Every week we do a quick wrap-up of some news items that may have slipped through the cracks. The wrap-ups will be shorter versions of our articles, lumped together to give you an idea of things you may have missed.

Max Payne 3 officially announced…officially

Given the fact that at the end of the last game it was already tentatively announced that there would be a Max Payne 3 and there seems to have been every indication that there would be at some point. Still, it’s nice to get a bit of confirmation from Rockstar that there will indeed be a sequel to the popular franchise coming, and it will hit stores this coming Winter. The game is supposed to start a new chapter of Max’s tragic existence, moving away from the Big Apple and being present to an even more down-trodden and beaten anti-hero. While the previous chapter was already called The Fall of Max Payne, this one seems to be even fallier, with Rockstar founder Sam Houser claiming that we would “experience the downward spiral of his life after the events of Max Payne 2” and with someone whose life was already in a pretty bad spiral this can’t be good news.

In an effort to discredit myself among the few and for full disclosure, Max Payne is one of my favourite games of all time and I couldn’t be more excited to hear about another installment arriving. My skepticism is set to high with a few pieces of the announcement, the first being that the game will not be developed by Remedy Studios, the creators of the series, instead being moved to Rockstar Vancouver. While I don’t doubt there is no shortage of talent from the team that put together Bully, there is always fear of the unknown associated with this. That coupled with the gritty, bearded Max looking as disheveled as ever gives the game an almost Condemned: Criminal Origins or Splinter Cell: Conviction feel and that doesn’t necessarily gel with the series. Still, the game offers a lot of what makes action games great, even in this era, and exploring something new with the character and mechanics may turn out to be a really good thing. We’ll see this coming Winter.

How do you know you’re rich? You own a bank!

It’s good to know that in times of global recession there are still some companies out there that can simply set out to create their own economy. Such is the way of Entropia Universe, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) that is free to play, but will cost you money in order to get upgrades such as weaponry, clothing or any other game or image enhancement. You are able to go through the game without paying, but it requires endless and menial tasks that make the economy lend itself to micro-payments that are apparently widely used throughout its hundreds of thousands of users. The game also allows you to make money by selling services to those who would need it, whether it is hunting enemies, transporting or creating buildings or clothing for people in the world, there is an economy within the game using Project Entropia Dollars (PED) as a 10-1 ratio to the US dollar. Having a game be responsible for income and spending can be a tricky task, which is why Mindark, the company behind the game, has applied for and been granted a banking license by the Swedish Financial Supervisory Authority.

I spent some time with Entropia this past summer and met a few of the people behind the game as well as some prominent players who made a living off their work within the game. There was a lot of passion associated with it, and the questions we had about funding and payment protection went largely unanswered, so for players of the game this announcement could be a big deal. Having a bank account control your actual funds gives you payment insurance up to $60,000 (USD), something that the game couldn’t necessarily offer before. While it wasn’t exactly my kind of game, where the payment plan and tedium of sweating (draining money and resources from) enemies didn’t work for my tastes, it hit a note with quite a few people and there have been big stories regarding millionaires made from property development within the game universe. It’s an interesting project, and now that it has become a bit of a safer venture for those involved it has taken a big step towards a legitimate study in a closed off economy.

Nintendo announces new storage solution for Wii

Good news, everyone! For Wii owners who have been sick of having to save their Virtual Console games (or any other Wii Channels) to an SD Card and then take them off, put them back on, etc in order to conserve the smaller amount of memory on the Wii, then worry no more! Or at least a little less. Nintendo has announced that SD Cards can now be used in place of permanent storage meaning that you can put in a card as an expansion on your internal memory without having to move channels on and off again. It’s a makeshift, but sensible solution, and one that doesn’t necessarily effect the majority of users, but anyone with a penchant of downloading titles from the online store or even saving a whole lot of game data will have noticed by now that the Wii wasn’t up to the task of storing all their info at once. It’s good news, as well, considering they’ve also announced support for arcade games on the Virtual Console – more specifically Mappy, which means I have a lot of money to start spending.

Nintendo also showed of a new Legend of Zelda title, Spirit Tracks, which is for the DSi and looks like a sequel to Phantom Hourglass and that is in no way a bad thing. Along with that Wario Ware Snapped was revealed for the DSi, which utilizes the cameras that come built-in. Wario Ware has always been a solid series for introducing unique play controls; it worked for DS and the Wii and I expect it will work well for the DSi, so it’s worth getting a bit excited about. President of Nintendo, Satoru Iwata gave out all this info at his keynote speech, which was a change of pace from the normal rounds of sales figures and successes that Nintendo has been displaying through most of the generation and seemed to be geared towards the more developer-centric crowd. Storage solution, while not a game breaker for their mass market, was something craved by some of their more fervent players and while it is a bit late-coming it is welcomed. Along with a few games and some insight to their own development cycle, it was a solid and stoic presentation from the guys sitting on the highest pedestal this generation.