To: Ash
From: Crecente
Re: Monday, Monday!

I've been playing around with the DSi XL today, trying to get a feel for what it's like to play on compared to the DSi. Tristan wandered up to my office in his pajamas while I was playing some Infinite Space on it and asked what it was. After I explained it to him he was he wandered back off. A few minutes later he returned, fulled dressed and asked to hold the DSi XL. As soon as he had it he proceeded to try to stuff it in his front pocket with no success. Then he turned around and tried to put it in his back pocket, failing again. Handing back the DSi XL to me, he walked off muttering to himself.

That's one less DSi XL sale, I suspect.

What you missed:
Growing Up Geek: The Past, Present and Future of Penny Arcade
Electronic Arts Plans to Make You Pay for Glorified Game Demos?
A Bit More Info On The Makers of Dead Space's Next, Mysterious Game
Accused Game Cheater Gets Knife Through Head and Survives
Super Guide, Vitality Sensor and Netflix DS: A Conversation With Nintendo
Nintendo DSi XL Delivery Comes With a Five-Foot Surprise
Ultima Creator May Already Own Some Of The Moon
Six Days In Fallujah Dev Gives Birth To Breach

BioWare further detailed its latest batch of Mass Effect 2 downloadable content today, locking down a price for the "Kasumi – Stolen Memory" add-on, a $7 USD purchase that lets players recruit master thief Kasumi Goto and her "special skills."

The new Stolen Memory DLC will cost, officially, 560 Microsoft Points on the Xbox 360, 560 BioWare points on the PC when it is released in North America and Europe sometime in April. (Yes, there is such a thing as BioWare points.)

Mass Effect 2's new mission involves Commander Shepard and crew buddying up with Kasumi and embarking on "a dangerous heist to infiltrate the vault of a deadly master criminal named Donovan Hock." In addition, according to BioWare, "players will also receive a new research upgrade, one new weapon, and a new achievement in this PDLC pack."

Further details on the 90-minute-long mission, direct from BioWare's Casey Hudson, are right here.

A report says Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, the publisher behind Scribblenauts and F.E.A.R. 2, will open a studio in Montréal to focus on developing games based on the Warner-owned D.C. Comics franchises.

The Canadian gaming news site GameFocus first reported the new studio's creation, and in a followup with Warner Interactive president Martin Tremblay, said the Montréal studio will work with Warner's newly formed D.C. Entertainment branch, which essentially reconstituted the D.C. Comics division as a division tasked with developing and managing its properties across more than just comic books.

GameFocus said Tremblay did not offer any details as to the Montréal studio's first game project. Tremblay himself will lead the studio, to be called WB Games Montréal. It is expected to employ as many as 300 people within the next five years.

Warner: Montreal Studio To Develop DC Comics Games [GameFocus]

Remember those Sonic the Hedgehog costumes for LittleBigPlanet that we told you about last November? They're coming your way this week, and they're still as hideous as ever.

Some things translate well into LittleBigPlanet. Ezio was lovely, and the recently released White Knight Chronicles costumes were downright hot. Sonic, on the other hand, doesn't fare too well in translation. If anything, they look like humans trying to cosplay the characters from Sonic, and doing a poor job of it.

Hopefully this is the last we will ever see of Sonic the Werehog on Kotaku. Fingers crossed, everyone!

LittleBigPlanet: This Week in DLC [PlayStation Blog - thanks Benny!]

Electronic Arts tells Kotaku that while they're exploring different downloadable game strategies, they do not plan to charge gamers for "traditionally free game demos."

The clarification comes after word hit via analyst Michael Pachter's visit to Electronic Arts, that the company planned to grow their digital game business in part by release what EA called "premium downloadable content" on the Playstation Network and Xbox Live for $10 to $15. Pachter described that content as "essentially be a very long game demo, along the lines of 2009's Battlefield 1943." The "full-blown packaged game" would later be released at a full retail price.

EA Group General Manager Nick Earl told Pachter during the recent meeting that the strategy would allow the company to limit the risk of marketing the full game and would "serve as a low-cost marketing tool."

Responding to request for comment, EA's Jeff Brown said that the publisher and developer is working on a "number of projects for delivering premium content to consumers before, during, and after the launch of a packaged-goods version of the game."

"EA SPORTS, EA Games and EA Play are each experimenting with download strategies that deliver fresh game content in formats players want to experience," he writes. "To date, there is no set pricing strategy for the entire EA portfolio. And many of the proposals include free-to-play content on models similar to Madden Ultimate Team, Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield 1943."

"None of the proposals" Brown wrote, "call for charging consumers for traditionally free game demos."

Speaking at the Game Developer's Conference earlier this month Ben Cousins, general manager of free to play Battlefield Heroes, told a gathering of designers that EA is becoming increasingly interested in free-to-play or "freemium" games.

