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MotorStorm RC, coming to the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita as a PlayStation Network download this week, will rely on leaderboards and ghost players for online multiplayer competition. Split-screen local multiplayer will be available on the PS3 version, but all competitive play on the PS Vita version will be asynchronous.

You'll receive notifications while playing the game when someone beats one of your records, and one button press will let you jump into a race on that particular track up against a ghost of that particular player to try and beat their time. You'll also see other lines indicating your previous best time to beat on the track, according to a video explaining how competitive online play works.

The upcoming launch of PlayStation Vita will be accompanied by a third game in the ModNation Racers franchise, and this one is planning to capitalize on many of the handheld's features to bring a strong set of asynchronous gameplay features as well as community unlocks. The developer, in a post on the PlayStation Blog, addressed concerns that the game won't have a WiFi infrastructure mode for competitive play by citing a desire to innovate instead of simply replicating features from their PS3 and PSP offerings before it.

Portal 2's PC release is tied to the Steam game store and distribution platform, and that platform has been pre-loading the game's assets for those who have preordered it for a little while now. Given that the release date is a matter of one final patch or key being released to the target systems to unlock the mass of binary data just waiting to spring to virtual life, Valve decided to turn their marketing up a few notches and have some fun along the way.

The release date for Portal 2 has been given a community co-op twist. The more time spent actively playing one or more of a collection of indie titles available on steam called the Potato Sack games, the greater the chance of moving up the release date for the game and unlocking it early. An Aperture Science page named glados@home charts the progress thus far.

The successful Assassin's Creed franchise gets another Community Co-Op challenge this week with this one centering not around in-game kills but Facebook. The previous challenge for Rome By Night was fulfilled after 18 days of slaughter, but this challenge for another map, Venezia By Night, will require one million people to "Friend" the Assassin's Creed page on Facebook.

Just before the end of 2010 the PC players of the Vietnam expansion to Battlefield: Bad Company 2 unlocked the Battle for Hastings map for their platform. DICE has apparently relented and unlocked the map for the PS3 and Xbox 360 without having them reach the 69 million team action requirement to do so. This was done with a pleasant Happy New Year message to their loyal fans.

Joystiq's writeup mentions that at the time of the unlock the PS3 had 34 million actions and the Xbox 360 had 46 million actions earned. Those aren't poor numbers, but it's the rate of new actions that's key. I ran some numbers using our original post about this challenge and I suspect it's a little bit of the numbers combined with some marketing that led to this decision. Let's take a look.