This Week In Gaming - Week 2

Playstation 3

• Square-Enix has announced future games for the Playstation 3 and PSP. These titles so far include: Arc the Lad III, Ridge Racer Type 4, Xenogears, Legend of Mana and Vagrant Story. This week in gaming will keep you updated on the list as more are announced.

• This year sees the arrival of the much anticipated “Splinter Cell” trilogy coming to the PS3. The trilogy pack, which comes to Playstation 3 on March 11^th, includes the original Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow, and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which will now be available to play in HD. The announcement from Crystal Dynamics comes just a day after they announced a Tomb Raider trilogy pack. The pack will include Tomb Raider Anniversary, Tomb Raider Legend and Tomb Raider Underworld, which are currently only available for PC and Xbox 360. If that wasn’t enough for the Playstation 3 owners out there, there is also a rumoured Prince of Persia trilogy pack coming later next year.

• Something I thought was very interesting this week was when it was announced that less than half the amount of time spent on a PS3 was spent gaming. The other half of the time was spent movie streaming, social networking and web browsing, meaning gaming consoles are becoming more of a entertainment centre than they are a gaming console. A study on Xbox 360 showed that they spend 67% of the time gaming and 33% using application such as Sky Player, Netflix and the numerous social networking apps.

Xbox 360

• Massively successful Xbox 360 Kinect is expected to roar past Playstation Move, which has shipped 7.3 million units since its release in October. The Kinect has already sold over 5 million units in its first 2 months of general sale.

• I wrote last week that Amazon were selling games with a “Buy one, get one half price” deal. Well now, they have revealed their latest tactics; selling games for under $2. This week’s game in question is Dark Sector. This game is being sold here for $1.49, which is a saving of over $18 Check this deal out before it ends!

 Wii

• It was announced this week that the Nintendo Wii has sold over 40 MILLION systems in the United States alone, with the rough estimate for the rest of the world included being 78 million, making it the biggest selling 7^th Gen console by nearly 20 million units.

Handhelds

• The PSP was announced as Japans best selling gaming platform last week, overtaking 2^nd place Nintendo DS and 3^rd place Nintendo Wii. The best selling game in Japan was named as Pokémon Black/Pokémon White with 4,734,064 sales in Japan. Second place was awarded to Monster Hunter Portable 3^rd , with 3,163,750 sales.

 Other News

• Popular ‘Rock Band’ developer Harmonix have been bought out by an unknown private company. Viacom, whom Harmonix were a subsidiary of, were in talks of releasing the developers since late November, and decided to go ahead with the deal for an undisclosed amount of money. The subsidiary of Viacom, who also produced the successful “Dance Central” for Xbox 360 Kinect, says that the sale will NOT affect the weekly Rock Band and Dance Central DLC song packs.

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