Dealspwn

In a recent interview with Ben Kuchera, who brought up the used games mess and the pertinent topic of piracy, Valve guru Gabe Newell slammed what he terms "draconian DRM systems or anti-piracy systems", arguing that in many cases piracy has little to do with pricing models and more to do with better service.

"To us it seems pretty obvious that people always want to treat it as a pricing issue, that people are doing this because they can get it for free and so we just need to create these draconian DRM systems or ani-piracy systems, and that just really doesn’t match up with the data."

The criticisms of the Metro dashboard update that went live across Xbox LIVE at the end of last year have been well documented. Indie developers in particular decried the "burying" of the XBLIG service behind a swathe of navigation options. However, an Xbox 360 dashboard update went live over the weekend that looked to increase the visibility of Xbox LIVE Indie Games, amongst other things.

Tim Schafer has been hitting the headlines recently with his studio Double Fine after the success of the developers' Kickstarter project, that's just broken the $2 million mark at the time of writing. Having recently embraced self-publishing, Schafer suggested that the closed systems of Microsoft and Sony are far less appealing nowadays.

Kingdoms Of Amalur: Reckoning has had its week in the sun, slipping from 1st place and out of the top ten entirely. Instead, UFC Undisputed 3 has sucker punched before the glove touch (a notable new feature) and fought its way up to the top spot, eclipsing the usual suspects of FIFA 12, Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and the Mario & Sonic Olympics tie-in.  Be sure to check out Carl's UFC Undisputed 3 review.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 and The Darkness 2 are both selling well, and proving that sequelitis doesn't have to be a debilitating disease.

Skylanders has also managed to claw its way back into the top ten, which is an immensely promising move for the brave cross-platform, cross-medium breakthrough hit. Long may it continue.

As always, we've got the full chart after the jump with links to all our reviews. Hit it!

Mass Effect 3 is almost upon us and, if you needed any more incentive to jump into the fray against the Reapers, defend your home planet and restore order to the galaxy, then this trailer might just do the trick. 'Take Earth Back' doesn't really feature any gameplay footage, but if you combine it with liberal amounts of the Mass Effect 3 demo, and listen to the Dealspwn team gibber in delighted anticipation in our latest podcast, that won't be a problem.

Commander Shepard returns on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in March 6th in the US and March 9th over here in Europe.

Ubisoft have got some exciting games coming out this year. With FarCry 3 on the horizon and a double helping of Ghost Recon action, not to mention the possibility of Assassin's Creed 3 at the year end, the publisher will be hoping for a strong 2012. This latest trailer for Ghost Recon Future Soldier takes an inside look at some of the animation development processes, and shows off the game's slick cover system.

Ghost Recon Future Soldier releases on May 24th for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.

Trawling through blogs can be time consuming, so we thought we’d make it even easier by rounding up the hottest headlines, ripe reviews and fantastic features each week in a handy, low-fat look at the previous seven days.

Randomly Generated First-Person Dungeons

Kot In Action Creative Artel, the developers behind Steel Storm: Burning Retribution, have unveiled their latest title... and it couldn't be more different from their action-packed tank-on-tank fare. Tomes Of Mephistopheles will be a first-person action-RPG dungeon crawler that leverages randomly-generated levels, customisable spells, visceral batting and nifty smaller features like fully-modelled items within chests.

We've got more details below, and will bring you our hands-on impressions with the alpha version very soon.

Sleeping Dogs - True Crime: Hong Kong by any other name - promises to let players explore an open world and engage in a mix of third-person shooting, brutal close-quarters combat and driving when it releases in the latter half of 2012 courtesy of Square Enix. We've got a wealth of new screenshots for your attention today, which show off this varied brutality to devastating advantage. As well as some "fast girls," apparently.

Get the announcement info here, along with our ancient hands-on preview from before Activision dropped the title.

Drew Karpyshyn, the writer behind some of BioWare's finest games of the last couple of decades including Mass Effect and KOTOR, has announced his retirement from both company and industry, to focus more on alternative platforms for his work, such as novels and screenplays.

Karpyshyn wrote the following on his website earlier this week:

"As of last week, I have officially retired from BioWare. (I’ll give all you gamers a second to let that sink in. Just to be clear, the parting was completely amicable, and 100% my decision.)"

The Vita is almost upon us, packing enough raw power to emulate some of the best titles of the previous generation... if not this one. However, Sony has announced that they have no plans to bring a selection of PS2 and PS3 games to their new handheld in the forseeable future, instead suggesting that players can enjoy entirely new games as well as supported PSP downloads and PSone classics.

"Users can play supported digital PSP titles and supported minis. In regard to PSone classics titles, we will announce further details when they are ready."

"PlayStation does not have plans to make PS Vita compatible with PS3 or PS2 titles at this point." - PS Vita FAQ

The words "missing" and "trick" come to mind.

