously though just do it…I asked nicely…

Click the above thumbs to whisk yourself to a magical place where prostitution was still legal and hitching a ride on the back of an eagle equaled p.i.m.p. status.

All of the above work is from the profile of deviantART user *kerembeyit. Head over to their gallery if you like what you see.

Gawking at all of those pics just made me want to watch Willow for some reason…yeah I’m THAT much of a geek!

The past couple of days consumers have been pummeled with news of the new PlayStation 3 Slim SKU and price cut (finally!. Too little too late though?). Lost in that sea of Sony news was the announcement of Firmware 3.0 and a list of new features coming to PS3 owners.

The PlayStation Blog has outlined what we can expect. And it looks like they may be steering the PlayStation Network in a direction more in line with Xbox Live’s NXE. Minus the cheesy avatars.

Go past the break to see the full list of new tweaks…

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GRIN has finally made official what most people  have rumored for months, that it has closed it’s doors and shuttered it’s operations.

GRIN execs Bo and Ulf Andersson released the following statement explaining the developer’s recent economic troubles:

“It is with a heavy heart we announce today that GRIN has been forced to close its doors. This as too many publishers have been delaying their payments, causing an unbearable cash flow situation.”

The Swedish company is responsible for recent titles such as Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 1 & 2, Bionic Commando Rearmed, Wanted: Weapons Of Fate, Terminator: Salvation and last but not least Bionic Commando.

Most of those titles saw anemic sales figures which didn’t help GRIN’s financial situation. When two of your last three releases are movie tie-ins you can’t expect good things. And the astounding thud that the Bionic Commando reboot made when it flopped must have been the final nail in the coffin.

Twenty-five ex GRIN employees are now working at Outbreak Studios, a newly formed development studio. Best of luck to you guys.

Mac owners and Linux users rejoice! The free to play web based shooter Quake Live will be ready for your playing pleasure next Tuesday August 18th.

id software’s CEO Todd Hollenshead announced during the QuakeCon 2009 press conference that they’ll be adding support for those two operating systems after their latest update rolls out next week.

Apple IIe support can be expected next month.

Also it’s worth mentioning that Hollenshead also announced sale prices for id’s iPhone/iPod Touch games Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom Resurrection.

From now until Sunday you can pick up Wolfy 3-D for the bargain price of .99 cents (Hitler soul patch and all). And Resurrection can be yours for a measly $2.99.

Codemasters announced the system requirements for the latest installment in the Operation Flashpoint series and they are no joke.

The game is boasting impressive graphics but the real system hog will be the scale of some of the battles you will be fighting in, with hundreds of soldiers and vehicles dotting the landscape.

Here’s what you’ll need just to be able to run the game:

Minimum requirements

Operating system: Windows XP SP2 or later

• GPU: DirectX 9.0c GPU: Shader 3.0 (GeForce 7900 GT / 256 MB VRAM or higher)
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
• 1 GB Memory: 1 GB
• 8 GB Hard disk: 8 GB
• CPU: Dual Core CPU 2 x 2.4 GHz
• DVD-ROM DVD drive: Dual Layer DVD-ROM

And here’s what you’ll need to be able to run the game and actually enjoy it:

Recommended System

• Operating system: Windows XP SP2 or later
• GPU: Shader 3.0 (GeForce 8800 GT / 512 MB VRAM or higher), DirectX 9.0c
• Sound Card: DirectX Compatible
• Memory: 2 GB
• Hard disk: 8 GB
• CPU: Quad Core CPU
• DVD drive: Dual Layer DVD-ROM

Just for a comparison Crytek recommended running Crysis with a Core 2 Duo @ 2.2GHZ.

So dust off your meth labs, you’ll need the money for some upgrades to your rig if you want to pimp this game. For realz.

This week we’ll feature throwback Transformer works of art. Not those abortions Michael Bay calls robots. I’m talking the old skool Autobots and Decepticons we all grew up with…before CG.

Click the thumbs below to see them in their larger robot glory, sorry no cool Tranformers sound effects included…

All of the above works of art came from the mind of devantArt user JP-V. You can check out the rest of his stuff here.

Every week we like to feature fan art by our readers. If you have something you’d like to have featured please contact us and we’ll be glad to showcase your crap works of art here!

We all know that Steam loves to help our wallets out with sweet deals on the weekends, and now it looks like they’ll be nice enough to slash prices during the middle of our week as well. You know, to make sure we have something new to play all weekend.

Tomorrow Steam will roll out their new promotion called “Mid-Week Madness”, and to help kick things off they’ll be offering up Call of Duty: World at War for a measly $25. That’s a whopping 50% off from the usual asking price. Not Bad!

The deal starts tomorrow and will only run through Thursday August 13 so act quick or your accountant will hate you forever!

We can all pretty much agree that Infinity Ward did a bang up job with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. My only serious beef with them was their lack of support after the game’s release. They only managed to release a single Map Pack which left fans of the game wanting more.

It looks like their support for Modern Warfare 2 will be more ambitious. Promising at least two DLC’s after the game’s release and maybe even more depending on fan reactions.

In an email to MTV Multiplayer, Infinity Ward’s community manager Robert Bowling hinted that this time around things will be different. Who loves you baby?

“As far as DLC goes, we love it and plan to support Modern Warfare 2 heavily with post-launch support,” he said. “We’ve confirmed we’ll be doing at least two map packs which were announced at E3 as a timed exclusive for the Xbox 360. The fact that we confirmed at least two map packs doesn’t mean there won’t be more; honestly we plan on shaping our DLC based on community feedback from the full game, and the first two DLC map packs. Therefore, the community will really determine what comes after that.”

It would be nice to see Infinity Ward follow in the footsteps of Treyarch, who just released it’s third Map Pack for Call of Duty: World at War. As long as gamers are willing to fork over their cash (and they will) IW should pump out at least three or four solid DLC’s.

Of course we all know Modern Warfare 2 will sell roughly 4,000,000,000  copies anyway. They’ll be able to print their own currency and buy the moon…

Comic-Con wrapped up a few days ago so I decided to dedicate this week’s Featured Artistic Creations to the comic book heroes we all know and love. Superman, Wolverine and the Green Lantern are all characters that facinated us as kids and even still as adults.

As a kid I remember tucking a towel into the colar of my shirt and running around like I was Superman. Actually my girlfriend caught me doing it last week too…but enough about me.

This week’s masterpieces are from deviantArt user LastSonofKrypton38 (how fitting right?). Check out his online profile here if you like what you see. Make sure you click the thumbs to super size them bitches.

And as usual let us know if you dable in the arts and would like your work posted. We’ll be glad to feature it here to make you rich and famous…for a fee of course.