Xbox 360

Splinter Cell Conviction CE’s Price Lowered

When Ubisoft was performing “random sampling” on the Splinter Cell Conviction Collector’s Edition, they found a percentage of the USB drives packaged in the CE were defective. This resulted in Ubisoft lowering the $80 price tag down to $70. Ubisoft refuses to comment on what percentage of the USB drives will be defective, but the good news is that on April 15th, instructions will be released telling you how to receive the bonus content should you have a defective drive. Ubisoft also refuses to say what is specifically wrong with the drives, only that “We do not have that information at this time.”

Just Cause 2

When you think of Square Enix, you think of elaborate, time-consuming RPGs and fantastic worlds where magic and wizardry are more commonplace than traffic at the Holland Tunnel. So when it came down that Square Enix was pairing with Eidos and Avalanche Studios to bring us a sequel to a game that had a lukewarm reception, befuddled to optimistically curious was the range of thoughts for many gamers.

Just Cause 2 sees the return of CIA special agent Rico Rodriguez, our protagonist from the first game, as he is again tasked with overthrowing a tropical island’s government that is somewhat hostile towards our good ol’ U.S. of A. On top of this, Rico must also track down his missing mentor and best friend, Tom Sheldon, whom the desk jockeys in Washington think has gone rouge after he fell off their radar for several weeks. In order to accomplish his mission, Rico is tasked with going around and blowing up as much government owned and operated equipment as possible in order to lure out both Tom and the dictator of the island nation of Panau, “Baby” Panay.

Two More Infinity Ward Leads Leave

Activision has had a rough week, to say the least. It’s 15 dollar “Stimulus” map pack for Modern Warfare 2 is facing backlash from the community and critics alike for it’s pricey nature and glitches it had right out of the gate. To make matters worse however, two more Infinity Ward leads have left. The two leads in question are Lead Designer Todd Alderman and Lead Software Designer Francesco Gigliotti. Alderman is a significant blow to the developer, as he reportedly was the lead creator on Call of Duty’s multiplayer. Activision is not commenting on the situation, so whether or not this has to do with the recent lawsuit against Activision by Vince Zampella and Jason West is not known.

Halo Reach Multiplayer

A few weeks ago a video was released of the Halo: Reach multiplayer and it was in short, awesome.  However, they gave very little detail about everything they showed till now, Bungie has released some information about things to come in the new Halo game coming out this fall.  For the whole story go to Bungie for all of the details but here we’ll give you a quick over view of what they said.

First of Elites are actually different than Spartans, they are faster, bigger, have a stronger shield and have the ability to evade (I’ll go into detail about that later).  So how does this work?  Seems like everyone would pick the Elite over the Spartan, and while Bungie hasn’t given detail about how the Elite vs. Spartan will be they said it will mainly be Spartan vs. Spartan and Elite vs. Elite.

XBLA Price Cuts are Abound! Until April 7th.

Thankfully, this is not a very poor April Fools Day joke. Ten, from what I hear, decent little XBLA games have had their prices slashed until April 7th. I have actually only played, out of those 10, Rocket Riot and South Park Let’s Go Shenanigans. Both well worth the price, but Rocket Riot is definitely the superior one. A very cute, lovable, time-sucking game.

Lost Planet 2 Moved Up a Week

In a change of pace for 2010, a game is actually being released sooner than planned. Capcom originally set the release date for the XBox 360 version of Lost Planet 2 for May 18, 2010. However, a new announcement has moved it up a week to May 11th, 2010. Also, the PC version has been given a release window to be in shelves this fall. There will be a new multiplayer demo on April 21st for Xbox and April 22nd for Playstation 3.THis demo will have a single map with voice chat, stat tracking, and a player cap of 16.

Natal’s E3 Hype

Microsoft will be holding two separate conferences at this year’s E3 gathering in June.

Aaron Greenberg’s blog announced that the Natal’s event will be held on Sunday and that Microsoft will hold a conference for the XBox 360 on Monday. This appears to show the importance Microsoft is placing on Natal while also showing that it is also meant for a different audience than the more traditional Xbox 360 demographic.

With the recent announcement of Nintendo’s 3DS and all the fuss Sony has been making about Move, this E3 should be one of the more exciting in recent history.