Twitter and all the video game podcast’s were all over Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption so it’s no surprise to see it have the top spot. I bought the game but after 3 hours of game play I’ve yet to get hooked into it. I know I’m still early on in the game but I don’t get it yet.

1. Red Dead Redemption Xbox 360 – 945.9K
2. Red Dead Redemption PS3 – 567.1K
3. Super Mario Galaxy 2 Wii – 563.9K
4. UFC 2010: Undisputed Xbox 360 – 221.1K
5 UFC 2010: Undisputed PS3 – 192.3K
6. Wii Fit Plus w/Balance board Wii -
7. New Super Mario Bros Wii -
8. Alan Wake Xbox 360 -
9. Pokemon SoulSilver NDS -
10. Skate 3 Xbox 360 -

Hardware Sales:
Nothing out of the ordinary here as the Nintendo Wii continues secure the top spot in sales. June should be an interesting month to see if the new Xbox 360 slim can overtake the Wii.

PlayStation 3 154.5K
PSP 59.4K
Xbox 360 194.6K
Wii 334.8K
Nintendo DS 383.7K

ModNation Racer’s is developed by  United Front Games who is located in Vancouver. The motto behind MNR is “Play, Create, and Share”, you may remember a similar motto from another Sony title Little Big Planet.

The game looks great and the controls work really well. The typical premise of a racing game is to drift around corners, collect boost, collect power up’s to blow your enemies out of the track and you also have the ability to block enemy attacks as well.

I had the most fan sitting down making my character and I think the real legs of this game are going to come from the user generated content. I wish I had more time to sit down and design a track for everyone to play but don’t worry as soon as the game is released on May 25th I’ll be working hard to get a level out. I’m also excited to see what their downloadable content plan will be for this game. What kind of crazy cool stickers, objects, animals and potential tie in’s with other Sony franchises.

Photo’s from the Event:

My sofa is about 5 feet away from my home entertainment console so I have 2-3 cables spanning across my living room floor onto my sofa so I can control the mix amp. So I could spend an extra 20 bucks and buy the re-chargeable battery for the mixamp to eliminate 1 wire. Great I still have 2 wires for sound from my Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Great, super annoying. I don’t really need to control the sound of every game every minute.

Another issue I’m having is trying to figure out how to get all my audio sources into a receiver and than have the output into the mixamp. So Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 sound into a receiver via optical in using optical out into the mixamp. Great it sounds easy on paper but I just can’t seem to figure what components to buy. If you have ideas, send them my way.

Other than my small personal annoyances, I love them.

The DS Lite, DSi and DSi XL take the top spot this month. The 360 and PS3 both very respectable numbers and the PSP was almost outsold by the PS2. Seriously? why are people STILL buying that console?

1.Nintendo DS 700.8K
2.Wii 557.5K
3.Xbox 360 338.4K
4.PlayStation 3 313.9K
5.PSP 119.9K
6.PlayStation 2 118.3K

Dear Kratos, thanks for the awesome combos you allowed me to pull while slaying Greek gods. Check out my review here. I’m playing a Final Fantasy game for the first time in my life and I’m very much enjoying it so far and god damn does it look stunning on the Playstation 3,No wonder it outsold the 360 version!. Battlefield Bad Company 2 is still my go to multiplayer game and props goes out to Dice for making a great game.

01. God of War III (PS3) – 1,100,000
02. Pokemon SoulSilver (DS) – 1,020,000
03. Final Fantasy XIII (PS3) – 828,200
04. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (Xbox 360) – 825,500
05. Pokemon HeartGold (DS) – 761,200
06. Final Fantasy XIII (Xbox 360) – 493,900
07. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 457,400
08. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (PS3) – 451,200
09. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) – 429,600
10. MLB 10: The Show (PS3) – 349,200

After we registered for the event, we were provided with a sling backpack which was full of supplies. Inside the bag we were given a Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) day pass, a $50 dollar pre-paid visa card, a mirror, a fake ID, snacks, water, TTC map, and a pen and paper. We were told to report back at 3:30pm for debriefing. Once the debriefing started, we were greeted by members of the Xbox team who explained the rules of the competition.  Christophe Grand-Jean came on stage to tell us about the grand prize which was a trip to Montreal, where you would get the chance to hang out with the Splinter Cell development team and the opportunity to play the game with the team.



