Only three multiplayer games are headed to store shelves this week, and while they include two re-releases and a glorified demo, there still isn’t a dud among them.

Pick of the Week: Gran Turismo 5 Prologue Racing | PS3 While it may not be the full meal, Gran Turimso 5 Prologue will serve as an adequate appetizer for the full game, which is expected sometime in 2009. Prologue features over 70 cars, 6 tracks, and 16-player online multiplayer, making it one of the premiere racing titles on the PS3, even if officially it’s just a glorified demo. Whether you’re a gear head or die-hard Gran Turimso fan, Prologue should leave you satisfied.

Runner-Up: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 First-Person Shooter | PC Once upon a time the FPS and the Rainbow Six series were considered PC commodities. Not so today. After showing up on consoles a few weeks back, the latest entry in the well known tactical shooter series is arriving on the PC this week, and features all the character customization options and online multiplayer modes available in the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

You know you’re in for a slow week when the best new offering is the multiplayer component of a game from October. Oh, games industry, your weekly release schedule is an up-and-down emotional roller coaster.

Pick of the Week: Team Fortress 2 First-Person Shooter | PC A standalone version of three new (in October) games found in The Orange Box will be hitting retail this week for all of you allergic to great value and/or Steam. If you like team-based first-person shooters and wasting money, this is the game for you. To be perfectly clear: Team Fortress 2 is one of the best multiplayer games in recent memory, but for twice the price of this standalone copy you can get Portal, Half-Life 2, and Episodes One and Two in the same box.

April Fool’s Day is the single worst day in the games industry. Fake news stories plus a rapid fanbase ready and willing to accept any morsel of information as gospel, regardless of how obviously fake, makes for a painful combination. It turns out the day isn’t particularly good for video game releases either.

Double Sequence Puzzle | DS Decode alien DNA by using the DS’ stylus to move and rearranged colored blocks, saving the world from the deadly Q-Virus. And mom said my Tetris skills would never lead to anything. You can also create your own deadly DNA patterns to trade with friends or battle against them wirelessly to see who has the superior DNA-rearranging skills. Hurray for giving a tired experience a fresh coat of paint!

Octomania Puzzle| Wii Oh joy of joys, another puzzle game where you match similarly colored blocks octopuses. But wait! This game also features bright and colorful, anime-inspired graphics and support for up to two players either locally or online! This would have been a perfect fit for WiiWare, but as a standalone retail game it’s hard to get excited for something we’ve played roughly a billion times already.

This week brings only a trio a new multiplayer titles, and while we can only have one winner, one runner-up, and one “loser,” your time and money would be well invested with any one of these three games.

Pick of the Week: Command & Conquer 3: Kane’s Wrath Real-Time Strategy | PC Command & Conquer 3 was a return to form after Tiberium Sun, reminding us all why we fell in love with the series in the first place. Kane’s Wrath brings all sorts of new features to the table, including brand new customizable epic units, specialized sub-factions, and a metamap campaign. EA gets a lot of crap for being “that big, evil games publisher,” but people tend to forget that they’re capable of producing exceptional titles like this one.

Runner-Up: Universe at War: Earth Assault Real-Time Strategy | 360 If you only buy one RTS for the Xbox 360 this week, buy Universe at War: Earth Assault. The game arrived on the PC a few months back, but was held back by some annoying Windows Live features. On the 360, however, you have no choice to but to subscribe to Live if you want to play online, so complaining about it’s a moot point entirely! In all seriousness, the game sports three radically different factions and some impressive 4-player online modes, and is worth checking for any real-time strategy fans.

Be Imba! is a new site that allows you to evaluate and improve your World of Warcraft characters using WoW Armory data. The site will suggest ways in which your talent points could be spent more wisely and point out specific problems with your current gear, including any improper enchantments or radically lacking stats. Be sure to check out what the site has to say about my shadow priest. Be gentle, though; I haven’t logged on for nearly a year.

The site only focuses on World of Warcraft at the moment, but hopefully we’ll see it branch out to other popular MMOs in the future. Whether you think you’re already an imbalanced pro or an inexperienced noob, chances are the site can still show you a few pointers.

According to Gender Swapping And Socializing In Cyberspace: An Exploratory Study, 68% of female MMO players and 54% of male players played characters of the opposite gender. This isn’t exactly new information, but it’s nice to have the cold, unflinching numbers of science to backup what most of us already knew. While participants in the study gave differing reasons on why they chose to play a character that differed from their real life gender, most of the answers reflected the desire to see the world – even a virtual one – from a different perspective.

As Wired’s Game|Life blog is quick to point out, this study is hardly conclusive, finding fault with the study’s small sample size (just 115 participants) and the fact that it only polled users from popular enthusiast sites such as (Allakhazam, Everquest Vault, White Wolf , and Women Gamers.

