Need For Speed: The Run

Adrenaline junkies and speed fiends will find themselves on the wrong side of the law in Need for Speed: The Run.

Players will take control of Jack, a driver on the run from cops and crims alike in a cross-country race from San Francisco to New York after a prize of US$25 million.

Players will blow across borders, weave through dense urban traffic, rocket down icy mountain passes and navigate narrow canyons at breakneck speeds.

Powered by DICE’s Frostbite 2 engine, Need for Speed: The Run aims to take the action racing genre to new heights with stunning visuals and car physics that hug the road even at top speeds all built around a gripping storyline.

“This is the year that Need for Speed goes to the next level,” says Jason DeLong, Executive Producer at EA.

“We think that Need for Speed The Run is going to surprise people with its intense, thrilling story and big action feel. But the game would be nothing without hot cars and crazy-fast chases. So that is what we’re delivering - explosive racing that will have players flirting with disaster at 200-miles an hour.”

Need for Speed: The Run is the 18^th title in the NFS franchise, and will be released for PC, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii and 3DS on November 17.

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MULTI PLAYER

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Even though it’s one of the best-selling franchises of all time, some may have missed that Need for Speed: The Run is coming out in less than two weeks on November 15 aka retail apocalypse for games. Despite competition from Assassin’s Creed Revelation, Mario 3D Land, and Saints Row: The Third that week (among a hundred other games), The Run keeps looking good every time we see it. This newest trailer details how the racers online works, with the races looking nice and on foot missions thankfully absent.

The cross-country multiplayer races are promising, and the graphics are top of the line, but can it beat the great online of last year’s Hot Pursuit? And if you need anything else to sell you on the game, The Run will soon have a fancy new commercial that involves the director of all things shiny and fast, Michael Bay. Once enough people like or share a teaser for it on the official Facebook for the game, EA will release the Transformers director's ad to the world. And if you don’t think Michael Bay knows commercials, you never saw this.
 
Watch the Official Teaser Trailer.

Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Will Generate Over $1.4 Billion in Q4

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With the epic showdown between Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3 and Activision’s Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 about to unfold, analysts predict that these two games will sell over $1.4 billion in revenue this fourth quarter. These two titles, alone, will generate 15% of total packaged videogame software sales for the quarter, according to Michael Pachter, videogame analyst, Wedbush Morgan Securities.

Pachter forecasts that Modern Warfare 3 will come out on top with 16 million copies sold worldwide this year. That’s double the sales total he predicts for Battlefield 3, which should sell 8 million copies globally. And that’s just this year. Modern Warfare 3 could sell an additional 8 million copies in 2012 and Battlefield 3 could tally another 2 million units sold next year.

Both EA and Activision have been pushing these huge games with astronomical marketing budgets. Each publisher has spent over $100 million to sell these two titles, including a lavish Call of Duty XP fan event and a towering billboard in Times Square for Battlefield 3. And that doesn’t include the cost of developing Battlefield 3 at DICE and Modern Warfare 3 at Infinity Ward and Sledgehammer Games.


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But at the end of the day, Pachter believes many gamers will end up buying both titles.

“I’d guess that around half of the console copies of Battlefield 3 will be bought by people who also buy Modern Warfare 3, so around 2 to 3 million will buy both,” said Pachter. “I don’t see much cannibalization of the titles.”

Check out the videos below to see what all the hype is about with these two games. Battlefield 3 hits shelves October 25 and Modern Warfare 3 ships on November 8.