Taking quite a different direction from the previous editions of the franchise, The Sims are about to take a journey back in time.
First hinted in the days leading up to E3 2010, The Sims Medieval won’t just be another $30 expansion pack; it will be a new series. +Continue Reading
(You may recall a story we posted a couple of months ago concerning the DRM in EA’s Command & Conquer 4, where a constant internet connection is required in order to play the game. In what will likely become a regular segment until EA, and others, come up with a solution to pirating that doesn’t hinder the consumer, I present to you with a harrowing tale straight from my own life, centered this time around EA’s ever popular Sims franchise. Enjoy.)
My girlfriend loves The Sims. Though it’s a statement that certainly ranks somewhere in the “Top 10 Most Commonly Stated Sentences of All Time,” the truth and validity of it remains unwavering. Most anytime we are parked on the sofa watching TV, she is simulating God on her laptop. If she is not, you can almost sense her desire to be doing so. And since her game of choice doesn’t hog the TV or require her to use the high-end PC in the bedroom, she gets to spend a lot of time playing it. There are many nights where she is only half-there on the couch watching a movie with me; her consciousness somewhere else, watching over numerous little lives.
This was all well, until one morning when we awoke to find her laptop refusing to power on. It was probably time for an upgrade anyway, so we drove to our nearest corporate megastore in order to pick out a young new laptop to take home. We found one that she liked and that was well-priced, but it didn’t include a DVD drive of any kind. Though I had prepared my speech on “Cloud” theory and how owning physical media would be dead as soon as we entered our species’ Enlightened Years, I instead assured her that we would have no problem getting The Sims 3 on her new laptop.
This, I later learned, would be no easy task.
Hey there, kids! Who’s up for a slice of justice with a side of comedy? Show of hands?
Well, you’re in luck! To celebrate this week’s upcoming release of Ron Gilbert’s DeathSpank (yes, that’s right – The Secret of Monkey Island‘s Ron Gilbert) on XBLA and PSN, our friends over at EA and Hothead Games have graciously provided us with some free copies of the game for our loyal readers. So if you’re down for a little Diablo-style action-RPG gameplay mixed with a liberal dose of humor, we’ve got your hook-up.
However, there’s a catch. There’s always a catch, after all. We’re not going to just do the typical random drawing sweepstakes this time around. We’re going to make you work a little bit for it.
Just how much work, you ask? Hit that jump and find out.
So a while back this thing happened with space zombies, a giant glowing stone thing and a bunch of psychotics. Everyone’s favorite errand boy, Isaac Clarke, managed to escape the doomed USG Ishimura and apparently makes it back to civilization. Of course, everything goes to Hell and he finds himself in the thick of it once more, but we won’t be taking part in any of that business until next year.
Rather than risk allowing players (read: potential customers) to forget about the only worthwhile Survival Horror franchise on the market at the moment, EA has opted to dangle a carrot in front of our noses in the form of a downloadable prequel adventure.
Skateboarding video games have a storied history. Reaching critical mass with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in 1999, the genre has experienced twists and turns that include the likes of Thrasher: Skate and Destroy to ESPN X Games Skateboarding on the PlayStation 2. EA Black Box’s Skate opened a new chapter for tired skateboarding-flavored games by introducing an innovative, mind-bending analog stick-based trick system and realistic physics that complimented the believable environments, bucking the ever-intensifying wild and ridiculous style trending in the Tony Hawk titles.
So EA just revealed a new gameplay video for Dead Space 2. The short version: it looks fucking phenomenal.
Isaac gets attacked by necromorphs (*spoiler alert*), then proceeds to turn them into little chunks suitable for stew or perhaps a borscht. It all looks fantastic and showcases many new features such as the Javelin, some actually different environments, the fact that Kinesis doesn’t suck anymore (pinning a Slasher to the wall with its own severed arm, FTW!!!) and plenty more of that crazy awesome presentation we’ve come to expect from the franchise.
But hands-down the best part of the video is the fact that it showcases exactly the kind of gameplay, scares and gruesomeness fans of the original game have been clamoring for. So all that worrying about Dead Space 2 turning into another Resident Evil 5 (i.e. not scary, too much ammo and shooting, etc…) appears to have been for nothing. Of course it’s still too soon to tell as the game isn’t slated for release until January 25th, 2011, but I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say it’s probably going to become my new most favoritest game ever. Just a hunch.
One pre-E3 presser down, two more to go. Well, today, at least. If we add in tomorrow, we’re looking at four more. Five if you count Konami’s after E3 starts proper. But enough number countery – time for the next one!
Next up is Electronic Arts. The event kicks off at 2pm Pacific/5pm Eastern. We’ll once again be firing up the liveblog about 15 minutes early to give everybody a chance to get settled in. The last one was a blast. This will hopefully be just as blast-y.
Another Summer is upon us and along with the customary triple shot of shorts, suntan lotion and stifling heat comes yet another alliterative hat-trick in the form of the video game industry’s biggest trade show: the Electronic Entertainment Expo – E3 2010 is here.
