Mercenaries 2: World in Flames

EA: Our licensing deal with Middle-earth Enterprises has expired, forcing us to shutdown the online services for The Lord of the Rings games. We hope you have enjoyed playing these games online and appreciate your patronage. There's still time for one last epic tower rush!...

Split-Screen: Pandemic Studios is officially shut with over 200 employees being shown the door. The fate of The Saboteur is thankfully not jeopardized, but another project – one that may have found more resonance with gamers – has been. This was Pandemic's latest sequel to the Mercenaries franchise, touted as a multiplayer sandbox game for the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, called Mercenaries Inc.

GoGamer's 48 Hour Madness is again underway, this time around offering a host of titles including Mirror's Edge, Prince of Persia, Mercenaries 2 and Shaun White Snowboarding for under $6 while supplies last.

As you may already know and bitch about, some EA PC games only allow the owner to install the game on five machines. Back in December, EA released a de-authorization tool for Spore which allowed users to switch these five authorizations around between machines. Now they've unveiled a new tool that allows you to do this for over a dozen different games with SecuROM.

X-Play writes, We began hearing rumors of two new characters in Mercenaries 2: World in Flames earlier this week and tonight, X-Play has the exclusive details straight from Pandemic. Tune-in to an all-new X-Play at 8PM ET to find out who you'll be playing as in Mercenaries 2 along with exclusive footage of the characters in action. Let's just say, one has a very expensive wardrobe. Who do you think it will be? Also, Adam and Morgan will review Midnight Club: Los Angeles and get a Hands On with Tomb Raider: Underworld.

From G4: Turns out that the rumors were true! Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are indeed coming to Mercenaries 2: World in Flames as playable characters in an upcoming update. X-Play landed the exclusive story and snagged some extra footage for us. We just had to set it to Hail to the Chief. Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb revealed the news just moments ago on X-Play in the Gaming Update. Tom Stratton of Pandemic Studios gave the following statement to X-Play: Mercenaries 2 is a game seemingly ripped straight out of today's headlines and fueled with the same type of over-the-top action found in the best summer blockbuster films. It only makes sense we inject the game with a spin on current affairs. The timing was too good to let pass.

ShackNews writes: With Pandemic's dangerously flammable open-world game Mercenaries 2: World in Flames set to receive a patch soon for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, publisher Electronic Arts has sent along a trailer commemorating the occasion. Entitled Total Payback, the update adds an undisclosed amount of explosions as well as cheat codes and six new playable characters. It drops on October 13 on Xbox 360 and October 23 on PlayStation 3. Paid DLC will follow in November.

Pandemic and Electronic Arts' open world action game Mercenaries 2 has only been out for a few weeks but EA is already planning to release a major patch to the console versions The patch is so big it has a name; Total Payback. The patch will enable cheats, add more playable characters to the game and more. The PC version of Mercenaries 2 already has a patch but it contains none of the extras that the Total Payback patch will have. PC owners will apparently have to do without the console extras, as EA's PR spokesperson tells Big Download...

Eurogamer writes: EA plans to reinforce Mercenaries 2 with free downloadable content this month (pinch, punch, etc.) and a bigger update in November. The first round of content is called Total Payback and includes a cheat that unlocks all the weapons, vehicles and airstrikes, and another one for infinite health and ammo. The Total Payback pack also includes cross-region co-op, allowing you to play the game with people from all over the world, and six new playable characters. There's one called Blanco, and one called Fiona, and Ewan and Eva. The other two names are secret, for some reason. Perhaps they're rude.

At 1.4 GB is downloading the Mercenaries 2: World in Flames demo worth your time? PS3 Attitude's Brodiesan writes: With a meta-review score of the final product in the mid-70s it's quite apparent that Mercenaries 2 is an accomplished, if not flawed, game but if you're currently on the fence this demo will do little to sway you to the purchasing side. With its immense size and limited playability we'd recommend skipping this one and just pick up the actual game if wanton destruction and mission-based objectives are your bag.