Left for Dead Goodness...

In a podcast delivered via shacknews a representative from valve stated that they intend to deliver more content for their hit title Left for Dead, saying "What we want to do is just deliver more content you can play at this point." Sounds like a great goal to me.

As far as what they are working on, the current focus seems to be on incorporating the Versus mode to the Dead Air and Death Toll campaigns. As of right now only Blood Harvest and No Mercy are playable in Versus.

This should be good, as the only major criticism of L4D was that it was short on content. It should be noted that through Jan 2ND almost all steam games are on sale, including Left for Dead.

Fear is coming home, and with a better story

Monolith created the first F.EA.R. game in 2005 for publisher Vivendi Games but because of a legal dispute over the F.E.A.R. title, Vivendi Games hired developer Timegate Studios to create two PC expansion packs for the original F.E.A.R (Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate). Niether expansion was as good as the original game and when Vivendi Games was absorbed into the new Activsion Blizzard, the new company gave the F.E.A.R. title rights back to Monolith and Warner Bros. Interactive.

Gof all that so far (yes we know it's confusing)? Now as Monolith prepared to release F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin in February its art lead Dave Matthews believes those Timegate expansions might have hurt the franchise. In a recent chat with Computer and Video games Matthews states, ""[TimeGate] took the story in a direction that we didn't intend. We look at Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate as an alternate universe, a 'what could have been', and because of that it doesn't necessarily diminish the story that we were trying to tell. F.E.A.R. was about Alma, F.E.A.R. 2 is about Alma, and we wanted to continue the story the way we originally intended."

Things like this happen. Im just glad its back at Monolith.

Wrath of the Lich King

Blizzard reports that following the expansion Wrath of the Lich King, World of Warcraft now has 11.5 million subscribers. And to think their parent company was considering selling them a few years ago.

Looks like someone finally learned something

Obtained Via BigDownloads.com:

In perhaps their biggest game publisher deal yet, Valve has announced secured the rights to distribute a number of PC game titles from Electronic Arts via their Steam service. EA has previously handled downloadable PC game titles via their own EA Downloader service but now Spore, Spore Creepy and Cute Parts Pack, Warhammer Online, Mass Effect, FIFA Manager 09, and Need For Speed Undercover are now all available to purchase and download via Steam (sorry, rest of the world, this is for North America only).

In addition to those games, EA will also offer Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, Dead Space and the upcoming PC port of Mirror's Edge via Steam in the near future. When contacted by Big Download, an EA spokesperson would not comment if any of EA's older PC games might find their way onto Steam as well. If you have been wanting to buy EA games but have been avoiding purchasing them because of EA's use of DRM in their recent titles, a message of Valve's Steam forums states that the EA games on Steam do not use third party DRM or SecuROM set-up, saying, " the only DRM it uses is Steam itself."

It looks like EA may have finally realized that there are alternatives to DRM. Personally, I don't care about most of the copy protection stuff out there, however limiting installs is BS, and the whole technology basically doesn't work. Now if EA wises up even more, they might consider making some exclusive content for the steam version, or offering a cheaper price than standard retail.

Starcraft 2 Electric Boogaloo

Blizzard Entertainment has released a video showing a multiplayer match for Starcraft 2. The narrators seems to take themselves a little too seriously, it almost sounds like a football game. Regardless it is a pretty good demonstration of how things are shaping up.

Duke Nukem Whenever...

Today 3D Realms released a new image from the game Duke Nukem Forever, to show off several of the title's monsters. However it does not appear to be in game.

How am I supposed to take this seriously?

Defense Grid

Despite what the reviews may say, Warcraft 3 was a crappy game, as was the expansion. It may have had the usual Blizzard polish, but as the saying goes there are some things you just cant polish, and unfortunately this was one of them.

One of the good things that did come out of it however was the tower defense games. In these, players have to use various defense towers to defeat a predetermined number of creatures before they can reach a point on the map.

