Jealous of your Xbox friends because they’ve been playing the latest Call of Duty: Black Ops DLC pack for over a week now, while you’re still stuck playing Escalation? Fret not, because PC and PS3 owners will have access to the the Annihilation Pack on July 28th.
Machinima is all the rage these days. That’s when people use footage from
video games combined with voiceovers to tell stories. Unfortunately, very few
people are doing it well. For
every hit like Red Versus Blue there are
hundreds of failed attempts. Such
is the case with a live Machinima theatrical piece called Romeoo and
Julietet. It’s a production of “Romeo and Juliet” performed live in
World of Warcraft.
The producers of the show have set up laptops in a theater
in Brooklyn, with a projection screen showing the in-game events. The players control World of
Warcraft characters all named after
characters in Shakespeare’s play, and they type out their dialogue in the game
while a cast of recorded voice actors recite the lines for the audience in the
theater. All of this is done live
in World of Warcraft, and anyone
playing the game can watch the performance live in-game at the same time the
audience in the theater is watching.
There
have always been plenty of licensed games available and for the longest
time they held a reputation for being poorly made attempts to cash in
on a franchise. It’s only recently that that has changed with licensed
games like Batman: Arkham Asylum topping Game of the Year lists, but one of the first quality licensed games was The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay. Escape From Butcher Bay was developed by Starbreeze Studios who was a relatively unknown developer at the time, and following Escape From Butcher Bay they developed a game based on The Darkness comics.
You’ll have to look long and hard today to find a good online sale, but that’s okay because we’ve done the work for you. Here’s today crop of sale game, including our recommendation on your best choice for the weekend.
After purchasing tickets to
what I thought was an interactive theater production called Red Cloud Rising, I received an e-mail confirming my appointment for a
job interview at a company called
Bydder Financial at the exact time and date as the performance was
supposed to
happen. Instead of being directed
to a theater, I was given the address of a Wall Street office building
where I was to meet a recruiter for this mysterious financial firm.
Before the show had even begun, I’d
already been drawn into the world of this Alternate Reality Game.
With all
the new free-to-play shooters being released these days, it’s hard to
tell if there are quality games behind the trend, or if free-to-play is
just a recent fad. After having played many of the most popular
free-to-play online shooters, here are the free shooters most worthy of
your time. Let’s get the obvious pick out of the way. Team Fortress 2 was originally a part of a compilation of Valve games named The Orange Box, eventually turning into an individual product, and most recently, a free-to-play title. Team Fortress 2
originally had 6 maps at release, with 9 unique classes, including the
tank-like Heavy, the agile Scout, and the stealthy Spy. Since release,
though, Valve has added ridiculous amounts of content to it, including
new weapons and gadgets for the classes, many new maps, UI changes,
balance changes, a full-on trading and crafting system, and more. This
was a $20 value at release, but Valves constant updates and improvements
have made it a steal, especially for free. There’s no incentive to pay,
unless you want the quick and easy route to new items. The only
problems I can think of are the stubborn server admins who’ve added a
line of code that auto-kicks free-to-play users upon connection. It’s
not like you want to play with those types of players, anyway.
Bethesda and Arkane Studios have announced their next game in the form of Dishonored. Dishonored
will be a stealth action-adventure game and it’s being worked on by
Harvey Smith, one of the minds behind the hugely popular PC games Thief and Deus Ex. The
game will be based around you playing as Corvo, the bodyguard of ‘The
Empress’ who is framed for her murder and then sets out to get revenge
utilizing a number of powerful supernatural abilities and deadly
gadgets. Arkane has said that the core gameplay will revolve around
assassinations, but unlike the Assassin’s Creed games, the world and gameplay of Dishonored
will react to how violently you play the game. Arkane also revealed
that Corvo’s different gadgets and abilities can be combined in various
ways, which should make for some very interesting gameplay.
