14 DAY TRIAL // Hello and welcome to another edition of A Gamer's Week, your roundup of the most important news in the gaming industry from the last seven days. It has been a pretty busy week, as E3 passed and companies are still trying to make their ideas heard by the average gamer. Without further ado, here's this edition of A Gamer's Week.
Monday saw two very interesting reports on features and characters from two sequels. First up was Left 4 Dead 2, which saw its new cast of survivors introduced to gamers around the world. This new team of characters will have to endure some much more challenging enemies than the ones in the first game. Mass Effect 2 was also detailed, with Casey Hudson, one of the game's producers, revealing that there would be many ways for the player's character to die in the game. Let's hope that, until 2010, we can find out even more about this title.
Sticking to Left 4 Dead 2, Tuesday, a lot of people were quite angry that Valve was releasing a sequel to the original only a year apart from it. As such, they started a boycott group on Steam, in which they demanded that people refrained from buying the future title until new content would be delivered to the original. The President of Polyphony Digital, Kazunori Yamauchi, who leads the development on Gran Turismo 5, revealed that day that the development of the PSP version had really helped the whole team get a grip on how to streamline experiences for such a small platform.
2K Games took the stage on Wednesday, as it announced that Los Angeles Lakers player Kobe Bryant would be on the cover of the NBA 2K10 basketball simulator. The athlete was very excited, and gamers as well, as they can vote which pose the basketball player will be in on the cover on a special website. An administrative announcement was made that day by Xbox 360 Community Manager Major Nelson, who revealed that the service would go down next Tuesday for maintenance.
One of the big announcements this week was made on Thursday, when EA President John Riccitiello revealed that the developers of the Burnout series were working on a new Need For Speed title, which would revolutionize the franchise. Who knows what we might expect from such a dedicated team. The Rumor Mill started spinning that day, as people began to speculate on whether Cryptic Studios, which is also working on Champions Online and Star Trek Online MMOs, was also preparing a Neverwinter Nights online game, due to be published by Atari.
The last day of the working week saw Valve's Gabe Newell trying to settle the concerns of fans over Left 4 Dead and its sequel. He revealed that there would be a lot of new content incoming to the original game and said that gamers needed to understand the new things in the sequel. This was also the day when the NPD group unveiled its charts on the hardware and software markets. While the DS is still selling a lot of units, things aren't so good for other devices. On the software side, UFC 2009 Undisputed is the top dog, while Nintendo still has a lot of titles present in the chart.
This week, my colleague Andrei Dumitrescu reviewed The Sims 3, while I had the chance to spend one hour with Prototype. Check back to the dedicated games section here, at Softpedia, for all the latest news, reviews and demos.