By Agence France-Presse

LONDON — One of the most eagerly-anticipated games in the history of the Sony PlayStation has been delayed because of concerns some of the background music may offend Muslims, the game’s developers said Monday.

LittleBigPlanet, in which gamers can customize the rag-doll protagonist Sackboy and allow it to roam through an interactive world filled with different challenges, had been hailed by video games website IGN as “nothing short of astounding” and given a review rating of 9.5 out of 10.

But its release date has been put back after one of its background music tracks, a song by Mali-born artist Toumani Diabate, was found to have included expressions from the Koran, which could be interpreted as an offense to Muslims.

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By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines– Filipino-owned company Ubersoft Inc. has started offering an advertisement-wrapped mobile game download service called Swoopin.

The service allows users to download as many free mobile Java games as they want to their mobile phones via Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and only pay for the corresponding phone network fees.

The ad-wrap feature will become available whenever mobile phone users start playing games.

There are also 850 Java games in 14 available categories ranging from racing, action, puzzle, sports, casino, arcade, among others.

More games are being added every week.

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By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines — While waiting for the upcoming World Cyber Games Finals in Germany, the organizers of the WCG Philippines tournament has started the WCG League in an effort to spur continues training of gamers hoping to get into the annual WCG Finals, local organzer eSports said.

The WCG League starts on October 18 and will be held at the Cyberzone of the SM Mall of Asia.

For now, two games will be highlighted and both are for the Microsoft Xbox 360. These are Guitar Hero III (GH3) and Soul Calibur IV (SC4).

For GH3, the game mode will be one-versus-one and will be set on expert. There will already be a selection of songs including “One” by Metallica, “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, the extremely difficult “Through the Fire and Flames” by Dragonforce, among others.

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By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

GADGETS Magazine Editor John Nieves will head to Hong Kong at the end of the month to represent the Philippines in the first Intel Asia PC Gaming Showdown, which is a competition open to gaming journalists and amateur gamers.

Nieves will be facing off against game journalists from Thailand and Malaysia.

Nieves won the top prize in the Philippine leg of the competition, which pits gaming journalists in three games from Electronic Arts; Crysis, Need for Speed Pro Street and FIFA 2008.

In an interview, Nieves said he has already been practicing on FIFA 2008, the only game that he is not strongly familiar.

“Crysis plays much like most first-person shooters that I’ve played before so it’s easy to pick up and I’ve been playing the Need for Speed series since it came out. Soccer games are more difficult for me because I’m not much into sports games,” he said.

The grand winner of the Hong Kong finals will take home an high-end Alienware gaming PC powered by an Intel Core 2 Extreme processor while the second place winner will be awarded with a Creative Gigaworks S750 gaming speaker system.

By Alexander Villafania
INQUIRER.net

NO, they’re not the infamous beast from Voltes V, a famous and classic Japanese anime about a super robot. It is a seven-man team that won in the recently held Ragnarok Online Philippine Championships.

The so-called “Bozanian Beastfighters” will represent the Philippines in the upcoming Ragnarok World Championships in Manila on October 18.

Members of the Bozanian Beastfighter are Frederick Banaag, Cris John Dimaunahan, Emmanuel de Leon, Ralph Christopher Magbag, Mel Bryan Unera, Jeffrey Custodio, and Miguel Luis Angeles.

They beat the teams Renegade and Demented who were in second and third place, respectively.

The event will also coincide with the annual Level Up! Live annual convention at the World Trade Center in Pasay City.

This year’s winning team is the same team that represented the Philippines in the Ragnarok World Championship 2007 held in Seoul, South Korea. The team won third place against 10 other countries.