The games new features include the highly anticipated Port Governance feature, over 60 new missions, and new NPC factions.

Power & Prestige™ expands upon the game’s already robust real-time Conquest system, allowing players to not only capture ports on behalf of their parent nations, but to also become a Port Governor with great economic and strategic influence.

Pirates of the Burning Sea: Power & Prestige™ Feature List:

• Port Governance
  Become the Governor of a port! In Power & Prestige™, players and player societies can spend influence to elect Governors in ports throughout the Burning Sea. Once elected Governor, you can:
  
  • Display your name under the port's name in the Open Sea, or choose to share the glory with their whole society. You can also set a message that greets anyone who enters the port.
  • Take important economic and military actions such as setting the tax rate of the port, improving the port's infrastructure, reducing the port's unrest, and boosting the port's defenses.
  • Draw a salary from the port's coffers.
  • Display a special title while you are governor, and access an exclusive shop to purchase special governor-only items.
• Content
  We are adding over 60 new missions to the game, using new techniques to produce content that is even more exciting and challenging.
  
  • We have added new content to ensure that you can reach Celebrated reputation with your favorite player-friendly factions and be rewarded for it!
  • We are introducing four new "Pirate Hunter" factions: the Board of Marque, the Men of War, the Salon d'Aventure and the Corsarios del Rey. Each of these new privateering factions has unique storyline missions available to all nations!
  • Factions will have shops that offer outfitting, customizable clothing and sails to players who have earned sufficient respect.
  • We’re adding new repeatable missions as part of Port Governance: Governor's Requests! Complete the bonus objectives to infuse your favorite port's treasury.
• Avatar skill revision
  We’ve giving our Avatar Combat skills an overhaul, and we’re separating out Brawling to be its own fighting school.

• Ship Combat Tuning
  We’re giving every ship in the game a significant revision, and we’re adding new features to help combat troublesome outfitting stacking!

• Career Improvements
  Each of our five careers is getting a complete revision, which will include the addition of new skills allowing for more tactical gameplay.

• Character Lighting Improvements
  Character lighting in towns and other environments has been overhauled to look more realistic.

• Mount and Blade: Warband @ StrategyInformer 8.5/10
• Mount and Blade: Warband @ Games On Net 3.5/5
• Metro 2033 @ RealGamer 7/10
• Borderlands Add-On Pack @ Ten Ton Hammer B+
• Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight @ ActionTrip 5.9/10
• Metro 2033 @ Original Gamer 8.4/10
• Mount and Blade: Warband @ IGN 8.1/10

Console Reviews

• Splinter Cell: Conviction @ ActionTrip 7.9/10
• Just Cause 2 @ gameSlave 8.5/10
• Splinter Cell: Conviction @ Games On Net 4/5
• Supreme Commander 2 @ Gaming Nexus C-
• Splinter Cell: Conviction @ IGN 9.3/10

Previews

• Split/Second PS3 @ StrategyInformer
• Outer Galaxies @ Games On Net

Interviews

• Hearts of Iron III @ StrategyInformer
• Dragon Age: Origins @ GreyWardens
• Dusty Monk Part I @ IncGamers
• Guild Wars @ Ten Ton Hammer

Uniloc came under fire in November 2008 when Football Manager 2009 owners had trouble authenticating games online. SEGA said that was due to high demand and a small key-printing hiccup.

Actual solid details on how Uniloc tools work are hard to find on the company's website. However, we're promised a "polite" and "unobtrusive" DRM solution that will run "without compromising your legal users' experience".

Who are we kidding, the DRM will probably crap out again while the pirates play with impunity.

GameStop

• Pre-order from GameStop and get the exclusive Forgotten Arena Game Mode:

  How long can you last against an unstoppable Sand Army? Find out with this exclusive mode. You’ll encounter waves of relentless enemies, which you must defeat to replenish your health meter and survive the trial. With no time limit and an ever-increasing number of enemies, staying alive means countering devastating hordes until you are overwhelmed by the onslaught. If you can kill more than 100 enemies, you may have what it takes to become a real Prince of Persia.

Amazon

• Pre-order from Amazon and get $5 off and an exclusive Prince of Persia Gameloft mobile game

Best Buy

• Pre-order from Best Buy and get the exclusive Sand Wraith playable skin: In Prince of Persia Warrior Within, the Mask of the Wraith transformed the Prince into a sinister being possessed with the power to coexist in the same timeline as his former self. Now you can adopt this dark and disturbing look as you play through Prince of Persia The Forgotten Sands.

In total, Infinity Ward has around one hundred employees, including the tea lady and cleaner, so the departure of many high profile staff could have an effect on Modern Warfare 3, already said to be delayed by West and Zampella's insubordinate actions.

In related Jerry Bruckheimer news, the prolific movie maker spoke to Gamasutra about failed movie-to-game adaptations.

Purchase here.

What's for lunch?

