Microsoft announced on Monday that it would be selling a 250 GB hard-disc drive (HDD) add-on for the Xbox 360 gaming console on March 11, but there’s a catch: The hard drive, for now, will only be available in Japan. The device will retail for 15,540 yen, or approximately $170. According to the press release (when translated from Japanese), two other products, a Wireless Controller Game Pack and a Wireless LAN adapter N will also go on sale on March 11. The wireless control will retail for 5,775 yen (about $63) and the wireless LAN adapter is listed at (nearly $100). The game pack includes an Xbox 360 black wireless controller, and four Xbox LIVE Arcade titles: Bomberman Live, the puzzle game Lumines, Pac-Man: Championship Edition and Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2.

Bioware's Ray Muzyka has been spilling some Bio-beans over on Eurogamer today. In the public interview, he says that while there is both PDLC (the "P" stands for "Premium") being developed for Mass Effect 2 and expansion content planned for Dragon Age: Origins, most of the core team for the sci-fi series has already started working on the as-yet-unannounced Mass Effect 3. He does promise that there's been a vision from the beginning and that the vision has been tweaked and changed as the games are coming along, so hopefully the trilogy will lead to a worthwhile conclusion.

Disc and download, 30th March. Rockstar has announced that Grand Theft Auto: Episodes from Liberty City will be released for the PS3 and PC on 30th March. As with the original releases for Xbox 360, the two episodes will be available on a standalone disc in the shops, or as add-ons for GTAIV that can be downloaded from PlayStation Network and Games for Windows Live. PC players will enjoy the added benefits of 32-player multiplayer and an advanced video editor. According to Kotaku, the Episodes disc will cost $39.99 in the US, with the individual downloads costing $19.99 each. There's no word on UK or European pricing yet.

But MS's operating income is on the up. Microsoft has announced its financial results for the last three months of 2009, revealing a drop in sales of Xbox 360 units. The company shifted 5.2 million machines during the quarter, down 13 per cent year-on-year. Revenues for the Entertainment and Devices Division dropped from $3.26 billion to $2.9 billion. However, more Elite and special edition Xbox 360s were shifted than in previous years, according to Kotaku. That helped the division enjoy a whopping rise in operating income from $130 million in 2008 to $375 million.

Find out how you can acheive the game's full 1000 points, courtesy of our sister site, GameSpy.

Will arrive in West a "little later". Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase has confirmed downloadable content for the game. He gave no details on what or when, but told OPM Benelux (via VG247) that "we did prepare a DLC but it will arrive a little later in the West". Strangely, Kitase was - just a day earlier - reported to have said DLC wasn't being considered for FFXIII at present.

Based purely on gameplay mechanics, the new Xbox Indie Game from Kydos Studio, titled Soul, is simple. The goal: Guide a dead man's soul to heaven. You do this by moving the soul through corridors while avoiding the walls and various hazards. It's the background art and atmosphere that make the game freaky, however. The game is filled with disturbing imagery and pop-out scares, like some kind of nightmarish game of Operation. Check out a trailer after the break and grab the trial version using the link below.

Welcome to the Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2 multiplayer demo! Get ready to feel the heat of battle in the vast Port Valdez map set on the Alaskan coastline. Fight together to secure valuable crates in 'Rush Mode' as the action progresses seamlessly across a variety of different locations. Delivering best-in class vehicle warfare and unprecendented levels of destruction Battlefield: Bad Company™2 will deliver an all-out war experience unlike any other. Demo ends 25th February 2010.

Having seen the game debuted during the 2009 VGA broadcast, we sat down for a live demo of 2K's Spec Ops: The Line last week at the company's Northern California headquarters. Behind the controls was Cory Davis, lead designer at Yager (developer of -- you guessed it -- Yager), who led us through a roughly 15 minute slice of the game designed to convey the uniqueness of the setting and some pleasantly surprising play mechanics that tie into its backstory. Set about 18 months after a massive sandstorm has ravaged Dubai, the game sees players entering this "no man's land" as part of an elite team sent to locate the origin of a transmission from an earlier mission that had been presumed dead, swallowed up by the sand. The demo began mid-firefight, with the player character (voiced by a decidedly all-business Nolan North) and two AI squad mates seeking cover behind remnants of an office, as unknown gunmen fired at them from a half-collapsed building nearby. What happened next was, well ... unexpected and very cool.

