One of the big games coming out next week is F.E.A.R. 3, or F3AR if you’re still into leetspeak. To help get gamers in the mood, Steam is selling the first two games in that series plus all of their DLC for just ten dollars. But that’s not the only deal this weekend so take a look at the full rosters of sales.
Valve has finally made headway on the microtransaction and DLC frontend that they added nearly a year ago, with five free-to-play franchises being offered on Steam. Spiral Knights, Forsaken Worlds, Champions Online, Global Agenda, and Alliance of Valliant Arms are all now available on the Steam platform for free. Microtransactions are handled via Steam’s DLC service, eliminating the need to give your credit card out to the developers themselves. This allows existing Steam users to feel comfortable paying for such content without having to worry about how that particular company handles its security.
Steam has added Facebook to expand the social networking portion of their frontend. Features include: importing friends you know on Facebook into your Steam friends list, and adding additional profile information brought in from the most popular social network onto your Steam profile. Presumably it will also allow achievement progress and purchase information to be posted on to your Facebook profile, similar to how the Playstation Network connects to your Facebook profile to inform your friends of trophies you’ve earned and purchases made on the Playstation Store. This could add an interesting layer, as it’s free advertising for the games by saying “Hey, I got this game! You might want to as well!”.
Steam is having something of an off day. Their big Midweek Madness sale is Darkspore for 40% off. That makes it $29.95; not really “Madness”, more like a perfectly reasonable price. Asking fifty bucks for the thing was the true madness.
After the disaster that was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s multiplayer, a lot of PC gamers are being cautious regarding the next game in the series, Modern Warfare 3. Despite the last game, Black Ops, featuring dedicated server support, initial leaks about Modern Warfare 3 stated that the PC Versions multiplayer would not include any dedicated server support.
EA is making a huge push towards gamers to buy Battlefield 3, however their DLC is causing an issue. EA’s DLC Physical Warfare Pack, currently only available via preorder at GAME and Gamestation stores, is causing a large outcry amongst customers. Gamers fear the DLC will provide an unfair edge to the players who purchase the Pack, ruining the balance which is the heart of the Battlefield series.
If you’re a fan of id’s Rage, you’ve been waiting for a really long time for it to be released, 7 years to be exact. This will be the first intellectual property of id to appear on consoles since 1996’s Quake, so there’s some understandable hype, anticipation, and excitement. However, id has delayed Rage from it’s original release date on September 13th, 2011 to October 4th, 2011.
Is it just me, or did the Sony hacking fiasco encourage everyone else to hack a game company? Epic, Codemasters, and Nintendo have all been recently hacked for personal user data, and now Bethesda has been as well. In Bethesda’s case, the page compromised was the Brink website. According to Bethesda, the only data that has been stolen is usernames, passwords, and email addresses. This must be pretty rough for PS3 Brink players, considering that they weren’t able to play online before, and now they may have their data accesssed.
Earlier
this year Telltale Games announced the staggering number of games that
they would be bringing out to gamers this year including Puzzle Agent 2, Jurassic Park and The Walking Dead.
At this year’s E3 they showed off and gave details about all three of
these games and from the way that Telltale described it, the three of
them could not be more different.
Remember Mirror’s Edge? In case you don’t, the long and short of it is that Mirror’s Edge
was a first person parkour game that EA said would get a trilogy, but
then critics said “Meh” and so EA killed the sequel. Then they said
there would be a sequel. And then they killed the project again. EA was
being pretty cagey and indecisive, and is now continuing to do so,
saying that a Frostbite 2-powered Mirror’s Edge 2 is a possibility.
