Video Games

In-Game Halloween Events: City of Heroes

Halloween is this Sunday and that means gamers have a week full of Halloween-themed events inside our favorite online games.  Player Affinity will cover these spookfests all week long to remind you which old game you should log back into just so you can fight off the hordes of darkness, go virtual trick-or-treating, or battle a seasonal undead plague.  For the six years since it was launched, long-running superhero MMORPG City of Heroes has held spooky October festivities

Fable 3: Packed Full of DLC!

For those of you who have pre-ordered Fable 3, you’ll be happy to know that you’ll be getting some nice DLC. Everyone who buys the game new will be receiving a potion for summoning monsters, a “Slow Time” potion, a

unisex Scot outfit, a Highlander Tattoo Set, and a Red Setter dog skin.

PC Digital Download Sales 10/24/10

This week was a good week for Fallout: New Vegas and Call of Duty: Black Ops, both of which took the top honors on Direct2Drive and Steam. Medal of Honor is still hanging in there on number 4, though it’s drop from the Impulse list shows a decline in popularity perhaps. Cities XL 2011 stays near the bottom of the list for Steam, but stays near the top for Impulse. 

New Mafia 2 DLC Hits November 23rd

The third DLC pack released for Mafia 2, titled “Joe’s Adventures” will hit Xbox Live, PSN, and PC on November 23^rd. The price will be, you guessed it, $10.

The new DLC focuses on Joe Barbaro who is the best friend of our protagonist Vito Scaletta. The DLC reportedly takes place while Vito is in prison and focuses almost exclusively on Joe.  The only downside is that you have to wait until November to get your paws on this Mafia goodness. Maybe the next DLC will take a cue from Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption and give us some zombie mobsters. One can only hope.

Natural Selection 2 Preview

Released in 2002, Natural Selection was a favorite mod of mine when it was developed late in the life of Half-Life’s viable modding cycle. By combining first-person shooter elements with the organizational finesse of an RTS, it broke the conventional mold and emerged as a groundbreaking new style of multiplayer cooperation. Based in a variety of outer-space colonies and bases in the far future, Natural Selection saw a battle between the Frontiersmen and the Kharaa, who were space marines and aliens, respectively. The environments were large and full of atmosphere, with sounds and effects adding to the sense of loneliness and isolation that was often the feeling when your teammates were killed one by one. The innovative commander mode and branching development and technology trees for players to take advantage of made the game an exercise in quality teamwork, as specialized units were needed for many tasks and no one player could win by themselves. When Half-Life 2 was released, Natural Selection 2 was on the horizon to be enjoyed as a Source mod, but since then the dev team has formed their own company, Unknown Worlds Entertainment, the game has been shifted onto a custom-made proprietary engine named Spark and will be released as a stand-alone commercial title.

Oni & Bungie Before Halo

It’s easy to forget that Bungie ever made games that were not Halo. Working on the same series for over a decade will do that to you, but first-person shooters were not always the core of Bungie’s creative output. Now that they’re starting anew with Activision, it’s a good opportunity to take a look back at some of their previous work.

Though the company first hit it big with the Marathon series of shooters for the Macintosh, they also created the well-regarded strategy series Myth for Mac and PC. It may surprise long-time Halo fans to learn that the company’s first foray into the console market was actually a Playstation 2 game, the brawler Oni.

Activision to Pirates: “Stop. Pretty Please.”

What’s the best way to stop pirates? “Ask nicely,” according to Activision.

According to a story on Venture Beat, the video game publishing giant has been tracking down pirated copies of their highly-anticipated title Call of Duty: Black Ops. Instead of throwing the culprits in the clink, though, Activision has been simply asking the pirates to stop. These methods stand in contrast to the arrest last year of Christian Del Amo, an 18-year old caught raising money to buy and duplicate a pirated copy of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.