None
The Week in Review news piece is a weekly article that summarizes and highlights the most important gaming related news and rumors over the past week. Microsoft was fairly noisy this week, officially announcing the price of their upcoming controller-free peripheral and two new console bundles. Kinect will set buyers back $149 and come with a copy of Kinect Adventures. However, for $300 you could also get the Kinect Holiday Bundle, which comes with the Kinect peripheral, Kinect Adventures, and a 4GB Xbox 360 if you can wait for it to be released “later this year.” In further bundle news, Microsoft also announced an upcoming Halo: Reach bundle. This bundle will include a silver 250GB Xbox 360, 2 silver controllers, and a copy of Halo: Reach, retailing for $399. EA also made a splash this week, announcing two big games. Their first announcement was Fight Night Champion, which surprisingly went away from the series’ “Round #” naming convention. Champion will include a new “Full Spectrum Punch Control” scheme, which was said to provide “the most realistic punching system ever seen” as well as “the most user-friendly title in the franchise’s history.” A sequel to the cult classic, American McGee’s Alice, was also announced, titled Alice: Madness Returns. This creepy sequel is set ten years after the first game, with Alice finally being released from an insane asylum where she spent the last decade trying to deal with the death of her entire family. Perhaps the loudest newsmaker this week was Netflix, who announced improvements to their service for PS3 users as well as plans to expand their service to our friendly neighbors to the north. Canada will finally be getting a chance to experience Netflix this fall, although, only the streaming portion of the service. Also coming from Netflix this fall will be the cue to discard those PS3 Netflix discs, as they will no longer be needed to utilize the service on the PS3. According to the company’s CEO Reed Hastings “Before our next call in October, we expect to be launching a major new version of our Sony PS3 user interface which doesn’t require a disc and is dynamically updated continuously with the latest Netflix UI improvements.” That’s all for this week, be sure to check back next week. |