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Here we have a video for Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions featuring one of the titular hero’s alternate costumes. This is the “Scarlet Spider” who is, if you’re up on your Marvel trivia (or have the internet and care), a clone of Peter Parker made by Jackal who took the name Ben Reilly. Not to be confused with the even more obscure villainous cybernetic version or the trio of Stark armor-wearing characters from recent memory.

Super-hero comic books are complicated.

Psyched for Valkyria Chronicles II? Is Sega’s “Community BLiTZ” working? Like pre-ordering things at GameStop? If you answered “yes” to the first and third questions, then this is the announcement for you, because GameStop is offering two bonus missions with pre-orders of the PlayStation Portable-bound strategy extravaganza.

The missions themselves will be made available as a PlayStation Network download upon release. Going by the descriptions (which you can read below), they sound like “challenge” missions, with one pitting your troops in a straight-up brawl with a rival unit, and another tasking you with overcoming a group that specializes in “stonewalling defense”.

Being the willing fan that I am, I’ve already pre-ordered the game, but are you, in light of this announcement?

• Exercise vs. Class E – Exterminatory war exercise against rival class E using all areas of Leanbluff Forest. Destroy all enemies in each area to win this challenge.
• Exercise vs. Class F – Defense exercise against rival class F. Break through their stonewalling defense and take over their encampment to win this mission.

The Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood beta starts up on September 13 in America which you can be a part of only when you pre-order the game from GameSpot. So what about Europe? Their beta date was announced to start up on October 4, 2010. The European beta is going to be a PlayStation 3 exclusive as well and you’ll only be able to play it if you pre-order the multiplayer assassin game from GAME or Play.

Additionally, here are some new screens. Look at that girl cut that guy’s neck with a fan! LOOK AT IT!

Check out the trailer and our preview from E3 for more on Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood which will be out on November 16 in the US.

Bret Hart is still wrestling — somehow — and since he’s one of the all-time WWF/WWE greats, fans are likely interested in playing as him in WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011. In North America, Hart will be a timed exclusive pre-order bonus for Best Buy and “all major Canadian retailers,” according to THQ (he is, after all, Canadian). I imagine he’s much more happy about this news than about being in the Walls of Jericho above.

Just like Stone Cold Steve Austin – who was exclusive to GameStop, EB Games, and GAME pre-orders in SmackDown vs. Raw 2010 – Hart will eventually be made available for everyone to purchase. (THQ sold Stone Cold for $1 last year, so presumably, that’s how much they’ll charge for Hart.) Even if you don’t get Hart, SvR 2011 will still ship with more than 70 playable WWE Superstars and Divas.

WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2011 will hit stores for PS3, 360, Wii, PSP, and PS2 on October 26, 2010. Check out my full preview for more details.

THQ and Volition is doing all that they can to make the next Red Faction be a big deal. The week Armageddon launches might as well be called “Red Faction week” with everything Danny Bilson, Executive VP at THQ, details above. Game, digital download, movie and more are in store for us next year.

In the mean time, you’re probably more concerned with how Armageddon is shaping up. Well you can find that out below as Jacques Hennequet, Creative Director at Volition, shows us some of the awesome things we’ll be able to do in the game. I think I have a new favorite weapon with that magnet gun.

I had the pleasure of being shown a pre-alpha build of Stronghold 3 by the Director of Firefly studios, Simon Bradbury, this afternoon. He opened the demo by stating that he didn’t feel Stronghold 2 was a bad game, rather that it tried to do too many things and lost focus of what made the first Stronghold game so popular.

With Stronghold 3, however, the game is set to return to its roots.

The first thing that impressed me was that the focus was on the core gameplay. Stronghold 3 will run on tech developed by outside sources as opposed to the internal development favoured for its predecessor. This, along with a streamline of in-game mechanics, will leave the development team free to strengthen the original’s gameplay.

With that established we were launched into the game and it soon became apparent the level of flexibility that will be available to players. With a castle constructed, players can fortify their possession by constructing battlements. It’s the way in which they can be placed that is unique in that you can almost paint a labyrinthine construction to keep your foes at bay, with twisting snaking walls of solid stone should you so wish to do so. Stairs can be added that will allow your soldiers access to the battlements so that they can rain medieval death from above on those foolish to try and attack you.

Gone is the grid based system of old as you are now free to position things with utter freedom. This can have consequences for your kingdom though. The amount of people present in your villages hovels is based on the distance to your castle. For example, a hovel some distance away will be a rotten shack capable of housing only one person. However, a hovel in close proximity to your castle will be a three floored structure that can hold up to ten people.

Your actions as a lord will affect how you kingdom works on many different levels. The example that we were told was that a cruel and evil Lord will have a barbaric but unruly military compared to a benevolent Lord whose army will be noble and take less damage.

Firefly are keen to use the Havok engine to create a battlefield strewn with debris and bodies. A castle we were shown was destroyed using catapults, causing it to crumble into pieces and roll down the hillside into the valley below. One catapult was shattered when it was too close to its target. The resulting detritus bounces off nearby buildings and landscape in a dramatic way that is sure to make any victory feel great and defeat feel crushing.

The team at Firefly has listened to fan concerns and are promising a true Stronghold experience. It’s been a long time coming — it looks as though Stronghold 3 will deliver a fun strategy game come April 2011.

Digital Reality and Grasshopper Manufacture have announced a co-development partnership that will see a number of games come from duo. The first project from this union is called Sine Mora and is going to be a side-scroller with “unique time manipulation mechanics.”

Additionally, the new game “takes advantage of the newest in 3D display technology to liver an horizontal side-scrolling shooter unlike any other.” I’m still hesitant when it comes to 3D tech, but if anyone can pull of something good, it’s the house that brought us No More Heroes.

