GOG.com has been running a Summer sale from the start of the week until July 5th. Almost their entire catalogue of games is discounted and they run a fresh set of daily deals every day with massive discounts.
Today is noteworthy because they have a massive collection of daily deal to celebrate the start of summer. Over 150 games on available, individually and in bundles, for a deep discount today. Some of the highlights are a Square Enix bundle featuring Thief and Deus Ex for 75% off and a classic Dungeons and Dragons collection (including Baldur’s Gate and Planescape: Torment) for 80% off. On the indie darling front, the best deals include Hotline Miami for 66% off, Fez for half-off and, one of my favourites, FTL for only $2.49 at 75% off.
Check out all of the deals at GOG.com.
The most successful video game on the market right now is the Call of Duty series. Say what you will about the game’s lack of innovation and utter disregard for the single-player campaign, this is the most commercially successful game on the market. The last couple of years have seen gross sales of over $1 billion and units sold well in excess of 10 million.
As such, you could understand why everybody is looking to CoD for cues for their upcoming efforts. Just look at the new all-brown colour palette and gritty art style of Dead Rising 3 and EA turning Battlefield into an annual franchise. The thing is that Call of Duty’s success isn’t about how it looks or how often it comes out. It may come as a shock but there’s a simple but largely undiscovered formula that makes CoD a massive success.
The lead writer of Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2, Drew Karpyshyn, went on Toronto radio to talk about his time working on the Mass Effect trilogy before getting moved to Austin to work on The Old Republic. In his interview, he talked about the ending to the trilogy that he had originally envisioned and whether it was truly cut by BioWare and EA in favour of the deus ex machina ending in ME3.
The controversial zombie MMO, The War Z, has a new name that you should be aware of with the Steam Summer Sale fast approaching. The War Z has been rechristened as Infestation: Survivor Stories after the United States Patent and Trademark Office said that publisher OP Productions couldn’t trademark The War Z.
If you recall, The War Z launched in December on Steam and was quickly the subject of much controversy. It was launched as a largely incomplete game with numerous graphical and gameplay issues. It was quickly pulled after it was revealed that the game’s description and promotion screenshots contained numerous inaccuracies. The game was relaunched in February but wasn’t reported to be any better.
Currently, the game has a score of 20 on Metacritic.
Dennaton Games is back with more brutal homicidal mayhem in Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number. The game follows up on the fallout from the first game with the stories of multiple characters whose paths intersect in an increasingly bloody and violent way.
No release date has been set but Dennaton is targeting a 2013 release.
Before I got around to playing The Last of Us, I found a fun little sink published by one of new best friends of indie developers everywhere. Adult Swim Games’ move from the flash game market to publishing games on Steam was unexpected but their propensity for getting simple but fun games straight onto Steam without going through the hit-and-miss Greenlight system benefits both the developers and gamers.
Their second release on Steam is another upgrade of an Adult Swim flash game. Super Puzzle Platformer Deluxe might be a bit of a misnomer but that doesn’t make Andrew Morrish’s creation any less delightful to play.
After taking a PR battering over 24-hour online check-in, used games restrictions, contradictory explanations of their policies and seemingly mocking people who didn’t like the Xbox One’s policies, Microsoft is performing an about-face on their established DRM policies.
A post on the Xbox website said that Microsoft was backtracking on the DRM and used games restrictions that nearly derailed the Xbox One in this console generation before it started.
Reports are spreading like wildfire that PlayStation 3 update 4.45 is causing some consoles to lock-up and become unusable after applying the update. The update was supposed to include trophy notification options and improved system stability options. It looks like they missed the latter by a bit.
According to some unofficial Reddit data analysis, if you have installed a new hard drive into your PS3 that’s larger than 500 GB, you have a 90% chance of your console bricking and becoming unusable. All other PS3 types have a failure rate of less than 10% with the stock 500 GB models suffering an 8% failure rate and 120 GB models locking up in 2% of cases.
As of publishing, it appears that Sony has rolled back the 4.45 update and lists 4.41 as the current firmware version. Just be aware if you do see an update 4.45 listed and check the internet to see if you’re safe to install it.
News of Visceral Games’ demise may have been premature but it looks like news of the end of the Dead Space may not have been. In an interview at E3, EA Games Label vice president Patrick Soderlund says that the developer has been moved on to work on a new IP while Dead Space has been but on hiatus.
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