No fancy name for this one, it's just the "Multiplayer Pack", and includes two new game modes (Bagman & Team Bagman) along with eight new maps that are playable across all multiplayer modes.

It's 560 MSP on 360, and $6 on the PSN. The video gives you a decent run-down of some of the new stuff on offer.

Earlier this year, a couple of game developers let me in on one of their secrets: They intentionally play bad games. They play the stuff you or I would avoid not to learn what to avoid, but to learn what to do and imitate. They told me that good ideas lurk everywhere, and no one else is looking in the bad games.

The game developers who told me their technique do not work for Rockstar Games. As far I know, they've had no hand at making Grand Theft Auto games. But if they did, I hope they would play EA's Godfather II, the most flawed of 2009's big-publisher open-world games.

Godfather II is a broken, sputtering jalopy of a game. To use a more apt metaphor, it is an open world beset by blight, the digital equivalent of a city where the bridges are crumbling and the water mains are about to burst. It has bland graphics, poor artificial intelligence, awkward story, etc.

And yet, after playing through it and THQ's new Red Faction, Sony's inFamous, Activision's Prototype and Rocsktar's Grand Theft Auto IV: The Lost and Damned, I believe Godfather II surpasses those more enjoyable 2009 open-world games in a crucial way: You matter in it more. It's more alive. It knows that you're in it. And it reacts to you.

Prototype's New York collapses to its red-sky ruin regardless of your actions. You surf its avalanche, chipping at rocks along the way, but the tumble is brutal and inexorable.

Red Faction's Martian colony towers do fall from your sledgehammer swings, but the swelling revolution that brings its citizens to take up arms against the police authority feels no more the product of your actions than a river's current feels determined by how you swipe your hand through the water.

In Grand Theft Auto IV, Liberty City stands unaffected by your mayhem, your impact noted only by new hysteria chattered on its radio stations. Like a good New Yorker, Rockstar's fake New York barely bats an eye at what you're doing in it.

The Empire City of inFamous bears more of your mark. The game comes closest to what Godfather II achieves, but it is still EA's crime adventure that manages to make its location feel most organic.

The method for the Godfather II's best success doesn't sound sexy. What happens in the New York, Florida and Cuba of the game is a property-control simulation. It's a dull-on-paper conquest of gambling dens, auto chop shops and whorehouses, committed sometimes at the hands-dirty ground level of the GTA games it apes. You, a mafia don, walk into a warehouse where a rival mob family runs guns and kill every rival mafioso who shoots at you before shaking down the warehouse's boss, extorting him, adding him to your income ledger and watching his property turning your color on the game's map. Other times, conquest occurs from the map's god view or, more likely, in the background, as the orders you delivered to the men in your mob family are executed off-screen. While you drive to one location for another mission that could have been in GTA III, you're notified that your capo took over a nightclub or that your foot soldiers stormed a waterfront factory. You told them to.

The prize accomplishment of Godfather II is that the mob families controlled by the game try to do all of that to you. They attack your properties. They try to take them over. They recognize your rising influence and push back. They necessitate that you send your underboss, who would otherwise be fighting at your side as a computer-controlled ally, from your ground-level crew to defend a money-making property. A rival capo you've marked for death and planned to throw off a bridge might instead show up storming the brothel you fought hard to take over. He's going at you on his own time.

The result is a game that registers the grand violence you perpetrate in its open world and retaliates. The results aren't smooth. At ground level, Godfather II crumbles. Enemies have poor intelligence; allies shoot at walls. Guns dropped by killed mobsters float in the air. The cities are cartoonishly shrunken, the game's graphics primitive and plain. But what is occurring within that mess and what is occurring off-screen feels like it has breath and life.

This landscape lives. Godfather's three regions are not prop cities or sets of cardboard walls. This New York is not just a doormat on which you may wipe your feet. It is a place that seems to know that you are in it and does something about it.

I'd rather look at Empire City. I'd prefer to drive through Liberty City or fight on Red Faction's Mars. I will, nevertheless, still yearn for the next open-world game that I play to react in the way Godfather II did. I want the game's world to remember the heat and stamp of my actions beyond the conclusion of the given mission I'm playing and to fire back. I want it all to feel alive. And I won't believe such things can be accomplished only or best in a broken-down Godfather game.

We want to be nickel-and-dimed! We want to pay $5 for a new suit for Alex, or $10 for a new hammer and eXtreme paintjob for Martian dune buggies. Not…not this. $10 for an all-new area of the map with new campaign missions, a new stoyline and a range of new gear?

It's outrageous.

