If you haven’t made plans for Halloween 2010, Konami has a few ideas. You could go see Saw 3D, since the movie will be out. Then you can head home and pop Saw II: Flesh & Blood into your PS3 or Xbox 360, since that will be out by then too. Actually, it’ll be out quite a bit before Halloween, on October 19, 2010.

The Flesh & Blood subtitle actually has a double meaning here. Of course, Saw II: Flesh & Blood will be incredibly gory and filled with all kinds of torturous traps, so that’s the obvious part. But it also stars Michael Tapp, son of Detective Tapp from Saw the movie and Saw: The Video Game…

It’s been a really good year for games about really bad guys, according to data from everyone’s favorite industry pundit Michael Pachter.

According to the Wedbush Morgan securities analyst, horror-based video games account for more than $147 million in sales this year through September 2009. Horror games sales for all of 2008 totaled only $131 million.

Leading the pack was Resident Evil 5, the newest installment in the Capcom franchise credited with starting the “survival horror” genre. RE5 moved 1.94 million units according to data from market research firm The NPD Group. Pachter said that accounts for more than half of the horror genre sales to this point. That genre number is certain to grow November 17, 2009, when zombie sequel Left 4 Dead 2 hits shelves, along with Wii exclusive Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles.

Despite a reported $400 million in pledged financing and some industry veterans at the helm, Brash Entertainment is no more.

Brash closed down on Friday (November 14, 2008) just 18 months after it promised sweeping changes in the way movie-based games are done. The company’s strategy hinged heavily on converting TV and movie licenses into games. GameStop’s recent Christmas shopping hint book [Gamestop] features Brash’s The Tale of Despereaux, based on an upcoming children’s film.

Games based on popular films often make a lot of money whether they’re any good or not. Looking at some of the games Brash brought to market shows they might have chosen wrong on licenses…

In any story-driven medium, be it novels, narrative videogames, films, etc. you can’t have a very successful project without solid writing. While visual mediums like film and videogames (and from here, we’re speaking of games with central storylines, not Tetris) don’t necessarily rely on the spoken word as heavily, the writing is still an essential piece of the puzzle. With narrative becoming more and more important in gaming, and the industry growing at such an exponential rate, we’re increasingly seeing established screenwriters try their hand at writing games. But can these skills really be translated into such a vastly different medium?At GDC 2008, 2k Boston mastermind Ken Levine gave a talk on storytelling in Bioshock. He revealed quite a few details about how the game’s story and world came together. To summarize very briefly, Levine stated that the narrative was actually written quite late in the development process, meaning that the game’s world and gameplay mechanics were established before the specific story details were written. It would appear that this organic, design-minded approach worked quite well for the format – seeing the title’s massive success and tremendous critical acclaim. He also left the audience with three bullet points essential for good storytelling in videogames: respect your audience, trust mystery, and empower the gamer.