Codemaster’s GTA-alike Heist – or Hei$t as it’s also known – has been officially canned. It’s not much of a surprise as nothing has been heard about it for ages, although IGN did enquire if it was still coming out in August 2009 and was told that it was still on its way.

“Codemasters is focusing its future portfolio on high quality titles that will, in the majority, be developed and produced by our internal studios” stated Californian-based developers inXile entertainment.

I just had a look on the ‘net and ShopTo.Net, Game and Amazon are still offering it to pre-order. Maybe somebody should tell them?

This Week’s Games

2010 could well be the year of the greatly improved sequel – Army of Two: The 40th Day was better than the first game and Mass Effect 2 – out today on Xbox 360 and PC – has been getting a run of 10/10s. Bioshock 2 is out on 8th February too and previews suggest that it’s even better than the original.

This week isn’t just about superior sequels though – MAG (Massive Action Game) on PlayStation 3 is the first ever console title to let 256 players shoot each other at once. There hasn’t been many reviews yet, but those that have been lucky enough – just two websites so far, according to GameRankings – have given it good reviews.

The same goes for the Wii-exclusive Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars which currently has an impressive average review score of 85%. Dead Rising’s Frank West is in it, so you should probably buy it.

Next week: Mx vs ATV Reflex, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, Endless Ocean 2, Dante’s Inferno and the apparently utterly rubbish Astro Boy.

A few months back gaming sites were suggesting that if anybody was planning to make and release a game on the Xbox Live Indie channel in order to make a bit of cash, they would be better off focusing their talents elsewhere. Not many people were downloading them and Microsoft’s support was poor, it was claimed.

Since then Microsoft have added a new pricing scheme and also included avatar support and a rating system. GamerBytes have done some in-depth research with the programmers themselves, and with these changes now firmly in place they report that there is now plenty of moolah to be made.

The best selling game of 2009 was I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMB1ES 1NIT!!!1, which I had a few words to say about back in September. So far it has been downloaded 160,000 times and cashed in around $112,000 (£69,366). For a game coded in somebody’s bedroom, that isn’t bad going. Avatar Drop and RC-AirSim were the second and third best sellers in 2009, netting their creators $81,900 (£50,714) and $129,000 (£79,880) respectively.

You can read their full, and rather interesting, report here .

UK Charts

Raise your hands in the air like you just don’t mind – Just Dance is #1 for the second week running. It’s now the first Ubisoft game since the original Assassin’s Creed to hold onto the top spot for more than one week. The knowledgeable bods at Chart Track also point out that the top 10 chart is made up of games from only three different publishers this week with Nintendo publishing no less than four of them.

Predictably, Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil Zero doesn’t enter the top 40. The best it can do is a #31 placing in the Wii budget chart. Dark Void – also by Capcom – fares better, going in at #33 in the multiformat chart. It’s at #16 in the PlayStation 3 chart and #17 in the Xbox 360 chart. Seeing reviews have mostly been around the 6/10 mark that doesn’t seem too bad to me.

The BBC have toyed with videogames in the past (remember the awful Little Britain game on PlayStation 2?) but they’re now aiming for a bigger slice of gaming pie. This includes hiring former EA and Yahoo exec Robert Nashak, and also touting Doctor Who, Top Gear and In The Night Garden to developers and publishers. I wouldn’t rule out an Eastenders either seeing that there’s a Coronation Street game due out on DS soon.

In other UK-related news, Alton Towers’ Spinball Whizzer is being updated and re-branded as Sonic Spinball thanks to a three year deal with Sega. The Alton Towers Hotel will also get a Sonic the Hedgehog themed room. I bet it doesn’t have a bed shaped like a Mega Drive though.

This Week’s Games

Slim pickings this week chums. Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil Zero on Wii is a mere conversion of the ancient GameCube scare-a-thon. Capcom recently claimed that RE: Darkside Chronicles has only shifted a mere 16,000 copies so far so Lord knows what the sales figures for this will be like. If you’re interested though it’s only £12.99 at Zavvi.

The stupidly named Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Tag Force 4 on PSP is this week’s only other offering. Is Yu-Gi-Oh still down with ‘da kidz’? I thought they’d moved onto other stuff. Like smoking weed and happy slapping.

Next week is a whole lot more interesting with all three of the big formats receiving an exclusive – Mass Effect 2 on Xbox 360, MAG on PlayStation 3 and Tatsunoko Vs Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars on Wii. The last is a very pleasing £17.95 to pre-order, again from Zavvi.

Publishers really shouldn’t slag off their own games, as it makes the people who bought them feel like mugs. It is pretty amusing when they do though. Case in point – Activision boss Bobby Kotick sharing his thoughts on the recent Spider-Man games to Game Informer:

“Our Spider-Man games have sucked for the last five years. They are bad games. They were poorly rated because they were bad games. We went away from what is Spider-Man. It’s about web-slinging. If you don’t do web-slinging, what is the fantasy of Spider-Man?”

Does this mean that this year’s Spider-Man game is having some love and attention put into it? It could well be a sign.