LOVED
Bang for Buck – This isn't just a random collection of new missions, it's a mini-campaign. You're controlling a new character (Sam), fighting for a new faction (the Marauders) in a new area of the map (Mariner valley), all the while unlocking a little of the backstory of the main game.

Aerodynamic – While in many ways this is just a snapshot of Red Faction, in another key area it actually improves upon the original by doing away with the "currency" of salvage. Now instead of having to pick through the ruins of every building you destroy, new weapons and upgrades are awarded automatically for completing missions, which is a lot less taxing on your patience.

HATED
Disconnect – There are only three "campaign" missions in DotB. Three. There are a ton of side-missions to compensate, but those who were hoping for something with a little more meat will be disappointed. It's also a bit of a shame that the new DLC takes place in a small, isolated area of Mars, meaning you can't access any of the regions featured in the main game.

Saints Row 2 fans will already be aware of this, but Volition are definitely on the right track with their DLC. Demons of the Badlands gets the balance between affordability and depth just right, giving fans of Red Faction a (mostly) new experience that should keep them busy for a week or so.

Red Faction: Demons of the Badland was developed by Volition, and published by THQ. Released on Xbox Live (reviewed) and the PlayStation Network on August 13. Retails for 800MSP/$10. Played story campaign to conclusion and around 2/3 of side-missions.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

(Check out our software and hardware reports for June here... then read this analysis and add yours.)

EA Nails The Wii, Thanks To Moms And Dads: EA has two Wii games placed powerfully in the top five best-selling games of June, a feat that I don't think any third-party publisher has accomplished since the Wii launched. And how did EA do it? Not with a game for teenage boys. Not with a first-person shooter. Not with an M-rated gorefest. But with EA Sports Active, a fitness game targeted at grown women, many of them likely to be moms. And they did it with Tiger Woods PGA 10, the definitive sports game for dads. That's the Wii audience for EA... all grown up!

Tiger Pulls A Guitar Hero: Also notable about the performance of Tiger Woods on the Wii is that the game charted for the Wii but not for any other platform. While Maddens and Call of Dutys are still series whose PS3/ Xbox360 versions handily outperform the Wii editions, Tiger performed more like a Guitar Hero game. The Guitar Heroes have been selling better on the Wii than on any other platform. That speaks to who has a Wii. It is also a likely a byproduct of the Wii Remote (with MotionPlus) being so well-associated by EA and gamers with the swing of a golf club. What's the next franchise that will see Wii out in front? [UPDATE: NPD Analyst Anita Frazier used the power of Twitter to inform me that the Wii version of Tiger was already out in front last year: "More than 1/2 Tiger Woods PGA Tour '09 sales and more than 40% of '08 were on Wii"]

Open Worlds Are Big — But Do People Think Of Them As Open Worlds?: It looked like Prototype, Infamous and Red Faction Guerilla, three open-world games released within weeks of each other, would cannibalize each other's sales. Maybe they did. Maybe they didn't. But none appears to have flopped, as versions of all three made the top 10. People like open-world an consume a lot of them, despite those games being among the longest games out there. Could the allure be that they give so much bang for their buck? Or is their open-worldness something most consumers don't notice? A genre connection that's invisible to those buying based on commercials and boxart?

Blasts From Pasts: Among the top 10 posts of June are only five games released in the new 35-day reporting period. That's the way it works these days: lots of games linger. This month's lingerers are the consistent strong sellers Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit along with recent stars Infamous, UFC and EA Sports Active.

Notable new releases that failed to make the overall software top 10 (With no console or handheld version selling more than192,700 units in the U.S. by July 4): Rock Band Unplugged (June 9), Ghostbusters: The Video Game (June 16), Let's Tap (June 16), Guitar Hero Smash Hits (June 16), Monster Hunter Freedom Unite (PSP), Overlord II (June 23), The Conduit (June 23), Transformers Revenge of The Fallen (June 23), BlazBlue (June 30), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (June 30), Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood (June 30)

June 2009 U.S. Video Game Hardware Sales - NPD-PD version
Daily averages based on the June NPD date range: 5/31/09-7/04/09

Nintendo DS - 21,900 units/day (down 725)
Wii - 10,334 units/day (down 5)
Xbox 360 - 6,874 units/day (up 624)
PS3 - 4,706 units/day (up 27)
PSP - 4,671 units/day (down 1,085)
PS2 - 4,363 units/day (up 184)

(Find out more about the Kotaku-patented NPD-PD stat)

"I like an open world where it feels like stuff is going on around you," James Hague, Red Faction Guerilla's lead designer at development studio Volition told me in a phone interview earlier this week.

