Despite being in development for over a decade Duke Nukem Forever‘s May 3rd, 2011 release date is finally approaching. While we’ve seen everything from gameplay to the collector’s edition there is still much to be known about the game. While it would be ridiculous to think that the developers will tell us everything prior to the game’s launch, some information has been trickling  out here and there.

The latest of such information focuses on the game’s campaign, more specifically how long it will be. Gearbox‘s own Randy Pitchford came forth during an interview with GTTV to let us know that it will be between 16 and 18 hours.

This is a decent amount of play time and will surely give Duke Nukem fans hours of fun. Now we just need some information on the multiplayer and we’ll be all set and, you know, a demo wouldn’t hurt.

via vg247

We’ve all seen these refer-a-friend deals where you get a friend to sign up for something and receive some sort of bonus but we’ve never seen it offered through Xbox Live. However, reports have just surfaced that say Microsoft has launched the system which will offer gamers free Microsoft Points and Xbox Live Gold access (among other things) for enticing their buddies to join up under their name. 5 friends per day is the limit which could potentially net you quite a bit of loot.

Below is a list of incentives and the like, courtesy of Joystiq:

• Get your free member friend to go Gold and (1) you and your friend will each get 400 Microsoft Points or (2) 600 Microsoft Points, depending on the active offer.
• Get your free member friend to go Gold and (3) you and your friend will get a multiplayer Xbox Live Arcade game of Microsoft’s choosing.
• Get your free member friend to try Gold with a promotional token good for 1 month of Gold, and (4) if your friend redeems the token within 30 days, you’ll get 200 Microsoft Points.

If you’re looking to get down on this you better do so (somewhat) fast as our sources tell us it will only last until July 1st, 2011.

If you’ve been laying Left 4 Dead‘s Crash Course campaign you may have noticed that you are unable to let survivors out of rescue doors in Versus mode. Today, Valve has announced that a new patch has been pushed out that will effectively fix this problem and let the zombie slaying madness continue.

Among other minor bug fixes, this patch also gives server owners the ability to designate a maximum ping for players on their server.

Read (Steam)

It was recently made known that Valve is preparing to launch a $25 million Left 4 Dead 2 advertisement campaign in hopes of hyping up the zombie FPS. To put this into comparison, Vavle spent about $10 million on the ad campaign for the original Left 4 Dead, so you can see they are a bit more serious about its sequel.

The decision to put such a heavy chunk of change into L4D2 most likely came about after it was made known that it was pre-ordered a tremendous amount more than the original.

Expensive ad campaign or not, you’re still not going to be able to get your hands on Left 4 Dead 2 until its November 17th release date for the Xbox 360 and PC.

via joystiq

The level of violence in a video game isn’t always directly correlated to its body count. Your average Star Wars game has little content anyone could object to while a single round of Mortal Kombat is filled with more potential parental complaints than any other game with only a single corpse left behind.

Some parents or advocacy groups might be disturbed to know that in the 565 days since the release of Halo 3 over ten billion covenant have been killed in the campaign mode. That means since the game’s launch over 12,000 aliens have been killed every minute. If you laid the corpses end on end they’d create a chain that wrapped around the earth 456 times, although it’d probably be shorter due to the many covenant who were blown into tiny pieces.