Others would never beat Call of Duty at their own game unless they had massive backing and a superior or easily distinguished product, said Pitchford.

"You really have to go for it. You really have to spend a lot. You have to not only out brute-force the market leader, but out-clever them. The game has to be better, the marketing and production better have to be... Everything has to be bigger and better."

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When asked about rumours regarding the studio’s closure, Zach Wilson, a level designer and writer at Kaos, tweeted, “That's what I'm hearing, that Kaos is shutting down, details to come. Most of the devs already have jobs with new studios anyways.”

This was followed by, “It'll be interesting to see how THQ corporate spins this one,” and, “I hear the studio got a box of Saint's Row-branded dildos with a note that read ‘Go f*** yourselves.’”

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At the time of writing, THQ’s shares have fallen 21.04 per cent.

Homefront is currently scoring 72/100 on review aggregation site Metacritic.

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Speaking with Eurogamer, creative director and general manager David Votypka said, “We've seen really expert players race through it pretty quickly – five hours, a little less. We've seen players take eight to 10 hours to play it. So it's a range, there. It depends who you ask.”

Votypka insisted that the game’s length was comparable to the games it intends to compete with, namely Activision’s Call of Duty and Electronic Arts’ Medal of Honor and Battlefield titles.

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The pretend protest will see hired actors marching across the Golden Gate Bridge and end at Yerba Buena Gardens, opposite the venue of the Game Developers Conference in the Moscone Center.

Our latest experience with the shooter left us with some reservations ahead of its imminent release.

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If you want to pose an uncomfortable question to a member of Microsoft’s Xbox team, ask them what they would most like the Xbox 360 to be remembered for: Gears of War or Kinect. On the one hand, Epic’s third-person shooter series has not only managed to sustain the machine’s relevance to a bevy of core gamers, it has also provided something of a developmental road map beyond Halo. On the other, the company wants the machine to pull in families whose gaming sensibilities are more likely to be informed by Farmville than Fenix.

Such is the tightrope Microsoft walks when pitching the Xbox 360 in 2011. Its Xbox Showcase event in San Francisco on Friday (NZDT) erred more on the gamer side of the equation – but not by much.

Here are some of the more notable titles on show.

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It also announced that Warhammer 40,000 MMO Dark Millennium will be release in 2012 alongside the Guillermo Del Toro collaboration inSane.

Both WWE Online and Company of Heroes Online have been cancelled and the publisher has closed its Korean office.

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There are infinitely more forgotten failures than there are blockbuster successes in the first-person shooter genre. Nonetheless, a glance at the balance sheets of Call of Duty, Halo and Battlefield will help you to understand why so many look at the genre with covetous eyes and decide that they’d also like a slice of that shot-riddled pie.

Genres also come in and out of style. It’s unlikely that the first-person shooter is going to fall out of favour any time soon but the growing sentiment is that most of this year’s highly anticipated entries into the category oversold and under-delivered. As innovation begins to stagnate it’s probable that next year’s offerings will be viewed with increasing scepticism by consumers.

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In the attack two South Korean soldiers were killed and 17 were injured. Three civilians were hurt and the island has been evacuated.

In response, the South returned fire, sent fighter jets into the area and has since promised “enormous retaliation” if the North continues to show aggression.

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What won’t be a problem is investing in the narrative once the game is actually in front of you. Written by Apocalypse Now screenwriter John Milius, Homefront may be a standout addition in an increasingly popular genre: the thematic, narrative-driven shooter.

Aliens, mutants, terrorists and Nazis will always be popular pop culture fodder, easy prey that we don’t have to think on too carefully before double-tapping the digital trigger. Perhaps some feel that the henchmen of rogue communist nations should be no different, but there’s something unsettling about indulging in a flight of martial fancy that has been built from the ground up on international current events.

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I had a look at a demo of Homefront, a first person shooter coming from Kaos Studios, part of THQ, and you know what? I’m optimistically enthusiastic about this one.

It offers rather a grim vision of a future where the U.S. is invaded and occupied by North Korea, but I think what I liked about it was that the game – well, the demo at least anyway – was set in a rural American town. No soaring skyscrapers with conduits and pipes and police patrolling the streets, but a run-down collection of houses, tents and shacks. Almost shanty town looking, with overgrown weeds and grass at the front of houses and boards nailed to broken windows and wallpaper peeling from the walls inside houses. Windmills and solar panels are bolted to roofs and structures.

It’s a first person shooter through and through, but it has some nice elements which might just lift it from that crowded genre into the stratosphere.

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