Most of us are going to the Penny Arcade Expo East to frolic with our fellow nerds and grab as much schwag as we can get our mitts on. However there are apparently some people who go to industry conventions to engage in actual productive behavior, like discussing how to improve the gaming industry
We all have that shameful backlog somewhere in our house; a stack of old games that we bought on impulse years ago, but never got around to playing despite the fact that we just had to own the thing. Then there’s all of those games we started playing and kept meaning to finish off, but were constantly distracted by the latest installment of Call of Duty. Well, Player Affinity’s PC crew pried open our chest of neglected classics and had another go at them to see whether or not we’ll ever play these old games.
BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins – Awakening was the only true expansion pack that built an entirely new adventure set six months after the events of Dragon Age: Origins. With the land more or less saved from utter destruction, it falls to the Grey Warden to visit Amaranthine, a northeastern section of Ferelden that was previously the property of Arl Howe, who is now dead at your hand. As a result, these lands are now yours, and so the player must ensure that any remnants of the darkspawn threat have been dealt with. However, there is another wave coming and it becomes the player’s responsibility to fortify defenses, explore new dungeons and encounter new villains that seek to overwhelm the already-battered strongholds. Although the expansion does give us a look at what happened to the Grey Warden after the defeat of the Archdemon, it is evident that the Grey Warden’s story is complete already and events cease to follow him/her as far as Dragon Age 2 is concerned.
Microsoft
had an Xbox Press event today in San Francisco to announce details of
upcoming games and future DLC. Here is all that was announced:
Gears of War 3
will have a public multiplayer beta in mid-April that will give you the
first chance to play the new game. The beta will include three versus
modes and four new maps. The game is set to launch this September.
New Halo: Reach map pack titled “Defiant.” The map pack will be on sale March 15th for 800 Microsoft Points. The map pack will contain three new maps called Condemned, Highlands, and Unearthed.
Bejeweled Blitz Live is a port of Bejeweled Blitz for Facebook and PC. Popcap games have come up with some very exciting and addicting games like Plants vs. Zombies and Peggle. But do they have the ability to take their formula for match three gaming and make them fun and addicting again? Are they able to make the player feel like he is experiencing something new and not just throwing out another version of Bejeweled?
As soon as you start up Bejeweled Blitz Live you will notice how the game is geared more towards multiplayer. The game supports up to 16 player party mode, where all the players play at the same time on their own board. The person with the highest score wins at the end of the round. At the time of this review I was not able to find an online multiplayer match. I could not even find a quick match to join. Luckily there is local battle where two players go head to head to see who can get the highest score. The local battle is fun as long as you are playing against somebody that is not new to this version of the game.
Ubisoft garnered quite a bit of hate from PC gamers last year when all
their new releases came with a new Digital Rights Management system that
prevented you from playing your game if you didn’t have a constant
internet connection. The reason this caused so much controversy is
because this system applied even if you were playing a game that was
exclusively single player. There were occasions where the DRM servers
went down and nobody was able to play any of Ubisoft’s PC games that
used the system, including the PC versions of Splinter Cell: Conviction and Assassin’s Creed 2.
Even though last month Ubisoft scaled back some of its DRM on last year’s games, there were still some initial worries that Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
would be using this same DRM system. Ubisoft has confirmed that the
game’s Single Player campaign would be playable offline, although it
would require an initial login process.
The day that Dead Space 2 launched, players were told that will be a DLC pack of single-player mission in the near future. Well the future is March first, when Dead Space 2: Severed becomes available for the surprisingly reasonable price of seven dollars. You won’t be continuing the story of Isaac Clarke, Dead Space 2’s main protagonist, but rather, you’ll play as Gabe Weller who was one of the characters from Dead Space Extraction (Which was only available on Wii and PS3).
