Midnight Club L.A.

Free South Central DLC Coming to Midnight Club L.A.
Free map add-on and premium cars, races, and other content all coming in 2009.

Now that everyone should actually be able to progress through Midnight Club: Los Angeles, what is Rockstar's next step in supporting the latest entry in the Midnight Club series? We learned today that they're planning to release downloadable content that will add a new area to the already-large map: South Central.
This new area is roughly one-third of the size of the current MC: L.A. map and will contain landmarks like the USC campus and the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, according to Rockstar. Alongside the release of the 'South Central upgrade map' will be the premium 'South Central content pack.' There's no indication as to what the pack will cost, but we know that it will include new cars, a motorcycle, SUVs (which aren't currently available in L.A.), races, music, and more.

All of this content is expected to be released in early 2009 on both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

GAMINGLADDERS.EU

Need For Speed

Need For Speed Series Possibly Cut By EA
Director of communications says publisher is "working through a process" with their products.

Not more than a month after the release of Need For Speed: Undercover, the Electric Playground is reporting that Electronic Arts may be cutting the franchise entirely. The videogame web show claims that future titles in the series have been canceled. EA director of communications Colin Macrae provided Electric Playground with the following comment:
"We're working through a process on people, products, and facilities at EA and don't have any announcements today."
Undercover, the most recent entry in the long-running franchise, was received fairly well but didn't crack the top 20 in the NPD sales charts for the month of November. Earlier in the year, EA CEO John Riccitiello had spoken of plans to split the Need for Speed development team into two groups, allowing for a 24-month cycle for creating each game rather than the 12 months cycle that he said "torture[d] a very talented group of people."
If this report is true, I'm disappointed that we'll never get the chance to see what could have come from giving this series a much-needed boost in development time to try out new ideas. And unless the publisher already has new plans for the creators of Need For Speed, we could be seeing further layoffs from EA soon, as has been previously predicted. We'll keep checking for official confirmation and word from EA on what's happening to the Need for Speed franchise and why.