Still, the issue of how we define gender in the inherently genderless space of virtual worlds remains an interesting topic facing our digital age.

This week is a week of pairs, with two excellent arcade sports titles, two not-so-excellent karaoke games, and a duo of shooters sequels (one 2D, one 3D) that should certainly impress fans of their respective series.

Pick of the Week: Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 First-Person Shooter | 360, PS3 The first Rainbow Six Vegas was a breath of fresh air for the Rainbow Six franchise, hugely streamlining and modernizing Tom Clancy’s seminal shooter series. With the sequel, Ubisoft Montreal promises more of everything that made the original so great: More multiplayer maps that focus on smaller, more intense battles; more weapons and armor; more customization. The game also features a robust co-op mode with missions designed to encourage replayability. Whether you’re a tactical shooter junkie or someone who has strayed away from the Rainbow Six series, Vegas 2 is worth checking out.

Runner-Up: Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds Arcade Golf | PS3 The Hot Shots Golf series has long-since established itself as the premiere arcade golf experience, and is making its PS3 premiere this week with Out of Bounds. As always, the game features cute characters in over-the-top golfing scenarios, but now includes some impressive online features to boot, including tournament support for up to 50 (!) players at a time. You can even completely customize your adorable golfing avatar in order to stand out from the online crowd. Truly, Hot Shots Golf is the Mario Kart of golfing games.

The GGL Wire is reporting that Activision plans to tap Blizzard Entertainment to bring Guitar Hero to “roughly 300,000 game rooms between China and Korea.” Clearly, Activision hopes to cash in on Blizzard’s extreme success in Asia, especially in South Korea, where StarCraft is essentially the national pastime.

Readers with especially good memories will recall Activision CEO Robert Kotick’s comment that a Guitar Hero MMO seemed like a logical move for the franchise in November of last year. Given Blizzard’s unending stranglehold on the MMO market with World of Warcraft, is Activision getting Blizzard acquainted with the Guitar Hero franchise with bigger projects planned in the future? One can only hope.

Looks like the rest of the video game industry has cleared out its release calender for fear of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Or as we like to call it: The Halo 3 Effect.

Pick of the Week: Super Smash Bros. Brawl Mascot Fighter | Wii Five years from now you’ll still be playing Brawl with your buddies and even bashing heads in the odd online match-up. This is not prediction. This is fact. With a massive character roster and a multitude of multiplayer game modes, Brawl isn’t just the Pick of the Week; it’s the Pick of Forever. Unless your one of the unlucky few with a Wii that’s unable to handle Brawl’s double-layer disc. In which case, well… You’re better off just waiting for next week, honestly.

“Terrific” in this case meaning “poorly conceived and laughably ineffectual.”

The program, which UK Resistance so aptly mocks, is the brainchild of the South London police force. PROJECT GAMERZ aims to get “anyone aged between 11 and 18, who live, or attend school, in the Riverside Ward of Rotherhithe, to get involved with their local community through Video Games and eSports.” Because clearly, the way to combat youth violence is to stick a dozen at-risk teenagers in a room filled with Xbox 360s and force them to play a few competitive games of FIFA. Never mind the socio-economic problems breeding environments that feed and encourage crime and violence. No, the answer here is clearly to play more video games.

Next up, we fight hunger by giving starving nations copies of Cooking Mama.

The recently released Warcraft 3 patch, 1.21b, allows players to run the game without a CD in their drive, according to N4G.

In these days of DRM and strict anti-piracy measures, the most prolific developer in the world freeing its most recent RTS from CD limitations may come as a shock. However, most Warcraft 3 players are playing the game online, where they still need a valid CD-Key in order to access Battle.net, Blizzard’s proprietary mutliplayer gateway. As such, this new patch won’t trigger an onslaught of Warcraft 3 piracy. The game is nearly six years old; everyone who wanted to play the single player campaign, legally or otherwise, has already done so. Blizzard knows that the statute of limitations on pirating Warcraft 3 has passed. Think of this patch as a big “thank you” to the fans, but don’t expect Starcraft 2 to run without a CD when it hits store shelves this year… next year… sometime this decade, at least… please.

Warcraft 3 players can patch to the latest version by logging onto Battle.net through Warcraft 3 or downloading the patch manually from Blizzard’s official site here.

There are a great many free MMORPGs out there on the interwebs, and let’s face it: most of them are garbage. How are you supposed to know which of them are worth your hard-earned cash hard drive space and which ones aren’t worth the webspace they’re stored on?

In the first of a series of posts that will no doubt lead to long-term emotional scaring, I’ll be braving the not-so-wonderful world of free MMORPGs and reporting on the horrors (and occasional diamonds in the rough) I find there. Today I’ll be taking a look at two of the biggest free MMORPGs out of South Korea: Fly For Fun and Silkroad Online.

Hit the jump to find out just how they stack up against their larger, pay-to-play brethren.

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