What recession?

Citing internal sales estimates and figures from third-party tracking firms, Activision announced Friday that Modern Warfare 2 has sold 55 million units worldwide (all platforms) since its November 10 release. At USD 60.00, that's $3.3 billion in total sales for a game that cost around $200 million to push out the door. PC-specific figures were not made available.

As IUN predicted way back in July, MW2's sales have exceeded projections that ranged from 11.1 million units in the first two months after release, to 12 million units by Christmas. The hype worked.

CoD4 Star Wars mod

Amazing.

Call of Duty: Secret Spielberg Level Unlocked

Call of Duty: Secret Spielberg Level Unlocked - watch more funny videos

Bad Co. 2 PC beta delayed

From Gordon Van Dyke:

Hey all,

We wanted to update you, and slow the flood of tweets, on questions surrounding the BFBC2 PC Beta being cancelled. I'll get right to it and say "the BFBC2 PC Beta is not cancelled". Now this all started due to changes made to an earlier blog that removed the PC Beta from the details and the reason for this was the plan changed. With the huge success of the PS3 Beta we decided to drastically increase the PC Beta's capacity to insure as many people as possible could participate. Unfortunately this meant we had to delay the Beta to very early next year giving us more planning time to make it happen and implement more optimizations.

Here is a recap of the current PC features, and we can now confirm DX11 support with more details to come later!

PC Enhanced Features

• Up to 32 Players on PC (24 on consoles) - Play with up to 32 players online in the biggest multiplayer Maps in Battlefield. Each with a different tactical and gameplay focus set across a variety of environments.
• Full DirectX 9, 10 & 11 Support - Immerse yourself in the Battlefield world as Frostbite engine brings tanks, helicopters and explosions to vivid life on your PC. The game will fully support Windows XP, Vista, and 7 with new tech that further improves things like lighting and shadows.
• Enhanced Gameplay - The PC version also includes wide peripheral support like Joysticks for flying, NVIDIA 3D Vision, Logitech LCD Keyboards and VoIP Support plus a variety of specific features tailored for PC play.
• Friend Support - Find your friends online with the new buddy list to see if and who is online so you can quickly join their game.
• Dedicated Ranked Server - Everyone gets non-stop action with no connection penalties based on some other player's internet. Ranked Server Provider program will give players opportunity to rent their own server(s) located in professional grade datacenters, ability to modify settings like map rotation, create reserved slots for friends or clan members, kick & Ban players, and custom name your ranked server.
• Clan Support & Private Servers - Independent Clan Tag, and ability to rent servers for hosting and controlling private password protected competitive servers with expanded control over the settings from public ranked servers.
• PC Squad Play System - Updated from previous Battlefield PC titles now gives control of your squad before heading into combat.

Turkey, Beans and Mustard ? Tough Decisions

Whether you're eating beans with mustard, potatoes heated up over a sterno candle, turkey from a microwavable plastic container or a hot dog from quik trip, have a happy thanksgiving.
Perhaps you can all celebrate by tearing each other apart in left for dead and posting screenshots of your appendages. Hope you all have a great holiday ! -Steve

If you want people to read your post ...

... put the word "hooker" in the title.

Monday's MW2 post has 454 unique hits as of today. That has never happened at IUN before. Excluding a post that gets daily hits from a Google image search, our previous record was 121 (for "Crushed").

Maybe we should rename the blog Hookers and Beer.

The inquisition in between

I was sick to death of Left 4 Dead. I think I still am. Playing a game four or five nights a week for a couple of months in a row will do that to you. Obviously. Night after night, safe-room to safe-room, pipe bombs and pounces, pistols and puke: it all got a bit painful by September.

I figured Left 4 Dead 2 would be more of the same, and to some degree it is. It's still all about "point A to point B," and the inquisition in between. The survivor bots are still assholes, and the game is still mostly intolerable when playing with strangers. Any game that discourages you from killing the one thing that's annoying you most has a lot to answer for.

There's light and heat in this sequel, however, and it throttles you straight away. Everything has been upgraded: the Source Engine, the level design, the sound, the vampires, the difficulty, the trees (yes, the effing trees), and it's almost dumbfounding when you start to realize how much the new array of stuff changes things. I thought I could just adapt and assimilate - applying the competencies I developed in the first game to the second, tweaking them slightly to account for the cricket bat. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Predictability between rounds - a core failing of L4D1 - has gone right out the window. Valve didn't escalate the difficulty by throwing more zombies at you, or giving them rocket launchers for arms. No, they opened up the terrain. They vastly reduced the number of accessible right-angles in the geometry (i.e.: good luck finding a corner). They created three new specials whose sole purpose is to separate the survivors with ruthless efficiency. And they made weather ... a monsoon with a mind that looks so menacingly real, you understand immediately that it wants you to die.

