Last week when news of Nippon Ichi Software’s downright stupefying 97.5% operating loss arrived, I maintained a small amount of optimism that maybe it wasn’t as bad as it looked. Unfortunately for me and the dozens and dozens of other Nippon Ichi fans in the western world, their investors thought it was pretty bad. When the JASDAQ stock exchange opened on Monday, Nippon Ichi’s shares were worth ¥36,200. After a day long fire sale, the shares had plummeted nearly 20% to ¥29,200. It got so bad that JASDAQ put a freeze on the stock to prevent a higher suicide rate among active Nippon Ichi board members.

Things obviously are not looking great for the quirky little publisher, and one might ask themselves in these dark times, “What can I do?” I suggest speaking with your wallet and buying a new copy of a Nippon Ichi game. Of course, Nippon Ichi is infamous for their limited distributions so acquiring a new copy of a Nippon Ichi title after around two weeks can be tricky, but if you find a copy of Disgaea 3 laying around, give it a shot. Just, for the love of god, please do not buy Cross Edge.

Valve’s zombie apocalypse continues, aka Left 4 Dead 2, exceeded publisher EA’s sales expectations last year, CEO John Riccitello said today during a conference call detailing the company’s Q3 fiscal 2010 earnings.

“Left 4 Dead 2, in partnership with Valve, exceeded out expectations with 2.9 million copies sold worldwide on the PC and Xbox 360 through the holiday quarter and in charted in the top 10 in North America according to NPD,” Riccitiello said, with “through the holiday quarter” being the key phrase — no 2010 sales included in that number. And no Steam sales too, probably. We’ll check on that just in case though.

One publisher that’s eager to jump on the motion control band wagon is EA, who have been talking constantly about Sony’s Arc and Microsoft’s Natal since they were first shown off. In a Q&A session during the company’s Q3 conference call today, it was confirmed that they will indeed have titles for both of these systems at launch, but were silent on what these games actually were.

The company has seen success with some of its more casual Wii titles, but we’re hoping for some intriguing offerings for the hardcore player. With both devices a little while off though, don’t expect to see anything just yet.

We haven’t heard much about EA’s urban MMO APB for a while now. That’ll change soon however as a recent SEC filing shows it can be expected to hit the shelves during the company’s Q2 fiscal 2011, placing it in a July-September 2010 release window. It’s been a long wait for David Jones’ next game, so much so it’s hard to believe it’s almost here. The game’s been in closed beta since October 2009, meaning developer Realtime Worlds have had a lot of time to tweak and tune it. Get ready to either commit or fight crimes in the coming months.

Update: EA has shot out a press release saying the game has sold, according to their internal data, 3.2 million units worldwide. The 2.7 million figure was for the company’s Q3 fiscal 2010 quarter (October-December 2009) only while the 3.2 is for lifetime sales.

Original story: BioWare’s dark fantasy epic Dragon Age: Origins has sold 2.7 million copies worldwide across all the platforms it’s been released on — that’s Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. CEO John Riccitiello broke the news during the company’s Q3 fiscal 2010 earnings conference call a few moments ago.

According to SEC documents filed, an unannounced Dragon Age title — Dragon Age 2 we may only assume — will be released before March 31 next year, or in the company’s Q4 of fiscal 2010.

A recent SEC filing shows that EA has a few surprises up its sleeve for their fiscal year 2011. The document shows that a to-be-announced “Dragon Age Title” and a co-published “Shooter from Epic” will be out in Q4 (ends March 31, 2011).

The Dragon Age title is on the way to the consoles, PC as well as handhelds, while the Epic game will be released for consoles and PC only.

An unnamed “Action Title” (marked down as “Console Full Game Download”), a “Fighting Title” (Q4) a “Spore Title” (Q4) and two Need For Speed games (one in Q3, other in Q4) were listed as well.

With Battlefield: Bad Company 2 just a month off, we figured EA would leave a sizeable gap between that and the release of its other modern war shooter, Medal of Honor. The end of the year sounded about right, but it could now be as early as July this year, according to a recent SEC filing from EA.

The title is pinned for a Q2 fiscal 2011 release, which covers from July to September 2010. Most likely we’ll see it in the latest month, then, but knowing that it isn’t too far off now gets our engine fired up a bit more.

Peter Moore has said that the forthcoming PlayStation 3 motion controller (Sphere, Gem, Arc, whatever) is “a different experience” to Wii.

Despite being a motion controller wand, just like the Wii remote, the head of EA Sports believes that the underlying technology requires a whole new approach. “It’s a different experience than Wii and we’re watching it with great interest,” he told CVG.

Moore also confirmed that EA already have sports titles in development for the platform. “As you might imagine, we’re working on stuff – in particular on what sports can bring to it.”

“One thing we’ve learnt with the Wii is that we can afford [to spend time on building bespoke games],” he continued. “The two that stand out in terms of authentic sports motion on Wii are golf and tennis. If you can capture that motion, that brings the game to life in a very unique way. We’re looking at how we bring that sports credibility and authenticity to life with Sony’s new platform.”

It’s about as balanced as Amy Winehouse, but the Xbox 360 demo of Aliens vs Predator is doing decent numbers. The forthcoming shooter/slicer/eater registered 14,000 downloads over Xbox Live last weekend.

“Just looking at how the demo’s been rated on Xbox Live tells its own story,” said Senior Producer Dave Brickley. “14,000 downloads in a few days and an approval rating of 4.5/5, we’re absolutely delighted with the response.”

“Someone described it as being an Avatar day,” he added. “People’s perceptions were turned upside down but having had time to get to grips with the combat system and the three species the comments are almost humbling, they see what we’ve done is deliver something genuinely new and fresh, a real reason to stop playing what they are currently, and we just can’t have asked for more than that - and they’ve only seen one mode,” he added.

Unfortunately for Brickley, Game Informer have seen all of the game. They gave it 5.75/10 (via VG247). Eek.

Blizzard’s World of Warcraft operation has hit another little snag; the MMO’s Chinese operator NetEase has apparently stopped accepting new registrants as they go through the process of re-applying for a license to operate the game’s The Burning Crusade expansion.

WoW has been tangled in a bit of a mess between the China’s General Administration of Press and Publications and the Ministry of Culture for a while now as the two try to figure out how the online game space should be regulated in the country, even forcing the MMO’s return to playable form following the operator switch from The9 to NetEase last year to be a delayed one.

“We recently submitted our application to operate World of Warcraft (The Burning Crusade) to the General Administration of Press and Publication for review,” NetEase wrote on the Chinese WoW website yesterday.

Starting today, new registrations are not allowed for a week.