BULLETCAST, June 21 – What you need to know now

It's boomtime Tuesday, baby. Get all the major headlines in video and text form after the drop. Can you afford to enter today not knowing what's going on in the world of videogames news? You cannot.

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• Phil Harrison, former head of Sony’s Worldwide Studios, has predicted the death of physical media and said Apple “will be the games industry” at its current rate of expansion into the medium.
• Avalanche’s next project is set for release on “next-generation platforms in 2014". The developer reckons at least one proper next gen format - as in, one from either Sony or Microsoft - will have released by then.
• LA Noire staffers are blowing the whistle of a crunch period that extended beyond a year. One has told the Sydney Morning Herald he left the developer before the game shipped because his "sanity depended on it".
• Ubisoft’s announced a Ghost Recon: Future Soldier open beta for next January.
• Witcher 2 figurehead Tomasz Gop has left CD Projekt Red. There's no word on what he'll be doing next.
• Gamespot's running a story quoting sources as saying it's "pretty likely" GTA V will release next year.
• Take-Two president Strauss Zelnick has said in a Forbes interview that more Duke Nukem will be coming from the publisher in the future.
• In further Duke news, Jim Redner, the PR dude, 2K fired for saying he was going to restrict future review copies based on "venom" he saw in DNF verdicts, has explained his side of the story on Wired.
• EEDAR has named Mass Effect 3 the most promising retail product of E3 2011, based on consumer interest.
• Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski has called hacking a "major problem" for games development.
• Star Fox 64 3D is due out on September 9.
• Microsoft’s said that Kinect support for Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary is only “additive,” and that it won’t affect the “core gameplay experience.”
• Valve's about to release an "Über Update" for Team Fortress 2. RPS has been speculating the shooter's about to go free-to-play. Apparently, the first part of it is "a free weekend (starting now, for some reason), and an initial Mafia themed update, complete with a new Payload map."
• Al Gore's noticed that videogames exist.
• Shigeru Miyamoto has said Wii U won’t “dramatically outperform” current consoles, because the company is struggling to keep the hardware’s price down despite the “reckless” new controller.
• Here's the Shadows of the Damned launch trailer.
• We want to know if you're going to be buying Battlefield 3 or Modern Warfare 3. Or both. Or neither. Tell us here.

That's it for now. A few of you have been asking for an update on my gopher issue. We poured petrol down its burrow last night and set fire to it. A neighbour advised me to do this. Apparently the smell keeps it from coming back. Don't judge me, animal lovers: it was eating my brassica.