The Week in Review: PES’s London call-up, Zynga’s stock crash and DOA5’s bouncing bunny girls

As the official games of the London sporting awards get off to a flying start (trust us to piss off the Koreans before the Olympics have even started), this week’s gaming news has ground to a halt – a bit like London’s transport links.

But as the world gears up for an athletic summer soiree, elsewhere in the capital Konami is staffing up for a new UK team to help revolutionise its struggling footie series, PES. The new London studio, which will support PES Productions’ existing Tokyo studio, will initially hire around 20 people to help PES “reproduce European football culture at its best”, eventually growing to over 100 staff members.

We discussed Konami’s decision to open a new studio on this week’s podcast, where Neon questioned how much of an impact a British studio will have on the series. A lot, I guessed. Remember when EA put a Brit in charge of FIFA? Yeah…

Oh, and PES 2013 is kicking off in October, according to a new magazine ad. We played a fair bit of the demo this week, too, and recorded some of it for your leisure. A woodwork-shaking goal from Cassano gifted Neon the win over my England team. Gutting.

Another game looking to shoot from distance is Sniper: Ghost Warrior 2, which has seen a second delay in almost as many weeks, being pushed back to January 2013 to provide more “polish”. Sniper 2 was originally meant to launch all the way back in March. Will it ever see the light of day?

And what do you get when there isn’t any light? Darkness! I had a pretty long chat with Darksiders II’s lead designer earlier this week, where we spoke about how Vigil had been affected by THQ’s financial trouble, and his views on Nintendo staying silent over the Wii U’s power. If you’ve got a spare five minutes and want to find out more about the future of the series, it certainly makes for an interesting read.

Instead of Darksiders III, though, it seems as if Vigil could be working on a first-person shooter, which could be the “interesting” game THQ boss Jason Rubin hinted at a few weeks ago.

Last week’s accidental reveal of Battlefield 4 hasn’t stopped EA from talking about the third game, though, and more particularly what’s in store for BF3’s fourth DLC, Battlefield 3: Aftermath. Expect its earthquake-themed maps to make tremors on the shooter market when it releases in December.

And talking of war, WWE Superstar Mark Henry wants to make a game that merges WWE with Call of Duty. I’m not joking.

Such a thing will likely do a lot better than Microsoft’s freemium attempt at a flight simulator though. With sales nose-diving, the firm announced that it would be axing both Microsoft Flight and Kinect-experiment Project Columbia.

Zynga’s having similar troubles with its social games, too. Earlier this week it announced that it had lost $22m across the last financial quarter, and reduced its expectations for Draw Something. Is anyone still playing that?

But don’t expect your smartphone to contain enough technical jiggery-pokery to power Kojima’s next-generation Fox Engine, which he’s using to build Metal Gear Solid 5. We’re going to see what the engine can do next month, he reckons.

What we won’t see next month, however (if the rumours are true), is the >Super Slim PS3. The slimmed down console is real, various outlets are reporting, but won’t be announced during next month’s Gamescom.

Hopefully, though, we’ll see it way before Q1 2013, which is looking even busier now thanks to Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance slashing its way onto consoles in February. Mind you, if Nintendo has its way, you’ll all be too busy buying up Wii Us to care. Nintendo reckons it can shift 10.5m Wii & Wii U consoles this financial year, with the majority of those being Ninty’s new system. There’s still no firm date for Wii U, mind.

3DS XL releases in the UK tomorrow, though, and if you’re looking to trade in your 3DS towards one you might do well to head to GAME. They’ll even chuck in an AC adaptor. How nice.

But that’s it. Enjoy the Olympics. Make Boris proud. And if you want to watch some Dead or Alive girls jumping around half-naked while you’re at it, the video below provides enough mild titillation to stir arousal. Boink.