Pandemic Studios has without a doubt had a rough week, with EA announcing its closure, people being relocated and even losing their jobs. But the studio is not to evanesce without style, as they just announced with their last breath that their latest - and final, as it stands - creation, The Saboteur, has gone gold on all platforms, which include Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

The 1940s Parisian open-world game is set for an early December release, coming out across Europe on December 4 North America on December 8.

Nintendo’s vice president of corporate affairs Denise Kaigler has announced that she will resign from her position after holding the position for less than two years. The decision to leave the company came down to simply wanting to spend more time with her family, as Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing, said in a statement, “Denise Kaigler has been a valuable part of the Nintendo of America team for the last two years. She’s made a personal decision to spend more time with her family in New England. We wish her all the best in this next chapter of her life, and we look forward to continuing to deliver great Nintendo experiences to people of all ages as we head into this holiday season”.

Best of luck to Kaigler in whichever new venture she chooses; here’s hoping that whomever Nintendo appoints in her place will keep the Nintendo ship sailing smoothly.

Remember that new shooter that 2K Games will be revealing at the VGAs next month? Yeah, not so new, it turns out. An extended version of the teaser trailer released yesterday has been out on Adland.tv since August, with first news of the game out for more than a year and a half now. The game is the revival of Take-Two’s budget bin Spec Ops series which is now apparently getting a AAA make-over. Check below for the full trailer.

It’s probably between retrieving some guy’s soft drinks from the local store to get him to blow up a barricade that’s impeding on your path to the mall and going into the mall itself while a special infected is humping your head that one realizes that Left 4 Dead 2 changes almost everything found in its predecessor. The most notable aspect of the game is that there’s an abundance of options. So many that you will find yourself choosing whether to grab a melee weapon and attempt to whack the incoming Tank with it or actually help your team by using a weapon that will actually take it down.

The name of the game is simple, survive the zombie outbreak as a group of survivors. Get from one safehouse to another until you’re rescued all while trying to avoid the many common and special infected. With four new survivors, new infected, several new weapons and more campaign action, Left 4 Dead 2 is a compelling offer.

The South is where we stage our escape in Left 4 Dead 2. With rows of cornfield sitting outside of an industrial farming facility and a little bit of rain, one might think this is Left 4 Dead all over again. That’s until you notice it’s raining and it’s raining hard. Thunder claps in the distance, distorting your group’s ability to determine what exactly is growling amongst the corn stalks. It’s a situation that makes you nervous. The rain has been pouring so hard that it’s created a miniature swamp out of the once dry fields, slowing the pace of you and the rest of the survivors. If that’s a Tank breathing in the distance, then we’re going to need to take shots of adrenaline and pick up the pace if we intend to take it out.

Back in the day, we reviewed an add-on for the PS3 and Xbox 360 controllers called SpeedFreek, which allowed you to gain more accuracy when rounding those corners in racing games. We gave it a thumbs up. Today, coming straight from KontrolFreek, the people who made SpeedFreek, we’ve had a chance to try out FPSFreek which is a pretty similar add-on but with the difference that it’s aimed towards shooters. What it’s supposed to do is give more accuracy and aiming precision due to the stick making the original analog sticks longer, hence making it more easily manageable and easier to aim with. Does it? Well, read on…

Before I even begin, you should be knowledgeable about the fact that I’ve tried this add-on on Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (PS3), Borderlands (PS3), FIFA 10 (PS3) and Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360), so it has been thoroughly put to the test thought a wide range of genres. Having said that, my initial approach to the FPSFreek sticks was that of skepticism. I really didn’t think they would work at all, probably worsening the experience rather than making it more enjoyable. But, I went for it anyways, starting with Uncharted 2. Although not a first-person shooter, I must say that the extra length of the sticks did give me a slight advantage when taking aim at my enemy. Not only was I happy about that, but the fact that the rubber top of the sticks are concaved rather than convexed made the PS3 controller so much better and easier to handle. It even felt so good that I played through Drake’s adventure in its entirety with the FPSFreek sticks glued on to the original ones.

