With the release of Castlevania: Lords of Shadow mere weeks away, what can reignite our interest in the latest and perhaps greatest attempt at a three-dimensional Belmont adventure? How about the creepiest coffins you've ever seen in a video game?

Frankly, everything in Castlevania: Lords of Shadow looks pretty good, whether it's Gabriel Belmont riding on a Warg or having a meeting with Pan. We have high hopes for Mercury Steam's stab at Castlevania in 3D. See if you agree with this latest batch of media, fresh from Gamescom.

During GamesCom 2010, Linkin Park's co-lead singer Mike Shinoda realized what it takes to successfully marry music and games, but not before blowing himself up on stage in front of the hundreds of people attending Sony's press event.

The members of Linkin Park aren't just a group of guys who are lending music to EA's new Medal of Honor revamp. They're gamers as well, as Mike Shinoda proved by taking the stage to demo Medal of Honor on the big screen during Sony's big 2010 GamesCom press event on Tuesday evening.

Shinoda made it through the game level without a scratch, but as the level ended, so did his life. ‘Mission Completed' flashed on the screen, followed quickly by ‘Mission Failed' as the exploding final objective took him out.

"I literally blew up the last thing, and then it blew me up right after," Shinoda tells me, sitting down for a brief interview amidst the glowing blue squares that make up EA's expansive media area. "You couldn't have engineered that. I couldn't recreate that if I tried."

He tells me that the other members of Linkin Park and he grew up gaming. He's a fan of first-person shooters and role-playing games. "Those are my soft spots," he says.

Shinoda is at Gamescom promoting Linkin Park's participation in EA's Medal of Honor via the song "The Catalyst," which is debuting on the band's next album, A Thousand Suns, due out September 14 in the States. "We really have made every effort to push the envelope and do something different," Shinoda says. He says the album will challenge many of the band's fans.

And it could draw some more in at the same time, now that "The Catalyst" is closely tied to EA's next big shooter.

From the Journey Escape game for the Atari 2600 to Eminem's latest showing up in Activision's Call of Duty: Black Ops, the relationship between the music and video games has steadily evolved from trite tie-ins to something more meaningful. At least that's the general idea. Tacking a song onto a video game is easy enough, but creating something special via the merger is another thing altogether. Like any relationship, the one between music and video game cannot be forced.

"Being here today," says Shinoda, "I'm realizing that the times when it works the best is when it's honest, and when it's not a forced relationship. If you truly like to play a certain type of game, or you're a fan of a title and you get to collaborate with them, then that's when it's the best."

And that's the sort of relationship he believes his band has formed with EA.

"If you look at our videos and you look at the trailer that Joe Hahn created for Medal of Honor, it doesn't seem out of place at all. It fits right in with what he does and what we like. It seems to fit pretty well. "

I'd like to personally thank Mike for his time, and for not laughing too hard when I responded to his question, "Do you play music?" with "Well, I own a guitar."

Konami didn't have too much to say during its brief Gamescom 2010 press conference today, but it did delight the crowd with a trailer for NeverDead, the action horror game from Metal Gear Acid! director Shinta Nojiri and Rebellion Developments.

Konami also released new screen shots of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game today, a fresh peek at the immortal hero in double-gun gameplay action. Whether you prefer your video game screen shots blue or you prefer your video game screen shots orange, there's something for you in this NeverDead update.

Sorry, PlayStation Home fans, but news about furniture in Sony's PlayStation 3 virtual world seldom excites me...except when we're looking at an AT-AT table or a chair based on the Millennium Falcon escaping a space worm. Starting tomorrow, $10 for this set in Home.

What happens when you add a guitar track to Sony's Singstar? You get half of Rock Band, and not the particularly fun half.

Imagine Rock Band or Guitar Hero's guitar portions, without the flashy backgrounds, star power mechanics, or decorative note highways, and you've got Singstar Guitar. It's Singstar, with a no-frills guitar track added to the mix.

I gave this Singstar add-on a try at the Sony press event in Germany last night, shortly after my go with the much more interesting and potentially embarrassing Singstar Dance. Once again I found myself between two singing Sony handlers, with a fellow member of the game press taking up the second guitar controller to provide backup.

