A Gamer's Week: 6 – 13 September

This week was dominated by the release of the NPD Group numbers for August, which showed the industry selling about 16% less than in the same period of 2008. Still, it was not all bad news. Here's what you need to know about the news from the last seven days.

On Monday, we found out that Sony was interested in keeping it old school when it comes to limited editions by saying that the Fortune Hunter version of Uncharted 2 would be coming with a dagger replica and would only be obtainable via competitions organized by Sony. Meanwhile, Hideo Kojima talked about how he shared his abilities and time between Metal Gear Solid Rising and the PSP bound Peace Walker.

On Tuesday, we learned, a little bit by accident, that Final Fantasy XIII was set to be released on the PlayStation 3 in Japan on December 17 but the big news was that Bungie pretty much confirmed that Halo 3: ODST would not be getting DLC and that Firefight might probably also show up in Halo: Reach.

Wednesday was all about Star Wars. On the one hand, BioWare revealed that it was looking at other revenue stream than subscriptions for The Old Republic, which probably means micro transactions. On the other hand, there are some rumors that Sony might be ready to put together a casual MMO based on a Star Wars Clone Wars theme and a Free Realms engine.

On Thursday, we got news that the FIFA 10 demo was live in Europe and was set to be released in North America on September 17, while Apple came out swinging against the PlayStation Portable and the Nintendo DS pointing out that gaming on the iPhone was easier and cheaper.

Friday was NPD data release day and with the industry seeing a fall in sales of about 16% over 2008, we took a look at the numbers for both software and hardware to see what they meant. We also talked about the performance of Madden NFL 10 a bit, as seen by John Riccitiello.

And if that is not enough, you can also take a look at the most recent Weekend Reading article, which talks about cloud gaming, OnLive, Gaikai and why some of the humanity inside all of us might lead them to fail.