The Week in Review and Rumor Round-Up: Blockbuster's Courting Sony, COD: Modern Warfare 2 Confirmed, MGS4 to Branch Out?, and more!

The Week in Review news piece summarizes and highlights the most important gaming related news and rumors over the past week. This weekly article will keep you plugged in and in-tune.

After a couple hectic months full of AAA game releases, we’ve finally hit the December lull. As such, only a few bits of news were truly relevant this week.

For starters, according to a statement made by Jim Keyes, Chairman and CEO of Blockbuster , the company is actively seeking strategic partners to promote their re-launched download service now known as Blockbuster OnDemand . The service sports about 10,000 titles and is available for Blockbuster consumers regardless of whether or not they participate in the movies-by-mail program. Companies being pursued include various electronics manufacturers. One of those may be Sony . Insiders speculate that a Blockbuster supported download service through Sony’s Blu-ray players as well as the PS3 may in fact be in the works.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was announced this week via the PlayStation blog and through the cover of the latest issue of GameInformer. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves features the return of Nathan Drake in an entirely new adventure. Mr. Drake will scour the world in the footsteps of explorer Marco Polo and his famous voyages to the Orient. Click HERE to be linked to the 30 second teaser trailer.

Pioneer has created a read-only disc that employs 16 layers of writable surface. That translates into 400 GB of total space. Best of all…it’s Blu-ray compatible! Does this mean game developers will be free to beef up their games? Will it be cheap enough to do so? Will this give Sony an edge in console wars? We’ll have to wait and see. Click HERE for more details.

Microsoft announced that their $199 Arcade version of the 360 will be getting 256 MB of internal memory. This memory upgrade will not only manage game saves, it will allow for the NXE update to be available to consumers without the necessity of buying an external memory unit. The new internal memory will be made available in the latest runs of 360 Arcade manufacturing.

At a Massive Inc. advertising event, Activision Blizzard made a few important gaming announcements:

1. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 will be coming out in fall of 2009 . No surprise there but the confirmation is nice.
2. The next Tony Hawk will be coming out in October of 2009. The game will not be controlled with a standard controller.
3. Guitar Hero Five is also set for a 2009 release. Game details are scarce but a return to the classic guitar set up is presaged.
4. Bizarre Creations, developers of Project Gotham racing, is currently working on two new IPs . The first is a racing title that uses the world of James Bond but will not be tied to any movie storyline. The second is a racing title that will combine Mario Kart with Forza.

The biggest rumor of the week came from Kojima Productions. Konami posted a highly cryptic graphic on their official website on Friday. The posting depicts an equation of sorts with a caption below that reads:

“A Next Metal Gear Is…”

This obviously points to something new from Kojima and crew . What isn’t clear is what they are actually hinting at. Due to the green font, many speculate that this means MGS4 is on its way to the Xbox 360. Still, the inverted exclamation point (¡) seems to point to the Wii or even the iPhone. Heck, the power symbol may refer to the PC. Could it be a new IP altogether? No one knows for sure, though the PC and 360 options seem to be the most likely. We’ll keep you informed when Konami makes it all official like.

Thanks so much everyone and we will see you next week!