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Ask any hardcore gamer what they think about the games industry’s tendency to rehash and follow the latest trends with no thought to striking out, and you’ll likely find that most of them will be against such an idea. A vast majority of them will demand that we have too manyHaloclones, too much exploitation of the cover system, and too many sequels. However, when I line that viewpoint up with a number of the most common demands and complaints concerning the latest game releases, something isn’t matching up properly....

In a pitch to get us to see their goods at GDC this year, developer Team17 has passed along some new screens for the upcoming Xbox LIVE Arcade title,Worms 2: Armageddon. Surprised, it looks like your NXE Avatar will make an appearance in some capacity. Neat. The sequel to one of the best-selling XBLA titles, Armageddon will combine the game’s classic weapons with some of those found in 2007’sWorms Open Warfare 2....

Time once more for the Badass of the Month Club,wherein the staff highlights a character or industry figure of noteworthy badassery. If there’s one thing that the whole of Destructoid could agree upon, it’s that robots are pretty damn badass. In the realm of robots however, there is clearly one which rises above all others in sheer badassitude, his badassity so far off the charts that he broke the needle of the badassograph....

See what I did there? It’s funny because there’s a ship, and it’s a banana. And “boat-load” means “a lot.” It’s also funny because it happens to be the name of aPolish vocal group, as well a brand ofsunscreen. I was going to throw in a picture of hot Banana Boat girls until I realized that I was actually thinking aboutHawaiian Tropics. But I digress … it was Nick’s joke anyway....

It looks like the rumor we hadpreviously reportedwas right on the money: Ubisoft has formally announced thatNaruto: The Broken Bondis in development for the Xbox 360. Serving as the sequel toNaruto: Rise of a Ninja,The Broken Bondwill pick up where the previous game left off (episode 81) and focus on Naruto, Neji, Kiba, Shikamaru, and Choji’s attempts to bring a despondent Sasuke back to the Hidden Leaf Village. Aside from boasting about the games’ online multiplayer (they’re the only ones with an online tournament mode) and mentioning thatThe Broken Bondwould come out “Holiday 2008” (therumorhad the release date set on November 14) Ubisoft wasn’t very forthcoming about any new details....

Final Fantasy XIII. Some of us liked it. Some of us quietly noted ourslight disapproval. BioWare doesn’t want to talk quality, but itdoeswant to talk genre assignment. According to theMass Effectstudio, Square Enix’s big balls-out RPG extravaganza was not an RPG. “Well, before I address the main point I just want to take a slightly more controversial route: You can put a ‘J’ in front of it, but it’s not an RPG,” arguesThe Old Republiclead writer Daniel Erickson....

It’s not every day you see a Free Weekend event on Steam, and those pushed for Activision properties are even rarer sights to behold. Even still, the multiplayer forCall of Duty: Black OpsPC istotally free to playthis weekend until Sunday at 1:00 pm PDT. Go make your ISP proud by downloading gigs of data. In related news, the Escalation add-on is now available on PC, should you long for further multiplayer maps and zombies getting their asses kicked by various actors....

I’ve played a few RPGs in my day, but I certainly don’t read fan fiction, attend conferences or masturbate to absurdist yaoi depictions of Cloud bangingParty of Five’sScott Wolf. As such, it’s hard for me to get really intensely excited about anything not beginning with the letter‘F’and ending with the letter ‘allout‘.The above footage, though, shows exactly why I’m so excited aboutBlue Dragon. Not only does it look prettier than Lea Thompson inBack to the Future, it also has a compelling art style — the sort of experimentalism the Xbox 360 is sorely lacking — that conjures images ofLeigh havingwaytoo much fun watching episodes of DragonBall Z....

Either that’s Frank West up there battling zombies alongsideDead Rising 2‘s protagonist Chuck Greene, or it’s his evil, blurry doppelganger. While I’m secretly pulling for the latter,this blog poston Tape It Or Die makes numerous references to a certain war-covering photojournalist. The whole concept of having both characters playChuck Greene in co-opfor the sake of hilarity is something I love dearly, but heck, if it’s Frank West we’re talking about I’d happily take him instead....

A new patchis availablefor the PC version ofCall of Juarez: Bound in Blood. The fresh notes are sure to crop up somewhere, but the official release mentions that this patch — bringing the game up to version 1.1 — balances several of the character classes in multiplayer, therefore making them useful. The patch also ushers in compatibility with user-created content. People with time on their hands can now download Techland’s “User Content Creation Package” overat its official Web siteand start making Bound in Blood-themed cacti mazes, clown shootouts … or whatever....

For a month,Gears of Warfans have been urged topick sidesover whether or not we’re going to have a Carmine survive the nextGearstitle with profits from the event being donated to Child’s Play. The votes have been tallied and the winner is… not going to be revealed. What teases. But generous teases and all thanks to the gamers who have been buying “Save Carmine” and “Carmine Must Die” t-shirts both for their avatars and original, meat-based equivalents....

TheLionhead websitehas acurious updateto it today. The above image of Che Guevara has cropped up on a splash page with a “6” next to him. The thumbs below determine a skin on the main site when you click on them, red for a positive response and blue for a negative one. But that’s all it seems to do and there’s no further information on the site relating to it. With Gamescom coming up next week and the suggestion that there’s going to be a “special announcement” from Peter Molyneux, it’s probably a good bet that the teaser relates to it in some way....

Ever get the feeling that real-time strategy as a genre is going through a weird transitional phase right now? There are a few exceptions; studios like Blizzard and Gas Powered Games who are staying true to the classic formula by updating outdated ideas without going overboard. But then there’s seemingly everyone else who are all trying to give the genre a radical face-lift by introducing new concepts where they — more often than not — aren’t needed....