PC News

PC Digital Download Sales 8/29/10

Maybe you know, and maybe you don’t, but at Player Affinity, there was a feature called the Steam Sales Report every Friday. This week, and from each week from now on, however, I’m not only going to track Steam sales, but I’ll look at Direct2Drive as well, despite my affection for all things Valve. There are some limitations associated with the sales tracking for Direct2Drive though, such as the fact that users can’t tell what games are coming to it ahead of release, so predictions may be effected as a result. Also, because of Direct2Drive, this feature will be on Player Affinity on Sunday with sales from 3:00 PM instead of Friday. Enough about the digital download services though, let’s look at the sales.

Starcraft II Getting Update- Your Favorite Unit Getting Nerfed

Do you know why your favorite unit always gets nerfed in the update?  It’s because you like using unbalanced units! That said, Starcraft II, just a month old, is getting it’s first update intended to address balancing issues among other things. The less controversial changes are support for left-handed hotkeys (Which also means that bad players can no longer claim they lost a match because they’re left-handed).  Support is also being added for Nvidia 3d Vision. As for what’s getting nerfed…

Weekend Game Sales

It’s Friday and that means one thing to destitute nerds:  Weekend Game Sales! This week Steam is discounting Mount & Blade along with its expansion pack Warband.  M&B is going for $7.50 while Warband is priced at $10.20.  For those not familiar with the franchise, it’s an Action RPG with mounted combat; a unique game with a small but hardcore following.

New Blood Stone Trailer

Activision has released a new trailer for the upcoming James Bond adventure Blood Stone. Due to MGM’s money troubles, the 23^rd Bond movie is stuck in development, therefore Blood Stonewill not be a tie-in, but rather will be a standalone story – the next chapter in the Bond saga.

The game, a third-person shooter, will star Daniel Craig as 007 and British singer Joss Stone as socialite Nicole Hunter, as they hunt down a missing researcher. The game will feature a global conspiracy involving the UK’s secret biochemical weapons program, and a story stretching across five different locations, including Istanbul (as featured in the new trailer), Athens, Monaco, Bangkok and Siberia.

“Witch Hunt” DLC Announced for Dragon Age

It’s been exactly two weeks since I complained that Bioware is releasing DLC for Dragon Age at a faster rate than we can play it. As if to spite me, those jerks have announced yet more DLC is on the way.  In their defense, they’re saying that this will resolve the last plot thread in Origins, so it might be the last time they harass us with their DLC and let us all get on with our lives (I still have all that Mass Effect DLC to play too, guys).  After all they’re hard at work on Dragon Age 2, and they have to make sure it is so full of content that no one will be able to finish that before Dragon Age 3 comes out.

Ninja Robots and Indie Games On Sale This Week

This week Steam’s Mid-week Madness sale is the indie action game Plain Sight for a whopping 80% off of its already low price of ten dollars.  If you like ninja robots, and you’re poor, you should have a look.  And speaking of big sales, Gamersgate.com is in the final week of an awesome indie game sale, with 35 games going for up to 75% off.  That’s just three or four bucks to grab artsy-smarty titles like Braid, or Zombie Driver.  Okay, Zombie Driver ain’t gonna impress the wine and cheese crowd, but it’s on sale for a measly two fifty. 

New Left 4 Dead DLC Announced

Left 4 Dead 2 has received a heaping amount of new content in the form of the Mutation mode that provides weekly game variants (most of them good) and DLC campaignThe Passing. Left 4 Dead 1 is going to join the fun too with The Sacrifice, its first DLC since Crash Course last September. The Sacrifice will cover the events leading up to Bill’s death in The Passing, and it will be played from the Left 4 Dead original cast’s perspective.  The Sacrifice can be played from either Left 4 Dead or Left 4 Dead 2, and if you are playing it in Left 4 Dead 2, you can play the No Mercy campaign with all the Left 4 Dead 2 weapons and enemies. All of this can be played on both PC and Mac, so Valve isn’t kidding with the Mac support stuff…

Mafia II Out Now

Mafia II is out for PC and I have to disagree with the preview that my cohorts posted over in the XBox department a couple of weeks ago.  They didn’t care for it based on the Demo, but I quite enjoyed it and think it’s worth a look, for PC gamers at least.

For those not familiar with the franchise, it’s basically a Grand Theft Auto Clone, a really good GTA clone.  The setting is 1945-1955 in a fictional version of New York called “Liberty City”.  I mean “Empire City”.  You can free roam around the city, stealing cars, driving anywhere you want, listening to various period radio stations…

Steam Sales Report 8/20/10

Welcome to the Steam Sales Report, Player Affinity PC’s weekly feature on the top 10 selling Steam games. This feature comes up every Friday, with sales recorded at 3:00 PM. There’s no shortage of Fall releases and Steam mainstays this week, which is a far cry from last week which saw the developer id’s best games at the top. With the Q3-Q4 game madness, new games are starting to come in to the top 10, except for the the top spot again. Take a look:

New Dawn of War II Expansion Incoming

Relic and THQ have announced the second official standalone expansion pack for Dawn of War 2, titled “Redemption.” They revealed that the expansion would, as tradition dictates, include new multiplayer maps, units and a whole new, as yet unrevealed, faction.

What should definitely get existing fans excited, though, is the ability to play the campaign as any of the existing races, a la Dark Crusade or Soulstorm. The original Dawn of Warand its first expansion, Winter Assault, included linear campaigns, though Winter Assault had campaigns for the forces of Order and Disorder. The third and fourth expansions,Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, featured Risk-style map-based campaigns, where players could maneuver their forces and acquire territory using any of the races included. Dawn of War 2 returned to the single-race campaign, which was an interesting mixture of story-driven and non-linear map based campaign, although it was a little shallow. Chaos Risingcontinued this trend, but it was even more linear.