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