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A veritable cornucopia of media reportedly from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3's upcoming September DLC drops has leaked. Several images and even some video footage were released by a YouTube user known as Gamecheat13, reports MP1st. The media allegedly shows off three new maps slated for September: Gulch, Parish and Boardwalk.

Boardwalk is, unsurprisingly, a boardwalk – complete with shuttered stalls, what appears to be an inflatable pig and a gift shop. Gulch, meanwhile, is a desert canyon map, while Parish takes place in and around a cathedral in a war zone. Video footage of Parish originally posted on Vimeo and YouTube has been taken down, though not before GameSpot was able to squeeze some of it into an episode of Start/Select.

MP1st also speculates that a new game mode, first hinted at by the Call of Duty Elite Twitter account, is slated to arrive this August.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD managed to move into 120,000 hard drives during its first week on Xbox Live Arcade. Robomodo head honcho Josh Tsui told Gamasutra that early success will eventually lead to a "fuller game."

"By making it 'lower risk' we were allowed to take some chances, which benefits both developer and publisher," Tsui said. He also noted that "the prospect of a fuller game is definitely on the table" and that it's "just a matter of when and how."

Of course, first thing's first: PC and PS3 ports of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD are still waiting in the wings, as is some DLC focused around Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. But after that, Tsui seems to think Activision will be more open to publishing a new game.

Square Enix has announced its Gamescom 2012 lineup, and all of its big names look to be attending. Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn seems to be headlining the event, with on-stage gameplay promised alongside signing sessions by producer and director Naoki Yoshida (will every autograph come with an apology?). Gamescom will also play host to the first European hands-on sessions with Tomb Raider, Hitman: Absolution and Sleeping Dogs.

Also on display will be the upcoming PC re-release of Final Fantasy 7 and the retro-styled mobile title Final Fantasy Dimensions.

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Speaking with XCOM: Enemy Unknown producer Garth DeAngelis earlier this year, I managed to unearth a little information that had been (appropriately) unknown about the game at the time. Specifically, I learned that aerial combat is returning in Enemy Unknown. Dogfighting alien aircraft played a huge role in the original X-COM, a game that developer Firaxis is trying very hard to live up to.

But what other secrets are housed within Enemy Unknown? We've been privy to plenty of information when it comes to ground combat and tactics. Make no mistake, that's the meat of the XCOM experience, but the core gameplay of outwitting alien combatants is all supported by the structure of scientific research and aerial combat.

To uncover more pieces of Enemy Unknown's intricate design puzzle, DeAngelis has returned alongside designer Jake Solomon to exclusively explain to Joystiq about gunning down UFOs, scouring its wreckage, and turning its alien tech back against the invaders.

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Capcom enjoyed a very robust first quarter, with a profit of ¥1.3 billion ($16.9 million) for the period ending June 30, which is up 290 percent from the same period last year. The company's digital content group (games!) made the majority of revenues during the quarter, with ¥13.74 billion ($176 million) in sales of the company's overall ¥18.62 billion ($238 million). That's up 79 and 56 percent from the same time last year, respectively.

The company highlighted Dragon's Dogma as being part of the success. Despite having "struggled abroad," according to Capcom, the game's "popularity in the more profitable domestic market exceeded expectations by selling more than one million copies."

The publisher also mentioned the continued strength of social games The Smurfs' Village and Snoopy's Street Fair, which have "brought Capcom steady fees." Minna to Monhan Card Master, Sengoku BASARA: Card Heroes and Resident Evil: Outbreak Survive were also mentioned as gaining Capcom 2 million new social network site users. Those new friends are sure to make all the other companies jealous.

Thanks to the start of the Olympics, sales of London 2012: The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games were up 25 percent last week in the UK, helping the global event tie-in game step up to the top pedestal.

The official game, which held the silver last week, wasn't the only Olympics game to benefit from the event's starting gun. Mario & Sonic London 2012 Olympic Games also saw a bump of 21 percent, raising it from eighth to bronze. Lego Batman 2: DC Super Heroes finds itself wedged between the two sports minigames in silver.

Pokémon Conquest was the only new game last week to break the top 40, storming spot 17 in its debut week. Now we wait to see if the Pokémon X Nobunaga's Ambition franchise crossover converts poke-fever into a desire to buy strategy games based on feudal Japan. Scout out the UK top ten after the break.

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FIFA 13 is integrating Kinect in a variety of voice-controlled scenarios, allowing players to choose formations, make substitutions and call plays as they happen live, as the above video demonstrates. Kinect will also enable the referees to "hear" it when you react poorly to a bad call, and while you won't get a yellow card for cursing out the refs, they will take your potty mouth into consideration on future rulings.