Defense Grid: The Awakening is by far one of the best games of this type I have ever seen. The graphics but every other game in this genre to shame. I'm not sure how many levels are in the campaign, but the first 15 I played flew past pretty quick.

Available for $20 on steam and direct2drive

Problems getting the word out

When people talk about the supposed "death of PC gaming", one of the main issues that comes up is the focus in the industry with hyping up big name, flashy games with advanced graphics that either sell big or fall flat, often times taking the company with it. Unfortunately, many gaming news sites help this process along buy not devoting any time to smaller or independent games to help them gain any attention. This seems to create an endless cycle where big publishers get all the press, most of it seemingly related to expansion packs for the same franchise.

Gamespot.com is probably the best example of this, though certainly not the only one. Anyway there are other sites that give a little more even coverage, and one of my favorites at the moment is Big Downloads, which not only gives a little more fair coverage but also offers trial downloads of several games, new and old. If your bored, take a look.

This weeks A' hole

The jerk of the week at this point would seem to be Sam Zell. One year after this real estate tycoon bought Tribune for 8 billion dollars, he has just filed for bankruptcy. Why does that make him this weeks winner you ask? Well, in order to raise the money necessary to purchase Tribune, he set up a deal where he basically used the employees tax exempt stock option plan to borrow the money he needed to wrest control, contributing only 314 million of his own money. Though technically it made the employees the owners of the company, he was obviously in charge. He then cut back on employees 401k contributions in order to pay back the money he borrowed in his "tax efficient" little scheme. Only now that he is filing for bankruptcy, those stock options are probably going to be worthless, leaving the employees to bear the brunt of Tribunes 12.9 billion in debt compared to its 7.6 billion in assets. The only bright point is that because this was only going on for a year, employees wont lose as much as if they had been contributing to this for 7 or 8 years.

Thanks a lot.....dick

The Political Machine - The Next Day

I am please to report that last night running as candidate Al Gore I soundly defeated my opponent, Ulysses S Grant with a final electoral count of 411 to 127. Click on the picture to see the electoral map. I almost carried Texas.

The Political Machine

One of the nice things about digital distribution platforms like Impulse and Steam is that it allows companies to sell games that might only appeal to a niche market by maintaining higher profit margins than a standard retail release. A good example of this is The Political Machine 2008, a presidential campaign simulator from Stardock, makers of Galactic Civilizations and Sins of a Solar Empire. This cartoony little game basically mocks the more extreme aspects of presidential campaigns while offering a easily to learn strategy game, with optional multiplayer. It's not going to win any 10's from game sites, but for the $5 I spent on it at Best Buy, it is well worth it.

Empire Total War

One of the games I am looking forward to most of all has to be Empire: Total war. For those of you who may not be familiar with it, Creative Assembly years ago made the groundbreaking game Shogun:Total War. Featuring A.I. that was designed directly from The Art of War by Sun Tzu, this game featured a combination of turn based and real time strategy that played out on an epic scale. I never played Medieval: Total War, but Rome TW was easily one of if not the greatest strategy game ever made. The graphics and AI were so realistic the history channel actually used the game to demonstrate how real historic battles played out.

Anyway Empire: Total War looks like another leap forward in this series. Dated around what looks like the Age of Sail and moving into the American revolutionary war, this new game will also feature Naval Combat in addition to visually amazing land battles. Check these out:

Thank you EA executives

NetDragon Websoft Inc, a China-based game developer, has teamed up with publisher Electronic Arts to develop a massively-multiplayer online game based on the beloved Dungeon Keeper franchise. Coined Dungeon Keeper Online, the MMO will be NetDragon's first MMORPG.

Way to ruin a good franchise. Thanks for that.

In better news, it looks like THQ obtained the rights to Homeworld when they purchased Relic from Vivendi. Recently one of their lead designers commented on it in an interview with eurogamer:

""We're really happy the [intellectual property] has made its way home, and yeah, we're definitely looking at it. We'll see what happens in the future," Ebbert told Eurogamer. "

Oh please, please, please...