Red Faction Guerilla is a sprawling open-world action-adventure for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 set on a Mars ruled under the tight grip of the heartless Earth Defense Force. The player is a miner-turned-revolutionary who shoots and batters enemies and buildings to help the just overthrow the bad.

What Hague was discussing a game that is loaded with opportunity and charged with the energy of an insurgent's rebellion against a military authority – the kind that, not intentionally, has parallels to those seen fighting on the news these days.

Let's start with the game design rebellion. The game Hague and his team made, the game that technical designer Luke Schneider maintains was not intended to be a "GTA on Mars," was made to feel like a more open open-world game than the average one. It was a game designed to enable rampant destruction and handle all of the gameplay consequences. Volition built their game, Hague and Schneider told Kotaku, on the premise that giving the player an axe and guns that can destroy every structure on the map is also a game that should open the player's options to do as much as they can imagine.

"We wanted people to play pretty much however they wanted to," Hague said.

There are signs of success. For example, the developers has learned that players are doing things the creators didn't expect. Take the destruction of a canyon-spanning bridge in the game's Badlands district. Some might take it down with explosives. Others might use the game's disintegration gun to zap one strut away at a time. Volition discovered that one player decided to attract military attention and then shot helicopters so they crashed into – and tore down – the bridge. Another player filled the bridge's lanes with cars then made them detonate in a chain. "When that was put in there, the goal was to put in something very large and allow the player a lot of choices in how to take it down. We're not looking to dictate how you do it."

What they pushed was emergence, a value celebrated by players and makers of open-world games at least as far back as the launch of GTA III.

"We were trying to go a little further out there in terms of emergent gameplay on the high level," Schneider said. During development, they went too far: "Players would just be completely lost." The developers said they wanted to make an open-world game that felt more open than gamers have been playing. Things in the world were just supposed to… happen. Convoys would drive through the game world at set times each game-day. Players could attack them or not. But some players of pre-release versions of the game panicked and felt that they'd be letting their guerilla movement down if they saw a convoy and didn't attack. Missions like hostage rescues that are now triggered only when a player goes to an icon on the game world's map – the classic way of starting missions in open-world games – used to instead be sprung upon the player as alerts they could choose to respond to. "We were trying to get a balance between letting you choose what you want to do and making the world seem alive," Hague said. "We tried at both extremes and I think the balance is pretty good."

They found the right amount of insurgency to make their game work. And if it resembles any current real-life insurgency, that's not intended, the developers say. "We weren't looking at the modern day situation," Hague said. "We were looking at stuff like the past wars in Afghanistan and so on. How do react when you have a superior force against you and you can't attack them head on? We weren't trying to make an Iraq simulator."

Yes, this is a game about being part of an insurgent fighting force, a game that rewards players who can sneak up and undermine a more powerful military maybe with a disintegration ray or maybe by blowing up a car in front of a building. But civilians are never targets. The enemy is only military and always armed. Early in the game, the hero of Red Faction tells his brother, "I'm not a terrorist," only to see his brother gunned down by the evil military rulers, the Earth Defense Force. "We didn't want people to feel like they were on the wrong side of this war," said Schneider, who said that wars as far back as the American Revolutionary War were studied for tactics. "We just wanted people to have fun blowing stuff up."

With both the politics of the game as well as in the gameplay design, the developers don't think they took their rebellion too far. Almost.

One mission, which puts the player in the turret position of a vehicle while a fellow freedom fighter sharpens knives and begins to viciously interrogate a captured military man, did make Hague briefly uneasy. "The first time I actually played that mission once we got it in place I felt kind of bad," he said. He remembered thinking: "The Red Faction really crossed the line here. I don't know if I believe in the same stuff they believe in anymore, but I've got to keep continuing because it's a good cause overall… I remember we were going to go with an interrogation fairly early on. It just wasn't until we did the final writing pass and recording pass that we could really hear it in context. Honestly, it came out a little more over-the-top and intense than I expected to be."

A scene like that wouldn't have been unusual in 24 or out of context in an action movie. It's an ethical boundary, pushed.

The rebellions of Red Faction Guerilla are set to continue. Development of downloadable content is underway. The two developers would not share specifics.

Is this as open as it gets? Of course not. But as far as they've gone, the makers of Red Faction Guerilla are happy with the result.

And you can look out for it in June, as that's when publishers THQ say the game will be out. June 9, to be a little more precise, and that's (at this stage anyways) for all three platforms: PS3, 360 & PC.

That's right. You use GIANT HAMMERS.

THQ bled cash to the tune of $115.3 million, way up from Q2 2007's loss of $7 million. Potentially worse for gamers was the delay of Red Faction: Guerrilla and Darksiders: Wrath of War well into 2009.

The publisher also confirmed it would lay off 250 employees as part of a "strategic plan and business realignment."

