PC Game News
Sep
The game streaming service OnLive is preparing a set of new promotions to bump its subscriber listing as we head towards the holidays. This Labor Day weekend, the service will offer all of its cloud-service games at 50% off. In addition, the company is extending its “Founding Members” program to the end of the year, which gives a free first year and an optional second year for about five bucks.
The company also announced that it will be rolling out a beta program of Wi-Fi connectivity for the service, so users will no longer need to have a hard-wire. The press release didn’t mention an exact date for the new feature, only that it is coming out sometime this month. “Wi-Fi support has been the most requested feature among OnLive members, so we made it a top development priority and were able to role out a beta version ahead of schedule,” said COO Mike McGarvey in the press release.
OnLive will have a booth at PAX this weekend, showing off the service along with the new Wi-Fi feature. Those interested in seeing video game streaming for themselves can find it at booth #3446.
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Sep
Indie MMO Love Free This Weekend
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Not quite sold on Eskil Steenberg’s one-man-MMO-show Love? What if it were completely free? That’s exactly what’s going down this Friday, as the developer just announced a free weekend for the procedurally-generated online game.
Beginning tomorrow, September 3 at 1:00 a.m. Eastern, you’ll be able to download the Love client from the game’s official website. From there you should have free access to the game servers until around 7:00 a.m. Eastern on Monday.
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Before Irrational Games decided to make BioShock Infinite, it was testing prototype ideas that might show up in a few different 2K games. We chatted with Ken Levine in the latest stop on our Cross Country Game Tour (above), who said that the eventual decision to make BioShock Infinite relied on some of the concepts that had come before.
“We finished BioShock, and we really didn’t know what was going to be next,” he said. “We actually prototyped a bunch of stuff… kinda decided it wasn’t [right], and sat in a room and said, what else is interesting us? The idea of doing another BioShock game came up, but we knew if we were going to do that it wasn’t going to be a game in Rapture.”
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Sep
StarCraft II Sells Over 3 Million
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Blizzard announced today that Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty has unsurprisingly sold a lot of units. More specifically, the game has moved over 3 million copies worldwide in its first month, making it the fastest-selling real-time strategy game of all time. We know that half of those sales were in the first two days, so after the initial zerg rush gamers calmed down and only bought another (staggering) 1.5 million.
“We appreciate all the enthusiasm that players around the world have shown for StarCraft II,” said CEO Mike Morhaime in the press release. “It was important to us to deliver an overall gameplay experience that was accessible, balanced, and fun, and it’s been gratifying to see how strongly the global community has already embraced the game.”
If you haven’t picked up StarCraft 2 yet, and were waiting for it to hit a few million buyers so you would know it’s the cool trend, now would be the time to bite. Check out the review for our own heaping helping of praise.
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Sep
Valve sure knows how to keep its audience guessing. Company co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell recently sat down with the UK’s PC Gamer magazine and discussed what’s on the horizon for the Half-Life developer.
“I can guarantee you people are going to be surprised at stuff we do. That isn’t going to stop any time soon,” Newell told PC Gamer (via CVG). “I’m just laughing because… people will be shocked again.”
He continued, “We have three pretty big surprises in the next 12 months at least.”
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Sep
Curious what Telltale has in store for Marty McFly and friends? USA Today’s Game Hunters blog snagged some early details on the upcoming Back to the Future games from the Sam & Max developer.
The USA Today article confirms that 71-year-old Christopher Lloyd is set to reprise his role as Doc Brown in Telltale’s episodic series. Original Back to the Future trilogy screenwriter Bob Gale is also on board to work on the plot for all five of the planned episodes.
Expect plenty of references to the films, including the DeLorean, Hill Valley, and even characters modeled after the original actors. But don’t hold your breath for a Michael J. Fox voiceover; the man who was McFly has yet to be confirmed for Telltale’s games.
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Sep
World of Warcraft subscribers on older Mac hardware will soon be left with no choice but to upgrade to a new system or give up the game for good. Blizzard announced on its official forums over the weekend that an upcoming patch will disable support for World of Warcraft on Power PC-equipped Macs.
“Apple has been focusing on Intel Macs since the end of 2005,” notes a Blizzard poster on the forums. “So since 5 years, PPC systems has received very few bug fixes. It is now too hard to deal with all the bugs and the lack of features to support the few PPC users that we have left.”
Following the pre-Cataclysm update, anyone with a Power PC machine will be greeted with an error message when attempting to run the game. Blizzard points out that StarCraft 2 also lacks Power PC support, as will Diablo III.
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Sep
The once-rumored Facebook adaptation of Madden NFL is definitely real, as it officially went live earlier today.
The spinoff features simulated games, with teams being assembled via packs of virtual cards. Points for new cards can be acquired by winning games, or by dropping real-life cash. There’s also a practice mode, where training points can be accrued over a certain period of time and used to improve the team.
Madden NFL Superstars has been teased since February, when EA Sports president Peter Moore said the franchise would be launching on the social network. It was developed by Playfish, which EA acquired last year.
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It looks like Blizzard has slightly lower standards than Valve when it comes to adapting their properties into movies, in that they will actually consider outside help. That help just needs to be of a caliber no less than James Cameron’s.
Speaking to MTV Multiplayer, Blizzard’s Rob Pardo, executive vice president of game design, said they’ve always been open to adaptions for their games — particularly StarCraft — so long as they find the “right partners” to adapt them with. “We probably could have made a ['StarCraft'] movie or something on TV years and years ago, but it’s really important to us that we find creative people that are really talented but also really excited about our properties,” Pardo explained. “That’s always been the challenge for us. I think if Jim Cameron came to us tomorrow and said, ‘You want to make a ‘StarCraft’ movie?’ we’d probably sign that.”
Pardo also said this is exactly what happened with World of Warcraft, and why they decided to go ahead with that film adaptation. “We were really excited about being involved with Legendary Pictures, who we thought had a really good track record with these sorts of movies that would make sense for our franchises,” Pardo explained. Previous adaptations under Legendary Pictures’ banner include Watchmen, 300, Where the Wild Things Are, and Christopher Nolan’s Batman films.
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As good as a Call of Duty campaign is, the multiplayer is easily where the lasting power of the franchise lies — it’s the reason why people like Tina Sanchez and Street Fighter producer Yoshinori Ono keep on playing Modern Warfare 2. And while Treyarch has shown some nifty stuff for single-player, the studio has only released a teaser trailer for multiplayer and has remained silent since then.
Until next week, where Activision is hosting a Call of Duty: Black Ops Multiplayer Premiere event. Both Tina and Thierry Nguyen will be in attendance to see first-hand what’s it like to double-stab dudes in multiplayer. We’ll start with the Live Blog (embedded below) of the multiplayer presentation, then we’ll also be posting impressions, footage, and maybe even a video interview. We’re assuming the venue has a decent Wi-Fi signal, but in case it doesn’t, you can also follow the 1UP Live Blog Twitter account
According to Activision, the presentation should begin around 6:00pm Pacific on September 1. Stay tuned to this story.
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