Turn 10 is giving players a chance to vote for the vehicles that will be included in a future Forza Motorsport 3 DLC release. Running until January 29, a poll on car enthusiast site Jalopnik.com features 120 vehicles for players to choose from, focusing specifically on "iconic" and "classic" rides. The partnership with Jalopnik doesn't end there; March's Forza 3 DLC pack will feature the most "coveted 2009 and 2010 models" as chosen by the site's editors. If you're looking for your favorite whip to make the cut, you best make your click. Wait, what's this? The Batmobile is not on the list? Where's the option for a write-in candidate, huh?

Insects! Pressure! Living machines! Nav-Bot! Irrational Games has explained that the enemies of BioShock weren't always sentient humans; once upon a time the inhabitants of Rapture and holders of ADAM were insects. "One of the original inspirations for BioShock was Ken Levine's belief that it was getting too hard to create meaningful human interactions in games. His first take on a solution: model meaningful insect interactions, like you would see on a nature show," said designer Alexx Kay on the Irrational Games website. "BioShock would feature a complex ecology of creatures that interacted in simple, easy-to-get ways. Harvesters would gather resources and bring them back to Queens. Aggressors would attack the Harvesters, Protectors would guard them. (The Queens were large, immobile creatures, with lots of Adam, who could summon Protectors if attacked.) There would never be any speech, or any indication of higher intelligence.

Better get going to San Francisco. The third instalment in the Fable series is set to get its first public showing next month. As reported on the Fable III Facebook page, the game will be on show at the X10 event in San Francisco, which takes place on 10th - 11th February. "Of course Lionhead is excited about showing the latest of Fable III, but we're also very much looking forward to all other games and announcements," a post on the page reads.

Fenix and Santiago already signed up. A couple of familiar faces from the Gears of War series are set to star in the next Lost Planet game. That's judging by a trailer shown at a Capcom event in Japan, as seen by Kotaku. Both Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago made an appearance in the trailer. Word is they will be exclusive downloadable characters for the Xbox 360 version of the game, and they won't play any role in the story mode.

I was an unlikely choice to review Mass Effect 2. Unlike most of the Joystiq staff, I wasn't in love with the first entry in the series. Oh, I could see the promise, but I had a hard time getting past the clunky combat, the terrible vehicle sequences and a damnably irksome inventory system. But in a weird way, I was the very best person to review the sequel, because BioWare has gutted the original framework, doing away with everything that didn't work and replacing it with something vibrant, something engaging. All the while, the developers have expanded on the sweeping yet personal scope of the first game that made such an impression on so many. The resulting concoction is the best game BioWare has ever made and the best action RPG in history.

It's not a good sign when Xbox know-it-all Major Nelson admits in his This Week on Arcade post that "information on the game is light, so here is what I was able to find." However, we can't blame him -- we'd never heard of KrissX, this week's new XBLA game, before today either. Apparently, the Blitz Games-developed, Konami-published puzzler tasks players with solving crosswords and unscrambling "over 3,500 jumbled words that will test your trivia knowledge and expand your own daily vocabulary." We're automatically apprehensive about games that try to sneak some education into our entertainment regimen -- we'll have to wait and see if KrissX is actually fun enough to deserve our 800 ($10).

Next instalment to be sans controller? Forza Motorsport developer Turn 10 appears to be gearing up for a Natal-powered project. Buried in a job posting for a business development manager was a challenge to "set strategy and drive high-quality game content for our next generation games including the Natal platform". And that's that; no further mention of Natal was made.

