EA chief operating officer John Pleasants confirmed Criterion has been assigned to an unannounced Need For Speed game.

“We’ve taken the Burnout team and combined it with our Need For Speed franchise,” he said, speaking on EA’s efforts to reboot the lagging racing franchise. “So we now have that in our favor because that Burnout team is probably one of the more online-centric and notably high-quality game developers that we have out at Criterion.”

I didn’t hear any other details on the game during the webcast, but confirmation that Criterion is taking a crack at Need For Speed is enough. Sounds like win to me.

Well, it turns out that Conviction won’t just feature a mind-blowing single-player adventure either. Ubisoft producer Alexandre Parizeau told Joystiq that, as with the previous three SC installments, Conviction will include multiplayer. Parizeau didn’t drop any more details other than to expect more info sometime over the summer.

Looking beyond Conviction’s release, Parizeau confirmed that the developers are planning to release downloadable content as well, but we’ll obviously have to wait until the game finally launches this fall sometime to find out more about what that DLC will include (Could episodic content be in Sam Fisher’s future?)

Many fans have noted that Double Agent’s multiplayer was noticeably more accessible than it was in previous installments, but the game’s co-op mode wasn’t as robust as Chaos Theory’s. Well, with Ubisoft Montreal once again at the helms, here’s hoping the team can build on what it started in Chaos Theory, and make the multiplayer portion of Conviction as new and exciting as the single-player mode.

Yesterday, you might have seen Media Molecule’s teaser trailer for the upcoming Team ICO DLC pack for the cuddly platformer LittleBigPlanet. The developers also revealed the costume designs for the characters of Ico and Yorda from the Ico portion of the DLC. Well today, Media Molecule have released some design pictures of a few of the Shadow of the Colossus costumes players can expect to see.

The three costumes on display are those for protagonist Wander and two colossi, Quadratus and Gaius. The Team ICO DLC pack includes stickers, costumes and sound effects based on both Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and will be available on the PSN Store tomorrow for an as-of-yet undisclosed price.

Anyone working on a Shadow of the Colossus level for LBP right now?

Even prior to Sony’s official unveiling of its next big portable device, the PSP Go, speculations abounded regarding what the company’s plans were for bringing UMD-released games to a UMD-less device. Well, things are a little bit clearer today.

Sony social media manager Jeff Rubenstein told Destructoid that “just about” every PSP game released on UMD after October 1 (the day the PSP Go goes on sale) will also be available for download on the PlayStation Network. Rubenstein went on to say that third party titles will need the approval of their publishers before they will be available for download.

This is of course great news for people who have never owned a PSP and, as such, don’t own a single UMD game, and plan on investing in a PSP Go. However, the download service still doesn’t help current PSP owners thinking about eventually picking one up. That is of course unless the vast majority of them don’t mind carrying around two PSPs all the time.

“You know, we didn’t say that it was exclusive,” clarified Xbox executive and corporate VP John Schappert (he was the guy hosting most of the event) during an interview  immediately following the press conference.

“We said that the next Metal Gear will be coming [to Xbox 360],” he said.

“I couldn’t be more excited about him [Kojima] working on that [Metal Gear Solid Rising] and having that be part of our show,” said Schappert. “When I heard about that, I was pretty ecstatic and it was an honor to be able to be on stage with him and announcing his next Metal Gear, which will be on Xbox 360.”

Of course, Schappert wasn’t in a position to announce where else Metal Gear Solid Rising would be appearing, but could series creator Hideo Kojima be pleasing everyone by announcing this latest work at one conference, showing it at another? We’ll have to wait and find out tomorrow morning at Sony’s E3 conference.

And thus, the waiting game continues.

Microsoft has confirmed that the game’s first two map packs will be a timed exclusive for Xbox 360 when it’s released on November 10.