Chocolate Harbour Rescue is a brand new Hello Kitty Online in-game charity event running September 9 - 30, 2010. When an accident at an offshore chocolate refinery spills tons of the sweet stuff into the sea, Sanrio Harbour is inundated by sugary threats. The whole zone is a mess, but fortunately Pochacco is on the scene to recruit volunteers. Interested players should talk to Pochacco in Sanrio Harbour to receive a free Mop-A-Choc which they can use to help clean up the chocolaty mess and generate donation points. When the chocolates are all cleaned up, players will receive virtual chocolate bags full of special rewards.

If only BP had it so easy.

At the end of the month-long event, [Hello Kitty Online publisher] Sanrio Digital will use the total donation points generated by all HKO players to calculate cash donations to Oceana and UNICEF, with each receiving 50% of the total. Oceana is an ocean conservation society that is researching the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the largest such spill in history. UNICEF is an international organization providing humanitarian assistance in developing countries, currently working to deliver aid in flood-devastated Pakistan.

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Hello Kitty dispatched to help clean up Gulf oil spill

I understand that Amnesia: Dark Descent is a really scary game. But anyone who watches sound effect no. 11 in the video above won’t find the “final monster” nearly as scary as it should have been. You’ll get through the game, then you’ll come to the final monster, and it will open its terrifying maw to groan menacingly. But in your mind’s eye, you’ll see a diminutive Finn in his garage wearing an oversized rubber jumpsuit rasping into the nozzle of a vacuum cleaner attachment connected to the lid of a backyard grill aimed at one of those cute fuzzy microphones. That’s not very scary at all.

Seriously, though, I love seeing how sound effects are made. Anyone who knows the anecdote about Hitchcock and the watermelon used for Psycho can tell you that a good soundscape is a combination of the absurd and the inspired. There’s a little of both in whatever’s going on for Amnesia’s sound effect no. 11.

The rest is here:
The secret sound of Amnesia: Dark Descent’s scariest monster

Apple’s new social gaming hub for the iPhone has gone live! Unfortunately, it seems to have forgotten one thing: the games.

You can download and install Game Center, which will let you register your account. Then you can admire the colorful icon. Touch it to marvel at the green felt texture in the app. Add some friends. Set your status message. Verify that you have no requests.

Until someone flips a switch somewhere, it seems that the actual games aren’t a part of Game Center. I’ve got about fifty of the darn things installed on my iPhone, and you can see above how many of them are integrated into Game Center. Oh, and before you tell me to tap that yellow banner, I did that already. It takes me out of the app to a web page that tells me how awesome the app will be.

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New iPhone Game Center is live and full of tumbleweeds

Bioshock 2 is a tough act to follow. I don’t envy anyone who has to come up with the storyline for a ten-dollar downloadable add-on to one of the best written videogames you will ever play. That’s like having to make a short film to screen after Citizen Kane.

Oh, hello, Minerva’s Den, the single-player DLC for Bioshock 2. So. What have you got for us?

Read the review after the jump.

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Is the Minerva’s Den DLC a worthy follow-up to Bioshock 2?

Gary Oldman and Ed Harris (pictured, shortly before his auto-defenestration in The Hours) are officially part of the cast in the next Call of Duty.

Oldman, known for his work in The Professional, Dracula, Batman: The Dark Knight and most recently, The Book of Eli, will reprise his role as Viktor Reznov from Call of Duty: World at War; and Harris, best known for his roles in films like The Abyss, A History of Violence, Pollock, Apollo 13 and The Right Stuff, will play one of the game’s main characters, CIA operative Jason Hudson.

I’m pretty sure this is Harris’ first videogame gig. Welcome aboard, Ed! Everybody’s doing it these days. You’re in good company.

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These famous people will be in Call of Duty: Black Ops

The above trailer gives you a look at how the keyboard works in Rock Band 3, which is now a second option for people who insist on sitting down when they play Rock Band (drums being the first, although sitting down to play guitar might — might! — be allowed for a few very specific songs). It also gives you a look at the sheer terror of Pro Mode. I look at Pro Mode in that video and part of my brain thinks, “I want to try that”. It’s the same part of my brain that watches footage of mountain climbers and thinks, “I want to try that”.

