At the start of next year, Xbox 360 users will no longer be able to purchase guns for their virtual Xbox avatars.

Epic Games’ community manager “raczilla” revealed this over at Epic’s forums saying that a new policy will take place on Jan. 1, 2012 that will prohibit the sale of “gun-like avatar items” on Xbox Live’s Marketplace. So guns like the Lancer and Hammerburst from the Gears of War series will unfortunately be gone in five days.

The good news, though, is that you can keep any gun that’s been purchased before Jan. 1, so there’s still time for your avatar to get their virtual hands on a firearm. As for me, I think I’ll just contentedly stick with my dual lightsabers (sword > gun).

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Lancer and Hammerburst avatar items no longer available on Marketplace on 1/1/2012 [Epic Games Community Forum, via G4TV]

The Worms™ Ultimate Mayhem “Single-player Pack” features brand new additions to the existing single-player challenge modes, with x8 new single-player challenges, including Sniper, Jet Pack, Super Sheep and Shotgun challenges. The “Single-player Pack” also includes x1 new multi-player map and x3 new Achievements.

• x1 new Sniper Challenge.
• x1 new Jet Pack Challenge.
• x1 new Super Sheep Challenge.
• x1 new Shotgun Challenge.
• x1 new Accuracy Challenge.
• x1 new Navigation Challenge.
• x1 new Crate Collect Challenge.
• x1 new Deathmatch Challenge.
• x 1 new multi-player map – “All Systems Oh No”.
• x3 new Achievements.

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The savings continue with Xbox Live’s Cyber Monday sale in which four Xbox Live Arcade games are being offered on the cheap.

For today only you can download Mortal Kombat Arcade Kollection for 400 MSP (normally 800 MSP), Dungeons & Dragons Daggerdale for 600 MSP (normally 1200 MSP), and Risk Factions for 200 MSP (normally 800 MSP).

I know, it’s not the best selection, but the redeeming factor here is Beyond Good & Evil HD. Normally 800 MSP, the game, which is hailed as very good title, is now only 240 MSP. I just finished downloading it. Yay, savings!

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Xbox LIVE Marketplace Cyber Monday Sales [Major Nelson]

The launch of Modern Warfare 3

It all started with Call of Duty 4, the first Modern Warfare. This game introduced us to a new breed of multiplayer. It singlehandedly breathed new life in the first person shooter. It was like the answer was right in front of us. Just add an rpg element with visable and useable player progression. Previous Call of duty’s had already nailed the controls (its just something about the connection with the controller and whats happening on screen- it feels so right).  Adding addictive multiplayer and amazing controls, Infinity Ward had the winning formula. To a lot of people the single player was throw-away.  It was like a summer action flick.  It had a decent story, and provided a good distraction – especially if your getting your ass kicked online. At this point people were just realizing the potential of this game.

Modern Warfare 2 was announced and the hype surrounding it was incredible. People were craving any information they could get their hands on. The sales numbers spoke for themselves.  Modern Warfare 2 had the biggest day one sales numbers of any game, selling a record breaking 7 million worldwide.  Everyone was hooked, including myself.  I remember a specific scenario,  justifying my insanity (dedication).  My wife was away at work one time and I was watching our 1 year old (at the time) daughter. She fell asleep in my arms and she would cry if I laid her down. So what did I do. I did what any normal and decent human being would do. I played Modern Warfare 2 while I held her for 2 hours. It was this kind of dedication that I had and I’m sure many others shared.  Modern Warfare 2 upped the ante by adding crazy kill streaks (one that would let you drop a nuke, ending the party), better weapons, a spec ops mode for co-op play, and more.  The fanbase was growing rapidly.  It even brought in new players. Modern Warfare 2 was supported by infinity ward for a long time. Releasing map pack after map pack.

Call of Duty: Black Ops was released 1 year later.  The sales figures were similar to the previous titles, it would go on be the highest grossing videogame ever.  Black Ops was set in the 60′s, during the Cold War.  To me it didn’t really offer anything new, it still had that really addicting multiplayer.  Now we have the next entry in the series: Modern Warfare 3, this game will conclude the story.  Everything has been turned up to 11, unfortunately the single player ends quickly.  I guess thats more reason to jump into the multiplayer cause its better than it ever was.  Not much has really changed, but thats a good thing.  What has changed though are all really good ideas that make sense.  Killstreaks are now known as pointstreaks.  These points are distrubted into strike packages which are divided up into 3 groups: Assault, specialist, and support.  The rewards for the support package don’t reset when the player dies, which is nice for those of us that don’t play 25 hours a day.

Modern Warfare is one of the reasons videogaming is more mainstream than it ever was. People will tell you that they don’t play video games, just Modern Warfare. Even celebrities like Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube proclaim that they play it. I know I answered my own question here about why gamers are so obsessed with the call of duty franchise. In fact I may be one of them.  The addictive multiplayer, the rollercoaster single player, the amazing and accurate controls, the list goes on. Let’s just hope they don’t lose steam releasing this game annually. Which is a whole other story.