Sine Mora will be out for the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge has been called “Gears of Warcraft” in some publications. Whether that is entirely fair, or what you should expect from this co-op oriented action game, is what you are clicking below the jump for — to read our hands-on impressions!

So what is Hunted: The Demon’s Forge? At its heart, it is a third-person hack-and-slash game where you walk around and hack and slash things. Amazing, I know! The thing that makes Hunted different from what you’re used to is co-op. You play one of two characters — a female ranged one, or a bulky male melee one.

I started the hands-on as the female, while a developer was playing the male and guiding me through it. Everything felt pretty familiar, so it was really easy to run around, use LT to aim in Gears of War style and RT to shoot arrows. Many skeletons were dispatched with arrows, because arrows are a skeleton’s bane! Just kidding — you can also use magic or swap your physical weapons from bow to shield and sword. You use A to run, you can snap to cover, and the level did look a bit gray for story reasons, so I guess you can’t blame anyone for the “Gears of Warcraft” nickname.

Still, that doesn’t really do the game any justice. While the controls and point of view were familiar, that only helped me to get into the action straight away. What was more important was the co-op design. If you play single-player, you have an AI companion. But playing with another person adds more than just the human element. For instance, you can use the ranged character to cover from a high angle while the melee character does his thing. Or the melee character can block a staircase while the ranged character runs upstairs to pick up some loot.

While you can choose to not care about coordinating, the hands-on showed me that if you do that, you can get overwhelmed and die. There were quite a few moments where we talked about the game’s specifics and ended up not looking at the screen and dying. Kind of similar to Brink, if you are incapacitated the other person can revive you. It costs you a revive potion, but you can revive your partner from anywhere, as long as you point at him or her and press a button. If you ever do get into a tough fight, you can also use magic on your partner to infuse them with the elemental magic (lightning or fire in the hands-on) and have them dash out damage like a U.S. short seller does to an economy.

After some early fights, an enemy took control of a ballista and started to shoot at cover in an open area. Cover where I was just chilling. The cover just got obliterated with my lovely female form. I would enter a sad smiley there if I could, but I was actually pleasantly surprised. Thankfully I was revived, and after some headshots to the ballista guy, the ballista was ours. My melee partner defended the only entrance to the ballista, and I was allowed to blast a ton of skeletons to bone dust. It took me a while to notice there was actually no end to these skeletons until I destroyed two pillars that spawned them.

As we continued, we got to a waypoint where you can switch characters to mix up the gameplay. As the melee character, instead of shooting a ton of arrows, you run around and hit things with your sword. Or use your shield to bash things with a short boost attack. One thing I noticed was that the sword I had was really slow to wield, but it killed enemies proper. In the full game, you will have light and heavy weapons which will be faster but less powerful or slower but harder hitting. After more killing, we got to a cutscene that I skipped on autopilot and the demo ended.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge looked like it still needed a bit of polishing on a couple of things, such as having a lack of an indicator for where you partner was. But it’s still a while until release after all. Mostly, I quite enjoyed playing it. It wasn’t very deep or heavy handed, but it satisfied my need for killing a literal ton of things. I do love the Dynasty Warriors games, and this felt like a much more focused and, well, better game than those.

The developer talked about how he loved to play old text adventures 25 years ago, because you would have a lot of hidden content in the form of side quests or dungeons that are off the beaten path. While that path seems linear in Hunted and you have a Fable 2 style indicator stream that flows from your character, Hunted will have a huge amount of hidden content if you take the time to explore. Hopefully inXile Entertainment (who also released the pretty enjoyable The Bard’s Tale “remake” in 2004) will provide enough hints to players so they won’t miss all that content. There will be plenty of hints throughout the game and a journal that collects all of them, so that will just depend on how much a hack & slash lover cares about exploration. Then again, it means more hacking & slashing!

Oh yeah, and you can execute some enemies if they are near death. Which in my case was death by penile sword impalement. And can anyone really argue against that?

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is scheduled for 2011.

[Update] An EA Sports spokesman sent us the following statement:

“We’re always exploring new platforms to deliver accessible and innovative sports experiences, as FIFA Superstars and Tiger Woods PGA TOUR Online have demonstrated. You can expect us to continue this with our other franchises, but we have no announcements to make at this time regarding a Madden NFL game for Facebook.”

There you have it — for now, Madden NFL Superstars remains unofficial.

[Original story] Back in February, EA Sports president Peter Moore mentioned that a Madden game would soon be making its way to Facebook. We’ve seen neither hide nor hair of the game since then, but in the interim, EA launched FIFA Superstars on Facebook and saw it become a successful product. FIFA Superstars is developed by Playfish, the social gaming creator that EA bought for $275 million last November, and now it appears that EA may be bringing Madden to Facebook as Madden NFL Superstars.

Bitmob’s community manager was trying to play FIFA Superstars this morning when he came across the following error message on Facebook: “Sorry, EA Sports Madden Superstars is currently down for maintenance but will return shortly.” (You can see a screenshot, courtesy of Bitmob, in the gallery below.) Presumably, someone at Playfish messed up, and now we know the name of Facebook’s Madden game.

Say what you want about casual gaming, but it’s smart for EA to get into the business. They likely wanted to test the waters with FIFA Superstars before diving in with Madden, their marquee brand. But it makes sense to bring Madden to Facebook now — FIFA Superstars‘ user base grew significantly during this summer’s World Cup, and the 2010 NFL season kicks off in just three weeks.

We’ve contacted EA for comment and will update this post with any reply.

Madden NFL Superstars Revealed [Bitmob -- thanks, Brett!]