Blog Archives

The Geth are More Popular Than the Quarians and Other Mass Effect 3 Stats

As part of their Mass Effect retrospective panel at PAX East, BioWare released an infographic detailing the decisions made by players. They didn’t reveal stats like completion rate or which ending was chosen (for obvious reasons) but they did detail the most popular classes, FemShep vs. BroShep, paragon vs. renegade, the favourite squadmates and even total single player play time across the community.

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PSA: Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer Ops are Done

A quick FYI for Mass Effect 3 fans: As implied by a post on the BioWare blog and later confirmed on the BioWare Social Network forums, the Mass Effect 3 multiplayer weekend operations have come to an end. They had been weekly since last fall’s release of the Retaliation DLC and bi-weekly prior to that.

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The 2013 Worst Company in America Tournament is Underway

ea-golden-poo-worst-company-in-america-2012

With the start of the NCAA Men’s Basketball championship tournament, also known as March Madness, comes a deluge of bracket tournaments to determine the winner of every competition imaginable. One of the more noteworthy is The Consumerist’s bracket to determine the Worst Company in America.

We gamers might have heard of this because the Mass Effect 3 ending and day-one DLC controversies powered EA to victory last year. Well, the tournament is underway for 2013 and EA is in with another chance to repeat.

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Mass Effect 3: Citadel DLC Review: An End, Once and For All

mass-effect-3-citadel-dlc-bannerThis is it, isn’t it? One last ride with Commander Shepard as we take on a group of well-armed and ill-intentioned bad guys in order to save the galaxy with our friends in tow. BioWare made us well aware that this was going to be the final piece of DLC released for Mass Effect 3. In effect, Citadel would be a send-off for the series that people had invested so much time and energy into over the last six years.

So how was our ride into the sunset with Commander Shepard and crew?

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EA and Maxis Scramble To Get SimCity Functional

simcity-promo-01-fireGood news for SimCity fans: EA and Maxis are working tirelessly to get everyone playing SimCity in as stable a manner as possible. The bad news is that their scrambling involves hurridly adding servers, patching issues that are causing performance instability and disabling what they consider to be non-critical features in order to address server issues.

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Building (Critical) Consensus: SimCity [Updated]

My time with the SimCity beta made me think that this is what players of the original X-COM went through when last year’s reboot was launched. It was familiar but it wasn’t the same. While it was nice to have SimCity back, it just didn’t feel like the SimCity that I knew and loved. But based on what the critics think, maybe I was wrong to feel turned off by the streamlined controls and the game telling me I have a slow rig.

When reading through this, please note that some reviewers trying to be the first ones out at embargo never had a chance to experience the queues to get on to servers, download issues or had the ability to download it locked out while Origin sorted its shit out. It’s also unlikely that press members on the one dedicated media server found out that your cities are locked to the server you created them on. It’s probably a bit early to be cynical about the whole thing but isn’t always-online DRM a magical thing? Read the rest of this entry

The Unauthorized History of Mass Effect 3

mass-effect-3-posterToday marks the one-year anniversary of the release of BioWare and EA’s Mass Effect 3. The highly anticipated conclusion to the Mass Effect trilogy launched on March 6, 2012, to great reviews from the gaming media but was almost immediately at the centre of a massive controversy among fans over its ending and DLC practices.

Let’s look back at the history of ME3 from launch to today to see what happened and when it happened to make one of 2012’s most anticipated games one of its most controversial. Read the rest of this entry

Reports Say Dead Space 4 Has Been Cancelled

dead-space-3-concept-art-01-isaac-clarkeDead Space 3 has been out all of a month but it looks like EA has seen enough from the sales figures to make a call about the series’ future. Reports say that Dead Space 3 failed to meet its sales targets so EA is pulling the plug on the series, including cancelling Dead Space 4 which Visceral Games already had in pre-production.

The rumour that DS4 has been cancelled is disappointing but apparently not a shock for people inside EA and Visceral Games. While the Dead Space series has been reasonably popular among gamers, it didn’t seem to have too many fans at the publisher. Read the rest of this entry

The Detailed Breakdown of Mass Effect 3: Reckoning Multiplayer DLC

mass-effect-3-reckoning-02-geth-juggernautThe final Mass Effect 3 multiplayer add-on pack is being released today. BioWare says that today’s Reckoning DLC will be the fifth and last free piece of downloadable content for ME3’s multiplayer mode.

As usual, BioWare is being tight-lipped about the details of Reckoning. If you do enough digging, you might be able to piece together what you’ll get when you download the DLC. But why do that when we’ve already compiled all the info and rumours about Reckoning for you. Read the rest of this entry

Mass Effect 3 Signs Off with Two Final DLCs

mass-effect-3-citadel-screenshot-01As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Whether you loved it or hated it, Mass Effect 3’s journey is finally coming to an end. Yesterday, BioWare announced that they would release the final two pieces of ME3 DLC, one each of single-player and multiplayer, over the next two weeks.

Both of the DLCs announced confirmed the rumours that had been circulating the interwebs for months. The single-player DLC is the Citadel DLC. Multiplayer will see the addition of the Reckoning DLC.

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