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See the Rock Band 3 keyboard in action

This week’s wallet threat level is a superhero hued shade of pre-Halo yellow. Spider-Man shows up in Shattered Dimensions, a four-fer for how it plays across four different flavors of Spider-Men. Batman shows up as a single cartoon flavor in The Brave and the Bold, which will sound like a soap opera if you’re not hip to the animated series on which it’s based. As befits a cartoon flavored Dark Knight, Batman: The Brave and the Bold is side-scrolling action on the Wii. You can hook up a Nintendo DS version of the game to the Wii version is you want to play as Bat-Mite. Yes, there’s something called Bat-Mite. Like I said, cartoon flavored.

Speaking of cartoons, Hawx 2 is the sequel to Ubisoft’s action jet sim [sic]. Faster, Tomcat F-14, kill, kill! Amnesia: Dark Descent is the spiritual sequel to the Penumbra adventure games for the PC. Also out this week is some sort of sports thing called NHL II. Is that a two? An eleven? What does NHL stand for? And will the Bruins take the Stan Lee Cup this year?

Finally, the one game out this week that I’ve actually played is Ruse, a real time strategy game that absolutely isn’t Starcraft II. This long-delayed World War II RTS has its share of clever twists and a few things that might actually pass for innovations, but I’m not convinced they hang together very well.

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September 8, 2010: wallet threat level yellow

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend and remember not to get confused by the name of the holiday. You’re supposed to not work (pictured)!

The staff of Fidgit won’t be back until Wednesday, at which point we’ll fill the truncated week with a write-up of the latest Bioshock 2 single player adventure, iPhone games that are smarter than you, hands-on impressions of why Fable III is unlike any other RPG, an exclusive-ish look at how Elemental will play in the future, and just about the last game diary you’d expect to lead into our Halo: Reach game diary. For a short week, it’s going to be very busy, which will play us nicely into the beginning of the busy fall season. And it’s going to be a doozie, so get to slacking while the slacking’s good. We’ll see you on Wednesday.

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Happy Labor Day weekend!

The fantastic little-but-actually-big real time strategy game, Swords & Soldiers, might have a hard time making the transition to the Playstation 3. It was carefully built for the Nintendo Wii, and using the Wiimote’s pointer is a big part of what makes it play so perfectly. But it’s going to have no such trouble making the transition to the PC, where it will dance wonderfully underneath your mouse cursor. On the PC, it will also enjoy Steam achievements, online multiplayer, and leaderboards.

The release for both the PC and PS3 versions are scheduled for this fall. In the meantime, I encourage you to grab this wonderful game from Nintendo’s WiiWare channel. It’s a perfect example of how real time strategy games can break away from the Starcraft mold without compromising what makes the genre great. And thanks to its fantastic splitscreen support, you won’t find a better way to play an RTS with a friend in the same room.

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Anti-Starcraft strategy game finally coming to the PC

Two days ago, Microsoft released some welcome downloadable content for Crackdown 2. They call it the Toy Box Pack. A free trial version enables a “Keys to the City” mode, where you can just randomly spawn stuff to shoot and blow up. But a $7 version gives you a multiplayer mode called Vehicle Tag, a couple of new weapons, an amphibious tank, a helicopter with room for four, jet boots, new achievements, and some sort of reward for maxing out your agent’s skill, which earned you bupkis up to now.

It also froze your Xbox 360 every time you tried to play Crackdown 2. After about twenty seconds on the loading screen, everything freezes. Hard. So hard you have to press the power button. Naturally, you figure this is a problem with your Xbox 360, as has so often been the case in the past. So you uninstall and reinstall various things and you frett that maybe your drive is eating games again (I’ve most recently had problems with my Xbox 360’s drive damaging disks, and I’ve lost about $200 in games that Microsoft’s customer support has refused to replace).

Eventually, you wonder if maybe it’s just the Crackdown 2 DLC. So you Google it. Yep. Sure enough, the DLC freezes up otherwise well-behaved Xbox 360s.

The downloadable content was finally pulled at some point today, but only after it had been for sale for well over 24 hours. But for those of us who’ve already downloaded it, there isn’t any sort of in-game notification that the DLC is a problem. I guess Microsoft is really busy these days upgrading their billing infrastructure so they can charge more money for Xbox Live subscriptions, so I can’t really fault them for not testing DLC before putting it up for sale.

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Crackdown 2 imposes a $7 lockdown on your Xbox 360