14 DAY TRIAL // Hello and welcome to another edition of A Gamer's Week, your roundup of the most important things that happened in the industry these past few days. It's been a pretty busy week as the NPD sales charts arrived at the end of it, but don't think that before Friday things weren't already pretty hectic. Without further ado, here's this edition of A Gamer's Week.
Monday opened with a big announcement from Gurrilla Games and Sony, the developer and publisher, respectively, of Killzone 2, regarding the upcoming Steel and Titanium DLC pack. It will include two brand new multiplayer maps and will come to a PlayStation 3 near you at the end of April. This day also saw the revealing of a brand new marketing gimmick set in place by Rockstar for its GTA: Chinatown Wars game. If you enter the Rockstar Social Club and play Mr. Wong's Laundromat, then you will receive codes to unlock money in the Nintendo DS title.
But all the marketing stunts in the world won't save Chinatown Wars, at least according to Jesse Divnich, an analyst with EEDAR, who revealed that the handheld title would most certainly be a flop with DS users who preferred casual titles. Sadly for Rockstar, Divnich was right on the money as the NPD charts showed that the handheld game had sold quite poorly. Tuesday also saw Microsoft reveal a job opening for a software developer who would have to bring the Halo experience to console, web and mobile for a full package. Whether or not we will live in a Halo-branded world is unconfirmed though, but there is a possibility that we will be ride Warthogs and battle the Covenant in no time.
Wednesday saw a pretty tough move from GameStop, which, probably out of fear that it would be outsold by digital distribution outlets, decided to break the street date for Stardock's Demigod title. This made the company quite angry which revealed that it had to call in all of its employees in order to prevent the multiplayer matchmaking system from failing due to the big number of players. Corporate worries continued on this day as Nintendo revealed for the first time since the Wii's release, that it was in an unhealthy situation, with sales decreasing a whopping 69 percent in just 5 weeks in its native Japan. Hopefully, the small white console hasn't reach its tipping point just yet.
Thursday saw a very interesting survey being conducted by Sony, which asked players what features they wanted in the God of War III Collector's Edition. One of the key elements was the presence of the first two games on a Blu-ray disc. But until we'll get to see Kratos on Blu-Ray running on all PS3s we still need to wait. Also on this day the PC Gaming Alliance saw one of its biggest members, Activision-Blizzard, leave but declined to comment on the move. Instead of the large corporation, the non-profit organization, which militates for the rights of PC gamers worldwide, saw the introduction of none other than SecuROM, an infamous DRM software that practically treats every PC gamer as a criminal. Whether or not Randy Stude's organization failed to see the irony or if it was a good move is still undetermined.
Friday saw producer Jesse Abney, who is hard at work on the upcoming Need For Speed Shift game, talk about some of the features that would be implemented. Besides the confirmations of drifting and NOS, the EA employee also teased about some big surprises. The end of the week also saw the NPD group post their monthly charts in both software and hardware sales. If in terms of consoles the Wii is still the undisputed leader, Resident Evil 5 managed to topple the reign of Wii Fit, alongside a few other “friends” like Halo Wars, which is still quite popular.
This week also saw me review Godfather II, which you can check out right here, and test out Battlefield: Heroes, which you can read about here. Until next time, you can always access the games section here at Softpedia to stay up to date.