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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. Take-Two CEO Ben Feder got the week started on a sour note when he announced that BioShock 2 will be getting delayed in order to polish the title up to the expectations of its fan base. Pushing back the game will make 2010 a dynamite year for Take-Two, the lineup will now include BioShock 2, Mafia II, Max Payne 3, and Red Dead Redemption. Infinity Ward raised the limited edition bar with their announcement of the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 “Prestige Edition.” This unbelievably unnecessary bundle will retail for $149, includes the Hardened Edition pack, a Soap McTavish sculpted head, and… a pair of functioning night-vision goggles. According to games industry analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Morgan, GTA V is not only in development but it has been for over a year now. The game will use the same engine that was used in GTA IV and may launch as early as October 2010, but likely won’t hit stores till fiscal 2011. Recent articles from Develop and Gamasutra suggest that Sony will likely be rebranding or remarketing at least a section of the PSN to resemble the functionality and content currently available through Apple’s App Store. Bill Gates made it clear that Project Natal – “depth-sensing cameras” – will be making their way to all sorts of hardware. The way Gates sees it, these cameras are the perfect user-friendly controllers consumers will want to have for controlling a number of devices including TVs and PCs. In fact, the R&D minds behind the camera technology have apparently been coming up with all sorts of ways the tech could be used, further strengthening its scope and appeal. Nintendo released a presser this week concerning their DS and DSi. According to the latest numbers that released from NPD, in the US in June, 766,000 thousand DS and DSi handhelds were sold – that’s more than all other consoles sold in the same month combined! Details surrounding the next Xbox firmware update were released. Too much new functionality was detailed to list here, but click HERE to be connected to the article for all the info. Finally, during the PS motion tech keynote from Develop, Sony let it be known that the PSEye has facial recognition capabilities. According to the liveblog, the peripheral can detect the “position and direction of your head,” as well as the “gender and age of face” and smiles. The camera also has the ability distinguish “different parts of the face, such as nose, mouth, and eyes.” This makes the PSEye a motion control system with similar capabilities to that outlined by Microsoft’s Natal. Thanks so much everyone and we will see you next week! |