This week we’ll skip our usual Tuesday and Friday sales reports and instead cover the terrifying daily deals that are being held by several download sites to gear up for Halloween weekend. Direct2Drive.com and Steam are each putting a different game on sale every day, all week long, and several other sites are holding big sales on horror games, so check back here each afternoon this week for Player Affinity’s round-up.
Last week Player Affinity did a round-up of gadgets shown at the New York Comic Con, and one of the things which impressed us most was a PC peripheral codenamed “Project Tuatara”. In short, Tuatara is a motion-sensing wireless controller that replaces your mouse and keyboard, and has a built in wireless projector which replaces your monitor. It senses where you aim and projects the game directly in front of you on the wall, floor or ceiling. We spoke with David Lashmet the Global Product Manager for Advanced Applications at Microvision, makers of Project Tuatara.
Last year’s award-wining fantasy RPG Dragon Age: Origins by Bioware certainly came with “Enough” content, right out of the box, yet Bioware persisted in a continuous torrent of expansion packs and downloadable content, right up the last month’s final installment Witch Huntwhich brought the story to its conclusion. Some gamers were happy for the additional material, others felt that it should have been included in the game in the first place, while the most-clever Bioware fans kept our mouths shut and waited for the inevitable Game Of The Year Edition which would compile it all in one box at a nice discount.
Halloween is this Sunday and that means gamers have a week full of Halloween-themed events inside our favorite online games. Player Affinity will cover these spookfests all week long to remind you which old game you should log back into just so you can fight off the hordes of darkness, go virtual trick-or-treating, or battle a seasonal undead plague. For the six years since it was launched, long-running superhero MMORPG City of Heroes has held spooky October festivities
This week was a good week for Fallout: New Vegas and Call of Duty: Black Ops, both of which took the top honors on Direct2Drive and Steam. Medal of Honor is still hanging in there on number 4, though it’s drop from the Impulse list shows a decline in popularity perhaps. Cities XL 2011 stays near the bottom of the list for Steam, but stays near the top for Impulse.
Released in 2002, Natural Selection was a favorite mod of mine when it was developed late in the life of Half-Life’s viable modding cycle. By combining first-person shooter elements with the organizational finesse of an RTS, it broke the conventional mold and emerged as a groundbreaking new style of multiplayer cooperation. Based in a variety of outer-space colonies and bases in the far future, Natural Selection saw a battle between the Frontiersmen and the Kharaa, who were space marines and aliens, respectively. The environments were large and full of atmosphere, with sounds and effects adding to the sense of loneliness and isolation that was often the feeling when your teammates were killed one by one. The innovative commander mode and branching development and technology trees for players to take advantage of made the game an exercise in quality teamwork, as specialized units were needed for many tasks and no one player could win by themselves. When Half-Life 2 was released, Natural Selection 2 was on the horizon to be enjoyed as a Source mod, but since then the dev team has formed their own company, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the game has been shifted onto a custom-made proprietary engine named Spark and will be released as a stand-alone commercial title.
Back in late 2008 LucasArts released their semi-popular Star Wars game The Force Unleashed to mixed reviews. The game was praised for its story and physics with most calling it “ambitious–yet ultimately dissatisfying”. Unsurprisingly however, LucasArts, undeterred by the reviews, are at it again and are set to release The Force Unleashed II tomorrow. TFU II starts around seven months after the events of the first game, bringing the time line up to a year before the events of Episode IV.
