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Nintendo kicked off a fairly slow news week by releasing Operation Wolf and Columns III: Revenge of Columns for the virtual console; they cost 500 and 800 Wii points respectively. The Xbox 360 camp announced new content, too. This coming Monday Black, Ninja Gaiden: Black, and Sid Meier’s Pirates! will release. It’s a great selection of games and as such you’ll have to shell out for 1200 MS points for each. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare will soon be graced with some DLC. The downloadable content will give players on both the Xbox 360 and PS3 a few new multiplayer maps. Unfortunately, there won’t be any single player or co-op content added to expand upon the story. Japan keeps getting lots of attention from Sony. They announced the release of a new color of PS3 for the Japanese market. Satin Silver will join the ranks of Clear Black and Ceramic White. There’s no word as to when this trio of colors will come to North America, but we’re hoping it’s soon. We also were pleasantly surprised to find out that a North American version of the Metal Gear Solid Anniversary Collection will soon release for the PS2. The three game set will include the first three titles and only set you back about $30. Hopefully, there’ll be enough to go around! The Nokia N-Gage is coming back, more or less. Nokia has developed a software gaming platform that will be compatible with several different Nokia models. As it stands, only the N-81 will be compatible at launch. It sounds like this second attempt at handheld gaming corrects the glaring faults of the initial offering that ended so poorly for the Finnish phone maker. We’re all waiting to revitalize our Wii’s with the upcoming release of Smash Bros. Brawl, but Nintendo teased us this week by releasing details for Mario Kart Wii. The famed cart racer will have 32 tracks in all with 16 of them being brand spanking new. The multiplayer support will be impressive and looks like it will even extend into its very own channel on the main Wii dashboard. We can’t wait! CoD 4 wasn’t the only phenomenal title of 2007 to announce a DLC. The folks at BioWare will be releasing content for Mass Effect. The new DLC is called “Bring Down the Sky” and it will contain about 90+ minutes of new gameplay. It introduces the feared Batarian race to the sci-fi RPG and will only cost you 400 MS points. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed looks to be shaping up nicely. The next title from LucasArts will utilize a series of technologies called Euphoria and D.M.M. which will revolutionize the way we interact with videogame environments. If that weren’t enough, it was announced that Darth Vader will be a playable character for the title. Unleashing the Force on the Wookiees of Kashyyyk will be delightfully dastardly. Are you looking to improve your English? If so you may want to import Sega’s upcoming English of the Dead. I guess Sega feels that Japanese students need some real motivation in order to learn English. What better way to practice vocabulary and phrasal verbs than by mowing down zombie scum with your DS stylus? David Jaffe confirmed that Twisted Metal for the PS3 is Eat Sleep Play’s next project. The classic Sony title recently released for a final time on the PS2 with Twisted Metal: Head-On Extra Twisted Edition. The franchise is now ready for a leap to the next generation Sony Computer Entertainment System. We can’t wait to take Sweet Tooth for a PS3 ride! Finally, the 11th annual Interactive Achievement Awards were presented by the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences last night in Las Vegas, NV. The big winners of the night were Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, BioShock, and The Orange Box. Each of these was awarded with a total of four awards. That’s a lot of hardware! Individual awards were given to Blizzard’s Mike Morhaime and Sony’s Ken Kutaragi. Mr. Morhaime was inducted into the AIAS Hall of Fame and Mr. Kutaragi received the lifetime achievement award. |