Week In Gaming - Week of November 6, 2011

Another week, another set of news, so let’s jump right into things!

The biggest piece of news this week is arguably the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Things have broken out to World War 3, with Makarov at the center of it all. Nonsurprisingly,Modern Warfare 3 was an absolute hit, breaking the previous entertainment launch record previously held by Black Ops. Modern Warfare 3 sold more than 6.5 million copies in North America and the U.K. alone in the first 24 hours on store shelves, with revenue topping $400 million. This officially makes MW3 the biggest entertainment launch in history. At the same time, Elite, Call of Duty‘s answer to stat tracking, community building, help guides, and original videos, was entirely unusable roughly two days after it was made available to the public. Even today, users are reporting several issues with Elite, including some sections not loading up. As of this writing, Elite is still intermittent, meaning that you can sign in, but don’t expect everything to be there. Hopefully, Activision will fix this, but until then, Elite remains a mess.

On a lighter note, Steam forums are back online after a security breach. A group calling itself FknOwned (get it?) changed around the text on the forums and began to spam some users’ e-mail addresses. Gabe Newell, head honcho over at Valve, confirmed that user details and credit card information may have been compromised. For Steam users, watch your credit card statements very carefully, and change your passwords. I hope after this, Valve will bump up security measures, because we don’t want another Sony debacle, now do we?

In what appears to be a weekly trend, more rumors swirling around the successor to the Xbox 360 surfaced. According to these latest rumors, the next Xbox will be based on Windows 9 and an ARM architecture. Allegedly, it will also be smaller and cheaper than the existing Xbox 360. More specifically, the next Xbox will contain “multiple dedicated assistive cores for graphics, AI, physics, sound, networking, encryption and sensors”. I don’t know about you, but all of this is adding up to a hot plate of awesome.

Remakes seem to be the hot thing these days, and Nintendo seems to be a fan of them. Seeing as how they released a 3D remake of Ocarina of Time, Nintendo might jump on the opportunity of other remakes. Eiji Aonuma, producer of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, did not rule out the possibility of enhancing 2D Zelda games into 3D. Talking it over with Miyamoto, Aonuma was able to confirm that while speaking with Miyamoto, they talked about going back to 2D Zelda games and recreating them in 3D in order to sense an extra depth in the world. In my opinion, I hope that if they do move forward with this, they won’t price it at a full $40. This would fit more with the 3D Classics moniker than an actual retail release, but we’ll never know until an announcement is made.

Finally, producer Jesse Houston took to the Bioware Blog to drop more information on Mass Effect 3′s co-op. There will be no Kinect support, there are playable races other than Human and Turian, such as Drell, Asari, Krogran, and “unexpected” races, there will be character DLC, the co-op story will be completely separate from the single player story, as well as separate achievements and trophies for co-op and single-player, and there will be no split-screen co-op or offline servers. Well, that kinda sucks.

These were the major news for this past week. If I missed something, please type it in the comments section below. Until next week!