Not to be one-upped by Square Enix’s announcement of the Final Fantasy XIV beta, Blizzard Entertainment has announced today that the closed beta test for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has officially begun. 
Invites should be going out right now, so if you’ve signed up for the beta with your Battle.net accounts, check to see if you’re in. 
“Our focus with Cataclysm has been to build on the knowledge we’ve gained through the previous expansions to deliver the best, most compelling World of Warcraft content for our players to date,” said Blizzard’s Mike …

Hope you haven’t traded it in yet, because Sega has announced that it’s releasing its second downloadable content for Aliens vs. Predator on July 7.
Called the “Bughunt Map Pack,” the DLC will contain two new multiplayer maps for “Deathmatch,” “Predator Hunt,” “Infestation,” “Species Deathmatch,” “Mixed Species Deathmatch,” and Domination. Also in the pack will be two more maps designed specifically for the “Survival” mode.
Sega says the maps will included “environment hazards and new weather effects.” Then again, it also says that detailed descriptions of the maps can be found …

Samsung has mercifully confirmed at an event in New York this evening that all Galaxy S versions — including the Captivate, Epic 4G, Vibrant, and Fascinate — will be receiving updates to Android 2.2 Froyo later this year and offer compatibility with Flash 10.1. All of the devices will be shipping with Android 2.1 out of the gate, so considering that Froyo’s already launched, we’re sure there’ll be no shortage of pressure to get the updates fast-tracked. Sprint says it won’t be a long wait on the Epic, but otherwise, …

Judging by some recently discovered website listings, two brand-new Activision titles are in the works. First up is Death Drive, which has a GameFly page and not much else. The rental outfit lists it as set for the Xbox 360 and PS3 with a November 2010 release date. Superannuation, for its part, says this is not related to the new James Bond title. That game — Bloodstone — had its own GameFly page. Past tense.
Meanwhile, over on the Australian Classification Board’s website, there’s a listing for a game called Above …

Funny story: at E3 this year, I had a chance to play Portal 2 cooperative multiplayer, while Jim (who wrote the preview) just watched a demonstration that I didn’t get a chance to see. Isn’t that hilarious? I’m here all week; tip your waitress, try the veal.
Where am I going with this? Oh, yeah — so Jim saw a pretty killer preview of the game in action, and now Valve’s nice enough to share it with the world. It will be releasing seven videos this week which will make …

When launched back in 2008, Acer’s Predator desktop was a mean gaming rig — and we don’t just mean because it had a tendency to actually set things on fire. We’re pretty sure the new, just announced revision of the desktop won’t suffer the same ailment, a non-customizable update that sports a 2.8GHz Core i7 930 CPU, an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 470 GPU, 1.5TB of storage, 12GB of DDR3 RAM, and an asking price of one buck under $2,000. That’s a solid deal, and the new black and orange case …

MDK2 is quite the game. It’s a little weird, but a total blast to play with some really creative level design for its three playable characters. Or so I’m told. I’ve never actually dug into it because I have a fear of characters with large pointy heads (damn you, Silent Hill!). However, if I can overcome my largiapointyheadphobia by later this year I will have another chance to play the game as Interplay and Beamdog have announced that the BioWare-developed game will be getting a Wii and PC release.
The Wii …

Destructoid HQ gets plenty of weird, cool and sometimes stupid pieces of swag to promote whatever game that needs promoting. The latest package to be thrown at our door (Goddamn FedEx guy … ) came from 2K Games and this is certainly one of the cooler pieces of promo items we’ve received since opening up shop in San Francisco.
As you can see in the video above and by the pictures in the gallery, we got a 1950s themed briefcase filled with all sorts of documents and pictures. Everything within the …