I really hope that I get proven wrong on this one because if I don't, it will be a pretty sad piece of news for us South Africans. As you all know, a few South Africans have been able to get their hands on copies of Gears of War 2 a few days early. I got the chance to speak to someone who has already gotten a copy and has played a sneaky multiplayer session with a few other of the lucky folks who got it early as well. The problem is that none of them could find the "Flashback Map Pack" code in their Gears of War 2 boxes. Say it ain't so. More after the jump. While there is a small chance that the early copies didn't have the codes, I very highly doubt that there is any difference between those copies and the ones that will be available on Friday. If this is true, it may mean that South Africans are going to completely miss out on the recreated maps from the original Gears of War. The truth is that South Africa isn't officially supported for Xbox Live but one would think that because we get the same stock as Europe, we would have the codes packaged in. At this point I am just sincerely hoping that the guys I spoke to were just hopelessly blind and couldn't find the codes that are actually there. Problem is that it isn't really likely. If we are lucky, the maps will become available over Xbox Live to everyone after a short while, even though a lot of South Africans will need to resort to special measures to bypass the region block on all of the Gears of War 2 content.

As you may know by now I hate piracy, I feel it is just as bad as walking into CNA and stealing a game of the shelf and I am all for pirates being caught and punished. However I never expected any country to take it as seriously as France seems to be. According to a new law that is …

  Having gained a stable subscription revenue base from World of Warcraft, Activision Blizzard may look to monetize some of its other titles through subscriptions — like Guitar Hero, CEO Bobby Kotick said today. Last Updated: November 6, 2008

At first I thought life was returning to normal when I saw the PS3 had once again outsold the Xbox 360 in Japan but then I saw that it had outsold it’s other competitor as well and once again things were wrong in the world. Nothing outsells the Wii, I thought that was agreed by now. The latest sales stats …

If my name was Peter Molyneux, I would be feeling pretty relaxed right now. Well, wouldn't you? There is an unspoken rule about videogaming that if your game sells a million copies, it can truly be considered successful. Fable 2 has proven itself more than worthy by crossing the one million mark in the first week of it's release. While some people get grumpy when I refer to VGchartz.com, their report for worldwide sales of the week ending on October 24th shows Fable 2 as the number seller with a total of 1,000,901 sales. I thought that Fable 2 was going to be very popular but I really didn't expect it to take off so incredibly well. Out of my personal experience I realised that I thought that most of the buyers were going to be the fans of Fable 2, completely forgetting that a lot of newer and more "casual" gamers might be interested by its approachability, which seems to also be the case. It's a pretty incredible start to Fable 2's sales, who knows how many will have sold by the end of the Christmas season.

Whilst browsing around the gametrailers.com website, I happened to find a neat little video in the user uploads section of a graphics comparison between Gears of War 1 and Gears of War 2. While it is initially difficult to see the major differences between the two games, you will find that a short while later it becomes heavily apparent that the upgrade to the Unreal 3 engine has really spruced the games visuals quite nicely. The original Gears of War already had some very impressive graphics to start with, so the fact the Epic was able to actually make it look even better whilst keeping the framerate the same or even better is quite a feat in itself. Well, it's only a short while now until we all get to see for ourselves, so let the excitement begin. I hate all of the people that have already got a copy, only because I am not one of them.

Yes there are in fact other games coming out soon and one of them is one of my all time favourite games, well it was. I haven’t had the opportunity to try this new reincarnation yet but I am really hoping it lives up to my expectations. Well the box art has now been released and to be honest I …

I don’t know about you but this week seems to be taking forever, I am not sure if it’s the excess workload or the fact that Gears is being released tomorrow though. Either way you deserve to take 4 minutes and 46 seconds off right now so grab yourself a cup of coffee and meditate the gamers way. By listening …