Treyarch is excited to announce that their first map pack for Call of Duty: World at War has managed to sell more than 2 million copies downloads since its March release:

“This is a huge milestone and we are so appreciative of our incredibly supportive community who continue to play and enjoy the game,” said Mark Lamia, Studio Head of Treyarch. “We’re hard at work on Call of Duty: World at War Map Pack 2 and look forward to delivering that in June.”

Sure it’s a good game and all but everyone who’s anyone loves the Nazi zombie feature that Treyarch introduced to the Call of Duty series. And, considering the forthcoming Map Pack 2 is going to include a new Nazi zombie map, it’s probably safe to say it will sell as good if not better than Map Pack 1.

Read (Kotaku)

It was recently announced that CEO of Vivendi, Jean-Bernard Levy, will replace Rene Penisson as Chairman of Activision Blizzard.

According to Joystiq, Vivendi is the majority owner of Activision Blizzard, just to give you a whiff of the company’s scale.

Let’s see, Activision Blizzard has Warcraft, Starcraft, Guitar Hero, Diablo, and Call of Duty; all colossal franchises. Vivendi, hower, has Activision Blizzard and Universal Studios. Yeah, big companies.

The world is often bizarrely cyclical. In its earliest incarnation Bioware’s fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins was based off the Neverwinter Nights engine and seemed more of a total conversion mod project than an actual independent title. Neverwinter Nights of course is one of many games to be based on the Dungeons and Dragons pen and paper (and more on occasion) tabletop roleplaying game.

Now Dragon Age: Origins is coming back to, well, its origins. Green Ronin Publishing will be releasing a pen and paper version of the game to accompany the digital adventure this summer. “We’re delighted to be working with Green Ronin to explore more of the Dragon Age universe through a pen and paper role-playing game. We’re excited to deliver Dragon Age’s unique dark, heroic fantasy to our audience in a brand new way – a perfect complement to the landmark game we’re launching on PC, Xbox 360 and PLAYSTATION 3 this fall,” said Dr. Ray Muzyka, General Manager and CEO, BioWare and General Manager and Vice President, EA.

The initial release will be a boxed set with more boxed sets and expansion books to be released later. An interesting possibility given that Bioware is including the suite of adventure creation tools is the possibility of user-created adventures being purchased and put out for the tabletop version.

These days popping down to the local rental store isn’t as popular as it used to be; Netflix’s format has heavily dominated the rental business and after a while someone realized that the same framework could work with video games. Rental service GameFly works in the same manner; pay a subscription depending on how many games you want at once and select your titles. The game discs are mailed to you in small paper envelopes which double as the return envelopes when you’re finished.

GameFly has apparently experienced incredibly high breakage of their discs and has been doing a constant dance of meetings and appeals to the postal service to try and get theses percentages down. As you might imagine with video games costing around $60 while DVDs are often a third or less of that price, GameFly’s profits are cut into quite sharply by high loss rates.

They’re now filing a complaint against the Postal Service, citing that their business is being harmed by preferential treatment that’s being given to other companies. You see, though Netflix and Blockbuster ship their dvds and games the same way around seventy percent of their mail is removed from the piles of letters and other items that get fed through automatic sorting machines. GameFly has requested the same service be granted to them, but apparently this hasn’t happened. In addition to high breakage rates, nineteen USPS employees have been fired for stealing discs from GameFly, which likely means there’s even more of it happening.

So Velvet Assassin finally managed to show itself, despite a long string of delays and various excuses as to why nobody could manage to lay hands on it.  And now that it’s finally out, is it any good?  Is it worth your rental or purchase dollar?

My answer?  Not a chance.  If it were possible to put a game on trial for war crimes, I would happily sit on the prosecution on this one.

You’ll play as Violette Summer, a British secret agent in the field in the declining days of World War II.  Violette is a lovely, charming lass with plenty of genteel English charm, and she’s also a trained instrument of death and mayhem.  She got that way after her husband, an RAF pilot, died in combat.  Feeling she needed to do something to atone for her loss–and get a note of vengeance in the bargain–she went in for MI6 training and thus came out a spy.  She’ll be neck deep in Germany with no support from the English government whatever, and she’ll be doing as much damage as possible to help bring about the end of the Nazi regime.

But she’s not REALLY in Germany right now–she’s actually in hospital right now, dying from massive injuries sustained in her spying efforts.  And you’re reliving her missions through a series of flashbacks.

This all sounds fairly innovative, of course, reliving your missions backward through an unusual perspective, but the problem is–the BIG problem, why I’d cheerfully put this game up in front of a firing squad, is that the gameplay is incredibly tiresome.

On the one hand, they’ve put some innovative concepts in here, such as a “morphine mode” which slows down your memories and allows you to engage in killing on a rampant scale, temporarily.  And of course, as numerous other gamers have already suggested, playing an attractive female character in third person vantage has some advantages of its own.  Admittedly, as advantages go, these are pretty minor at best, and frankly, of limited appeal.

