Bill Russell, the former Boston Celtic and owner of 11(!) championship rings, is the latest athlete to sue the NCAA and EA Sports for using his likeness in a sports game without compensation. Russell’s likeness was used in NCAA Basketball ’09, as his University of California at San Francisco college team was part of the game’s Tournament of Legends mode.
Gamers across the globe have always looked to id Software since the days of Wolfenstein and Doom as the pioneers of the deathmatch. With virtually every shooter released since those glory days in the early 1990’s having some sort of “kill everyone you see” multiplayer mode, it came as quite a surprise that id’s newest release, RAGE, was lacking the staple of first-person shooters. In an interview with Kotaku, id’s Tim Willits sheds some light on the decision.
Despite the PC Version of Dungeon Defenders missing its originally set June 2011 release date, the game is (finally) ready to come out on the PC via Steam and the developer Trendy Entertainment have announced a slew of cool items exclusive to gamers who pre-order the Steam version of the game.
Those looking to save the world in Mass Effect 3, but wishing to do so with their friends, have reason to rejoice. A recent cover of PC PowerPlay all but announced that there will be a multiplayer component in the third iteration of Bioware’s hit franchise. Mass Effect 3 is the first game in the series to feature multiplayer of any kind, something that could very easily add a whole new layer to an already extremely enriching experience.
Since this announcement is being made without much detail, it leads gamers to wonder what type of multiplayer this could entail. Will it be a single player experience that can be played along with a buddy at the same time, or will it be a much more competitive affair? If I were a betting man, I would guess that it is the latter, but without much information until the magazine releases in November, it is hard to tell. No matter the decision that the Bioware gents decided to make, as either one will probably end up working well, Mass Effect 3 will most likely make quite a few game of the year 2012 lists. You can check out more in the magazine, which will be released in November, as well as Mass Effect 3 which will be coming out on March 6th 2012.
After four releases on PS2 and three on PS3, Insomniac Games is handing over the latest entry in the series, entitled All 4 One, to its secondary studio which was foundered a few years ago. While the primary Insomniac team is busy working on its cross-platform title Overstrike, it will be interesting to see if their newer team can meet the high bar of quality that has been set by the main studio for many years since its first release. In all honesty, I was pretty burnt out on Ratchet and Clank after the last game and although I have been a fan since the original and own every one of them (save for the PSP releases), I didn’t think I would be interested in another and after hearing that a new studio is working on it, I initially thought this was a good reason to move on from the series.
But gosh darn it, All 4 One looks so fun! While the original gameplay videos showed a much slower paced game with a massive emphasis on co-op that I wasn’t really liking, the latest videos demonstrate the single player campaign and somehow it just looks much faster and more close to what I know and love about RnC. Now I’m all excited once again. So much so that I decided to review it in two weeks. Who knows? I might end up liking the co-op even more than single player, as one would hope, since the game is built around it.
Mainstream media has a short memory and Steve Jobs is mostly being remembered for his work creating recent Apple products like the iPad. Gamers are likely to remember Steve for the many hours of play spent on the Apple II, or Macbook laptops, and even big blue G3 towers (with round mice that had one giant button). These brought us endless joy with games by Mac-friendly publishers like Blizzard and Bungie. Our PC department shares some of these Mac Gaming Memories:
Batman:
Arkham City developer
Rocksteady has made the Batman video
game franchise a force to be reckoned with, but now they could have their eyes
set on another superhero – Superman. Paul Dini, writer for Arkham Asylum and the upcoming Arkham
City, spoke to Yahoo Games recently about the future of DC superhero games,
and said “I think it would be fun to do a character like Superman or Captain Marvel
or maybe Green Lantern…there’s a lot of reinvention being done on Superman at
the moment, both in the comics and in the movies and I think it would be fun to
revisit that character and kind of see what makes him tick.” Because Batman is “real world-centric,” according to Dini, in his next
game Dini wants to “amp it up a bit as far as the power level
goes and do more of a superhero with more superpowers.”
