From The Front: Tuesday, July 26

This is the first post in what I hope to turn into a series of daily musings and thoughts on the happenings in the game industry. 

I'm also happy to announce that we've begun a collaboration with our colleagues at GameFront to bring you new, original content in addition to the stuff we post here. That I've decided to call this column "News from the Front" has absolutely nothing to do with GameFront, however! 

To start things off, we've got a brand new article from our writer Kyle Wattenmaker who's written about the five FPS franchises he'd like to see rebooted. It includes Half-Life, but that's only because we haven't heard a peep about Half-Life 3 for years now.

The Humble Indie Bundle has released a third pack which includes five games including VVVVVV, and Crayon Physics. Personally, I've never been a big fan of games like Super Meat Boy and So You Wanna Be The Guy, but the deal is an absolute steal.

Also on the good news front is the surprise announcement that Final Fantasy Tactics is headed to the iOS. That's big news for those of you who own an iPhone. An iPad version of the game is set to arrive a month later. I can't imagine how it'll look at a higher resolution. 

DICE has begun sending out Alpha and Beta invites for Battlefield 3. I haven't gotten mine yet, but I've my fingers crossed that I'll be receiving one of those sometime soon. Having over 150 played hours on my belt in Bad Company 2 should count for something, right? 

Ubisoft has released Eric Chahi's From Dust as a part of the XBLA Summer of Indie, which has received a relatively good reception from the gaming press. There's some complaints about the game's controls on the 360, so you might want to wait for the (now delayed) PC version that comes out on the 17th next month. The game, I'm told, takes a lot of precision, so you'll want a mouse to play it right. It's kind of hard to feel like a god on the gamepad unless you're behind a scope, anyhow. 

Meanwhile, Gamefront has assembled an ensemble of texture mods for Minecraft, a game not particularly known for its rich visual details. If you play Minecraft, you'll want to check this out. Personally, I'm a fan of the DokuCraft texture mod—it makes the game look kind of like Ocarina of Time.

They've also released part five of their Re-Dubz series which returns to L.A. Noire, as Cole Phelps takes on Rupert Murdoch this time around. I wonder if the video would've ever been made had IGN published it, being a part of News Corp and all.