Game Diary

This week we get Avadon: The Black Fortress from Spiderweb Software on the iPad in the iTunes App Store. I have already gushed about the Mac and PC versions of the game, and will have my full review (hint: it is also gushing) of the iPad version this week. Almost immediately the forums of traditional computer role-playing games – in theory the biggest supporters of an ‘old school’ developer like Spiderweb – exploded with loads of vitriol. It came from all directions – and it is pretty much all wrong-headed. Rather than celebrating one of the few advocates of traditional…

EA was actually relatively early to the digital download game, with their online store serving up games through the evolving EADM since 2007. Even back then EA pushed use of the service, but users balked because initially the EA specified that downloads were held for 6 months, or 2 years if you paid the extra ‘insurance’. Just before E3 last week EA launched their Origin digital download service, clearly aimed to take on market leader Steam. This week EA has made moves that show it is ‘On Like Donkey Kong’ … or, more appropriately, ‘Off Like Crysis 2’! That’s right…

C’mon … you KNEW it was coming. First there was the price increase to $60 for this generation of games. That is easy enough to justify and accept based on the cost to product the graphics assets. Next we started with DLC, which very quickly spawned the whole ‘Horse Armor’ DLC nonsense. DLC is paid ‘downloadable content’, and the ‘nonsense’ is that companies quickly realized that gamers would buy $2 – $5 DLC on impulse for games they like – and that it was possible to ‘hold back’ content or at least create it in parallel with the main game,…

… but sadly the song of choice is ‘But not for me’. Sony has announced their restoration plans, their ‘Welcome Back’ plans – which include the PSP incidentally – and other things. I will list those details in a bit. But unless you have a PS3, you will NOT be doing anything anytime soon! How bad is it? Sony pretty much assumes that PSN = PS3, as noted in the header message on the PSN Blog Thank you for your patience and encouragement over the last few weeks. As covered in the post from earlier today, you can now update…

When you look at the image above, what do you think? For me, when I opened AppShopper and saw the new Big Fish game Serpent of Isis for FREE I was thrilled and clicked the link to iTunes right away and grabbed the game. A few hours later I got their iSplash newsletter and saw that the game is NOT free, but in fact is a demo with a $4.99 in-app purchase of the full game. Here is the image from the newsletter: Don’t get me wrong – I love Big Fish adventure games and am sure that Serpent of…