Month: August 2009

Mass Effect Pinnacle Station DLC Released

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

BioWare has released new DLC for Mass Effect, for the 360 and PC. Priced at $5, Pinnacle Station provides a new space station for players with a Spectre character to board and face 13 battle challenges, approximately 2-3 hours of content.

Pinnacle Station Pinnacle Station Bring Down the Sky

What makes this release interesting is the complete lack of a formal announcement from BioWare. The DLC was hinted at for months, leaked on the Swiss Live Marketplace, and then eventually released to the rest of the world with no acknowledgement from the developers. Moreover, the launch was less than smooth, with some users facing problems getting the mission to work 1)http://www.joystiq.com/2009/08/26/bioware-looking-into-mass-effect-pinnacle-station-dlc-gli/. Additionally, this DLC pack is not free for the PC, which the first one, Bring Down the Sky was. There is a marked difference in the kind of gameplay offered in Pinnacle Station, being primarily a combat-focused mission with little story. Bring Down the Sky featured a meaty side mission, introducing the previously mentioned but unseen Batarian race. Whether or not this latest pack is worth your hard-earned bucks is most likely down to how much you enjoy the combat in the game 2)http://kotaku.com/5347695/mass-effect-pinnacle-station-micro+review-a-curious-experiment; here’s hoping that this progression (or would that be regression?) in depth doesn’t extend to the next pack, if there will be one.

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Sqr

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

Sqr is a quirky little shooter by experimental developer Retro Anomaly. Utilizing simple but psychedelic graphics in a style reminiscent of Gunroar, the game is a nice little distraction for restless fingers – though confusing at first glance.

Sqr Sqr Sqr

The title of the game refers to the motif of square elements that comprise everything, including numbers for the odd high score screen. you control a tiny green square and are swarmed by larger pink ones in a variety of patterns. The two attacks granted to you are a steady laser and glowing orb. The first attack, activated by the z key, is controlled in the manner of a turret, with the orbiting blue square acting as the pivot. The second attack, on the x key, seems unpredictable and useless at first but with a little practice can be controlled fully (but is still useless). It’s basically fired by a sling motion – that is, hold x, move in the direction you want to fire and then let go of x.

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Mass Effect Galaxy Review

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

Mass Effect Galaxy was released a couple of months back for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This $2.99 top-down shooter tells a story that takes place between Mass Effect and the upcoming sequel. The main characters will appear in ME2 and the story touches on threads that will be picked up therein, too. So is it worth checking out for fans of the series?

Mass Effect Galaxy

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bitComposer Publishing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

German publisher bitComposer Games report they are to publish GSC Game World’s latest game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat in the fall:

bitComposer Games has secured the worldwide rights to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, the next first-person shooter from Ukrainian developer GSC Game World and follow-up to the highly successful S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: … the newest episode seamlessly connects to Shadow of Chernobyl. The release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat for Windows PC is scheduled for Fall 2009.

This turn of events was largely presaged in GSC Game World utilizing a different publisher for each game in the franchise so far: With Shadow of Chernobyl, they utilized THQ, and Clear Sky was published by Deep Silver respectively. Looking from the outside in, I would personally wager that GSC Game World’s relationship with Deep Silver was marred somewhat by the publisher’s odd insistence on prematurely publishing untested patches for the game – not once but twice – first with 1.5.06 and again with version 1.5.09, further contributing to the pre-existing stigma of the game series’ assumed instabilities.

Though there’s a decided dearth of footage – some twelve screenshots in all – available for this forthcoming prequel at the moment, you can nevertheless take a gander at the game’s official website. bitComposer Games, then, are an all-new company, founded only last March, and are planning to come out with a slew of titles all to be published Q3 2009, including “RACE On“, the obscure “Scorpion: Disfigured” and “The Void”.

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Dissecting the Casts of Valve’s Left 4 Dead Series

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

The last-minute visual overhaul of the original Left 4 Dead cast, revealed during EA’s 2008 E3 conference 1)http://www.destructoid.com/e3-08-left-4-dead-main-characters-get-redesigned-95661.phtml, came mere months before the November 18 launch date for the game. The changes, though minuscule as well as practically-minded, felt like a crushing blow to some, yet wholly inconsequential to others.

Revision Comparison
Revision Comparison

Some players might have missed the debacle altogether. Me? In response to the news, I envisioned a future scenario wherein Beyoncé models for a revised Alyx in Half-Life 2 EP3. I was desperate to commentate on the topic right there and then, but ultimately decided against it. Phew. Now, despite the fact that Left 4 Dead 2’s characters have barely been cast out to light, however, I am bold enough to suggest that an intriguing pattern has emerged, that a trajectory of design can be seen in the way Valve and Turtle Rock Studios have designed the various characters of the Left 4 Dead series.

In this text – which is just as much a history of the games’ development cycle as it is an analysis of the concept of “character” in the gaming medium – I will first navigate us through a series of dates, occurrences and currents that ultimately affected the make-up of the casts of both games. I will also attempt to explain and pinpoint decisions related to the series’ art direction. Since we’re broadly three months removed from Left 4 Dead 2 release date of November 17th, you’ll have just about enough time to read through my admittedly thorough assessment. Thanks for reading!

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