News: Gaming news round-up The Call of Duty edition

Sony confirms GT5 before Xmas

Gran Turismo 5's famous delays have been in the news a lot of late, and each day the game is delayed it's looking less and less likely to make its Xmas release.

But Sony Computer Entertainment America's VP of marketing, Peter Dille, has said the game will be arriving on time. Talking to CVG he said, “Yeah [it's on track], Kazunori [GT5 creator] came out with a comment that they are working on a few last things. He apologised to the community, but explained it is coming before Christmas.”

He went to confirm that this statement counts for both the Japanese and US release, and we're assuming worldwide release dates will also be set on the same day.

Official Sony retail site, Sony Style, today posted a GT5 release date for “on or about 11/30/2010”. We can only hope it's an accurate date, it would be a shame for the game to miss the holiday rush, and we're sure Sony knows this.

Activision rolling in the dough

Activision Blizzard, one of the gaming world's mega publishing houses, recently issued its earnings report for the July-September quarter, reporting sales of $745 million.

According to Gamespot, the company achieved sales above expectations during the quarter, growing profit year-on-year from $15 million in 2009 to $51 million in 2010.

The company has shown strong performance this year thanks to Blizzard Entertainment's successful World of Warcraft and Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. As of September 1 the highly addictive sci-fi real-time strategy title sold more than three million units worldwide, with 1.5 million flying off the shelves within the first 48 hours of release.

Things are looking good for Activision for the remainder of the year as well, with large revenues expected from Call of Duty: Black Ops and World of Warcraft Cataclysm.

EA coffers trickling money

Unfortunately Electronic Arts (EA) isn't in the same good earnings spot as Activision at the moment.

The publisher saw quarterly revenue drop 20%, reporting a loss of $201 million for the three months ending September 30. While obviously not good, the loss was smaller than the $390 million loss it posted during the same period last year, Gamespot reported.

Best sellers for the EA stable have been named as Madden NFL 11, FIFA 11 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2, while its modern Medal of Honor reboot didn't fare nearly as well. EA's senior VP Patrick Soderlund told Eurogamer recently, “what I can say is the game didn't meet our quality expectations. In order to be successful in that space, we're going to have to have a game that is really, really strong.”

Ubisoft announces exclusive Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood PS3 DLC

It seems Sony has been working hard with Ubisoft, publishers of the Assassin's Creed titles to arrange some PlayStation 3 exclusives for its premium gaming console.

The first of these was a PS3-exclusive beta-testing phase for the game, but the second seems much more promising - an exclusive downloadable content pack known as Copernicus Conspiracy. The add-on will be available for download through the PlayStation Network on the same day the game launches, the 16th of November.

In the add-on pack Ezio will be charged with defending the famous Renaissance astronomer (who first theorised that the earth revolves around the sun), from the church and others who would prefer to see his idea's vanish. The DLC will include courier, assassination and protection missions.

Bethesda expands its gaming repertoire

According to Kotaku, Bethesda (and parent company ZeniMax), has been expanding its gaming influence beyond the world's of Fallout and Oblivion by snapping up a number of new studios in recent months.

The company already purchased Doom creators id Software as well as Shinji Mikami's (Resident Evil creator) Tango Gameworks and Arkane Studios. Now ZeniMax Media has also added Swedish studio Machinegames, developers of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay to its collection.

The Swedish studio has been quiet so far this year other than saying it's “a developer of exciting AAA titles for next-gen platforms.” This all bodes well for ZeniMax and Bethesda, although neither company has yet officially confirmed the take-over.

Even more Black Ops insanity

Earlier today we reported that Activision has already announced that the next title in the Call of Duty (COD) series is in development and should be seeing the light of day this time next year, possibly named Modern Warfare 3.

But until that time, the COD limelight will be hogged by Treyarch's upcoming Black Ops. Now according to CVG, yet another Black Ops secret has been revealed, this time in the form of 'Dead Ops Arcade', an unlockable arcade mode in the game that ties in with the previously mentioned zombie mode. Dead Ops will be a round-based mode that will see players cooperatively clearing out waves of zombies, but this time from a top down perspective.

No official word has been given to the legitimacy of the new mode, but proof has been delivered in the form of an achievement listing known as 'Easy Rhino' which require players to use a Speed Boost to blast through multiple enemies at once. Whatever the case, we'll know for sure this Tuesday (9 November), when the game launches worldwide.

Check out the new launch trailer below for some explosive Call of Duty action.

Video courtesy of IGN

Gaming news round-up The Call of Duty edition

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