Stiq Flicks – from film and video game industry freelance writer Kevin Kelly – examines video games and attempts to pair them with matching films. It's like wine and cheese, but with more aliens.
NCAA Football 13 has been out for a couple of weeks now, providing players with the college football experience more than a month before it officially begins in the real world. For many, the collegiate experience ends and begins with sports. With college athletes being courted, hand-picked and groomed for the pros, the brainier student side has no real equivalent. You don't see tens of thousands of fans gathering in stadiums to watch a team of mathletes work out quadratic formulas by using Lagrange resolvents.

We know that the last thing you probably want to think about in the middle of summer is school, but we're pairing this rough-and-tumble game with the cerebral experience of Dead Poets Society in order to provide you with a fully rounded learning experience without the exams. So Blue-47-21, Carpe Diem and read on for this week's game / movie matchup.

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Minecraft mastermind Markus Persson, better known by the sexually ambiguous alias "Notch," has cleared up the matter of gender in Minecraft's boxy world with a blog post. Simply put, there is no gender in the game, even for Steve, the default character. "He" got "his" title when Notch jokingly answered a question regarding the main avatar's name with "Steve?"

"The human model is intended to represent a Human Being. Not a male Human Being or a female Human Being, but simply a Human Being," Notch writes.

"The blocky shape gives it a bit of a traditional masculine look, but adding a separate female mesh would just make it worse by having one specific model for female Human Beings and male ones. That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn't even exist."

Notch touched on this subject at GDC, during his fireside chat with SpyParty's Chris Hecker. Making a female character model wouldn't only be strange-looking, as Notch said then, but it would be completely unnecessary in a genderless world. Even the animals are neutral (rather than neutered).

"Cows have horns and udders (even if I've later learned that there are some cows where the females do have horns), and the chicken/duck/whatevers have heads that look like roosters, but still lay eggs," Notch writes. "For breeding, any animal can breed with any other animal of the same species."

Notch notes that this particular post serves only to provide official clarification on gender questions in Minecraft. Oh, also: "As a fun side fact, it means every character and animal in Minecraft is homosexual because there's only one gender to choose from. Take THAT, homophobes!"

If you've been waiting to get your hands on the latest Transformers title, the wait is nearly over. Activision has announced that the Transformers: Fall of Cybertron demo should be arriving on Xbox Live and PSN on July 31. Players who download it will be able to play through two single-player missions (High Moon Studios has been showing off two missions starring Bumblebee and Grimlock at various events recently, so odds are it's those two), as well as dip into multiplayer and the in-depth customization system.

And if that's even too long for you, you can preorder the game at GameStop. Customers who preorder the game there are getting access to the demo as soon as, well, now. Imagine this one in your best Peter Cullen voice: Autobots, roll out!

If you haven't finished GTA: Vice City yet, you don't want to watch this C64 demake because it totally ruins the ending. Then again, if you haven't finished Vice City yet, you're the biggest procrastinator we've ever met and maybe it's time you caught up to the rest of the world.

Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD was clearly a good business call, as the franchise update earned 120,000 sales during its first week on XBLA. Developer Robomodo shared the detail with Gamasutra, noting the sales have remained "consistent" since launch.

The game will make its way to PSN in late August and later this year for PC. In our deja review of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD, we praised the game's enhancements and commitment to ye olde ollies."

Battlefield 3's "Aftermath" DLC pack, leaked way back when and then finally confirmed but a day ago, will find itself in the hands of capable soldiers the world over come December, according to this Battlefield Premium hype page.

The site's calendar also officially acknowledges and dates BF3's "End Game" DLC pack for March of 2013. Both packs are said to contain four new maps, new unspecified weapons, equally new and equally unspecified vehicles, and "more." While Battlefield Premium subscribers gain access to DLC content two weeks earlier than regular folk, we expect the December and March launch windows to apply to both categories of people, provided the Premium launches aren't near the tail end of either month.

A major part of Facebook's business, in addition to keeping an accurate and exceedingly detailed log of the horrible web of lies you spin during your daily social activities, is as an advertising platform. As it turns out, advertising on Facebook can be pretty helpful, at least if the product you're shilling is something globally recognized like Battlefield 3.

"Electronic Arts recently spent $2.75 million promoting Battlefield 3 on Facebook," said Facebook COO Sheryl K. Sandberg during the company's first investor call since going public. "They attributed $12.1 million of their sales to these ads, translating to a 4.4x return on their Facebook marketing spend." Sandberg didn't elaborate on how EA extrapolated that figure.

An independent study performed on 60 different Facebook advertising campaigns showed that 70 percent of campaigns analyzed saw a 300 percent return on investment at minimum, according to Sandberg, while 49 percent of campaigns enjoyed 500 percent returns. It's difficult to determine how well that figure scales up, considering its small sample size, but we're sure that the simple act of typing "500 percent returns" has caused several dozen advertising executives to salivate uncontrollably.