THQ further explained that its plan involves "the cancellation of several titles that were in development but had not been publicly announced."

Both Red Faction: Guerilla for Xbox 360, PS3, and PC as well as Darksiders: Wrath of War for Xbox 360, and PS3 will now ship after March 31, 2009 a move that will hurt the company's fiscal 2009 to the tune of approximately $125 million.

For the quarter, THQ reported that the lion's share of its revenue came from the Nintendo DS and Wii, similar to Activision Blizzard's console earnings announced earlier today. THQ released de Blob and WALL-E (internationally) on those platforms, with the latter seeing lower than expected sales.

The downside: It's a developer diary. The upside? It's a developer diary that actually has a ton of proper footage in it! And not just pre-rendered stuff, either, proper footage. Of your man running around Mars, blowing stuff up, hitting bad men with a giant hammer. Looks surprisingly fun, in a hitting-men-with-giant-hammers kinda way.

THQ president and CEO Brian Farrell said that most of its struggles were due to a crowded and competitive market for kids' games, as well as key franchises — Juiced, Stuntman and Conan that ultimately "were simply not competitive."

"Insufficient game quality led to inadequate sellthrough, resulting in markdowns at retail," Farrell said.

Farrell said the company spent heavily to promote Juiced and Stuntman, and had to take a loss when those titles fail to perform. What growth THQ did see, Farrell credited to Frontlines: Fuel of War, MX vs. ATV Untamed and WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008, all of which exceeded expectations.

Farrell also said the kids' market, in which THQ has several franchises, was the most competitive in years, and that the company's currently struggling to compete with music games and Nintendo first-party titles.

Nonetheless, THQ appears to have placed its faith in the Wii, concentrating much of its upcoming original IP there. Although Saints Row 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla are still the "anchors" of its lineup, Darksiders, De Blob, Deadly Creatures, Big Beach Sports and All Star Cheer look likely to be slated for Wii along with other unannounced projects, though the company did not announce specific platforms.

New installments in existing franchises for fiscal 2009 include WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, Disney/Pixar's Wall-E film tie-in, and its previously-revealed Nickelodeon portfolio. The company will publish a game based on DreamWorks' Animation's unannounced 2010 fall film, and has slated WWE: Legends of Wrestlemania for 2009.

Notably, the company seems to have an eye on the free-to-play, microtransactions-driven online gaming market in Asia, highlighting the co-publishing agreement it's signed with Shanda Interactive to bring Company of Heroes Online to China in 2009.

THQ is more confident about the year to come, with three new initiatives in place: "We are rolling out a stronger slate of products. We have put in place and are executing against initiatives to improve our product quality and competitiveness. We are also realigning our cost structure to generate significant operating leverage in fiscal 2009. We believe these initiatives will restore profitable growth and improve value for shareholders," said Farrell.

"We faced a number of challenges, but I believe we have the right strategy to overcome these challenges and achieve significant growth."

You play a member of the Red Faction, a group of resistors who are trying to protect the planet and its earthly inhabitants from the evil Earth Defense Force. Weapon choices are wide and varied including a giant mining hammer, an assault rifle, sticky bombs and a rocket launcher. These were the weapons of choice in the portion of the game I played, but I was assured that there were plenty more to use to bring down the enemies and buildings around you. The portion I enjoyed the most in the game was the various vehicles one could pilot around. Of the few that I saw, nothing was more fun than the giant mining mech/robot that you could hop into and roam around crunching things under your colossal feet and fists.

Destructible environments are certainly nothing new, but Red Faction Guerrilla takes it to a new level. Hiting a building once with a bomb doesn't just send the building tumbling to the ground in a giant mass, oh no. These buildings must be torn apart and taken down piece by piece. It's really quite a satisfying feeling knowing that it will take more than a simple kick in the balls to bring these structures down to size.

There was certainly plenty to do in the game besides just roaming around causing trouble. There were many missions dotting my map's landscape although in the short amount of time I had to see it I didn't get to complete more than one. This seemed to be one of the games everyone wanted to try and the lines were quite long. Unfortunately, I didn't really get much of a sense of the story from what was being shown. This is something I hope will come more into play when the game is released sometime next year. As interesting and graphically pleasing and fun as Red Faction: Guerrilla was, it will need more than exploding buildings and giant destructive mechs to keep me truly captivated.

First Images Of Red Faction: Guerilla [2Qr @ NeoGAF]

UPDATE: OK, we have an answer! The top one (ie the better-looking one), yes, that's from the game, and appears in the latest issue of Game Informer magazine. The bottom one, no, it's a FAKE. [thanks Keldan!]