Terrible news has befallen Realtime Worlds today. A report from Develop claims the CEO of Realtime Worlds flew to Colorado to tell employees its US branch will be shutting down. This comes days after Realtime Worlds laid off 60 employees and pledged continued dedication to its recently released MMO All Points Bulletin. It has now been confirmed that Realtime Worlds has entered administration, placing even more doubt on the companies future.

In anticipation of the July 6, 2010 release of Crackdown 2, Microsoft has debuted an animated mini-series based on the game’s tales of law and disorder in Pacific City. The five-part mini-series is called, “The Pacific City Archives”, which act as a bridge for the events between the first Crackdown and its upcoming sequel. The first episode was released on Friday, May 21, 2010.

The sequel machine continues to march ever-onward this year, and Crackdown will be seeing the same treatment this summer. The gaming public will get a chance to once again crack some heads in July, but I had my own chance yesterday at PAX East 2010.

During the single hour that the press was allowed to freely roam the expo hall, Crackdown 2 was the first on my list to check out. There was already a line, unfortunately, as I had overslept and managed to miss the first twenty minutes or so where press could wandering the floor. But that just meant that I got to watch other people play and had time to prepare myself for the inevitable onslaught.

While the prospect of a Crackdown sequel has been shot down in the past, the likelihood of it coming to fruition has increased, thanks to a 1UP report that Microsoft is funding a start-up studio titled Ruffian Games, with the singular of working on Crackdown 2.

However, the decision to take this action did not necessarily please Real Time Worlds studio developer Colin Macdonald who remarked that he was doubtful that Microsoft would…

In a move that represents the good kind of customer service, Microsoft and Bungie have fixed the “Rule of Three” fiasco that accompanied the Crackdown/Halo 3 Beta launch. Due to an unforeseen glitch in the system, many of the players that put in the time and effort to secure a Halo 3 Beta code by more »

Forum chatter on console mod site, TeamModders, may indicate that Microsoft started to crack down on modded Xbox 360s the day of the Halo 3 beta (Crackdown – get it?). The ban appears to affect systems with modded firmware using the system’s serial ID to determine the systems that get banned. Once banned, the system more »

The hype, the wait and then … more waiting. That’s essentially what happened to most people who tried to download the nearly 1 GB Halo 3 multiplayer beta through Crackdown earlier this week. The main glitches was in tying to download through the Xbox 360 game, Crackdown, which resulted in a grey (unselectable) menu option more »