Battlefield 1943 and Bad Company 2: Onslaught canceled on PC

Battlefield 1943 for PC is not going to happen. Posting on the official Battlefield blog, Karl Magnus Troedsson, general manager of DICE, confirmed that both 1943 and Onslaught, a co-op add-on for Battlefield: Bad Company 2, have been "officially canceled." He states that the team is focusing all energy on Battlefield 3 in order to make it "the best Battlefield game ever" and "the biggest launch in DICE’s history." (Good luck getting into a game during the first three days!)

Battlefield 1943‘s delayed trek to PC had become hopeless in recent months, though company reps believed it was still set to deploy at some point when we followed up last summer. The downloadable experiment has been a resounding success on consoles, netting $16 million for Electronic Arts.

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Gigabyte nVidia GT 440 GV-N440TC-1GI Graphics Card

Gigabyte today launched a new video card that uses an nVidia GT 440 GPU. Dubbed as the Gigabyte GV-N440TC-1GI, this video card has some nice features such as a 512MB of GDDR5 on-board with a 1GB of TurboCache memory, a 830MHz core clock, a 1660MHz shader clock and a 3200MHz memory clock.

This new graphics card card also supports DirectX 11 and has several connectivity options including D-Sub, DVI and HDMI. The card fits into a PCI-E 2.0 slot and has a 128-bit memory interface.

What’s more, the GPU uses the 40nm technology and supports PhysX, CUDA and more. No word on pricing at this time.

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Homefront Arriving One Week Late On March 15

During THQ’s investor call today, president and CEO Brian Farrell repositioned Homefront’s launch from March 8 to March 15. A THQ rep confirmed the delay to Joystiq, saying, “We moved our Homefront launch date by one week to March 15.”

No specific reason was given for the move, but the launches of Pokemon Black & White and Dragon Age 2 on March 8 go a long way in explaining it. The rest of THQ’s statement seems to reflect our supposition: “We think we have a great opportunity to dominate retail on this date.” Tell that to Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s World Championship 2011: Over the Nexus.

 

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Avalon Hill’s ‘Battle Cry’ Gets New Release

Avalon Hill and Wizards of the Coast are celebrating the up-coming 150th anniversary of the American Civil War with a new edition of the popular war game Battle Cry. Scheduled to release in November, the new edition features all-new artwork, new graphics, and twice as many scenarios as the previous edition.

Battle Cry was originally released in 2000. Designed by Richard Borg, the game has enjoyed critical and popular success. It is a low-complexity introductory level war game, featuring a modular game board and detailed plastic models. The game is designed to be easy to learn and quick to play.

The new version, described as the “150th Civil War Anniversary Edition” includes 30 scenarios. Thirteen of the scenarios are new to this edition. 122 plastic models, mounted game board, 60 game cards, 54 terrain tiles, and 8 dice are included in the game.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops Sells 5.6 Million Copies On First Day

Move over, Activision. Here comes Activision.

Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies in 24 hours, making it the biggest entertainment launch ever, Activision said Thursday. This breaks the previous record of 4.7 million, which Activision set last year with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

“There has never been another entertainment franchise that has set opening day records for two consecutive years,” Activision CEO Bobby Kotick said in a statement.

The game is also on track to outperform last year’s five-day global sales record, which was $550 million, Kotick said.

Activision places the total one-day sales figure at $360 million, which is an okay amount of money, I guess. It makes you wonder, though — do 5.6 million people really care about Call of Duty, or did they all just want to play Zork?

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‘Way of the Samurai 4′ Appearing On PS3 Only

Way of the Samurai 3‘s North American release was handled in an unorthodox manner, with Agetec publishing on PS3 and UFO Interactive publishing on Xbox 360. That may not be an issue with the newly-announced fourth entry in Acquire’s free-roaming samurai action series, because it’s been revealed as a PS3 exclusive.

Of course, the Xbox 360 port followed the PS3 version in Japan by four months, so Xbox players may still see the way.

