Details concerning the upcoming release of Mass Effect 2 have surfaced. The Blu-Ray disc will contain the core game along with the larger DLC packs including Kasumi: Stolen Memories, Overlord and Lair of the Shadow Broker.
Yesterday we listed most of the weekend sales early, but there are a few latecomers today, including a Daily Deal from Direct 2 Drive, a sale news from Good Old Games, and a special in-game bonus item if you grab Dead Space 2 from Gamestop today. Act fast because Direct2Drive is holding a one day sale on Aion: Assault on Balaurea. They’re cutting 50% off the price, which makes it $19.99, and this edition includes the original Aion game and all content updates, in addition to the Assault on Balaurea Expansion pack.
In light of the Supreme Court recently hearing arguments on the constitutionality of California’s law regarding violent and inappropriate video games, the PS3 team decided to look back and remember some of their favorite games to cause uproars among some of the more uptight members of our society. Whether it’s violence, profanity, sexuality, or anything else, these are games that people have claimed are harming our children, regardless of if they actually understand the extent of the content or not. These games are also a lot of fun, and often smarter than a lot of the safe stuff parents think is fine for their kids.
Activision really needs to sit down and take a long, hard look at their business model. After running both the Tony Hawk and the Guitar Hero series into the ground, you would think that they would really play it safe with their biggest franchise of all, Call of Duty. Sadly this is not the case, as the series has pumped out entry after entry every year since 2003 (including mediocre console spin-offs Finest Hour and Big Red One.) And while Black Ops has certainly been the most successful game in the franchise in terms of sales, and although it does bring a few new ideas to the table, I can not help but feel that the series as a whole is reaching the point of stagnation.
Nowhere is this point driven home more than in the single player campaign mode. Although perfectly functional, the incredibly brief story feels less like a cohesive whole and more like a series of concepts and set pieces torn directly from other Call of Duty games. The game opens with the obligatory hostage scenario, in which an enemy takes a human shield, time slows down, and you must pull off a head shot with your pistol to save the day. It seems like this scene alone has been in at least five or six games since the first Modern Warfare popularized it. From there, the game throws you into an off road vehicle chase, a few on-rails shooting segments, a scene in which you use guided missiles to destroy targets, and a “follow your AI partner and do everything exactly as he says or fail” stealth scene that has apparently become a requirement for all modern shooters. The campaign portion of Black Ops is almost embarrassingly devoid of new and interesting ideas. Worst of all, these now-standard shooter elements were all popularized by the Call of Duty franchise, making the entire game feel like a less polished highlight reel of past games. You know that a series has gone creatively bankrupt when it starts ripping itself off.
Eve Online is a massively multiplayer online RPG, in which player controlled corporations and businesses fight and trade for dominance in a universe and economy driven entirely by players. As the latest expansion, the 14th, Eve Online: Incursion includes an attack on EVE space by a rogue nation called the Sansha, in which players and join extra-corporate fleets to fight these NPC forces. Incursion changes include hardware and software upgrades and updates intended to improve performance, new implementations of the proprietary Carbon graphics engine, new ships and changed mechanics for older ships (Sansha Mothership, Fighter-bomber performance changes, Noctis Salvager), new loot, events, visuals and more streamlining for Planetary Interaction (the interface corporations can use to administrate captured planets). The in-game web interface, EVE Gate, has also been improved through the implementation of forums and other social media tools. All of these changes were suggested though the Council of Stellar Management, an elected body of players that focuses on improvements and representation to their counterparts in Crowd Control Productions (CCP: the developer).
Using EA’s Partners program, three independent developers have signed to make games for PSN, Xbox Live and PC. The three developers; Vanguard Games, Borne Games, and Trapdoor have all already announced titles they are working on.
