[Via Nobuooo]

Yesterday's NPD announcement that New Super Mario Bros. Wii had sold 1.4 million copies in the November NPD period was impressive. But Nintendo topped it today by noting that, including sales after the NPD cutoff date, the game has reached a total of two million copies. It's not Modern Warfare 2 or anything, but it is a very strong start for a game that is likely to have a very long tail. Even just in November, it easily beat New Super Mario Bros.'s first month on DS (which, admittedly, was May and not November).

Nintendo also announced that the Wii has reached a US installed base of 23 million, and that the DS broke the November handheld sales record set by ... the DS.

According to CVG, the recently teased Pirates of the Caribbean content pack for LittleBigPlanet was not only recently confirmed by Sony, but also given a tentative launch window: "We're expecting it to launch just before Xmas," an unnamed Sony rep explained.

If the prospect of platforming as a dreadlock'ed Sack Sparrow isn't exciting enough for you, CVG is also reporting that, as you probably assumed, the Water expansion will be arriving simultaneously with the Pirates pack. Well, of course it would. Can you imagine how much shorter those movies would have been if they didn't have any water? We reached out to Sony and Media Molecule to get confirmation of the two packs' imminence first-hand, but only received a "we don't comment on rumors and speculation" from the former. We'll let you know when we hear more!

It's been a bumpy road to release for Brütal Legend. Tim Schafer's had to change publishers, deal with a pesky lawsuit, soldier through PR missteps and even handle some post-release DLC. This is all common knowledge, but in a lengthy postmortem at Gamasutra, Caroline Esmurdoc, executive producer at Double Fine, goes in depth on the development strategy for the title and talks about what went right and what went wrong in the creation of this rock gaming opus.

Double Fine adopted the Scrum method of agile software development for Brütal Legend, which allowed the company to create a renderer, terrain and a playable Eddie Riggs for Tim in a mere month. Content creation was fairly steady, Esmurdoc admitted, but around January of this year, the game's content jumped from the 2.5GB generated over three years to a massive 9GB, thanks to multiple teams unloading assets for the game simultaneously.

Esmurdoc also touched on the lawsuit, though she couldn't go into specifics beyond mentioning that the transition between publishers caused "internal unrest and morale dips among the team", and that Double Fine learned Activision would not be publishing Brutal Legend when the game was suspiciously absent from a list of the publisher's upcoming games. Double Fine then pursued a new publishing partner.

If you're in Los Angeles tomorrow and have an interest in either Mega Man collectibles or eBay profits, be sure to get to 1013 W. Olympic Blvd. in LA tomorrow between 2pm and 5pm -- actually, we're guessing you're going to need to get there early. And bring a printout of this coupon with you.

Capcom and i am 8 Bit plan to hand out some kind of extremely limited Mega Man swag in enticing E-Tank boxes. It's likely related to the newly announced Mega Man 10, and with the Mega Man 10 "box art" done by i am 8 Bit's Gerald de Jesus, it's possible that the item will bear that image. If you get one, be sure to let us know what's in the box! We have to know what is in the box.

Bible Adventures, the first console title from Left Behind Games, will "educate young children by teaching them academic lessons vital to early childhood development through Bible stories." Based on the Charlie Church Mouse series, the game will not only span both the Old and New Testament, but should also teach mathematics, spelling and "reasoning skills."

Left Behind CEO Troy Lyndon noted (via GamePolitics) that expanding their offerings to home consoles should expand not only their reach, but their wallets. "We expect our financial projections to grow exponentially as we transition from a PC game developer to a Wii & Xbox developer."

But what about PS3 owners? Well ... they can go to hell.

Valve has decided to inject some "healthy competition" into the next patch for its long-lasting, cartoonish multiplayer shooter, Team Fortress 2. The update will award three new weapons to both the Soldier and Demoman classes -- weapons which will be revealed piecemeal over the course of the next week. However, the two classes will be fighting during the week to unlock a secret fourth weapon for their profession. Whichever class can kill the other the most will be victorious, and can claim the additional armament.

You can stay on top of the current kill count on Valve's hub page for the update, which is appropriately titled "The War." Our money's on the Demoman, but that might just be because we love his Shrek-inspired accent.

More than twenty years and five home consoles later, you'd think Nintendo would get this "third-party support" thing by now. However, EA CEO John Riccitiello says the console manufacturer is still learning how to reach out and offer a hand to games other than their own. "They've always been first-party-centric, and they're learning how to be third-party supportive," Riccitiello told Gamasutra. Looking at November's NPD figures, it's clear that Nintendo has been very good to itself. But is there hope for EA on the Wii? "Third-parties can do a lot better on the platform with the right support from Nintendo."

