Last week, a survey leaked to Kotaku suggested that Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Evan Longoria would be on the cover of 2K Sports' Major League Baseball 2K10. 2K sent out a press release earlier today to make it official, but we now know that the four covers that the survey included were mere mock-ups. Six different box art designs, available for your viewing in the gallery below, accompanied the press release; you can vote for your favorite at 2ksports.com/vote. (They did the same thing for NBA 2K10.)

Longoria, like MLB 2K9 cover athlete Tim Lincecum, is one of baseball's most quickly rising stars; he made the AL All-Star team in his first two years in the league, and he recently won his first Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards. And he isn't related to Desperate Housewives star Eva Longoria.

Which cover do you guys like? I prefer the one pictured above. MLB 2K10 will be out in March for the PS3, 360, Wii, PS2, PSP, and PC. Cover voting will be open for two weeks, until noon EST on December 8th.

The recent talk of Pandemic has made me realize something: I haven't played a truly crazy action game since Mercenaries 2: World in Flames. And no, Modern Warfare 2 doesn't count. Can you fall hundreds of feet from a helicopter and still survive the landing? Exactly.

Just Cause 2, or as I like to call it sometimes, Just 'Cause 2, looks to be the next decent void-filler. Between the grappling hook improvements and the increased options for base jumping with a more vertical game world, I cannot wait for March 23 to get here.

I was the guy who spent an unholy amount of time just flying peacefully through the sky in Super Mario 64. Who knows what will happen to my social life when Just Cause 2 hits. Bad things, probably.

It makes sense that Traveller's Tales' LEGO games have heavily emphasized on-the-couch co-op play. While they may be intended for everyone, you get the distinct feeling these games are perfect for families with younger gamers.

But what about the rest of us? It's not always easy getting together in real life with our busy schedules and all. Enough LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues players felt this way -- LucasArts hopped on Twitter to tell us about an impending patch for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that'll add online co-op.

Is this going to be the norm now? It'd be neat if we didn't have to run a similar story a couple of months after LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 releases. Just saying.

[Via Kotaku]

Having spent some time with it, I can safely say that Ruffian Games' Crackdown 2 is absolutely no joke. 

Everything you loved about the original is back, and amped up for the sequel. Plus mutants, four player co-op action, and a slew of slick new weapons. Basically, it's exactly what fans of the original had been wanting for. What else could they need?

How about a ton of images, including screenshots, weapon art, and character art? Yeah, it's a lot. Start browsing the gallery early, because you've got your work cut out for you.

Ruffian has also kicked off an art competition, which will allow you to get your work into Crackdown 2 as graffiti. You're a talented, so give it a shot, eh?

Tis' the season for gift giving. With some many great games released this year, finding the perfect gift for that gamer in your life (or for yourself, you selfish jerk!) can be quite a task.

That's where we come in. Destructoid staff writers were asked to make a few holiday, game-related gift picks, either based on personal choice or simply in the spirit of giving. The results were wide and varied, as each staff member's tastes and gaming experiences, uh, vary widely. We're quite an eclectic bunch, that's for sure. 

Hit the jump to see what made the list, and we hope to ignite some gift-giving sparks for you this holiday.

As we said about 40 minutes ago, Borderlands DLC “The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned” is a thing that is happening right now over PSN and Xbox LIVE. I grabbed the content off of Xbox LIVE Marketplace this morning, hoping to put some quality hours into the material before having to hit the grind again. Turns out that I was only able to put about 30-40 minutes before putting down the controller. Bummer.

No matter, though -- I think I got gist of it. The DLC adds a central HUB to the core game, Dr. Ned’s little haunted island of awesome. Upon downloading the DLC, you’ll be told to hit a travel beacon and zip to the content if you so please. It’s that easy to break into, and that easy to leave if you so desire. But you probably won’t want to get out. The epic introduction to the content pulls you in hard.

And speaking of that introduction, there’s a TMT above in the header showing off the first 10 minutes of the DLC. You’ll catch some heavy narrative, some zombie-skull busting, and a brief look at the immediate environment. Its swampy, dark, and infested -- just what we expected the DLC was announced.

So, what do you guys think?

[Update: Just to be clear -- the DLC is no doubt longer than 40 mintues. I just had something come up.]

Cast away your fears of terrorist attack or natural disaster while immersed in a session of your favorite Xbox 360 game. It's no longer a problem if you live in New York.

New York State is planning on blasting out alerts of natural disasters, terrorist attacks and the like to your Xbox 360 messaging service from the Emergency Management Office. This is like an updated emergency broadcast system. The goal is to reach younger people to spend more time on game systems than they do radio or TV. Good call.

InformationWeek says that the plan is still early, and is only in the testing phase so far.

I'm one of those rare ones that has his messages shut off in Xbox Live. I guess I'm screwed should we be hit by the Big One one day.

Oh, and look at what one douche's reply at IW:

Wonderful. This is just more way for the government to invade our personal lives. I believe that the current warning system is quite adequate. At what cost is this being implemented and how many lives is it expected to save? Isn't there somewhere else that our money might be spent with greater impact?

Not a gamer, obviously.

A lot of people -- including a few Destructoid staff members -- didn’t dig the so-called “weak” conclusion to Borderlands. I can’t agree with the assessment for a few reasons (one being my epic confrontation with you-know-who), but I understand the argument. More insightful than my reactions to the matter, though, are Paul Helquist’s, a senior designer for the game. He told MTV Multiplayer that Gearbox is going to keep the poor reception of the ending in mind going forward, in both downloadable content and full games in the future.

