PC games sales aren’t monitored by the NPD, so it falls on the shoulders of the Steam Sales Report to monitor how well PC games are doing in the market every Friday at 3:00 PM. Here is where you can see what Steam games are selling well, and I’ll do my best to explain why they sold. This week, there was a QuakeCon 2010 Steam Sale, which overturned a good chunk of the top 10 list.
Great games are released monthly and occasionally, our picky little eyes miss it and someone else’s will spot it. In this week’s top list, Xbox Team members Nate Butch, Tristan Wong, and myself discuss our top 3 most underrated games on the Xbox 360.
Deadly Premonition is the butt of all jokes and for good reason; it has many bad things about it. But a lot of those “bad things” are incredibly charming in their own way. The combat is straight up abysmal, but apart from that, I can’t think of anything that made me furious, it all had a unique charm unmatched by any game I’ve played. The story is very “Twin Peaks” but along the way, it takes quite a bit of twists and turns. I will proudly say I enjoyed the story of Deadly Premonition. It’s a silly, silly story though at times it’ll blend just enough seriousness into it to make you actually care about what happens to the characters. And at the end of the game, I couldn’t help but think I had just witnessed one of the strongest endings of a game, story-wise, this year.
Summer of Arcade 2010 has featured a lot of really strong XBLA titles so far. This year’s line up is a nice balance between new takes on established franchises and completely original properties. Original properties like this weeks release from Uber Entertainment. Monday Night Combat is a class based third person shooter set in a goofy stylized future where the masses tune in to watch human clones duke it out in an arena. It comically spoofs gladiatorial combat while offering a satirical take at our own professional sports.
One thing the Civilization series does well is kill time, in an epic way. Civilization IV is no different, having chewed up hours of my life. This incarnation of the series is the best to date, managing to streamline the game for new players, while keeping the in depth game play for veterans.
For those who haven’t played or heard of the Civilization series, they are 4X genre games. This means there are multiple ways to win and in Civilization IV that could be Military, Diplomatic, Cultural or Scientific. In fact there are many ways to win, which is one of the things that make the game great. Another important factor is that the game is turned based, choosing all your moves and then allowing your opponent to choose theirs. Finally, one of the biggest things about the game is that it’s EPICALLY LONG. To get an idea how long a game may last think about watching The Lord of the Rings…trilogy…back to back, yea it’s about that long.
Test Drive Unlimited 2, originally scheduled for release in Q4 of this year, has been delayed until early next year. The official website of the developer Eden Games posted a short news story with the information: “TDU2 is a highly ambitious game and also very big. Since locking down the final features, some months ago, we have been busy getting the bugs out of the game.” “We’re at the point now where we have a pretty solid game, which is fun and could be launched shortly. However, with a few extra months of polish it could be even better.”
Irrational Games has a long, unbroken history of making spectacular games, including System Shock 2, S.W.A.T. 4. and both Freedom Force. Not to mention the artsy-smartsy shooter Bioshock. For weeks they have been tantalizing gamers with their new project “Icarus” which, as you all know is the name of the Greek hero who doomed himself by foolishly flying too close to the sun. Is that a symbol? A metaphor? Are they making a sequel to the old Nintendo game “Kid Icarus”? Will it be an ancient Greek flight simulator?!
Back in 2006 when we first got our hands on the shiny new Playstation 3 Sony released two models, one premium model and one basic. The basic model missed out on WiFi, it had a smaller hard drive, and it didn’t have a multi card reader like the premium did. But other than that the two models were actually very similar. They both had 4 USB ports compared to the 2 you get on all models now and, crucially, in the US both of the launch versions had PS2 backward compatibility. This means that at the time Sony thought backward compatibly was important enough to even fit on the base model.
