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Europe might be getting the shaft when it comes to their release of Dead Rising 2 not arriving until three days after we get it in the United States, but this might soften the blow a bit. Capcom is offering a very cool pre-order bonus for those who are being made to wait so long.

If you pre-order your copy of Dead Rising 2 from Play.com, you’ll receive a special code in your e-mail during the game’s release week. Enter the code in at MyDeadRising.com, upload a photo and you’ll receive a custom cover inlay featuring yourself! That’s super-cool and, in my mind, beats out a lot of the junk marketing materials so frequently packaged in with games. Of course, it’s no “Zombrex” edition (or even the European “Outbreak” edition — that toy looks sweet) but still damn neat.

The promotion is good for copies of the title on all platforms. So, just like an actual zombie apocalypse, it doesn’t matter what your personal politics are since we’re all going to just be lusting for brains in the end.

Dead Rising 2 [Play.com via Playfront.de]

In most circumstances where the Japanese get something that we don’t see in the US or elsewhere, I’m pretty bummed but accepting. The cultures are different, and the consumers demand different products than the mainstream in other parts of the world. These circumstances are just the nature of the beast and we have no choice but to be understanding about it.

Once in a while — today, for example — my gut instinct is to drop to the floor, flailing my arms and legs like an unsatisfied toddler in a grocery store, screaming, “IT’S NOT FAIR!” I’ve long lamented the decline of the American arcade and it’s things like Metal Gear Arcade that pulls my long mourning into sharp relief.

Just look at these screenshots. Can you imagine being in a crowded room, holding a massive plastic gun and stealthily eliminating all resistance? Because I can and it hurts. Damn this culture and its desire to experience entertainment solely on its own terms, away from the prying eyes of others. I hate you all.

Metal Gear Arcade Screenshots [andriasang]

Are you sick of me repeatedly expressing an unquenchable desire to play Castlevania: Harmony of Despair? Keep scrolling. Nothing to see here.

Are they gone? Good. Because, I just have to say, I want this more than I want to experience the awkward discomfort of meeting Scarlet Johannsson. I want it more than I want to slap Ernest Borgnine. Nothing against Borgnine, whom I’ve always found to be a delight. I just think it would be exceedingly funny and one of those stories which would make me the hit at parties I don’t belong in.

But Castlevania trumps discomfort and desire for social acceptability. These screenshots show the second chapter of the game which is based around Dawn of Sorrow. Harmony of Despair arrives on Xbox Live Arcade on Tuesday. My goal is to try and keep from immolating spontaneously from anticipation until that time.

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair Screenshots [andriasang]

Konami had been all set to publish a game for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network based upon the popular Adult Swim cartoon, Metalocalypse. Announced at Comic-Con last year, it was nowhere to be found at E3. A subsequent failure to materialize for this year’s Comic-Con caused Siliconera to get a case of curiousity and ask.

Turns out that the game was unceremoniously canceled at some point in the last year. According to Konami, Adult Swim pulled the license and that was that. Well, that’s a bummer.

Metalocalypse: Dethgame was a brawler which put you in the shoes of a Dethklok roadie beating people up in the service of your Swedish metal masters. Or something. I’ve heard some rumblings that the product wasn’t shaping up to be very good, so perhaps we’ve dodged a bullet here. Wouldn’t want to besmirch the pristine name of Dethklok, after all.

It’s Game Over For Metalocalypse: Dethgame [Siliconera via 1up]

Realtime Worlds snuck an announcement in tonight for a new venture that they’re calling “Project: MyWorld.” According to the above trailer, it takes a 3D recreation of planet Earth and combines it with gaming and social media to do… something.

Perhaps the concept is just too vast for my tiny brain to comprehend. The game shows elements of world construction, but I thought the world was already built. How would changes to structures in the virtual environment affect other players? And what’s with buying Buckingham Palace? Something tells me the contract for such a thing would be ridiculous, possibly containing more lines than the code used to create Project: MyWorld.

This is another one of those things which seems to not be built with me, as a hardcore gamer, in mind. I don’t want to draw comparisons to PlayStation Home here but it’s a little bit difficult not to. The odds of my participating in something like this for more than five minutes, based solely on what I’ve seen here, is unlikely. Then again, I would have said the same thing about FrontierVille and that’s kept my attention for a while (admittedly, it’s waning). Perhaps some more information may change that perspective.

What about you? Do you need another virtual world to play in with all of the people in your real one? And what would you like to be able to do in such a place?

Monday Night Combat is the fourth title in this year’s Summer of Arcade promotion on Xbox Live Arcade, due out in a couple of weeks. Above, you can view a trailer featuring the assassin character class in action.

The influence from Team Fortress 2 is apparent, which can be good or bad depending on your perspective. What’s caught my eye is how much it reminds me of an arcade multiplayer game, The Grid, which was the last thing Midway released to arcades back in 2001. I’ve always wanted a home version of that game and, while this isn’t it, I suppose it’ll have to do.

Anybody going to be picking this up when it comes out on August 11? I’m going to need people to play with. Plan accordingly.

