Rockstar is planning to show off a new trailer of GTAIV later this month according to a very brief (and vague) press release. Ok, actually it wasn’t too vague. They gave us a .jpg image with a date: March 29, 07.

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The best things in life are free. Sure you need your 40 hour epics, too, but those home grown morsels of gaming can be almost as entertaining. Here’s some of what I’ve been playing this week.

Pixel, the one-man team behind the amazing platform adventure Cave Story released his followup project this week. This one isn’t nearly so ambitious. It’s a low-res grayscale shooter in the Gameboy tradition called Guxt. It’s pretty old school, with no bombs, cheesy shooterpop soundtrack, and gameplay that will make you miss your NES. It’s not the masterpiece that Cave Story was, but it’s good to see Pixel at it again.

You can check out Guxt at Pixel’s site.

Clones and remakes have long been a staple of homebrew gaming, but it’s rare when a remake genuinely adds something to the original formula. There have been a lot of clones of Tempest and Tempest 2000 over the years, but Typhoon 2001 is by far the most faithful and the most fun. It doesn’t really innovate, but it does add a new look that’s clean, polished, and really captures the spirit of Jeff Minter’s Jaguar classic. It could still use some balancing, but the author is still refinining the game. If you’ve never had a chance to play T2K, or just don’t have the Jag around anymore, it’s really not a bad approximation at all. Check it out at the official site.

But my favorite freeware find of the week is a simple little arcade-style game called rhacp. I have no idea what that name means, but it’s an original take on the old “snake game” theme. The goal is to ram the little tadpole creatures with the front of your snake, which will cause it to get longer and longer. You’ll have to avoid your tail as per convention, and you’ll also have to avoid stars that you drop behind. Collecting all the dots on screen will cause the start to convert to dots. From there it becomes a game of survival. The perspective is a bit dizzying, but it couldn’t be more addictive. I’ve played this stupid game for hours this week. Check it out here.

If anyone enjoyed these and wants to see more freeware selections, leave me a comment, and I’ll try to make it a weekly thing.

Sony, as a company, hasn’t been making very good decisions lately. Mostly it’s just PR, who they let talk and the stupid things these people say, but today hit a new low in sheer brain-dead stupidity. After Kotaku published a rumor on what Sony’s big announcement at next week’s Game Developers’ Conference was going to be, Sony followed through on their threat to cut Kotaku off from anything Sony related, forever. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed and Kotaku was reinstated in Sony’s good graces after a few short hours, but the thought processes leading to the initial decision don’t exactly help with Sony’s current reputation for overwhelmingly self-destructive arrogance.

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Well here’s something hot for those of us hungering for some more World War II action. Okay, Wii owners craving more WWII-themed games. Alright, fine, even if no one’s exactly starved for more war games, the prospect of some Remote/Nunchuk dogfighting does sound pretty sweet. Peep the first screens:

  

That’s actually not looking half bad. I mean, it’s no Wii Far Cry, but it’ll do. Seriously, though, if it delivers on half of what the release promises, then I might even put my weathered fatigues back on and return to the war.

2D fans can rejoice now that AH has hit the Xbox 360’s live arcade, but it comes with all the good old faults we know and love from the PS2/GC ports and lacks the much coveted online play for the main game.

The presentation is retooled for HD (it’s smooth and looks amazing!!!), so in that respect, it’s worth owning even if you own the original console ports, but don’t be fooled by the multiplayer promise — it’s multiplayer locally, not online for the main game (mini-games are online multiplayer enabled). And it’s still as insane as it ever was (sometimes good insane and sometimes cheap $%^&*$*# insane). But for 2D fans, this is a welcomed offering and something to hold us over until Castle Crashers makes an appearance.

Developer The Behemoth is offering an awesome, tanglible reward for perfecting your skills at the game: real trophies for top leaderboard scores — check out more info at the AH site: http://www.alienhominid.com/leaderboards.html.