In its first week on the charts in UK, EA’s Need For Speed Shift topped the sales charts, knocking Batman: Arkham Asylum of the top spot, and beating fellow racer DIRT 2 as well. Interestingly, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is #8 on the list, despite being almost two years old and the fact that the sequel will be arriving in less than two moths.

The top 10 chart:

1. 1: Need for Speed Shift
2. 2: Guitar Hero 5
3. 3: Dirt 2
4. 4: Batman: Arkham Asylum
5. 5: Wii Sports Resort
6. 6: Wet
7. 7: The Beatles: Rock Band
8. 8: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
9. 9: Wii Fit
10. 10: Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2010

Sales of downloadable games are raising rapidly, from Valve’s Steam platform, to EA’s Link and Xbox Live and the PlayStation Store, it’s hard to get an overview and some solid sales numbers, especially for games that are download-only. No digital content provider shares sales numbers, which is where NPD comes in.

NPD has been tracking retail sales for a long time, and is the third party sales tracking service that offers the most accurate sales charts each month in North America. The company has revealed plans of a digital sales chart for North America, and combat what it calls “misinformation”, from the publishers on sales numbers. However, it remains unclear how it plans on getting sales numbers from digital distributors such as Steam, as digital sales are a lot harder to track than retail sales.

Square Enix’s President and CEO Yoichi Wada has recently went on record to say that he strongly believes Nintendo is gearing up to launch their next generation Wii sometime next year. He doesn’t go into much detain but does suggest that the console could possibly feature a completely redone controller in addition to high definition graphics, which would make sense.

Furthermore, Mr. Wada has also said that while the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 motion controllers are cool, they probably won’t make much of an impact. He elaborates by pointing to the fact that game consoles now have a wide array of uses from a network terminal to a Blu-ray player and that the list of things you can do with these new motion controllers is quite small.

Read (Financial Times)

Fans of the Yakuza series will know that it took some time before SEGA finally decided to release a North American version of their hugely popular Yakuza 2. Well, if recent rumors are to be believed, we may not be subject to such a tedious wait with Yakuza 3.

Rumors come to us from 1UP who says that an anonymous source close to the project told them that “Yakuza 3 is currently being localized for release in the U.S. and European markets”.

As with any rumor, take this with a grain of salt, at least until we hear and official announcement from SEGA, that is.

It’s almost that time of the year; the period of a two month interval where tons of highly anticipated video games are released. And even though lots of games this year have been pushed to early 2010 because it was simply too crowded, there’s still a ton of great, quality AAA titles which will be released in the upcoming months. Here are our ten picks:

10: Avatar (November 15)

James Cameron’s upcoming sci-fi epic Avatar has been in production for years and sci-fi fans around the world are looking forward to its December premiere. The game adaptation, developed by Ubisoft, uses the same technology as the film, and will be in 3D as well.Very little is known about the game, mostly because it follows the movie closely, which itself has been a tightly kept secret.

9: NBA 2K10/NBA Live 10 (October 6)

The rivalry between NBA basketball series NBA 2K and NBA Live has been ongoing for several years, and for the 2010 versions of the respective games — which will be released on the same day — the stakes are even higher. 2K Games and EA have added a ton of new features to their games, which will make this years line up even more compelling to basketball fans around the world.

8: Aion: The Tower of Eternity (September 22)

Korean developer/publisher NCsoft is known for creating lots of MMOs, from Lineage, to Guild Wars, to the failed Auto Assault. Aion is their latest creation, and unlike many other MMOs, the main attraction here is that combat will, for the most part be airborne. Unfortunately however, unlike Guild Wars, Aion will be subscription based, and will cost $15 a month to be a part of.

7: Halo 3: ODST (September 22)

Halo 3 ODST (“Orbital Drop Shock Troopers”), doesn’t follow the main protagonist Master Chief, instead, it centers around an unknown soldier, “The Rookie”, who crash lands on a hostile planet and must find his teammates. While it’s not a true sequel, rather something in between Halo 3 and the upcoming Halo Reach, it’ll most certainly satisfy hard core Halo fans this holiday season.
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The Sturmovik games have been a pillar of WW2 air combat ever since the first game was released back in 2001. Against all odds and countless games building on the same concept, the series has been very successful for Russian developer Maddox Games (“Sturmovik” is the name of the Soviet Ilyushin Il-2 fighter plane). Birds of Prey is the series first appearance on consoles, and it does a great job at delivering a solid WW2 combat simulator. However, the transition hasn’t been flawless, as a few issues prevent the game from being a top-notch sim.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey continues building on the successful formula, with plenty of new additions and updates, most noticeably the visuals. The worlds beneath you are now a lot more detailed, the dogfights are more intense, and following the trend of modern games, there are tons of unlocks to be had as well. The controls — arguably the toughest part to port from PC to consoles when you talk about flying games — have been done quite well, and the different control options and layouts are going to satisfy a wide variety of players, from the newbies to the pros. The difficulty level follows as well, from an arcade style to pure simulation, there’s something for everyone.

The campaign missions are fairly well thought out, however, it becomes rather tiresome after you’ve flown a few raids, since there is very little variety among them. The 20 missions span from Italy, to Britain, to Germany and to Russia, however, all of them have two objectives: bombing runs and dogfights. And while the dog fights are exciting and thrilling, it too gets tiresome after a few missions. It helps with the different theaters of war, but we would have wished for more variety in the mission structures.  There’s also a large verity of authentic planes — as expected — and they’re all very nicely detailed and feature a ton of encyclopedia information, in case that interest you.
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If you currently play NCsoft‘s Dragon Runners you better start looking for alternatives as it was recently made known that the online serviers for the free-to-play game will be shutting down on January 1st, 2010.

News comes to us from the game’s lead programmer, Stephen Nichols, who said the following:

Dungeon Runners just isn’t cutting the mustard. If she were a ship, she’d be taking on water… The game just isn’t profitable.

However, according to Eurogamer, NCsoft will be giving Dungeon Runners players ‘free game time and copies of City of Heroes and Guild Wars Prophercies‘.

It was recently made known that a full 3,600 GameStop retail locations across the United States will be holding midnight launch parties for the forthcoming Halo 3: ODST. You had to have seen this coming because, well, it is Halo.

Anyways, the launch parties are said to play host to things such as trivia, give-aways and other normal business. But who cares about that, the only reason you’re buying Halo 3: ODST is for the Halo: Reach beta, right?

via kotaku

We first heard of the iPhone app-esque PSP Minis back at Gamescom but other than the fact that they would be small downloadable games, we don’t know much. Today, however, recent reports bring us news that the PSP Minis will be single player only and will not feature support for downloadable content. So, those of you who hoped to play a Tetris PSP Mini remake with your buddys over the internet will have to seek alternative options.

Then again, iPhone apps are generally single player with DLC compatibility added only recently and they still sell like hot cakes. We’ll have to wait and see if the PSP Minis share the same success.

via kotaku

In leui of International Talk like a Pirate Day (9/16) Steam has announced that they will be cutting the price of The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition by 50%, dropping the tag down to just $5.

For those of you who aren’t aware, this is a remake of the 1990 hit classic originally developed by LucasArts. That means, all of you who weren’t able to get in on the action back then, now’s your chance.

Readt (Steam)