As most people have noticed, cloud computing is everywhere and it first started with Netflix and now we are at the point where we’re all using some sort of cloud service in our daily lives. In theory the idea is great, because of the ability to have access to music, videos, photos and document files on the go and that’s something that makes life easy.

To a degree a service like Onlive seems to be something that might be worth taking a look at, but is a service of that nature worth subscribing to? Well that really all the depends on you and what you do in your daily life. Below we have the negatives and the positives of cloud gaming and this should help you guys and gals interested in cloud gaming make the right decision.

The Negatives

In common situations and especially if you are living with roommates you may find that they use a lot of bandwidth. These days bandwidth is a huge problem due to the fact that companies like Comcast and Verizon will shut your internet down if you go over your monthly limit. Cloud gaming will be a problem in future, because of the amount of bandwidth that will be used to play those high definition games.

The other problem with cloud gaming and I noticed it a lot on the Playstation 3 is that if you do not have Internet you might as well forget it as there will be no way that you could load up certain games due to DRM.

With a service like Onlive or any of it’s successors there will be a lot of downloading involved and unlike Steam, Origin, or Direct2Drive that download the games and store them in your hard, you will have to re-download certain games every time that you play them.That can cause a problem because if you already use Netflix, Hulu Plus, Crackle, Amazon video or any other video streaming service you will use up a lot of that bandwidth.

Onlive being slow and skipping

The Positives

There are good things that come with cloud gaming and that is the ability to have the game for a long time without worrying about a cd key, a scratched dvd/cd, and then of course game saves, which is kind of a good concept.

Another nice part of cloud gaming is the ability to get the game it’s release date and not have to go to visit a game store to buy the game. An annoying part of going to a store is that you better remember to take some sort of id with you. If you’re buying a rated M game and do not have that id to show the store clerk, you might as well forget it cause the store clerk will not sell you the game.

The training that Gamestop and many other stores give to their employees is ridiculous and they use fear tactics on their employees. The employees are of course in fear of being fired and then because of this they can’t make the correct judgement as to who is old enough to buy that game.

Cloud gaming is a concept that we like as it gets games to gamers fast.The only problem here is that companies like Verizon and Comcast are being douche-bags these days with that whole bandwidth thing. This makes services like Onlive useless, because these days people use a lot of bandwidth on their regular computer use and let’s not forget Netflix instant streaming and Hulu Plus that eat bandwidth like there’s no tomorrow. When it comes down to it, you could have an internet connection problem and be disconnected for days and if that happens you can’t play any games at all.

Take a look at these new screenshots and gameplay video of Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil COD: Veronica X. These games came out a couple of years ago and it’s awesome to see them come back in High Definition. They look great being that these are PS2 titles we are talking about here. Get Resident Evil 4 on the XBOX 360 vix XBOX Live or on the Playstation 3 via PSN this September 20, 2011. For now take a look at the trailers and screenshots.

Screenshots

Check out the new trailer for the third DLC pack on Call of Duty: Black Ops. In case you didn’t know the next downloadable content pack is going to be called Annihilation and we received a tip of it yesterday and posted it right away, but today we got you guys the trailer. It seems like this map pack is finally answering our prayers as it has a map that resembles the one and only “Nuketown” one of our favorite maps on the game. There is a Zombie map and it looks promising, but really the maps are still too big for a Call of Duty game. You can expect Call of Duty: Black Ops Annihilation map pack on the XBOX 360 on the 28th of this month and probably a month later on the Playstation 3. For now check out the preview below.

We have received a tip that Microsoft is planning to reveal on E3 2011  a Television subscription service that might be coming to your XBOX 360. The service will work with Kinect and it will also bring a new membership to XBOX Live called “XBOX Live Diamond” and will feature many premium things that our tipster didn’t want to say. It seems legitimate and it will be interesting to see more details on the feature, but in the end it’s a matter of price and if the price is really high let’s hope that the subscriber get’s a good service out of it.

If this rumor is true this might be the thing that make the XBOX 360 a bigger competitor to the Playstation 3, but the folks over at Sony might come up with something similar and add it to their Playstation Plus service. We will keep you updated as the news comes our way.

Microsoft is putting up an update today that would update their dashboard on the 360. In the case that your console get’s damaged and cannot read any disks the folks over at Microsoft are going to replace it with a new and shiny sleek XBOX 360 free of charge and the best of it all is that it will comes with a 250 GB Hard drive. Hey I hope my XBOX 360 get’s broken as I wouldn’t mind a hardware upgrade.

If you were planning to get some DLC for Brink you should know that they will be offering their first downloadable content for free. This content will make it to your Playstation 3 or XBOX 360 around June of this year and will bring maps and new content. There isn’t much detail, but hey if you bought the game is good that there will be some freebies with it.

[Bethesda Blog]