Trust me, no one is more excited about Catwoman being playable in Batman: Arkham City than I am. But I just can’t see how anyone would get excited by the announcement that Robin will be a playable character too. I’m even more baffled as to how making Robin a pre-order bonus would drive consumers to choose Best Buy over the competition.
Settle down, eventually, it’s going to come out for PC and Playstation 3 too, but the new Call of Duty Black Ops DLC is going to start out as an Xbox exclusive. Which begs the question, is this sort of stunt actually going to sell more Xboxes? Are there Call of Duty fans so hardcore that they’ll ditch their Playstation 3 and run out and buy an Xbox just to get some DLC a couple of weeks early? Well, someone certainly hopes so, because the new pack, Annihilation will hit Xbox Live on June 28th leaving PC and Playstation owners pining away.
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!”.
2011 has already given us several big indie game releases such as Magicka and Frozen Synapse but there are still plenty of indie games coming out this year that gamers should definitely take a look at. Here are five very promising independent games on the horizon.
At this point, Duke Nukem Forever has become a legend, regardless of it’s quality. It has been in development hell for the past 14 years, and considered dead for a while, only to be rescued by Gearbox Studios and 2K. Now, it’s been released, and while the fact that it has been finished at all is something of a minor miracle, the actual game is far from miraculous.
