Yeah, we know the deal: companies always hype up their upcoming products and product launches, and according to Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg, there will be millions of Natals sold this holiday season, quite a large figure, considering that Microsoft sold 2 million Xbox 360 consoles last holiday season. Talk about hype, especially considering that “natal” is still a code name.

As you can see above, a new Modern Warfare 2 server hack gives players lots of speed — far beyond the usual sprint. Expect a fix soon. And a few Xbox Live bans as well.

According to some wild rumors, Nintendo’s excellent Metroid Prime Trilogy is out of production, according to Coffee With Games, who noticed that the game wasn’t being stocked at Amazon. They contacted Nintendo and got the following reply:

Unfortunately, Metroid Prime Trilogy is no longer being shipped. Having said that, you may be able to find what you seek through the secondhand video game market.”

There’s absolutely no reason why Nintendo would seize production of the excellent trilogy, which was released only 6 months ago. It seems like either a hoax or a PR blunder from Nintendo’s side.

When Take-Two acquired Irrational Games back in 2006, it immediately smacked a 2K brand on it, calling it 2K Boston. Irrational Games were the developers behind System Shock 2 and, most importantly, BioShock.

Now though, they’re back with their old, and much much cooler name, Irrational Games. The studio is currently working on an un-announced project, expected to be unveiled at E3.

When released back in 2007, Army of Two had a great core principle, however, bad execution prevented the title from being the top notch game it was destined to be. The sequel, The 40th Day, is set to straighten out some of those flaws, and deliver a great co-op shooter. Does it succeed? Read on to find out.

In case you don’t know Army of Two, it centers around, Rios and Salen, two bad-ass, rough and tumble mercenaries, who work from job to job doing what they need to do, which always includes lots of shooting and blowing stuff up. In 40th Day, the two execute a mission in Shanghai, which goes wrong, and you’re thrown right into the action, a sort of “in-medias-res”, and must find out what’s going on. This unfolds throughout the game, and the story is actually quite well told. Read the rest of the Army of Two review

The Steam Hardware surveys are always a great indication on what kind of specs PC gamers have, and in December, it looks like dual core CPUs are quite the mainstream, and on the graphics side, Nvidia still dominates over ATI and Intel. You can check out the full stats here.

In case you don’t know it, Machinima has an excellent series called “All Your History Are Belong To Us”, where they examine the histories or game companies, franchises and so on. They have a wonderful five part series on Valve, the first of which you can see above. It’s great watching on a Saturday like this (where many people are snowed in all over the world).

Child’s Play, the gaming charity which raises money, games, toys for children’s hospitals in North America. The charity reported that it raised a record $1.78 million USD in 2009, making the total money raised in its few years of operation at over $6 million. You can read more about them here (and donate as well).

A rumor started by French gaming site NoFrag suggests that Blizzard may be working on a MMO FPS game, claiming the game, which features a futuristic setting, will two components; a social element, like The Sims Online, and a component with the FPS combat itself. The site cites no sources other than “sources familiar with the matter”. Which we all know what means: it’s probably a lot of hot air.

Valve’s offers extend beyond Steam and PC, now, Left 4 Dead 2 is getting a free Xbox Live weekend, where Silver members, which can’t play games online, will have a whole weekend to play Left 4 Dead 2 online, starting January 15. Considering it’s a multiplayer title to begin with, we don’t really know who’d buy the game in the first place without having Xbox Live Gold.