14 DAY TRIAL // Well, another week has passed and with it quite a lot of interesting things in the gaming industry. While this week wasn't as filled with companies being impacted by the recession as usual, we have heard a lot of interesting things about games that will appear this year. While some of them are good, as they have reached the end of the development process or have received concrete release dates, some aren't as pretty, detailing delays or other problems encountered in the creation process. So without any more delays, here's this edition of A Gamer's Week.
Monday was a pretty busy day for the team at Ensemble Studios, which announced that the last game it made, Halo Wars, had achieved Gold status, meaning that the title was completed and all that was left was to manufacture the copies and send them to retail stores around the world. Also, in addition to this great piece of news, Halo fans were treated by the MLG to a contest in which they could get the demo of Halo Wars early and test it out before the game launched. PC gamers weren't neglected, as Rockstar released a new patch for Grand Theft Auto IV, which aimed at providing a better experience to those who didn't have very powerful gaming rigs. Unfortunately, people weren't very impressed by it and still complained of problems. Hopefully, Rockstar will address these issues in the near future.
In line with the Halo news from Monday, we saw on Tuesday a big announcement made by the team at Bungie, which is hard at work making an expansion to the extremely popular Halo 3 shooter. Entitled Halo 3: ODST, it seems that that it won't feature one of the most loved characters in the sci-fi universe of the game, the Elites. Sad news indeed for fans of the Xbox 360 title, but not as sad as the fact that Electronic Arts' upcoming game The Sims 3, the follow-up to one of the most popular titles made by the company, was delayed. The old release date of February 20 has now turned into a cold TBA (To Be Announced), meaning that the huge number of Sims fans will still have to wait until they can control their own little society.
But Electronic Arts wasn't done with the announcements, as on Wednesday the company unveiled the star-studded cast of Red Alert 3's future expansion, entitled Uprising. Joining the lovely Gemma Atkinson and Ivana Milicevic, who appeared in the original game, are famous actors like Malcolm McDowell, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe or Jamie Chung. And speaking of war, it seems that fans of the Total War series will definitely be in for a big surprise on March 3, when the latest iteration in the series, Empire: Total War, will be launched by SEGA. No more waiting for the single-player game, but fans will still have to wait for a future patch that will add the multiplayer mode to the game, as, sadly, the team at Creative Assembly still needs time to polish it up.
Thursday marked two official announcements that were teased for quite some time. First of all, all Prince of Persia fans need to mark out February 26 on their calendars, as that is the day when Ubisoft will release the Prince of Persia Epilogue DLC (Downloadable Content), which will add a lot of new adventures, hot on the heels where the original game left off. Complete with new powers for both the Prince and Elika, and new enemies, this small expansion will definitely be a treat for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 gamers. Also, Square Enix decided to release a brand new trailer for its Final Fantasy XIII title, which will appear at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010, depending on where you live. Filled with the usual action-packed sequences and fights between mechas or other Japanese-oriented stuff, the trailer really made the day of a lot of Final Fantasy fans. But sadly we still have a long wait ahead of us until we can finally see this game completed and launched.
The last day of the week saw a very big announcement for any Warhammer Online fan. Mythic Entertainment, the company responsible for the popular MMORPG, has announced that it will release an expansion for the game, entitled Call to Arms. But not an ordinary expansion, but a free one, which will be rolled out in stages, starting in March and ending in June. All in all, a lot of new adventures, quests and epic battles await WAR fans. In line with all of the Halo-related announcements made this week, it seems that the team at Bungie wants to keep the hype going around Halo 3, and has released new details about the Mythic Map Pack which, although it still doesn't have a concrete release date, is very interesting. Don't forget that if you get the special edition of Halo Wars, you might get to test out these new maps early. Let's hope that we'll get the chance to write an article about the release of this pack soon.
In conclusion, this week was filled with a lot of news for gamers, and you can really see that the whole industry is starting to work at full speed in order to keep the great titles coming. Until next week, play safe and don't forget that you can check out all of the most recent gaming news in our special section here at Softpedia.