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Reports began circulating this morning about major layoffs at a handful of Activision-owned development studios, affecting as much as half of Radical Entertainment's staff (Prototype), an undisclosed amount of Neversoft employees (Guitar Hero, Tony Hawk), and the entirety of Luxoflux (Tranformers). An Activision rep confirmed two former studio layoffs to us this afternoon, though a representative didn't city any official numbers -- the rep also told us he could "confirm the closure of Luxoflux."

The full, significantly more vague, company statement given out to everyone reads: "Activision Publishing continually evaluates its resources to ensure that they are properly matched against its product slate and strategic goals. In 2010, the company's SKU count will be smaller than in 2009 driven in part, by a decrease in the number of music-based games we will be releasing. As we discussed on our earnings conference call yesterday, we are directing our resources against the largest and most profitable business segments, and as part of this initiative, we are realigning our resources to better reflect our slate and the market opportunities. At the same time, we are increasing our digital/online capabilities as we expect that digital/online will continue to become a more meaningful part of our business model in the years ahead."

The image above could serve as kind of robotic Rorschach test. What do you see? A cute little tripod help-o-bot, whose head is cocked curiously to the side, as though it's studying its new master to better serve his or her robotic needs? Or is it a three-legged killing machine, who's observing his new master's weaknesses, which it plans to exploit with its now-charging eye lasers?

Sadly, the answer's not as provocative as either of those two choices -- its actually a photo of a Project Natal prototype, as nabbed by the Seattle Times. According to the report which includes the photograph, Natal units and iPhones are being produced in the same factory. We're terrified of the thought of these two consumer electronics cross-pollinating -- we're pretty sure that's how SkyNet got started.

[Via Siliconera]

Our elderly readers may remember all the way back in October of 2009 when we showed you the first video of Microsoft Research's muscle-based game control interface. While it'd be a safe bet to say that the project is still very much in the prototype phase, the experimental division of Microsoft recently filed a patent application for the "Wearable Electromyography-based Controller for Human-Computer Interface", effectively bringing us all one step closer to a future with fully realized air guitar.

Sure, the interface could be used for "computer stuff" or something we suppose, but what'd be the fun in that? Though, as Engadget points out, we're not likely to see anything more solid on this in the near future -- most Microsoft Research projects are "pretty far from market." That being said, a combination of muscle sensor-based control and the not quite 1:1 video capture of Project Natal could produce some rather intriguing results. Your move, Big M.

[Via Engadget]

The website for Eric Testroete, who recently made the rounds for his "big head mode" Halloween costume, shows work-in-progress screens of an unannounced Wii war game he animated for MLB Superstars developer Deep Fried Entertainment. The game uses an almost top-down, zoomed-out perspective, and appears to put the player (or players) in control of jeeps equipped with machine guns.

As Kotaku notes, it looks rather like Konami's Jackal, prompting the site to speculate that it's a ReBirth made for Konami, like the recent Castlevania, Contra, and Gradius games. If true, it would be the first ReBirth title not to be developed by M2 in Japan. Of course, the American side of Konami is also working on refreshes of old Konami franchises in the form of Rocket Knight, so there is precedent.

Fans of Barry Pepper and blowin' the crap out of everything in sight need to pay attention to this next string of words: Steam is discounting Prototype by 20% until August 13, bringing the game's price down to $40. While the story is largely forgettable, there's big value in elbow-dropping tanks and throwing air conditioners into helicopters. Oh, and consuming everyone in Manhattan ain't too bad a time, either.

Prototype and Infamous get compared pretty frequently, but you're probably more interested in this: which one has easier Trophies? Easy, that award goes to Infamous.

You're sure going to see a lot of green arrows in the chart below. However, don't be fooled -- while sales have gone up from last month, overall sales are down from 2008. In fact, total industry sales dropped 31% year-over-year to a measly $1.17 billion.

-DS: 766K132K (+20%)
-Wii: 361K71K (+24%)
-Xbox 360: 240K65K (+37%)
-PS3: 165K34K (+26%)
-PSP: 164K64K (+64%)
-PS2: 153K36K (+31%)

Check out the software sales chart after the break.

Tiger Woods Pro Tour 10 and Fight Night Round 4 dominated UK sales charts for the second week in a row (albeit in a different order), taking first and second place, respectively. In total, Electronic Arts software accounted for four of the top 10 titles for the week ending July 11, according to Chart Track.

Top 10 chart mainstay Wii Fit fell to number six, while Ubisoft's Western-themed Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood climbed ahead to number five. Activision Blizzard also scored big with Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (#3), Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (#9) and Prototype (#10) in the platform-combined top 10 list. With Transformers sneaking into the third spot, we're content to find out that, for all the cred British people get for being classy, they still make as many terrible decisions as North Americans. Cool, innit?

It appears that Amazon is slashing and absorbing the extra cost of Prototype, as the action-packed, vertical sandbox gorefest has been reduced by $20 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC for today only.

The game was certainly well-received, so nobody is going to spit on you for deciding to take Amazon's offer. Well, inFamous' Cole might spit on you, which would be shocking. But not as shocking as these photos of him and Alex Mercer when they aren't saving/destroying the world!

[Thanks, Lesek]

In the celebration of all things great and American, we're proud to present the characters of inFamous and Prototype cross-dressing. YAY! (See inFamous' Cole after the break.)

