Tech Olive

According to NPD analyst Anita Frazier, Black Ops has pushed Wii Play out of its #1 spot on USA’s all-time best-selling charts after only a few months on the market. Last October, Nintendo reported about 13 million copies of Wii Play had been sold since its December 2006 release, and reports are saying that Black Ops has surpassed that.

Activision has yet to release the actual number of units sold for Black Ops, but we do know that 5.6 million units were sold on release day, and that Black Ops had surpassed $1 billion in sales by late December.

via [Joystiq]

Developer Eidos Montreal confirmed via Twitter that the PC release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution will release August 23rd in the US and the 26th in Europe. Don’t forget to pre-order your copy of the game for some bonus starting items and bonus missions.

The Bargain Bin is a weekly feature that helps out gamers in this tough economy. How does it help? Once a week, it offers a great and cheap game ($10 or less) to keep you going until your next paycheck.

With new independent developers popping up every day, each with their own games to show the world, it can be difficult to find the hidden gems in all the hustle. Luckily, the Independent Games Festival helps us with this very issue. This week’s budget title was among only a few finalists for IGF’s prestigious “Seamus McNally” award.

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Always working to further improve Steam’s user-friendliness and security, Valve has announced the latest feature to enter beta: Steam Guard. Steam Guard is a system designed to keep user accounts safe from hackers and other nefarious persons, even if your password gets out in public.

“Account phishing and hijacking are our top support issues,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “With Steam Guard, we’ve taken a big step towards giving customers the account security they need as they purchase more and more digital goods.”

What Steam Guard offers is hardware-based recognition and authentication, much like many online banking systems use. For a login to be accepted, you must manually define if a PC is allowed access via an activation email sent to your Steam account’s email address. Gabe Newell is so confident in the technology that he even publicly released his login details to prove the system’s reliability. In the future, Steam Guard will make use of technology built into second-generation Intel CPUs that generates a new password every 30 seconds.

[Press Release]

Finally and officially announced, the third installment in the Saints Row franchise will be exclusively gracing Game Informer’s April cover. Saints Row: The Third will take place after The Third Street Saints have evolved past being just a street gang, straight into super-stardom with bobble-heads, branded clothing, and specialty merchandise. This new fame becomes a problem for the gang after getting noticed by The Syndicate, a massive crime fraternity.

“Saints Row: The Third puts you on top of the world, right at the beginning of the game, with all the perks that go along with being the head of an elite criminal organization,” said Danny Bilson, THQ Executive Vice President, Core Games. “There’s no delivering pizza, no shuttling family members about in a long series of taxi missions. Instead, you take all the power of the Third Street Saints and you take the world by storm.”

via [Game Informer]

As Black Ops slowly evolves into a snag-free multiplayer experience, a new server-based PC patch has rolled out. Fixing only some issues with reserve slots and kicking players, this should be the last patch we see before getting the large upcoming 1.07 update that Treyarch keep mentioning. Hopefully we’ll get details on that patch soon.

Also on the Black Ops multiplayer front, we’re getting another double-XP weekend running from March 4th to the 7th on all platforms.

[Twitter, Community Forums]

For the first week of March, Steam is offering a fantastic 50% off deal for anyone looking to purchase one of the scariest games ever created. For a mere $9.99, Amnesia: The Dark Descent can be yours. The sale is to celebrate the game’s Independent Games Festival (IGF) 2011 finalist nomination.

[Press Release]

Despite Crysis 2‘s unintentional beta release last month, Crytek has powered forward with the release of Crysis 2‘s public multiplayer demo. You can grab the 1.5GB demo for yourself over at Big Download and frag some Nanosuit-wearing noobs.

Video-making team DefendTheHouse posted a new video detailing their special plans for the month of March. Each day in the month of March, the team will release a new “Black Ops Mythbusters” video testing a new myth. Now’s the time to subscribe to their YouTube channel if you want to catch all 31 videos over the next month. Check out their announcement video after the break.

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After several delays, the PC release of Fable 3 slipped into the unknown and we were left with only an undelivered promise and some teasing gameplay at this year’s CES. Well, it seems publisher Microsoft has once again returned to the project, and we’ve been given a new date for release: May 17th, 2011. The PC release will bring Nvidia’s 3D Vision technology as well as a hardcore difficulty that isn’t available on console versions.

via [Big Download]