UK Charts

Shock! Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has been knocked of its loft perch by Just Dance. If it wasn’t for Ubisoft’s uber rubbish dancing game then Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 would have been at the top of the chart for 10 weeks straight. Incidentally, Just Dance is Ubisoft’s first #1 since Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 way back in March 2008.

The much improved sequel Army of Two: The 40th Day is the only new entry in the chart at a respectable #4. Bayonetta has dropped from #5 to #7 while Darksiders has risen in its second week of release and goes up from #8 to #6.

It’s also pleasing to note that Borderlands is back on the rise, going from #23 to #13. It has been something of a steady seller, which pretty much guarantees that a sequel will appear somewhen.

Activision releasing a version of DJ Hero on Nintendo DS is inevitable. What isn’t inevitable though is whether they’ll bundle it with a peripheral like the DS version of Guitar Hero before it. It’s no big deal if it doesn’t happen – Deep Silver’s DJ Star proves that something like this can work just fine without any hunk of plastic hanging out of the DS’s cartridge slot.

Any game of the this ilk is going to live or die by its music selection, so it’s fortunate that the developers have had wide enough wallets to be able to include a large selection of licensed music including stuff from Calvin Harris, Eric Prydz, Bob Sinclair and Pharrell Williams. The sound quality is surprisingly good, although the DS’s speakers aren’t really designed for heavy bass lines.

At the start only a few tracks are available, with the rest becoming unlocked as your custom-made character starts their clichéd career path of going from a bedroom based disk jockey to a superstar DJ. There’s also a simple to use music creation tool to make your own music with. It reminds me of something I used to play around with on a Sony Ericsson mobile phone about five years ago – just drag and drop beats and away you go.

This Week’s Games

Not many reviews of Capcom’s Dark Void are up on the internet yet, so the review scores on GameRankings are incredibly sporadic – the PlayStation 3 version is currently at 80%, the Xbox 360 version at 62.5% and the PC version at 53%. If you’re thinking of buying it, it would probably be best to wait until a few more reviews roll in.

After appearing on DS the budget priced Love Is In Bloom: The Flower Shop Garden is out on Wii this week. When the one of the special features is “Unique Wii Remote controls with gameplay specifically designed to take advantage of the extra level of control,” you know that you’re looking at one turd of a game.

Activision’s Winter Sports 2010: The Great Tournament and Sega’s Vancouver 2010: The Official Videogame Of The Olympic Winter Games go head to head this week too. I can’t find any reviews of either but you should know what to expect – plenty of button bashing and analogue stick waggling.

Next week: It looks like there’s just one game out – Resident Evil Archives: Resident Evil Zero on Wii

The 14th January 1990 will be a date recognisable to any Simpsons fan – it’s the date that the first ever episode aired on American TV, some three year afters the crudely animated 30-second shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show made the yellow fellows famous. To celebrate The Simpsons 20th birthday this month, we would like to present to you this sketchy history of The Simpsons videogames. Grab a Squishy and enjoy!

It’s rather sad to start this feature by saying that the first Simpsons videogame is also one of the best – Konami’s side-scrolling beat’em up The Simpsons: The Arcade Game (1991) let you play as four out of five members of the Simpsons clan as they fought Mr. Burn’s goons to rescue Maggie. It’s largely believed that there were no home conversions but this is untrue – there were versions for both PC and Commodore 64. You can see the C64 version in action on YouTube in its pixilated but faithful glory. Konami also released the little-known Bart’s House of Weirdness for PC (pictured) in the same year and then later returned to arcades in 2000 with The Simpsons Bowling.

Ocean’s Bart vs. the Space Mutants (1991) was the first major Simpsons console game, released on no less than 10 different formats. It was an actually quite innovative platformer – on each level Bart had to find different objects to foil the Space Mutants plans. The aim of first level was to destroy all purple objects; Bart could purchase rockets to blow apart purple shop signs and could also buy also cherry bombs to scare off purple birds. True to the show, any phone-boxes found could be used to make prank calls to Moe. The Amiga 500 version had an animated intro that took up an entire floppy disk.

UK Charts

It’s Monday, which means it’s chart time here on GamesAsylum. Let’s see how Bayonetta and Darksiders did, shall we? Yes!

It certainly looks like THQ’s decision to hold Darksiders back until after the Xmas rush was a wise one – it has managed to get to #8 in the all formats top 40. Sega’s Bayonetta does even better, dashing in at #5.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is still #1, which makes it the 9th week running. Chart Track also point out that it has already become the third best selling game in the UK ever. I’m willing to bet that within the next six month it’ll end up being either the second best, or possibly best ever. Brain Training on DS and GTA: San Andreas hold the first and second positions, if you’re wondering.

The rest of the top 10 has had a good old shuffle this week – the rubbish Just Dance is up from #7 to #3, Wii Fit Plus is up from #5 to #2, Assassin’s Creed 2 drops from #2 to #7 while Mario & Sonic at the Winter Games also slides all the way from #3 to #11.