All The Gaming News That Interests Me

Welcome to the first installment in our very creatively titled gaming news segment. We’ll be offering up some not-at-all objective gaming news, sound bytes and tidbits on a quasi-regular basis, so make sure you make any requests you have in the comments below and we will see whose palm we can grease to get some info for you.

– Modern Warfare 3 hit this week to do battle with its old nemesis, Battlefield, and so far the clear winner is….well, everybody. Both games are selling like crazy and seem to be pretty amazing in their own right. Industry reviews have been fairly high for each title, but Modern Warfare appears to be suffering at the hands of users who are either genuinely disappointed that the game basically continues the proven MW formula, or who are just being internet trolls and trying to drive down the scores for their own reasons.

– Next week’s release of The Greatest Game Ever, aka Saints Row The Third, has caused users to flock to its downloadable “Initiation Station”, which is basically the character creation segment of the game, so that on the 15th you can jump straight in without having to set up your character. This press release sums it up nicely:

WOKING, UK – November 9, 2011 – THQ Inc. (NASDAQ: THQI) and Volition, Inc. ® today announced the Saints Row®: The ThirdTM community has created more than one million unique, hilarious, and often disturbing characters in the Saints Row Initiation Station.

With the free Initiation Station demo, available now on Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Steam, players can create, share and upload their most devious character creations to the Saints Row community site, SaintsRow.com. On the scheduled release date of November 18 in the UK, players can download their favorite characters from the site into Saints Row®: The ThirdTM and wreak crass destruction across the city of Steelport.

“The characters we’ve seen are mostly ridiculous, often hilarious, and always over-the-top. And now there are a million of them,” said Kevin Kraff, Vice President, Global Brand, THQ. “With the crazed creativity we’ve seen in only one week, we can’t wait to see what’s to come. One million is just the beginning.”

Some important facts: 1.2 million people have played the Initiation Station so far. The most popular nontraditional skin colors are green, red, and silver metallic. Finally, there are 24 created characters tagged by users as “God,” representing a variety of religious backgrounds.

The great thing is that you can upload as many characters as you like and share them with the world. My favorite so far?

– The biggest release on the horizon, possibly for the whole year, is landing this week, on 11-11-11, or, if you’re European, 11-11-11. I speak of course about Skyrim. What you couldn’t hear just now were the trumpets that played when I said the name. I’m not sure that any game can possibly live up to the hype surrounding Skyrim, but I can’t imagine a more likely contender. People are already suggesting this is the Game of the Year before they’ve even seen it

Seriously, this game is tracking a near-perfect rating on Xbox.com with 87,903 people having rated it. Before it’s out. That is some serious anticipation and pressure. I still believe that Oblivion is the single best game to hit the Xbox 360 and I’m hoping that years of development and improvements will reward us with another epic blockbuster into which we can sink hundreds upon hundreds of hours.

– EA has announced that, contrary to previous assumptions, Mass Effect 3 will not require a constant internet connection to play on the PC. Rather a one-time online activation will be necessary, after which you can make it with sexy aliens to your heart’s content offline. And make sure your webcam is off. We don’t want to see what you’re doing when Liara comes out of the space shower.

– On the PS3 side of things there might have been a release that matters to somebody. Uncharted 3 lumbered onto the scene and basically did what most people expected it to do, which was cause many thousands of PS3 owners to blow the dust off their consoles, take out their “Dark Knight” blu ray that has been in there for six months and play a truly awesome game.

The latest installment proves once again that gamers care about a quality story, great characters and suspense. Of course Cell-driven visual awesomeness and amazing sound design don’t hurt, either.

– Of interest to probably pretty much EVERYBODY is the announcement that there is, indeed, a new Xbox console in development. Code named “Ten”, it is slated for an official announcement at CES 2012 and rumors peg it for a holiday 2012 release. I would guess that means that the oft-delayed Star Wars edition of the 360 is going to sell like a box of cold turds as gamers instead lock in their pre-orders for the Ten. And since Nintendo and Microsoft have already announced their new consoles, it’s a safe bet that all of that R&D money Sony has been throwing around will result in some news very soon.

Thanks for reading, and let us know here what you want to know and we will send boys around to shake the info out of the developers.