Okay, so you're probably wondering where these images came from. Yahtzee presented a challenge to the development teams of these two games after he couldn't decide which game was better in a recent episode of Zero Punctuation. So, he jokingly said the "winner" would be whichever team sends in an image of the other game's protagonist cross-dressing.

And now the world is a much better place.

According to Chart Track's UK software sales figures from last week, we know the Barry Pepper-voiced free-roamer, Prototype, has managed to secure the top spot. It wasn't an easy battle, as Radical Entertainment's title had some stiff competition in Terminal Reality's Ghostbusters, which made its debut in the UK last week.

The ghost bustin' reunion was not enough to topple the "go anywhere, kill everything" game, and managed to secure the bronze with a third place showing. It should be noted that this is the all-format charts, and with it being a PS3 exclusive in the territory (Xbox 360 owners do have options, though), third is pretty impressive for a game on just one platform (excluding Wii Fit). As for second place, The Sims 3 dropped down from its cushy throne last week thanks to a 49% decline in sales. Don't feel too bad for the game, though -- it did have the best PC launch in EA's history, you know.

[Update: We've picked a winner! Congratulations, mahunoy! Everyone else: thanks for the best wishes. Here's to five (hundred?) more! Now, enough playtime. We've got some news to report on!]

Earlier this week, Joystiq turned five. Five! That's half a decade of daily video game reporting. That's over 38,000 posts and over 1.5 million of your comments. That's up from over 27,000 posts last year, and less than a million comments! Let's put that in perspective: even lowballing the average word count per post at 100 words (for example, this post is 339 words) that's nearly four million words! How does that stack up? If Joystiq had been a monthly magazine, and if you consider a standard printed page to be 250 words per page (spoiler: game magazines aren't 250 words per page), each issue would have been over 250 pages, with no images and no ads. And we're lowballing here! And that doesn't include comments.

So what? This is all to say, "Thanks!" Thanks for reading the site today; this week; this year; or this half-decade. Thanks for supporting our unique flavor of game journalism. Thanks for taking us to task when we get it wrong and for sharing when we get it right. Thanks for being interested enough in video games to read about them every day, multiple times a day, and for staying engaged.

So, what better way to say "thanks" than to give you free stuff. Introducing Swag Saturdays – every Saturday, we'll be donating something from our pile of free stuff to you, the Reader. Slow week, it may be a shirt for an iPhone game. This week: A superhero c-c-c-combo pack for your PS3, featuring both inFamous and Prototype.

Again, thanks!

-Love, Team Joystiq

Rules after the break!

Hitting retailers just two weeks after the PlayStation 3 exclusive (and highly regarded) inFamous, we were a bit worried about the fate of Radical Entertainment's Prototype. It seems from the response that most game reviewers are having to it, our worries were somewhat unfounded.

• 1UP (B-): "Making Alex [the main character] such a badass also proves to be Prototype's undoing. It becomes a fight to follow and control Alex in the midst of the action. This problem mounts the further you get into the game, leading to more frustration than fun ... Alex can essentially fly around the city. With his jump, air dash, and glide abilities fully powered up, and the basic ability to run on any surface, the buildings become like a giant jungle gym."
• Eurogamer (7/10): "Fans of serious hero fiction will find Prototype a bit of a turn-off. You're infected with some sort of virus ... and the story of why, told through snatches of video obtained by absorbing key characters (basically, weakening and eating them) and in moody cut-scenes, is basic and yet difficult to follow ... Mission design isn't very open-ended, usually boiling down to doing something violently or stealthily, but with such a vast array of attacking options you often have the luxury of trying something different."
• IGN (7.5/10): "How long can you do flying elbow drops onto tanks or throw people off of rooftops before it gets boring? The world itself here is far from the most engaging ... Since repetition is oftentimes the name of the game here, you can be sure you'll be doing uninspired tasks over and over again."
• Giant Bomb (4/5): "Radical almost went too far with its kitchen-sink approach to combat design, but the gameplay here is satisfying and broad enough that you can have plenty of fun with it even without mastering the nuances of every last combo and attack ... Prepare to be frustrated from time to time when the mission difficulty amps up to insane levels and you feel it's you against the entire world all of a sudden."

Did you just pick up the PS3 version of Prototype only to discover you can't, um, play it? You are not alone! If your PS3 tells you that you don't have enough hard disk space for the installation -- and you know that it's LYING to you -- then you'll have to use this workaround, provided by Activision support: change the amount of free hard disk space on your system by 700MB. This can be done by either installing another PS3 game (like Infamous), downloading game demos (like the Infamous demo), or downloading and removing videos from the hard drive (like videos of Infamous).

The Activision support site notes the team is working on a better solution: "We take this issue very seriously and are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause." We're sure PS3 owners will patiently wait for a patch.

[Thanks, Patrick!]

So, Prototype, we're a little worried about you, not gonna lie. Considering the recent wave of positive inFamous reviews, talk of Crackdown 2, and APB's E3 reveal, a game we once looked forward to greatly could quite possibly fall by the wayside.

Luckily, the developer walkthrough of "mission #7" (found after the break) helps to assuage our concerns and brings back some fire into our lonely, cold hearts. Unfortunately for the person piloting Prototype's main man Alex Mercer, things don't go so well and the video ends in tragedy (spoilerz! omg!). Hopefully we'll do better when we get our hands on the retail copy June 9.