PC

Gaming From Across the Pond 08.21.10

Hello fellow gamers and welcome to another week of ranting from the PC Department’s pet Brit. Some of you may have read a feature this week on games that sit on our shelf and never get played, if not check it out. My game chosen was a Settlers game, but it got me thinking about the original and how much fun I had with that game, even though the graphics where appalling by today’s standards. So my question is how important are the graphics?

Though I could never actually say what my ten favourite games are, or put them in order, I do know a few which would definitely be included: The original Command and Conquer: Red Alert,StarCraft (including Broodwar) and Monkey Island 1 and 2 for example. The hours I spent on these games are far larger than the time I have spent on any other game (though maybe notWorld of WarCraft). My point is that even though these games had graphics that can be replicated in flash games now, they were still awesome. The game play was great, the storyline fantastic and the mechanics brilliant.

Steam Sales Report 8/20/10

Welcome to the Steam Sales Report, Player Affinity PC’s weekly feature on the top 10 selling Steam games. This feature comes up every Friday, with sales recorded at 3:00 PM. There’s no shortage of Fall releases and Steam mainstays this week, which is a far cry from last week which saw the developer id’s best games at the top. With the Q3-Q4 game madness, new games are starting to come in to the top 10, except for the the top spot again. Take a look:

Will I Ever Play This Old Game?

Every gamer has a shelf of dusty old CD cases, each containing some game we just couldn’t wait to buy, yet never actually played.  Sometimes the hot new game got eclipsed by an even hotter newer game.  Or we bought a classic that we felt we should play, but didn’t.  Maybe we just grabbed a bunch of games at the Big Sale.   Will we ever actually play all these things stuffed away in our drawers and bottom shelves?  We here at Player Affinity chased the raccoons away from that pile of old games behind our office and dug into our backlog.  Here’s what we decided to try:

New Dawn of War II Expansion Incoming

Relic and THQ have announced the second official standalone expansion pack for Dawn of War 2, titled “Redemption.” They revealed that the expansion would, as tradition dictates, include new multiplayer maps, units and a whole new, as yet unrevealed, faction.

What should definitely get existing fans excited, though, is the ability to play the campaign as any of the existing races, a la Dark Crusade or Soulstorm. The original Dawn of Warand its first expansion, Winter Assault, included linear campaigns, though Winter Assault had campaigns for the forces of Order and Disorder. The third and fourth expansions,Dark Crusade and Soulstorm, featured Risk-style map-based campaigns, where players could maneuver their forces and acquire territory using any of the races included. Dawn of War 2 returned to the single-race campaign, which was an interesting mixture of story-driven and non-linear map based campaign, although it was a little shallow. Chaos Risingcontinued this trend, but it was even more linear. 

Borderlands On Sale at Steam

Do you like guns?  Do you like video games with guns? Of course you do, but video games these days have such limited arsenals, offering players a mere twenty or so guns with which to shoot stuff. Some even boast that they have up to a billion guns, but that just isn’t enough for the serious fan.

So, how about a game with 87 Bazillion guns?  Well, Borderlands by Gearbox Software claims to have 87 Bazillion guns.  Surely such a game would cost a fortune, and normally you’d be expected to pay twenty-nine ninety-nine for Borderlands, yet, for a few days you can get it for 66.% off if you download it from Steam. 

City of Heroes Going Rogue Review

Way back in 2004 the biggest MMORPG in the world was Final Fantasy 11, which had an unfathomable two-hundred thousand subscribers. It all sounds so quaint in the wake of World of Warcraft, yet this was the standard when City of Heroes first appeared at the end of 2004.  Six years later, City of Heroes is still around with a constant stream of updates for its loyal band of about two-hundred thousand crime fighters.  Today, Going Rogue, the first commercial expansion pack for City of Heroes in five years came out.  Online superheroes are no doubt asking “Is it worth the extra bucks for a six-year-old game”?

In short, Yes.  It does what an expansion should do; augment the existing game. No one is going to claim that City of Heroes short on content after 18 free updates, the City of Villains expansion, and a “Mission Architect” which allows players to make and share their own missions.  The new expansion is just three new zones; but what it does do is increase the quality of story-telling and world-building.

RAGE Gets Release Date

id Software has a long history in the first-person shooter genre, masterminding two of the longest running and most popular franchises, Quake and Doom. It’s no surprise, then, that their upcoming post-apocalyptic shooter, Rage, has been on plenty of radars since its announcement three years ago at QuakeCon 2007. Now, id have finally issued a release date for the game: September 13th 2011 for the US and September 15th 2011 for Europe.