Daily News: COD Stats, Journalism, RockStar and Portal

I do like to keep this site pretty clean and not drown you guys in dozens of news posts taken straight from press releases. That does frequently mean, however, that you miss out on some interesting stuff. I’ve decided to do a daily news round-up post that pulls together the most useful, interesting or just plain weird things we hear about each day.

Biggest story of the day was obviously the Call of Duty: Elite announcement that you’ve doubtless already seen here on The Average Gamer ;) What you may have missed was the Wall Street Journal publishing it a full 14 hours before the internal online and print embargo that the rest of us were given. Cue this cathartic rant by MCV’s Ben Parfitt:

Of course, if the press really wanted rid of this practice we’d refuse to cover any games or information protected by an NDAs. Perhaps if Activision had told us all that WSJ was getting special treatment a few of us might have torn up the agreement and left the Elite event right there and then.
But who’s going to do that? Gotta get dem clickety-clicks, innit.
– Ben Parfitt, OPINION: Who’s the more foolish?

And because I’m a shameless self-promoter, I shall point out that this is just another ugly side to the gaming press’s dependency on PRs for content that I talked about in my personal blog last week.

That’s the elephant in the room, isn’t it? …Who advertises on games websites? Games companies. Who provides the content? Games companies. Everybody knows this.
– Debbie Timmins, Am I Destroying Games Journalism?

In other news:

The Official PlayStation blog announced that the PlayStation Network will be fully functional again by the end of the week. It’s not quite the previously-reported May 31st but it’ll do.

This beautifully strange live-action Portal video has been making the rounds:

RockStar and/or Xbox announced an L.A. Noire Rockstar Pass which gives you all forthcoming LA Noire downloadable content but at half the individual price.

GTA.net have released an amazing map of Liberty City made in Google Streetview.

And finally, Falmouth-based café Loading has created a fabulous Resident-Evil-inspired cocktail.

[hat tips to Joe Barron and Sinan Kubba]