PC Gamer has spilled the beans about the mysterious connection between Team Fortress 2’s new medic class achievements and the mysterious “large scale modification,” and they are delicious. By earning the new medic achievements, players will unlock new weapon loadouts for everyone’s favorite healing class. For example, unlocking half of the medic’s new achievements allows you to replace the standard healing beam with the Overhealer, which doubles your target’s health but builds up Ubercharge more slowly than the standard beam, if at all. Clearly, everyone should expect to get addicted to TF2 all over again.

Valve also plans on releasing a new map, Goldrush, which will see the red and blue teams taking turns trying to escort a mining cart past the enemy’s defenses. All of this new content, along with a second new map called Badlands, should arrive on Steam a month from now. Unfortunately, there’s still no word regarding when the game’s other eight classes might see their own new achievements and unlockables or whether any of these new goodies will show up on the PS3 or 360.

Hellgate London’s official site has information concerning the first post-release content for the game, called The Stonehenge Chronicles. The update, which will finally bring Hellgate up to version 1.0, nearly three months after its initial release, will introduce Stonehenge and a batch of new quests, areas, weapons, and monsters with it. In addition to a handful of bug fixes and more balance changes than you can shake your soggy fish and chips at, The Stonehenge Chronicles will also include the game’s first group dungeons. Of course, all of this new content will only be available to subscribers.

But really, is any one even playing Hellgate: London any more, let alone paying for it? The game was riddled with development problems, with the final version playing more like a very buggy, very underdeveloped beta than a retail release. Truthfully, Flagship Studios has made great strides towards righting the wrong of Hellgate’s early release, releasing three major patches in the the three months since its Halloween release date, but all the band-aids and duct tape in the world isn’t going to be enough to redeem this lesson in wasted potential, we’re afraid. Cut the cord, Bill Roper, and bring us The Next Big Thing.

These people mean business.

If anything, it’s a sad day in this world when a government feels the need to regulate how people spend their free time. However, it’s even sadder when you need your fix bad enough to enter one of the 563 illegal Internet cafes just to play some Warcraft. The Chinese gaming industry is a phenom of the world, and not letting people take part in the $1.46 billion dollar economy builder seems ridiculous.

Then again, if people aren’t smart enough to stop before they drop dead, maybe there is a need for some type of limitation.

The end of January is the new middle of November, apparently, as several genuinely excellent titles see release this week.

Pick of the Week: Tie: Burnout Paradise Racing | PS3 360 Finally, a real next gen Burnout! Paradise sheds the structure of previous Burnout titles in favor the open-ended, load time-free Paradise City. And best of all, it’s all playable online. You can race with or against your friends or ignore them entirely, continuing your single player experience in an online environment. Seriously, buy this game. Just look at that awesome box art!

Pick of the Week: Tie: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin Turn-based Strategy | DS This week’s releases are too good to throw our full support behind just one. Like Burnout Paradise, Days of Ruin is essentially a must-buy. The latest Advance Wars title strips away a lot of the dead weight from earlier games, including the questionably balanced Dual Strike CO powers from which the previous DS installment takes its name. As you already know, Days of Ruin features online multiplayer and map sharing, meaning this game’s gonna stay in your DS for a long, long time.

Robert Bowling, Community Relations Manager at Infinity Ward, has posted a weekly Call of Duty 4 roundup over at his blog in which he laments just how pervasive piracy has become on the PC, writing:

They Wonder Why People Don’t Make PC Games Any More

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn’t fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I’ll check and see; if I can I’ll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it’s not physical or it’s on the safety of the internet to do.

Even without the specific numbers (which Robert has further commented he cannot disclose), it’s clear that piracy has affected Call of Duty’s sales on the PC enough to warrant a mention here. Worst of all, Activision is paying to maintain servers that benefit paying customers and pirates alike. If you can excuse the high horse here, just because it’s easy to pirate a game doesn’t mean you should. Game developers and publishers aren’t otherworldly forces exempt from forces of nature or economy. Games cost money to make, and every pirated copy takes money out of developers’ pocket and adversely affects their next release. Simply put: if you love games and want to keep playing them, do the right thing and pay for them.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled (and significantly less preachy) website.

Are people wising up the yearly sports game strategy? Are they tired of the lack of core improvements? Is the $60 too much to ask?

It must be one of those reasons as analysts are beginning to worry about a steady decline in sales of EA Sports titles. Madden 08 sold 100,000 less copies this year than the 07 edition did. NCAA Football took a spill as well, selling measly 325,000 units. The price bottomed out rapidly too, and many stores including Toys R Us offered bargain sales to clear out inventory a short time after release.

The transition is complete from the previous generation, and at the most, players might see one more year squeezed out of the PlayStation 2 before it’s over. Fans have been avid about the quality of the next generation games, and their performance with critics has been brutal at times. The exclusive licenses the company snapped up may be backfiring if the numbers don’t take a substantial leap next year.

