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Long before Mass Effect hit the shelves, developers Bioware had announced their intentions of it being the first in a trilogy. Now, with the runaway success that Mass Effect has proved to be, the sequels are pretty much a certainty. Microsoft’s glee at the prospect another franchise to milk is palpable, considering the game is an exclusive for the Xbox 360. Add to that, the fact that the game in itself is one of the best titles out there, what with gamers in their third and fourth playthrough of the game and still enjoying it. It only means that there is more money waiting to be tapped in form of downloadable content (DLC).
As expected, Bioware has announced “Bring Down The Sky”, the first DLC for Mass Effect, scheduled to be released on March 10. The DLC will be available for download at Xbox LIVE Marketplace at 3:30 PM IST (2:00 AM PST) for 400 Microsoft Points. With around 90 minutes of completely new gameplay, fans have much to cheer about. Achievement Whores will also have a reason to smile with new Achievements worth 50 Gamerscore points for them to loose their sleep over.
Although Halo 3 managed to reclaim it’s throne from Call of Duty 4 (COD4) on Xbox LIVE a few days back, it did prove the popularity of Infinity Ward’s breathtaking offering. Infinity Ward managed to revive a dying a genre and my, what a revival it has been! So it comes as a no surprise that gamers have been salivating all over there controllers ever since the news of an expansion for COD4 surfaced. Now, while a concrete date hasn’t been fixed for the expansion, there is something more coming our way to keep us busy till the promised expansion shows up.
After having finished the fight last September, rabid fans of the Halo franchise had to be content with sticking their friends with grenades online and waiting for the next game set in the Haloverse, the first RTS in the series - Halo Wars. Though the continuation of the story (or rather, the prequel) was expected long before Halo 3 wrapped up (or not) the Master Chief saga, few expected it to take the form of a real time strategy game that Bungie, in collaboration with Age of Empires legend Ensemble Studios are expected to spring on us later this year. RTS games on the Xbox 360, like Command & Conquer: Tiberium Wars before it, have always been iffy, what with the level of control and freedom that a conventional keyboard-mouse combination offers, but Ensemble Studios, like every other console RTS dev before them, have claimed to have worked out the nuances of controlling the game using a standard Xbox 360 controller without frustration levels peaking into the red-zone.
While we wait for the official demo of the game to check out the control scheme for ourselves and speculate on the possibility of wreaking havoc with the Covenant war machine, one of our friends over at Microsoft, like many of us from time to time, developed a case of verbal diarrhoea and slipped us some really interesting information. Now, while we are never in the habit of starting rumors, this one comes from someone on the inside who swears on its authenticity on pain of death, and we’ve been sitting on this one for almost a couple of weeks now, trying to verify it before we say anything about it.
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Talking about stuff hitting you out of left field, a nice little PR “roundup” from Microsoft is definitely not what we expected to find in our inbox this warm (yes, warm, weird, I know) Saturday afternoon. A colorful little flyer full of “gamer-talk”, the notice promises a lot more fun for the Indian Xbox 360 community, including local releases for Sakaguchi-san’s Lost Odeyssey and the much-awaited Ninja Gaiden 2, which we presume will happen sometime early February.
Apart from talking a little bit more about the educational content, which Microsoft will release on the Xbox 360 in partnership with Educomp - a “technology driven education organization” (FATAL ERROR: Keyphrase Overusage!) we are told that kids would now be able to play with math, science and social studies in completely new ways (oh joy!) and hopefully walk away “educationally enriched” rather than a bad craving for Mass Effect and Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties. Hey, don’t quote us on this, but we actually learnt more of our history playing with the latter than by sitting around in class, where we usually just passed notes back and forth to stave off the Sandman’s intoxicating aura.