Fictoids

• Johnny Depp suffers from self-injury.
• Leonardo DiCaprio got his first 'onscreen kiss' from a man.
• Among older men, vanilla is the most erotic smell.
• In Albania, nodding your head means 'no' and shaking your head means 'yes'.
• The warmest temperature ever recorded on Antarctica was 3 degrees F.
• There are no ants in Iceland, Antarctica, and Greenland.

The amusing bit is that in this particular case, the code did not work for the recipient. Here's the content that you may or may not have received. (Thanks Bret!)

• Palazzo Medici
  Save Lorenzo de Medici as he is held captive by the templars in his own house, which is riddled with many secret passages. Once the Secret Location is unlocked, enter from the Ground Floor of the Palazzo Medici in Firenze, go through the Passage on the bottom right to the “courtyard of the mules”.

• Santa Maria dei Frari
  Explore the Venetian church and perfect your free-running skills by making your way through a risky course. Once unlocked go to the Santa Maria Dei Frari church in Venezia, then find and enter the secret entrance located in the middle of the bell tower.

• Arsenal Shipyard
  Enter the shipyard in Venice and kill the guards in a stealthy way without them noticing you. Chase down the guard before he warns the others of your presence. Once unlocked you can enter the Arsenal Shipyard in Venezia via a manhole outside the Shipyard.

"You have to remember that Ensemble came from a standpoint of being really good at competing against Blizzard Entertainment," he noted, drawing comparisons between the success of the Warcraft series and the success of the Age of Empires series. "We had a pretty good history of knowing the types of stuff that Blizzard put into their games to make them really successful, and the kinds of things we'd need to put into an MMO to compete against Blizzard." In fact, he used those two little words that everyone hates... "WoW killer".

"Just to give you a couple of examples," Monk elaborated, "we were using a heroic stylised artform. This heroic stylised artform is exactly the artform that you see being used in Star Wars: The Old Republic right now. It's timeless. It doesn't age itself like a game that's built with a strictly realistic artform does."

"We were developing a cover system. This cover system is in Star Wars: The Old Republic. We had the idea of quests - and like I said, this was between 2004 and 2007, before Warhamer Online had been released - but we had this idea of quests where you could participate and pull them together without having to be on the same team. This would be a public quest that everyone in a particular area could work on. That idea went into Warhammer Online."

Rockstar Games Social Club

Remove Rockstar Games Social Club application

Separate RGSC application no longer required to launch game

Social Club login now occurs during the launch process

Shadows

A new, less memory-intensive, and better-looking scalable shadow solution has been implemented

Enhanced Night Shadows added with user-selectable level of detail (replaces Shadow Density)

Performance

Rendering optimizations have been made to improve performance, particularly when enabling shadows

User-configurable graphics settings have been added for shadow control

Improved memory management

Multiplayer

Enhanced security to isolate users from cheaters and hackers Episodic Content

Provide in-game support to purchase "The Lost and Damned" and "The Ballad of Gay Tony" (Not available in Russian/Japanese Versions)

Bug Fixes

Vehicle shadows re-enabled between 8pm and 6am

Fix floating street textures

Pedestrians in vehicles appear further out from the player to allow for long range sniping

The Moon has been implemented with simulated lunar phases

Fixed garbled text in Japanese Multiplayer menus

"RESC 10" error fix for specific hardware configurations

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has announced the millionth sale of Heavy Rain for PlayStation 3 worldwide - just five weeks after its launch at the end of February. The game has become an overnight sensation for its combination of gripping plot, thought-provoking themes and emotional involvement. The critics are raving about the new possibilities in emotive, open-ended play and cinematic gaming that Heavy Rain delivers. Now, just five weeks in, the sales figures show that more than a million gamers agree with them. Years in the making, developer David Cage’s hugely innovative and ambitious project has paid off.

"It has been hugely gratifying to see the positive response that Heavy Rain has received from gamers” says David Cage, the Writer and Director of Heavy Rain and CEO of Quantic Dream. “It shows that it is possible to create games that break with convention, games that seek to tell complex stories, and games that can inspire unexpected emotions in players - and that such games can be commercial as well as critical successes. I hope that this success will continue to help pave the way for new, groundbreaking experiences."

“It’s a stunning achievement – not least because Heavy Rain is not a traditional blockbuster game,” says Mark Hardy, European Product Marketing Director at SCEE. “It’s a blend of gaming, drama and cinema – groundbreaking and utterly immersive for players – that defies the normal rules and lets you shape the story you play. It’s been wonderful to hear the reviewers admiring the game’s ambitiousness; however, the real delight has been in seeing the gamers taking Heavy Rain to their hearts so quickly. It shows that gamers are ready for more: more interactivity, more choice in how to play and more of the open-ended gaming experiences that only PlayStation is delivering.”

Who knew Quick Time Events were so popular?

Episodes can be purchased individually through the Games For Windows Live Marketplace if you own Grand Theft Auto IV, but don't include the new radio stations.