Some of the coolest games are the ones that never get made, at least judging by these character concepts for Mortal Kombat, drawn by Midway’s former visual creative director Vincent Proce.

GameSetWatch stumbled upon four unused designs, part of a pitch that re-imagined Scorpion as a wraith drenched in the yellow blood of the demon that resurrected him, Raiden as a hovering spiritual being who doesn’t dare soil his feet, Sonya as the deadly Special Forces-trained daughter of a Texas Ranger and Kano as a half Japanese, half US military cyborg with an unhealthy penchant for baked goods. So basically, he took the already awesomely ridiculous backstories and made them even more awesomely ridiculous.

“The basis for the idea was a re-imagining of the Mortal Kombat franchise from the original premise but mixing modern muti-player and dismemberment game design with the original fighting mechanic,” explained Proce on his blog. “The game idea isn’t going to happen now that I no longer work there.”

Though the game was not to be, Proce says he would like to revamp the remainder of Mortal Kombat’s colorful cast if he ever finds the time. Oh, how I hope he finds the time!

The recent launch rumours for Microsoft’s Natal project may have turned out to be inaccurate, but apparently we can expect some hot news direct from the company in February 2010. The chosen place is Seattle, Washington, where the American leg of Microsoft’s Gamefest conference is due to be held on Feb 10 and 11.

A session (or ‘track’ as they like to call it) will be held on design, to reveal just what makes the “magic” in a Natal game. We’re only speculating here, but we reckon it’s down to tiny pixies that live inside the box. Now that would be a cool announcement. A further session will be held on more technical aspects, such as the much-hyped gesture and speech recognition.

Microsoft are also taking their Gamefest conference to London in February, followed by Tokyo in April. So far there’s no information on what will be divulged at those events, but you can join the mailing list on the official site if you want to be kept up to date.

There are a lot of great games sitting on the shelves of both Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network just waiting for us to find them. Most get used up and set aside to collect dust after their initial run, but Worms 2: Armageddon refuses to be put to the side and be forgotten. That fighting spirit just gives us yet another reason to love the little buggers, brainless as they are - but hey, starfish are brainless too and we still prefer Patrick Star on SpongeBob over that mean old Squidward, so brains are not everything.

Team17, the developer of all things Worms, announced on their Facebook page today that the game, out since July 1, is receiving a major patch in order to fix tons of glitches, bugs, and exploits. It seems like the fixes run from the major, save deleting variety to adding missing particles to the Holy Handgrenade. If you still have not picked this game up, now might be a good time as it seems gameplay has changed for the better.

No More Heroes has long been one of the surprisingly numerous games I will point to when people say there are no “hardcore” games for Wii, and so I was really stoked that more people would be able to experience this wacky, nutty masterpiece in No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise on the PS3 and 360. One thing that will not be included with this port is the involvement of Ubisoft, as a company spokesman let slip that ”Ubisoft will not be publishing either of these versions.”

This is somewhat puzzling, as Ubisoft is still publishing No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle for Wii in January 2010. You can’t be sure, but demand seems high enough to the point where somebody will pick this up and publish it. If you don’t wanna wait on a decision, you can probably pick up a copy of the original version for around $15 if you got a Wii, and I found the motion controls in the game to be well implemented to the point where I question if I would miss them playing the game with a traditional controller. Charging your beam katana just never got old.

That scene. Modern Warfare 2’s airport level is one of the most discussed sequences in the history of the medium. So when the scriptwriter behind it speaks up, it’s probably worth listening.

In an interview with GamePro, MW2 scriptwriter Jesse Stern had some interesting things to say on the level and its creation. “Every single person in testing opened fire on the crowd, which is human nature,” said Stern. “I hope that people don’t just look at it as being this simplistic and brutal sequence. We’ve done our best to treat it with care and not to make it gratuitous.”

Stern went on to laud Infinity Ward for taking risks, “This is a triple-A game and the top grosser of all time with this huge budget behind it, yet we’re still taking major chances wherever we can and the airport level was a risk we had to take. Sometimes you take huge risks and it really works. Sometimes it doesn’t work at all. But if you don’t take the chance, you’re not going to make something new.”