That was it, all the teams raced out to the lobby to get the first clue and there official Xbox 360 Splinter Cell jackets. Johnny Rotten73 and I formed an alliance with Mister Switch and his partner IvIxANTHMANxIvI . We dashed quickly up Bathurst Street to King to catch the King streetcar eastbound to a local Russian Vodka Bar, Pravda.  Our challenge was to get information from Ivan, a local Russian Mafia member. It wasn’t easy, we had to head back out on to the street to find Vlad and ruffle a few feathers to get some information from him. We met back up with Ivan where he gave us our final challenge in the form of an image. We had to locate, using the image, a bottle of liquor and record the size of the bottle, percentage of alcohol and the country of origin. We gave this information to Ivan and he stamped our passport, Challenge 1 in Soviet Russia completed.

We only needed to complete 3 of the 4 challenges so we skipped the Mark and Execute challenge and because challenge number 4, Isabella, was geographically closest we decided to head there. We checked in using our new identities, mine being Edward Flaspoehler. We waited in our room for a few minutes and got a phone call with the information we were waiting for. We cautiously made it to the Employee’s only basement, where we met someone who was tortured and tied up and needed serious medical attention. We gave him the little rations we had and he told us that reception was holding a package for room 304; we had what we needed to know! We got our package and got our passport stamped.

Then, we dashed west across town to Bathurst and Queen and snuck into the Burroughes Furniture store. Once inside, we had to carefully maneuver through the security office making sure not to wake the security guard in order to obtain a visitors pass. Once acquired, we ran up flights of stairs to the rooftop where we needed to locate vital information that was located on the side of a building. We than made it down to the 4^th floor, where we needed to dodge security, hop on the elevator and dash around the back of the building to get our passport stamped.

That was it; it was time to get to the final destination, EB games at Bathurst and Bloor. We checked in and since we did not complete the Mark and Execute challenge we needed to locate a game that had the following UPC 6178962, which happened to be Avatar. We got our final clue, ran to the subway station and headed to Downsview station. Our new mission, locate the Splinter Cell Bus line. It was a long and agonizing 25 minute subway ride. Our minds ran through questions like, how many teams had made it the final destination?  Where there any other teams on the subway with us? We made it! We were team 4 of 6 to qualify for the final challenge. We had to sit and wait on the TTC bus for the final 2 teams to show up and qualify. We waited for approximately 45 minutes and then took a quick 8 minute bus ride to our final destination. The only information we were told was that we were going to be locked up in a jail cell and tortured while the other 34 teams watched on.

So we waited for over an hour in our cell, then finally a riot occurred and we managed to escape our cells for a brief minute. We headed across the hall to the other cells, where we saw a bunch of numbers written on the wall. We quickly jotted these down and returned to our cells before the prison warden caught us and put us in the hole.  A package was slipped into our cell and we had to decipher the numbers along with all the information we collected throughout our challenges to solve the puzzle.

Sadly, we couldn’t crack the code in time another team won. Congratulations to the winners, who took off in style… in a helicopter!

It was a long, physically and mentally exhausting day.  As I sit here and write this piece, my body aches all over. I can barely walk around my apartment. I now know what Sam Fisher goes through on any mission and I’m really looking forward to playing Splinter Cell Conviction on April 13^th 2010.

Thanks to all that organized the event it was a true blast to participate in.

• * Nintendo DS – 613,200
• * Xbox 360 – 422,000
• * Wii – 397,900
• * PlayStation 3 – 360,100
• * PSP – 133,400
• * PlayStation 2 – 101,900

So the juggernauts keep on selling New Super Mario Bros and Modern Warfare 2. I was surprised to see BioShock 2 take the top spot.  I was very happy to see Heavy Rain make the top 10.

