Mirror's Edge is the latest title to come out of DICE studios and has been hailed and nailed for being incredibly or even overly innovative. I spent quite a lot of time with the game over this last week and while the main storyline is pretty short, I found the experience to be quite breathtaking and the time trials a whole bunch of fun on their own. The game isn't perfect but it got me quite excited at the thought of how much more can be done with the concept in future. Problem is, I don't know if I am ever going to find out. As you can see from the title, the first week of sales for Mirror's Edge have been really bad. How bad, you may ask? Reports have come in showing that in it's first week in Europe, the game only managed to sell an embarrassingly low total of just on 30, 000 copies. Now, even if you aren't that clued in about game sales, it's not hard to figure out that when a game only sells 30,000 copies in the whole of Europe, it has failed miserably. With so many big titles sitting on the shelves at the moment, it's not that difficult to see why the sales are so low but it is still sitting significantly lower than what I had originally anticipated. If you are interested in the game, I highly recommend that you try the demo first. I found it to be an exhilarating experience but at the same time, I could see why many other gamers might find it frustrating and strange.

Very soon, the first set of Horse Armor, I mean... let me start again. As you all know, the NXE dashboard update has brought with it a whole lot of possibilities in terms of friends list backgrounds as well as avatar clothing options. Microsoft have now announced that they will be continually releasing theme packs that include avatar clothing over the next six months. Pretty soon, a Ninja Blade them is going to be released for Xbox Live that not only comes with a background image and friends list backdrops, but 5 pieces of themed clothing to wrap around your new Xbox Live Avatar. As much as I am enjoying the new dashboard, I am sorry to say that a new era has begun in terms of paid downloadable content. While I already thought it pretty ridiculous that so many people were spending tons of money on gamerpics and dashboard themes in the old dashboard, the new dashboard brings with it an entirely new way to draw gamers' money out of their wallets. The price has gone up as well. More after the jump. While the old dashboard themes had a price tag of 150 points, the new ones are coming in at 250 points and while they are significantly more interesting than before, I can see a whole lot of people throwing their money at Xbox Live just to get some interesting clothing and backdrops to look at. At the same time, I have to wonder... if one of you are on my friends list and you download and add new items to your avatar, doesn't that mean that I will have to download them automatically when I next see you in my friends list? I think so. So tell you what, do us all a favour. Save your money by not spending it on silly outfits because at the end of the day, you will be saving all of us a bunch of bandwidth as well.

A rep from Microsoft has complained that Microsoft has completely screwed a lot of them over by releasing the NXE update, which was rumoured to start causing RROD's, right after the time that a lot of customers warranties had ended.... Apparently the update has been causing a lot of issues for users and caused the MS service lines to explode with calls of complaint. The rep from Microsoft had the following to say: "I hate what the company did this year," "They released the New Xbox Experience a few days after the extended warranty period ended for most users and it's tough to explain that to raging callers. How do you say that MS just screwed them all?" Ouch, not afraid to tell it like it is I see. More of this whole mess, after the jump. The rep also went on to say that: "our bosses really fed us to the lions this time. We're getting everything from crying kids to death threats from angry adults. It's an orgy, I tell ya." Now while I don't want to move the focus away from how incredibly bad the NXE experience has been for many people, I really had to laugh at this next bit. The rep also said that some callers were blaming the update for some of the most ludicrous things.... Well, someone actually phoned in to complain that the his power went out after updating to the new dashboard. Well angry caller, look on the bright side, at least that way you were safe from having a RROD burn your house down, just like in those other reported cases. I can't see the release date of the NXE being a coincidence, so this whole deal of releasing just after a lot of peoples warranties had expired was a pretty mean trick to pull. Any South African users experienced a RROD after the update?

Left 4 Dead for the Xbox 360 and PC hits shelves this week and looks to pack a ton of multiplayer mayhem. Think Gears of War 2's horde mode, on crack, with zombies and with a different experience every time that you play through a level. There are quite a couple of gameplay videos available now and I can tell you that some of them are showing off exactly how dark and scary some of the locations will actually be. I'm all for zombie bashing though, so I cannot wait to pick up my copy and let rip on the suckers. Honestly, where would the world be if Zombie's weren't invented.

So, the other night we were playing a game of Gears of War 2 and we were all destroying each other on a map called Day One. I have taken quite a liking to the photo mode that came with the game, so after my death, I was having my usual fun taking photo's of the action. On the Day One map there is a small street corner arcade, in which I found something rather interesting. You may remember that the infamous anti-videogame lawyer Jack Thompson always referred to the Grand Theft Auto series of games as a "murder simulator". Now looking at that header image will show you that Epic decided to poke a bit of fun at that whole mess by creating an arcade game by the name of "Murder Simulator" and placing it into the map. I live easter eggs like this and I think it was really cool that Epic took the time to take a quick stab at an industry story that has caused a lot of grief for gamers worldwide. At least Jack is barred for life now, so until another lunatic comes along and tries to pick up where he left off, we can all rest easy knowing that we can play our violent games in ironic peace.

By now you are all very obviously aware that the NXE dashboard update has been released and is impressing a lot of 360 owners the world over. Lazygamer reported earlier today that there are some issues in the form of an error coming up when you try and view certain pages. It also now seems as though that isn't the only problem. Before the release of NXE, Microsoft promised that the old themes from the original dashboard (OXE?) would work seamlessly and also look great, but the truth is that they just don't. Although I found an article about this on OXM's website, it was one of the first things that I realised when I booted up into the new dashboard. Not only are the background images not suited to the new layout that has windows running through the centre of the screen, but the images seem to also be stretched wider and have a definite loss in quality as a result (see header image). Although I don't feel as though it is a major issue, I am not the type of gamer that spends a lot of Microsoft Points on themes and gamer pictures, so I can understand if those who do are not very impressed with the translation over to the NXE. I'm sure that more little issues are going to be popping up here and there, there are rumours flying around that the NXE is causing RROD's, but until we are sure that it is not just one or two random cases, we won't be saying anything about it just yet.

Just a quick update, the NXE is officially up and runnning. I turned on the console at around 12:10 and it was downloaded and installed by around 12:20 (on a 4mb line) so the whole process was fairly quicker than I initially thought it was going to be, although I can see download times increasing when a lot of people get home. Creating the Avatar was pretty simple and the length you take all depends on how fussy you are going to be with your settings. I have just installed Gears of War 2 to my HDD and it looks like the install took around about 10 minutes or so. So there you have it, it's up and you can get it as soon as you get home. If you have any questions you can pop them into the comments and I will try and answer them for you.

While a lot of us are still hurting from the sting of not receiving the map pack codes in South Africa, a few images have popped up on Flickr that show someone playing Gears of War 2 on a never-before-seen multiplayer map. The new map looks to be some sort of take on the whole sunken-city idea and could be one of many that are already in the works as DLC. Once again, there is no way to tell if us South Africans will even have any access to them, so maybe we shouldn't get our hopes up. Pics after the jump. [Thanks to Poddle for the tip] You check the full gallery by clicking here.