Now THAT’S the spirit America! The only way out of our nation’s economic crisis is to use our credit cards to buy digital goods, then spend dozens of man-hours playing video games during our national three-day weekend! Now YOU can show off your patriotism buy spending money you don’t have on things you don’t need with these weekend video game sales!
Steampowered.com is having a Daily Deal on a various games through July 10.
World of Warcraft
took its first steps to becoming completely free to play yesterday,
adding a “Starter Edition” that allows players to play for free up to
level 20. The news came alongside Blizzard merging the original game and
its first expansion, “The Burning Crusade,” into a singular package.
This means that its two exclusive races, Draenei and Blood Elf, are
available to Starter Edition players as well. A list of limitations for
these free players was released shortly after the news as well:
Electronic Arts recently announced their new PC release platform Origin. Whether this attempt will stand up more powerfully than previous attempts like EA Link remains to be seen, but EA’s Frank Gibeau has made it clear that they will be pushing the plaform hard by making many of their upcoming (and existing) releases exclusive to Origin.
Before games like Call of Duty and Halo dominated the online FPS genre, Tribes was a big game for PC gamers looking for some sci-fi shooter action. While the last game, Tribes: Vengeance, was released back in 2004, its been far longer since the series has been a popular choice for PC gamers.
While the 1.6 update for Minecraft was released less than a month ago, fans of the massively successful sandbox are already clamoring for the next update to the game. The 1.7 or Adventure Update as it was known, was going to feature pistons, underground ravines, ridable clouds as well as a slew of new features which Notch claimed would make Minecraft more like a game by improving its combat and exploration systems.
It’s no secret that Google has been attempting to position itself in the gaming market. Google’s own browser, Google Chrome, received a game and app store in May 2010, and the browser giant invested $100-$200 million in Zynga, the developers of Farmville, in July 2010. Then, there were rumors circulating about Google trying to bring social games to their unannounced and undefined gaming service.
Lately, several casual gaming companies have been acquired by larger corporations. Playfish, Playdom, and Ngmoco are just a few examples of casual gaming companies that have been bought for, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars. So it comes as little surprise that the incredibly popular Bejeweled developer Popcap may be next in line for purchase.
It didn’t take much of a detective to see this coming; Take Two announced that LA Noire is getting a PC port. Of course Rockstar’s big huge giant hit is going to be spread out to PC, Mac, Wii U, iPad and any place else they can cram their new IP. But, so far, only the PC version has been officially confirmed. The only real surprise is that it was announced before the inevitable PC version of Red Dead Redemption, which came out for consoles a full year earlier than LA Noire.
When Valve announced earlier this week that they had a free-to-play shooter in the works, the smart money was on Team Fortress 2 which had an existing micro-transaction service already in place. Of course, Counterstrike Source might have been a good choice too, and Left 4 Dead Play 4 Free would have been much more fun market, but Valve’s virtual haberdashery game with guns turned out to the one.
