I’m not talking about overpopulated servers in on-line games, I’m talking about a controversial theme even in fictional stories: humans overpopulating the Earth. Population control is generally left as the goal of utterly immoral villains, and conquering alien races. Still even when voiced by evil-doers, the concept of population control is rare in games, and virtually non-existent as the goal of a protagonist.
We here at Player Affinity love reading! You know, video game manuals, video game strategy guides, in-game text telling us which button to push to jump… and of course we love books based on video games too. That’s why we’re so keen on the hard-boiled detective tales that Rockstar is publishing to help promote their two-fisted game LA Noire. Today the latest story, “Hell of an Affair” by Duane Swierczynksi hit the internet, and you can read it online, or download it as a PDF.
Sony has reported that the online
services will most likely remain down for the next few days, and may
not be entirely restored until the end of the month. The company is
still working around the clock in efforts to bring the new systems
online, but at this point everyone is frustrated with the progress.
The outage officially hits the 3-week mark tomorrow and there doesn’t
seem to be a lot of good news circulating. A few websites have
reported other security breaches occurring over the last few days but
the details are highly speculative. The bad news is that new releases
such as Brink, Portal 2, and SOCOM 4 rely
heavily on online connectivity and as a result have suffered in sales
on the PS3 because of the attack. It’s unfortunate that consumers are
being directly affected but it’s an important lesson for Sony and
proves that nothing is off-limits when dealing with hackers.
Mass Effect was one of
those titles that I had zero interest in until it came out. For some reason I decided
to give it a try. That approach doesn’t always work out so well, but in this
case it led me to what I felt was the best game of 2007 – one that I ended up
playing through three times. I enjoyed the universe so much that I’ve read the
novels by Drew Karpyshyn, who also wrote the story for the game. The soundtrack
was easily the best of the year and one of the most unique in a long time.
Needless to say my anticipation for Mass Effect 2 was extremely high.
Anyone
remember that game Hard Corps: Uprising that came out a few months ago? You
know, that game that constantly gift wrapped your ass and handed it to you over
and over again. Well, you get a similar feeling while playing Bangai-O HD: Missile
Fury upon starting it up. This game is absolutely insane at first, and the
“Missile Fury” part of the title should be taken extremely literally. While early
experiences with this game are likely to turn off most players, there are
really only a couple things you need to learn in order to be able to have a lot
of fun with this game.
If you’ll all be so kind as to turn off Brink for a minute or two, I have some important news about some sales on games that aren’t Brink. Some of these are actually good enough, and cheap enough that you can still afford them even if you busted your budget buying Brink.
The original Witcher was a unique game in many ways and was praised for the emphasis that it placed on your choices and their consequences. Developer, CD Projekt Red are aiming to use The Witcher 2 to push the series out of its cult following status and into a more mainstream success so as to compete with other big RPG developers like Bioware and Bethesda.
