14 DAY TRIAL // Hello and welcome to another edition of A Gamer's Week, the weekly special here at Softpedia dedicated to all the gamers out there. This week was filled with various announcements from the gaming companies as the GDC has shut its doors and the PR people went back to work promoting their titles. Without further delay, here's what happened in gaming in the past few days.
Monday saw some corporate chest beating by Sony, which guaranteed to PlayStation Portable owners that the Grand Theft Auto franchise would return to it. Don't forget that GTA: Chinatown Wars, the latest handheld installment in the famous series, is only a Nintendo DS exclusive, but Sony does seem optimistic. This day also saw some footage of Mass Effect 2, the sequel to one of the most popular RPGs of 2007, leak on YouTube, which demonstrated the point that BioWare boss Ray Muzyka made, namely that it would be a shooter RPG title.
Tuesday was a big disappointment for all Halo fans, as Bungie went on the record to say that it wouldn't create any new Halo 3 content after the release of Halo 3: ODST. This goes against the statement made by one of its employees at the GDC, who revealed that the company would be working on Halo 3 for another couple of years. EA then revealed some new details about the Battlefield Bad Company 2, the next project to arrive from its DICE studios in Scandinavia. Apparently, it will be a bit more serious than the first one, but it will still focus on the brighter sides of warfare.
Sticking with Electronic Arts, Wednesday saw the release of a special de-authorization program that would give people who bought games bundled with the infamous SecuROM DRM software more options and allow them to install the games on multiple machines. Japanese company Square Enix was up next, revealing, through its Final Fantasy XIII producer, Yoshinori Kitase, that the game would harness all the power of the PlayStation 3 when it would be released next year. For Xbox 360 fans, this means that some disk swapping and lower graphics will be present.
Thursday saw another dose of corporate gloating, as Activision revealed that, during its first weekend, the first DLC map pack for Call of Duty: World at War was downloaded over one million times. Seeing as almost three weeks have passes since its launch in North America, that number has surely doubled. Remakes have made headlines recently, as Konami also announced that its survival horror franchise, Silent Hill, would be receiving a remake of the first title exclusively for the Nintendo Wii. Entitled Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, it will be adapted to the unique controls of the Wii and might become a best seller.
Controversy was one of the main topics on Friday, as a North American high-school principal decided to ban the Nintendo Power magazine from the library of his institution because it featured a cover with a character from GTA: Chinatown Wars. Hazardous Software then decided to break the mold of conventional RTS gameplay and announced its upcoming Achron video game, which would use time travel as a core feature in the action.
This week I got a chance to review Resistance: Retribution, as well as spend an hour with Midway's Wheelman game. For the latest gaming news, demos and reviews, check out the dedicated section here at Softpedia.