January Wrap Up

Welcome to the first IncGamers Wrap Up of ... what year is it? Oh yeah, 2010. We’ll be donning the latex gloves and rifling through the news stool in order to pick out the choicest info nuggets from a month in which Jack Frost terrorised Britain and my car broke down. A lot.   

Dance to the Music

The year began, just as the last had ended, with Activision’s shooty behemoth Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 dominating the headlines. First up came the news that MW2 had not only taken the coveted Christmas number one spot in the UK charts, it had also held onto its place in the first chart of 2010. The CoD train kept a-rumblin’ as rumours of a Treyarch-developed Vietnam game emerged, followed predictably by some abuse for the developer and a spirited defence from yours truly. Activision kept (some of) the fans happy with a DLC announcement but, amid the publisher’s celebrations, trouble was stirring. January was also the month in which the MW2 multiplayer game became swamped with hacks, glitches and exploits making Microsoft quite mad and the game considerably less fun to play.

As if that wasn’t enough to shit in Activision’s corn flakes, then came the news that the mighty shooter had finally found a commercial nemesis as Ubi’s Just Dance toppled it from the top of the chart. Yes, that’s Ubi’s Just Dance. Blame Simon Cowell.

World in Motion

The motion controller war intensified in January as Microsoft and Sony made sure that their respective inventions were never far from the headlines.  The former revealed that its much-anticipated Project Natal can be expected to hit the shelves before the end of the year and will detect human movements at 30 frames per second. Juicy, no? Capcom followed the news with the announcement that it is reviving an old franchise for Natal, while Forza developer Turn 10 also confirmed it is working with the motion sensing technology on a new project.

Sony, meanwhile, would not be outdone, adding yet another potential name for its motion controller to the long list of candidates. So far that’s Sony Motion Controller, Gem, Sphere and Arc, although we’re reliably informed that Mega-Movey-Wang-o-Matic will be its final title. Then came the news that the scheduled spring 2010 launch had been moved back to autumn, meaning a likely face off with Natal towards the end of the year. Hopefully we’ll see a Natal vs Wang-o-Matic episode of Deadliest Warrior with Kaz Hirai and Steve Ballmer battling to the death. You don’t know, stranger things have happened.