The twelfth Contra game is coming out in the United States in only two days, so we’re all getting excited for some side-scrolling action. Contra ReBirth is much like Contra 4; old school 16-bit action. Remixes of songs from previous titles in the series are also featured in the game.

European and Japanese residents can already grab the title if you’re wondering. ReBirth was developed by M2 exclusively as a WiiWare title.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has made its way onto Steam today, retailing for $9.99. The 2003 RPG was originally released on the Xbox, followed by a retail PC release not too much later.

The game is considered as one of the best Star Wars games out to date, and it’s a nice addition to the Steam library.

The third entry into the series, Star Wars: The Old Republic, is currently under development by BioWare, and will be out on PCs sometime in the future. Keep an eye out for more news updates on the official website.

Read (Steam)

Over at the World of Warcraft forums, a Blizzard representative gave word that they have successfully changed how the infamous “Additional instances cannot be launched” error works.

The limit for instances per server has been notched up a bit, and the performance instances are being given are also improved.

The reason behind many players participating in Heroic instances is due to the recent 3.2 changes of Heroic dungeons providing Emblems of Conquest. This way, all fresh 80′s can get their Ulduar gear with just some grinding.

No word on when European and Australian servers will be seeing the fix.

Read (World of Warcraft Forums)

Valve has announced that the pre-order exclusive for their upcoming zombie shooter Left 4 Dead 2 will be the American baseball bat. The weapon has its own unique characteristics, and is a standalone weapon.

The way that it will work is if you are in a server with someone who pre-ordered the game, the entire server will have access to the baseball bat.

The weapon will be available on both the Xbox 360 and the PC. Left 4 Dead 2 will be arriving in North America on November 17th.

This weekend’s deal for Steam is an offer you can’t pass up; Street Fighter IV for 50% off. This brings the game from an original $39.99 (which is already cheap compared to the console versions) down to a bargain-bin $19.99.

Now, if you haven’t already grabbed this fighter, you really don’t have an excuse not to anymore. If you’re going by our Street Fighter IV review, ignore it; that shmuck doesn’t even write here anymore. Do yourself a favor and check it out, it’s well worth the money.

Read (Steam)

Usually, Capcom develops games on console platforms, and later ports them to the PC months later. This is one of the attributing factors of the recent downfall of PC gaming.

In an interview with VG247, Capcom’s Christian Svensson revealed that there are a few development teams teams that are working on a few “PC-lead” projects. This means that the games’ development is focused around the PC. Of course, the games will be be ported over to consoles in time.

Svensson did not reveal any information about the projects, but it’s good to know that there are at least a few companies out there who still want to keep PC gaming alive.

Demons of The Badlands, the downloadable content pack for Red Faction Guerrilla is the first one for the series, and fans of the game will be delighted that it lives up to the destructive action that the original game delivered. The new downloadable-only expansion offers a prologue to the original campaign, with the same level of destructiveness and lots of new weapons. The story is quite an interesting one, as developer Volition didn’t simply chose to continue the campaign where it left off, but instead told an important part of the story — what happened before the arrival of Alec Mason’s and the fight between Earth Defense Forces and Red Faction. The story is set eight years before the original game, and offers a good, but short view of the events that occurred. READ ON »

Players have been reporting several issues since updating to the current 3.0 firmware for the PlayStation 3. Problems range from DualShock 3 controllers not functioning correctly, inability to access trophies, and even game freezing. No fix for these technical problems have been detailed yet, however, Sony has responded to the issues:

SCEA is aware of reports that PS3 owners are experiencing isolated issues with their PS3 system since installing the most recent system software update (v3.00). Rest assured that we are looking into the matter and will provide an update here as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience, as it’s our mission to deliver the best consumer experience on all PlayStation platforms.

It’s not much, but at least we are assured that they are trying to do something about it. Many players have not been seeing any problems at all, so if you’re fortunate enough to be one of those people, congratulations.

Read (PlayStation.Blog)

Runic Games have announced today that their action RPG Torchlight will be seeing an October 27th launch date. Co-designers of Diablo and Diablo II, Max Schaefer and Erich Schaefer, are said to have worked on the game.

The game is Diablo-esque, but much easier to hop into. Each level of Torchlight is chosen randomly, having new Players will be allowed to create their own content via developer tools, and publish them to fellow gamers.

The game is scheduled for an exclusive PC launch via content distribution services for $19.99.

Sure, the Halo movie may have been given the axe but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from releasing the above live action trailer for Halo 3: ODST. Much like the recently released Ratchet & Clank trailer, this will do virtually nothing in terms of gameplay but definitely gives us another perspective on the world of ODST.

Halo 3: ODST will be out for the Xbox 360 on September 22nd, 2009.