It seems impossible, right? Well, this Xbox Live thing is apparently pretty popular. Trixie revealed via her Twitter account that in the seven years since the service launched on the original Xbox, gamers have racked up 17 billion hours on Xbox Live, equal to 2 hours of play time for every person on the planet. And with 20 million subscribers on the service, you're looking at an average of 850 hours for every member. Another one of her Tweets states that there have been "more than 1.2 billion downloads of gaming and entertainment content," which averages out to about 100 downloads per second. And according to our completely scientific analysis of these figures, we conclude around 750 million of those 1.2 billion-plus downloads were free gamer pics and themes, Rambo stuff specifically.

During an online community Q&A session held earlier this week, Remedy's Mika Reini dashed hopes for an Alan Wake demo before the game's launch. When asked whether or not the game would see a pre-release demo, Reini replied, "Demo before the launch, most likely not." Of course, that doesn't rule out the possibility of demo after the game's release, though Reini didn't imply that one was in the works. Reini also responded to a question regarding whether or not we'll see an Alan Wake collector's edition. He wouldn't confirm if a collector's edition is in the cards, and opted instead to cheekily suggest people keep an eye on the official Alan Wake forum. If Remedy isn't working on a collector's edition, allow us to make a suggestion: Just throw a high-powered flashlight in with the game. Bam, instant collector's edition -- and one that would really mess with the people who bought the Modern Warfare 2 special edition.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Microsoft Game Studios head Phil Spencer responded to criticism that Microsoft takes fewer risks than Sony in first-party development by referencing Project Natal -- "if there isn't risk in Natal then I don't know what's keeping me up at night." "We're trying to build a set of new games, new experiences that will have the same quality metrics of our past games," he said, "but really entice both existing 360 customers and new people. It's a huge challenge, a huge investment and it's fraught with risk."

Were you quick enough to catch the handful of Halo: Reach screens released via the EBGames website? Well it happened, we assure you, and luckily the folks at XCast Online snagged the whole lot of 'em. That said, if you've already got the February issue of Game Informer, chances are you've seen these screens before -- that's because a good deal of them are directly from that issue's cover story on the upcoming prequel. If EB Games has already gotten its hands on these screens, chances are we'll be seeing an official release from Microsoft in the not-so-distant future. In the meantime, we've pestered the publisher for some idea of when exactly that'll be.

Between Ska Studios' The Dishwasher last year, this year's I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MBIES 1N IT!!!1, and the recent announcement of Charlie Murder for Xbox Live Indie Games, the nascent developer has certainly been establishing a name for itself. The game's Facebook page offers us a first look at the characters and a bit of the gameplay (which seems to be an arcade beat-em' up with punk rockers/zombies), as well as a glimpse into the fictional band's history. The game's announcement tells us that Charlie Murder follows the eponymous punk rock band on a side-scrolling journey to find the lead singer's girlfriend, Skelekitten, murdering everything in its path along the way. Ska Studios will be heading to PAX East and we've been told there's a "good chance" the game will be there, though a release window of "March 2010" means we might even be playing from the comfort of our couches before that.

A new addition has appeared in the Xbox Live Games on Demand store. You can now download Tony Hawk feather-ruffler Skate for £19.99. It's an oldie, but a goodie - Skate scored 9/10 when we reviewed it back in September 2007.

Microsoft has revealed just how much of a headstart Xbox 360 owners will have with the new downloadable content for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. "We have a 30-day timed exclusive on the Modern Warfare content packs," a spokesperson told Eurogamer. "So it will be available on other platforms, but you get to try and play on Xbox 360 first." The exclusivity deal was first announced at E3 last year. Back then John Schappert said it covered the first two map packs for Mod War 2.

Ruffian Games has revealed that Crackdown 2 will "definitely" get a pre-release demo, thank goodness. "You can definitely expect a demo to hit Live before the game is out but I can't say when that will be... Yet. The Crackdown demo was fantastic and we want to carry on in that form," James Cope, producer, told IGN (via VG247). Open-world games can often prove tricky to cut into demo-sized chunks, making a sampler far from a shoe-in.