Games

Earlier we got a message from frequent commented DBMurray regarding a message he received about what is happening to customer data as part of the EA/Popcap merger I wrote about here. As we were conversing, I got the same message which is shown at top. Although the message says ‘good news’, neither DBMurray nor I find the news all that great. Why? Well, as my earlier article indicated, PopCap is a pretty cool company with great games. EA is a terrible company with a tendency to treat customers poorly, lock people out of their games for vague and inconsistent reasons,…

Doug wrote about the new ‘reimaginged’ Tetris app, which includes the following: · The fan-favorite Marathon Mode. · A brand new level-based Galaxy Mode, where players can use game-changing power ups to dig down and shatter their scores. · Innovative Marathon One Touch Mode, a simple and easy-to-use control scheme for Marathon mode that is specially designed for touch screen gameplay. · New gameplay challenges delivered via the never-before-seen Tetris Log system. · Tetris Rank functionality that tracks players’ lifetime “lines cleared” to assign an overall rank. · Ability to subscribe to the T-Club, the only Tetris fan club to…

Early this year I wrote about two separate incidents of gamers being banned from playing games based on comments made in separately housed gaming forums – the first was about someone banned for upsetting a forum moderator by asking “Have you (Bioware) sold your souls to the EA devil?”. At the time EA claimed it was an ‘error’: “Unfortunately, there was an error in the system that accidentally suspended a user’s entire account,” he told Ars. “Immediately upon learning of the glitch, EA took steps to restore the user’s macro account and apologized for the inconvenience.” My speculation that the…

Earlier this week I wrote about the great 50% off sale on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare on the Mac App Store. The deal is still going on, by the way! Anyway, it put me in the mood to replay the game, so I checked Steam to see if they ever opened up Steam Play – they hadn’t. Fortunately I had reviewed the game back in the summer of 2008 for the Mac, with a game gotten through Aspyr’s GameAgent. This meant I had a full game at some point. UN-fortunately, the install file was >4GB, and the Iomega 250GB…

Today we have a special treat: Jeff Vogel is providing a guest editorial on game pricing. Vogel is the founder, CEO, and primary developer of Spiderweb Software – a company that was making ‘old school’ RPGs before it was hip to do so, and from the very start using the ‘shareware’ model of a generous demo with paid unlocking that we see so often now under the guise of ‘in-app purchases’. Many of the games Mac & PC RPG fans love now – such as “Eschalon Book 1 & 2” from Basilisk Games, “Depths of Peril” and “Din’s Curse” from…