Red Dead Redemption is my current front-runner for Game of the Year, and frankly, I don’t think anything else will eclipse it. Much of my love for the game stems from its stirring score, which Bill Elm and Woody Jackson composed. Rockstar has put out a four-and-a-half-minute featurette detailing the process by which Elm and Jackson put together the soundtrack and integrated it into the game, and as someone who’s interested in music composition, I found the video fascinating.

If you’ve played the game, then you’ve surely noticed certain musical motifs that correspond to particular environments and actions. A particular riff comes in when you saddle up on horseback, and a different sequence will join in if you start shooting your gun. The composers planned for this by creating musical “stems” as opposed to entire songs, and they composed the entire score in the key of A minor at 130 beats per minute to allow for the stems to be overlaid among each other.

Even more interesting are the instrumentation and techniques used to create the music. Elm and Jackson utilized many period-specific instruments, such as jaw harps and harmonicas. There’s an instance in the video of someone playing a trumpet into a kettle drum! Everything comes together to create a unique, situation-based soundscape in Red Dead Redemption, and you can learn about it by watching the video.

A press release from Sony says that Latin America will get localized “blockbuster” games in 2011. That’s good news for them. Killzone 3 and inFAMOUS 2 are coming in Spanish. Killzone 3 will also get 3D and Move support as well as a  Portuguese language version. Killzone 3 will be available there in February 2011 while inFAMOUS 2 will follow in the spring. Muy bueno.

What’s crazy is that there’s still PS2s being sold. Latin America gets a new bundle called the PlayStation 2 Gamer Kit. This kit contains a PlayStation 2 system, two controllers, an 8MB Memory Card, and three unnamed games. The PSP gets a kit too. The PSP Gamer Kit  bundles a PSP system, a Traveler’s Case, and three games. Both will be available in August.

Our game systems do some video, but not quite enough, especially when you think about all of the awesome streaming Internet content out there. Slowly but surely, we’re seeing console-specific applications pop up on your PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii, but it’s not quite fast enough. Some of us want it now. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who are dying to cancel their cable/satellite service and just watch streaming Internet television on their living room TV.

PlayOn makes this all possible. This PC application runs in the background and serves up all the Internet video you could ever want to your game system of choice. And it does a very nice job of doing that. We put PlayOn through its paces for you in our full review.

PlayOn is a very small application that quickly encodes and sends along your favorite video services from your PC, through your network, and onto your game systems. It’s a PC-only application, but I was able to get it to work perfectly fine on my Mac systems using Parallels with Windows 7. I’d imagine Boot Camp would also work well for my fellow Mac users.

Video services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, Amazon VOD, and tons of others are listed under PlayOn’s channels tab. Others include Pandora, ESPN, and CNN, as well as many other web-ized television offerings. All you need to do is drop in your username and password for each service to enable streaming. Save, start your server, and then go switch on a game system.

I tried both the PS3 and the Xbox 360, and they worked like a charm. I liked the PS3 best, as the navigation seemed a bit easier. On the PS3, you’ll need to hit the menu item under Video that searches for media servers. PlayOn’s icon will appear, and by clicking on that, you’ll get a folder-based view of all your enabled content. For example, by clicking on Hulu’s folder, several subfolders would open up, even down to an alphabetical listing of all the shows on the service. In the YouTube folder, I was able to watch all of my uploaded videos, subscriptions and favorites. This experience was especially easy with the PS3 Bluetooth remote control.

The Xbox 360 version is just as easy. Simply find PlayOn’s served content under the Video Library of the Dashboard. There’s also compatibility with many other non-gaming systems, if you’re interested.

What impressed me most was the quality of the video. At first I wasn’t sure how nice of a stream would come through my network, especially with only 1GB of RAM being allocated to Windows via Parallels. Thankfully, there were never any hiccups in the signal for any service I tried. If content was shown on the internet in a higher resolution, that would come through on my living room’s 52″ LCD perfectly fine, in HD. Some of the shows on CBS and Hulu looked very nice in HD.

The performance of PlayOn is directly linked to how fast your setup is, and how you’re networked between the two. I have a powerline Ethernet connection between my Mac and my router, and this was more than enough. PlayOn recommends a 1.5 to 2.0 Mbps constant broadband download speed, which shouldn’t really be an issue for most users out there.

As for the software itself, it’s basically invisible. PlayOn is really just a little icon in your system tray. Double-clicking pulls up a settings box that lets you start and stop the server, tweak settings, add channels and even point to on-disc media files that you’d like to stream. The last function, called My Media, is in beta, and doesn’t seem to work with every video file. It loved QuickTime and the like, but didn’t play as well with some of the more specialized formats. I noticed that it requires a separate install of VLC Media Player to get going, so I’d think it would be able to play and encode anything.

PlayOn is quite impressive. I really like the no-hassle installation and background running features. Once your computer is on, all you really need to do is turn on your game system to get video going. Yes, some of the systems have dedicated services for specific streaming outlets, but this is everything, all in one place.

MediaMall’s PlayOn is $39.99, but there’s a free 14-day trial available on their webpage.