Although we have a number of complaints about what we received, we’ll look the other way this time when it comes to encouraging people to trash talk and indulge in unsporting and aggressive behavior on Xbox LIVE (no matter how sarcastic you wanted it to appear) or plagiarizing content straight from GameSpot’s game guides. Please don’t let us catch you doing these again as we might most probably be tempted to send a sharply-worded critique your way. For now, we’re happy we’ll get to see Ninja Gaiden 2 soon, which coupled with the Burnout Paradise release at the end of the month and the Burnout 3: Takedown Marketplace release on Monday, should keep us coasting until April until the big ticket items end up in our grubby mitts.
Boy, it’s been quite a while without any news on Kane’s Wrath - the expansion to last year’s blast-of-an-RTS that was Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. But with the game just around the corner, we’re starting to see a lot more assets designed specifically to make us play through Tiberium Wars all over again, including the 12 new screenshots you see right here. While you enjoy their goodness and dream about blasting enemies into oblivion with an Ion Cannon or a Nuke, we’ll just go and drool all over Natasha Henstridge as Alexa, who is all set to join Joe Kucan (Kane) and Carl Lumbly from Alias in the HD-cutscenes that made us drool all over Tricia Helfer (poor Kilian) and Jennifer Morrison in Tiberium Wars. And for the love of God, why the heck does Tiberium always remind me of Kryptonite?
Hit the jump for the screenshots.
For a series that was left practically dead after the horrifying Angel of Darkness, Tomb Raider has been revived so well by Crystal Dynamics that it’s now got people who’ve never played the games hopelessly falling in love with it. Having first taken the spunky, extremely well-endowed Lara out for a spin in 1997, and having gone back to where it all began with Anniversary, this deranged, maniacal, slack-jawed Tomb Raider nutcase has seen it all. Having made Legend and Anniversary the best damned games in the series, Crystal Dynamics looks set to pull out all the stops in the upcoming Tomb Raider: Underworld, which already has a quite a bit of fans going “Drake who?”
We sat and dug through the first preview on the PLAY magazine, and we’ve got all the dirt on Lara’s latest adventure. Directly continuing from her adventures in Legend, Tomb Raider: Underworld (as the name suggests) will see Lara explore vast labyrinthian areas around the world, in addition to doing all the monkey stuff that she does in one of the largest, lush areas seen this side of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. While it is not entirely sure how the story will tie in to Legend’s and all that is hinted at in Anniversary, fans might want to look closer into Lord Richard Croft’s words in Anniversary, and at the deeper connections between Jacqueline Natla and Amanda Evert (as in why do they look so much like each other and why Amanda’s operation in Bolivia has crates with Natla Technologies logos on them) to figure out where the story is heading in Underworld.
Yves Guillemot and Jade Raymond couldn’t be happier. Why wouldn’t they be, considering a certain robed and hooded Santa, complete with a spring-loaded dagger for his ring finger has been stuffing Ubisoft socks with millions of dollars over the last three weeks? The first part in a trilogy involving all sorts of medieval (and futuristic) hijinks, Assassin’s Creed has crossed the 2.5 mn. units sold milestone - recording worldwide sales of 1.51 mn. units for the Xbox 360 and 0.95 mn. units for the PlayStation 3 - making Ubi so damn happy that they have revised their initial financial forecasts and sent them packing straight into orbit.
Announcing that Assassin’s Creed had earned the distinction of becoming the fastest selling new videogame IP in the US ever, Ubisoft now claims that it will sell a minimum of 5 mn. units of the game in 2007-08 instead of the previously estimated $3 mn., with sales targets being raised to €840 mn., an increase of €15 mn. from their previous target. So much for all those “crystal ball gazers” who jumped the gun and screamed from the rooftops about what a phenomenal failure the game was. Hope you got enough quarters for the suicide booth, fellas!
In more good news, if you were worrying about sprunging the house for enough money to buy Tom Clancy’s EndWar, Brothers in Arms 3: Hell’s Highway and Far Cry 2, don’t worry, you won’t have to. The bad news is, the games have now been delayed to the 2008-09 fiscal year, which means you can probably expect to see them sometime around next Christmas, if you’re lucky. We know we’re not, considering we’re still got our keisters parked waiting for Altair to show up around here.