The disadvantages are much, MUCH more tragic—mainly, this is a game that requires a lot of sneaking around, especially in the early stages, and I have never been one to enjoy the sneaking around.  I’m going toe to toe with NAZIS.  I expect to be able to bust some serious caps up in some fascists.  One particularly annoying segment in the beginning required me to jam a knife in a Nazi while his partner wandered off.  If after doing the killing on the first one, you don’t get the body sufficiently hidden in sufficiently rapid fashion, you’ll be attacked by the second.  You’ve only got the assassin’s knife you’ve been using all along, and that’s not going to do a whole lot of good against the German with the grease gun.

And that in a nutshell is the biggest problem with Velvet Assassin—entirely too much sneaking around.  If you recognize games like Assassin’s Creed (that one even HAS the word assassin in it), or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell or No One Lives Forever, well, that’s not a surprise.  I kind of caught that one myself.    Oh, sure, some people can’t get enough of stealth action games like this, and for some, the adventure and romance of being a spy in World War II is just entirely too much to resist.  Depending on your very specific tastes, you’ll either love this game or wish it’d never been made.

Whether you prefer the double handed grip of the original Nintendo zapper, the more realistic gun style of Nyko’s Perfect shot or some other Wiimote add-on designed to simulate the lightgun experience, they all have something in common; they’re all just analog devices that utilize simple mechanics to depress the buttons. Unfortunately most zapper controls only utilize a trigger mechanism, leaving the rest of the buttons and the directional pad on top of the zapper. Unfortunately games like Red Steel 2 and the Conduit are going to be utilizing both the wiimote and the nunchuck, meaning that manipulating all the controls could be difficult and cumbersome.

Penguin is creating a new peripheral for the console that hopes to correct this issue, the CrossFire Remote Pistol. It’ll be a smaller, more compact device with the A, B and D-pad buttons are all repositioned for easier access. Of course the B button is located in the trigger position, with the A and D-pad buttons located right next to the thumb. It also features enhanced vibration function and more powerful speakers. Of course since it’s simply just a modified Wiimote with the same buttons it’ll function with normal games. The new peripheral is set to be debuted at E3.

Sure, EA correctly predicted this past weekend’s professional boxing match using the game, but up until now we didn’t even know Fight Night Round 4‘s full roster.

Recently leaked by means of a scanned Official Playstation Magazine page, the Fight Night Round 4 roster includes a full 50 fighters for you to choose from.

Not happy with the list? Nestled subtly above the list is a little tidbit that there is a possibility of more boxers being added via DLC.

Full list after the break. READ ON »

Just as they did with the Stanley Cup and Super Bowl, EA has utilized one of their game engines to accurately predict the outcome of a sports match – This time around EA used Fight Night Round 4 to predict the winner of Ricky Hatton and Manny Pacquiao, two boxers who duked it out this weekend.

The funny thing is they were right again, Pacquiao knocked out Hatton in the third round. Then again, EA said the game would last 11 rounds so they weren’t exactly spot on but close enough.

Expect Fight Night Round 4 to hit retailers on June 30th for the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Read (Kotaku)

If you share my distate in shelling out any amount of cash for iPhone apps but want to give Metal Gear Solid Touch a go, you’re in luck — Konami evidentally wanted more people to get a taste of the game as they have recently released a trial version onto the App Store.

Entitled Metal Gear Solid Touch Lite, the trial will run 84.4 MB and feature 3 full levels of tap-shooting action.

After fiddling with the game for a bit I’ve discovered it to be quite fun but found my finger getting in the way causing me to miss my target. I probably won’t be buying the game but perhaps after trying the Lite version, you will.

With the introduction of DSiWare comes the introduction of almost useless applications – Both additions for the DSi are based around Animal Crossing and get this; they are a clock and a calculator, nothing more. Both applications are priced at 200 DSi Points and do everything you would expect a clock and calculator to do.

On the Wii side of things, it gets a bit more exciting:

WiiWare

Penguins & Friends – Hey! That’s My Fish! (Gammick Entertainment, 1-4 players, Rated E for Everyone, 800 Wii Points™): The penguins are hungry and need your help. Catch all the fish you can before someone steals them from you. Strategy is fundamental in this exciting game. Keep moving ahead of the other penguins so you don’t get trapped, and try to get to the ice floes that hold more fish. One to four players can play Penguins & Friends at the same time, provided they can handle the polar cold. The board is made up of ice blocks with a set number of fish under them. The ice blocks are hexagonal and form a structure like a beehive. The starting position of the ice blocks can change, creating different game boards.

Virtual Console

Tower Toppler™ (Commodore 64, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone, 500 Wii Points): Weird things are happening on Planet Nebulus. Someone or something has begun building huge towers on the sea floor without a construction license. Your mission is to ascend each of the eight cylindrical towers, passing various obstacles along the way, and to trigger the tower’s destruction mechanism to demolish the evil threat. Praised upon its original 1987 release for its graphical innovation, this is considered to be the most outstanding game from Hewson. Don’t miss out on this classic favorite.