What kind of "support" are third parties like EA looking for? Most likely, third parties are looking for co-opted marketing opportunities provided by other first-party platforms, like Sony's PlayStation.Blog or Microsoft's MW2-branded hardware. Unfortunately, Nintendo appears content with its hands-off approach to third-party marketing, offsetting all the blame for the failures of GTA: Chinatown Wars and countless other games at the hands of their respective publishers.

We've heard from Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson in the past on why he thinks certain games shouldn't be available to Australian consumers. And when he was asked recently by ABC why the upcoming Aliens vs. Predator was refused classification in his country (read: banned), he echoed previous sentiments on the interactivity of games having a stronger affect on people than other mediums. "I accept that 98 percent, 99 percent of gamers will tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but the 1 to 2 percent could go on to be motivated by these games to commit horrible acts of violence," Atkinson said.

When the subject of AvP comes up, though, Atkinson put on his game reviewer cap and offered, "You don't need to be playing a game in which you impale, decapitate and dismember people." So, what're you thinking, Mr. Atkinson -- 5.0/10 maybe? 4.7/10? We're all ears.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

For the sake of clarity and brevity in this week's Rock Band Weekly, let's split this info up:

• The Beatles: Rock Band will have the album Rubber Soul available next week. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and Abbey Road were previously released on November 17 and October 20, respectively.
• The standard Rock Band music store receives new tracks from All-American Rejects, 30 Seconds to Mars and even more Green Day.

As a reminder, Rock Band Unplugged DLC is going on holiday for an unspecified amount of time. Check out pricing and track details after the break.

Update: MTV Games/Harmonix has corrected the pricing for Rubber Soul.

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The latest Transformers game, War for Cybertron, takes place before the Autobots and Decepticons arrived on Earth. As such, they have no concept of our Earth "trucks" and "awesome jets," and can only transform into ... things that look pretty much like trucks and awesome jets, but alien.

The teaser after the break introduces the setting for the new High Moon-developed title, and Game Informer promises more info on its constantly updating War for Cybertron hub page. If the new locale and exotic transformations don't grab you, think about this: all humans are millions of miles away from Cybertron, so unlike the movies, you'll actually get to see the Transformers in this game.

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Huzzah! No more of your intense Headquarters Pro matches will be interrupted by gargantuan, killer shockwaves expelled by morally dubious combatants. That is to say, Modern Warfare 2's Javelin glitch, which enabled a dirty, cheating player to instantly detonate upon death, was fixed earlier this morning by a patch for the Xbox 360 version of the game. According to a recent tweet from Infinity Ward's Robert Bowling, the PS3 version of the game has already received the patch.

In addition to removing the Javelin's unadvertised self-immolation feature, the patch also fixes the equally insidious "unlimited care packages" glitch, and fixes a few areas where players could exploit gaps in the game's geography. In a perfect world, Infinity Ward would have also sent parcels to the houses of anyone who leveraged these exploits -- parcels full of bees. The bad kind. The kind you see on the Discovery Channel. The ones that can kill a full-grown elephant with a surprisingly small swarm.

Konami appears to be daring enough to localize Ninety-Nine Nights 2 -- which, we suppose, isn't too much of a surprise since it showed the courage to publish the sequel to the mediocre action title in the first place. While Konami hasn't said anything official, an OFLC rating has appeared for N32, outing at least a tentative plan to publish the game in Australia. Speculation: Konami's not going to localize the game just for Australia.

Whether the announcement is good news or not depends on your faith in Feelplus (for whom this is the first action game) to deliver a better Dynasty Warriors-type game than Phantagram did.

We've got another two months to go before the release of Splinter Cell Conviction. That's plenty of time, it would seem, for Ubisoft to tease us relentlessly with more information and gameplay snippets, as evidenced by the latest trailer. It's filled with a mess of information for returning Splinter Cell fans, and capped off by the realization that, "For the first time, you'll feel what it's like to be one of those NPCs hunted by a Splinter Cell." And yes, that prospect looks just as terrifying as it sounds.

Look, we know you've been waiting with bated breath for all those Hearts of Iron 3 content packs to arrive on Impulse, so we were glad to tell you that they've finally arrived. Sure, so did The Saboteur and X-COM, but we know you're not concerned. We suppose it's possible you'll tire yourself out with the new Hears of Iron 3 content to the point that you'll need a break, so we should probably point out that a mess of other games made it onto Stardock's digital distribution platform this week. Being the good friends we are, we've dropped the whole list just after the break, just for you!

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