So, Fallout: New Vegas has come out, there’s no new RPG at the moment, and you’re ready to lose your life to the wastes once more. Great! With Fallout: New Vegas being the next release of a Fallout game since Bethesda’s series defining Fallout 3, this is a good time to look back at the Fallout series as a whole, from Interplay’s Fallout to Bethesda’s Fallout 3, Vault 13 to Vault 101.
Square Enix has a long history of making addictive Tactical RPGs, and there’s no shortage of gamers who logged endless hours on Final Fantasy Tactics in its various incarnations. They seem like the right publisher to handle the upcoming North American release of the tactical MMORPG Wakfu, which is developed by French developer Ankama. Ankama isn’t known in America, but they’ve made several successful European game franchises, including Dofus.
Independent developer Interwave Studios is set to release their first title, Nuclear Dawn, a blending of FPS and RTS game styles that explores a niche that could stand further development. Initially a mod for Half-Life 2, it was announced in 2009 that the product would be released as an independent commercial offering. The game is entirely multiplayer, and focuses on a war between two post-apocalyptic nations as they battle for supremacy in 2049 over the battle-scarred remnants of society. As players begin a match, they can choose to enlist under the flag of either the Empire, a communistic society that emphasizes numbers and mass over quality, or the Consortium of Free States, a collection of nations that value individual liberty and technology as the solution to survival in the wastes. As the only factions left on earth, both sides continue a war that began a decade previous to decide the ideology that will guide mankind.
You can become the night for 66% off with these weekend sales. Batman Arkham Asylum Game of the Year Edition is marked down to $13.60 at SteamPowered.com. This is the GOTY version with several extra challenge missions. It’s a great deal on a spectacular game, and the PC version has spawned a small modding community who make alternate outfits for your caped crusader to wear as he battles evil.
PC Peripheral-makers, Razer have unveiled two new lines of gaming-optimized accessories; one based on Starcraft II, and the other on Tron. Both include a high-performance mouse and keyboard, while the Starcraft II series has a headset, and Tron has a special mouse mat. The Starcraft II headset, called The Banshee after one of vehicles in the game, goes for $119.99, and it has a color-coded “Actions Per Minute” system which lets players know how efficiently they’re using their time.
The movie Tron was made back in 1982, and it about those new-fangled electronic thinking machines; “Com-pu-tors” they were called. This was the primitive past when a typical computer was the size of room, didn’t have a mouse, and only a handful of people had ever used one. They were big, mysterious, frightening machines and- as far as the average person knew- it was perfectly plausible that a computer with 1 meg of ram could become sentient, then zap you with a ray gun and pull you inside the terrifying world of its digital brain!
An update to our Mid-Week sales roundup, Good Old Games (Gog.com) has spent the last month trying to repair their image after pulling a shameless publicity stunt back in September. Their latest ploy to regain the respect of the classic games community is giving away a free game to their long-time customers, while also holding a mid-week sale on products published by Strategy First.