Nintendo's upcoming WarioWare: D.I.Y., the game that lets players create their own playable microgames, is tapping a handful of all-star developers to create free downloadable content, including the makers of games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Metroid and Scribblenauts.

Followers of WarioWare: D.I.Y. may already be aware of Nintendo's celebrity-made microgame giveaways. The Japanese version of the game, Made In Ore, has already received downloadable content from folks like Yoshio Sakamoto of Metroid fame and Brawl producer Masahiro Sakurai. Fortunately, both of those WarioWare games will come to the North American version of WarioWare: D.I.Y. on March 29.

Nintendo also plans to release weekly downloadable microgames from development luminaries such as Daisuke Amaya (Cave Story), 5TH Cell (Scribblenauts), WayForward (A Boy and his Blob), Gaijin Games (BIT.TRIP) and Team Meat (Super Meat Boy).

WarioWare: D.I.Y. hits the Nintendo DS on March 28 in North America alongside its WiiWare counterpart, WarioWare: D.I.Y. Showcase. The downloadable microgames will be available to owners of both titles.

Ubisoft's Red Steel 2 hits stores this week, so you'd best get familiar with the weapons you'll be using to get the job done.

While I've yet to play the game (or have any reason to attach my Wii Motion Plus at all for that matter), the style certainly has captured my attention. Then again, I'm a sucker for anything that mixes cowboys and swords. It's two great tastes that taste great together, no matter how you combine them. Ninja with a six-shooter? I'm sold. Cowboy with a katana? I'm buying that. Sheriff with a badge that's actually a shuriken? I'd buy that twice.

In short, I'm a ninja cowboy fanboy, so my opinion doesn't count here.

So who's planning on partaking in a little Red Steel 2?

Developer Atomic Games, perhaps best known for its missing in action shooter Six Days In Fallujah but also responsible for the V for Victory series, has a new "multiplayer title for consoles and personal computers" that will "blow your mind."

Or so says official word from Atomic Games, revealing the title of its newest game Breach. The military game specialists' forthcoming game is based on the "elite CIA Special Activities Division officers" but doesn't offer much in the way of additional details. Atomic does make reference to the United States Special Operations Command Central (aka SOCCENT) command unit, teasing us with a "redacted" release.

We may be looking at Breach real soon, so expect Breach's details to be declassified rather quickly.

Atomic Games didn't name a publisher for its next game, but considering the Six Days In Fallujah publishing fiasco, it's understandable how the developer might hold onto that information just a little while longer, ensuring contractual 't's are crossed and 'i's are dotted.

This is the third time we've posted a completely different version of the official box art for Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption. Hopefully it'll also be the last, but we're not promising anything.

First there was the stylistic cowboy. Then came a slightly more realistically-colored version of that same box art. Now we've lost the cowboy hat, replaced the pistol with a shotgun, and tossed in some iconic American imagery in the background for good measure.

I like it, and having said that, I fully expect it to change again before the game hits in May.

Richard Garriott, space tourist, rat tail enthusiast, and creator of Ultima and Tabula Rasa (RIP), may also be the first private citizen to have a legitimate claim to ownership of a good portion of the moon.

How, exactly, did Garriott become a possible lunar land owner? Well, way back in 1993, the man known in some circles as Lord British purchased the Russian space rover Lunokhod 2 at a Sotheby's auction. The piece of equipment, which landed on the moon in 1973 and stopped working that same year, set Garriott back $68,500 USD.

The Lunokhod 2 had been missing for 37 years, but was spotted in newly released photographs of the moon's surface by Phil Stooke, a professor at the University of Western Ontario. So, not only does Garriott own a busted piece of machinery on the moon, he believes he has a right to a long swath of moon land.

"I am now the world's only private owner of an object on a foreign celestial body," Garriott told NPR's All Things Considered, "and I'm also the first person that has what you might call a private flag sitting on the moon that allows me to, you know, debate and discuss territorial rights."

"I think its real value is not in being recovered and, for example, being put in a museum," he says. "While there are international treaties that say no government will lay claim to property off the planet earth, international convention also says that if you're a private citizen who discovers a territory that is
not claimed by another country already, any of that territory you put to use is yours."

Garriott believes the 40 kilometers worth of moon travel accomplished by the Lunokhod 2 and the expanse that it has surveyed—"as far as its cameras can see"—fall within his domain of moon property ownership.

"I believe I actually do have a foundation for a legit claim for lunar property and I'm the only one to do so," says Garriott.

Whether Garriott is serious (like, crazy moon squatter serious) about his lunar land grab is unclear. But at least he has one more interesting anecdote—in a long line of interesting anecdotes—and another possible reason to appear on the Martha Stewart Show.

Lunar Rover Is Spotted For First Time In 37 Years [NPR]