According to Siliconera, the exclusivity was announced in a Famitsu article, which also offered some details about gameplay. You’ll be able to choose your samurai’s age, and then, through actions, choose to align them with one of three feuding groups. You’ll also have more available actions within event scenes.

Of course, during the gameplay scenes you’ll always have the "slash" action.

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StarCraft 2 Expansion/Sequel Out In 2012

Blizzard’s Battle.net project director, Greg Canessa, was quoted at GDC Online suggesting an early 2012 release window for sequel-spansion StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm.

GameSpot caught the quote during a panel, in which Canessa responded to future Battle.net upgrades by saying they are "a main area of focus we’re going to be seeing on the Starcraft side over the next 18 months between now and Heart of the Swarm." However, a Blizzard representative told Joystiq "We have not announced a release date or window for Heart of the Swarm."

Blizzard’s next release will be for the World of Warcraft (population 12 million) expansion Cataclysm on December 7. With that bit of news out there, hopefully BlizzCon‘s big reveal will end the hellish wait for a Diablo 3 release date.

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Gears of War 3 Multiplayer Preview

While you will have to wait an extra five months to get the full version of Gears of War 3 at retail, Epic Games is offering up a concession in the form of a free multiplayer public beta. You’ll be able to check out the new multiplayer well before the game ships, although Epic has not released the exact date yet. And the extra development time will allow the developer to take full advantage of feedback from players and implement that information into the final version of the game.

"A big part of what we’re trying to do is embrace the different play styles that people have, so this public beta is going to be a very big chance for us to throw it out in the wild and see how well we’ve met the needs of what players want in order to use different tactics," said Lee Perry, senior gameplay designer, Epic Games.

Epic held an open house, showing off its newly expanded digs in Cary, North Carolina and offering a first taste and hands-on gameplay with a trio of multiplayer maps – Checkout, Trenches and Overpass. Each map showcases a different aspect of gameplay strategy: Checkout is set inside a large market; Trenches is a map focused on trench warfare that has a large hill at its central point that leads to a very powerful sniper position; Overpass is a section of street with buildings on one side and a bus stop on the other with a large overpass dividing the two sides of the road.

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President Of Disney Interactive Media Resigns

Steve Wadsworth, head of Disney’s Interactive Media Group — better known to us as "the guy in charge of Disney’s video game arm" — has stepped down. According to a New York Times report, Wadsworth issued a late-night missive to his staff last Thursday announcing his resignation. "I have been thinking about this for quite some time, and while it is difficult to leave a great company, an exciting business anda wonderful group of people, my desire and excitement to pursue other opportunities is too great to ignore."

Disney confirmed the news and offered an official statement from Wadsworth: "While there is never a good time to leave a great role at a great company, for many reasons now is the right time for me to move on. I am extremely proud of the huge progress we’ve made at Disney Interactive Media Group, and am confident that the business is well-positioned for continued significant growth." The split appears to be amicable, with Disney CEO Robert Iger offering only kind words about Wadsworth (found in full after the break).

The NYT also heard from "people with knowledge of the matter" that a replacement should be revealed "shortly," with Playdom head John Pleasants allegedly being eyed for the position (a social game developer that Disney acquired earlier this year).

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StarCraft 2 – Updates Coming ‘Soon’?

To hear Starcraft 2 designer Dustin Browder tell it, creating games at Blizzard takes years of fighting and yelling rather than coding or creating art — every little decision is a "a three-week or longer holy war." Browder says that the controversial decision to release the RTS as three titles was made to get the game out faster — after all that arguing, Blizzard figured that it needed to release something, and if that had been the whole game, we’d have been waiting even longer. As it was, he says, "we wanted to get a product into consumers’ hands sometime before the end of the decade. Even that we didn’t quite make, I guess, but it was still sooner!"

Browder answers fans’ concerns about how closely the second game resembles the first by suggesting that adapting RTS competitors’ innovations wouldn’t have made the game more successful. "I haven’t really seen another gameplay experience that’s attracted millions of players with hundreds of thousands playing online," he says. "I have not seen someone else be successful by removing economy. I have not seen other RTSes be successful by removing micro." Read more

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