And even though CFD! can’t be in Los Angeles this year, we’re going to do our best again to cover things from afar (while silently assembling our master plan to dominate the show floor next year). What does that mean to all of you, our loyal readers? We’re going to run down all of the details just under the jump. See you there.
If reports are to be believed, then after 15 years the Command & Conquer series is coming to an end. With the release of Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight, EA has decided to lay one of real-time strategy gaming’s forefathers to rest. Unfortunately for us, Grandpa C&C decided to get a little cosmetic work done for his last outing, and the areas of injection are all too noticeable. After years of proudly delivering its own RTS style, C&C4 has gone and aped the finer elements of games around it, forging some only slightly enjoyable mishmash of a game.
Let’s face it: The Saboteur wasn’t on anyone’s immediate radar until creators Pandemic Studios got canned in late 2009. With virtually no hype and no marketing campaign, the circumstances surrounding the game’s final stages of development were more intriguing to most than the notion of actually playing the studio’s last project.
While the Pandemic brand lives on, the majority of its staff rushed to finish The Saboteur on time, only to be laid off days before its release. Some employees even went so far as to place a countdown clock in the building which predicted their job eliminations while others shook one last fist at the company who shook them off. Of course, the ultimate question was whether or not The Saboteur would be the doomed studio’s swan song or yet another of their current-gen disappointments.
It’s always something.
It’s seems almost immediately after Commander Shepard and company defeat Saren and put a stop to the Geth attack on the Citadel, a new threat to the galaxy pops up. Thousands of human colonists have been disappearing from settlements throughout the Terminus Systems. The Alliance isn’t doing jack about it either, which forces Shepard to look for help elsewhere. That elsewhere turns out to be Cerberus, the shadowy organization with very questionable ethics which was the source of many of the Commander’s woes throughout first game. But like any galactic savior worth their legendary reputation, Shepard sucks it up, joins forces with an ex-enemy, and sets out to find out the culprit behind this new threat.
And then kill it.
Having trouble deciding whether to pick up Command & Conquer 4 or waiting for StarCraft II? Well, Electronic Arts would like to assist you in making your decision by helping you catch up on some of the C&C you may have missed over the years. Right now on their site they are offering not one, not two, but three games from the venerable RTS series for free. No strings attached!
Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy, Violence, Fraud and Treachery – for Dante, these sins represent steps on a literal trip through Hell and back to try and save the soul of his beloved. For me? It sounds like an average weekend. And I’m sure that the average Indianapolis Colts fan is dealing with at least five or so of these today, if not all seven.
Oh ho ho! But I do kid about, don’t I? Look at me, being topical with a Super Bowl reference.*
*Ahem*
Anyway, with Dante’s Inferno about to release this Tuesday, it’s about time to enjoy what is probably the final new trailer before the game launches. No ’70s soul in this one, sadly. Oh well. We can’t win them all, can we?
If you’re like me – and I know I am – you could care less about the Super Bowl. All it means to me is that for a couple of hours, the streets will have marginally less traffic and the salty snack isle at the grocery store will be a little more sparsely stocked in the days prior.
However, I know I’m the anomaly and not the norm in this situation and that millions of people will be watching it. EA knows this too – that’s why they’ve purchased a block of super-expensive ad time to hype Dante’s Inferno, mere days before it releases in stores. Also noteworthy is the fact that CBS forced them to remove their customary “Go To Hell” tagline from the end of the commercial, replacing it with the presumably less offensive “Hell Awaits.”
So, if you, like me, indulge in the blasphemy that is not giving a crap about football, why not indulge in a bit more and enjoy this (surprisingly soulful, thanks to the Bill Withers soundtrack) Dante’s Inferno commercial? Just don’t ask me where the tortilla chips are – the store was sold out… *grumble*
All you youngsters out there may find this hard to believe, but there was once a time when people didn’t play games on their TVs or computers. There were no “Xboxes” or “PlayStations” or even “Wiis”. Nope. Instead, people used to gather around the family dinner table and play games on cardboard “gameboards” using dice, cards and little plastic statuette characters. And the most unbelievable part about these “boardgames”, as they were called, was that they didn’t even feature online multiplayer modes! Everyone who wanted to play had to physically be in the same room. Can you believe it?
Okay, of course you know what a boardgame is. You might even have gotten one for Christmas just a few weeks ago. But if you did, hopefully it wasn’t Risk, the classic “Game of World Domination” from the good folks at Hasbro, because Electronic Arts has just announced that they plan on making that old “analog” version obsolete when they release Risk: Factions on XBLA in early 2010.
Join the CFD! editorial staff as they bicker incessantly and vent their collective neuroses on air... and somewhere along the way they talk about games too.
Rob Thomas
Editor-in-Chief & Founder
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Rob Rich
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Nate Andrews
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Sage Knox
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Beki Sutcliffe
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Dustin Stevens
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Jason Smith
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Scott Thompson
Podcast Producer & Contributing Editor
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Aubrey Klanecky
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