A Gamer's Week: 7 – 14 March

This week, my playing time has been totally taken over by Empire: Total War, the newest combination of real time battles and turn based strategy from Creative Assembly and SEGA. But there has been other news we talked about and here's a handy round up.

Monday saw at least one analyst overestimate the power of DLC by predicting that The Lost and the Damned, which is the first add on for Grand Theft Auto IV, would be selling no less than 2 million copies until Christmas, on the strength of current sales since launch being of about 1 million. We at Softpedia suspect that once the initial interest fizzles, sales will plummet. Meanwhile, Capcom is also jumping on the DLC bandwagon by stating that it will be more important than retail. When? We don't know.

On Tuesday, we learned that videogames can cause early death, or at least that's what the government in the United Kingdom strongly believes, as indicated by this add campaign. So, if you want to die early, you should really take a look at the new details related to Need for Speed World Online, which will surely keep you playing for quite some time.

And in case that's not your cup of tea, then you can always hold out for BioShock 2, which is coming with some very mean Big Sisters playing nice instead or along the Bid Daddies from the original game. All this while Take Two posts losses, in spite of those 1 million pieces of DLC that it claimed to have sold on Monday.

Meanwhile, Activision is surely not losing money and will probably make quite a nice profit in 2009, especially when taking into account that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the sequel to Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (notice the change in placement for the numerals) is, reportedly, looking fantastic and coming in time for Christmas. Brad Wardell, the CEO of Stardock, says that, for all the hype, Steam, the digital distribution service from Valve, might not dominate the market.

And, finally, on Friday, we played a bit of the Watchmen: The End is Nigh (go see the movie, even if the game is not fantastic), while also learning that Resident Evil would bring at least three new games on the ever popular Nintendo Wii, the most important being Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles.

That's another week in gaming news. Don't forget to check out our oh-so-personal Weekend Reading columns and have a nice week ahead. Don't forget to play some videogames (I recommend Empire: Total War)!