The Week in Review: Microsoft fools no one, Minecraft $$, Day Z, Blops2 multiplayer and more

Apologies to fans left waiting until Saturday afternoon for last week’s The Week in Review. The scheduling monkey completely freaked out when it was discovered that the cleaning lady took his bananas and as a result completely forgot to publish the article.

With any luck – and the fact the aforementioned monkey has been euthanised – you should be reading this as early as Friday evening.

We’ll get this week’s round-up rolling with a recap of reviews, notably the rather disappointing New Super Mario Bros. 2 and new ‘games are art’ title Sound Shapes. We weren’t overly taken by either, but Sound Shapes does look somewhat interesting in Neon and Dave’s Extended Play.

SEGA continued to make the most of Team GB doing well at the London 2012 Olympic Games with the official video game tie-in claiming another week at the top of the chart. Hoping to jump onto the golden Olympic bandwagon we launched our new Staff Challenge series with a 100m Freestyle race in the Aquatics Centre – let’s just say that some reputations were left in tatters.

So happy was Matt in seeing himself on camera that he ordered us to partake in a second challenge – this time bizarrely covering faces with tea towels in a session of Blind Bomberman. Watch the video closely as a certain partnership did more than bend the rules.

Microsoft’s PR team was on red alert after the next generation Xbox was apparently revealed… well that’s what everyone thought until PR gurus spun the comments into the far more innocent topic of a new Dashboard update. Despite the cover up it seemed there was no stopping the next-gen Xbox stories: Next-gen Xbox to launch within the next 18 months, Microsoft mentions next generation Xbox, and Kinect 2 image leaked.

So good job Microsoft on keeping next-gen Xbox chatter under wraps.

Speaking of next-gen, THQ disappointed many graphics whores in revealing that it believes there won’t be huge graphical improvements from the next consoles – but we want more polygons in our trees 🙁

THQ also canned development of Guillermo del Toro’s Insane to continue its focus on the franchises it knows will perform well – which is no doubt why the publisher’s four internal development teams are now working on new secret projects.

THQ is keeping its cards to its chest for now, but Codemasters has dealt its hand, finally announcing Grid 2 for release in 2013 and putting a September 21 date on F1 2012.

On the topic of reveals, Treyarch lifted the lid off the Black Ops II multiplayer, details of which Martin has gathered and published here.

So much more happened this week which I can’t fit together into a lovely word jigsaw so it’s just being plonked into the space below.

Day Z broke the one million player milestone before creator Dean Hall announced he is working on a standalone version of the hugely successful mod.

SSX got an online multiplayer update which we have helpfully videoed so you can see what it’s all about.

Minecraft continues to make f*@#tonnes of money, selling 17,000 copies a day just on Xbox.

Namco Bandai appears to want to kill off the imminent release of Dark Souls on PC by revealing it will be a shonky port of the PS3 version which runs at a wonky resolution. Bad form From Software.

Blizzard revealed its Battle.net service had been hacked, compromising email addresses, but not financial information. Users are advised to update their security details.

The reportedly troubled BioShock Infinite got some good news when it was announced that former Epic Games director Rod Fergusson had joined Irrational Games, and this means everything is now fine and dandy.

Please don’t forget to listen to Episode 56 of The VideoGamer.com Podcast which is now GMA nominated doncha know.

As a special treat I’m not leaving you with the week’s best trailers, but Dave pissing his pants on camera. Enjoy 🙂