Last night, Electronic Arts revealed a new partnership with a Canadian developer called Trapdoor who will create a new sci-fi game for XBox Live Arcade, PSN and PC. Little is known about the new development team aside from the fact that they are based in Montreal and that it is headed by Ken Schachter, formerly of Gameloft Montreal, and who is credited with working on the XBox arcade title Prince of Persia Classic a few years ago.
Did you finish playing all the games you bought during the big Halloween sale a week ago? And you just can’t wait for the inevitable Black Friday sales that will come at the end of the month as well? Don’t worry, you can find a few nice deals on spies, soldiers, and adventure in today’s crop of online sales. Gamestop.com generally doesn’t do much for PC Gamers, but today they are offering 10% off on Mafia II on any platform, this comes out to $35.99 for PC, or $44.99 if you buy it for a console. This deal is only for today, Tuesday.
On Steam, discounts and new releases permeated the list. Call of Duty and Fallout stay near the top, and discounts on Grand Theft Auto and everything Supreme Commander 2 push down Civilization V. Left 4 Dead 2 is the only standard on this list. With the holiday season in full swing, maybe Civilization V will go off the top 10 sales list soon. Don’t expect Divinity II or Medal of Honor to stay on the list for long, though.
Call of Duty: Black Ops is coming soon, and most everyone will buy it, complaining bitterly or otherwise. That’s just the kind of status that the Call of Duty series has reached. This wasn’t the case in the beginning, though. Call of Duty used to be the up and coming World War II shooter, competing against the then popular Medal of Honor. Infinity Ward, the creators of Call of Duty, had been newly developed from departing members of the Medal of Honor development team, and everyone thought that Medal of Honorwould remain on top. This radical change from new kid on the block to multi-billion dollar franchise is remarkable, and something well worth looking at.
PC Gamers tend to be a little brighter than the average person; we have the brainpower to change a graphics card, we can Min/Max our stats in Online RPGs, and plan balanced strike forces in Real-Time Strategy games. We can even calculate the ideal trajectory for a grenade in our shooters. But how does our superior left-brain functionality deal with the idea of “Video Games As Art”?
When Onlive was announced last year, my first reaction was “There’s no way it can do what they say it does”. What they claimed it could do was let you use the internet to control a video game that was being run on a server, which would then stream live video of that game back to your computer. Basically, you could play on a powerful game rig through the internet, while watching hi def video of that game on your crappy computer at home. It sounds a lot like sorcery, but it turns out that Onlive actually does what they claimed.
Battlefield Play4Free is exactly what you probably think it is. Electronic Arts already has a free to play version of the series, the cartoonyBattlefield Heroes, which is currently running. Now they’ve announced the next version of the game to use the play online for free plan, but will have a more realistic design scheme, and will use a modern day setting more akin to Battlefield Bad Company, or Battlefield 2. The game is set to go live in Spring of 2011, with a beta test starting later this month.
