GamesBloggo - Your source on game news! January 2009

Major Nelson has published the list of the most played games on XBox Live during the past year. On the top of the list, is Halo 3, followed by Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Grand Theft Auto IV.

Gears of War 2 is only fourth on the list, maybe due to the fact it only arrived by the end of last year, but there are also the few multiplayer problems it encountered at the beginning, and the fact that it’s not truly managing to reach the numbers that the first chapter of the series managed to obtain.

The full list can be found here.

Chet Faliszek from Valve has confirmed during a video podcast for Kotaku that the developing team is working on downloadable contents for Left 4 Dead.

He confirmed that the team is working on additional contents that will be available for download, and that the developing is being done contemporarily for the XBox 360 and PC versions. Although there aren’t many details on how this expansion will present itself, Faliszek has declared that it will feature “new playable contents”.

We’ll be waiting on more information on the matter.

Pandemic has published on the official forums the PC version requirements for The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, the newest title based on J.R.R Tolkien’s series.

For those who are interested in purchasing the game, here’s the minimum configuration in order to play the title on a PC:

FOR WINDOWS XP SP2 or Windows Vista

• 2.4 GHz Core Duo processor or equivalent
• 1 GB RAM
• A 256 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 3.0 - nvidia 7800 or equivelent
• The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
• A DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
• At least 6 GB of hard drive space for installation.

Although it’s not too far from normal standards, it still seems a little high for being the minimum requirements. It remains to be seen how much more superior the hardware will need to be in order to play the game with its full details.

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest will be launched on January 9th for PC, PS3, XBox 360 and Nintendo DS.

Capcom surely has nothing to be worried about, but Jun Takeuchi, Resident Evil 5 ’s producer, seems to have their own reasons to be worried. In an interview to Famitsu, Takeuchi has declared himself worried about Western developers and on the turns that the videogaming world is taking.

“I’m worried about the movements of Western developers. Japan is now their target - it’s the last big marketplace. The truth is that Western studios are making great games, and they’re going to continue to do so next year too”, he says. “”It’s not good if Japanese developers are making games that can’t be enjoyed by Japanese people”.

Takeuchi fears that the “westernalization” of the videogaming world will eventually annihilate the “Japanese Style” that has been loved by many fans for a long time.

The first press reviews about the new Street Fighter IV titles are rather good, praising Capcom’s work on the new chapter of the Street Fighter series that should be launched on consoles and PC in about a month.

Now, a list of the PlayStation 3 trophies for the game has been released. We’re talking about 48 objectives to be achieved, divided in 35 bronze, 10 silver, 2 gold and 1 platinum trophies.

On the PS3Trophies website, there’s the full trophy list with the official icons. It’s worth reminding that the launch date for Street Fighter IV is scheduled for February 20th.

In a long interview to Gameplayer, Red Faction: Guerrilla’s producer Rick White has answered questions about the stage of the game’s developing for the Microsoft console. One of the interesting comments was that, even though the developing continues to be done in schedule, there are some evident programming issues for the XBox 360.

“We’ve got it to the point where we can’t even put an extra vehicle into a world, because it’ll blow the memory. Every little change we make we have to be hyper-critical about it because it could just bring the whole system down”, says White.

In order to try and avoid “panic”, White underlines that THQ and Volition’s plans isn’t much about optimizing the resources in order to better manage the console. Their plans is to push the current hardware to the maximum levels as possible.

The full interview can be found here.

Electronic Arts has decided to release the demo version of Skate 2 only on XBox 360 and restricted to the American territory for now. Despite the restrictions, it’s good to know that the Skate 2 has fortunately survived the closure of EA Black Box, a branch of EA that was also responsible for the latest Need for Speed saga.

We hope that EA will make the demo available for European players as well, especially because the January 23rd launch date is coming close, and a playable demo could be useful to convince players to buy the game.

We’ll keep tuned.

Reuters has published important numbers concering the Call of Duty franchise, that has sold more than 35 million copies in all its versions, in the several countries in which it is distributed. GTA IV has reached the 11 million copies, while Gears of War 2 has sold 3 million copies on its first commercial month.

In the war amongst the “rhythm” games, the Guitar Hero series remains untouched with its 23 million copies sold for all its versions. For Nintendo, Mario Kart Wii and Super Smash Bros. Brawl sold more than 4 million copies in the US, according to the updated data from November.

For Sony, of course, LittleBigPlanet has interesting numbers as well: it already features more than 100.000 levels created by users that have generated more than 20 million matches.

A new initiative from Eidos has made its appearance on the official Tomb Raider website. On the page dedicated to the serie’s soundtrack, it is now possible to download a good number of songs, extracted directly from the original soundtrack from many of the Tomb Raider chapters.

It’s possible to download mp3 file packs that are divided according to the chapter in which those appear, including the new Tomb Raider Underworld Deluxe Edition, that contains 71 mp3 tracks.

Everything is available for free too. Which is always a good thing.

According to what was reported by several users on the official LittleBigPlanet forum, the outfits inspired on the Metal Gear Solid saga are creating several problems.

The bugs that were found go from the deletion of contents created locally or downloaded through PSN and stored on the hard disk, to the loss of game progress in the single-mode campaign. It didn’t take long for players to swarm the official forums with their complaints.

We hope that Media Molecule will be able to solve the issues as soon as possible. In the meantime, click here to go to the official forums.