"We went through lots of different iterations on what the ending of the game was,” Helquist said. “We ultimately ended up with what you get to play. We didn't know how people were going to react to it. Obviously the reaction hasn't been as strong as we had hoped.

“That's something we're going to be keeping in mind as we do new things, whether it's download content or other games in the future. We're gonna think more about it and try to get more user feedback before the game comes out so we can ensure that we'll have endings that you guys like in the future."

Later, Helquist said that, at the least, the ending of Borderlands keeps the story open for sequels and content. The recent release of the “Zombie Island of Dr. Ned,” is proof of that. It picks right up where the game trails off. Hell, it even adds zombies to the core game without issue. Weird, right?

As Nakky promised over on the official Super Street Fighter IV dev blog last week, the new issue of Famitsu carries within it some hot new character reveals for SSFIV. Officially joining the roster this Spring will be Adon, Cody and Guy from the Street Fighter Alpha series.

Looks like Adon's foot was probably the source of Chun-Li's pain in that Focus Attack screenshot we saw last week, and the new stage was Cody's. This being a leaked scan spotted over at Shoryuken, Capcom still has yet to release any official information on these characters. But a look at the scans gives us a taste of what kind of action they'll be bringing back to the game. 

Perhaps when they get to talking, they can tell us why Cody is still wearing his prison clothes and shackles after all this time.

And if our SFIII fans out there are feeling let down, don't. Take a look at the gallery below and you'll see that the cropped shot of Guy's punch is blocking a kunai. Furthermore, the text above that image in the magazine pulls the Chun-Li teaser stunt from last week and asks whose it might be. 

Hmm, kunai ... I don't want to speculate, but I'm going to guess her name definitely rhymes with Ibuki.

If there is one thing that people can't seem to agree on in the world of MMOs, it's how games that are designed to be played forever should fund themselves.

There are plenty of models out there, like subscriptions, micro-transactions, advertisements, but all of them seem to have their different issues. When we spoke to Jeff Strain about his new MMO company, Undead Labs, and his upcoming zombie MMO, we brought this up.

He had some interesting things to say about why paying a monthly or annual subscription fee is the best way to go.

cdv Software Entertainment and dtp entertainment have announced that its action-RPG, Divinity II: Eco Draconis, has gone gold. The title will hit North American retailers on January 5, 2010 for both PC and Xbox 360. 

The game is the sequel proper to 2002's Divine Divinity, and puts players in "the role of a young Dragon Slayer, a hero with the ability to transform into a dragon, and take to the skies to fight against an onslaught of deadly creatures." Imagine the internal psyhological conflict that guy has to deal with. He kills dragons and he can turn into a dragon. That's deep, man.

In other news, I haven't stabbed anything with the knife cdv sent me awhile back.

Publisher Ubisoft is pleased with the reception to Assassin's Creed II, so much that its issued a press release to remind us.

According to the publisher, the title has sold through 1.6 million units if its own internal estimates are to be believed. That's 32% up from the first week sales of the original, which apparently remains the fastest selling new IP ever in the United States. 

Reviews are also positive, with the aggregated Metacritic scores pointing to "Universal Acclaim." I went out and picked up a copy of the game last week, and have been (mostly) enjoying it so far, despite some issue (i.e. why does Lucy look like that now?).

Of course, this isn't a review -- Jim Sterling will have his full write-up shortly. In the meantime, let us know what you think of Assassin's Creed II, but no spoilers, kids.

In a recent conversation with GTTV (via TVGB), Mass Effect 2 project director Casey Hudson revealed that most of the ME2 team would switch to working on ME2 downloadable content after the completion of the core game. And don’t expect just huge expansion packs -- the game will support a range of different content unlike the first ME.

“As part of trying to build the game, as ambitious as it was, one of the things we weren’t able to do technically was to have the support in the game itself for certain kinds of downloadable content,” Hudson said, speaking to the first Mass Effect and its hang-ups.

“So, it had to be a huge pack or nothing essentially was the issue. Now we’ve gone through and made sure that its technically possible to do a whole range of different kinds of downloads,” said Hudson.

Hudson continued, saying that "pretty much the whole team" will begin working on DLC once the game is ready to ship, and that content could be influenced by fans: “Once we’re done working on Mass Effect 2, pretty much the whole team switches into working on really cool downloadable content. That’s where we like to listen to what fan feedback is for ‘where do you want to go’ and ‘what kinds of things do you want to see.’ “

DLC details remains unannounced, but if a recent retailer survey has the right of it, we can expect “planned episodic combat via DLC,” weapon and armor packs, new downloadable characters for the “campaign experience,” new downloadable worlds, as well as “full campaign expansions for download.” And all of that is in addition to some sort in-game "periodic update" network dubbed Cereberus Network.

News flash: a lot of people signed into Facebook through Xbox LIVE after Microsoft rolled out the planned summer update that also added Last.FM and Twitter.

Microsoft dude David Dennis recently told CNET that around 2 million people have signed into the social platform via the Xbox 360. He added that half a million people have signed up for Last.FM accounts within its first full day of availability.

Dennis didn’t have numbers for the amount of people who got bored with both apps and went to play Modern Warfare 2. He also didn't have a number for the amount of people using the Twitter app, but we’re guessing a lot of people signed into that as well. Not many can resist sending that, "Hey, I'm doing this over LIVE" tweet. Not many at all.