01. BioShock 2 (Xbox 360) – 562,900
02. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 555,600
03. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360) – 314,300
04. Just Dance (Wii) – 275,400
05. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) – 272,500
06. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3) – 252,800
07. Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360) – 246,500
08. Dante’s Inferno (PS3) – 242,500
09. Dante’s Inferno (Xbox 360) – 224,700
10. Heavy Rain (PS3) – 219,300

Wii – 465,800
Nintendo DS – 422,200
Xbox 360 – 332,800
PlayStation 3 – 276,900/li>
PSP – 100,100
PlayStation 2 – 41,600

The biggest surprised for software sales was Just Dance making the top 10. Congratulations to Bioware on Mass Effect 2 selling over 572 thousand copies

01. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 656,700
02. Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360) – 572,100
03. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) – 555,700
04. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360) – 326,700
05. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 310,900
06. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) – 297,600
07. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3) – 259,000
08. Army of Two: The 40th Day (Xbox 360) – 246,500
09. Just Dance (Wii) – 191,900
10. Darksiders (Xbox 360) – 171,200

Hardware sales for the month of December 2009

• Wii – 3,810,000
• Nintendo DS – 3,310,000
• PlayStation 3 – 1,360,000
• Xbox 360 – 1,310,000
• PSP – 654,700
• PlayStation 2 – 333,2000

As I expected New Super Mario Bro’s sold a ton of copies and in some parts of Toronto a copy was hard to find. Modern Warfare 2 still continues to rack up those sales pushing total sales to over $1 billion US.

Software Sales for the month of December 2009

01. New Super Mario Bros. Wii (Wii) – 2,820,000
02. Wii Fit Plus (Wii) – 2,410,000
03. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) – 1,790,000
04. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360) – 1,630,000
05. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (PS3) – 1,120,000
06. Wii Play (Wii) – 1,010,000
07. Mario Kart Wii (Wii) – 936,1000
08. Assassin’s Creed II (Xbox 360) – 783,1000
09. Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360) – 728,500
10. Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story (DS) – 656,700

If your interested in buying them check out Amazon.com or PDP’s website

It’s that time of year, time to discuss my favourite game of the year along with honourable mentions and biggest disappointment. But before I get into that, I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about how I came to decision and what criteria I used.

So to me game of the year represents the overall best complete package that a game has to offer. This includes everything from the menus, the graphics, the sound, the story, the multiplayer, the connection I have to the characters within the game, and I guess the best way to say it is how engrossed I am into the game. I must eat, breathe and think about the game and lastly what replay value does it offer. Things that shouldn’t be considered when tabulating your game of the year is number of copies sold, marketing budget and whether it is a console exclusive title. It shouldn’t matter that the game is on 1 platform or several. It’s all about the best game of 2009.

There truly was only one logical choice for Tehflakes.ca game of the year that is Uncharted 2:  Among Thieves. You can check out my review here.  Nathan Drake is the new James Bond and Laura Croft of the video game space. The plot twists alone will have you on the edge of your seat. Uncharted 2 doesn’t do a lot new but it does what it does better than anything out there right now. You can beat it on normal in about 10 hours and don’t worry you can replay the game and be sure to go and hunt for all the treasures. Had enough of the single player? Why not check out the co-operative levels or the new multiplayer. I know what you’re thinking great a new multiplayer but the team at Naughty Dog did a fantastic job with it. In the span of 2 days I played this game for almost 15 hours and if I didn’t have to work I would have probably played more. I still continue to hop on to get some multiplayer action when I can

Well it’s time for some honourable mentions that were under consideration for Game of the Year:

-          Batman Arkham Asylum

-          Assassins Creed 2

-          New Super Mario Brothers

Well I am certainly going to get some heat for this but Forza Motorsport 3 was probably my biggest let down of the year.  Don’t get me wrong it was a good game but the difference between Forza and Forza 2 was huge, that made think we would see Forza 3 turn out to be an epic game but it wasn’t. It felt more like Forza 2.5 with a good physics system. The track selection was boring, the menu system was awful, and just in general I found it boring. I really had a hard time staying focused and wanting to play it, it was a very different feeling compared to Forza 2.

Art done by Todd Lawson -Visit Todd’s site at www.toddlawson.com