So yeah, L4D2 is hard. An early Spitter can have you reaching for your health pack three steps out of the safe-room. A Charger can knock you into next week. Oddly enough, though, the Boomer still feels like the linchpin of the infected attack. The consequences of being blind and covered in gooey demon pheromones are much more dire in these circumstances. These days, Shiva stacking puts you on a timer (of doom). Oh, and the Director hates you. It hates you like you kicked its food and peed on its dog. The moment you start to feel good about your progress, the Director flips the switch for Relentless Mode (TM), and things go south at the speed of stupid.

In the midst of all the evolution, the one thing to truly love about the second game is that it constantly forces you to make choices you don't want to make. Do you wait for the next ammo pile, or do you drop your ass-kicker with the laser site in favor of a lesser weapon that actually has some bullets? Do you grab the chainsaw for its (very temporary) close-range lethality, or do you stick with the magnum with its longer range and infinite ammo? Which incapped teammate do you save first, and when do you just leave them all and bolt for the safe-room? How you answer those questions - and a seemingly infinite array of others like them - goes a long way towards determining whether you stay alive for the next 90 seconds. It's intense and maddening and orgiastic in equal measures, and I usually stop playing more out of exhaustion than anything else.

There are, of course, a number of peccadilloes I could mention, but they hardly matter in the grand scheme of the Great Southern Apocalypse. In one year, Valve managed to elevate the game I used to love to a level I did not expect, and I just don't care about the rest of my gaming library right now. Good on them.

This one's not going away

Another gaming media outlet - Crispy Gamer - has picked up Ars Technica's journalistic ethics story regarding Modern Warfare 2. Kudos to Ben Kuchera for taking the lead on this, and to James Fudge for picking up the torch. I'm betting we'll hear a lot more on this subject in the coming days. In particular, I'll be very interested to see how Metacritic responds.

Here's your hooker. Like our game?

From ArsTechnica:

The gaming press had a choice: either play Modern Warfare 2 in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision and on their dime, or give up early coverage. Many sites wrestled with the ethical implications by posting disclaimers, others simply ignored the issue and didn't discuss it in their review. We explore what happened during the review event, and ask the question: what does Activision get for all those plane tickets and hotel rooms?

Ars didn't accept the free hotel room and airfare, but enough gaming press outlets did. Go ahead and skip right to the end of the article:

Would knowing when and how a review takes place change the way you think about the final score? What's clear is that readers should know the circumstances surrounding how the game was played, and how controlled the situation was. Reviewing the game at home is one thing, reviewing it in a remote location, surrounded by other enthusiasts and the game's creators is another. There is no reason Activision couldn't ship writers prerelease copies of the game: it has been finished and packaged for some time, and the leaks had already spread across the Internet.

Instead the company decided to pay for the gaming press to come to a specific location, stay in company-provided rooms, play the game a specific way... and all this came at a substantial cost to Activision Blizzard.

What value did they get for that money? We asked Activision and have yet to receive a response.

What value, indeed? Even if you suffer from some kind of virulent retardation that causes you to conclude that these "professionals" were not influenced - even a little - by all the pampering, it would still be obvious that the Acti-vacation was designed to skew MW2's Metacritic score upwards. The whole thing creates such a massive appearance of impropriety that it doesn't matter if MW2 actually is worthy of an 87 ("generally favorable reviews").

"Playing in a room full of friendly developers and your games press colleagues with perfect connections is undoubtedly much more fun than gaming online with some of the legendarily obnoxious Xbox Live players," [one compromised reviewer] told Ars. "You'd have to be a pretty naïve reviewer to think there's no difference—and if you let that experience form the basis of your multiplayer assessment without qualification, you're giving too much credit to online gamers' behavior."

Well no shit. Any media outlet that accepted Activision's package should have their MW2 review nullified for the Metacritic calculation. It's that simple, and it's that stupid.

Borderlands DLC video

I'm a bit disappointed Gearbox went in this direction, but at least I don't have to listen to more bandit trash-talk.

Video Games | Borderlands | Zombie Island DLC Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Destructoid previews Bad Company 2 (some more)

If you're trying to decide if BC2 is worth all the hype (on its own merits, as opposed to simply capitalizing on MW2's stupidity), this Destructoid article is a good read. It really would be nice to play a PvP multiplayer FPS that sports interesting objective-based game modes without skimping on the shooter core. Quake Wars and Section 8 failed because they couldn't do both. BC2 has the potential to avoid that trap.