Resistance: Fall of Man was unquestionably the number one reason to own a Playstation 3 at launch, and a over a year later still stands as one of the strongest titles on the console. Not one to sit idly by and see themselves outdone by up-and-comer Killzone 2, Insomniac Games has pulled out all the stops with Resistance 2. Game Informer has an exclusive cover feature on the new game, but NeoGAF user Wollan has created a forum thread detailing all the new information available in the article. Highlights include a lengthy single player campaign, an additional co-op campaign playable online with up to 8 (!) players, online multiplayer featuring dedicated servers capable of hosting 60 players, and partially randomized levels. And best of all, Insomniac promises Resistance 2 will be on store shelves before the end of 2008.

Clearly, this is going to be the PS3 FPS to beat this year, but this announcement leaves us with two questions: (1) what eldritch entity did Insomniac Games sell their collective soul to in order to become so damned adept at harnessing the power of the PS3 and (2) who do we talk to do the same?

Remember all of the trouble Xbox Live experience over the holiday season? Of course you do, because for some, you’re still having issues. Microsoft, in their heart of hearts, have decided to give users Undertow for free starting Wed., January 23rd. The 800 MS Point title looks superb using Unreal 3, but plays like so many other dual analog shooters on the service.

What if you already own Undertow or bought it a few minutes before reading this? The only advice was posted in the comments section of the announcement by Major Nelson who said “call support.” Users seem to be experiencing mixed responses, with some gaining 800 points to spend as they please, while others end up with dumbfounded people who haven’t heard of this deal. Your best bet? Keep calling until you find someone who knows what they’re doing.

World of Raids has a great link to an online flash game that trains players for the Teron Gorefiend raid boss in World of Warcraft’s Black Temple. Like the actual boss fight, the flash game is hard, but with a little practice you’ll soon find yourself a more than capable player ready for a spot in any raid group… as long as your gear is up to snuff, of course.

Even those of you who have no idea what a “world” or a “warcraft” are can waste away a few minutes of your day, hopefully while on the clock. Hardcore raiders, however, should look on this as the excellent learning tool it is. Perhaps in the future we’ll see more of these online raid trainers (please), allowing raiders to brush up on boss fight tactics and the rest of us to live vicariously through their fantastic online adventures.

The third week of the new year brings three new Wii titles and a couple of handheld games.

Pick of the Week: Nitrobike Ubisoft’s answer to Excitebike arrives on the Wii this week from developer Left Field Productions, the same studio behind Excitebike 64. This arcadey motorcross title features 6-player online multiplayer and should be easy to pick up and play for anyone familiar with Excitebike 64 or Excitetruck. In fact, besides the online multiplayer, it’s difficult to tell this game apart from the Excite titles. Oh well, at least it’s not a minigame collection.

Runner-Up: Furu Furu Park Looks like we spoke too soon. Square Enix thrall Taito brings us yet another minigame collection for the Wii, this time with games inspired by a few Taito classics like Bubble Bobble and Pocky & Rocky to try and rope in the “core” gamers. Still, the game’s almost certainly better than the rest of this week’s releases. And besides, it includes a multiplayer mode called “Love Challenge.” We don’t know what it is, but we’re sure it’s awesome.

Following in the footsteps of Bungie and Insomniac, Blizzard has released its first official podcast, BlizzCast. The first episode includes a conversation with Samwise Didier, Blizzard’s Art Director, as well as a sneak peak at World of Warcraft’s upcoming 2.4 patch, which will introduce the Sunwell Plateau, the game’s final, pre-Wrath of the Lich King raid instance. World of Raids has a partial transcript and some screenshots from the anticipated patch.

Jeff “Tigole” Kaplan, WoW’s Lead Designer, reveals that the Sunwell Plateau will feature loot “a tier above Tier 6,” not unlike AQ40’s loot when compared to the loot found in Blackwing Lair. Kaplan goes on to say that “we really are planning to do the itemization a lot better than we did with Ahn’Qiraj 40 so people can rest assured.” Considering AQ40’s loot table, it would be virtually impossible to do any worse.

Now that the most profitable developer in the world has their own official podcast, hopefully even more developers will follow with podcasts of their own. Those of us will long commutes will thank them.

Valve employee Robin Walker told Shacknews they hope to have two new Team Fortress 2 Maps available to PC players within the next two months, one of which is a remake of Team Fortress Classic’s “Badlands” with some added verticality. The much-hyped new Medic achievements as well as a “large scale modification to the core of the game [that will] debut in a limited fashion through the Medic first, but [will] be affecting all classes eventually” should show up before the two new maps.

The exact nature of this “large scale modification” is a big question mark at this point, as is the exact nature of the Medic achievements, which have only appeared online in their (possibly fake) German form. No word yet if any of this new content will be available on the PS3 or 360. Still, it’s nice to see a developer continue to support their product after launch, regardless of where that support ultimately does and does not end up.