About a year ago Activision canceled the release of True Crime: Hong Kong because the company felt the game would not bring in the buckets of money Activision has come to expect from the titles it publishes. The fate of True Crime: Hong Kong remained in limbo until Square Enix purchased the rights from Activision more »

United Front Games has been reportedly hit with layoffs today. The developer was responsible for True Crime: Hong Kong, a game that was recently canceled by Activision. Activision’s reasoning behind stopping production on the game was due to the fact that it “just wasn’t going to be good enough.” United Front Games responded to the cancellation in the classiest manner. The developer didn’t have any harsh words, or expressed any bad blood between it and its former publisher. In fact, United Front Games hopes it can work with Activision in the future.

Modnation Racers is going to get a little bit easier. The PlayStation Blog Modnation update this week did the usual – showed off some custom creations. It also revealed what’s going on with the patch United Front Games is preparing for the PS3 version of ModNation Racers. A new difficulty level is being added in for beginners.

The casual difficulty level is the first of many improvements that will be added to Modnation Racers with the new patch…

A lot of work can go into creating the perfect ModNation character and racetrack. That’s why the demo will allow you to save your work on the PS3′s hard drive. When the full game comes out on May 25, 2010, you can upload all that data and pick up where you left off. The demo won’t have all the creation tools you’ll find in the full game, but it should provide enough to help you get the gist of how to customize things.

The cart is powered by enough solar energy to run both the battery and the built in PS3. You aren’t restricted to daytime driving only though. The battery can be charged and used if it’s a particularly cloudy day or at nighttime. Besides, driving at night is what the headlights are for. This cart unfortunately does not have weapons you can shoot at passing motorists or directions to the closest ramp.

Mod Nation Racers amazed me. When United Front Games’ William Ho and James Greeve stepped up on stage to demonstrate how the PS3 game Mod Nation Racers worked during Sony’s E3 2009 press conference, it was easily one of the most surprising moments of that press conference. Especially the part where Greeve created an entirely new racetrack in five minutes. It’s a PS3 exclusive, and won’t be out until 2010.

Mod Nation Racers is to cart racing games what Little Big Planet is to platformers. Players completely customize their characters, carts and tracks. They can share the tracks, carts and character with others over the internet. They can even take tracks from other people that they’ve downloaded and tweak them on the go. Best of all, it’s an amazing simple, totally uncomplicated process.

Just watch the trailer below, which shows the creation of a new racing track in Mod Nation Racers…