Dynasty Warriors' production lead Kenichi Ogasawara has called for Japanese developers to realise that their country's culture is a "huge treasure" in the crushingly competitive market of the games industry, and to stop trying to "copy" Western development models.

"We've looked at the way Western developers make and present their games, in terms of the cut scenes, the graphics and all of that, and we've tried to take that approach in development," he said. "Unfortunately, we weren't able to get the result that we wanted."

Epic has announced the final DLC pack for Gears Of War 3: entitled Forces Of Nature. It will include five maps (three new levels: Artillery, Aftermath and Cove, as well as Raven Down and Jacinto from Gears 1 and 2) – and four new skins: Commando Dom, Mechanic Baird, Savage Grenadier Elite and Savage Hunter. Note, however, that two of these skins were originally included as pre-order incentives.

Gears 2's Guardian Mode will also make a welcome return along with seven new weapon skins and 250 Gamerscore's worth of achievements.

Forces of Nature will release on March 27th for 800 MS points, or included in the season pass.

SCE America CEO and President Jack Tretton has suggested that although Sony are always looking to the future, and considering what's next for the Playstation brand, next generation consoles and their announcements are always dependent on the health of the ucrrent crop, and Sony's pretty happy with where the PS3 is right now, with the Vita releasing next week too.

"I, quite frankly, would be very distracted if I had to be talking about next generation hardware this year," said Tretton, suggesting the likelihood of a paucity of announcements in that respect this summer.

There'd be no Fallout without Wasteland, suggests Interplay founder Brian Fargo. The old-school 1988 RPG was set in a post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear blast, but the developers failed to secure the rights, weren't allowed to make a sequel at the time and moved on and created the Fallout universe.

And now, inspired by Double Fine's recent success in securing crowd funding for their adventure game, Fargo is looking at creating Wasteland 2 with public backing.

• What: Xbox 360 Silver Controller (With Play & Charge Kit)
• Where: Amazon
• Current Price: £29.71
• Top Ten Console Controllers

We love the Xbox 360 controller, but we have to admit that it's got a major flaw: a seriously inaccurate D-Pad. The Special Edition Silver Controller promised to fix all that with a "transforming D-Pad," which can be twisted into a cross or regular (crappy) disc at the drop of a hat. Amazon has the cheapest price around along with Tesco Direct... but with free delivery.

However, I actually own one of these, and I can't really recommend it in good conscience. The D-Pad is fiddly to rotate and offers little functional difference 99% of the time even in games like Deathsmiles and BlazBlue. Plus, the whole greyscale effect actually looks rather tacky IRL. If you're a fan of fighting games or SHMUPS, seriously consider buying an arcade stick instead.

Could 2D fighter Persona 4: The Ultimate be looking at the prospect of a Western release? Well, a speculative reaction to a teaser sent out by the publisher could suggest so.

It would appear that Atlus USA were sending out some rather odd emails yesterday, mainly featuring a large, black rectangle and little else. However, some sneaky fiddling around with the contrast on the picture reveals the message 'Stay Tuned' along with a background image that appears to look a litte bit familiar.

As Siliconera note, the pattern bears a resemblance to the glass shard image that makes up the Persona 4: The Ultimate logo.

Coincidence? Let's hope not.

Rockstar have released a new trailer for Max Payne 3 that spills the beans a little on the backstory. Max has relocated to hotter climes since we saw him last, now working for businessman Rodrigo Branco, and protecting Branco's beautiful young wife Fabiana. Until she gets kidnapped. Cue the menacing music, load up a whole bunch of guns and watch Max roll out in the heart of Brazil to get her back...

...which sounds a little Kane and Lynch to us. Hmmm

Max Payne 3 will be available for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 on May 18th, with the PC version dropping on June 1st.

EA's Peter Moore has asked that gamers give Origin time in comparing the service to existing digital distribution platforms, drawing parallels between Origin's rather rocky birthing and a similar scenario that befell Valve's Steam when it first released back in 2003.

"It's one of those things where I would ask give us 18 months to two years. And if we sit here two years from now, start looking at it then," he said. "I think the ability to have your own direct platform with the consumer is going to be very important in the digital world going forward."

Mojang & Humble Bundle Team Up For 60 Hour Dev Binge

Mojang is going to make a game this weekend. In sixty hours, streamed live, the Indie titan will develop an entirely new title... with gamers deciding on the genre and theme. You can go and make your choice by heading over to the announcement page.

Humble Bundle will be accepting and handling donations - 100% of which will go to charity - as well as hosting the streams on-site. You'll receive a copy of the game if you donate, as well as contributing towards "some fun and silly incentives" for reaching certain amounts of money.

Get involved. You know you want to be a part of this!