Gaming News and Notes from 8-2-10

PlayStation Plus announces their publishing schedules for the next month as well as a change in their scheduling. Instead of weekly updates they are moving to bi-weekly. Not exactly the end of the world, but not exactly what people were told to expect either and it’s got a few people riled up on forums already.

I loved Dead Space. I still need to get the Wii version to try and play at some point, but for those of us who like the series, there’s been talk of a movie for awhile now and it looks like it will be a prequel to where the game picks up. Hoping they don’t much this up.

Annoyingly it looks like EA’s method of getting people to buy their sports games new using the online pass is working according to this article. As a big proponent of buying used games, this new approach by them, THQ with their UFC game, and the White Knight Chronicles sequel I griped about before – well, I simply think it sucks. It’s content you would expect to have, and that they advertise and while I understand why they do it, I strongly dislike it.

Crysis 2 has been delayed and there’s an announcement by EA that there will be a Speed Shift 2 game.

Most people who follow the console basketball games know that the 2k series has been ahead of EA’s Live series both in reviews and sales for a few years or so now. This year both companies look to be bringing their best to the table, but EA decided to up the ante by including a code to download a watered down version of NBA Jam as well. Not a bad play, but I want to see what their newly renamed ‘Elite’ series does first. I’d rather have 1 solid, fully functional hoops game this fall, than 2 that are lacking.

Surprise, surprise. Starcraft II has been selling like crazy. As someone who has had coworkers conspicuously absent from the company this week, I can vouch for the game’s popularity. My poor desktop won’t handle it without becoming a puff of smoke and flames, but one coworker in particular has been singing its praises to me the last few days and IGN scored it a solid 9.0 today. Oh, how’d it sell? 1.5 million copies in the first 48 hours. Wow.

Following the success of the recently released Transformers: War for Cybertron (which I have been playing quite a bit and will post a review to hopefully in the next week) – there is an announcement that there will be a Transformer’s Online game next year, though details are a bit scarce still.

Can’t get enough God of War? SCEA is counting on that as Ghost of Sparta is slated for the PSP Nov 2nd. As a big fan of Chains of Olympus, I’ll likely be grabbing this at some point as well.

Fable III is trying to get you to preorder by offering a ‘Villager Maker’ creation tool on their site. With Fable 2 there were some cool interactions with doing an online flash ‘story’ and having it carry over to your character online, and this looks to be a similar tie-in. A lot of people didn’t care for Fable 2, and it was certainly flawed in places and somehow lacked the charm of the first, but I still enjoyed it and am looking forward the 3rd in the series now.