February 16, 2012

Good evening, this is Will. If you haven't heard already I got a new job on the site. I have officially become the second News guy. For those following the news regularly you know about the many recent upheavals and well Alex and I did a little swap of jobs on the site so I will be the new Tuesday/Thursday news guy. Now that that's out of the way lets get into some actual news.

Mojang has recently had some big devlopments. The team, best known for Minecraft, stated in a video on Youtube that they would be developing a game for the Humble Bundle. Here's the kicker they are developing the game in a single weekend and putting all the proceeds toward charity (Joystiq). This is a monstorous undertaking for such a small company but they didn't stop there. The leader of the company, Notch, announced via Twitter that he would be willing to fund Psychonauts 2 (Industry Gamer). The idea is still being tossed around and is in no way official.

EA has gone overboard with the new Mass Effect game. To celebrate the upcoming launch of the third installment of their award winning Mass Effect series, they decided to launch a select number of copies with tracking chips into space via weather balloons (Game Informer). Fans can track these balloons online and attempt to grab a copy before they are available in retail.

Microsoft has confirmed that they will not be showing the Xbox 720 at E3 this year. They did however announce the codename for the new system. The new home console from Microsoft is being called the Durango while in production (Industry Gamer). This does in fact confirm the existence of a next gen console for Microsoft. We should be getting more news on that in the upcoming months.

More disheartening news from THQ today. They have just shut down their Japananese publishing business (Industry Gamer). This is just another of the many cuts the company has had to make in recent months because of their sudden defecit.