At least that's how it went in my mind.

Any guitar controller that works with the PlayStation 3 works with Singstar Guitar. In this case, Sony spent a pretty penny on a pair of wooden Logitech models, which have a very lovely heft when compared to your standard plastic controllers.

The first song was my choice, and I chose that one song from Paramore. I think it's called "Crush Crush Crush"? That's what the cool kids call it. God I am getting old.

I love the presentation in Singstar, with the music video playing full-screen as you sing along, but it doesn't quite work when you're playing the guitar, especially with two players. The two minimalistic note highways are crammed on top of each other on the left hand of the screen, feeling very much like an afterthought instead of a fully realized feature.

There are no separate bass, lead, or rhythm guitar selection. The tracks only vary with different difficulty levels, so if you and your fellow guitarist are playing on the same difficulty, you're playing exactly the same notes.

This time around I was on medium, and my co-star was on beginner, so I stumbled through some of the tougher parts of the tune while he picked easily through his rendition. I am pretty sure the yellow fret button on my controller was sticking as well, which didn't help matters.

The track flowed pretty naturally, easily comparable to similar difficulty level versions of the song on Rock Band, but without the Rock Band bells and whistles, the experience was rather tame. The omission of any sort of star power mechanic strips away a large portion of what little complexity guitar video games normally possess. If I don't need to tilt my instrument, or hit the whammy bar, I might as well be playing with a Dual Shock controller.

My partner and I picked through "Rock the Casbah" by The Clash before putting down the controllers and moving on, the fine music not changing my overall impression of Singstar Guitar. It's half of what it needs to be, and what it needs to be already exists in several different forms.

That's not to say it's not a nice addition to Singstar. Just don't expect a Rock Band replacement; this isn't it.

PC role-playing-game Torchlight is back. There is a reason why. This trailer tells you that reason. Would you like to know? Then watch this!

Developed by Runic Games, the fantasy title will be out next spring.

Sonic Free Riders is all about the pelvic thrusts.

Sega's hover board racing game has you controlling Sonic the Hedgehog, or one of his many friends or enemies, with the Xbox 360 Kinect controller, which means, you use your body to play.

To play, you stand with your body almost sideways, as if standing atop a skateboard facing the television, and then you swipe your foot over the ground to start and speed up. To steer you lean forward, bending at the knees, or lean back. Kinect can also sense when you reach your arms out, allowing you to grab on screen items and pick up the lines of golden rings that litter the race track.

The weapon items you pick up are used in different ways during a race. For instance, you swing your arm down in an arc toward the screen as if bowling to toss a giant bowling ball at enemies, but you swipe your arms sideways to throw missiles.

Initially I found the steering controls a bit difficult to use, with my poor Sonic riding his hover board nose into the side of the track for long stretches of time. But once I started stretching my arm out in the direction I was trying to turn, the game seemed to become a bit more responsive.

I still had issues with making jumps, which seemed to require that I jump a bit too soon to launch properly off a ramp.

The game seems like it could be a fun diversion, but I'm not sure I'd want to invest the price of a full Kinect game to pick it up.

The game also supports two-player split-screen mode and when I played it had six riders available, with more to be revealed down the line. There are also going to be "lots more weapons and tracks," the spokesperson told me.

A bleak future is portrayed in these Ghost Recon Future Soldier screens, released for this weeks Gamescom. No hotel sign is safe.

NetherRealm Studios adds two more to the roster of kombatants appearing in the all-new Mortal Kombat, with cybernetic ninja Cyrax and queen of fans Kitana officially committed to beat the shit out of each other next year.

The new Mortal Kombat also has a few new old stages that fans may recognize, the Desert and Bell Tower, which appear to be throwbacks to arenas from Mortal Kombat 3 and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3.

Until that unreal StarCraft FarmVille mod becomes a reality, FarmVille's millions of fans can use this helpful image to understand what in the world this StarCraft II thing is all about. [Via Rafardeon's Soup]