EA reports that The Sims 3 has sold over 1.4 million copies during its first week on the market, making it the fastest selling Sims game ever. The original Sims game sold more than 16 million copies, while the sequel, The Sims 2 sold over 14 million units worldwide, excluding all the expansion packs.

Hollywood trade magazine Variety reports that Neverwinter Nights developer Cryptic Studios is developing an MMO based on the Neverwinter Nights universe. The report also suggests that Atari’s main intention with the acquisition of the studio was the MMO, which Atari is putting all its bets on. No other details of the game were mentioned, other than that a 2011 release date was expected.

The poplar propaganda tool shooter America’s Army 3 is currently preloading on Steam, and will be released on June 17. The game is free to download and play, just like the previous two installments.

America’s Army 3 is built from ground up using the Unreal Engine 3 and the Steam version will include all the features as regular games, like auto-updating, Steam achievements and Steam cloud.

In a recent update on the official Xbox.com page of Crackdown 2, it was revealed that the game will support 4 player co-op, in addition to 16 player multiplayer. Developed by Ruffian Games, Crackdown 2 was revealed in a teaser trailer form at E3.

The original Crackdown only supported 2 player co-op, which was in itself quite entertaining, taking on the whole city of criminals with a friend. Crackdown 2 is slated for release in the first half of 2010.

Again Nintendo prevails on my deeply ingrained sense of nostalgia by bringing a game that I actually recognized from my original straight-eight days of gaming. See, way back when, before Mike Tyson was a gigantic practical joke / train wreck, he was a professional boxer. And a good one, too! So good that Nintendo commissioned a game around him, dubbed Mike Tyson’s Punch Out. As time went on and Iron Mike’s career went wildly off the rails (and his contract expired, unrenewed), Nintendo then sought a way to re-release their game without paying Tyson. Thus, the game was shortened to Punch Out and Iron Mike was replaced with a no-name called “Mr. Dream”.

And now, Nintendo has once again released its Punch Out line, this time for the all too appropriate Wii. You’ll once again step into the role of the Bronx’s boxing sensation Little Mac, looking to make a name for yourself along with your trainer Doc Lewis. You’ll take on a series of outrageous characters with a series of different boxing styles until you face your final opponent. You’ll also be able to completely replay the game in a whole different way by selecting the Title Defense mode, in which you’ve already won the title but are now out to hold onto it against every boxer you defeated. And they’re none too happy about the loss.

The first thing that I have to tell you, if you’re going to try this game is, for the sake of all that’s holy, STRETCH FIRST. It may not be intuitive—stretch before playing a video game? Preposterous!—but you’re going to save yourself plenty of hurt if you stretch your arms and shoulders before playing. The way this game is set up, there’s two ways to play—with the Wii controller horizontally inclined like a normal controller, or using the motion sensitivity features of the Wii to make regular air punches, and believe me, you will be throwing a LOT of punches. The boxers you’ll face are downright turtles in their capacity for blocking, and you can pretty much count on one in every two or even three of your punches landing. That is, of course, unless you’ve studied a walkthrough or videos or even practiced in advance so you already know each boxer’s pattern.

Each of the boxers you’ll face does have a pattern, and generally, it won’t take too long to learn just where to lean and where to block and where to throw punches like a lunatic, but still, in the intervening space you will be wasting PLENTY of motion. All of this can do horrible things to your arms and shoulders if you’re not careful. Trust me, I still ache from my bout with King Hippo.

But still…I’m pretty satisfied with this game. It’s got decent graphics and excellent background musical effects and fun gameplay that’ll actually be a halfway decent workout. That’s the one really interesting thing about the Wii, really—a lot of their games make good workouts. And this is a workout that’s surprisingly plenty of fun, too, making it one of the best kind: the kind where participants will come back.

The current generation of console gaming seems to be split between two camps. Sony and Microsoft vie for the more adult audience, the so called ‘hardcore’ gamers while Nintendo captures the attentions of the casual crowd or the social hangout gaming of the hardcore crowd. Though many of the more popular Wii games are pretty simple, Nintendo is confident that with some of their upcoming releases they’ll be able to bring more hardcore players into their camp.

“We think we [can] win over the Halo audience with something like The Conduit, a multi-player, online, shooting experience, or Dead Space Extraction. And you know what? Once those people buy into Wii, they’ll go buy Mario Kart or Wii Fit Plus,” said Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America.  Unfortunately so far the record for third party hardcore games hasn’t been good, with even the critically vaunted No More Heroes doing pretty poorly in sales.

WIth the recent announcement of a new Metroid game and more Mario and Zelda games coming along there is some hope for a Wii hardcore renaissance in the future, but it’s not guaranteed.

Fusion IO, makers of extremely fast (and extremely expensive) PCI Express SSD storage solutions, has announced a “Fatal1ty” branded PCI-E SSD targeted at gamers, or rather, very rich gamers.

The 80 GB SSD (pictured above) will retail for a whopping $900, which is still cheaper than Fusion IO’s other SSDs, which are suited for enterprise use only and cost several thousand dollars. The ioDrive Extreme, as it’s called, will deliver read and write performance of over 500 MB/S, a lot more than standard SSD drives. Expect it to launch in a few months.

Noted game industry analyst Michael Pachter has given his opinion on the new technologies revealed by Microsoft and Sony, and their possible effect on the Wii. Pachter essentially said that Nintendo has nothing to worry about, and that the Wii’s domination of the current gen wars will continue, despite Natal and the new PS3 motion controller.

However, neither Microsoft’s nor Sony’s controllers won’t be out for at least a year, which will give the Wii even longer time on the market as the only console with motion controls.

Fallout 3 developer/publisher Bethesda is riding on a massive wave of success with Fallout 3, both commercial and critical success. Bethesda’s Todd Howard said that they’ve considered porting Fallout 3 to the iPhone (and iPod touch), but that the ideas so far haven’t met their standards. However, he certainly sees the iPhone as a viable platform for the game.

While movie tie-in games are usually poorly made cash-ins on films released around the time the source material is in theaters developer EA has for some time now been breaking the mold by releasing movie licensed games simply on the virtue that the intellectual properties could make for some excellent games. Most recently they released Lord of the Rings: Conquest and The Godfather II.

It seems this heyday of film-based games might be in its twilight hours as EA has suggested they’re shifting their focus away from licensed properties when planning for their future. “The bloom is really off the rose for licensed games,” said Games boss Frank Gibeau in an interview to the LA times. In the same interview he also confirmed that they’re not planning to release another Godfather game, although later an offical spokesperson came forth saying that nothing has been decided as far as the Godfather license.

This can only come as good news since along with some quality gems EA has mixed in a fair amount of generally terrible garbage. Devoting their resources towards their original properties means we’ll see more and better of those. Though the claim that something in the general mentality about licensed games has changed doesn’t hold much water.