Circuit Jerk

Here’s a collection of some of the tops news storys in the gaming world.

With Final Fantasy XIII hitting shelves this week, reviews have started popping up. 1up, IGN, Gamestop, and G4 have all about agreed on the review scores.   They’ve been good reviews, but not great, mostly sitting in the 80% area. Reading the reviews seems like the reviewers are giving the game pity points. They don’t want to deal with the flac of giving the game less than an 80%. Either way, I’ll still probably pick the game up mid-summer.

Two major events in gaming have happened this week.

First, the hostile destruction of Infinity Ward by Actvision has left most gamers angry, but unsure as of why. Does this mean Infinity Ward will produce a new IP? What’s going to happen with the cliffhanger ending from Modern Warfare 2? From several sources, the top Infinity Ward executives have been tossed out on their ass and Actvision cites breach of contract. Infinity Ward’s offices have that mommy was just hit by daddy feeling. A bunch of beefy bouncer type people have been hanging out and not saying why. Wouldn’t be surprised to see the studio disbanded and locked Monday morning.

The Playstation network failed the most loyal of the Playstation fanboys when older PS3s couldn’t connect to the network, deleted trophy info, and made downloaded games unplayable with a Y2K like glitch that caused the system to think it was New Year 1999. Sony’s answer was to leave your Playstation 3 off while they fix it. Crap time for this to happen during the launch of one of their most promising IPs, Heavy Rain.

Portal 2 has been announced for this Christmas season. The only real details released is a Co-op campaign and that it will take place 100s of years in the future, causing a Jurassic Park looking Aperature Science lab. Still no word on Half Life Episode 3 or hell, even Half Life 3.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is having many issues. Players are reporting lost stats, not being able to launch the game at all, and PC version of the game having bad codes.

Hideo Kojima has joined Twitter under the handle Kojima_Hideo and has been posting pictures of the box art for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker and the first Japanese commercial for it started airing.